Dr. Tess Gerritsen joins Art Bell to explore Gravity, her thriller about a deadly single-celled organism outbreak on the ISS, threatening astronauts and Earth—inspired by Mir’s mold crisis and NASA’s 1-in-50 mission disaster rate. She details microgravity’s brutal toll: fluid redistribution, osteoporosis, and pre-written obituaries for shuttle crews, while questioning Mars mission feasibility. Gerritsen also speculates on extraterrestrial microbes surviving space, like halobacteria in the Dead Sea, and warns of prion risks in pet food and elk meat, underscoring nature’s far deadlier potential than fiction. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a very sad note, obviously, we begin the program with, as you know, many times over the years I've interviewed Dr. Mack, Dr. John E. Mack, and I'm sure by now you're all aware, this audience certainly, of Dr. Mack's passing.
Dr. Johnny Mack of the Cambridge Hospital's Department of Psychiatry was incredibly killed on Monday evening in England, apparently a drunk driver.
Struck and instantly killed.
And it could not come as more of a shock to ufology to the entire legitimate investigation of those who are abducted.
It's a gigantic shock, and I don't make more of it than it is.
Of course, you get the usual, oh, he was murdered.
No, he wasn't.
He was run over by a drunk driver.
And as you get older, you begin to note the passing of those who have been around you, and many I have interviewed are now gone.
Dr. Mack, another, and he'll be sorely, sorely missed in doing programs like this and in every other way in the world.
So it is with great sadness indeed that I note the passing of Dr. Mack.
Take care, buddy.
Let me cover a little bit of news.
I've got so much to tell you about tonight.
Of course, number one on the hit list is the mountain.
A government scientist raised the alert level Saturday.
As a matter of fact, a CNN USGS guy who did an interview said earlier, well, we now believe that the explosion or the eruption could be bigger than perhaps we thought originally.
There's a lot of that going on with scientists.
Scientists tracking earthquake activity at Mount St. Helens raised their warning level on Saturday to a 3.3 volcano alert, and officials prepared to evacuate a visitor center about five miles from the crater.
A level three warning indicates there is a potential hazard to life and property in the area, said the U.S. Geological Survey earlier Saturday.
A level two was issued.
Then three.
Small earthquakes were detected at Mount St. Helens on Saturday, a warning sign that pressure was building up yet again in the volcano after it spewed steam and ash on Friday.
The volcano, this is a quote, has repressurized.
That's Dan DeZerzen, a USGS researcher.
It has repressurized.
He said they could be comparable to Friday's eruption that belts steam and ash for about 24 minutes to an altitude of about 10,000 feet.
A lot of pictures running around.
I had one up earlier.
Small, shallow Earth.
In fact, there's one up there now, I think, on my webcam.
Oh, no, there isn't.
No, there isn't.
There's a picture of the book that has been written that's going to result in my interview tonight.
Oh, what an incredible book.
I'm going to tell you about that.
At any rate, if you live anywhere near the mountain, you're going to want to keep yourself availed of information sources like the one you're listening to right now, and we'll try and keep you up on the latest.
But the headline of the latest, kind of to me, is USGS guy saying, well, it may be bigger than we thought it was going to be.
So we'll have to wait and see.
That's all you can do with the volcanoes, wait and see.
Or is it?
I actually had an idea the other night.
I'm sure it's not a novel idea, to be sure.
but let me run it by you and i'm sure we'll get you know some reaction from the audience now you know volcanoes when they go on Mexico's volcano of fire belched plumes of smoke and fired hot rocks down its slopes on Thursday, but officials said the activity did not pose any immediate threat to residents living in the area.
The explosions in Mexico began Wednesday were provoked by the collapse of a dome that had formed recently in the crater of the 12,533-foot volcano.
Now, Mount St. Helens in the last eruption lost over 1,000 feet of its altitude.
Just blew the whole damn top part of the mountain off.
Now, I know this may be a cockeyed idea, but this is the home of cockeyed ideas.
Coast-to-coast ham money.
We were having a conversation on ham radio the other night, and I said, well, isn't a volcano kind of like a champagne bottle?
And every now and then somebody shakes it up and the pressure builds and off she goes, right?
Or would it be or something actually much more impressive?
Some volcanoes hurt a thousand miles away when they blow up.
So here's the cock-eyed idea.
If there's a rock dome over a volcano, which I believe is correct, the dome forms, the lava hardens, and then you have a closed bottle of champagne, right?
Now, obviously, it would not be a human endeavor, but why would it not be possible with modern technological, whatever it is, robots or whatever, to put a drill up on the dome of a volcano and drill into it, kind of like, you know, when you're opening a bottle of pop and you don't want it to go all over the place, you open it just a little bit, right?
And it goes, and then you can pour it out without getting it all over yourself, right?
So why not extend that idea to a giant robotic drilling machine that would punch a hole in the dome and it may not be that simple for a volcano, but, you know, I nevertheless toss the idea out, and I'm sure it's not original.
Obviously, people must have thought of things like this, right?
Then, in this last week, there was the big debate.
I'll give you my view of the big debate in a moment.
radio I watched every moment of the debate, and I concluded pretty much what everybody else did while watching.
I thought the president looked kind of terse, you know, kind of uncomfortable, terse, unhappy, not in his comfort zone, and it came through.
You know, all the polls are saying that Kerry ran away with it, and there's three different polls here, and a lot of people say, well, who's going to believe that?
Well, you know, it's kind of the way it hit me, too, so I tend to believe it.
However, it should be noted here that most of the recent victors in the first debates, in recent memory of presidents, have never gone on to become president.
In other words, even though they've done very well in the first debate, they have never gone on to be president.
That would be through about the last, I don't know, five or six presidential debates.
That's an amazing stat.
That's kind of like a football stat, I suppose, in some ways, right?
But it's true.
I don't know whether it's something that holds true or not.
We shall see.
But clearly, Terry did himself some good, and he needed to.
His campaign was obviously going nowhere, and it looked like Bush was going to be a shoe-in.
Now, now, maybe we have a race on our hands.
We'll see.
Now, here's an interesting story.
Navy will shut down Project ELF, Wisconsin site.
Now, I don't get this at all.
We must have something really new out there in the world.
Project ELF.
Now, you remember in a lot of movies you've seen, right, submarines way under the sea are able to be communicated with by an extremely low frequency that sends extremely, painfully slow baud rates, meaning it may take them some minutes to send even one letter, but it gets through to subs way down there.
Well, the Navy is going to disassemble it.
They say they don't need it.
It was accomplished by these incredible miles-long antennas in Wisconsin.
And they're going to take it apart.
So what does that mean?
Hmm.
The Navy Friday said it will turn off two submarine communication systems in northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan and permanently dismantle them because, quote, they are outdated and no longer needed.
The Navy's extremely low-frequency radio transmitter in the National Forest near Clam Lake has been the site of repeated demonstrations by anti-nuclear weapons activists.
The Navy also will shut down a similar transmitter in Michigan's State Forest near Republic.
Radio transmissions from the sites will end September 30th.
So it's over.
It could take the Navy up to three years to permanently close down the sites.
But obviously, they've got something new.
Now, what do you think it is the Navy has come up with to talk to their submarines?
Could it be HARP?
Could it be something discovered with the HAARP research?
Who knows?
But obviously, they've got something.
Now, over the years, I think I have made perhaps what I'm about to do is a personal book recommendation to you, an extremely strong book recommendation to you.
I devour a book about every, I don't know, two days on average.
I'm a very avid reader.
And I tend to like science fiction that is based in science fact.
And my wife, Ramona, picked up this book for me the other day by a gal named Tess Gerritson.
Actually, it turns out Dr. Tess Gerritson called Gravity.
It says a novel of medical suspense.
And it's generally available right now.
And I am telling you, this will knock you out.
How good is this book?
Well, if you're a techie, you know, or even sort of slightly a techie, this book is going to knock you out.
I'll read you what it says on the back of the book, because that's generally all they give as a tease for a book, right?
And that's how you kind of decide in the store whether you're going to pick up this book or not.
You read the little tease on the back.
It says, Gravity, Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime to study living beings in space.
But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagination when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results.
Emma struggles to contain the virus outbreak while back on Earth, her estranged husband Jack McCollum works frantically with NASA to bring her home.
But there will be no rescue.
The contagion now threatens Earth's population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station where they are now dying one by one.
And I picked up this book and started reading, and it was like an infection itself.
I couldn't put it down.
I'm telling you folks, for days, two days straight, actually, I just, you know, normally I read, I get in bed, you know, at night like a lot of people and read myself to sleep.
I just kept reading and reading and reading and picked it up in the middle of the day when I never would and just, you know, cut hours out of my day and said, huh, I can't put this down.
And it was that good.
And I talked, I think it was on Thursday, to my producer up in Oregon, Lisa, and said, hey, Lisa, see what you can do about getting a Tess Gerritson, Dr. Tess Gerritson.
And the next day, I went and picked up my paperwork on what was about to happen this weekend, and there was the name Tess Gerritson, and I just started jumping up and down.
She's incredible.
She's a doctor and lives in the state of Maine.
And though she writes novels, they are based absolutely on medical fact.
And some of what you're going to hear tonight, no doubt, is going to scare the hell out of you.
But I recommend you stay tuned for Tess Gerritson.
I also recommend that you go straight out and buy this book.
This would be about over the years, about my third really excited, hey, you better go get this book right away and read it.
You don't have to be a real techie type person, but you have to enjoy medical suspense.
You have to enjoy reading about reading a book, obviously, where the author really knew what they were doing.
I mean, she is a doctor, so obviously she knew what she was writing.
It is medically accurate and frightening and really good.
It's called Gravity.
So trust me on this one.
Go get Gravity, and we'll talk to Tess Gerritson in the next hour.
What a pleasure and honor it will be.
That's one of the cool things about being a talk show host.
I mean, you can read something like Gravity that just grabs you and won't let go, and then you can reach out and find the author and do an interview, and that's the case tonight.
So there you have it, that coming up in the next half hour.
By the way, Denmark apparently would like to claim the North Pole as theirs.
That's right.
Denmark wants the North Pole.
That's a headline.
Denmark is joining Russia and Canada to see if it can lay claim to the North Pole and whatever natural riches may lie beneath it.
So you see, it's not so much the pole they want.
It's the riches that lie beneath that intrigue.
The key to Denmark's claim is Greenland, the world's largest island, and a semi-independent Danish territory about 500 miles south of the North Pole.
Now, researchers are hoping to find evidence that Greenland is connected to a huge ridge beneath the floating Arctic ice.
In other words, land connected, right, to the North Pole.
And if they can find out that Greenland is indeed connected, then they're going to say, well, it's all ours.
It doesn't matter that there's ice on top of it.
The land below is connected.
That means it's ours.
So Denmark will then take the North Pole.
Denmark has allocated $25 million for the project, which is also surveying four other areas around Greenland.
The Canadian government allocated $55.4 million for a similar seabed mapping.
So as soon as they can figure out that the land is connected, they're going to figure it is their North Pole, not the world's North Pole, but their North Pole.
Well, okay, one more comment about the volcanoes, because I also want to run this by you.
Now, I've heard rumors that the volcano in Hawaii has become active, right?
Very active recently.
Something about a volcano in Japan becoming active.
Something about Vesuvius becoming active.
We know about Mexico, and we certainly know about the one here at home.
So, you know, again, is it worth suggesting ruminating about the possibility that under our Earth, we know so very little about what's under the Earth, right?
That's why stories about holes down to the center of the Earth are always so intriguing.
Holes that yield sounds that we've never heard before are intriguing and dark.
And the whole concept of what's beneath and to the center of our Earth is basically unknown.
Scientists talk about an iron core and all of that.
Well, maybe.
But they haven't been down there to find it and see it and document it, so they don't know for sure.
So is it not possible that there is an area of lava, hot rock, that virtually encircles the globe?
Because it does seem like when one volcano gets active, they all tend to get active.
Now, what does that mean to you?
Just a coincidence?
I think not.
I think there's more to it.
I think there is somehow connected underground, and there's a great lava pool, and that pressure in the earth, for whatever that is worth, tends to express itself when it builds at all points of earth orifices.
How about that?
And so that's why I think all our volcanoes get going together.
So there is that for you to ruminate about, and you're welcome to make your own observation if you wish.
It may be a cockeyed idea.
And my other idea may be a totally cockeyed idea as well.
you got that cork effect right and it seems to me that if you could release a little bit of energy s That you could prevent an eruption that might be very economically costly to many people.
In fact, costly even in lives.
How many were lost?
30?
50 lives in the last big eruption?
Mount St. Helen.
So it's a big deal economically and in every other way when a volcano inconveniently goes near a very large city.
Or near actually several large cities because it envelops, if it really goes, a large part of the northwest.
So, yes, it is kind of a cockeyed idea drilling into a volcano.
And no, I wouldn't want to be the human with the jackhammer.
But remember, I'm envisioning something on a different scale, done perhaps by robots.
unidentified
Robots.
drilling and drilling and drilling until finally Oh Who knows?
You get a shit up in the dark.
It's raining in the park.
Meantime.
Tell the river, you stubborn your home.
Everything I'm gonna throw in mixing, double fall.
Feel alright when you hear the music break Music
Now you step inside, but you don't see too many faces Coming in out of the rain and you This world wants to know that you guys thought it was that you're going to play this turning back off here It's 2am
It's 2am, here it's all that I'm starting to win But it's still a warm connection, it's time to take a chance
Yeah, there's no more moves, the sirens in my head Grabbed my sign and star circuits to tear Yeah, let me go, my whole life spins into a friend's head
So I'm turning through the twilight zone Where this is in my house, wheels are getting blown All right now, let's go to the twilight zone All right
now, let's go to the twilight zone And the twilight zone, wheels are getting blown And the twilight zone, wheels are getting blown And the twilight zone, wheels are getting blown All right now, let's go to the twilight zone Everybody listen very closely because the numbers on the weekend are a little different.
You know, from an idealistic point of view, Art, and we talk a lot, or rather you talk a lot on the show, you know, about things that take sort of a more holistic view of life and of the universe.
And, you know, it just always, idealistically, it always irks me when I hear about human beings vying for more control of the Earth, especially in an ecosystem as fragile as, you know, the North Pole, you know, looking for resources and stuff buried beneath.
I mean, it could eventually, you know, digging under the ice or doing whatever could contribute to a lot of these Earth changes and just sort of the negative effect that we have on the planet as a species.
Propaganda would be information that is not true, that's contained, that contends to be true, to be news, for example.
Let's say you're listening to a newscast and you get something that's clearly right or left-wing to the extreme and crosses the boundary between news and opinion.
Then, baby, you're getting Propagandized.
But if you listen to a talk show host, when you turn on your radio, you're inviting in opinions.
Rush doesn't hide that.
He has a particular point of view.
It's a right-wing point of view, and he doesn't mind telling you so.
So he's upfront about it.
If you don't like that, tune to something else.
The truth will come to you when you examine enough outlets, sir.
I guarantee it.
So spend less time raging about how unhappy you are about Rush and tune into something else.
I can't remember how long ago it was that you had the psychologist on on a Sunday night from the University of Chicago who was dealing with induced after-death contacts.
We adopted that at our clinic here where we treat veterans out of the Portland metropolitan area.
So you're saying the experiment was so successful there that somebody took their own life to continue the road they had already seen in the experiments?
unidentified
That will never be known.
Basically, the person after one of the other patients, and these are intelligent men, and they master the algorithm so quickly, and they want to experience it time and time again after their first experience.
And so we don't know for certain why this man committed suicide.
It may have been because he believed that we have stumbled upon, and I got the impression from that psychologist you had on, that this was something that he kind of just stumbled upon.
That's why death is always supposed to be a mystery to us.
What that man just said was very interesting, and that is that from a sort of a theoretical point of view, what if everybody decided that there was life beyond this life?
There absolutely was life beyond this life.
They would be with their loved ones.
I wonder if that would induce a lot of suicides and a lot of people who had sort of a partial experience to the degree that they now absolutely believed.
And so just shed their skin and said, that's it, I'm out of here.
On to the next one.
Maybe that's why death is supposed to remain such a mystery.
Yeah, I was wondering if you think that might have anything to do with a severe weather pattern that might have existed in the past, where the hurricanes maybe got stuck in the same pattern over and over and maybe created that severe weather you talk about a lot.
I think that anybody who now does a study of the ocean's currents and really does a study is going to be a shocked puppy about what's happening with the currents, slowing down by alarming percentages.
And as go the ocean currents, so goes our weather here on Earth.
So go the land temperatures here on Earth.
And thus far, with one very brief exception, that would be Senator Kerry during the debates mentioning global warming.
It was just sort of mentioned.
And the President did not respond, and there was no debate beyond that.
But take a look at what's going on with the world's ocean currents right now.
Well, the only problem with that scheme or that idea is that the chemtrails would be at, to use them as an ionizing agent, I would say, but they would be too close to the Earth, and any bounce that you would get would be too close in to do any good in terms of communicating with submarines worldwide.
So I don't think that's it.
However, the first part of what you said regarding HARP, maybe, maybe.
HARP is, remember, they're experimenting with sounds that are harmonically related and sounds being transmitted that produce both the sum and difference of the main frequency being transmitted because they're combining them, the sum and the difference.
So it may well be that with HARP, they have discovered how to produce a frequency, a modulation, that penetrates salt water.
I don't know.
There is one example, one you haven't heard yet of harp.
You don't have to be one of the biggest psychics or sensitives in the world to feel what's going on right now.
You're exactly right.
I think the average person with the average amount of intuitive ability can feel that something right now is very much askew, out of balance, and that something's about to happen, right?
unidentified
Oh, you got that right.
And, you know, you know, I just started learning about God and Jesus, oh, gosh, back in 97 or something.
I wasn't raised with it.
I just figured it out on my own, you know.
And the reason why I kind of feel like it's Jesus coming back type of thing is I don't know if you know much about CV radios, but if you get out here and you talk about, you know, God, Jesus, anything religious over the CB radio, these boys out here will crucify you.
You're going to get a cussing like you never had before, right?
In all the years I've been broadcasting, I've made perhaps two or three personal from Art Bell to you guys.
Don't even think twice about this.
Just go out and find Gravity, the book Gravity by Tess Garritson and buy it.
That's all there is to it.
Go on, you know, Amazon and just buy it.
Just take my word for it.
Buy it.
This book was given to me by my wife Who thought I would enjoy it.
Boy, was she right.
One more time, I'm going to read a little bit from the back of gravity, because that's all I dare do without giving away more.
Gravity is summed up on the back of the book by this: Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime to study living beings in space.
But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control and infects a space station crew with agonizing and deadly results.
Emma struggles to control the virus outbreak while back on Earth.
Her estranged husband, Jack McCollum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home, but there will be no escape, no rescue.
The contagion now threatens Earth's population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station where they are dying one by one.
That's gravity.
I just consumed it.
I ate this book.
I couldn't put it down.
Tess Gerritson is the author.
And I think I did finally finish with the book, put it down on Wednesday and said, but boy, would I like to interview her.
And Lisa called, and she's a producer for Coast to Coast AM.
I said, hey, Lisa, see if you can get a hold of somebody named Tess Gerritson, would you?
Here she is.
Tess Gerritson is a person who took a very unusual route to being a writer.
Her lifelong interest has always been science, especially the creepy and weird aspects.
That would be just down our alley.
As a child, she would dissect snakes and collect buckets full of lizards to study.
It is no wonder, then, that her college studies focused on biology and physical anthropology, which in turn led her to study medicine, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University.
She earned her BA in anthropology and went on to receive her M.D. from the University of California of San Francisco.
She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii, that's nice, where she worked as a physician.
Tess is the author of eight bestsellers, and in her free time, she continues to compile a weird biological facts file, which is viewable on her webpage entitled, appropriately, tessgarritson.com.
Well, all right, so this book, this book, I just, I've never, with all the books I've ever read in my life, have I ever been affected as strongly as I have been by this book, Gravity.
But that was my personal thought, you know, trying to imagine somebody you love there and you want to save them and you can't and they're so far and there's nothing you can do.
When you drive into the NASA parking lot in Johnson Space Center, you do see a lot of bumper stickers that talk about beat-me-up, Scotty.
And you can tell that these are men who grew up loving Star Trek with this grander vision of humankind as one race, one being, as opposed to killer satellites.
So I think they do tend to be something of a more international view of things.
I guess you've heard the latest, by the way, that there was an article, Reuters, I believe, indicating that if the Russians don't manage to fix the oxygen regenerator, they're going to have to abandon the whole station.
And when you look at Mir, which was really, by the time it came down, was a pile of junk, they kept it going with duct tape.
And, you know, there's the old, I don't even know if this is a true story, it's maybe a little bit apocryphal, about the difference between the Russian and the American space program is NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that would write in space, and the Russians use a pencil.
And then the other things that happen to your body is immediately you start to have redistribution of your fluids.
Fluid leaves your intravascular system, your blood vessels, and goes into your soft tissues.
So that very often when you see pictures of people from space, their faces are kind of puffy.
It's because the fluid has moved into their soft tissues.
Another problem is that calcium starts to leak out of the bones into your bloodstream, and so they will get premature osteoporosis if they stay up there very long.
And they'll get kidney stones as well because of that extra calcium.
And I actually had to find that out when I went down to NASA because I knew that I had a hero named Jack who was in the space program.
He was going to be an astronaut, but I needed something to disqualify him so that he would have this sense of bitterness that his wife was going up and he couldn't.
So there's, first of all, just trying to get yourself stationary.
The other thing is, say you want to take bloods.
You put the tourniquet on and you take the tourniquet off.
If you don't fix that tourniquet to something, it will float off and you will never Find it again.
It's interesting how, because things are in 3D up there, people don't normally, when they're searching for something, they don't normally look up.
But in space, of course, things will float all over, and you will lose things.
Astronauts lose tools all the time and don't find them until they come back down for a landing.
Sally Ride, when she went up once in the shuttle, she lost her boots.
And when they were coming back for a landing, she had to come back in her stocking feet.
And only as they were starting, you know, coming back and then they were feeling gravity again, she heard the boots fall and realized they were just there all the time, just above her head.
In other words, you just you assume blood would and I guess it would, just the way any other liquid tension makes it makes it stick round, uh but because there is no gravity it does not drip.
Well, before I give you the number, let me just let you know.
I'm sure you already know this, that before you are even launched, your obituary has already been written by all the news agencies.
So that it must be a really bad feeling to be strapped in on the launch pad, waiting to lift off, knowing that your obituary is just, it just takes a click of a keystroke, and there goes your obituary to all the newspapers.
And the other thing that must be a little eerie knowing is that in a bunker at Cape Canaveral, there is what they call range safety officers.
These are Air Force officers who are there to really blow up the shuttle in case the shuttle should have a problem and the trajectory takes it over a populated area instead of over water where it's supposed to go.
And in fact, they make a point of meeting these officers before their mission just to give them a human face to look at them and say, this is who you're killing if you have to do this.
And these two disasters have been on liftoff and on landing.
But then we don't think about what it's like to actually die in space, which we haven't really had happen yet, which could have happened aboard Mir.
And there's another set of nightmares that you can come up with.
When people think about dying in the vacuum of space, what they don't really think about is that it's very much like dying of the bends.
There are a lot of analogies between space and deep-sea diving.
In space, you're enclosed in a, well, I think of it as a tomb almost, surrounded by an environment of a drastically different pressure.
And if there's a breach in the spacecraft, air will start to rush out of that breach, and then the air pressure inside starts to drop.
You experience what a deep sea diver feels when he surfaces too quickly.
At the very beginning, you'll have a little pop in your ears because things will be changing inside your eardrum.
And then as the air keeps leaking out, your chest will start to hurt because what's happening is that nitrogen bubbles are forming in all parts of your body, including the brain and the spinal cord.
That's the bends.
And if it keeps on leaking out, there's this little thing in physics called Boyle's Law, which describes the relationship between pressure and volume as gas.
As the pressure falls, the gas in your body starts to expand and it distends your body cavities.
It ruptures your lungs.
Your lungs really explode.
By that point, you're probably dead.
But just to go on with the gruesome scenario, as the pressure keeps falling all the way to vacuum, the blood in your veins will begin to boil.
And then as the pressure drops all the way down to a point where the boiling point and the freezing point merge, your blood will go from boiling to frozen solid in just about an instant.
So in all that time, probably communications is continuing, and people on Earth can hear you take your last screen.
So that's the kind of things that I kind of look into and imagine while I'm writing these books.
And it really, really raised my admiration for anybody who goes into space.
What do you believe NASA would do in the case of deadly, a horrible contagion?
Maybe not exactly what you wrote about here, although yours is so plausible, but anything that would have perhaps mutated in space and would be a terrible danger to Earth.
Faced with that kind of horrid scenario, what do you imagine we would do?
What happens when you get six of them together in one little space?
And you know, space travel, it's very stressful.
A lot of the flight surgeons I've talked to said their worst concern about long-term space flight to Mars is not really the physical effects, although that's a problem.
It's the emotional effects.
Is somebody going to go bonkers up there?
It has happened.
There has been a problem, and it happened aboard Mir.
One of the cosmonauts who was up there, his mother died while he was up in space.
And he was so grief-stricken and so upset that he locked himself away in one of the modules and would not talk to Russian mission control for two weeks.
I'm not sure what their psychological screening was at that particular time.
I can tell you what NASA does.
NASA makes it mandatory that at least once a week you have a private medical conference with your physician, your psychologist.
The astronauts, while they're in orbit, are given a private hour with their doctor to discuss all the problems they're having.
They also have what they call private family conferences, or PSCs, where they are given the chance to talk to their families and maybe relieve some of the stress that way.
And those are both mandatory because NASA understands that, you know, people are going to have problems there.
And, you know, that's part of the reason I think we really do need an orbiting space station.
A lot of people will say, well, why can't you do this stuff by computer or remote control?
These things, these tests with psychology, with human habitation, you're not going to know what it's like to send a man to Mars unless you've had him in similar situation for months.
Well, I'm going to fall back on your book again a little bit to sort of ask this again.
Are you really certain that in every case, I mean, there are all these cultures that are set up to the space station, that the astronauts themselves are not just keepers of some of them without knowing everything that's possible?
You know, when I wrote that book, I was looking at payloads and how they're delivered to NASA.
And I discovered that the payloads, I mean, the experiments are approved on paper by a science committee at NASA.
But when they are delivered to the launch site, nobody actually checks to make sure that the payload that was promised is what is delivered from the laboratory.
So it is possible to slip something in that way.
And in fact, I heard later that one of the astronauts who had read the book went to payload's directorate and said, is this possible?
And they said, yeah, that's kind of a little loophole there we hadn't thought about.
That's what I heard from the movie producer who actually bought the rights to the film, that she had called in an astronaut to be a consultant, and they confirmed that that was a problem.
How much of a possibility is it that with biological experiments on board with plants and animals and just every sort of biology being experimented with, including Petri dish level stuff, that something would happen in microgravity that they would not expect?
I mean, isn't it a high probability that there'll be the unexpected?
Yes, so things get loose there, and it's a closed environment.
And if your filters aren't working, I mean, they have the most advanced HEPA filters up there, but on Mir, it wasn't, you know, and those HEPA filters, by the way, are easily overwhelmed by too much liquid, which is what happened in Mir also, that all that antifreeze screwed up their filter, their filtration system.
One of the things that you do when you go up to spaces is you do experiments because you can do things up there you can't do on Earth.
What they have noticed is that on Earth, when you grow tissue cultures, tissues tend to grow in two dimensions, flat and a sheet.
You bring them up there, they start to grow in three dimensions.
They assume forms that they never would have on Earth.
So there, right away, you have a difference in just how biology behaves itself.
Well, you know, that is, of course, what everybody's dream is, Mars.
Mars is the next.
Of course, that won't take generations, but I think that once we figure out what is going to be happening to the human body, just for instance, how are we going to protect against UV light, against solar radiation, all these other things, protecting the human body in those little tiny, thin-hulled spacecraft.
But, hey, but on the serious side of this question, and it's hard to get over there, serious side, but a baby conceived in microgravity, that would be the incredible first instant of creation and the genetic makeup getting done and all that, right?
I mean, I think that just from the point of view of us of human beings being explorers, you always want to find out what happens next, what's over that next hill, and creating a baby in space would be quite a first step.
Right now, I'm reading stories about scientists who are out resurrecting the 1918 flu that killed, I forget how many millions, millions, tens of millions, tens of millions.
Really a bad mama of a flu.
And they're resurrecting this thing ostensibly, I guess, so that they can figure out how to combat it should it come alive again.
But how worrisome should it be that they're resurrecting this?
I mean, on the one hand, we don't have a problem with it right now, and I don't want one.
So there may be some partial protection, but I suspect that even though you and I were probably vaccinated when we were children, it doesn't mean we won't get it.
I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but smallpox sounded like it was pretty well locked up, the virus itself, and it would be unlikely for it to be spreading.
But you know, there are some government contracts out there that they're getting a lot of money to develop these vaccines.
On this program, I interview a lot of even physicians like yourself, some quite renowned, who are big believers in life after death, and they've purchased into these stories that people tell who die and then experience something virtually on the other side.
I don't know what the percentage of near-death experiences are overall in people.
But, I mean, that is one of the theories, is that they are just experiencing, you know, the sense of light, of seeing a tunnel, of coming out into light, of hearing voices of loved ones.
Those very well could be just neurons firing off or...
The ones that grab me are the ones where patients that are dead out, coded, as it were, do come back and repeat things that were said during that period of time.
But you're saying even somebody whose heart has stopped, they could still during that, I mean, that's a pretty morbid, horrible thing to think about, but you're saying it might even be very likely that for those two minutes they would continue to hear what's said with the panic of trying to get their heart started.
It could explain some of these near-death experiences.
I mean, I don't, I hate, it's a wonderful thing to think that we have life after death, and I think we all want to know there's a heaven or our loved ones are waiting for us, but there's no proof.
Well, what I've seen is that those who belong to the National Science Foundation, I would say probably 95% of them are agnostic, at least, at the least.
Many of them are atheists, but I think most of them are agnostics.
Well, that's exactly what drives scientists, because those of us who are agnostic or atheist feel this is our one and only shot at existence, and we want to prolong it as long as possible, because we don't think there is another chance.
At least that's what Carl Sagan believed, that that was his one shot and he wanted to make the most of it.
So yes, I think they would probably have a greater motivation to prolong life, but we all do.
We all want to stay around long enough to watch our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and every other generation beyond that.
But, my gosh, there would be a war between the eternal and the non-eternal.
There would be a serious war.
So I'm just wondering if a scientist in a lab somewhere virtually came up with this juice, how it would go straight to our government and then be controlled on sort of a who do we want to keep around basis?
Well, maybe that one creeps right up on the fact that I hear that serial killers in prison getloads and boatloads of fan mail, and a lot of it's from women.
And so you don't think a lot of their readers, I don't know, don't enjoy being, or maybe perhaps enjoy a few moments of being tied up every now and then?
I know, but if it's women that enjoy this, and it has to be about women victim of serial killer, then somehow they must be psychologically placing themselves in that spot.
Indeed, so this could be about a killer, a serial killer, if you ever notice the words.
Stand your hair right up.
We'll be right back.
Stay right where you are.
We're going to talk about serial killers here in a second.
But, you know, I've got to ask a question and answer for my audience something that for years now we've been bantering around at certain morbid moments.
And it goes back just a little bit in the interview to this two-minute thing.
You know, in years past, they used to cut off people's heads and they'd fall into a basket, right?
Well, I thought about what is it about medicine itself that kind of bothers me?
And what has always given me like a little chill?
And I thought, you know, when I go into, as a patient and get my blood drawn in a doctor's office, it sometimes makes me wonder what happens to that tube of blood.
Where does it go?
It's the most intimate substance you're going to pass over to somebody.
And there are a lot of secrets in blood.
Somebody can find out whether you've smoked a cigarette, whether you've taken medicines, whether you're diabetic, you know, things you may not want to tell people.
I mean, these people do not, they're not schizophrenic.
They don't have hallucinations.
They know right from wrong.
They just have no sense of morality.
That's not really considered insanity, so to speak.
I've come to the conclusion, you know, looking at what happens around the world when there are wars and terrible things happen to societies and there's a number of people out there killing, that there are walking among us almost a subspecies of human being who they're predators.
They're born predators and they've always been predators and they look at the rest of us as prey.
They walk around a shopping mall and they say, well, there's a zebra and there's a gazelle and I could get her and I could get her.
But they don't do anything about it because they are aware of the consequences.
Would you suspect there's any greater or lesser degree of that present in, for example, the U.S. population versus, by comparison, fourth world African nation?
His mother and sister were put in prison by the Romans, and years later, the Roman guard comes and opens up the gate to see if these prisoners are still alive.
And the gate squeals open, and there's this staring music, and the guard backs up and says, oh, my God, they're lepers.
Well, for an impressionable kid like I was, that made me think, oh, there must be something really, really terrible about this disease, leprosy.
And it does.
It was mentioned 41 times in the Bible.
It's usually mentioned in terms of being punishment for sin.
And through history, lepers have been horribly treated.
They were burned alive.
They were buried alive.
In medieval times, they were forced to wear cloaks and walk around with these clappers or bells so that people could know the monster was coming and they could flee.
So we've always had this ancient history of this particular disease.
And you ask why?
Because it doesn't really kill you.
What it does is it does something which a lot of women think is much worse.
Pain is our early warning system that something is wrong.
And if you don't have pain, you can burn yourself, you can cut yourself.
In third world countries, and here's kind of one of these gruesome details, the real reason that children who have Hansen's disease, which is the official name for leprosy, the real reason they lose their fingers is that the rats get them.
When they're sleeping at nighttime, rodents climb into their cribs or their beds, and children.
And thousands of people with leprosy were taken on boats and just abandoned on the beach in Molokai, left to their own devices, pretty much to die of starvation.
But there was a man, a Belgian priest, named Father Damien.
I think there's been a movie made of him, who decided that God had called him to serve the lepers in Hawaii.
So he came and established a colony and really did quite saintly work and ended up dying of the disease himself some years later.
They find that actually husbands and wives don't really pass it to each other very often, that it's more likely to go from mother to child, so there is a genetic predisposition to it.
It's caused by a bacterium.
It's actually a relative of tuberculosis bacterium.
So it doesn't grow very well.
One way to culture it, interestingly enough, is in the foot pads of the armadillo.
Yes, well, it's certainly controllable with multiple drugs.
And a lot of the drugs are the same drugs you take for tuberculosis, but you have to take a number of them.
And one other little interesting detail is one of the drugs that's useful in treating leprosy is thalidomide, that old nasty drug that caused all those deformed babies.
Yes, well, that came about because I was working on a book about mad cow disease that was life support.
And I know you've probably had guests who've come in to talk about mad cow disease.
But it's something that I've been interested in since I was in medical school.
When I was in medical school, first of all, the human form of the disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD for short.
When I was in medical school, they thought that it was due to what they called a slow virus.
They didn't really know what the organism was yet.
And I remember sitting in my medical school class for infectious disease, and you know, those are really boring classes, and almost falling asleep when I heard the instructor suddenly use the word human cannibalism, and I kind of sat up straight and thought, what did I miss?
Yeah, he was talking about a tribe in New Guinea called the Foray tribe, where a huge number of women were dying of CJD, and nobody knew why.
You know, we've had a number of guests on, doctors, so I guess I've got to try this one on you, who suggest that CJD is much more common and not diagnosed as cause of death in many, many cases.
And so they try to build the case that there's CJD sort of all over the place or there might be.
I know, crackpot theory, or is it more possible than we know?
Yes, there was an outbreak, I think it was in 1997 in Kentucky, of a whole valley of people where CJD was breaking out in young people, and they couldn't figure out what it was.
Indeed, and my guest, Dr. Tess Garritson, you know, as a child, she'd dissect snakes and collect buckets full of lizards to study and who knows what all else.
And that was as a child.
Then, of course, she became a full doctor.
In fact, let's see, Phi Beta Kappa University of Stanford.
You get the idea, right?
But she's kind of an interesting gal because she has a, is it a macabre side or a interest in real medical terror?
interesting gal and she'll be right back and of course we're going to go to the phone so stay right there the the Okay, let's say that gravity is a guy's book for a second.
I'm technical enough.
You all know me on the techie side, big time, right?
And in the Air Force, I was in medicine, you recall.
And so I found her book just absolutely accurate.
I mean, just accurate here, accurate there, accurate all the way through.
He said, a human hand needs to flip three switches.
They need to flip a switch that starts the deorbit burn to get them out of orbit.
I said, okay.
They need to flip another switch as it's coming in for a landing to launch the air data probes to give the computers enough data so that it can land.
And then a human hand has to flip a third switch to lower the landing gear.
And I said, thank you.
You've just answered my question, because that's exactly what goes wrong in the book, is the pilot goes unconscious between the second and the third switch.
So, you know, they were just so easy to work with and such a lot of fun.
And I think that because they all grew up on Star Trek, we all spoke the same language.
We all understood each other.
We all had the same vision of what space could be and what people could be.
I'm Old enough to remember the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, you know, that first wonderful day.
I still remember crying upon that day.
And I think of all of us who are old enough to remember when we had our first moon walk, we probably all remember that as being one of those few pure moments when every American was proud of being an American.
There was no sense of, oh, we're fighting about this or we're mad at each other for that.
unidentified
We were all equally amazed and awed and proud of ourselves.
I think that if we are going to be invaded by an extraterrestrial being, I think it's going to be on the microbial level.
You know, this is a funny thing.
Ever since I was a child, and I continue to have this nightmare, believe it or not, I do have nightmares.
My nightmare always has to do with invaders from the sky.
And it's a strange thing.
I've always been afraid of that.
But when you look at certain organisms that we have on Earth, these archaeons that I talk about in gravity, which are true organisms, they're single-celled organisms.
They're so ancient that they probably split off at the same time that bacteria and eukaryotes split off.
It's called a halobacterium, which is actually an Archeon, even though they call it a bacterium.
It's in the Dead Sea, and it lives in extremely salty conditions, and it can survive the vacuum of space.
They have found that when we have spacecraft in orbit and they flush their toilets, that actually some of that fecal bacteria is still surviving in orbit years later, still alive.
And Arthur C. Clarke had this wonderful quote about that.
He said, what if life on Earth was actually a result of an ancient space-faring race flushing their toilet?
What if we evolved from some alien's toilet?
It makes a completely different vision of Genesis, doesn't it?
I very much enjoy what your guest is saying, and I just wanted to bring up a point.
When I first heard about the plot that she used, many, many years ago, when I was much, much, much younger, there was a writer I very much enjoyed, also a science fiction writer by the name of Martin Caden.
And he wrote a book called Four Came Back that had a very similar plot.
And then during one of the extra vehicle activities, they would pick it up and bring it inside before they'd return.
According to Caden, at least within the context of the story, when the researcher opened up the trap, he got sick, but then he got well very quickly.
Now, in his story, it was a space station, and there were about eight people there, and they had a similar collection, only it was opened up while it was inside.
Now, I have no idea about the nature of the plot, and I've got to admit, I'm really going to run down and grab it.
But is there some possibility that some of the, oh, I don't know, maybe viruses or something on space dust might come in to infect a crew in a similar fashion?
And while it does get very hot, I suppose if you had a big chunk of something conceivably within it, and when they find something that falls from space, they run after it and section it and look at it and open it up.
And one of these days, could we open up something we ought not?
And as I was talking about, these halobacteria, which are probably would be able to survive an entry because of the fact that they enclose themselves in these little salt crystals.
So they can live in the vacuum of space.
And they're able to live at very, very high temperatures.
So it's something to think about.
You know, there are people who think that we're the only life in the universe.
Well, I think that's probably not true.
I'm sure that there is life somewhere.
All it really takes is water and carbon molecules and some nitrogen, and you could have life other places.
To you, then, perhaps, the possibility of life, extraterrestrial life, is greater than the possibility of a Maker in heaven and, you know, all the stuff that we're taught?
And I seem to recall an answer that was given going back to contact, and somebody said, I think it was one of the candidates said, well, you love your mother, right?
I just had a feeling, so there was that in you somewhere.
And that's a really important question, too, and that is, in all of your books, can you write about all of this without having an awful lot of tests in the books?
But I do get some very strange people, and I get really interesting serial killer stories from my audience.
I had a man come up to me to tell me that there was a serial killer in his wife's family, made sure I knew it was his wife's family.
And the story he told me was that there were two twins in this family.
One grew up to be an attorney in the prosecutor's office, and the other worked for the California Highway Department.
The one who worked for the highway department was going up and down California killing women.
And when he killed them, he would cut up their underwear in a certain pattern with a pair of scissors.
Then he would call up his brother in the prosecutor's office and say, hey, they just found another body.
What are the police doing about this?
So the prosecutor did not realize he was feeding information directly to the killer himself.
Eventually, he was caught because a cop who was on the verge of retirement remembered that he had had a juvenile who used to sneak into women's bedrooms and cut up their underwear with a pair of scissors in exactly that pattern.
And that's does, if they're intelligent and if they're fairly normal, like Ted Bundy was, they can be really hard to capture, especially if they move across state lines, because then you're dealing with multiple jurisdictions.
I had one Maine state policeman estimate for me that there have been three serial killers in Maine, and we're a very small state.
So I can imagine they're all over the country.
Now, the FBI does have a central computerized database called VICAP in which they are able to keep track of certain patterns of killings and maybe identify which ones are killed by the same killer.
But it's still a matter of finding these people, especially if they're bright.
You know, we had the earlier example of Kozlo, for example.
Is a serial killer somebody who's just simply said to himself, or for whatever reason, all those inhibitions are gone or they were never there in the first place?
But, you know, 1970s, there was a family called the Bloody McCrary family.
They were a mom, a dad, a son, a daughter, and a son-in-law, and they traveled from state to state robbing convenience stores and kidnapping female clerks and taking them on the road and shooting them and leaving them at the side of the road.
They killed almost two dozen young women.
Purely for practical reasons.
They were robbing stores, but I think that the killing had to do maybe with a certain amount of pleasure and control.
First time Color Line, you're on the air with Dr. Jess Garretson.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes.
Hello, Dr. Garrett and Art.
I was just wanting to hopefully leave you quickly with this thought because I'm working and enjoying your show here late night up here in Canada.
I actually got introduced to Dr. Garrett when Dr. Garritson's reading as part of a book list where she was included in sort of a medical thriller list.
And I was hoping to get her impression on one of Tom Clancy's books where he actually illustrates the effects of someone using weapons of terror, sort of a viral attack on the U.S. And I was wondering what she would feel about that.
They actually used the Ebola virus, the Ebola Miang strain.
And I was wondering just what her thoughts were.
And Art, if you wouldn't mind playing my part for any follow-up, I'd be more than interested to hear what you guys have.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritson.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, hi, Art.
Excellent show tonight.
This is Orville calling from Miami, Florida.
I listen to you on WINC 610 Radio.
I have a question for your caller, for your guest.
Earlier when you were discussing gravity, you said that there was a range safety officer that had the ability to destroy the shuttle if it went overpopulated area.
And then later in the discussion of gravity, you said that if all the astronauts died before the retro rockets were fired, that the shuttle would probably stay in orbit for several months, being an embarrassment to NASA.
Why would NASA use the Range Safety Officer's explosives to destroy the shuttle in that case?
If you were working for the government, doctor, and the government told you that a terrorist had loosed in some small or mid-sized town airborne Ebola and you had to make a decision.
So if you were advising the president on that situation and it was obvious it could not be contained, you would advise the president to take that forward.
Yes.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Garritzon.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello.
I was wondering if a parent feels like that his children are maybe having masochistic or predatory tendencies, is there anything he can do to kind of nip it in the bud before they get too old?
They do a lot of antisocial things like break into cars or steal cars or do property crimes, which may actually probably be within the range of normal behavior for teenagers.
When you start doing cruel things like that, like torturing animals, killing dogs, killing cats, that's another level of concern.
And so I wash all of those cans in my sink, not with my dishes, but it's the same sink that I wash my dishes in.
And I also wonder if the cans that I've washed, since this can't be killed, and they're recycled into something else if there were mad cow disease in there, am I poisoning, you know, maybe the next can that has spinach in it or something?
Well, so far, there's been no reports of it in the United States because we did not do what, or we should not have done at least what they did in the UK, which was feed cows downer cows.
I think you probably understand that's how it got into the system, into the herd in Great Britain, is that when cows died, they would be ground up and fed to other cows, and that's how it was passed on.
That doesn't happen in the United States, or it should not happen in the United States.
So I don't think there should be any problem with canned pet food in the U.S., as long as it's American.