September 1, 2022 • 39 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Bill Schutt, author of "Pump: A Natural History of the Heart," about the evolution of the heart and the history of humanity’s attempt to understand it -- along with a few questions about monsters. (originally published 09/30/2021)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we've got
a couple of days off coming up, so we are
running a vault episode today. This episode originally aired on
September and Rob this was an interview that you did. Yes,
this is an interview with the Bill shut author of
(00:27):
Pump A Natural History of the Heart, about the evolution
of the heart and the history of humanity's attempt attempts
to understand the heart. So it's a really fun chat.
And at the end of the episode we actually discussed
monsters a little bit. We talked about the Thing from
Another World. Oh, I can see because of the day
this would have been right and the edge of October
last year, wasn't it, Yeah, but it it was. It was.
(00:50):
It was weird because it was just after we had
watched The Thing from Another World for Weirdout Cinema. But
I just organically asked him. I was like, hey, you know,
you you obviously about you know, vampires and so forth,
and you're very interested in sort of monstrous aspects of
anatomy and in the biological world. Do you have a
(01:10):
favorite monster movie? And he said, Oh, without a doubt,
it's the thing from another world. So we chatted about
about it a little bit and it was pretty fun
all right. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the episode Welcome
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio.
(01:32):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and my co host Joe McCormick
is away from the virtual workspace today, so it's just me,
but I'm going to be joined by vertebrate zoologist and
author Bill shut So. Bill is the author of two
previous nonfiction books, There's Dark Banquet Blood and The Curious
(01:52):
Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. I know for a fact
that I've I've mentioned that book on the show before.
He also wrote Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History. His latest
book is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart, which
is out right now and hard back, as an e
book and also as an audio book. Now, we're mostly
going to be talking about the weird and wonderful evolution
(02:15):
of the heart, as well as humanity's attempt to understand
it through history. But as always I have to stress
that the book itself, pump Uh in this case goes
into far greater detail and includes so many more wonderful examples. UH.
Case in point, we don't get into the horseshoe crab
at all or blood transfusions, but there are great chapters
(02:35):
in the book on these topics. Is a great read
and I highly recommend it. So let's go ahead and
jump into the interview. And hey, towards the end, we're
actually going to chat a little bit about horror movies.
I'm not gonna spoil which one, but it just happens
to be a film that I watched for the first
time in recent weeks, so this was this is quite enjoyable.
Welcome to the show, Bill, would you mind introducing yourself
(02:57):
to our audience. Hi, Yeah, I'm nice to be here.
My name is Bill shut and I am a vertebrate
zoologist and recently took an early retirement from Long Island University,
where I taught for over twenty years. I taught anatomy
and physiology to courses and evolution and dinosaurs, and my
research interests for the past thirty years or so have
(03:17):
centered around bats and UH, and within the four plus
species of bats, I specialized on the three vampire bats
and m so that sort of led to my first
book after writing a bunch of scientific papers, and that
was Dark Banquet, Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood
Feeding Creatures. And I followed that up with a book
(03:37):
on cannibalism called Cannibalism of Perfectly Natural History. And so
here I am now having written a book on the heart,
and that is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart.
When did you know this is going to be your
next book? Did you just seem like the next logical
step or was there something in particular? Yeah, it really
didn't seem like the first the next logical step because
(03:59):
of the top that I had covered initially. We're more
macabre and and um, you know, you go from vampiresm
to cannibalism into the heart and that's sort of there's
sort of a jump there. And and really what I
was lucky enough with the first two books to sort
of find a niche between the sensationalized sort of garbage
e stuff on the on one side and on the
other side is sort of academic material that nobody would
(04:22):
read unless you were studying those topics. And so I
so so I I sort of fit myself into the
into the middle of that, and I've always been interested
in taking complex or misunderstood concepts and demystifying them, putting
a zoological slant on them, making it humorous, entertaining, and
not using a whole lot of jargon, and and then
(04:42):
going off on sort of side trips where I got
to discuss what I thought and what I believe are
important topics, whether it's history or or or or or biology.
So when I was starting to think about what I
wanted to write from from my third nonfiction book, um
my editors at Algonquin and my agent all suggested that
(05:05):
I possibly look for something a bit more mainstream, and
they gave me a short list, and and one of
the things that I've did some preliminary research on was
the Heart. And I gotta say, initially, I thought this
has got to have been done before, because there are
hundreds of books. This topic is, you know, so widespread
and popular, and I was really surprised to find that
that that there was this space for the type of
(05:29):
book that I wanted to write, where you move through
the animal kingdom, you tell these interesting stories based on animals,
and then you move into humans, go into myths and
the history of of a particular topic. UM, and then
UM sort of grab interesting stories about medicine past, present,
and future. And so I was really surprised, to tell
(05:49):
you the truth, that there was so much there and
a lot of it was really strange enough to satisfy
that part of me. And I've always been into um
horror movies and and books, and so I always had
this kind of like weird bent as far as that
stuff went. So UM. Once I figured out that that
that there was enough interesting material they had to satisfy
(06:10):
myself and and I think my readers that then it
was a done deal that I was going to work
on the heart. So the heart, especially from the human perspective,
takes on all of this additional symbolic weight, and you
do you discuss this in the book. But but stripping
away all of that, what what is a heart and
why did it become necessary from an evolutionary perspective? Good question.
(06:31):
Let me lead off by saying that there are all
sorts of different things that you might call a heart,
where some people might not consider it to be a
heart because it doesn't have a specific lining that sort
of thing. Um. But a hard is really a pump,
a muscular pump. So we're talking about uh involuntary muscle,
so it's not under your conscious control. And when it contracts,
(06:53):
it sends a fluid either blood or if you're an insect,
hem a lymph around the body and there and what
it's doing, and there's there's variation here as well, is
it's carrying oxygen um to the body, and it's carrying
carbon dioxide to a place where you can be eliminated.
(07:15):
By the same token, it's carrying nutrients that are either
absorbed through the digestive track wool to the body and
getting rid of waste products that are produced by the body.
So it's a way to move that fluid around and
to move around those substances. Now that is not a problem.
If you're really really tiny, you don't need to have
a special circulatory system because those those materials that I
(07:39):
just mentioned that they just diffuse in and out of
your cell. If you're a single celled organism, or if
you're really flat like a tape worm, then then that
material just moves from a high concentration to a low concentration.
So just for as an example, um, if if a
single celled organism is surrounded by water, and that water
has got more oxygen in it then is inside that cell.
(08:03):
Then the oxygen is going to go from high concentration
outside the cell right through the cell membrane into the
cell itself. And and that's how that material moves. It
just goes high concentrations are low. That works great if
you're tiny or or or flat, and it doesn't work
at all if you have any kind of size, because
it's very difficult and and and diffusion doesn't work efficiently.
(08:27):
If you're talking about an organism with made of millions
of cells and thousands of cell layers thick, the fusion
just doesn't work, or it works, but it works really slowly.
So millions and millions of years ago, probably half a
billion years ago, in order four creatures to get larger,
they had to evolve systems that allowed those materials to
(08:49):
move in and out and within the body. That had
to take place, and so what evolved with these systems
of tubes and pumps to to help distribute that liquid,
which became the carrier for oxygen and nutrients and waste
and carbon dioxide. Um So, so it was in a
sense organisms couldn't evolve to be as complex as they
(09:12):
are now, um, if they didn't have this transportation system
evolving inside them. I have to say I really loved
the evolutionary journey you take us on in the book. UM.
I think back to your your your book on vampires
and blood drinking and the evolution of bats, and in
a way, it's like, we kind of think, we already
(09:33):
feel like the destination there is weird enough, so we
expect the journey to be weird. Um And with the heart,
it's easy to take it for granted. But it's such
a weird and wonderful evolutionary journey you describe. Thank you
very much. Now, I love how you explain that we
have to get away from the human centric view that
the human heart is is like the pinnacle of design
or anything of that nature, you know, the the ultimate
(09:55):
In um An evolution, you describe a number of of
wonderful um and if I guess from the human perspective,
strange hearts in the book. If you were to play favorites,
which non human heart in the book impressed you the most, UM,
probably the blue whale heart, for for reasons that that
might not be readily apparent. And and so in the
(10:18):
prologue in the first chapter, I detailed the um the
adventure that my friends up at the Royal Ontario Museum
in Toronto took when when unfortunately, nine blue whales died
on the ice up in Canada, and usually these whales
sink and uh and three of them didn't. They washed
the shore on in these remote spots, and and and
these guys went in there and and and recovered one
(10:40):
of the hearts. And the reason they did this is
because you know, they were mammalogists, and they kept hearing
this question from folks about what's the largest heart in
the world. Well, blue whale heart, how big is it?
They really didn't know. Well, it's probably as big as
an su they but so so when they got the
chance to go get one, they did it. And it
took five years, which I and heavy construction equipment to
(11:02):
get to move these things around. There were four of
them inside the whale, pushing the heart out through the ribs.
And when the thing was when when they finally got
it on the ground, it when I looked at the
pictures of it, reminds me of like a four hundred
pounds soup dumpling. It did not look like a heart
that you might get it, uh, you know what a
butcher's for example. UM. And so there was so many
(11:24):
strange things about the heart, and one of them was
was this shape that it took because it we we
think that it's able to collapse on the high pressure
when they die, so we would They don't know, but
this is what they hypothesized. The other thing is that
it was a lot smaller than they thought it was
gonna be. Now, this is the largest heart in the world,
Yes it is, but maybe it's the size of a
(11:46):
golf cart rather than an suv. And and that question
became really interesting to them and to myself. And and
what it boils down to is if you were to
look at the heart of a humming bird, for example,
and this is an anim mold that can can can
beat its wings eight hundred times a minute. To do that,
it takes muscle and you know, it takes nutrients, It
(12:07):
takes oxygen, produces carbon dioxides. So there's gotta be this
massive amount of blood flowing into those flight muscles in
order to do that. Um. One thing you can do
is have your heart beat as really fast, and hummingbird
heart can beat twelve hundred beats per minute, and that
is probably about the physical limit that a heart can beat.
So we're talking about phil empty relax and then this
(12:30):
whole thing taking place again twelve hundred times a minute
is ridiculous. So so as a as a mechanical device,
it's probably about topped doubt right there. I don't know
if you can go any and beat any quicker than that.
The only other way to get more blood to these muscles,
these wing muscles is to have a larger heart. So
because of that, um, humming berries have a heart that's
(12:52):
four or five times larger relative to their body size
than a blue whale heart, whose heart maybe beats ten
fifteen times a minute, and it doesn't have that high
metabolic demand that the little guys like hummingbirds and shrews
might have. That that to me was you know, that
was probably the most interesting. But you know, there was
this long list that I had to sort of picture
(13:12):
before I figured out how to answer that one. But
but blue whale hearts and they are on display as
far as gone through this plastination process. If you've ever
seen the body's exhibit, it's like these guys with their
cadavers who are posed and strange position drug dribbling the
basketball with no skin, which is trying to avoid that. Um.
So so this, this this plastinated blue whale heart is
(13:35):
now back on display at the wrong and that got a.
They have an interesting exhibit on the whales and they
so they pulled this thing back out of storage and
it's just fantastic, awesome. I I'd love to see that someday.
And there's of course an illustration in the Book of
Youth setting beside it like that than now on a
(14:00):
similar no, you know, thinking back to you know, getting
away from the human centric view of the heart, you
stress that we also have to realize that the organ
systems in the body don't function like separate chapters in
a textbook. And uh that I found this really eye opening.
Um you know, because I think to my own self
and I'm thinking, well, that's exactly how I think about it.
I think of those clear overlays and anatomy books, and
(14:22):
I think, Okay, this system, this system, um, and I
fall into that trap of thinking about my own body
that way. Can you can you get into this a
little bit? Because I found this a rather insightful part
of the book. Sure as I might have mentioned. I
taught anatomy and physiology for for about two decades and
and and one of the things that I stressed in
my students this is an extremely complex uh of course
(14:44):
too semester course that I taught with a lot of
difficult concepts. And I think that that that the people
fall into this trap, especially students, of thinking that Okay,
I'm taking an exam, I'm studying circulatory system, and now
I'm gonna take an exam and then I can forget
that stuff before I get out to my car after
the exam is over. And and that's just not the
(15:06):
case with when you talk about anatomy. So, for example,
in my mind, there's no way to separate the circulatory
system from the respiratory system, because if you're going to
begin you know, we talked about the fact that one
of the things that the hearts and circulatory systems too,
is this circulate blood that carries oxygen. Well, how do
you get that oxygen. That's the role of the respiratory system.
(15:28):
And then at a microscopic level, the circulatory system and
the respiratory system come into contact and there's this transfer
of either carbon dioxide from the circulatory system to the
respiratory system or oxygen from the respiratory system to the
circulatory system, and then we breathe out and the whole
(15:49):
thing starts again. So so I always stress the fact
that you can't that you really can't understand one without
putting it into into the cons texts of the other.
And then you go into things like, well, how do
how do these muscles contract? Well, that's tied into the
nervous system as well. My students would laugh at me
(16:10):
because this is something that I've just stressed over and
over again, that they have to think of this as
something other than a chapters in a book. I love that,
Like I say, I feel like, even though I don't have,
you know, this kind of anatomy background, I still flash
back to those anatomy books from like high school and whatnot,
(16:31):
and and think of myself as decided that way. Now
in the book, you also get into the history of
humanity's understanding of the heart, and h I you stressed
this in the book, and I realize our our understanding
of this is imperfect. But can you talk about what
the ancient Egyptians seem to understand about the actual functionality
(16:51):
of the heart and heart related pathologies. Yeah, well, well
the ancient Egyptians, and so we're talking say from from
what I have restort something like fift undred and fifty
BC e so that would be the Egyptian Book of
the Heart, which is written on papyrus and hieroglyphics, and
and it appears to some translators that the Egyptians knew
(17:17):
quite a bit about heart attacks and aneurysms. And you've
got to be careful there because these translations from papyrus
um to English or to whatever language you might be using,
you've got to be careful because that it's it's not precise.
(17:38):
They had a different way of thinking back then and there,
and and our translations of ancient works you always have
to sort of be careful about what you're about, what
about what you're stating as a as a fact, what
we do we we are more sure that the Egyptian
physicians believe that at the heart was was the center
(18:04):
of of things like emotion or what we would call
the soul. And then on a on a physiological level,
and this is this got picked up by the Greeks,
that that that there were really two circulatory systems that venus,
blood was completely different than arterial blood, which was actually
air and so um. So it was initially thought by
(18:25):
these guys that and and then passed onto the to
the to the Greeks, and then and then the Romans
who disproved the air part um that that the venus
blood derived from the liver uh and and some of
it seeped across into the into the left side uh
and that mixed with air, and there was this magical
material called numa in the air and and and so
(18:47):
they got a lot wrong. Um. Not that's not to
sort of mock them, because they were working with you know,
zero instrumentation and things that we take for granted nowadays. Um.
But unfortunately that got picked up. The that that the
idea of cardiocentrism and and and also their their ideas
about um about the circulatory system were picked up by
(19:09):
the by the Greeks because Egyptian medicine, that that type
of information was held in high esteem by by the Greeks.
Up from their Hypocrates and Aristotle wrote about about the
heart and the circulatory system, they stayed with this sort
of cardiocentric view that that that that that the heart
was the center of things like that like the mind
(19:31):
and intellect, and they really thought of it the way
we now think of the nervous system. Um. So at
the same time, now artists are jumping into play and
their writing and uh, it's poetry and and and there
are there's all sorts of plays and and and this
idea that the heart is the seat of emotion became
(19:52):
entrenched with artists and it's still there um and and
then passed on to the Romans. And that when things
take a downturn because of because of somebody who must
have been brilliant at the time, Galen. But uh, but
that was that was problematic as as we might talk
about event. Yeah, my next question concerns that because because Galen,
(20:12):
of course is always this important figure that that we
have to bring up and we discuss uh in anatomical
history and the advancement of anatomical knowledge. But as you
discussed in the in the book, in many ways that
you put Western medicine back um d years tell us
about this. Yeah. So, so Galen was a Roman surgeon
and uh, and he got to travel to um to
(20:36):
to to Egypt and picked up methodology UM and then
um worked in the gladiatorial school as a physician and
and began to study anatomy. But there was a it
was it was outlawed to to actually work on human cadaver.
So a lot of what he interpreted about the human
body came through dissections of things like apes or dogs
(20:59):
or pigs, and and he wrote a lot and and
and some of the material, the three million words that
were eventually recovered, may have been written by his followers
years later, maybe even after Galen died. But the thing
is that he um, he got a lot wrong. So
this was all taking place in the second century c
e and um after Rome fell hundreds of years later.
(21:25):
Galen's work was not was not initially translated into Latin,
which was the language of sciences back back then, and
so it sat around untranslated and and was not translated
until the early Middle Ages, and it was translated by Christians.
They were Syrians, and so when they translated Galen's work,
(21:48):
they did it into Arabic, and they put their Christian
slant on that translation. Now, that work that had been
translated into Arabic was eventually translated into Latin, and it
reflected that Christian slant that the Syrian translators had put
on it. And and the problem was is that that
(22:10):
looked great to the leaders of the church and and
that you know that we're talking about so the European
Church and the Western Church, and so they looked at
it and said, well, this material is divinely inspired. And
so it became in a sense the rule of law
that that you had to follow in a lockstep fashion
(22:32):
Galen's teachings and so I for a fifteen hundred years
it was pretty much voting to do research and and
and so. Um. So medicine stagnated and that became really
and that was really problematic because so much of what
of what was practiced was wronging this whole idea of
the four humors, you have to lead people to balance
(22:54):
these four substances, one of them didn't exist. Um So
that was a real that was really troublesome and you
and that continued in some ways right up until the
early twentieth century. They're still bleeding people. So so that
was that was a bit problematic. Yeah, And like you
put it in the book, speaking of the humors, that
(23:14):
you know, we still talk about people being melancholy, So
we still have the linguistic legacy of of that system. Yes,
thank Now skipping ahead more into the present and looking
ahead to the future, you describe some amazing advances and
(23:35):
medical science in the book. You get into what you
get into the history of blood transfusion to where we
are now. You you just got some hard transplants. How
far are we away from what we I guess sometimes
roughly referred to as as lab grown hearts. Um. Yeah,
this is to me, this was one of the most
amazing things because I got to go to Harvard and
(23:57):
and meet with a researcher by the name of Harold,
and he is he is aware of the fact that
that there's a real problem with with with people on
waiting lists for organs and and and and thousands of
people die every year, not necessarily waiting for hearts, but
waiting for liver is waiting for kidneys, um, and and
(24:17):
and so um. What he's trying to do is take
a very different approach. The reasons why the people wind
up dying on a waiting list is because you have
to have the right type tissue type, blood type. You've
got to be able to move this thing maybe across
the country, um, keep it refrigerated, and and so that's
often times a crapshoot whether that's going to work out
(24:38):
for somebody. So what he's done is, and and this
is preliminary, he's taken to daver hearts and put them
through in a sense of de turgent rents. And that
de turgent doesn't wash away the dirt. It washes away
the cells in the heart that your body would reject
(24:58):
were you to take up that hard and transplanted. So
we're talking about the muscle fibers and and other associated cells.
And so what's left is this ghost white framework of
the heart. So now you've got something that that that
looks like a heart but really has no other cells
(25:19):
besides the connective tissue cells, which your body is not
going to reject. Okay, So now what he's done is,
and this science does exist, he will take a sample
a biopsy or a sample of skin cells from the
person who's going to receive the heart, the recipient and
and and so so we're not talking about something deep
in the body. This is this just comes right from
(25:39):
your skin. These these cells are called fiber blasts. The
science now exists convert those fiber blasts into stem cells
and stem cells depending on how the body stimulates them
can be converted into any type of cell. Now, so
what they are able to do now still is to
take these stem cells and stemmy like them to become
(26:00):
muscle cells. And so his idea now is to take
these muscle cells and embed them, seed them, as it were,
onto this heart, to this framework, and grow a heart
that is a match for this recipient. And and and
it won't reject the recipient won't reject that that heart.
(26:23):
The immune system won't won't find it to be a
foreign cells or foreign tissue because it actually is derived
from the cells of that recipient. So when I asked
them how long do you think this is going to
take until it becomes commonplace? He said ten years. That's
his hope. So I said, well, so, so how does
that work? He said, Well, somebody comes in with a
heart problem, they need a heart transplant. You take a
(26:45):
sample from them, you do what I just described about
how you change them into stem cells. You take a
cadab or heart, you embed it, and then you do
this transplant and the person is you know, is up
and walking in a day or two. Well, it's really
exciting to match getting to that point. And uh, and
like I said in the book, you know, there's this
this wonderful evolutionary journey you take us on. I love
(27:07):
the journey through our our attempts to scientifically and I
guess culturally understand what the heart is. Uh. Now I
have to ask, we're getting since we're getting into October here,
your previous books have dealt with vampires and cannibals. Um,
now we do doing with the heart and blood. And
I'm to understand you're working on a book about teeth.
(27:28):
So I have to ask, what what what is your
favorite movie Monster? Without a doubt it is the original,
So the nineteen fifty one version of the thing. Uh yeah,
with um James Arness who's in gun Smoke in the
nineteen sixties and I guess early seventies playing this uh
walking carrot who lands crash lands in the Arctic, and
(27:54):
how it's recovered by this research group and what happens
when when it gets thought out by mistake. I just
think it has The movie has everything to me. Um
it is, it's got a great mood, it has wonderful
that as a wonderful soundtrack. It's one of the first
films ever that has overlapping dialogue. So when you hear
these these soldiers and these scientists and conversation, they're not
waiting for someone else to stop talking before they before
(28:17):
they talk. So this old has to do with the director,
Howard Hawks and it's just to me is is a
perfect film and stands up. Um even today, A lot
of people are in love with the John Carpenter two movie,
which is a gore fest good movie, you know. Um,
but um but I don't think that it that it Uh,
(28:38):
I don't think it's it's it's it's quite as as
a much of a classic as as as the original.
I have to agree with you about the the the
original holding up so well. I happen to just watched
it for the first time a week or two ago,
and um, yeah, the I totally agree on the dialogue.
It's it's it's snappy and and real and so many
(29:00):
of the secret I feel like there there were those
promo images of James R. Ness as the monster, and
especially for people who came up uh you know, post Carpenter,
we kind of looked at that and we're like, I
don't I don't want to maybe don't want to see
a movie with this old fashioned looking monster, but the
way it shot in the film is so impressive, and
you have that that really frightening sequence with the fire.
I think it totally holds up. Or when that door
(29:23):
opens and it's standing on the other side of the
door and it's just like slams the door frame. Uh yeah,
the well, I think it's very it's really funny. Um
and and it affected me so much that when I
started to write fiction, and I've written three novels, I've
based the characters in those novels on the characters in
(29:46):
The Thing and especially the original, but but certainly some
of the characters in the Uh. You know, when I
was looking for for a name of a character, i'd
i'd go looking in in those movies, especially McCready. Who's
Who's the hero in? In these three nine zero technical
no thrillers that that I wrote with my co author Finch,
(30:07):
I have to ask how old were you when you
first saw The Thing? From an edit world? Young? Um?
My parents, you know, back back when I was a
little kid, we went to the drive in every week.
Now that that movie is older than I am, it's
it's it's actually seventy years old this year and so
I probably was five six years old, and uh, you
(30:29):
know that type of of of film. And I've always
been a huge film buff. And when I'm writing my
my novels, I'm thinking about these big cinematic scenes and
and and I think that when when I write nonfiction,
I'm able to go back. So I opened up the
you know, cannibalism with with the story of a vent
(30:51):
gain who was who was who was really the cannibal murderer.
That that the that the that the Bates character or
in Psycho was based on. You know, Alfred Hitchcock just
took this real event and and got rid of the
cannibalism aspect, uh and and kept the mother obsession aspect
(31:12):
of it. And so that to me is that's another
perfect film that there are. There's about five of them,
Psycho being one, and and and the Original Thing being another.
In the Original the Thing, it also is more of
a blood drinker. It is more of a vampire. Do
you think that had any any impact on your eventual
(31:32):
study of vampire bats? Uh? You know, I wish I
could say, because that sounds so cool, that connects, But
you know, I don't. But I've been into into vampire
movies as well. You know, I've been into the original
Dracula and and then the hammer versions that came out
in the in the sixties and seventies. So so I
guess I'd always been intrigued by by blood feeding. But
(31:54):
when when I started the study bats, that was my
first semester as a PhD student at cornell Um, I've
always been into strange animals and and and I've always
kept a lot of animals as pets. When I was
a kid, I had a monkey. That's how different things
were back then. Every snake, every type of lizard, whatever,
(32:15):
whatever you could could find in a pet shop or
collect under a rock or drag out of a log um.
So so I'd always been into sort of offbeat type creatures.
And and so when I started to work on bats,
it probably took me abat five minutes to decide that
within these fourteen hundred species that I wanted to work on,
(32:35):
the three vampires. And I just lucked out because in
the early nineties of what it was known and the
literature about vampire bats was known about the common vampire bat,
and the other two were open books. So that allowed
me to go in and do research on these because
and I was really lucky because a lot of not
wen't say a lot a number of really important, um
(32:59):
influential back biologists took me aside and said, you know,
bill a vampire, about as a vampire, about as a vampire,
but you're not gonna see differences. And I was fresh
out of classes, thinking it doesn't that doesn't make sense,
because if you have two animals that do the same
thing and they live in the same place, then then
then either one of them is going to adapt a
(33:19):
different behavior, or it's going to migrate, or it's going
to go extinct. And so when so this this this
little biologist Arthur Greenholfen Museum and Natural History, which I've
been lucky enough to be there since the early nineteen
nineties as well, took me aside and said, Candy got something,
so shut up down, don't do it, um. And from
there I was able to look at all these differences
(33:40):
that were clearly apparent once we started looking at them,
and just to sort of put a shout out there.
It's not that people didn't know about it, because when
I went down to places like Trinidad, they knew from
the start that there were these huge differences. One of
them fed on birds, the other one is on the
ground and feeding on cows and pigs. Um. And they
knew about it, they just weren't publishing. And so I've
(34:03):
made it a point to to bring these guys on
as co authors and bring them up and make sure
that they came to conferences and and got to do that.
I thought they deserved. Bringing back to pump for a second,
I also love the bit where you get into the
the bats that hibernate uh in the in the snow. Yeah. Um,
not a whole lot is known about them, except that
there's a species of bat that lives in Japan that
(34:25):
that that evidently hibernates in in in snow. And and
so the researchers originally thought, well, this, this, and these
guys in polar bears are the only the only mammals
that do that, uh and so what since then, since
this work was started, they figured out that polar bears
might not really be card carrying hibernators because they wake
(34:48):
up off and during in the in the winter. Um.
And so it's not known if these bats are If
these bats wake up in the middle of the winter
or enough and they make this little with their body.
Hea they carve this little cone and the snow and
then the snow covers them and you don't find them
until until the spring, when it's either either somebody that
digs them up by mistake or or or it thaws
(35:10):
out and you know that they're cold. They're laying there
for a while, like can start to crank some some
blood moving through them, and then they fly off. But yeah,
that was just one of I don't know, dozens of
really interesting stories that I've learned about because the learning
curve was steep, which made it that much more interesting.
(35:32):
You know. I don't go into these things as sort
of experts on on the heart, for example, or cannibalism thankfully.
Of course, the bats also remind me of the thing
from another world, you know, the organism is suspended in
the ice, which I guess drives home no matter how weird.
An idea is that we dream up about an alien creature,
(35:53):
like there's something in the natural world that is already
as weird or weirder, right, oh, yeah, no doubt, and
and that you know, I try to bring that out
in the book as well. And and then the fun
thing is to try to tie that into modern medicine.
So you have uh, you know, you know, you have
an aquarium fish, the zebra fish, which everybody's seen this
little stripes, the horizontal stripes. It turns out that if
(36:16):
you snipal its heart, the heart not only grows back,
but it's completely functioned. Now, if you were to do that,
you know, we don't really do that, and we're gladiatorial combat.
You know a lot of people are upset about that.
But to be serious, if if you have a part
of your heart is damaged because the blood flow has
(36:36):
been cut off to it, and and it and in
a sense that tissue dies when it grows back. It's
scarre tissue. It's not contractile, good function named muscle tissue.
That's not the case with the zebrafish. So how do
we take that? What does the zebrafish have going for
it that enables it to completely repair? It's hard after
being traumatically uh injured, And and how do you try
(37:00):
in slate that into um into curing a sick heart
that is undergoing a heart attack or multiple heart attacks.
And there was a list of those that that I
ran into. So that was kind of fun as well well. Bill,
Thanks for taking time out of your day to chat
with us about the book. Well, it was really good
to be here, especially to talk about the thing that's
(37:21):
a that's a new one for me, that one I
haven't spoken to, have been interviewed about. So it was
a real pleasure to meet you and talk with your owner.
All Right, thanks again to Bill Shut for chatting with me.
You can check him out online at Bill Shut dot com.
That's b I L L S C h U T
T dot com. Uh. That website contains links to his
(37:44):
social media accounts as well. The website features information about
his three non fiction books, That's Dark Banquet, Cannibalism, and
Now Pump, as well as his three fiction books co
written with J. R. Finch That's Hell's Gate, The him
Alan Codex, and The Darwin Strain. I have not read
these but yet, but now I'm super interested to check
(38:06):
them out after after chatting with Bill. In the meantime,
as you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind where you can find them
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On
Tuesdays and Thursdays, we give you our core science episodes.
On Monday's we do Listener mail. On Wednesday's we do
an artifact short form episode. On Friday's we do a
(38:28):
little weird how cinema You know what that is. That's
our chance to kick back and discuss a weird film.
And yes, as luck would have it, we very recently
discussed the Thing from Another World on the show. So hey,
especially after this chat with Bill, go back and listen
to that episode if you haven't. Again, wonderful film. Oh
and then on the on the weekends we do a
(38:48):
little rerun that's a vault episode. Thanks as always to
Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show and recording us
here and if you would like to email us, as always,
you can do so at con Thatt add Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind
(39:11):
is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we've got
a couple of days off coming up, so we are
running a vault episode today. This episode originally aired on
September and Rob this was an interview that you did. Yes,
this is an interview with the Bill shut author of
(00:27):
Pump A Natural History of the Heart, about the evolution
of the heart and the history of humanity's attempt attempts
to understand the heart. So it's a really fun chat.
And at the end of the episode we actually discussed
monsters a little bit. We talked about the Thing from
Another World. Oh, I can see because of the day
this would have been right and the edge of October
last year, wasn't it, Yeah, but it it was. It was.
(00:50):
It was weird because it was just after we had
watched The Thing from Another World for Weirdout Cinema. But
I just organically asked him. I was like, hey, you know,
you you obviously about you know, vampires and so forth,
and you're very interested in sort of monstrous aspects of
anatomy and in the biological world. Do you have a
(01:10):
favorite monster movie? And he said, Oh, without a doubt,
it's the thing from another world. So we chatted about
about it a little bit and it was pretty fun
all right. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the episode Welcome
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio.
(01:32):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and my co host Joe McCormick
is away from the virtual workspace today, so it's just me,
but I'm going to be joined by vertebrate zoologist and
author Bill shut So. Bill is the author of two
previous nonfiction books, There's Dark Banquet Blood and The Curious
(01:52):
Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. I know for a fact
that I've I've mentioned that book on the show before.
He also wrote Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History. His latest
book is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart, which
is out right now and hard back, as an e
book and also as an audio book. Now, we're mostly
going to be talking about the weird and wonderful evolution
(02:15):
of the heart, as well as humanity's attempt to understand
it through history. But as always I have to stress
that the book itself, pump Uh in this case goes
into far greater detail and includes so many more wonderful examples. UH.
Case in point, we don't get into the horseshoe crab
at all or blood transfusions, but there are great chapters
(02:35):
in the book on these topics. Is a great read
and I highly recommend it. So let's go ahead and
jump into the interview. And hey, towards the end, we're
actually going to chat a little bit about horror movies.
I'm not gonna spoil which one, but it just happens
to be a film that I watched for the first
time in recent weeks, so this was this is quite enjoyable.
Welcome to the show, Bill, would you mind introducing yourself
(02:57):
to our audience. Hi, Yeah, I'm nice to be here.
My name is Bill shut and I am a vertebrate
zoologist and recently took an early retirement from Long Island University,
where I taught for over twenty years. I taught anatomy
and physiology to courses and evolution and dinosaurs, and my
research interests for the past thirty years or so have
(03:17):
centered around bats and UH, and within the four plus
species of bats, I specialized on the three vampire bats
and m so that sort of led to my first
book after writing a bunch of scientific papers, and that
was Dark Banquet, Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood
Feeding Creatures. And I followed that up with a book
(03:37):
on cannibalism called Cannibalism of Perfectly Natural History. And so
here I am now having written a book on the heart,
and that is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart.
When did you know this is going to be your
next book? Did you just seem like the next logical
step or was there something in particular? Yeah, it really
didn't seem like the first the next logical step because
(03:59):
of the top that I had covered initially. We're more
macabre and and um, you know, you go from vampiresm
to cannibalism into the heart and that's sort of there's
sort of a jump there. And and really what I
was lucky enough with the first two books to sort
of find a niche between the sensationalized sort of garbage
e stuff on the on one side and on the
other side is sort of academic material that nobody would
(04:22):
read unless you were studying those topics. And so I
so so I I sort of fit myself into the
into the middle of that, and I've always been interested
in taking complex or misunderstood concepts and demystifying them, putting
a zoological slant on them, making it humorous, entertaining, and
not using a whole lot of jargon, and and then
(04:42):
going off on sort of side trips where I got
to discuss what I thought and what I believe are
important topics, whether it's history or or or or or biology.
So when I was starting to think about what I
wanted to write from from my third nonfiction book, um
my editors at Algonquin and my agent all suggested that
(05:05):
I possibly look for something a bit more mainstream, and
they gave me a short list, and and one of
the things that I've did some preliminary research on was
the Heart. And I gotta say, initially, I thought this
has got to have been done before, because there are
hundreds of books. This topic is, you know, so widespread
and popular, and I was really surprised to find that
that that there was this space for the type of
(05:29):
book that I wanted to write, where you move through
the animal kingdom, you tell these interesting stories based on animals,
and then you move into humans, go into myths and
the history of of a particular topic. UM, and then
UM sort of grab interesting stories about medicine past, present,
and future. And so I was really surprised, to tell
(05:49):
you the truth, that there was so much there and
a lot of it was really strange enough to satisfy
that part of me. And I've always been into um
horror movies and and books, and so I always had
this kind of like weird bent as far as that
stuff went. So UM. Once I figured out that that
that there was enough interesting material they had to satisfy
(06:10):
myself and and I think my readers that then it
was a done deal that I was going to work
on the heart. So the heart, especially from the human perspective,
takes on all of this additional symbolic weight, and you
do you discuss this in the book. But but stripping
away all of that, what what is a heart and
why did it become necessary from an evolutionary perspective? Good question.
(06:31):
Let me lead off by saying that there are all
sorts of different things that you might call a heart,
where some people might not consider it to be a
heart because it doesn't have a specific lining that sort
of thing. Um. But a hard is really a pump,
a muscular pump. So we're talking about uh involuntary muscle,
so it's not under your conscious control. And when it contracts,
(06:53):
it sends a fluid either blood or if you're an insect,
hem a lymph around the body and there and what
it's doing, and there's there's variation here as well, is
it's carrying oxygen um to the body, and it's carrying
carbon dioxide to a place where you can be eliminated.
(07:15):
By the same token, it's carrying nutrients that are either
absorbed through the digestive track wool to the body and
getting rid of waste products that are produced by the body.
So it's a way to move that fluid around and
to move around those substances. Now that is not a problem.
If you're really really tiny, you don't need to have
a special circulatory system because those those materials that I
(07:39):
just mentioned that they just diffuse in and out of
your cell. If you're a single celled organism, or if
you're really flat like a tape worm, then then that
material just moves from a high concentration to a low concentration.
So just for as an example, um, if if a
single celled organism is surrounded by water, and that water
has got more oxygen in it then is inside that cell.
(08:03):
Then the oxygen is going to go from high concentration
outside the cell right through the cell membrane into the
cell itself. And and that's how that material moves. It
just goes high concentrations are low. That works great if
you're tiny or or or flat, and it doesn't work
at all if you have any kind of size, because
it's very difficult and and and diffusion doesn't work efficiently.
(08:27):
If you're talking about an organism with made of millions
of cells and thousands of cell layers thick, the fusion
just doesn't work, or it works, but it works really slowly.
So millions and millions of years ago, probably half a
billion years ago, in order four creatures to get larger,
they had to evolve systems that allowed those materials to
(08:49):
move in and out and within the body. That had
to take place, and so what evolved with these systems
of tubes and pumps to to help distribute that liquid,
which became the carrier for oxygen and nutrients and waste
and carbon dioxide. Um So, so it was in a
sense organisms couldn't evolve to be as complex as they
(09:12):
are now, um, if they didn't have this transportation system
evolving inside them. I have to say I really loved
the evolutionary journey you take us on in the book. UM.
I think back to your your your book on vampires
and blood drinking and the evolution of bats, and in
a way, it's like, we kind of think, we already
(09:33):
feel like the destination there is weird enough, so we
expect the journey to be weird. Um And with the heart,
it's easy to take it for granted. But it's such
a weird and wonderful evolutionary journey you describe. Thank you
very much. Now, I love how you explain that we
have to get away from the human centric view that
the human heart is is like the pinnacle of design
or anything of that nature, you know, the the ultimate
(09:55):
In um An evolution, you describe a number of of
wonderful um and if I guess from the human perspective,
strange hearts in the book. If you were to play favorites,
which non human heart in the book impressed you the most, UM,
probably the blue whale heart, for for reasons that that
might not be readily apparent. And and so in the
(10:18):
prologue in the first chapter, I detailed the um the
adventure that my friends up at the Royal Ontario Museum
in Toronto took when when unfortunately, nine blue whales died
on the ice up in Canada, and usually these whales
sink and uh and three of them didn't. They washed
the shore on in these remote spots, and and and
these guys went in there and and and recovered one
(10:40):
of the hearts. And the reason they did this is
because you know, they were mammalogists, and they kept hearing
this question from folks about what's the largest heart in
the world. Well, blue whale heart, how big is it?
They really didn't know. Well, it's probably as big as
an su they but so so when they got the
chance to go get one, they did it. And it
took five years, which I and heavy construction equipment to
(11:02):
get to move these things around. There were four of
them inside the whale, pushing the heart out through the ribs.
And when the thing was when when they finally got
it on the ground, it when I looked at the
pictures of it, reminds me of like a four hundred
pounds soup dumpling. It did not look like a heart
that you might get it, uh, you know what a
butcher's for example. UM. And so there was so many
(11:24):
strange things about the heart, and one of them was
was this shape that it took because it we we
think that it's able to collapse on the high pressure
when they die, so we would They don't know, but
this is what they hypothesized. The other thing is that
it was a lot smaller than they thought it was
gonna be. Now, this is the largest heart in the world,
Yes it is, but maybe it's the size of a
(11:46):
golf cart rather than an suv. And and that question
became really interesting to them and to myself. And and
what it boils down to is if you were to
look at the heart of a humming bird, for example,
and this is an anim mold that can can can
beat its wings eight hundred times a minute. To do that,
it takes muscle and you know, it takes nutrients, It
(12:07):
takes oxygen, produces carbon dioxides. So there's gotta be this
massive amount of blood flowing into those flight muscles in
order to do that. Um. One thing you can do
is have your heart beat as really fast, and hummingbird
heart can beat twelve hundred beats per minute, and that
is probably about the physical limit that a heart can beat.
So we're talking about phil empty relax and then this
(12:30):
whole thing taking place again twelve hundred times a minute
is ridiculous. So so as a as a mechanical device,
it's probably about topped doubt right there. I don't know
if you can go any and beat any quicker than that.
The only other way to get more blood to these muscles,
these wing muscles is to have a larger heart. So
because of that, um, humming berries have a heart that's
(12:52):
four or five times larger relative to their body size
than a blue whale heart, whose heart maybe beats ten
fifteen times a minute, and it doesn't have that high
metabolic demand that the little guys like hummingbirds and shrews
might have. That that to me was you know, that
was probably the most interesting. But you know, there was
this long list that I had to sort of picture
(13:12):
before I figured out how to answer that one. But
but blue whale hearts and they are on display as
far as gone through this plastination process. If you've ever
seen the body's exhibit, it's like these guys with their
cadavers who are posed and strange position drug dribbling the
basketball with no skin, which is trying to avoid that. Um.
So so this, this this plastinated blue whale heart is
(13:35):
now back on display at the wrong and that got a.
They have an interesting exhibit on the whales and they
so they pulled this thing back out of storage and
it's just fantastic, awesome. I I'd love to see that someday.
And there's of course an illustration in the Book of
Youth setting beside it like that than now on a
(14:00):
similar no, you know, thinking back to you know, getting
away from the human centric view of the heart, you
stress that we also have to realize that the organ
systems in the body don't function like separate chapters in
a textbook. And uh that I found this really eye opening.
Um you know, because I think to my own self
and I'm thinking, well, that's exactly how I think about it.
I think of those clear overlays and anatomy books, and
(14:22):
I think, Okay, this system, this system, um, and I
fall into that trap of thinking about my own body
that way. Can you can you get into this a
little bit? Because I found this a rather insightful part
of the book. Sure as I might have mentioned. I
taught anatomy and physiology for for about two decades and
and and one of the things that I stressed in
my students this is an extremely complex uh of course
(14:44):
too semester course that I taught with a lot of
difficult concepts. And I think that that that the people
fall into this trap, especially students, of thinking that Okay,
I'm taking an exam, I'm studying circulatory system, and now
I'm gonna take an exam and then I can forget
that stuff before I get out to my car after
the exam is over. And and that's just not the
(15:06):
case with when you talk about anatomy. So, for example,
in my mind, there's no way to separate the circulatory
system from the respiratory system, because if you're going to
begin you know, we talked about the fact that one
of the things that the hearts and circulatory systems too,
is this circulate blood that carries oxygen. Well, how do
you get that oxygen. That's the role of the respiratory system.
(15:28):
And then at a microscopic level, the circulatory system and
the respiratory system come into contact and there's this transfer
of either carbon dioxide from the circulatory system to the
respiratory system or oxygen from the respiratory system to the
circulatory system, and then we breathe out and the whole
(15:49):
thing starts again. So so I always stress the fact
that you can't that you really can't understand one without
putting it into into the cons texts of the other.
And then you go into things like, well, how do
how do these muscles contract? Well, that's tied into the
nervous system as well. My students would laugh at me
(16:10):
because this is something that I've just stressed over and
over again, that they have to think of this as
something other than a chapters in a book. I love that,
Like I say, I feel like, even though I don't have,
you know, this kind of anatomy background, I still flash
back to those anatomy books from like high school and whatnot,
(16:31):
and and think of myself as decided that way. Now
in the book, you also get into the history of
humanity's understanding of the heart, and h I you stressed
this in the book, and I realize our our understanding
of this is imperfect. But can you talk about what
the ancient Egyptians seem to understand about the actual functionality
(16:51):
of the heart and heart related pathologies. Yeah, well, well
the ancient Egyptians, and so we're talking say from from
what I have restort something like fift undred and fifty
BC e so that would be the Egyptian Book of
the Heart, which is written on papyrus and hieroglyphics, and
and it appears to some translators that the Egyptians knew
(17:17):
quite a bit about heart attacks and aneurysms. And you've
got to be careful there because these translations from papyrus
um to English or to whatever language you might be using,
you've got to be careful because that it's it's not precise.
(17:38):
They had a different way of thinking back then and there,
and and our translations of ancient works you always have
to sort of be careful about what you're about, what
about what you're stating as a as a fact, what
we do we we are more sure that the Egyptian
physicians believe that at the heart was was the center
(18:04):
of of things like emotion or what we would call
the soul. And then on a on a physiological level,
and this is this got picked up by the Greeks,
that that that there were really two circulatory systems that venus,
blood was completely different than arterial blood, which was actually
air and so um. So it was initially thought by
(18:25):
these guys that and and then passed onto the to
the to the Greeks, and then and then the Romans
who disproved the air part um that that the venus
blood derived from the liver uh and and some of
it seeped across into the into the left side uh
and that mixed with air, and there was this magical
material called numa in the air and and and so
(18:47):
they got a lot wrong. Um. Not that's not to
sort of mock them, because they were working with you know,
zero instrumentation and things that we take for granted nowadays. Um.
But unfortunately that got picked up. The that that the
idea of cardiocentrism and and and also their their ideas
about um about the circulatory system were picked up by
(19:09):
the by the Greeks because Egyptian medicine, that that type
of information was held in high esteem by by the Greeks.
Up from their Hypocrates and Aristotle wrote about about the
heart and the circulatory system, they stayed with this sort
of cardiocentric view that that that that that the heart
was the center of things like that like the mind
(19:31):
and intellect, and they really thought of it the way
we now think of the nervous system. Um. So at
the same time, now artists are jumping into play and
their writing and uh, it's poetry and and and there
are there's all sorts of plays and and and this
idea that the heart is the seat of emotion became
(19:52):
entrenched with artists and it's still there um and and
then passed on to the Romans. And that when things
take a downturn because of because of somebody who must
have been brilliant at the time, Galen. But uh, but
that was that was problematic as as we might talk
about event. Yeah, my next question concerns that because because Galen,
(20:12):
of course is always this important figure that that we
have to bring up and we discuss uh in anatomical
history and the advancement of anatomical knowledge. But as you
discussed in the in the book, in many ways that
you put Western medicine back um d years tell us
about this. Yeah. So, so Galen was a Roman surgeon
and uh, and he got to travel to um to
(20:36):
to to Egypt and picked up methodology UM and then
um worked in the gladiatorial school as a physician and
and began to study anatomy. But there was a it
was it was outlawed to to actually work on human cadaver.
So a lot of what he interpreted about the human
body came through dissections of things like apes or dogs
(20:59):
or pigs, and and he wrote a lot and and
and some of the material, the three million words that
were eventually recovered, may have been written by his followers
years later, maybe even after Galen died. But the thing
is that he um, he got a lot wrong. So
this was all taking place in the second century c
e and um after Rome fell hundreds of years later.
(21:25):
Galen's work was not was not initially translated into Latin,
which was the language of sciences back back then, and
so it sat around untranslated and and was not translated
until the early Middle Ages, and it was translated by Christians.
They were Syrians, and so when they translated Galen's work,
(21:48):
they did it into Arabic, and they put their Christian
slant on that translation. Now, that work that had been
translated into Arabic was eventually translated into Latin, and it
reflected that Christian slant that the Syrian translators had put
on it. And and the problem was is that that
(22:10):
looked great to the leaders of the church and and
that you know that we're talking about so the European
Church and the Western Church, and so they looked at
it and said, well, this material is divinely inspired. And
so it became in a sense the rule of law
that that you had to follow in a lockstep fashion
(22:32):
Galen's teachings and so I for a fifteen hundred years
it was pretty much voting to do research and and
and so. Um. So medicine stagnated and that became really
and that was really problematic because so much of what
of what was practiced was wronging this whole idea of
the four humors, you have to lead people to balance
(22:54):
these four substances, one of them didn't exist. Um So
that was a real that was really troublesome and you
and that continued in some ways right up until the
early twentieth century. They're still bleeding people. So so that
was that was a bit problematic. Yeah, And like you
put it in the book, speaking of the humors, that
(23:14):
you know, we still talk about people being melancholy, So
we still have the linguistic legacy of of that system. Yes,
thank Now skipping ahead more into the present and looking
ahead to the future, you describe some amazing advances and
(23:35):
medical science in the book. You get into what you
get into the history of blood transfusion to where we
are now. You you just got some hard transplants. How
far are we away from what we I guess sometimes
roughly referred to as as lab grown hearts. Um. Yeah,
this is to me, this was one of the most
amazing things because I got to go to Harvard and
(23:57):
and meet with a researcher by the name of Harold,
and he is he is aware of the fact that
that there's a real problem with with with people on
waiting lists for organs and and and and thousands of
people die every year, not necessarily waiting for hearts, but
waiting for liver is waiting for kidneys, um, and and
(24:17):
and so um. What he's trying to do is take
a very different approach. The reasons why the people wind
up dying on a waiting list is because you have
to have the right type tissue type, blood type. You've
got to be able to move this thing maybe across
the country, um, keep it refrigerated, and and so that's
often times a crapshoot whether that's going to work out
(24:38):
for somebody. So what he's done is, and and this
is preliminary, he's taken to daver hearts and put them
through in a sense of de turgent rents. And that
de turgent doesn't wash away the dirt. It washes away
the cells in the heart that your body would reject
(24:58):
were you to take up that hard and transplanted. So
we're talking about the muscle fibers and and other associated cells.
And so what's left is this ghost white framework of
the heart. So now you've got something that that that
looks like a heart but really has no other cells
(25:19):
besides the connective tissue cells, which your body is not
going to reject. Okay, So now what he's done is,
and this science does exist, he will take a sample
a biopsy or a sample of skin cells from the
person who's going to receive the heart, the recipient and
and and so so we're not talking about something deep
in the body. This is this just comes right from
(25:39):
your skin. These these cells are called fiber blasts. The
science now exists convert those fiber blasts into stem cells
and stem cells depending on how the body stimulates them
can be converted into any type of cell. Now, so
what they are able to do now still is to
take these stem cells and stemmy like them to become
(26:00):
muscle cells. And so his idea now is to take
these muscle cells and embed them, seed them, as it were,
onto this heart, to this framework, and grow a heart
that is a match for this recipient. And and and
it won't reject the recipient won't reject that that heart.
(26:23):
The immune system won't won't find it to be a
foreign cells or foreign tissue because it actually is derived
from the cells of that recipient. So when I asked
them how long do you think this is going to
take until it becomes commonplace? He said ten years. That's
his hope. So I said, well, so, so how does
that work? He said, Well, somebody comes in with a
heart problem, they need a heart transplant. You take a
(26:45):
sample from them, you do what I just described about
how you change them into stem cells. You take a
cadab or heart, you embed it, and then you do
this transplant and the person is you know, is up
and walking in a day or two. Well, it's really
exciting to match getting to that point. And uh, and
like I said in the book, you know, there's this
this wonderful evolutionary journey you take us on. I love
(27:07):
the journey through our our attempts to scientifically and I
guess culturally understand what the heart is. Uh. Now I
have to ask, we're getting since we're getting into October here,
your previous books have dealt with vampires and cannibals. Um,
now we do doing with the heart and blood. And
I'm to understand you're working on a book about teeth.
(27:28):
So I have to ask, what what what is your
favorite movie Monster? Without a doubt it is the original,
So the nineteen fifty one version of the thing. Uh yeah,
with um James Arness who's in gun Smoke in the
nineteen sixties and I guess early seventies playing this uh
walking carrot who lands crash lands in the Arctic, and
(27:54):
how it's recovered by this research group and what happens
when when it gets thought out by mistake. I just
think it has The movie has everything to me. Um
it is, it's got a great mood, it has wonderful
that as a wonderful soundtrack. It's one of the first
films ever that has overlapping dialogue. So when you hear
these these soldiers and these scientists and conversation, they're not
waiting for someone else to stop talking before they before
(28:17):
they talk. So this old has to do with the director,
Howard Hawks and it's just to me is is a
perfect film and stands up. Um even today, A lot
of people are in love with the John Carpenter two movie,
which is a gore fest good movie, you know. Um,
but um but I don't think that it that it Uh,
(28:38):
I don't think it's it's it's it's quite as as
a much of a classic as as as the original.
I have to agree with you about the the the
original holding up so well. I happen to just watched
it for the first time a week or two ago,
and um, yeah, the I totally agree on the dialogue.
It's it's it's snappy and and real and so many
(29:00):
of the secret I feel like there there were those
promo images of James R. Ness as the monster, and
especially for people who came up uh you know, post Carpenter,
we kind of looked at that and we're like, I
don't I don't want to maybe don't want to see
a movie with this old fashioned looking monster, but the
way it shot in the film is so impressive, and
you have that that really frightening sequence with the fire.
I think it totally holds up. Or when that door
(29:23):
opens and it's standing on the other side of the
door and it's just like slams the door frame. Uh yeah,
the well, I think it's very it's really funny. Um
and and it affected me so much that when I
started to write fiction, and I've written three novels, I've
based the characters in those novels on the characters in
(29:46):
The Thing and especially the original, but but certainly some
of the characters in the Uh. You know, when I
was looking for for a name of a character, i'd
i'd go looking in in those movies, especially McCready. Who's
Who's the hero in? In these three nine zero technical
no thrillers that that I wrote with my co author Finch,
(30:07):
I have to ask how old were you when you
first saw The Thing? From an edit world? Young? Um?
My parents, you know, back back when I was a
little kid, we went to the drive in every week.
Now that that movie is older than I am, it's
it's it's actually seventy years old this year and so
I probably was five six years old, and uh, you
(30:29):
know that type of of of film. And I've always
been a huge film buff. And when I'm writing my
my novels, I'm thinking about these big cinematic scenes and
and and I think that when when I write nonfiction,
I'm able to go back. So I opened up the
you know, cannibalism with with the story of a vent
(30:51):
gain who was who was who was really the cannibal murderer.
That that the that the that the Bates character or
in Psycho was based on. You know, Alfred Hitchcock just
took this real event and and got rid of the
cannibalism aspect, uh and and kept the mother obsession aspect
(31:12):
of it. And so that to me is that's another
perfect film that there are. There's about five of them,
Psycho being one, and and and the Original Thing being another.
In the Original the Thing, it also is more of
a blood drinker. It is more of a vampire. Do
you think that had any any impact on your eventual
(31:32):
study of vampire bats? Uh? You know, I wish I
could say, because that sounds so cool, that connects, But
you know, I don't. But I've been into into vampire
movies as well. You know, I've been into the original
Dracula and and then the hammer versions that came out
in the in the sixties and seventies. So so I
guess I'd always been intrigued by by blood feeding. But
(31:54):
when when I started the study bats, that was my
first semester as a PhD student at cornell Um, I've
always been into strange animals and and and I've always
kept a lot of animals as pets. When I was
a kid, I had a monkey. That's how different things
were back then. Every snake, every type of lizard, whatever,
(32:15):
whatever you could could find in a pet shop or
collect under a rock or drag out of a log um.
So so I'd always been into sort of offbeat type creatures.
And and so when I started to work on bats,
it probably took me abat five minutes to decide that
within these fourteen hundred species that I wanted to work on,
(32:35):
the three vampires. And I just lucked out because in
the early nineties of what it was known and the
literature about vampire bats was known about the common vampire bat,
and the other two were open books. So that allowed
me to go in and do research on these because
and I was really lucky because a lot of not
wen't say a lot a number of really important, um
(32:59):
influential back biologists took me aside and said, you know,
bill a vampire, about as a vampire, about as a vampire,
but you're not gonna see differences. And I was fresh
out of classes, thinking it doesn't that doesn't make sense,
because if you have two animals that do the same
thing and they live in the same place, then then
then either one of them is going to adapt a
(33:19):
different behavior, or it's going to migrate, or it's going
to go extinct. And so when so this this this
little biologist Arthur Greenholfen Museum and Natural History, which I've
been lucky enough to be there since the early nineteen
nineties as well, took me aside and said, Candy got something,
so shut up down, don't do it, um. And from
there I was able to look at all these differences
(33:40):
that were clearly apparent once we started looking at them,
and just to sort of put a shout out there.
It's not that people didn't know about it, because when
I went down to places like Trinidad, they knew from
the start that there were these huge differences. One of
them fed on birds, the other one is on the
ground and feeding on cows and pigs. Um. And they
knew about it, they just weren't publishing. And so I've
(34:03):
made it a point to to bring these guys on
as co authors and bring them up and make sure
that they came to conferences and and got to do that.
I thought they deserved. Bringing back to pump for a second,
I also love the bit where you get into the
the bats that hibernate uh in the in the snow. Yeah. Um,
not a whole lot is known about them, except that
there's a species of bat that lives in Japan that
(34:25):
that that evidently hibernates in in in snow. And and
so the researchers originally thought, well, this, this, and these
guys in polar bears are the only the only mammals
that do that, uh and so what since then, since
this work was started, they figured out that polar bears
might not really be card carrying hibernators because they wake
(34:48):
up off and during in the in the winter. Um.
And so it's not known if these bats are If
these bats wake up in the middle of the winter
or enough and they make this little with their body.
Hea they carve this little cone and the snow and
then the snow covers them and you don't find them
until until the spring, when it's either either somebody that
digs them up by mistake or or or it thaws
(35:10):
out and you know that they're cold. They're laying there
for a while, like can start to crank some some
blood moving through them, and then they fly off. But yeah,
that was just one of I don't know, dozens of
really interesting stories that I've learned about because the learning
curve was steep, which made it that much more interesting.
(35:32):
You know. I don't go into these things as sort
of experts on on the heart, for example, or cannibalism thankfully.
Of course, the bats also remind me of the thing
from another world, you know, the organism is suspended in
the ice, which I guess drives home no matter how weird.
An idea is that we dream up about an alien creature,
(35:53):
like there's something in the natural world that is already
as weird or weirder, right, oh, yeah, no doubt, and
and that you know, I try to bring that out
in the book as well. And and then the fun
thing is to try to tie that into modern medicine.
So you have uh, you know, you know, you have
an aquarium fish, the zebra fish, which everybody's seen this
little stripes, the horizontal stripes. It turns out that if
(36:16):
you snipal its heart, the heart not only grows back,
but it's completely functioned. Now, if you were to do that,
you know, we don't really do that, and we're gladiatorial combat.
You know a lot of people are upset about that.
But to be serious, if if you have a part
of your heart is damaged because the blood flow has
(36:36):
been cut off to it, and and it and in
a sense that tissue dies when it grows back. It's
scarre tissue. It's not contractile, good function named muscle tissue.
That's not the case with the zebrafish. So how do
we take that? What does the zebrafish have going for
it that enables it to completely repair? It's hard after
being traumatically uh injured, And and how do you try
(37:00):
in slate that into um into curing a sick heart
that is undergoing a heart attack or multiple heart attacks.
And there was a list of those that that I
ran into. So that was kind of fun as well well. Bill,
Thanks for taking time out of your day to chat
with us about the book. Well, it was really good
to be here, especially to talk about the thing that's
(37:21):
a that's a new one for me, that one I
haven't spoken to, have been interviewed about. So it was
a real pleasure to meet you and talk with your owner.
All Right, thanks again to Bill Shut for chatting with me.
You can check him out online at Bill Shut dot com.
That's b I L L S C h U T
T dot com. Uh. That website contains links to his
(37:44):
social media accounts as well. The website features information about
his three non fiction books, That's Dark Banquet, Cannibalism, and
Now Pump, as well as his three fiction books co
written with J. R. Finch That's Hell's Gate, The him
Alan Codex, and The Darwin Strain. I have not read
these but yet, but now I'm super interested to check
(38:06):
them out after after chatting with Bill. In the meantime,
as you would like to check out other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind where you can find them
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On
Tuesdays and Thursdays, we give you our core science episodes.
On Monday's we do Listener mail. On Wednesday's we do
an artifact short form episode. On Friday's we do a
(38:28):
little weird how cinema You know what that is. That's
our chance to kick back and discuss a weird film.
And yes, as luck would have it, we very recently
discussed the Thing from Another World on the show. So hey,
especially after this chat with Bill, go back and listen
to that episode if you haven't. Again, wonderful film. Oh
and then on the on the weekends we do a
(38:48):
little rerun that's a vault episode. Thanks as always to
Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show and recording us
here and if you would like to email us, as always,
you can do so at con Thatt add Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind
(39:11):
is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app,
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