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Feb. 14, 2002 - Art Bell
02:47:45
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Philip Tierno MD - Bioterrorism, Secret Life of Germs. Jim Berkland - Earthquake Predictions
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Time Text
So, I'm going to go ahead and start the video.
Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 14th, 2002.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be, located in all 24 time zones around the globe, covered by this program, which is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
You had better get ready for as well.
First, you know, there's good news and bad news.
There's good news and bad news.
There always is, right?
The good news, I think, is that the six men named in an FBI terrorism alert this week are now in custody in Yemen and elsewhere and have now been removed from the list of those being sought.
And hopefully will be permanently removed.
So that's the good news.
Now, the bad news is... The man who has successfully predicted too many good earthquakes, Jim Birkland, is my guest coming up this hour.
And why, you might ask, would I have Jim Birkland here in a moment's notice?
Well... Because I began to get emails from all of you, or many of you, I should say, saying, Jim Birkland saying that more pets are disappearing and he's got all kinds of information indicating there's about to be a pretty good-sized earthquake.
That's why Jim Birkland is here.
here, the moment he will make his appearance.
Now, we take you back to the past, on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
The Alright, Jim Birkland is an interesting guy indeed.
He was the first official geologist for Santa Clara County, which is only the most populated county in Northern California.
Northern California has a habit of shaking.
In fact, as does California generally.
He predicted the 1989 World Series earthquake, hit it dead on the head.
He's in Who's Who in America, and he's got a few things to say about what condition our condition is in at the moment.
Jim Birkland, welcome back.
Long time.
Thank you, Mark.
Real pleasure.
Great to have you.
Well, Jim, I started getting these emails from people fairly frantic saying, You know, I'm hearing Jim Birkland say that pets are disappearing all of a sudden, and a lot of them at that.
Any truth to that?
Yes, not as much as to really raise my level of concern to an extreme level.
Like, just before the World Series quake, we had 58 missing dogs and 27 missing cats ads in the local paper, and that's normally about 3 or 4 cats and 15 or 20 dogs.
Right now, in the LA Times, there are 17 missing dogs, which is the highest since the 6th of September.
And three days later, there was a 4.2 quake practically under the La Brea Tar Pits.
So that was the strongest quake since September, was that one.
And we're tying the number of missing pets at that time.
What's of more concern, I think, is what Jack Coles has observed with the glitches in the radio and television.
He used an electronic quiz and noted that there were sudden pops and snaps when he had the shielding off the television he was working with, a couple of firms, a television repair.
Right.
And then there would be a small shake in the San Jose area, and after about the third time he put it together, that there must be something Coming out of the ground that causes electronic interference.
Wouldn't surprise me for one second.
Of course there is.
Yep.
And so he began then to pin down even the direction.
The first time I ever heard of him, somebody said, you know, this dumb fellow is kind of trying to take over your job and predicting earthquakes around here.
And he has a little notice in the paper.
So I said, well, I'll straighten this guy out.
Hello, this is Jim Berkman.
Oh, Mr. Birkeland, you know, I've been following you for some years, and it really was coincidental.
He says, just as the phone rang, I got a final confirmatory signal that we're going to have this, about a 4.2 quake around here within a few days.
And I said, well, can you pin it down better than that?
And you're trying to egg him on a little bit.
Well, it looks like tomorrow.
I said, oh, well, about what time?
And he said, well, it's a little hard to say, but about 930.
And I said, well, what direction from San Jose?
He said, well, when they're this close, It's pretty hard to separate, but I just know it's within about 30-40 miles of San Jose.
The next day at 940, we had a 4.0, and I called him up to congratulate him, and he pointed out a couple more quakes that happened.
He said, you know, at church on Sunday before the Tuesday World Series earthquake or Loma Prieta quake, he had warned his congregation.
Of this upcoming big quake, because he had some of the biggest signals he'd ever seen.
Yes.
Well, he just now warned us that the signals that preceded that, and Northridge, and Landers, and the Kobe quakes, were exceeded by what he just reserved on the 26th of January.
Oh my God.
And he finds that the optimum dates are squares.
like 2, 4, 9, 16, 25 days.
And so the dates that he's picked up this time was between the 11th of February and
the 15th of March, the Ides of March.
Now this was especially interesting because you had a couple of predictors that were talking
about the first week in February.
I did, yes.
And so when you put that together with a lot of people reporting strange animal behavior,
and then from my standpoint, at the end of this month we're having the optimum seismic
window of the year based upon the tides from the sun and moon.
I know that's been an important factor for you and I've seen your quake predictions come true in those windows again and again and again and again.
Well let's just lay it out I summarized it here on the last page of my latest newsletter, Syzygy.
And if people would like to get a sample copy, they can, you know, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope with a couple of bucks in it.
Alright.
So here's, to be concise, this is why I'm concerned about February.
The seismic window of February 24th to March 3rd figures to be quite potent.
The highest oceanic tides until December will occur on February 26th and 27th.
With an 8.1 foot range at the Golden Gate, and a 14.4 foot range in Puget Sound on February 27th, the astronomical tidal effects on the Earth's crust will be even more stressful.
The solid Earth, of course, moves up and down, as well as the ocean waters.
Because of the full moon on February 27th, when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are lined up at Physigee, and that will be only 11 hours before the closest approach of the moon, the Perigee, for the whole year.
And the fact that we are less than two months after perihelion, which is the closest separation of the Earth from the Sun.
So at this month's perigee, the Moon will be only 221,633 miles from the Earth.
And that will be within 200 miles of the closest possible distance.
And the nearer these astronomical bodies are, the higher the tides.
In fact, the tide raising force varies with the cube of the distance, not just the square of the distance or the distance, but the cube of the distance, which is why the The effect of the moon on our tides is almost about twice as much as the effect of the sun, because the moon is so much closer.
Okay, and so you would make a window out of that, wouldn't you?
In other words, if the exact date is February 27th, you'd put a window around that, right?
Yeah, so February 24th to March 3rd is the eight-day window, and so I'm calling for a three-and-a-half to six-magnitude quake with 140 miles of Mount Diablo.
Well, it's just east of San Francisco.
I'm now north of San Francisco instead of south.
So I've spread out my area of concern a little bit so I can share in my own predictions.
Alright, and Jack Cole's prediction?
He says the Bay Area and secondarily the Los Angeles area.
And sometimes, as in 1906 when we had our 8.2 quake here, the great San Francisco earthquake on April 18th, that afternoon at 430, There was a 6.5 down in the southern part of the state near Brawley that did quite a bit of damage down there.
It was, in essence, an aftershock of a great quake up here.
And when I asked Bruce Bolt, a seismologist from Berkeley, about that about 15 years ago, he said, you know, he's quite aware of that, and that does open up the possibility of a superquake.
A superquake?
A whole fault rift at once.
Jack Cole's prediction, is he specific with regard to the Richter scale?
Yes, and it's really a little troublesome because he says a 7 or an 8.
When he sees the greatest anomaly he's ever seen with electronic glitches there.
Can you explain, a 7 or 8 is a catastrophic earthquake?
Yes, an 8 is catastrophic.
A 7.1 was the World Series earthquake.
That's called a major quake.
Right.
We normally get around the world 16 major quakes per year.
This year so far we've only had one and it came three days after the January full moon.
But we haven't had one since.
Now we normally get about one great earthquake, an eight, per year.
And last year we had 19 quakes that exceeded 7.0 and 15 were in my seismic window and one was just a day out.
Wow.
That's some record.
So, in other words, we're looking at your window, the biggest, probably, opportunity of the year from your point of view, and we're looking at Jack Cole's.
May I understand more about what exactly is Jack Cole's monitoring?
You said television interference or something like that.
Yes.
You remember the work of Stanford professor Tony Frazier Smith, Dr. Smith, was doing some work for The military on communication with the naval submarines, nuclear submarines.
Yes.
And of course they need high power, very low frequency to communicate with them when they're down a few hundred feet below the surface.
Right.
And so they were looking for optimum times for these communications because things like BART and streetcars and things like that and enlarged dynamos of various kinds cause interference with communication.
So they're looking for windows of time, quiet windows.
So they were monitoring in the quiet area up on the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Well, the station that he had, coincidentally, was only about three miles from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake.
And about a month before the quake, his background levels suddenly jumped up about twice, still very low levels, but they were about twice what they had been.
And what frequencies were they monitoring again?
That's down near the ULF and ELF category.
Oh, it certainly is.
Actually, that's near Schumann Resonance, isn't it?
I don't know even the term.
When the quake happened, it knocked off the power.
When he got to his instrument a couple days later, he found that about an hour before the quake, it had gone off scale.
And then when everything reconnected, there were a number of aftershocks.
It was quite chattery for a while, and it never achieved that high anomaly again.
But the quakes never achieved more than about a 5.5 Richter for aftershocks.
So it seemed that he was really on to something.
We know that there are earthquake lights prior to quakes.
Which would have to be electromagnetic in nature.
Yes.
So they think the quartz, it is piezoelectric and it's also, and they've only discovered this in the last 25 years, that it's triboluminescent.
When you rub it, it glows like... Oh, you may have heard, I played with that the other night and I've got some pretty good sized pieces of crystal here and I went in during a break to a dark room and rubbed them together and I was It bowled me over.
I couldn't believe it.
Not only were there sparks, but there were these little weird lights as well.
Well, the whole crystal, if it's a nice rock crystal, it'd glow internally.
Oh, yes.
But if you rub it together and then smell it, you actually get the smell of ozone.
Oh, yes.
You think lightning's going off.
Well, that phenomenon associated with quartz, the most common mineral in the world, was not known by scientists until the 1970s.
So does that mean that when they get signals like that, then down deep somewhere, compressed quartz is rubbing together?
Yes, most rocks on the continent have quartz in them, and most of our beach sands are made up of quartz.
If you go over to Hawaii, you don't have any quartz.
So we get these electromagnetic bursts, but there's a big difference between listening down in the Hertz range, very low, and television, which is, you know, that's UHF.
Well, there's a whole range of frequencies and harmonics and everything else that adds to the complexity.
Well, of course, and it would be all the way across the spectrum, actually.
Now I'm not quite sure what they were measuring in Alaska in 1964, but on the island of Kodiak
they had installed a device to measure the ionosphere, the radiation from there, electromagnetic
radiation of the ionosphere.
And it suddenly went to a 100 gamma anomaly.
They'd never seen anything like it.
Normally a daily change is two or three gammas, and sometimes maybe five or ten before an
earthquake.
It went to 100 and they thought, oh that can't be, it's a damn machine, a kick in the machine
I guess.
They said, well, the equipment.
Well that afternoon they had the 8.5 great Alaskan quake on the day of the full moon.
And there's so many scientists that think, oh that was coincidence.
And that's what really gripes me.
When you get the evidence and you turn your back on it, it's just foolish.
Your prediction is for the 24th through the 3rd, your window.
Yeah.
Does Jack Coles make a similar... 11th through the 15th is his window.
11th through the 15th?
Yeah.
Of?
Of March.
Of March.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Now, there's something else.
Of course, despite He's had a couple of spectacular failures, I guess like we all have, but the most spectacular failure brings chills down my spine because he was so concerned back in 1991 that this terrible event was going to occur because he had not only the electronic signals, but he had premonition, and so much so
That he had his family evacuated to the San Joaquin Valley from San Jose, and the media was right on him, following him, locking the door and everything, and sending the family off.
The date he was concerned about was 9-11-91.
Oh my God.
And exactly ten years was something else for us to be concerned about.
So, I think that Jack has something more going for him than just electronic signals.
Well, Jim, I've been doing a lot of work in this big collective mind.
Yes.
And, you know, all of this, in fact, might fit possibly into that category.
Well, I've been watching Crossing Over.
I stumbled onto it about a month over.
Right.
And I'm fascinated by that show.
And I can say, if he's merely a showman, he is doing wonders.
Of comforting people.
Really good at what he does.
Yes.
You refer, of course, to John Edwards.
Yes.
Jim, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Jack Kohl's talking about a 7 or an 8.
Jim Birkland, something lesser.
Both in roughly the same area.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
Come on baby, don't feel the reaper.
Baby, take my hand, don't feel the reaper.
Will we ever look like, Baby I'm your man?
La la la la la La la la la la
Since the day I saw the cat at night dawn So I came in to you sweet lady
Answering your mystical call Crystal ball on the table
Showing the future to the past Same cat with them evil eyes
And I knew it was a spell she cast She's just a devil woman with evil on her mind
Beware the devil woman, she's gonna get you She's just a devil woman with evil on her mind
Beware the devil woman, she's gonna get you from behind Give me the ring on your finger
Let me see the lines on your hand I can see me a tall dark stranger
Giving you what you hadn't planned I drank the potion she offered me
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14th, 2002.
You know, I don't much like what I'm hearing tonight.
This is quadruple witching.
Jack Coles with a prediction of a 7 to 8 earthquake.
Jim Birkland, my guest right now, with his own prediction, roughly in the same time period.
Looking toward the end of February and the first part of March.
Jack Coles with the electronics, and then there's the dogs and the cats.
Kind of a quadruple witching.
And by the way, speaking of cats, on the front page of my website tonight under What's New, you're going to want to look at this, because researchers in Texas have cloned a cat.
This is from the BBC, and I've got a link directly to it for you.
And they have a picture of the cat up there.
The cat's name is CC.
It's a cute little cat, but take a good look at its blank little eyes.
The work is described in the scientific journal Nature and is the first time anyone has cloned a pet.
Cece is a copy of her genetic mother, not of the surrogate cat which actually birthed her.
Despite having the same genes and the same color code as her genetic mother, Cece has a different coat pattern given These patterns are not exclusively down to genes.
The Wall Street Journal is saying the work at Texas A&M University was financed by an 81-year-old financier called John Sperling, who wants to charge wealthy pet owners to clone their animals.
He was quoted by Reuters News Agency as saying that he'd also like to see cloning used for socially useful animals such as rescue dogs.
You wanna see a picture of CC?
I was kidding about the eyes.
CC along with the story the full story is on my website right now
You're listening to art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14th,
2002.
Music.
Quadruple witching. Birkeland's prediction, Cole's prediction, the moon, the animals, and again about animals.
What do you think, Jim, about this animal reaction thing?
What have you concluded, if anything, over the years?
No question about it.
Animals detect changes in electromagnetic field that precedes quakes because of strain in the crust.
Affecting the magnetic minerals like magnetite, ilmenite, and chromite.
Why do you think it would make them run away?
They are used to navigating by means of magnetic fields, whether it's marine mammals or bees or homing pigeons.
And when there become these glitches in the field that they're used to depend on, just linking to the magnetic field that goes from pole to pole, Prior to quakes, there are these local anomalies.
And so you can imagine, they now pretty well understand that whales travel in magnetic loads.
No, there's no question about it.
So what you're saying really is they don't run away, Jim.
They get lost.
Well, they become very uneasy.
Now, if we're used to seeing a nice golden sun out there, if it should suddenly turn purple and pink and wink off and on, we'd get very upset.
Oh, absolutely.
Some of us would burrow in under the covers, and others might just take off blindly.
As an old hunter, we'd take a new dog out on a deer hunt, and you'd see a deer, and bangity-bang-bang, and these young dogs, they would panic and just run off, totally out of control, and you might get lucky to find them 15 miles away.
But they had to get used to this anomaly.
When I worked in the Santa Clara County building, they had this white sound.
And the only time it would, you weren't bothered by somebody's telephone conversation in the next desk, you know?
And for about three weeks, the women especially said, we can't work under these conditions, do something.
And then all of a sudden, it got into the background, they totally forgot about it.
White noise, really?
White noise, exactly.
And so, the only time there'd be a disturbance in that white noise, you'd hear some static, and then somebody will have picked up A microphone upstairs said, folks, there's been a bomb scare.
We have to walk down the stairs.
There could be a fire drill.
They would never say, you're all doing a great job.
Keep it up.
There was always something bad.
So when you heard a break in the white noise, you perked up your ears and said, oh boy, what's this?
What's coming?
Yeah.
And so that's where the animals react.
That was really the first.
Thing you worked on, wasn't it?
I mean, you were making predictions by watching the number of lost animals.
No, actually, that came five years after I started using the tides.
Oh, really?
I thought that the highest tidal force in about three or four years was coming on January 8, 1974, and I thought then that this close approach of the moon on the same day as the perigee, when it lined up with the sun-moon earth, That might cause the solid Earth to move up and down as well as the ocean waters, and sure enough, that was the case.
I didn't know it at the time, but I looked in the six quakes that had greeted me into Santa Clara County, and they all fit this time.
Now, Jim, is there any way that you could suggest or imagine that a quake the magnitude of Jack Cole's prediction?
Not at this time.
Well, no, what I'm asking is that a quake of that magnitude would be along the San Andreas?
If it's an 8, it would just about have to be.
It would have to be?
Yeah.
You have to get a quake, a great earthquake, you have to have a long fault line.
And in 1906, it ruptured for 270 miles, which is one of the reasons that I just scoff at trying to lower the magnitude down to a 7.7 as some People in high science have tried to do in recent years that would make it say it wasn't even a great earthquake and it it ruptured the ground 270 miles for a maximum displacement of 21 feet and you don't get that from a 7.7.
Since you know the geology and the building practices along the San Andreas at least certainly up in your area what would an eight-point quake do in your area?
Well we've had such a New regulations, building codes, I don't think it would be as severe as 1906, if it were on the San Andreas.
Yes.
If it were even a 7-5 on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay, it might be worse, because it's so close to all the buildings.
The main fault went right through Kobe, and they hadn't even considered that part of Japan to be that earthquake prone, and they got a Well, wouldn't something that size on the San Andreas have a good chance of setting the other one off?
Or the other way around?
Well, it didn't.
There has been an effect of a lag time of about two to five years, where it seems that it has ricocheted back and forth from one side of the bay to the other.
But it doesn't cause large quakes at the same time.
The World Series quake in 1989, about a week later there was something like a 4 magnitude on the Hayward Fault.
And it did cause quite a bit of apprehension that it might have been another foreshock.
Yeah, I was about to ask about foreshocks.
How frequently is a major quake foreshadowed by a foreshock?
In California, about half the time.
Half the time?
That's all.
And in California, about half of the damaging earthquakes have been on faults.
They either hadn't recognized or thought were not a problem.
So we were constantly learning.
And, you know, like the Northridge earthquake was on a fault that was deeply buried.
It didn't even reach the surface.
So they were unaware of that.
The Coalinga quake in 83, the same thing.
Dumb question for you.
Other than using the methods that, you know, you use and Jack Coles uses, Why don't we know more about earthquakes by now, Jim?
I think it's a scientific ego many times.
Not born here syndrome.
We tried to emulate what the Chinese did with the animals and set up a four-year program funded by the USGS and through Stanford Research.
It was called Earthquake Watch and I was a member for three of those four years.
Made some predictions that hit.
And reported on animals that I was observing and that friends were telling me about.
Towards the end of the program, their newsletter said there had been seven earthquakes in California preceded by so many hotline calls, there was only one chance in thousands that it was accidental.
Now this was the best program they had, and they dropped it immediately.
Right after that.
In other words, that program had more success than any other, all the lasers and the measurement stuff.
Absolutely.
I can't think of another success they've had.
Why would they drop it, Jim?
Because it was hard to justify it to Congress.
What, you're going to study animals?
Come on.
I'd rather fund this $500,000 black box for you.
How stupid are we?
Well, yeah.
Well, why are they not looking at The tides, in fact.
There are hundreds of papers in the world literature demonstrating the statistical validity of tides and quakes.
There are also almost an equal number saying there's nothing to it.
And I've seen leading scientists completely change 180 degrees over time.
And so, truth is hard to establish if every time you find some evidence, they turn their back on it and say, we don't see any evidence.
And well, I haven't missed a five magnitude quake in the Bay Area since 1973.
And we had one over here in Napa Valley.
By the way, I just had somebody send me something.
It could be totally inaccurate.
Somebody says about 10 minutes ago there was a 5.3 earthquake near the coast of Chiapas, Mexico.
5.3 it says.
Well, that's called a moderate earthquake.
And it's about a monthly occurrence down in Mexico.
But this is a likely time.
We just had the new moon on the 12th of February.
And on that same day, there was a 3.0 just north of Seattle, the strongest of the year in western Washington.
That's true.
So then, with all of these things coinciding, what advice would you give to people?
The standard stuff, I suppose.
I mean, what advice do you give?
Well, there are numbers of things to think about.
If you got ready for Y2K, then you're ready for a strong earthquake.
I bought a generator and we put in a 2,500-gallon water tank.
And I say, you've got your generators going, wind and solar.
So power could be out for days or even longer.
Oh, yeah.
And water's the number one problem, not only for fighting fires, but just for staying alive.
We've had well over our annual supply of rainfall here in Sonoma County, so we're in good shape, but lots of the country is under drought conditions.
Well, and in a large earthquake, what would happen to the distribution system for water?
Well, we know what happened in 1906, just absolutely ruptured them where the pipelines crossed the fault line, and then where you get liquefaction and sandy soils that are saturated, it just shakes longer and stronger and just ruptures I hadn't heard about that.
Oh, there's something going on in Southern California too that hasn't been resolved yet.
There's this gas, this stinky gas that spread over a couple of counties down there last night.
I hadn't heard about that. What, what, what?
Well, I hope it's... well, I don't know what it...
It hasn't been explained. If it's H2S, hydrogen sulfide, or the rotten egg smell,
that's the kind of thing that does precede quakes.
Your well water has begun to stink.
Where did you get this?
Somebody sent me a copy from the Times and it's been on the internet here.
There's a whole series of things on my website under phenomena.
Oh really?
Yeah.
That doesn't sound real good at all.
No, and I do want to make sure that people know just exactly where I stand on this.
I'm not nearly as concerned About a big one here in the next month as I was prior to the Loma Prieta quake.
Before Loma Prieta, instead of 20 missing dogs, we had 58, which was one of the all-time highs, and the all-time high of missing cats.
Also, we had unusual rare whales beaching themselves at Santa Cruz and Ocean Beach, and we had a waterfall that had been just trickling and began to flow at high volume.
Banana slugs and newts crawling through the woods.
They could hardly avoid them.
We had pigeons that couldn't find their way home.
We had seagulls flying miles inland.
And this one here.
There were a number.
One doctor said all ten of his multiple sclerosis patients deteriorated rapidly just before Loma Prieta.
And right after Loma Prieta, they got back to where they were before.
And I have a very good friend.
The same thing happened to her.
And we didn't put it together until this doctor called me.
And that made 11 out of 11.
And when you have MS, your nervous system, your body attacks the insulation.
And so you are very susceptible to stray electronic radiation.
So, the fact that all of these things are true and documented, and you've documented them again and again and again, even a scientist, Jim, should be susceptible to numbers.
I mean, to collected information.
To not be sensitive is to not be scientific.
Well, that's been my standpoint ever since 1974.
And it's amazing the heat I've taken.
But actually, in the last few months, there's a lot more credibility being established.
I've been asked to give talks at scientific meetings.
And some of my longtime critics have eased off and said, well, maybe there's something to it.
But it's not enough so we can use it yet.
Mainstream science has said it is impossible to predict earthquakes.
They only came to that conclusion after they failed.
Yes, I remember some spectacular warnings.
Oh boy, they thought they had it nailed and they warned it and it just didn't happen.
Well, they gave it a 95% chance for the six magnitude at Parkfield halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Why were they so damn sure of themselves?
Well, they looked at history and they said, well gee, they had a quake about that big in 1857 and 1881 and 1901.
1922, so about every 22 years.
And it didn't bother them that there was one in 1934, just 12 years after the 1922 one, and then it wasn't again until 1966 when I felt the two down at Coalinga.
So they were going by history?
A pattern.
And you can't deny history, but it's not the final answer.
And they went way overboard on their probabilities.
They had the statistics, you know, but Yeah, I remember seeing on CNN people packing up and leaving and all the rest of it.
Oh yeah, I remember.
Well, so I don't suggest anything like that.
If you are living in an earthquake country, you should be well aware of it.
You should explain it to the kids.
You should pick up things from the Red Cross and the Office of Emergency Services and the Planning Departments and the Geology Departments.
Educate yourself.
Get the book Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country by Peter Yaniv.
Or the book Earthquake Country by Sunset.
If you want to find out about what the animals are doing, the best, absolutely the top book on that subject that should be reprinted is When the Snakes Awake by Helmut Tribute.
An absolutely incredible book.
And he said in the foreword, when a scientist comes up against a totally inexplicable, mysterious phenomenon, he is inclined to be cautious.
If he is smart and concerned about his reputation, he will take no public position on it.
But when the phenomenon is one on which life and death may depend, and when those enigmatic observations made under tragic circumstances are passed on to him by people whom he knows and trusts, then he cannot escape serious conflicts of conscience.
And that was exactly the position that I've been in.
Well, scientists have always said weird things.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
That was Charles H. Stuhl, U.S.
Commissioner of Patents, in 1899.
Right.
Get this.
There is no known reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
Kenneth Olsen, President and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
Storms of the Sun have nothing to do with the weather on the Earth.
Lord Kelvin, about 1890.
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
carry em warner warner brothers nineteen twenty seven yeah
uh... so yes uh... yes indeed
So we have to be persistent.
My colleague at the U.S.
Geological Survey, in fact my mentor, Edgar Bailey, he said, Jim, I don't know about this syzygy thing you're dealing with, but you know you're never going to convince your severest critics your goal should be to Outlive them, or have your ideas outlive them.
I'm working on that.
We're all watching these days.
Alright, listen.
Thank you for being on the program.
Scissor G, the newsletter available.
Just send a couple bucks.
Self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Otherwise, they won't get it.
Because you just can't do that much licking.
That's right.
Not an older geologist, anyway.
Jim, thanks.
You're welcome.
Take care, everybody.
Alright, so there you go.
I'll dribble witching for you.
It's something that you need not panic about, but certainly you want to note it.
Maybe you even want to write it down.
If you're in California and you didn't get ready for Y2K, you might want to get ready now.
Store a little water.
Have a good radio.
Have a good light.
Do the sensible things to get ready for what may come.
I'm Art Bell.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
When I dig a little down about an hour ago, took a look around.
Be it sight, sound, smell or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
I'm trying.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it moves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
To have all these things in our memories whole?
And they use them to cover the sun So far
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Yeah
Why Why would she so
Take his place On this trip
Just for me Why
Take a free ride Take the place
Of my seat It's for free
I would have wanted to spend a few years Work so hard
Just to win my fears Have to live my life
For my rights But by now, I know, I should like
Why Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 14th, 2002.
Birkeland got me started, now I can't stop.
Bill Hamilton sent me some of these, listen.
These quotes, listen, before you get your nose buried too far in science.
Believe me, Germany is unable to wage war.
That was former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, August 1st, 1934.
We don't like their sound.
Group of guitars are on their way out.
Decca Records rejecting the Beatles in 1962.
Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French military strategist figures in future World War I Commander 1911.
Or how about this?
The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.
A president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Horace Rackham, Henry Ford's lawyer, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, 1903.
Rackham ignored the advice, bought $5,000 worth of stocks, sold it several years later at $12.5 million.
Or this one, relevant.
Radio has no future.
Lord Kelvin, Scottish mathematician and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897.
Radio has no future.
So before you get your nose too buried in science, remember some of these.
And I have more.
Many more.
In a moment, Dr. Philip Tierno, Jr.
He's a well-known microbiologist with more than 30 years experience in the field of clinical and medical microbiology.
He's got a lot to say about BT bioterrorism, and germs in general.
Coming right up.
Now, we take you back to the past on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
And now, comes Dr. Philip M. Tierno, who is a well-known microbiologist with, I guess,
more than 30 years of experience in the field of clinical and medical microbiology.
He is director of the Clinical Microbiology and Diagnostic Immunology at Tisch Hospital, New York University Medical Center, oh my, as well as Mount Sinai Medical Center, and is a part-time Associate Professor, Departments of Microbiology and Pathology at the New York University School of Medicine.
He also lectures at both NYU School of Dentistry and the SUNY, that's S-U-N-Y School of Optometry in New York City, is a member of numerous respected scientific societies, Did his graduate studies at the New York University, where he was awarded an M.S.
degree in 1974, his Ph.D.
following in 1977.
Dr. Tierno acts as a consultant to the Office of Attorney General of New York State, Department of Health of the City of New York, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, In the College of American Pathologists, Dr. Tierno is a member of the New York City Mayor's Task Force on Bioterrorism.
Dr. Tierno has been recognized extensively for his numerous contributions to the medical scientific community.
In 1986, he was bestowed the honor of knighthood.
So he's really Sir Philip Tierno.
Sir Tierno, huh?
Wow, that's something, knighthood.
Absolutely, and then there's so much more here, but let us begin with, is it Sir Tierno, then?
Not really, that's an honorary knighthood.
Still a knighthood, though.
For contributions, you know, in science.
my my my uh... what an extensive background you've got and what a uh...
what a what an interesting job it must be uh... at the moment to be advising uh... in in new york on
bioterrorism actually it's a fascinating
field and uh... one that is uh... opening up all sorts of doors
to interesting uh... avenues uh... of exploration
One of the reasons why I wrote my book, The Secret Life of Germs, is to express my profound love for this field.
So that individuals, the lay public, can get some insight as to what a microbiology is.
Many of them, you know, have very little awareness of the dynamics of that field.
If you were to discover a particularly horrible new germ, some complex, at the beginning certainly indecipherable something or another, You would probably privately describe it as beautiful.
Yes?
Well, I don't know if I would describe it as beautiful.
I would say that this is another example of a germ probably jumping species.
Most of the new germs that we've seen, like the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and even the West Nile organism, either jump species in that their original species that
they infect was an animal of some sort, or they tend to move in geographic areas, as is the case of
the West Nile.
But the very inability to explain what it is at the time and to see what it does is sort of a beautiful process to
watch.
I mean, they're very complex, and I would imagine represent an immediate and great challenge for you.
So beautiful in that sense.
Absolutely.
Just as has occurred with the HIV virus, before we knew what it was, the chase, so to speak, was extraordinary.
You bet.
And so too for the Legionnaires' disease, until we found the culprit.
And the same is so for a wide variety of other organisms.
Well, as a general question, I would ask you, are we... Would you say it's fair to say we are seeing, in the last decade or two, an increase in emerging diseases and new things, or at least new things to us, that suddenly, all of a sudden, take off.
Maybe they've always been there, but for some reason, something keys them, and suddenly they're on the go.
No question about that.
Whether it's something as simple as certain types of cold viruses expressing themselves better or easier in the population so that a larger segment of the population comes down with them, or whether it's like a whole host of different organisms that are more virulent and are able to infect us at a better rate, or simply like Lyme disease, We are interfacing in areas that we probably, because of our expansion, shouldn't be.
And we're interfacing with the forested areas, and we're seeing a greater incidence of Lyme disease because we are on the turf of various animal cycles, animal tick cycles.
And so we put ourselves in the middle of that and wind up with Lyme disease.
And there's many other examples.
The Ebola virus is another one.
Because of deforestation in areas in Africa, and because we're moving populations from cities to the suburbs, and encroaching on forested space where man has never been before, we're interfacing them with strange diseases.
Ebola has been very interesting because it has struck in Africa in a relatively isolated way.
Ebola seems to strike so hard, too hard, that it burns itself out fairly rapidly.
But an analogy for me is I live out here in the desert, a doctor, and in many areas you have just a little bit of brush and then some bare land and then some more desert brush and bare land, more desert brush, that kind of area.
And it's kind of like Ebola.
In other words, one of those bushes could go very quickly and then just burn right out.
And there'd be enough space so that it wouldn't catch to the next piece of brush.
But then there's other parts of the desert, Doctor, where if one catches and the conditions are just right and the wind is right, it's the fastest, most fierce fire you've ever seen in your whole life.
And it can it could conceivably consume vast amounts, you know, areas.
Very, very, very quickly.
Does Ebola have that potential?
Well, every organism, if it's found in the wrong place at the right time, has the potential to cause a scourge for a particular point in time that may be very detrimental to the human species.
Ebola virus strains vary.
Some of them are very aggressive and result in 90% death rate.
Others are less aggressive and result in maybe a 40 or 50 percent death rate.
The idea here is that the human host is not the designated host for that particular virus.
No organism, no germ, would want to kill off the species it infects because it too will be killed.
A successful parasite likes to cause an infection that's sort of low-level.
So that it's always there, and it can use that species to propagate itself.
And Ebola kills its own victims.
Exactly.
So eventually, man will acclimate sufficiently to that virus to allow infection without actually succumbing to the infection.
Much the same is so for the HIV virus.
The chimpanzees have an HIV virus, something similar, it's called a simian.
I mean, immunodeficiency virus.
That does not kill them.
In fact, almost all of them have it.
And as such, that virus is said to be a successful parasite.
Whereas the HIV virus in man is not very successful because it was killing off most of the people it infected.
But over time, even HIV Will not be a killer of man, if we survive the interlude.
Do you recall the Ruston, Virginia situation?
Yes, I do.
Now, I remember watching 60 Minutes, and about the most chilling thing I ever saw in my whole life was the end of their report, where they had somebody like yourself, who said, you know, it's a funny thing, if there had been just the tiniest, teeny, tiniest switch Well, you can have a mode of transmission change that could be detrimental for any organism, not just Ebola.
For example, an HIV.
and well I don't know you tell me what would have happened.
Well you can have a mode of transmission change that could be detrimental
for any organism not just Ebola.
For example an HIV, imagine if it were to be transmitted and currently it's transmitted by blood and by secretions.
Imagine if it were transmitted respiratorily.
If people talk through the air.
There are droplets and it would spread like wildfire within the population before the population has time to acclimate to it.
Is that possible?
You're saying it's possible?
The HIV, you know, anything is possible.
HIV mutates constantly, does it not?
Yes.
It's even more mutatable and changeable than the influenza A virus.
And influenza A, as you know, and B virus, we get different vaccines for it every year.
That's how rapidly it changes its face.
We call that changing the antigenic composition.
In fact, some years they even miss it.
It modifies itself.
Everybody takes shots and it doesn't work.
Correct.
So much the same as so for a whole host of viruses, yes.
You get a change in the way it's transmitted.
And germs are transmitted in four general ways.
One is by contact, person to person.
And in fact, there's an interesting statistic that goes with that.
Eighty percent of all infectious disease is transmitted by contact, by touch.
Wow.
So that's the primary way germs are spread.
Secondly, you can get something called a common vehicle spread.
In that, let's say you get a foodstuff that is replete with some salmonella, and you ingest that at a picnic or at a fair, and you come down with gastroenteritis.
That's another way germs are spread.
Of course, in the air, like tuberculosis, is a third way.
And fourthly, by The wing, I call it, and leg method.
That is, mosquitoes and flies can provide germs.
Like West Nile virus, right?
Exactly.
By the way, how did West Nile virus get here?
Do you have any idea?
Well, that's a very good point.
I have my own idea, and in the book I go into it in detail.
In fact, it's speculation, but it is a possibility.
The way I speculate.
And I believe it got here most probably on a plane.
As a rider, just as passengers are riding the plane, probably in the luggage hold, or perhaps on a passenger's sweater, or hair, as the mosquito It took its ride after the landing, let's say, at Kennedy.
It maybe bit a few of the passengers and then went to some swampy area, as we would find around the Kennedy Airport.
Actually, you'd even find it around LaGuardia.
And from there on, it went through its cycle, biting some birds.
And then probably passing the virus in that way.
Other mosquitoes picked up the virus and propagated it.
Well, we have planes crisscrossing every landmass and ocean in the world in mass quantities today as compared to yesteryear.
And so that's going on constantly.
Is that level to bring us more little goodies like this?
I would say absolutely.
It's an obvious thing that a disease, let's say, that is infecting a rural African city or some little country in Asia or even South America, an individual from that country can make a Trip to New York, or to London, or to some other major city.
And there it is.
And there you go.
You have it introduced.
Doctor, hold it right there.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
My guest is an expert in these matters, advises New York on these matters and bioterrorism.
Should be an interesting evening, I would say.
These, as the Chinese have said, The Curse actually are very interesting times.
They are here now.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
on this Somewhere in Time.
I'm going to be a part of it.
We make it tomorrow Will the stars shine on you?
Midnight in the desert I'm a less than
Ooh, a less than you Ooh, a less than you
Ooh, a less than you Now, we take you back to the past
On Art Bell Somewhere in Time Dr. Chiarino acts as a consultant to the Office of the Attorney General of New York State Department of Health, City of New York, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
He's a member of the New York City Mayor's Task Force on Bioterrorism.
and he'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14th, 2002.
If you're any kind of regular listener to the show, you know every now and then something
gets in my craw and I can't let it loose and I want to ask Dr. Tierno about this.
It's an article that appeared in the Observer in London, and the headline is, is human evolution finally over?
And here's my application with Dr. Terranova.
We're using antibiotics at an unheard of rate.
We are conquering disease.
We are learning all kinds of things.
And this professor in London is saying that basically evolution in the West Basically has come to a standstill because the process of natural selection has been perverted and continues to be perverted.
A stark controversial view of a group of biologists Who believe that a Western lifestyle now protects humanity from the forces that used to shape homo sapiens.
Obviously not totally, but sufficiently that they think the process of evolution may have been perverted.
It's an interesting theory.
What do you think of that, Doctor?
Well, I would say a better word would be diverted.
Diverted.
Perverted.
Okay.
It's kind of true about evolution.
And a selection of organisms, if you leave everything to chance, there would be a certain evolving going on, until the species either burns itself out or evolves into something else.
However, because man has a gift that no other living creature has, and that is the brain,
man is able to interject himself in places that no other species has found itself in
a position to do.
Today, actually, you know, we talk about the new age and the new millennium.
We're finally uncovering the deepest biochemical and genetic workings of germs.
In so doing, we're gaining the capacity to use the knowledge of these breakthroughs for the benefit of mankind.
Helping mankind evolve in a specific way, using these smallest of creatures.
And one day, they may allow us, these little creatures, gaining insight into their genetics, just as we're gaining insight into the human genome.
We can use these organisms to help us address the most pressing human problems of disease, hunger, and even pollution.
That we face that could cause our demise.
So in other words, we could become the engineers of our own evolution.
Exactly.
And that's the way we're exploring a gargantuan potential of germs.
And that may sound ridiculous, but it is in fact true.
We can harness their power for the good of mankind.
And isn't it strange right now that the future of nature's greatest creature, man, Depends upon an intimate cooperation with nature's least, the germ.
Nobody gives germs a second thought, except when they cause disease.
They're harnessing their genetic... Don't forget, there's something that we're missing here, and that is that germs were around long before man hit Earth.
If we look at Earth as being four and a half billion years old, germs have originated in the very beginning.
Around 4 billion years ago.
We have, in fact, indirect evidence of their existence.
The first prototypical cell being around 3.8 to 4 billion years ago.
Then in some sense, scientifically, we owe our existence to them.
Exactly.
But we have actual fossilized bacterial cells in an Australian rock about 3.5 billion years old.
And that's hard evidence.
The first prototypical type cells were cyanobacteria that still exist to this day, and everything has evolved from them, in a sense.
And if you look at another fact, and that's why I say man, we're learning so much about microorganisms that we thought had nothing to do with the evolution of man, and realizing that we can use them as instruments of man's evolution.
So I think it's quite amazing.
Doctor, may I take a side step for a second?
I would imagine you'd be in some way involved in this, or at least in the information flow regarding this, but with regard to the anthrax attack that was made, there was a very great deal in the press about doing the genetic research on anthrax to trace its likely origin.
And I was sort of waiting and waiting and waiting to hear the results of that research, and I still have not heard.
Have you?
Well, I can only talk about what is in public information.
In other words, you know more than you can say.
That's another way of looking at it.
Okay, thank you.
I will tell you that a lot of that Had been done.
See, there were two avenues of exploration.
The anthrax bacterium has a chromosome, just like we have chromosomes inside the nucleus of our cells.
Well, bacteria don't have nuclei, but they do have a chromosome, or chromosomes, dependent upon the organism.
And that was probed, just like we unfolded the genome of man, we unfolded the genome of anthrax.
And it was thought that We would be able to look at various segments to see what might be in common with the organisms that kill those people, with the inhalation anthrax cases, and the known strains.
Well, unfortunately, that did not yield very much, since most of the virulent strains were what we call the AIMS strain, which was found in AIMS, Iowa.
Okay.
Plasmids.
That's where it got its name from.
But we then looked at something very important.
Bacteria carry little segments of DNA, circular DNA, called plasmids.
These are separate from the chromosomes.
This was worked out in Arizona, actually, at the laboratories, the anthrax laboratories
in Arizona.
And they started to break down the genetic makeup of these plasmids.
There are two plasmids in an anthrax bacillus.
One carries the genes for the toxins, and there are three toxins, protective antigen, lethal factor, and edema factor.
And another plasmid, a separate plasma, carries the genes for the capsule.
By looking at these genes, by looking at the segments, I don't have that information in my hands, but I know that that was done.
I see.
will say. So in other words, we are at hand. So in other words, doctor, what you cannot
say right now is what you know, and what you know is the specific identity of this strain.
I don't have that information in my hands, but I know that that was done. I see. Okay,
good enough. Do you believe the public will be made aware of this at some point?
Absolutely.
I think it's a matter of FBI domain here.
They want sort of a heads up.
Why should anybody reveal all of their hand if they're playing a card game?
You don't just put your hand for everybody to see so that they have an advantage.
Strains of anthrax go.
How pure, and we've heard a million different things about this, how pure and how deadly and how refined was this particular anthrax?
Was it to the category to be called weaponized?
Alright, the answer to that is yes and no.
There were two, what should I say, Letters or a series of letters that were submitted.
The first contained a less pure spore.
In fact, there was some brown discoloration, which shows that whoever did it sort of did it in a more crude manner.
The second letters, the dashall letters, were weapons grade.
They were extraordinarily good, extraordinarily pure, extraordinary in every way.
In fact, I have a second book on bioterrorism.
I go into it in detail about what a weapons grade is.
It's called Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism.
It's a paperback.
Well, it almost seemed, Doctor, as though it would have to be that strong to have been infecting people from the casual, you know, sort of, in the letter processing area, cross-contaminating and that sort of thing, because there would have been very little cross-contamination, and yet it certainly did get people, didn't it?
Yes, it did.
That's because the spore size was extremely small, and the spores themselves Lost electrostatic ability to adhere to one another.
In the ground, for example, when cattle graze, you might find spores of anthrax naturally along the old cattle trails in this country and throughout the world, in fact, can be found.
But cattle don't ordinarily come down with it.
It's pretty difficult for them to come down with anthrax because the spores in nature clump together.
That's some sort of protection that species have.
And of course, they do cut themselves on twigs and branches and they come down with a cutaneous form that could be pretty fatal to the herd.
But in general, it's very difficult to aerosolize.
But the weapon grade spores of the second group of letters was really extraordinary in that it was a whitish powder, apparently not as brown as the first And as such, this was what I would call weapons grade.
The only thing, the delivery system did not make it a weapon.
However, we learned a lot from that situation because no one thought that anthrax could be delivered so well by letter.
But then again, most people had no clue what's going on in the post office with regard to those sorting machines.
Looking at that, it amazed me how rapidly that mail is handled and they even use suction devices and blowers and all sorts of things that would make it more hazardous handling mail.
What have we done since all of this has happened?
In other words, if a weapons-grade letter of the type sent we just talked about were to be sent again today, what would happen?
Well, I'll tell you the truth.
We are lucky in the sense that we were exposed to this small series of events.
Of course, there were fatalities involved, and that's unfortunate.
But the learning experience has been traumatic.
It's been unprecedented.
And because of that, I think we are better prepared today And we have ever been prepared before.
What I'm asking is the sorting machines, the whole process the mail system uses, has that been modified so that in all likelihood it wouldn't occur again?
To a great degree that it has.
To other degrees, there are sanitizing methods that are used on the mail prior to getting to that step.
There's a whole host of things that were done in response.
Not only in the mail room, but throughout the country.
We have sort of been given a practice run and we responded to it in an exemplary way.
If a terrorist, Doctor, were to obtain a large amount of this weaponized anthrax and get it to the air, as in a small plane or some dispersal system, God knows what, what's the potential?
Well, that is a significant potential.
In fact, crop dust, if it were retrofitted, and that's not easy to do, that could be extraordinarily detrimental to whomever is in the way of those spores.
In fact, in Chapter 12 of my book, I talk about terror by night, which describes an individual leaving from a hangar in old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York.
In fact, about a hundred miles from the city up to Hudson.
And I describe of this disgruntled former Army employee as having a bone to pick with the Army and he's going to make his mark.
And most bioterrorists want to make a statement.
They don't have the wherewithal to make a grand statement except to resort to bioterror weapons as anthrax.
He had access, in my little scenario here, to anthrax.
So he cooked up a batch of spores Put it in his crop duster, which, by the way, he got access to by looking for a job during the preceding year, the year before he decided to do this episode, as a crop duster.
And he would get part-time work, so he cut the suspicions of anybody at the time.
And this book, by the way, was written about three years ago.
It was in three years in the making, well before the bioterror events that took place in September.
And he decides to Take his chance on New Year's Eve to get into the plane.
He's got access because he's a working member of Cropdusting Corporation of the State, and he decides to fly at night, generally by wind direction, using what you said, a bunch of spores in a plane, releasing it.
It could be monumentally disastrous.
As you saw what happens with a few letters, Anyway, he does this during the night because we have what's called inversions of temperature.
Yes.
Inversions of the atmosphere where you have sort of everything closer to the ground.
Yes.
So that any current of air would follow the path that is predicted.
He goes to the weather map and understands where he should drop that load and at what time he should drop it to be just in time for the revelers during New Year's Eve celebration.
And in fact, my scenario was written for the new millennium, the year 2000 celebration.
In your scenario, how many people might be affected?
Literally everyone that was in that New York City Times Square in Barnes and everyone down the path that would have gone outside even to walk their dog.
As the flow of spores came towards the city carried by the jet stream, it would have been catastrophic.
Hundreds of thousands, if not a million individuals at least would have been affected.
So you weren't really surprised when the FAA grounded all crop dusters?
Oh no, absolutely not.
The thing is, it's very difficult to retrofit I took liberties in the book, but it's very difficult to retrofit a crop duster to be able to dispense spores of anthrax.
So that's something we could rest easy on, although it is possible.
And it would have to be a country that sponsors that kind of an event.
I don't believe it's going to be sponsored by an individual terrorist or a group of terrorists or terrorist cells.
They would not have the capacity to do that.
They may try, and fortunately for us, one of our greatest weapons, 300 million pair of eyes and 300 million pair of ears... Well, Doctor, the President recently referred to an axis of evil.
That would be three countries with that capability, I presume?
That and other things like dirty bombs, nuclear weapons, Of course, bioterrorist weapons is very important consideration.
In your mind, with regard to a terrorist, for example, with the help of some nation, would a biological weapon be more effective than a nuclear, say a dirty nuclear weapon?
I've heard they wouldn't be as effective as we have previously thought.
Well, that's my feeling.
I mentioned that in the A little soft-covered book on bioterrorism.
I go through a litany of the 18 agents that are on the Department of Defense list of bioterroristic weapons.
The one I fear most is not smallpox.
It is anthrax.
Just as a scenario we discussed, anthrax can be a pretty wicked weapon, and it's my number one on the hit list of weapons to be used against humanity by a terrorist.
All right.
What I fear the most.
Doctor, hold it right there.
We're at the top of the hour.
And my guest is Dr. Tierano.
He has a book.
We'll tell you all about that book.
But as I've mentioned to you, he acts as consultant to the Office of Attorney General of New York State Department of Health of New York City, the NIH, Bethesda College of American Pathologists.
Dr. Tierano is a member of New York City Mayor's Task Force on Bioterrorism.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
So you think you're a Romeo. Playing a part in a picture show. Well take your love and take me home.
Well take the long way home.
Take the long way home.
I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra
And how she gave me life And how she made it in
Some velvet more than when I was trained Flowers growing on a hill
Dragonflies and daffodils Learn from us very much
Look at us but do not touch Phaedra is my name
Some velvet more than when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14, 2002.
And how she gave me life And how she made me...
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 14, 2002.
Dr. Philip M. Tierno Jr., among other things.
Since 1977, for example, has been recognized as a biography in consecutive editions
to date of Who's Who for his work in the field of microbiology.
He'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14th, 2002.
Music Once again, Dr. Philip M. Tierno, Jr.
Doctor, a straight out question for you.
Do you have the knowledge necessary that if you were a bad man, you could concoct what would virtually be weaponized grade anthrax?
Could you do that?
Is that within your scientific knowledge to do that?
It's a possibility.
It's a possibility.
At least I would be able to concoct Spores that would be pretty good.
Not ideal, but pretty good.
Pretty good.
Doctor, how many people do you suppose there are in America with the knowledge that you have?
I would say that the members of the American Society of Microbiology, of which I'm one, any one of the members have access to microorganisms, and that would be in the neighborhood of maybe 30,000.
I want to read you a very quick story and get your reaction.
This is breaking news.
It's on my website right now.
It's dated February 13, 2002.
Of course, from British news, but you'll find it as the first item under What's New Right Now.
Detectives were last night trying to unravel the circumstances in which a leading university research scientist was found dead At his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home, the body of Ian Langford, 40, who was a senior fellow at the University of East Anglia's Center for Social and Economic Research on Global Environment, was discovered Monday night by police and ambulance men.
The body, naked from the waist down, partly wedged under a chair, it is understood the doors to the terrorist house were locked.
A post-mortem examination failed to establish how Dr. Langford, who lived alone in the house in Norwich, died.
Dr. Langford began working at the University in 1993 after gaining a PhD in childhood leukemia and infection following a first class honors degree in environmental sciences, worked most recently as a senior researcher assessing risk to the environment.
Now, Dr. Tierno, my question for you is as follows.
In your field, you cannot help but be aware That recently there have been a lot of very, very suspicious deaths of people in your field, and a very unusual, disturbing number of them.
I've been reading them in the news.
I'm supposing you've heard about it.
Yes, I have heard about it.
Well, certainly it is alarming when you see an unusual number of scientists die strangely.
But yet, there's no hard evidence that they have died because of involvement in some underhanded operation of some sort, or because they were not cooperative with, let's say, some terrorists.
No, but it's a scenario one can certainly imagine.
Yes, and it certainly crosses my mind.
I'm extra careful that anybody can basically walk into my office.
They just have to go through my secretary.
And if they, you know, check her out when she goes to lunch and takes a break, they could possibly get me there alone, that's for sure.
We do have security.
There's been a recent survey showing how security lapses missed several individuals who came in with backpacks.
So, you know, I'm aware of all of that and I'm extra cautious.
But I mean, I can't do any more than that.
I will not allow any terrorist to arouse my fear.
And that is the biggest weapon that they have, regardless of all of these agents and their youth.
And regardless of the amount of death and disease that they can cause, the greatest weapon that they have is fear.
It is indeed, both for somebody like yourself and for the country as a whole.
Doctor, let me jump very quickly to another question that I've been meaning to ask somebody like yourself.
In San Francisco, Now, several years ago, in a quest to try and help an AIDS patient, and it was certainly a valiant attempt to help this patient, my recollection is that some scientists, people in your field, completely destroyed what was left of the immune system of some poor man who had AIDS.
inserted in his system that immune system of a simian.
In the hopes of obviously having it take and beat what he was fighting.
Now, I remember the story at the time and I remember reading about it and I remember reading that scientists at the time admitted that there was a certain global risk to what they were doing.
We were talking earlier about diseases and germs, and when you take a simian immune system and you put it in a human being, it seems to me as a layman that there's some potential risk that for all of us and it was announced more or less after the fact the general population that this had been done and I remember objecting heavily to that at the time thinking my god you know if something had jumped or developed and spread it would have been a pretty big oops and I wonder if you have any comments on this line of research I personally would be against such a thing
No question that we are in enough trouble and difficulty with antibiotic resistance and pathogens becoming so-called super germs.
We don't need any help from scientists to create a condition in a human which allows germs to come through that individual and then infect the general population as might occur.
And I can understand the idea behind it.
We're trying to take the simian uh... ourselves which are refractory to the
hiv in other words the hiv would not kill a monkey sir uh...
putting that any human
making those uh...
felt uh... very much like a monkey would protect the human against the hiv yes i can
understand that i'm not familiar with the case but
on the other side of that coin when you're fooling with mother nature to that degree
uh... and you don't know all of the consequences the inherent dangers are extraordinary
i thought so uh... so then there must be some large ethical debate that
rages in circles like your own
about the advocacy of doing something of this sort and whether you inform the
general public that you're going to try this or I don't know who decides, but I mean, it's like they told us about it afterwards, and I thought, well, gee, thanks.
Well, you know, review boards in institutions really make the decisions as to what kind of research will be allowed and what kind won't be allowed.
And I'm very surprised that an institutional review board allowed that kind of experimentation to occur, unless it was guised in some way that duped these people into believing that it was a benign type of extraordinary measure to be taken because the person was going to die anyway.
So maybe they gave permission under those circumstances in hopes of some sort of breakthrough.
Yes, of course.
Sure.
I understand.
I just I thought at the time, gee, anyway.
I do want to back away from all this a little bit and just talk about disease in general.
I know that you recently did an experiment there in New York with a reporter.
What was it all about?
One of the reporters came to me with a question related to how risky is living in the environment The New York City environment.
The idea here would be to take specimens from various areas within New York City, the so-called hot spots of New York City, to get a better understanding as to what dangers might be lurking there.
She was then of the New York Observer, now she's with the New York Times, came to me and I taught her how to collect samples from about 34 germ hotspots in New York, which range, by the way, from the back seat of a cab, a taxi cab, to an engagement ring counter at Tiffany's, and restrooms at both the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, as well as the subway system.
She taught fellow reporters what I taught her, and we did this throughout New York City in a fairly rapid time frame.
They brought the cultures to me, and I tested these to see what we grew.
Just to give you some idea, for example, a sample taken at a taxi cab seat, from a taxi cab seat, it contained what we call streptococcus viridans, which is a common mouth bacteria, probably expelled by a cough.
I found an introbacter species, which is an organism of gram-negative bacteria, which is usually found in the feces.
A staph aureus, which is usually said to shed from the skin.
A movie theater thief, for example, had staph aureus, as well as a group B strep, which is usually found in vaginal fluids.
And an enterococcus, which is usually found in feces.
Again, the idea here is probably a woman wearing Shorts or a short skirt probably deposited these germs on the seat.
Yes.
And in that regard, you can sort of tell a lot about the germs that are present in a particular site.
The bottom line is we run into all sorts of germs such as these every day of our lives.
Some of them like Staph aureus, which is shed from the skin, or even the intestines that get past some feces.
A part of the body's normal flora, or normal complement of germs, that are necessary for our health.
And I can explain that at a later point.
Well, would the next person, or the next 50 people who sat in that taxi be at risk?
Or somebody with a compromised immune system sat there, would they be at risk?
Well, only in as much as you'll pick up that strain.
You may have one of those strains, actually one of the isolates of Staph aureus.
on your own skin which is harmless to you because you've acclimated to it,
he'll pick this strain up which might not be as harmless.
And what kind of illnesses?
Probably very low level illnesses, Harb would be involved.
Remember, man is very resilient.
Man is able to fight off most challenges to his immune system.
And in fact, I don't want to be disgusting, but the average individual could spoon eat human feces
and human feces without coming down with any deleterious effect except, of course,
if you have pathogens, let's.
Let's say, for example, you didn't.
And I say that because human feces contain probably the largest repository of germs known to man, and is probably involved in most infections of man.
There are one times ten to the twelfth bacteria per gram of feces.
That's one with 12 zeros after it, per gram.
In fact, there are more germs in any individual's intestinal tract than there were men who have lived on the face of the earth since the beginning of time.
Now, knowing that, you can actually eat that and your body would fight it, because we do have a normal immune system, and part of that immune system comes from the germs that we harbor in and on our body.
I'll take your word for it.
You did a 2020 segment on money.
Now, money, money, money, money, money.
We all handle money.
What do you know about money?
Actually, the segment was called Dirty Money, and it's interesting in that the concept here was to take paper money from various places.
Let's take a Frankfurter man, a so-called hot dog vendor in New York City.
in the east coast and a west coast survey of uh... turning money
considering uh...
that uh...
so let's say individuals
so let's take a frankfurter man so-called hot dog vendor in new york city
plenty of those let's say he comes into work in the morning he's got a little
cold colds happen in the summer too.
Let's say it's a summer day, very hot and humid, and he retrieves his cart, which sat idly, let's say, overnight.
Ample time for germs to flourish, by the way, on food particles and drippings that might have been left, you know, from the day before.
As the vendor prepares his wagon for the day, of course, he heats up his water so he can put his hot dogs into the hot water tank.
Mind you, he's handling these now with a cold.
He coughs into his hands, he blows his dripping nose, let's say, with a tissue, without washing his hands, because not every one of these vendors is hygienic.
He arranges his buns, let's say, and fills up the tubs of relish, sauerkraut, or whatever other condiments he has, and therefore transfers the viruses to all of these things.
Next, let's say he'll load some canned soda drinks into his ice chest, getting ready to sell to consumers.
Let's say he starts up his money count with his wet hands, interfacing all of those bills with his germs.
germs need moisture to propagate.
And finally, let's say he starts up his money count with his wet hands, interfacing all
of those bills with his germs.
And then he heads to a busy street corner somewhere in the city.
And one of the other things, by the way, one of the challenges of all of these street vendors,
especially in New York City, is that every few hours they have to visit a restroom.
Now, some vendors employ what's called a floating substitute.
You might see these people that come around to relieve an individual so that he could go to bathroom duties periodically.
Or he may relieve himself in his own car and have the This may be more than I wanted to know about hot dog vendors, but okay.
I'm just trying to create a scenario.
Oh, you're doing that?
And what happens with one aspect of money.
And here, as the vendor sells his food and drink, let's say, to customers, his spotted condiments and melting ice water and meat drippings provide food and drink for the germs.
They eventually inevitably find their way to both customer's food and onto the fibers
of paper money.
Actually they are exchanged in various transactions.
When you go to buy a hot dog you hand money to the vendor and he gives you change.
You are touching that money and you are touching the change and then you touch your hot dog
and you eat.
Basically what we found was various types of microorganisms indigenous to the feces,
respiratory tract and skin.
Which is not unusual and which was anticipated.
We just wanted to prove it, showing that you can have an effective transfer of germs via paper money.
So the bottom line here is not that you're going to become deathly sick, but who needs an unnecessary bout of diarrhea or an unnecessary cold or stomach flu?
Nobody really needs that.
You need to wash your hands prior to eating or drinking anything.
That would be the bottom line of that scenario.
Well, if you're in the middle of the streets of New York City, that's not always an immediately available option.
Now, just as a matter of simple curiosity, having researched all of this as thoroughly as you obviously have,
and being somebody from that part of the world, I am curious, Doctor, in New York, do you buy hot dogs?
On occasion I buy a hot dog, and prior to eating them, I would use a soapless hand cleaner.
It's an alcohol-based product.
And I presume you'd recommend that for everybody?
Absolutely.
All right.
Dr. Holder, right there.
there with a lot of the art will be right back Yummy!
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
I'm on the right.
I'm here.
I know.
I'm here.
The voice of rage and ruin.
Don't go.
I remember your worry.
How could I ever forget?
It's the first time, the last time we ever met But I know the reason why you keep your silence up
The beautiful me, who the hurt doesn't show And the pains to rose, so stranger to you and me
I knew we'd come in the end of night, oh lord But I knew we'd hold this moment for all my life, oh lord
I knew we'd come in the end of night, oh lord But I knew we'd hold this moment for all my life, oh lord
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14, 2002.
Dr. Philip M. Tierno, Jr.
is my guest.
His book, by the way, his book is Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism.
That's the name of it.
Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism.
You might want to check it out.
My website is a link.
You can go to Amazon.com places like that and buy it.
We'll find out more about that as the morning goes on.
Stay right there.
Now, we take you back to the past on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
Stay right there.
Money, money, money, money.
Let's talk a little bit more about money in a slightly different vein.
If money is such a good vector, then doctor, as a matter of curiosity, what would money be like as a vector mechanism for some sort of terrorist?
It would probably be very inefficient, because most weapons that are going to be used by a terrorist I would probably be aerosol-y dispersed, in other words, like the anthrax hit the air and it was inhaled.
That seems to be the best way, outside of food and water intrusions, which is not as good a means of spreading germs as is aerosol.
You aerosolize it, you can spread it to large numbers of people, and that's the route that If I might, Hort, you mentioned my book, Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism, but that may confuse the listeners because there is another book, my first book, The Secret Life of Germs, which is a hardcover book.
The bioterrorism book is a soft cover that deals just with bioterrorism, but The Secret Life of Germs deals with germs in general and deals with all the concepts we're talking about now.
The Secret Life of Germs, Observations and Lessons from a Microbe Hunter.
Is that correct?
Yes.
I've heard a lot lately about prions.
Some sort of virus-like protein I know it has a lot to do with mad cow disease or something, but can you explain so the average person might be able to understand what a prion is?
They used to be referred to as what's called a slow virus, but they're really not viruses at all.
They're bits of protein material.
We sometimes refer to them as a sub-viral particle.
What happens is that prions actually exist as normal components of the human body.
But in a prion disease, the prions are folded in an unusual way that makes them disease triggers.
In human prion disease, for example, we know that genetics, genetic susceptibility, also plays a role.
But about 40% of the British population have an abnormality in their prion gene that makes them very susceptible to this folding that might occur if they ingest a prion from mad cow disease.
Wow!
I didn't know that.
And that is specific to the British population?
Well, I don't know if it's only them, but primarily it's they who are being looked at.
In fact, These patients possess a specific genotype called MM, as opposed to two other possible genotypes that occurs in Britain, and that's MV and ZV.
So since only 100 people in Great Britain became sick after ingesting materials from mad cows, so to speak, there is some other co-factor that is obviously involved.
In fact, there are some researchers that are thinking that you need a bout of tonsillitis to facilitate the prions from getting in and causing
problems.
Because tonsils are known reservoirs of prions.
Prions and tonsils can migrate, of course, to lymph nodes adjacent to it.
And that could explain why most of the victims have been relatively young.
Because younger people are more susceptible to repeated bouts of tonsillitis.
Interestingly, the prion is unique, as you pointed out, from every known germ in its structure and effects on
people.
In fact, it's not a full cell, and therefore, unlike viruses, which are primitive as they are, they contain no nucleic acids of any kind, and solely made up of proteins.
It's interesting in that they're able to particularly attack the brains axons and neurons and they actually eat them
to create sponge-like appearances. You might hear the term spongiform encephalopathy.
In fact, mad cow is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
So it virtually turns your brain into a sponge.
Exactly. You lose ability to carry on, literally.
In fact, British farmers back in 1986 named it mad cow disease when they reported their cows dancing.
They really weren't dancing, they were losing their balance and moving side to side.
So the British farmers didn't know what the problem was.
The bad thing here is, if you want to talk about prions, is they're very difficult to kill.
Can't even burn them, can you?
Well, you really need heavy incineration.
Yes, that could do it.
You can use pure lye.
Oh, but I was talking about the farmer going out into the field, piling the dead cows together and burning them.
Not necessarily a good idea?
Yeah, no, that's okay.
You can incinerate them.
You can use things like autoclaving, which is steam under pressure, like a pressure cooker.
Sure.
That can kill them.
Sure.
Or break them up.
Interestingly, we first recognized the cases of Pre-On Disease in 1977 in New Guinea, in the New Guinea Highlands.
But we coined the term KURU, K-U-R-U, as designating the disease.
Research is linked actually to funeral practices, which involve these natives, these New Guineans, eating the parts of the dead.
In fact, as an act of mourning and like a final affirmation of kinship.
And when the New Guineans stopped eating their dead, the disease stopped.
They would eat, of course, as part of the dead, the brain.
And that's cool.
Well, then that goes back, then, to the practice that many said caused mad cow disease, which was feeding cows other cow or animal parts, yes?
Yes, sheep brains.
In fact, there's a disease similar to this encephalopathy in sheep.
It's called scrapie.
Yes.
It gets its name because when sheep come down with this mad sheep disease, if you want to use the term loosely, they tend to get very itchy and they rub their back on trees and they scrape their back.
So that's why they coined the term scrapie for that.
It's a very interesting disease.
We used to refer to it, and it can occur one in a million cases has CJD disease. You might have heard that disease.
Critzfeldt-Jakob disease.
I have, yes.
Yeah, that's very similar to Kuru. And that's the naturally occurring prion disease that
we've been used to, and that's a rare entity. But the new Critzfeldt-Jakob disease, or Med-Cal,
it's actually called V, V for variant Critzfeldt-Jakob, in that Critzfeldt-Jakob used to be what I
referred to earlier as the slow viral disease, which took maybe 20 years, 30 years to develop,
to reach fruition.
Whereas the new variant, Critical Jacob, or what we commonly refer to as Mad Cow, only takes a few months or years to fully develop.
And once it does, the patient invariably dies.
It's almost 100% fatal at that point?
When they express symptoms, it's fatal.
Too late when you get to symptoms.
Yes.
I recently heard that there was some kind of something that was close to Marburg that they found all along the border of Afghanistan.
And it was interesting timing and an interesting place for that to be showing up.
Perhaps it's a normal place for it to be showing up.
I mean, here we've got these terrorists said to be in Afghanistan with lots of really good samples all around them.
Any thoughts on that?
Yes, they're actually... I think the disease you're referring to is CCHF.
It's sometimes known as Crimean Congo Fever.
Yes, sir.
It's actually a hemorrhagic fever.
It's very closely related to the Ebola or Marburg It's one of the few hemorrhagic fevers that can be transmitted by ticks.
this particular strain unlike most other strains of hemorrhagic agents
are transmissible by contact
and by ticks oh brother
it's one of the few hemorrhagic fevers that can be transmitted by ticks
so if one were to
utilize this as a terrific weapon one might
take ticks uh... from a person
uh... who is suffering from this disease places in this scalp
and take a plane ride And by contact, you can potentially unleash this particular Crimean Congo on a population such as ours where it does not exist, and which probably would result in fatalities before we even identified
I was about to ask, Doctor, if we were attacked in the manner you just described, how long would it be before we realized we were under attack?
It would be a considerable length of time.
To give specifics, it would depend on the incubation period.
For this particular disease, Crimean Congo, incubation could be anywhere up to three weeks.
And by the time We noticed people starting to bleed from orifices, having high fever, or what we call petechia, little black and blue marks all over their body.
And most people might not think that's strange, you know, because people tend to have bloody noses, and they may have other lesions that bleed, or they may keep it private, other orifices that might bleed, for a while before they even go to their doctor.
And many of their physicians might not even know the symptoms.
That's one of the good things that came out of bioterrorism.
More people are into symptoms now and they're better able to recognize this.
But it could be three weeks.
It could be up to three weeks.
Incubation period can vary from about five days or so to about 21 days.
And by the time 21 days came along, if the infection were started in New York City or Los Angeles or a populated area, how many people would perhaps be infected?
It would depend on the number of terrorists that would make this visit, and would have this disease, and how many contacts they make, and how efficient their secretions are containing the virus.
It does vary, and as the individuals who have this disease get ill themselves, they may be taken out of circulation by the illness, so it also varies with their stamina and ability to Well, I'm sure if they were the terrorists, we'd become familiar with it.
Go till they dropped.
Well, that's for sure.
Go till they dropped, and that might be evidence.
But in general, I don't want to scare anyone, but in general, hemorrhagic fevers, even though they're horrific diseases, they're difficult to weaponize, because there's no real carrier state, and they can be contained if we knew that Somebody had them by simple nursing techniques, barrier techniques, we call it, aseptic technique.
Could somebody like yourself or in your field take something like hemorrhagic fever and toy with it a little bit and weaponize that?
I know it's a horrible question, but... Yes, the answer to all those questions would be yes.
And hopefully the integrity of the microbiologist is such that that would not be a likely scenario.
I mean, someone would have to be mad to do that, and certainly we do have plenty of mad people going about it.
Well, mad is by perspective, and you're right.
We have plenty of mad people, by that definition, in the world, and we have people that simply want us dead.
They don't really want to change, have us change anything, or they're not making any specific demands, we all might have noticed.
Since the World Trade Centers came down, the Pentagon, then the anthrax, all the rest of it.
No real demands, no real claim of responsibility.
The conclusion there is, they want us dead.
That's correct.
Now, if that's the case, then the kind of scenarios we're talking about right now, they make sense.
They may seem mad, but they would make sense, wouldn't they?
Yes.
Certainly, somebody intent on doing harm may cause The bottom line here, in my opinion, is that it's very unlikely for this country to experience widespread death by any bioterror agent.
The greatest agent of fear, I think, personally, is the anthrax.
But outside of that, the other 18 agents, yes, they can cause death to a limited number of people, just like in Israel, You can have Obama who is going to go and take out ten people or five people.
You can never prevent that completely.
But I'm talking about the human race and the Americans in America.
I don't think that a bioterrorist organization, even a country, can take out a good segment of our population.
We've just become too aware of circumstance and we have now risen to the occasion and I think the three greatest abilities that we have at this point in time after having
experienced all these events is the vigilance that we have, the education, we're
becoming aware of symptoms, diagnosis, and even treatment of each agent, and the knowledge that we
have, what is and is not possible, as well as how to limit attacks. That knowledge and those
things are making it better for us to defend against bioterrorism.
Our government has recently been taking the position that it informs us there is an imminent threat.
In other words, they get wind of something or another, and there's an imminent threat, they will say, and they're now beginning to nail it down to this day or that day or within a couple of days of whatever date.
And, uh, they're not getting specific beyond that.
How do you feel about those kinds of warnings, if you were the one In possession of information that would perhaps generate such a warning, would you issue it or would you hesitate to?
I think I would issue it because periodically we need to be, what should I say, reminded of our vigilance.
I think we live in a very strange world and we live in a unique place in American history.
I think if the population is forewarned, it is forearmed and you need to heighten the guard at times.
When you get good information saying that there may be a bomb threat, or there may be a person with a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb, let's say, which is contaminated by nuclear waste, that person might be likely to express himself anywhere, not only in this country, but outside this country.
So we must make everyone alert to that, so that One anomaly that might occur, where it results in one phone conversation with a police authority, that might mean the difference between life and death.
So I think, yes, it is necessary to warn the public at the right time.
Everybody stay alert.
Again, with regard to this anthrax thing, we all, and we did all sort of go through it because we had no idea of the extent of it.
Doctor, if you were to guess, would you say that this was perpetrated by a foreign nation of some sort with regard to origin or the money or the power behind the action, or would you say that's more likely homegrown?
Just if you were to guess.
If I were to guess, I would say this looks like it's an internal situation.
It looks like it's coming from someone who had access to very, very good grade anthrax, very potent, very toxic, and someone who had excellent microbiological knowledge, therefore some scientific background, whether that person is foreign born or in the United States.
A citizen remains to be determined.
But you think homegrown.
I appreciate your guests, Dr. Stan Mai.
Stay right where you are.
Got a good break coming up.
We'll be right back.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Dr. Philip M. Girod, Jr.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from February 14th, 2002.
Don't come easy, you know it don't come easy.
Got your big shoes if you wanna see the blues and you know it don't come easy.
You don't have to shout or think about you can even play them easy.
Get about the...
...but you have lost your mind.
Whatever happened to our love?
I wish I understood.
It used to be so nice, it used to be so good.
So when you near me darling, can't you hear me SOS?
The love you gave me, nothing else can save me SOS.
I say B.S.O.A.
When you're gone, I feel like it's time to go on When you're gone, though I try, I feel like carry on
You seem so far away, though you are standing near You make me feel alive, but something's that I feel
I really tried to make it out, I wish I understood I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get out of here.
Dr. Philip M. Giorno, Jr., one of our nation's leading microbiologists, is my guest tonight, talking about the little things.
Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks.
Dr. Philip M. Tierno, Jr., one of our nation's leading microbiologists, is my guest tonight
talking about the little things, you know, those little things that might get us, actually
get us all the time.
We'll get back to it in a moment.
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
tonight featuring coast-to-coast AM from February 14th 2002 Once again, Dr. Philip M. Tierno, Jr., whose books are out
there, one you might want to get right away, Protect Yourself
Against Bioterrorism, or the hardback, The Secret Life of Germs,
observations and lessons from a microbe hunter.
And he even wrote one before that called Staying Healthy in a Risky Environment.
Well, the environment certainly has become riskier since that book.
Doctor, I'm going to ask you something kind of weird and strange.
But it's another thing that I've been wanting to ask somebody of your stature about.
I've been watching these interesting shows on TV that show these archaeologists going into various places and Digging up dead folk.
People have died long, long ago.
Even mummified folk.
And, you know, I just have this vision in my mind of some casket and opening it and hearing... You know, I mean, something from thousands of years ago that hasn't been around, tickling us for thousands of years, suddenly coming loose from one of these damn expeditions.
Is there anything to that Well, when you consider the fact that organisms, like I say, have been around for about four billion years.
Oh yes.
Man is the interloper who's appeared on an imaginary day, let's say, to depict the appearance of various species.
We appeared a few minutes before midnight, or a few seconds before midnight, depends on who you read.
I don't think that's a likelihood.
It's a possibility.
There are many plagues and many organisms in the past that probably disappeared, at least at different strains.
Sure.
They may reappear, but it's unlikely that they would have survived that amount of time unless they were, let's say, in the amber of some fossil.
How about frozen?
We have evidence of frozen organisms.
the reason i say that it because uh... in parts of alaska as i saw program not long ago
uh... they were actually intentionally uh... going into tundra country no frozen under country and
uh...
attempting to dig up victims of the nineteen eighteen flu uh...
uh... disaster and uh... you know i wondered about that
times was really good idea or not i i i I understand the theory, certainly, that you get your hand on a specific good sample of the virus, and maybe you do some work trying to figure out how to prevent it, should it get loose again.
So that's certainly the theory, but a little bit of danger there?
Well, to some degree.
If you consider that we've isolated germs from the gut of a 40 million year old bee, And from a 250 million-year-old piece of frozen brine.
We have?
We isolate, yes.
We've isolated germs.
So what you're saying is possible.
I don't think it's likely, but it is a possibility.
It's something that can't be dismissed, so we should handle such carcasses very carefully.
I don't believe they will pose any more Any unreasonable danger, but we should be cautious.
There's always a possibility, though, that some little bug that was around thousands of years ago could, through some method, intentional method like this, become resurrected and look around and say, hey, look at this environment.
Gee, this is better than when I was around before.
Yeah, that's a possibility, but as I say, it's not likely that you're going to uncover such a germ.
If you look at the cyanobacteria, which were around about four billion years ago, they've not changed very much.
And in fact, germs have a very interesting role.
We didn't touch on that, if I might.
If there were no germs, for example, that existed, there'd be no food, there'd be no oxygen, there'd be no nitrates for plants to grow, there'd be no recycling of life.
There'd be no life.
The role of germs of course, the foundation of the food chain.
As you know, all the seas have microorganisms of various types that provide foodstuff for other organisms to eat.
They also supply, unknown to most people, more than 90% of the oxygen on Earth are provided by germs, not by plants.
Less than 10% of the oxygen is provided by green plants.
And in fact, One of the reasons why we're afraid that the ozone layer might be broken down by, you know, various use of hydrocarbons, fossil fuels, and chlorocarbons
We're afraid that that would allow ultraviolet radiation to kill the cyanobacteria that reside in the water and provide the bulk of the oxygen and thereby suffocate humanity as well as other oxygen requiring species.
I never looked at it that way at all because I did not know that germs provide, you said 90%?
Over 90% of the world's oxygen.
So we should worry more about that than we should the rainforests?
But we should worry about both.
Green plants, for example, can only exist if there were germs.
Even though we're bathed in nitrogen gas around the atmosphere, about 78% of the Earth's atmosphere, we can't use nitrogen.
That is, the plants can't use it.
Germs have to break down nitrogen gas to nitrates.
And therefore, this bacterial conversion of nitrogen gas allows plants to survive.
And lastly, without germs, we could not recycle organic matter, all organic matter, including plants, animals, and human beings die.
If it were not for germs, we could not recycle those organics into inorganic compounds to be reused.
There would be a buildup literally of carcasses on this planet until we run out of resources And life would cease to exist.
Okay, well, Professor, I know with regard to the ozone, they're very worried about small things like frogs and other things that they think have been affected by the ozone.
Now, if something as large as a frog, or even a pollywog, or whatever, is already being affected by the depletion of the ozone, then wouldn't it stand to reason that the little tiny things were affected some time ago?
Well, the ozone layer is revealed in just one particular area right now that's really bad.
In fact, it's about the size of, oh I would say, Australia.
It's about, the hole that was uncovered is about 390, no strike, it's about 10 million square miles in the southern hemisphere of our globe.
If that increases in size, more ultraviolet light would be able to strike the earth, thereby killing off animal species that are sensitive to it.
And you know already, we're seeing more skin cancers caused by this ultraviolet radiation.
So man is affecting adversely his environment.
Actually up by hundreds of percent for both men and women in the last, I think, 30 years?
Yes.
There is the other caveat that we must always keep in mind to temper this condition, and that is man has unique knowledge and is able to, in fact, intervene in the phenomenon and take the necessary steps to rectify whatever damage he causes.
A man with his brain has been doing a lot of intervention, and particularly since the discovery of antibiotics, we've been intervening a lot now.
That's another story there.
It is, and it's one I want to get into a little bit here.
I notice that in the last several years, we've been getting fewer and fewer newer heroic antibiotics.
I mean, sort of last-ditch-try antibiotics.
But, you know, it seems like the diseases are mounting up faster than the new heroic antibiotics, and I wonder what you think about that.
Yes, it's mainly because of the improper use of antibiotics that has occurred.
Let's look a little bit at antibiotics.
Extraordinary concept.
In the United States, 150 million prescriptions are written annually.
Of these, 60 percent, six zero, are for antibiotics.
That translates to about 90 million prescriptions.
Of the 90 million antibiotic prescriptions, Fifty million antibiotic prescriptions are totally unnecessary.
Now, when you consider that that's the primary reason for antibiotic resistance development, the inappropriate use of antibiotics, that is profound.
Fifty million of the ninety million are unnecessary.
Now, three million antibiotics are used to treat disease.
I'm sorry, three million pounds of antibiotics.
Of course, with the inappropriate and improper use.
In the United States agricultural industry, 25 million, which is 70% of the production of antibiotics, goes into livestock and other non-medicinal uses.
That's the second reason for antibiotic resistance development.
In fact, this costs the American taxpayer around $5 billion.
Antibiotic resistance is a man-made phenomenon.
Certainly, microorganisms have been around a long time.
And have the biochemical ability to eventually evade even the smartest of man's creations, unless we go into something called multi headed antibiotics.
And by that I mean, antibiotics generally work in one way, let's say they interfere with cell wall, let's take penicillin.
And once they interfere with the cell wall synthesis, they create a hole in the bacterium And that eventually kills the bacterium.
The bacterium just explodes and loses its ability to function.
But if the organism develops a resistance to penicillin, penicillin no longer works.
Which is its natural evolutionary reaction to penicillin, right?
Correct.
And we select for strains, of course, that would be resistant if a patient is on that.
But if we do something, and that's what manufacturers are doing now, called multi-headed antibiotic development, take different sites on a molecule and have it interfere, let's say, with a cell wall, have another portion of the molecule interfere with protein synthesis, have another portion of the molecule interfere with DNA replication, have another interfering with cell membrane function, let's say, and on and on.
We have what's called multi-headed antibiotics to which germs We'll have a difficult time developing resistance during the average treatment period.
Well, I hope we're really smarter, but I mean, suppose one of them actually evolves sufficiently to tackle this multi-headed approach.
I mean, what are you going to end up with then?
Well, no, it's unlikely because, let's say by mutation, you have one in a million cell divisions of bacteria that would give rise to a mutant that would be resistant.
If you have two methods of injuring a cell, that would be double the mutation rate, 1 times 10 to the 12th.
That's 1 with 12 zeros after it, number of cell divisions that would have to occur before you develop resistance to both drugs.
With 3, it's 1 times 10 to the 18th.
With 4, it's 1 times 10 to the 24th, and on and on.
But every now and then, someone hits the $100 million lottery.
Yeah, but a hundred million dollars, a hundred million is nothing in comparison.
I would say nothing.
But a hundred million as a number is nothing compared to the number I'm talking about.
I understand.
Let's talk about one times ten to the thirty-two.
Yes.
Thirty-two zeros after the one.
That's the number of divisions it would take to let's say have five mutations occur.
So then maybe we are smarter.
Yeah, I think we're pretty smart and we're starting to learn that we can't give antibiotics to patients because they demand it.
But we need to have also what I call a paradigm change.
But here we're, I mean, we're fighting nature here, human nature, because if you go in with something that could get kicked away fairly quickly with an antibiotic, you're going to damn well want it if your doctor doesn't give it to you.
Well, he's not going to have a lot of business.
I mean, he knows He's in business trying to make people come to him feel better, so he's going to give them what they want to feel better.
That's just human nature.
Now, I know that a lot of these things, if untreated, the immune system would take care of just fine without antibiotics, but that isn't the way the world works.
That's true.
But, as they say, if we have a paradigm change, that is, instead of treating infections with antibiotics, we look to nature to treat.
Right.
The infection like probiotics, for example, is a perfect example.
You take good bacteria like lactobacilli, people take yogurt and cultures when they're on antibiotics to protect their body from flora that will be lost with the antibiotics.
You bet.
We allow those good bacteria to reside in our intestines and thereby protect us.
In the same way, we can take those antibiotics when we have a gastroenteritis.
I'm sorry, probiotics.
We take those bacterial cultures and we can ingest them and that will help maintain the normal floral state of the intestines, thereby eliminating the pathogenic germs.
But how do you get this paradigm shift that says we need to begin treating in a different way 90% of the time or better?
Well, that's the hard part.
I address that in the last chapter of my book.
I give 17 different ways of treating other than the use of antibiotics.
And some of them you might want to hear about farming, for example, using a botanic like spinach to administer vaccines, have the genes for the vaccine in the spinach leaf so that when you're eating your spinach, you can take a vaccine instead of using injections, having the use of certain decoy molecules.
And we're doing this with the flu influenza.
Where you inject an individual with a decoys, where you take them by mouth, and the sites are like receptor sites on the body, so they compete with the germ.
You can also do what's called bacteriophage therapy, which was used by the Russians during World War II, where they drink a little cocktail of bacterial viruses that kill dysentery, let's say, which you often get in battle.
This diarrhea would be raising havoc.
So, why haven't we taken this path?
Well, to tell you the truth, the easy answer is, antibiotics developed and we thought we had it licked.
We thought there wouldn't even be need to culture various infecting sites.
specific pathogens in the intestines killing them.
So why haven't we taken this path?
Well to tell you the truth, the easy answer is antibiotics developed and we thought we
had it licked.
We thought there wouldn't even be need to culture various infecting sites.
Just give people antibiotics.
Germs are passe.
They're gone.
Well, it looks like germs were a little smarter than we thought they were.
They don't even have a brain.
We thought we win, and we didn't win.
Yes.
One very quick question, because we're near the bottom of the hour.
There's one school of thought among the general populace that says Colds and flu are really good for us that it builds our immune system and prepares us and that people who Really are ultra clean and careful and wash their hands.
They just you know you hear them all the time Oh, I never get sick well Then something comes along and really just clobbers a hell out of them because their immune system wasn't ready for it is that Foolishness or is that true?
Well That's not true.
It's not true?
Nobody can eliminate all of the germs we come in contact with.
There is nothing you can do.
No use of a germicide, no use of a product, an antibiotic, nothing.
So boil down, we're out of time here, but in other words, the point is that getting colds or getting the flu does not build you stronger.
Is that right?
It does, initially, when you first get them in your immune system.
But not in the long term?
Not in the long term.
That's what I wanted to know.
Stay right there.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
My guest is Dr. Philip M. Giroux, Jr.
He's one of our nation's leading microbiologists.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
I've got to ride, ride like the wind to be free again. And I've got such a long way to go to make it to the border of
Mexico. So I ride like the wind, ride like the wind.
I was born a son of a lawless man. I was put my mind with a gun in my hand. Live that life, don't die.
I'm gonna ride like the wind And I've got such a long way to go
Such a long way to go To make it to the border of Mexico
So I'm gonna ride like the wind Sweet dreams are made of these
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you Some of them want to be abused
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Sweet dreams are made of these Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas Everybody's looking for something
listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 14th, 2002.
We're about to go to France with Professor Chernow.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning everybody, stay right where you are.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 14th, 2002.
And I'm Art Bell.
Doctor, my wife and I love Paris, France.
It's our favorite city.
Even if the French aren't our favorite people, Paris is beautiful.
It's romantic.
We go there when we can, a lot.
But, you know, you get on an airplane at Charles de Gaulle and you fly to Los Angeles.
Inevitably, you get on the plane, no matter where you are, you're next to some lady who's got a little kid about eight months old that's dumping in his diaper about every, I don't know, 45 minutes or so for the flight, and then you have another person very near you who's snotting all over the place, has obviously the flu or a terrible cold or whatever, and I have yet to take one transatlantic or Pacific flight and not come back sick as a dog.
Airplanes are bad, aren't they?
Well, unfortunately, to some degree, you're right.
They are, like, trapping their guests, if you want to call them that.
Big aluminum incubators.
Yes, and you can transmit.
I have gotten ill after a flight, in fact, to Paris, France.
There's a woman in front of me, sneezing and coughing.
There you are.
Out covering themselves.
That's right.
And three days later, into my Paris trip, I developed the symptoms of a cold.
Unfortunately, those in closest proximity to individuals are more susceptible.
Interestingly enough, a few years ago, the airpacks that airplanes used used to be closed, and about 50% of them during a flight, to save on fuel.
These air packs allow fresh air to come in and mix with the cabin air.
That helps a great deal in fighting such infections, but it cannot eliminate them totally.
So you are subject to the vagaries of life dependent upon the passenger list.
Well, it's inevitable.
There have been interesting case reports where tuberculosis was actually passed during a flight.
All right.
I want to go to the phones.
I'm late doing that, so let's do that.
First time caller on the air with Dr. Chernow.
health organization. The same is so for some other organisms like influenza that had been
shown and documented to have been spread during a flight.
Alright, I want to go to the phones. I'm late doing that so let's do that. First time caller
line, you're on the air with Dr. Cherno. Hello.
Hello Art, thank you for taking my call.
Sure.
I had a couple of related questions for your guest with regards to CJD.
Yes.
I had two family members, a great aunt and a great uncle who both died from it.
They were in the same immediate family.
And then a couple of years later I went in for surgery and received tainted albumin from a donor who later turned out to have CJD and died from it.
And now I've been looking into getting further surgery it's an ongoing problem with a birth defect I had and now the doctors are a little concerned about my exposure to this with regards to the instruments because I'll be working close to my brain and I'm wondering is there any test for me to get to tell whether or not I have CJD and if not or if so is there a way for them to be able to sterilize their equipment without destroying it?
Well, I'm not going to give you any medical advice.
Can't do that on the air, really.
Is there a test?
There is a test that is available.
It's a special test that your doctor has access to.
It's an expensive test.
As to its efficacy, it may not be the highest in sensitivity.
I guess the best way to detect is by doing brain scans and to examine By doing an MRI, you know, whether you do have any evidence of such lesions on the brain.
So short of those sorts of procedures, if you were advising a surgeon, you would say, do all that before operating?
Under those circumstances?
No, if you're a suspect of Christopher Jacob disease, the good thing is, if anything, you would have the flow type, The one we're used to seeing, not the mad cow type.
The best thing to do is to destroy the instruments that are used because of the difficulty in sterilizing them.
Is mad cow likely to show up in the United States?
Not at this time.
There's no evidence for that.
We do have a disease very similar to it called the chronic wasting disease, CWD, of elk and moose, which is very similar.
It's not identical with prions.
It's in the wild, yes.
Yes, in the wild, and we're afraid that some hunters, when they go eat the deer, they may eat portions of the deer that may be tainted with this material, so that's being looked at very carefully.
As far as mad cow coming here, it's not likely.
We take extreme care to ensure that our beef stocks are absolutely good.
And, of course, anything is possible.
It's not probable.
Well, it would kill me.
I'm a beef eater.
I love beef.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Turner.
Hello.
Good morning, Mr. Bell.
Good morning.
Where are you?
This is Brandy in East Tennessee.
Okay.
Doctor?
How are you?
Two summers ago, my daughter was one of the children in this area who came down with encephalitis in a very short Period of time, several, a great many children did.
I wondered, is there any connection between encephalitis and urinary tract infections?
What was the organism of encephalitis?
See, we never got, you know, I was there for a week and you talk to the other parents when you're in a hospital for a week.
They never really gave us much.
They said that it was most likely a mosquito-borne encephalitis, but other than that, that's all they told us.
So then it's a viral encephalitis, much like the equine encephalitis carried by mosquitoes, much like West Nile.
No, there would be no connection of those organisms with You sure it was encephalitis and not meningitis?
That's what they said, but there were like eight kids that came in within like three or four hours to the hospital, and she was one of them.
And, you know, talking to the other parents, nearly all of them that I spoke to said that they had severe, according to the doctors, severe urinary tract infections and they wanted to put catheters in all of them because they couldn't determine whether the infection was in their bladder or the kidney.
Mm-hmm.
And I thought it was very strange.
Yeah.
Sometimes viruses, in addition to their target organ, which might be the brain in this case, sometimes viruses can cause systemic damage.
So that's a possibility.
In other words, even a flu virus can not only infect your respiratory tree, but it may infect other organs in the body during the course of that.
Even poliomyelitis that has a predilection for the spinal cord and the brain may give you gastroenteritis, let's say, and other types of syndromes or symptoms before it does its final target organ thing.
month or two.
I've been getting a lot of stories of schools closing because of unidentified rashes that have been appearing in clusters in students.
Some describe it as something like slapped-faced disease or something like that.
They call it something like that, but not that.
Something else that they have not yet identified.
You've been hearing anything about that?
Yes, in New York City we've had, in fact, a couple of schools involved.
I spoke with the Department of Health on that, in fact, last week, and no determination was made as to what caused these rashes that were not only on the face, they were elsewhere on the body, and it looked like a typical allergic reaction.
Sometimes you're not going to find out the cause.
It could be something as simple as A child putting itch powder throughout a particular classroom or area and no one will determine that because by the time symptoms develop, people are scratching and all traces of the itch powder is gone.
There were no infecting organisms that could be detected in any of these events.
And then after the rash is gone, I've heard that people are left with sort of a bumpy, weird skin.
Some of that has to do with trauma.
But in any hypersensitive reaction, you might, you know, you might react that way.
Okay.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air with Dr. Terrano.
Hello.
Gentlemen.
Yes.
I have two extremely important questions.
First, isn't it true that colds kill weak cells and let the strong cells survive and flourish?
First off, when you say cold, there are so many agents that cause the common cold that we experience attributed to different groups.
Rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses, even an influenza virus can give rise to symptoms that we would call colds and parainfluenza viruses.
Although they do cause also the flu.
So when you generalize like that, immediately we have to say that is not the case.
All cells have receptor sites for specific viruses.
And it is those cells that are infected.
The virus eventually, by nature, kills the cells that it infects, because it has to do what's called burst.
It's a burst size.
It reaches, in other words, it reaches a large enough size where it's reproduced many viruses within the cell, and the only way to get the viruses out is to burst the cell.
Once it reaches burst size, it infects any cells in its area so that the cells are not resistant necessarily to the virus.
The virus is going to infect at random different cells and kill them.
So what you're saying I don't believe is true.
You're saying the virus basically is selecting weak cells.
That's not the case.
Is it true, doctor, that Ebola patients that survive are carriers after they survive?
A lot has been unknown about the Ebola virus.
It's interesting that you bring up Ebola virus.
Because I do go into that in my book.
In fact, I have a scenario of a man at a urinal almost fainting, being a United Nations employee, having come down with Ebola unknown to him.
And at the urinal, as he moves away, he almost faints.
And two Good Samaritans grab him to hold him up.
And in so doing, they contact his hands and his garments.
Which are replete with some vomitus, which contains the Ebola, as well as secretions, including urine, that contains Ebola, so it could be spread in that way.
The chances are, if you survive it, you have antibodies sufficient.
Nobody really knows if there's a dormancy of the Ebola viruses, or the hemorrhagic viruses.
Antibodies sufficient, yes, for yourself, but the question was, are you a carrier?
What I'm saying, you may have antibodies, and But nobody really knows if you do have remnants of the virus in you.
That would be one of the hemorrhagic viruses.
It would appear to me not to be the case because we have vaccines against some of the hemorrhagic viruses, and after vaccination we don't see people come down with those hemorrhagic viruses anymore, with that particular strain that they got vaccinated from.
So I would imagine if you develop an immune response, you're not going to carry the virus, although I don't know.
I don't think anyone does.
There's no absolute evidence.
By the way, your books, The Secret Life of Germs, Observations and Lessons from a Microbe Hunter, The Hardback, and Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism, the softcover that you've got out right now, are both of these currently available at Amazon and the usual?
Yes.
Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, available at most bookstores.
You may have to ask for it.
Sometimes they put it in the science section, so they put it off the Absolutely.
This is written for the lay public and is a book that is dedicated to make them understand the magnificence of microorganisms and not to make them fearful of microorganisms, but to give them the knowledge they need to carry on their everyday life with the least amount of risk.
All right, let's see if we have time.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Tierno.
Hello.
Hello, Doctor.
This is J.D.
Cullen from Arcata, California, up here in the Redwood Nation.
Yes, sir.
And I had a question about the origin of protocells.
I understand our inter-atmosphere is comprised of mostly like methane and ammonia and other nasty compounds.
And I heard in a lab situation, scientists have synthesized organic molecules using the Miller apparatus And basically creating the building blocks of life.
And my question is, do you think we'll be able to take that essential next step and synthesize basic life in a lab situation in the near future from these organic molecules?
Well, as you pointed out, I do address that, by the way, in my book.
And there were many researchers that have discovered abilities of germs and they've actually concocted Prototypical type cells or cell-like materials.
Were they photosynthetic?
No.
In fact, what they were, they were just genetic materials that would be the beginning or the start of primordial type life using the Miller-Urey experiments and then later experiments performed by other researchers They've managed to put together compounds that would have been put together during the formation of the primordial cells.
So I think it is possible for that to occur, whether life itself can be created de novo, that's another question.
So was the first thing they created, the scientists, when they were creating these protocells, was it RNA?
Was that the basic key?
No, what they were doing is they used In the early Earth, the atmosphere had no gaseous oxygen.
It was comprised mostly of methane, hydrogen, and ammonia, and some water vapor.
And what they did is they synthesized... Remember the experiments of the Russian biochemist Alperin and the British biologist Haldane?
Well, Miller and Urey used their model and constructed the primordial conditions of the Earth and showed that with an electrical spark, as would occur with lightning, you can I don't understand.
If life began mostly as simple organisms that had to have RNA to start synthesizing the proteins, it's kind of like a chicken and the egg.
Which came first?
is to show how life began rather than to create life.
Right.
How did that start?
Okay, scientists currently believe that life was in a primordial soup which was replete with all the necessary ingredients for the propagation of life.
For example, they didn't need to be photosynthetic.
Life started with all the ingredients in a pool and The first cell coalesced into a rounded miscell, it's called.
And that miscell was able to get nutrients.
Later, organisms had to be able to produce what they needed.
So it evolved over a long period of time.
It's not like the chicken and the egg.
It's really like a cell was formed in this primordial sea that was able to utilize whatever was All right, Doctor?
over the time of the evolution of the Earth, enabling it to survive and divide.
Later, it depleted that store, so that evolution favored those organisms
that were able to become autosynthetic, able to produce their own materials to survive,
and killed off the so-called heterotrophs in that primordial sea.
Evolution occurred slowly over time.
All right.
Doctor, we're out of time.
That's how quickly it goes.
Boy, what a fantastic guest you are.
Kind of the Carl Sagan of microbiology.
Really something.
I really appreciate your being here, and I hope that when we invite you back, you will come.
My pleasure.
Yes, definitely.
I hope you sell lots and lots of books, and I'm sure you will.
Good night, sir.
Thank you, and good night to you all.
And that was Dr. Philip M. Cierno, Jr.
His books available at Amazon.com through my website link.
Uh, to his, uh, to his book.
And, uh, you mel- uh, certainly may want to, uh, read Protect Yourself Against Bioterrorism or The Secret Life of Germs.
Sounds fascinating.
From the high desert, you know who I am, Tata.
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