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Dec. 18, 2005 - Art Bell

02:29:16

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Tess Gerritsen - Strange Medical Tales

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	I've done about... well, I've done all my life of broadcasting.
	But I love broadcasting.
	Huh!
	Baby, it's in my blood.
	Radio is simply in my blood.
	There'll be a lot of blood talked about next hour with Tess Gerritsen, incidentally.
	But it's in my blood.
	And if I'm not here, then I'm on ham radio, as most of you know by now.
	And, uh, I simply decided, you know, I did do weekends, as you know, for a year, and, um, I decided, well, that's not really giving me the break, because I, you know, I, look, if you do a talk program, you have got to live that program.
	You virtually have to live the program, and that means day and night.
	You're preparing for it if you're not doing it.
	Frankly, doing it is the easy part of it, and a good talk show host makes it sound very easy.
	Well, it's not.
	It takes a lot of preparation.
	In the old days, I went out and got all the guests, I interviewed, pre-interviewed all the guests, and did everything else.
	So, 20 years of that is a lot, and I decided I wanted to spend a little time with my beautiful wife, who for 20 years, you know, supported me.
	And so that's what I'm doing, and I'm only doing two Sundays a month.
	To be specific, the third and fourth Sundays of the month.
	Now one exception to that will occur this month.
	I will be doing the yearly prediction show, and on that score I want to urge those of you who call me to make predictions during those couple of days, that I regard this very seriously.
	We number the predictions for the year coming.
	We review the predictions made for the year past, and we do this in a very serious manner, and I expect you to treat it seriously.
	I want you to think very hard about the prediction you're making, not just something you're pulling out of your navel in order to call a talk show and get on the air, but a really thought out prediction, whatever it may be.
	Now, I'll be doing those prediction shows, it seems to me, let me look, on the 30th and the 31st.
	And then they're numbered, sealed in the Bell family vault until the following year.
	So please think hard about it.
	Now, the Bell family is all fine.
	All five kitty cats are great.
	Sadly though, Tower is not.
	Tower, our bird, has expired.
	Tower Tower expired because Tower lived in a house with five cats.
	And our cat, Yeti, made a jump that was unnatural.
	Now, our cats don't have front claws because, you know, they're all inside cats all the time, and if you let them out, coyotes get them.
	So, to save the furniture and all for a million other reasons, we do all get emails, I know, they don't have claws in the front.
	Nevertheless, Um, Tower had learned to fly from Tower's cage all the way around the room, navigating, circumnavigating the room perfectly at a high altitude, and then landing back on the cage as exercise.
	Well, incredibly, beyond all reason, Yeti, who had been lusting after Tower for, oh, well, forever, since Tower came in the house, actually made a jump from the floor to at least seven feet in the air, snatched Tower out of mid-flight, and then ran into the living room with Tower in the mouth.
	And we, of course, uh, Ramona was chasing after, uh, Yeti, throwing things at him, unclamped his little jaws, and pulled Tower from what seemed like a sure death.
	Well, Tower lingered for about a day and then passed on from internal wounds.
	So rest in peace, Tower.
	He was a good bird.
	And we did give him, or her, we didn't ever really know, six months of life that otherwise Tower would not have had.
	But it was very sad, indeed.
	And Yeti... I mean, these are instinctual things in a cat.
	You know, a cat wants birds.
	That jump, nevertheless, was unbelievable.
	Mid-flight, I mean, really fast, too.
	So how he could have done that so accurately, we have no idea.
	Yeti, of course, is so proud of himself.
	It was like the other cats made way when he walked.
	He didn't just walk.
	He strutted.
	It's like...
	Did you see what I just did?
	Did you see it?
	It was the ultimate.
	I am the king.
	And that's the way he acted, and still is to some degree acting.
	It's like, all other cats are now lesser.
	I did what all of you dreamed of doing and were unable to do, and I did it in midair.
	A football analogy would be the pass caught and the toes coming down just a quarter of an inch inside.
	You know, that kind of jump.
	I mean, it was incredible.
	So yet he's still strutting around like he owns the place.
	The other cats are showing respect.
	They actually move away when he comes by.
	All right, the webcam photo tonight is of my mom, myself and my mom.
	She was just here, is back in North Carolina now, but there she is.
	That's my ma.
	Now in her 80s.
	What's better than I do?
	And I, of course, want to plug smeter.net.
	It's a secret way you can sort of listen in to the shenanigans that we indulge on amateur ham radio.
	And we're going to be talking a little bit about ham radio tonight because I've got a couple things I want to say, so...
	Anyway, that's a webcam shot tonight.
	My mom and smeter.net, the secret place to listen.
	www.smeter.net, not dot com.
	I got so many emails.
	I couldn't find it.
	Dot com.
	It's not dot com.
	It's www.smeter.net.
	And then you'll find the prompt receiver and other receivers, soon going to have one back in Tennessee!
	So you can listen to Ham's back east.
	Many emails about this, like this.
	Uh, Art, I heard the rebroadcast, the Madman Markham rebroadcast, and his time machine.
	Does anybody know what happened, uh, because of him?
	Uh, what became of him?
	Um, I have no idea.
	I've not heard from that man.
	And in addition, I have not heard from Dr. David Anderson.
	He was another time travel expert, a real expert in the field.
	And I'll tell you something, it's been years now, and he's just gone.
	For God's sakes, Dr. Anderson, if you're out there somewhere in our time, Get hold of me, buddy, and we'll get you on the air.
	Same with Madman Markham.
	Love to have a follow-up, as would the rest of the audience, but both of the men who were really involved in time travel are, for all intents and purposes, gone.
	Draw your own conclusions.
	A quick look at the usually, and not to be disappointing, depressing national news.
	Bush asserts U.S.
	is winning the Iraq War.
	That's the first story.
	President Bush asserted Sunday that the United States is winning the war in Iraq, and he issued a plea to Americans divided by doubt, do not give in to despair and do not give up on this fight for freedom.
	In a prime time address he said all this and more.
	Second story in the national news is, Analysis.
	Bush drops rosy Iraq scenario.
	No more rosy scenarios after watching his credibility and approval ratings crumble over the course of 2005.
	The president completed a rhetorical shift Sunday night by abandoning his everything's okay pitch to Americans and coming clean.
	He was wrong about the rationale for going to war in Iraq.
	He underestimated the dangers.
	The country has suffered terrible loss and the bad news is not over.
	Even with his high-profile display of candor, a step anxious Republican leaders have been demanding for weeks, Bush remained unyielding.
	Mexico's President Vicente Fox stepped up his attacks on the United States' plan to build a fence along the southern border on Sunday, saying it was, quote, shameful, shameful for us, a shameful initiative for democracy.
	He said barriers between nations belonged to the last century and had been torn down by popular uprisings, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
	Build not a fence, keep our people, to keep our people out.
	The movie Kong made about 50 million dollars in its debut, doing very well.
	People like monsters.
	And of course I watched with a big smile on my face while our San Diego Chargers ruined, ruined an undefeated season for the Colts.
	Score 26-17.
	It was a glorious game to observe.
	Absolutely glorious.
	all right we'll get to the rest of the news as paul would say in a moment
	i wonder how many of you remember the last show i did with major ed dames
	It was the last Sunday program that I did.
	And in that program, Ed came up with a brilliant idea to assassinate a top Al Qaeda leader by causing a bomb near him to go off.
	Well, it may not be the same exact target, or maybe it was.
	Who knows what Ed had us working on subconsciously, but I did flinch a little bit when I read the following story from CNN.com titled, Al-Qaeda number three dead, but how?
	Witnesses say missile strike.
	Pakistani officials dispute the claim.
	Pakistani officials have indeed confirmed the death of a top Al-Qaeda official.
	Looks like Abu Hamza Rabia.
	But witnesses and officials give very conflicting stories of how he died without elaborating.
	The Pakistani president said on Saturday he was 200% certain that Rabia, the operations chief of Al-Qaeda, the terrorist network, was indeed killed Wednesday.
	He was killed north of the border town.
	of Maureen Shaw.
	now other pakistani officials also confirmed the death but said
	he died during an explosion at a home
	in the northern tribal area in a a north northern tribal area uh... of
	pakistan near the afghan border a pakistani information minister shake ramaad ahmaad told cnn
	that would be a apparently died while working
	with explosives.
	.
	Now, I'm not saying that's a hit in every form, but may be.
	The Earth's magnetic pole is drifting very quickly.
	Now this is back in the news again, heavily.
	The Earth's magnetic pole, in fact, is drifting away from North America so quickly now that it might end up in Siberia in 50 years, according to scientists.
	The shift could mean that Alaska will lose its northern lights, auroras, Might even be more visible in areas of Siberia and Europe.
	The magnetic poles are different from geographic poles.
	The surface points marking the axis of the Earth's rotation magnetic poles are known to migrate and occasionally even swap places.
	This may be part of a normal oscillation and eventually it may migrate right on back toward Canada, but it may not.
	It may flip completely and we may be in the middle of something right now.
	In fact, let me stick my neck out.
	We really are in the middle of something big right now.
	It's happening.
	If you care to step back and look at what's happening around the world and on our Earth right now, there is no question about it.
	One of the effects of the magnetic movement would be occurring on shortwave radio.
	Here's an article, interesting article, what effect will all this have on radio propagation?
	Well, it's clear the regions for best VHF auroral propagation will move as the magnetic north pole drifts.
	I'm not clear on how this would affect the United Kingdom, obviously written in that area, but some people speculate the drift of the magnetic pole into Siberia would increase visible auroras in parts of Europe.
	If the Earth's magnetic field collapsed during a flip-over, we might see increases in incoming cosmic rays and particles in the solar wind, because of course the magnetic field protects us against all of that, which would normally be deflected by the Earth's magnetic field.
	This may well affect the ionosphere.
	Could we see increased ionospheric propagation at, say, 50, even 70 megahertz?
	Who knows?
	But one thing's for certain, we live in interesting times.
	That's from Ham, M5AKA, and he's sure right about that.
	We live in very interesting times.
	I work a band called 75 and 80 meters, 3.5 to 4 megahertz.
	Now, I must tell you that unprecedented things are occurring.
	At this point, when the sun goes down at night, Those people that we've been able to reliably hear at 100, 200, 300, 400 miles away, they're gone!
	And propagation is gone.
	Now, is this the result of the shifting Earth's magnetic field?
	I don't know.
	But I can tell you we are in the middle of a big sea change in almost every aspect of what's going on in the world.
	I called it the quickening.
	And I maintain that what I wrote then is now manifestly becoming the truth.
	Since I only have a couple of Sundays a month, I've got a lot for you.
	Siberia is melting.
	It's part of it.
	A peat bog in western Siberia about the size of France and Germany began melting three or four years ago and will spark an irreversible ecological landslide and unleash billions of tons of methane gases.
	This is potentially awful.
	The new scientist, very honorable, reliable, new scientist reported in August.
	A Russian researcher visited the region which is warm faster than anywhere else on our planet.
	Temperatures increased three degrees Celsius in the past 40 years.
	Now bear in mind This ecological area is existing on a very, very tiny temperature gradient.
	In other words, a very few degrees rise and you begin to get a very great deal of melting.
	And so already we've got a 3 degrees Celsius rise in the last 40 years alone.
	The findings followed a June report that said thousands of lakes in Siberia's east have dried up over 30 years.
	And if that's not enough, it may be the latest evidence of global warming.
	Polar bears are now drowning.
	Drowning!
	Scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming very long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf.
	The bears you see spend most of their time hunting and raising their young on ice flows.
	But as it gets warmer, The ice flows are melting.
	In a quarter century of aerial surveys of the Alaskan coastline before 2004, researchers from the U.S.
	Mineral Management Service said they typically spot a lone polar bear perhaps swimming in the ocean far from ice once perhaps every two years.
	Polar bear drownings were so rare that they've never been documented in the surveys previously.
	In September of 2004, when the polar ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of the northern coast of Alaska, researchers counted 10 polar bears swimming as far as 60 miles offshore.
	Polar bears can swim long distances, but have evolved to mainly swim between sheets of ice, if they're there.
	The researchers returned to the vicinity a few days after a fierce storm.
	They found four dead bears floating in the water.
	Extrapolation of survey data suggests that on the order of 40 bears may have been swimming and that many of those of course drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds.
	So...
	There you have it.
	All the while our ocean currents, the ones that give Western Europe the relatively balmy weather, are beginning to stutter.
	I'm sure you've seen the headline perhaps on Drudge the last few days, and the fear is they may halt.
	As in the coming global super storm, or the day after tomorrow, the movie that was based in part on that, and of course we wrote that as well some time ago, and it Sadly, it would appear to be coming true.
	So what we have going on in front of us is a shift.
	♪♪♪ The following is from Whitley Streber's Unknown Country,
	but I assume it appeared elsewhere, certainly.
	Another asteroid headed our way.
	Yet another asteroid is heading our way, and it could hit us.
	In 31 years, will this one spell our doom?
	Like an earlier one did for the dinosaurs?
	This one is called... I guess it's Apophis.
	Apophis, that looks right.
	After the ancient Egyptian spirit of evil and destruction, the asteroid is now aiming for Earth.
	In fact, it's being watched by astronomers all over the world.
	And it looks like it will hit a body of land.
	If it does, they may try to figure out how to deflect it or break it up in space.
	Most asteroids that hit the Earth land, of course, in the ocean, since oceans cover most of Earth.
	NASA says that an impact from Apophis, which could come in 2036, would release, ah, this isn't bad, 100,000 times the energy of the nuclear bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima in World War II.
	No matter where it does hit, We would all be affected by the nuclear winter that would affect millions.
	We'd get affect certainly from dust particles being released into our atmosphere and that probably would bring on nuclear winter.
	It's probably what killed off the dinosaurs and would do a job on us.
	Astronomers have tracked this rock ever since it was discovered in June, but it has only started worrying them now because they say the odds of it hitting Earth in 2029 are becoming very alarming.
	We don't have much time to lose.
	It will take many years to design, test, and build the technology we need to deflect the asteroid.
	Meteor expert Monica Grady says an impact by this rock could cause mass extinction and we're overdue for the big one.
	So that'll give the next generation something to worry about a little bit, huh?
	There is a legacy of the tsunami out there, and it's not a good one.
	There's a dead sea, a dead zone, devoid of all life, has been discovered at the exact epicenter of last year's tsunami, four kilometers beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.
	Scientists taking part in a worldwide marine survey made it 11 Our dive at the site five months after the disaster, they were shocked to find nary a sign of life around the epicenter, which opened up an 11, make that 1,000 meter chasm on the ocean floor.
	A 1,000 meter chasm.
	Instead, there was nothing.
	Nothing but eerie emptiness.
	The powerful lights of the scientists submersible vehicle piercing through the darkness showed no trace of anything living.
	A scientist working on the census of marine life project, Ron Odor of Dalhousie University in Canada said, quote, you'd expect a site like this to be quickly recolonized, but it just hasn't happened.
	It's unprecedented.
	And speaking of unprecedented, that's the right word.
	I just got a quick fast blast from another ham operator, John out there, who says, Art, I have to disagree with the comment on the propagation on 80 meters.
	The band isn't dead, it's just fantastically long.
	Conditions to Europe, especially Scandinavia, have been fantastic.
	Well, yes, John, I understand that.
	But that's not been the nature of 75 and 80 meters since I've been licensed in 58 up and down through a few sun cycles.
	It is unprecedented That on a regular basis, as soon as the sun goes down, propagation for the short range completely disappears.
	And that's part of a pattern, John.
	of change that's occurring, whether it's to do with the Earth's magnetic field or some other ecological change, the Sun cycle notwithstanding, I have never, ever seen anything like it in my life.
	And while it's great for talking to Europe, it's not so good for talking to your buds.
	And beyond that relatively minor Difference and change.
	I mean it's not a big deal that we can't talk to our friends but it is a big deal that it's changing like this because I believe it has never done this before and it's part of the larger change.
	It's just one small aspect that I'm able to observe as a radio person that I think points to what's going on the bigger picture that is to say with our environmental changes They're predicting another bad hurricane season, maybe even tragic hurricane season ahead.
	That shouldn't be a surprise for anybody.
	Storms are going to become more and more violent as time goes on.
	To the phones.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hey, Art.
	How you doing?
	Quite well, sir.
	Thank you.
	I just want to jump right to the chase.
	I'm calling from the area of WABC in New Jersey.
	77 W... Yes, of course.
	Yeah, no doubt.
	I've got to tell you, Art, this is on the level.
	In around June or July, 2003, I was taking out the trash one night on a Sunday night.
	They pick up on Monday morning.
	I spotted a UFO above my neighbor's house, and that's how it appeared to me.
	I was setting the trash out with two other people.
	When I pointed the object out to them above the neighbor's roof, they both ran into the house and locked the door behind them.
	I was left out on the curb alone.
	And Art, I gotta tell you, when I was looking at this thing, I was tracing it with my index finger, pointing at it.
	It was moving so slow and changing color.
	Gradually, I thought my eyes were playing games with me.
	All right, are you able to give us a sense of the size of it compared to the house, for example?
	Exactly.
	Well, here's the weird thing about it.
	As it was above my neighbor's house and just floating around, no noise at all, it appeared to be right above their chimney, yet at the same time, It seemed to be way off on the horizon towards New York City.
	I mean, it was, the visual was, it's here, but it's there.
	But at the same time, you know, the weirdest feeling was, all time kind of stood still as I was looking at it.
	Yes.
	And it drifted across the street into the wood line, and I was staring at it as it was just so slightly, gradually changing color.
	And then, in like a Blink of an eye.
	Don't know what direction it took off.
	It was gone with no trail of light behind it.
	Just zap, it's out of here.
	Well, bud, we're sure they're here.
	Somebody's here.
	They're watching us.
	They're doing something.
	I wish I understood their motives.
	I wish I understood what they want from us.
	Why they're watching us.
	What will come of it.
	But all I can say is welcome to the club.
	I mean, millions and millions of us have seen these things.
	We know they're real.
	We just don't know what they're all about.
	The strange thing about it was there was no sound except the sound of night time, 11 o'clock at night.
	That's not strange, thank you very much.
	What it is, is they've got a manner of propulsion that simply doesn't make noise.
	And everything we do here on Earth right now, propulsion-wise, makes noise.
	Takes engines, fuel, rockets, rotors.
	Jet blasts, propellers, all the things man does on Earth to move through the air and make noise.
	If it's silent, there's a good bet it's not from here.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Yes, sir.
	If they are capable of attaining zero mass, just their light would be an accelerator and they would be able to hover with just lights or accelerate to extreme speeds with lights and the zero mass Well, that might be true in space.
	I'm not sure about within the, you know, the gravity of Earth.
	Well, and in a neighborhood where they have zero mass on a craft, it could affect the neighborhood, including the time that the man talked about distortion.
	Yeah, that's true.
	If it had zero mass, true enough.
	But what I wish to talk about is all the large bodies in our solar system are not only departing from the solar system, but increasing in speed.
	Yes.
	And one of our space platforms is going out of our solar system and increasing in speed.
	That's true.
	I wonder if someone like Stephen Hawkins... Not only is that true, sir, but scientists are unable to explain why.
	Well, and my question is, is it feasible that as these particles go through the imperfect vacuum of space, that
	would drag on them?
	But what if, as it proceeds around the back of the planet or the space platform, that there's enough turbulence to
	annihilate antimatter or some phenomena of dark matter?
	We need some lessons on dark matter.
	Yeah, I would probably opt for dark matter.
	I think scientists now believe, theoretical physicists believe, that dark matter is what is propelling objects away from each other.
	There's nothing else obvious.
	Otherwise, you know, physics laws say that no matter how small it might be, the drag or friction of anything in its path would tend to slowly And the next time we have a vehicle that we want to send out of the solar system, we ought to send it 180 degrees in the opposite direction and see if it does the same thing.
	I agree, and my guess would be that it would.
	Thank you very much.
	There is something out there that is pushing on these objects.
	Pushing hard enough to get them going faster, not slower, but faster away from us.
	As all objects are slowly moving away from us, modern theoretical physicists believe firmly that ultimately our fate is to be alone.
	That other star systems, Other planetary bodies are all moving away from us so that the end, if Earth should, and man should be so lucky to live that long, the end would be a lonely, dark, cold existence.
	Man would go out of his house, if it could happen.
	Should he live that long, and there would be nothing in the night sky, save perhaps our own moon, and by then it may have moved far enough away, too.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Oh, how you doing?
	Very well, sir.
	Well, I wasn't talking exactly, or earlier I wasn't talking about this, but I found out something about, you guys were talking about the Vero chip earlier?
	We were?
	Well, not earlier today, but this was a couple days ago, that somebody was talking about the Verotip.
	And I found out that there was an emperor of Rome named Nero, and a lot of people think that that was like the beast back then when they were talking about Revelations, and it's just funny how it sounds exactly like the same thing of Nero meaning Nero.
	For buying and selling stuff.
	And so, you're referring, of course, to the Mark of the Beast.
	Right.
	And it's just funny how the Vero chip name sounds a lot like the Emperor that they were thinking about was the Beast.
	Back then, you know, like a hundred years after... Well, let's try this out on you, sir.
	They say that eventually we shall all have to take The mark.
	And perhaps have a chip implanted in ourselves to buy and sell things.
	Right.
	And without the chip, you cannot buy and sell, you cannot buy food, you cannot exist, you can't buy gasoline, can't go down to 7-Eleven, can't do anything.
	Wait a minute.
	If it comes to that, and it comes your turn to take the chip, the mark, are you going to do it?
	No.
	You're not.
	No.
	You would starve to death first.
	Yeah.
	It's funny how Nero translates 6-1-6 and also 6-6-6, and this was like an emperor.
	Oh yeah, but there was a Ronald Wilson Reagan.
	I mean, that was 6-6-6.
	I appreciate it.
	There's a lot of sixes out there if you look for them.
	But again, that's a classic test of a true believer.
	Would you take the chip?
	Would you take the mark?
	Not me!
	Well, maybe not.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Yeah, no chips here either.
	No chips there either.
	You would starve to death.
	Pretty much so.
	Good evening.
	Good evening.
	I just wanted to bring up one thing about the pole shift that's been going on here.
	Yes.
	You know Edgar Cayce brought that up a long time ago, and he also said that there'd be, along with the pole shift, that there'd be a change in consciousness, kind of at the same time.
	I can believe that.
	Well, you know how birds, you know, they seem to be losing their migratory path.
	Yes.
	I mean, what do you think it's doing to human consciousness?
	You know, we kind of depend on, you know, kind of the magnetism ourselves, don't we?
	You bet we do, sir.
	There's magnetite in the human brain, as there is in other mammals, and that's how birds navigate, and so human beings could also be suddenly confused.
	We could become something else altogether.
	That's why I said there could be a shift in consciousness.
	It could be true.
	Well, yeah, in case you brought that up.
	I mean, you know, no telling.
	No telling, but one thing.
	I kind of summed it up at the beginning of the program.
	There's so much going on right now that points to a profound shift of some kind going on right before our very eyes if we just take the time to look at it.
	You know, people don't look at what the South and the North Pole looked like 40 years ago and now.
	They don't take the time to recognize the weather that's changing.
	They're like the little boiling frogs, you know, getting hotter and hotter.
	And rarely do we take a moment out to look at what's going on around us, but the change is happening now.
	I agree.
	Right now.
	I appreciate your call, sir.
	Take care.
	Take care.
	That's happening right now, all around us.
	Can't you feel it?
	It's a kind of a quickening feeling.
	And every news article leads you a little further down that trail if you're paying attention.
	Of course, a lot of people have their head in the sand.
	But this change is occurring around us now.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hello, how are you?
	I'm quite well, sir.
	I wanted to bring up an interesting point that you were talking about how the northern pole was going to be shifted in 50 years in Siberia.
	Well, if it continues its present pace, it will in fact be in Siberia within 50 years, yes.
	Okay, so how about the whole Mayan calendar?
	I mean, if it's going to be there in 50 years, that means that it's moving at a quite quickly pace.
	So, wouldn't you think that the Mayans had some intelligence of that and produced that into their calendar?
	All the catastrophic events that are going on with weather nowadays.
	Of course, it's entirely possible that the Mayans understood the cycles better than we do today.
	You know, I believe that I see a cycle or, you know, a change of a cycle right now, going on right now.
	But the Mayans may have known and may have seen and may have had access to history that goes far back beyond what we really understand other than soil samples and ice cores and that sort of thing and understood cycles that we don't yet understand and that's why a lot of people do pay attention to the Mayan calendar and believe it does portend something.
	I think it does kind of talk a lot because I listen to your show quite frequently since I'm graveyard shift and it's just kind of weird that all the correlating facts with all the different subjects kind of Come together into one point.
	You can feel it yourself, huh?
	I sure can.
	I appreciate your call, sir.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi there.
	How are you?
	Quite well, sir.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Richmond Hill, which is just north of Toronto in Canada.
	Way up in Canada.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Fire away.
	We don't have a lot of time, but go ahead.
	Okay.
	What I wanted to let you know about, we've got a radio station up here that doesn't operate anymore.
	It's called CFGM AM.
	Okay.
	And there's a gentleman that used to be on, uh, his name was Ron Knight, and it was the Ron Knight Radio Show, and it was a late night talk show.
	Yes.
	And they were talking about UFOs one night.
	I believe it goes back to 1975, so possibly one of your producers can get the audio tape.
	Gentleman called in saying that he was looking at three UFOs.
	over the lake in the back of his house.
	Yes.
	As he's describing these UFOs, they started to change, uh, they were changing formation.
	Anyway, um, all the power went out in the radio station and all the phone lines went down only in the radio station.
	The radio station was a small building above a pharmacy.
	The pharmacy still had power.
	The alarm never went off in the pharmacy.
	Because it was hooked into the phone line.
	It's quite a fascinating story.
	I can't remember all the details, but I did want to bring this to your attention.
	Well, that's quite all right.
	I appreciate the story.
	As you know, we have a collection of many extremely credible stories.
	As a child, she would dissect snakes.
	Collect buckets full of lizards to study.
	It's no wonder then that her college studies focused on biology and physical anthropology, which in turn led to her study of medicine.
	A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, she earned her B.A.
	in Anthropology, then went on to receive her M.D.
	from the University of California, San Francisco.
	She completed her internal medicine residency in Honolulu, Hawaii, rough duty there, where she worked as a physician.
	Tess is the author of eight, count them now, eight bestsellers, and in her free time, huh, what free time, she continues to compile a weird biological facts file viewable on her web page.
	We have a link up to that right now, www....
	Tess Gerritsen dot com.
	And appropriately, the background to all her material appears to be black.
	Coincidentally, my favorite color.
	In a moment, Dr. Tess Gerritsen.
	Perhaps even the Alfred Hitchcock of the medical world.
	I don't know.
	Dr. Tess Gerritsen, welcome back to the program.
	Thank you for having me, Art.
	And I have to say, that is the best comment I've ever heard, that I was a female Art Bell.
	Is there a higher compliment?
	There are.
	You are a doctor, and doctors heal.
	Doctors promise to make things better, and at the very least, not worse.
	And yet, somehow, your studies sort of turn to the dark side.
	I mean a fascination with death, not life.
	Explain that.
	You know, it's more a fascination with things that creep me out.
	And we all are.
	That's why you have so many listeners on your station.
	We all are fascinated by things that just freak us out.
	I can trace it back to my childhood.
	My mother was an immigrant from China.
	And when we were growing up, really, her English was not so good.
	So she took us to horror films.
	That was the one thing she did understand about American culture.
	She loved American culture.
	Well, horror crosses all cultural lines.
	Yeah, because you don't need to know a lot of English to know that when Frankenstein's coming after you, it's a bad thing.
	So I spent most of my childhood, you know, cowering in movie theaters and screaming as a five-year-old.
	So I think that from an early age, I was very aware of the dark side.
	I'm aware that when you opened up a locked door to a room that there was something bad behind that door.
	So really you were raised in the Chinese culture, weren't you doctor?
	Yes, well my mother was very traditional and like a lot of little Chinese girls, we all took piano lessons, we all were very good at school, we all got straight A's in class.
	So that was quite traditional.
	And the expectation is that you become a doctor or a lawyer or a professional of some sort?
	And that's exactly what it was.
	I think that if I had, you know, been allowed to do my own thing, I might have actually gone into journalism because I'm just curious about things, especially strange things.
	You must have some insight then into the Chinese way of looking at things.
	I mean, the way we look at the paranormal, for example, or what we think of as paranormal, or the strange stuff you talk about, versus the way the Chinese culture does.
	I've never had anybody explain that to me.
	Do they believe as we believe, or profoundly differently?
	You know, I don't know enough about it, because I was raised so thoroughly in Western medicine.
	You know, in the belief that things can be proven, that there are double, you know, double-blind studies that can show whether something works or not.
	All science.
	Yeah, and my understanding of Chinese culture is that it really believes more in spiritual things.
	Well, exactly.
	Yeah, whether things are either cold or hot, or yin or yang, and it's all, you get sick when things are out of balance.
	I think that's really kind of what summarizes as far as I know about Chinese medicine.
	Doctor, and there aren't very many doctors, I interview countless doctors and scientists, and I ask many of them, do you believe in God?
	And most don't.
	Some are very concerned to even begin an answer to that, and you're welcome not to answer it, but being so immersed in science, there aren't too many physicians that express publicly a belief in God, are there?
	I think that probably there are fewer physicians who believe in God than the general population.
	I mean, when you look at the poll numbers for Americans in particular, they say about 90-95% believe in a supreme being, whether it's God or some other form.
	But physicians, I suspect, will be like scientists, and that'll be a little bit lower.
	To answer your question, because I have actually... You don't have to.
	I have answered this question before on your show, and I always get into trouble, but I'll do it again.
	Sure.
	Which is, I consider myself an agnostic, simply because I feel that I like to see evidence of things, and faith is one of those things that requires no evidence.
	That's sort of like the definition of faith.
	Well, would you describe yourself as perhaps spiritual in some sense?
	You know, I think all human beings are spiritual in some sense.
	It doesn't mean we believe in a supreme being, but to me spiritual means you have a sense of wonder about just being alive.
	Well, for example, a patient is being operated on and they're in anesthesia, you know, deep into anesthesia, really out, out, out as far as the surgeon is concerned.
	And some surgeons just absolutely believe there's no way in hell that this guy or gal lying on the table with me opening them up is hearing or understanding anything I'm saying.
	Some of the more spiritual surgeons are careful what they say during surgery because they know or think or believe or have faith that the patient can in some way understand at some subconscious level what's being said.
	I mean, if the guy above says, man, this guy, look at that bleeder, he's not going to make it.
	Not a good thing to say.
	You think not?
	I don't think you have to be spiritual at all to believe that patients can hear through anesthesia.
	I think it's just a matter of understanding neurological chemistry that there are some patients who do hear things.
	Perhaps anesthesia wasn't as deep as we thought it was.
	Sometimes not at all.
	In fact, aren't there these horror stories of people waking up in the middle of, I don't know, gut bypasses and stuff like that?
	Well, the worst stories I've heard have to do with kind of crooked anesthesiologists who are stealing drugs or stealing pain medications.
	There was one case of a gas man, as we call him, who would put them under lightly and then he would paralyze them, which is normal.
	You know, you get a form of curare to keep your muscles totally relaxed so that when the surgeon opens you up, you want your muscles, you know, they don't want them too tight.
	And these patients would wake up and they'd be paralyzed and there was no way they could say or do anything to tell anybody they were in pain.
	So they would lie on that table and endure surgical procedures, cutting everything else you can
	imagine, and would feel the whole thing.
	That to me is probably the most nightmarish thing I can imagine.
	You know I would like to say that I cannot imagine it, except I went through it. I didn't know that.
	I didn't wake up during a surgery, but when I was in the Air Force, I had a little thing in my left shoulder that wasn't so little, kind of a big bump.
	It was a possible tumor.
	They took me in and said, you know, we'll just open this up and pop it right out.
	We'll do it with xylocaine and you won't feel a thing.
	It'll be easy.
	I was four hours on the operating table.
	It went deep into my chest, and they started the xylocaine, and they told me that they couldn't put me under general, because they were already deep into my chest, and they were giving me all the xylocaine they could.
	I bet I had 30-something or another.
	And they said they couldn't put me under general, much as they would have liked to, and believe me, doctor, I felt every snip, clip, and cut.
	Oh, that is a nightmare.
	It was, yes it was, but I was awake during the whole thing, but I can't imagine what it would be like to be anticipating your next conscious moment, you know, looking at flowers in the room or something, but instead you see the bright light, you see the hands moving, and you feel the sharp cutting.
	Yes, and you're awake the whole time.
	It's such a terrible crime to imagine that a doctor would put a patient through that.
	If you are a good anesthesiologist, it should not happen.
	Even inadvertently because you're supposed to be monitoring blood pressure and pulse rate and those things go up in pain and you see that happen.
	On the monitor, you maybe would think you'd dial up that anesthesia a little bit higher.
	Well listen, you're a doctor, maybe you can tell me.
	The physician, and I ended up, you know, it was going to be a simple procedure.
	I had four or five doctors in there doing this thing to me by the time I was all over.
	They told me, again, that they could not give me general anesthesia because they'd given me so much xylocaine.
	Was that BS?
	I don't.
	You know what?
	I'm not an anesthesiologist.
	It sounds a little strange to me, though.
	I would think that when you start getting in deep in there, you're causing so much stress to a patient, you really want to put them out.
	I agree with you.
	Anyway, that's what they told me.
	I thought at the time, you know, that sounds, well, that'd be true.
	You know, the doctor, you believe doctors.
	Well, you know, the other question you have to ask is, was there an anesthesiologist in the room or did they not want to call one in?
	Yeah, see, I don't know.
	They just gave me that BS story, and I have no idea some captain.
	And then to top the whole damn thing off, I worked in the hospital, and so when the report came back from Lackland Air Force Base, you know, the test on this stuff they took out of me, it came back and it was completely benign, but the doctor took me in there and told me I had six months.
	And then he cracked up and actually fell on the floor.
	We were pretty close.
	We all knew each other in the hospital, but I didn't think it was funny at all.
	That isn't funny at all.
	It wasn't, no.
	I hope you never had to go back for anything else at that hospital.
	No, that was it.
	That was enough.
	Anyway, these things do happen.
	People do wake up and the trouble is you'd be paralyzed, right?
	You'd be paralyzed.
	And then there is even a case of an anesthesiologist who tried to hide it.
	By giving his patient a beta blocker, which suppresses the ability of your heart to speed up, so that nobody else in the room knew that the patient was awake because they could not see the monitor and did not realize that the pulse should have been higher.
	But the patient's normal reaction to pain was muted because the anesthesiologist did that to him.
	This has got to be like a special place in hell for people like that, if you believe in such a thing.
	Yeah, and I think he was just a drug addict.
	There's really no end of material for you for writing books, is there, in this field?
	No, there isn't.
	Right now, I'm doing crime thrillers, but a lot of the fiction that I write about, I base it on true crime, things that have actually happened.
	I did notice you kind of did start down that line of more crime than medicine.
	Well, I think it's because we're all fascinated by evil.
	Is there any better way to explore evil than with crime fiction?
	You know, what people do to each other, and that's the stuff that really freaks me out, and unfortunately, because of the subject matter, I am meeting a lot of very strange people, Art.
	I bet you are.
	I'm getting a lot of strange correspondence, and when I go out on book tour, I actually encourage people to tell me their own personal crime stories, because I'm always fascinated by it, and I'm getting some Some real doozies that make me come home with nightmares.
	You want more of that material?
	I've got the audience for it.
	Well, you know what?
	I would love to put out a... You know, just tell your audience, if they have any personal weird crime stories, let me know, because I collect these things.
	And by the way, while I'm on the radio with you, I just want to say hi to the Coast Riders.
	Say hello, and especially particularly to Tim, who has been corresponding with me.
	You have a lot of fans out there.
	We do indeed.
	Um, with police, there is the great blue wall.
	You know, if something internally goes wrong, there's the great blue wall.
	With physicians, there's a similar wall.
	It's probably white, I suppose, huh?
	You mean to be protecting ourselves?
	Yes, in other words, I just have always wondered how many people died, you know, due to the stupid mistake of some doctor or some surgeon and it, you know, it gets covered up.
	It gets covered up, you bet.
	Well, I think it probably, I hesitate to give you details because this is somebody I know.
	He's an anesthesiologist who works in Texas.
	And he works at a hospital, and there are two surgeons that he works with in this hospital.
	One of them, he says, is fine.
	The other one, he says... The saying in this hospital is, if you send a patient to them, tell them to buy the coffin.
	And they all know this person is incompetent.
	Yes.
	But I think that they are all concerned about getting sued for, you know, they're hurting his reputation if they were to say anything.
	Um, and probably Black Ball themselves.
	And Black Ball themselves, and this man who told me this story, he's just, you know, he just...
	Does he have anesthesia?
	He does not want to get in trouble with the hospital.
	Well, Tess, when you go into the military, you go through basic training, which basically strips away your personality and makes you subservient and makes you obey orders.
	And I think that as a doctor, when you go through medical school and then you're an intern, it's kind of the same psychological thing, isn't it?
	It is, but there's another thing going on too.
	I think a lot of doctors feel that there, but for the grace of God, go I. Everybody makes mistakes.
	They all realize that.
	Maybe if they see a colleague make a mistake once, they're not going to say anything.
	But you know what?
	I think that most doctors, I think that was the exception that I was talking about, that hospital in Texas.
	Most doctors, if they see somebody who isn't competent, who is doing bad things, who's Losing patients, they're going to say something quietly to the hospital.
	And the hospital is going to quietly withdraw their privileges.
	Yeah.
	But that could take some time and some number of mistakes, right?
	It could.
	But that's really where medical licensing boards come into play.
	Yeah, but there's politics, right?
	There is, but you know what, here in the state of Maine, my husband actually is the president now of the Maine Medical Association, and he is constantly doing reviews, you know, quality assurance reviews.
	Whenever there is a complaint, they have a panel that includes not only doctors, but also lay people, attorneys, and they decide whether the doctor did something wrong, and they're not at all shy about removing somebody's license.
	How does one, in so many cases, discern between a bad decision and incompetence?
	In other words, a lot of times, given a set of, I don't know, some patient presents with this and that, they simply make a wrong diagnosis and give the patient the wrong thing and the patient dies.
	Well, that happens.
	And I think that what doctors do when they're on these evaluation boards is they look at what the original doctor was presented with.
	What was the evidence?
	And they think to themselves, could I have made this mistake?
	Or, knowing what I know, would it have been clear what should have been done?
	And, you know, it's really a matter of judgment of the particular panel that has been chosen to evaluate that case.
	And, you know, it's the same thing with airplane mechanics or lawyers or anything else.
	You see something you think that's really stupid, then it's clearly a case of incompetence.
	Well, lawyers can certainly tell you that there's some kind of white wall out there.
	You know, I think that there is, to some extent, because doctors work with each other, they're friends.
	They are all colleagues and sometimes they just don't want to turn someone in.
	Yeah, well as I say, the difference between an honest mistake and just a misdiagnosis and issuing the wrong medicine and actual incompetence, that would be one hard line to try and discern.
	It might be, but I think that if it happens more than once, then every doctor is on alert, and they know.
	You know, I had surgery recently, and before I chose my surgeon, what we would do is we would go around to our doctors we knew and said, if your wife needed this operation, which doctor would you send her to?
	Oh, did you now?
	We did, and it's because the same name kept coming back again and again.
	That was the one I chose.
	So, when is death not really death?
	Heh heh.
	You know, this question actually came up in a news article that inspired my book, Vanish.
	Here's the real story.
	It was in the suburbs of Boston, and a young woman was found dead in her bathtub.
	And the state police were called, the fire and rescue team came, they found Empty pill bottles on the floor and said, uh, she had an accidental overdose.
	They dipped her into a body bag and sent her off to the morgue.
	And a couple hours later, she woke up and walked out, apparently completely healthy.
	And six months follow-up later, it was fine.
	Oh, God.
	We get these stories every now and then.
	We really do.
	They're in the Associated Press.
	You know, people waking up in morgues.
	Oh, God.
	And you know, it happens so often that I have a friend it happened to.
	He was lying on the gurney.
	They had just declared him dead of an arrhythmia.
	He was being wheeled down to the hospital morgue when the orderly bumped up against a doorway and my friend woke up.
	And the orderly turned right around and brought him back up to ICU.
	It's such a common story that I actually did a search on LexisNexis looking for some examples of how often this happens.
	I wonder if it ever happens to a coroner, you know, a scalpel in hand, ready to begin the autopsy, and the eyes blink, and oh my God, that could kill a coroner.
	It did.
	And you know this.
	It did once.
	In the 1980s in New York, there was a man who was about to be autopsied.
	And the doctor had the scalpel in hand and was about to make the cut.
	So-called dead man woke up and grabbed the doctor and it was the pathologist who keeled over dead of a heart attack.
	I understand that the man who was supposed to be autopsied survived that.
	So it does happen, especially, I mean I think it probably happened quite a bit that people were buried alive in the
	days prior to embalmment.
	Yeah, we've talked about that, of course, on past shows, but I mean, how can we get it so wrong?
	There's a criterion, right, for declaring somebody dead.
	They check this and that, hopefully.
	I mean, pulses and respiration and, you know, everything.
	So how do we get it wrong?
	Well, in the case of the girl in the bathtub, she had taken an overdose of medication that probably depressed her respiration so that you could not see them
	very well.
	And whoever is listening to her heart, who knows what happened.
	I don't know how they could have missed it.
	But it does happen.
	And I can tell you as a doctor that it's not that out of the question that if you are in
	a very noisy room, if you have a lot of relatives who are crying around you, that maybe you
	don't hear the heart as well as you should.
	You don't watch long enough to see whether there are any respirations.
	Speaking of that, when somebody codes, that is to say, I guess, when they code, their heart stops, they stop breathing, they are more or less dead, right?
	Yes, and I mean if you were to check somebody's vital signs at that moment, they would appear dead, even though their brain cells may still be alive.
	Okay, so many times the paddles are applied and they're brought back, right?
	Yes.
	Are all patients who go through that, who code, are they told about it always?
	Afterwards?
	Yes.
	Oh, they all know about it.
	We always tell them, we had a hard time with you yesterday, your heart stopped.
	I mean, I think that they all know about it.
	Okay, I always wondered.
	And the other case, in which you may not know it, is drowning in cold water.
	I don't know if you're aware of this.
	I am.
	The lowering of the body temperature, I guess?
	It's a diving reflex.
	It turns out that this is such a primitive part of our brains.
	I mean, it probably goes back evolutionarily to when we emerged from the oceans, possibly.
	But especially with children, if you are to submerge them in cold water and bring them back out. They will look dead.
	They will not be breathing. They will not have a heartbeat. But their
	brains have somehow managed to preserve themselves.
	And so that was, you know, that is one criteria for continuing a code on a
	young child.
	Even though you don't have immediate response for quite some time, they will
	put them on a respirator and keep them alive.
	Doctor, people who come back from things like that and other things similar, do they frequently have personality changes?
	I mean, I'm told, for example, that people who go through heart bypass surgery frequently come out with personality changes.
	I think that's probably, with heart bypass in particular, it's a function of anesthesia.
	We don't realize how bad anesthesia, you know, how many side effects there are to it.
	Oh?
	Okay, I'll give an example of myself.
	I mean, I'm a pretty healthy person, and I went under general anesthesia to get the next surgery done.
	I woke up, and I swear, I had memory problems for a whole month.
	I was not the same person.
	It took me, it really did take me four weeks to bounce back, to be able to think again, just to be able to, you know, Reason my way through a story.
	And I hear this again and again from people that anesthesia really does take a lot of brain function away.
	Part of it is that it lingers in the body for quite some time.
	Okay, you're thinking of it then as anesthesia's primary cause.
	I thought also perhaps the brain being deprived of oxygen for some period of time, you know, some parts.
	We don't know how the brain operates, right?
	No, I mean, there's a lot of mystery involved.
	Now, with bypass surgery, there should not I mean they should be maintaining your blood pressure and keeping your oxygenation up.
	I think that a large part of it is anesthesia.
	Being on a bypass machine is also bad for your brain as well.
	I see.
	So many times what we think is death is just simply not necessarily death.
	You know the traditional thing is your heart stops and you're not breathing.
	Real death, to me, is brain death.
	That's where our personality lies, it's in our brains.
	Well, that begs the question then, and I will ask it, and that is...
	When we die, are you confident and comfortable that that's it?
	That there is no thinking process that's continuing after a parent declared biological death?
	I don't want to know when I'm being carried away in the bag, when I'm going into the ice chest.
	You know, I don't want to know about that stuff.
	And I'm depending on the fact.
	That we're gone, we're out, we're not, somehow the brain is not limping along at some percentage of saved up oxygen and still going.
	Well you know, let me, you bring that up and this is one of, this is a nightmare that was actually awakened by my mother years ago.
	There are people who believe that after you die you should wait three days for cremation.
	Yes.
	And I think that that of course is one of the scariest ideas is that maybe the brain there's still something left in the brain when they put you in the crematorium.
	But I personally don't think that once you have gone without oxygen for that long that there's much left.
	I don't think you're going to think you're going to be Well, okay, but what about right after you've expired?
	I mean, let's say you have a heart attack and your heart stops or whatever other manner of death, but your head is okay and your brain is still there.
	My question is, How quickly would all functions that are associated with any kind of consciousness, how quickly would they cease?
	Immediately?
	Two minutes?
	30 seconds?
	I would guess no longer than two minutes.
	Probably more like 15 seconds.
	Because you think about, just think about if somebody was to choke you, how quickly do you lose consciousness?
	That happens within 20 seconds.
	Yes.
	So, maybe there's a brain function, but you would not be conscious.
	Well, perhaps in that manner of death.
	But they're not all the same.
	I mean, there are many, many ways to die.
	Yes?
	There are.
	There are.
	I mean, I know what you're feeling.
	You are afraid of everything that we're all terrified of.
	Of course.
	And I mean, the cases of people who have near-death experiences, who are coded, but still feel they can hear things and still see white lights and see The hallucinations that are not unusual for near-death experiences.
	That's still brain function.
	I mean it just means that some neurons are firing and maybe you're awakening memories in the brain, but it just means that you are still conscious on some level even though you're undergoing CPR.
	And do you attribute that... I've got a very good friend, Danian Brinkley, struck by lightning, declared dead by the way, had an incredible NDE, a couple of them actually, and where does that stuff come from?
	Is that NDE, according to what you believe, scientifically occurring either just as they're going down or just as they're coming back up, but not in that bottomless pit we call death?
	There is a theory that it's all related to a lack of oxygen, that it's the hypoxic brain that comes up with what seems to be very consistent sorts of things, seeing lights, seeing a bright light, seeing people who you love who have died or passed on.
	Don't those stories cause you to doubt?
	A little?
	I mean, how could they not?
	They're so common.
	I also interview all these folks who study this at the top of their game, and they swear, how could any rational person listen to story after story after story, and not at least have some doubt about what may be over there on the other side, or not?
	Again, that's why I consider myself an agnostic.
	I do not say that it's not possible, you know, that it's impossible.
	I think that it's, you get experience.
	Research is fascinating, but nobody has... It's one of those things you can't... you don't really have any... any way of proving it, do you, until you cross over?
	No, you don't.
	But, you know, a person of science does have to take into account all of these unaccountably similar stories and make something out of it.
	Well, one of the possibilities is, as I mentioned, it's a common hallucination for the hypoxic brain.
	Who knows?
	Maybe.
	I grew up in a paranormal household.
	I don't know if I ever told you this.
	No, you didn't.
	Yes, I did.
	My mother lived in a demon-haunted world, let's put it that way.
	We were members of the San Diego Parapsychology Association.
	No kidding!
	I grew up with psychic mediums sitting around our dinner table.
	We had, people would go into trances over dessert in our house.
	And I just, I was surrounded by, my mother would always tell me stories about ghosts that she had seen in China.
	And she firmly believes in ghosts because she has seen them herself.
	So have many of my listeners.
	I mean, it's another area of interest.
	You know, obviously there cannot be ghosts if there are not spirits who live beyond death.
	So, I have a great interest in these ghost stories, and there are millions and millions of them, again.
	There are, and I would love to see a ghost.
	I have been looking for a ghost all my life.
	And as a child, I always wanted to see one.
	Sorry, I never did, because I think that Were I to see a ghost, were I to be convinced of that, it would be a great deal of comfort to me that there is evidence of life after death.
	All right.
	All right.
	We have been fascinated with the possibility of death not being the final toll for a long time.
	Actually, in reviving the dead.
	That was Frankenstein.
	Yes.
	Do you believe, Doctor, that it will ever be possible to revive the dead?
	Well, that's where cryogenics comes in, isn't it?
	That's the only real way.
	We do not have the technological capacity to truly revive the dead right now.
	Again, I've interviewed people who are paying substantial amounts of money to have either their head or whole body frozen upon their death to be brought back millennia in the future when whatever it is that killed them can be corrected.
	Are they crazy?
	I wouldn't say they're crazy.
	I would say that they have a great deal of faith in technology, but knowing the practical aspects of keeping a body frozen for that long in terms of how many companies go out of business, I think they're probably wasting their money.
	I mean, just think about how here you have a giant freezer with 500 heads waiting to be awakened at some later century, and you go out of business.
	You go bankrupt.
	You're not going to keep those things frozen into eternity, you're just going to let them defrost.
	Well, that's certainly a breach of contract.
	It is a breach of contract, but once you're dead and gone in 50 years, are you going to be able to say that your heirs will keep up the cryogenic lab?
	Well, I mean, people have this elaborate plan for invested funds, you know, that will keep it all going.
	Well, you certainly hope that they would.
	So let's go back to it.
	I mean, is there at least a slim possibility that science may find a way to reanimate the dead if they were properly preserved?
	Yes.
	I think that there probably is, assuming you did not let the brain cells die.
	It has to be.
	And this is part of, I think, their protocol is that they undergo cryogenics while they are still on light support, before the brain actually goes.
	Once your brain is dead, there's no way to revive it.
	The courts won't let them do it.
	There have been several who have tried.
	They say, you know, I know I'm terminally ill.
	I know I've got weeks or months or whatever.
	I want to go now.
	It's my only chance.
	And the courts have not let them do it.
	Well, no, because it leads to what appears to be premature death, right?
	It's almost like committing suicide in the eyes of a lot of courts.
	I suppose.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But you're telling me that to be, at least have a good hope of being revived, you would have to be put down.
	There is that term, put down.
	Well, your brain is still functioning.
	That's a choice.
	I mean, are you willing to give up, say, six months of extra life for the possibility of waking up a century from now?
	Would you be?
	You know what?
	I would be waking up in a world where my loved ones were not with me.
	If I had not cryogenically frozen them.
	To me, that's not worth living, actually.
	To think of having lost everybody you've loved.
	I mean, really, when you think about what is the purpose of life.
	Oh, maybe if you were holding enough early Google stock, you know?
	Oh, that you would be able to keep them going.
	If I could wake up 100 years from now and everybody I loved would still be here, that would be different.
	But I think that to wake up in the future when your children are gone, your spouse is gone, everybody you care about is gone, I'm not sure that's worth coming back to.
	Well, I imagine that a lot of attempts to revive the dead, through centuries and centuries, Doctor, have been made.
	I just bet they've been done, and of course they're not publicized, right?
	I don't know that.
	You know what, Art?
	I think they would be publicized because there's a lot of money to be made.
	Well, only if it's successful.
	I said attempts.
	I didn't say anybody had done it.
	Oh, okay.
	All right.
	Attempts.
	If they're successful, believe me, there would be a lot of publicity and a lot of people willing to pay millions of dollars.
	Yes, but my question is this.
	Are there, and have there been through the centuries, do you believe, quiet attempts to revive the, let's call them the long dead.
	No, I think once, unless you're going to count Jesus and Lazarus, but I just don't think that anybody really has felt that it was possible.
	Now, the recently dead, they have done.
	I mean, this is really the whole basis for resuscitation, where we come up with the science of resuscitation.
	You know, way, way back in the 1500s, really, midwives were already using mouth-to-mouth on newborns.
	Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation goes back quite a ways, probably, you know, even before the 1500s.
	And I think what everybody got interested in was in the 1700s when galvanism came into play.
	This is something started off by Luigi Galvani, who found out that you could Apply electrical current to a frog's leg and make it twitch and it'll look like it was alive.
	And so people thought, oh, well, if you can make a frog's leg come back with electricity, maybe you can make the whole body come back.
	They didn't understand brain death at that point.
	The inspiration for Frankenstein, no doubt.
	The inspiration for Frankenstein.
	I mean, Frankenstein was published, I think, in 1813.
	But not such an outrageous theory, doctor, because, frankly, if your heart stops, what do they do?
	They put those paddles on and apply what?
	They apply a lot of voltage and a lot of current.
	They sure do, and that's what got everybody very excited.
	Benjamin Franklin, actually, was one of the early proponents of using electricity to wake people up again.
	He was a brilliant man.
	Why not?
	uh... no it it'll be interested in electrical
	re-stimulation of the heart has been around for quite some time
	cheating death that's what we're talking about and uh... when death really
	isn't death and Doctor, welcome back.
	As a doctor, you explained already earlier that younger, you actually participated with your mom in In some trances, yes.
	And so as a doctor then, with that background, you must have had an eye out for the paranormal.
	Did you ever have an experience yourself that you would put in that category or that you can't explain rationally?
	Oh, you know, in medicine, you see strange things.
	And you're always dealing with people who are dying, have died, are about to die.
	Um, and I worked in a hospital in Hawaii.
	You know, Hawaii's kind of a very spiritual place.
	People seem... Oh, yes.
	...in tune with the afterlife.
	No doubt.
	With ghosts and things, because there are just a lot of people there who believe in this stuff.
	I worked in a hospital that had, uh, it was a Catholic hospital, and one of the nurses there was also a nun.
	And, um, it was very creepy.
	Every so often, she would walk into somebody's room and bless them and walk out.
	Yes.
	And I asked somebody, how come she did it with that patient?
	They said, when she gives that blessing, she knows they're going to die.
	This woman, this nurse knew.
	And I'm not talking she was an angel of death.
	It's just that she had this ability to know somebody was going to come in and was not going to make it.
	And she would make sure they got their blessing ahead of time.
	Now part of it is that, yeah, you see somebody and you think, yeah, they're pretty sick, of course they're going to die.
	But she did it a couple times to people who were perfectly healthy.
	She just had this sense.
	I asked her once and she said, I can smell it.
	I can smell when somebody's going to die.
	Wow.
	And she couldn't explain it.
	She just said they smell like death.
	There was a room on one particular ward in that same hospital.
	They tried never to put patients in that room.
	That room pretty much stayed empty until they got loaded to the gills and they had to put people in there.
	And the reason was the room was haunted, according to the nurses.
	Again and again they would have patients who were in that room who would wake up, would call, you know, ring the call button and say, who is that person standing over my bed?
	And the person that they would see would be a man in a hospital gown.
	That was the ghost.
	And I never saw the ghost.
	I kept going in there looking for the ghost and never saw it.
	Still, when you have experiences like that, the one you just described with the nurse, how can you not, how can you not Be spiritual to some degree.
	In other words, have enough doubts that you're not just an agnostic, but kind of a spiritual person.
	It almost sounds as though you are in some ways.
	I mean, you tell these stories and it has to have affected you.
	I'm curious.
	I'm agnostic about ghost stories as well.
	I'm waiting.
	I'm waiting to see one myself.
	I'm open-minded enough to know that there are things out there we cannot explain.
	And that idea of the haunted room in which patients again and again seem to have experienced the same thing.
	On the other hand, what if they're getting checked in and the nurse happens to say, oh, you're in the haunted room?
	That's going to affect what they dream about.
	Suggestion, I'm sure.
	But you wouldn't think that a nurse or anybody else in the hospital would admit to any patient they're going into a haunted room.
	You would think not, but you never know.
	I mean, there may be a volunteer comes in, and it's just hard to know why this particular thing happened.
	It may be that a lot of patients wake up with hallucinations of seeing something in the room, because they're in an unfamiliar room, and the nurses just happen to remember that it was this particular room that happened more than once, and it became a legend, and it became, you know, embellished over the years.
	All right, maybe.
	But going back again to your first story, and that sister.
	That has to affect you.
	Well, you know, again, there could be a logical explanation for that as well.
	Is it that she's just a very, very good clinician, and you know that she has an instinct?
	There is something that she is picking up on.
	Maybe she is able to see that they're a little paler than usual, or there is something about them that looks preterminal, or And the other thing that's interesting is that people who have cancer do give off a certain odor.
	This is what I've heard that doctors, that dogs are actually used sometimes.
	Because they're such, you know, they have such acute senses of scent that they can, and I don't know what the scientific investigation on this is, but I have heard stories that sometimes dogs can detect it when somebody is suffering from cancer.
	Is it possible that this particular nurse had an advanced olfactory system?
	Possibly.
	Certainly it has been proven that dogs know when their owners are coming home.
	They did this experiment that ran on one of the primetime news shows where they kept cameras on dogs.
	Then they'd have the owner start home at a unusual time of day and inevitably and every time the dog would know the owners on the way and start rushing the door and you know getting agitated and waiting for the owner.
	They knew the owner was on the way.
	Now I don't know how to explain that except ESP.
	Well, I don't either, but it may mean that animals do have some senses that go beyond ours, it would seem.
	Well, dogs in particular are very attuned to human behavior, incredibly attuned, domestic dogs.
	There's an interesting study about the difference between domesticated dogs and wolves who have never been domesticated.
	What is the difference between a wolf and a dog in terms of our relationship with them?
	That's the only difference, I think.
	Well, okay, but domesticated dogs are used to paying much more attention to people's moods.
	Yes.
	And the one experiment that I remember was they placed a piece of meat in a way that was very difficult for the dog to get at.
	And they put a wolf in there, and the wolf just kept trying and trying and trying to get this meat, and it couldn't get it.
	The dog would try a little bit, realize it couldn't get it, and would look at the person.
	Kept looking at the person, like, are you going to help me out here?
	So, I mean, that was really, the difference is wolves are just not used to checking in on people.
	So I think that there is a very strong bond, and it is bizarre.
	I mean, I don't own a dog myself, due to allergies, but I have seen them do extraordinary things, and seem to be extraordinarily sensitive to Human needs, and you know, we all know about seizure dogs, right?
	You've heard about dogs who, people who have epilepsy.
	They have special dogs who are able to sense before the person has a seizure, and give the person a warning, and what this does is it allows the patient to get to a safe place, to turn off the engine, to pull off to the side, because they know a seizure's coming.
	Okay, I could be wrong about this, but you know there was an animal act in Las Vegas that had a tragedy.
	You know about that?
	You mean the tigers?
	Yes.
	There's a story going around that that tiger did not maul him, just for nothing.
	In fact, he was having a stroke.
	And that the tiger, in an effort to protect him and get him off stage, grabbed him, as it would one of its own, around the neck and dragged it off.
	Well, I believe Siegfried and Roy themselves said that.
	They did not feel it was a mauling.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	Whether he was having a stroke or there was a noise in the audience or something that made the tiger concerned about Well, they did say that, and I would think that could be perhaps backed up medically, or maybe not, you know, with all that happened, perhaps not, but... Well, the one thing is that that tiger could have killed him and didn't.
	I mean, it could have really ripped him apart, and what it did was it grabbed him and pulled him off the stage, as if it was trying to take it to a safe place.
	So it could be a case of that.
	It could be a case of that.
	I don't believe the tiger has been destroyed.
	I think the tiger is still in their family.
	Oh, okay.
	We've got a long list to get through here.
	You have this thing down.
	I had no idea there was such a disease as a perpetual fever?
	Oh, peripheral fever.
	Is that what it is?
	Peripheral?
	Peripheral fever.
	It's childbirth fever.
	But what is fascinating, the reason I bring this up is I wanted to write a book about this subject for a long time.
	Childhood fever?
	Childbirth fever.
	Birth fever, okay.
	It's really what Mary Shelley, who woke Frankenstein, what her own mother died of.
	And the reason I bring it up is it is such a horror story.
	You know, we can't imagine what medicine was like in the 1800s.
	Oh, and I'm not fully understanding what it is, so begin there.
	It is death from a bacterial infection sometime between birth and 10 days postpartum.
	It's the death of the mother.
	And it's a fever that's caused by a variety of bacterial species, but they infect the genital tract, usually the uterus, and the infection spreads throughout their body, and they die really of sepsis.
	Now, today we treat it with antibiotics, but in those days, They did not, and what was frightening about it was that it happened in hospitals.
	If you gave birth to a baby out in the street, you didn't get it.
	You went to a hospital, you got it.
	And it got to be so bad that I found statistics for late 1700s.
	One hospital in France, no woman survived childbirth that whole year.
	They all died of it.
	They all went into the hospital and died of it.
	Oh my God, I'd stay away from the whole hospital.
	But it brings up It brings to mind what the medical conditions were in those periods.
	What was happening was, of course, it was being spread by the doctors and the nurses.
	That's what was happening.
	There were no gloves there.
	So they would examine a woman who was in labor.
	They would go on to the next bed, examine the woman in labor without having washed their hands.
	I see.
	And they were really sort of like death agents.
	Ten to twenty percent of women were dying after coming into hospitals, but it's the conditions of the hospitals that reawaken the sense of, oh my God, we've gone a long way.
	They would put women in hospital beds with the sheets that had not been changed since the previous people had died.
	So you'd be lying in a bed that's soaked with blood, dry blood, or you know, all the secretions of childbirth.
	They would put four patients to a bed.
	They would die so quickly.
	They didn't have enough coffins.
	They were throwing several people into coffins at a time.
	There was a description in Hungary of a hospital where the women's lying-in area was in a ward, and on one end they could look out the window and see the cemetery, and on the other end of the ward they saw the dissecting room where all the autopsies were being done.
	Huh.
	Great atmosphere.
	Yeah, a great atmosphere, exactly.
	And, you know, things were dirty, and The reason women actually went into these hospitals is, number one, they maybe did not have enough money.
	The real reason, though, is that if you went into a hospital and you died there, your baby would be taken care of by the state.
	If you died at home, your baby was left to the elements.
	So a lot of these women were concerned about what would happen to their children.
	Under the circumstances, your chances sounded better at home.
	Your chances sounded better at home.
	And you'd think that they would stay at home, but there were just large numbers of people who went into the hospitals essentially knowing that they were going to die because they were giving birth to a baby.
	Why, even at that time, Doctor, would they not have considered the possibility of cross-contamination?
	You would think so, and this is an example of how medicine sometimes has a total blind eye to the obvious.
	You would think so.
	The question was, why were these women dying?
	They didn't really have a good sense of what infection was caused by.
	Right.
	One of the ridiculous, ridiculous ideas was that, well, these women were dying because their modesty had been violated by being examined by male doctors.
	That they were dying of, you know, just... Embarrassment?
	Embarrassment.
	God, no.
	The other thing that happened was they were noticing that actually Women were dying at a faster rate if they were examined by doctors, as opposed to midwives.
	The wards in which the midwives were taking care of these people were not dying as quickly.
	There were not as many mortality rates.
	And what would the scientific reason for that be?
	Well, this is something else that freaked me out when I read this.
	Medical students who were attending to these women, where would they hang out during the day?
	They had no lounge for doctors.
	They had no place for medical students to sit around in.
	Spend the time.
	So where they would spend the time was the dissecting room.
	They would hang out there around these infected corpses.
	Oh!
	They would do their dissections, they would do the autopsies, they'd get totally covered in bacteria, and they would go straight to the wards without washing their hands.
	So, you know, the doctors were the ones who were really spreading it because they were hanging out with the corpses, the midwives were not.
	They were all spreading infections.
	All be damned.
	Yeah, and to think about Just how many bacteria they were carrying on their hands coming from the autopsy room.
	The really sad part was the one man who really made a difference was a doctor named Ludwig Semmelweis.
	He was from Hungary, and he noticed that the midwives seemed to have a better rate of survival than the men, than the doctors, and he began to wonder why.
	And didn't care about the so-called atmospheric conditions or noxious air idea that was killing women.
	He thought maybe it had something to do with the fact the doctors were spending all this time in the autopsy room.
	It also impressed him that one of his friends punctured a finger while he was taking care of a woman and that friend died of essentially sepsis.
	And he thought there's an infection going on.
	There's some kind of a bug that's being passed around.
	So all he did was tell everybody, wash your hands.
	He made everybody in this one hospital wash their hands.
	And the mortality rate dropped to one-tenth of what it used to be.
	And you'd think that was enough evidence to make doctors change their practice?
	One would think.
	One would think.
	It didn't.
	Doctors were so upset at the idea that they would have unclean hands.
	They thought they were gentlemen.
	Doctors were gentlemen.
	And they did not want to be labeled as unclean.
	So they hounded Dr. Sommelweiss out of his practice.
	That's absolutely amazing.
	He ended up in an insane asylum.
	Oh my.
	He was so devastated by the attacks, by the loss of his reputation, that he ended up in an institution where, ironically enough, I think he cut himself and he died of sepsis, the very disease that he had been studying all those years.
	He did not demand that whoever treated him go first, wash up?
	Well, I think at that point in a mental institution, what can you demand?
	They do what they're going to do to you.
	I suppose that's true.
	While we're on the category of things being passed like this, you know, I've been watching the headlines, Doctor, for some time now, about the possibility of a tiny little genetic change in this horrifying bird flu.
	And the possibility of it being, even some stories beginning to suggest they're seeing human-to-human transfer of this bird flu with a mortality rate through the roof.
	I mean, some incredible figure like 55%.
	Yes, it is.
	It's somewhere between 30 and 70%.
	of the people who get it die is what that means folks and I'm watching these stories very carefully and they're kind of eerie doctor because the stories sort of are saying it's not it's not a matter of when or if but rather when in other words it's going to happen We are overdue for a pandemic of the flu, and I don't think there's anybody who doubts that there is going to be one.
	Whether it is this particular one, we don't know.
	Why do the scientists seem so damn convinced that this is the one?
	I mean, there are so many stories about it, saying we're just, you know, a hair's breadth away from it, and why are they so convinced in this particular case?
	Do you have any idea?
	Well, it's because it's already killed people.
	I mean, and we already Part of the problem, of course, is that, you know, where its cradle is in Asia.
	Yes.
	Because there's so much contact between people and birds.
	Yes.
	They live with their chickens and their ducks and their geese.
	And this is sort of like the perfect stew to get this virus to mutate.
	It doesn't take very much.
	It just takes one person being infected with the avian flu.
	At the same time, they are infected with a more common And they somehow merge?
	They exchange genetic material.
	Yes.
	And what it does is it changes the bird flu into something that's more easily transmissible between people.
	Like a sneeze.
	Like a sneeze.
	And that's, of course, what scares us all.
	You know, I've been worried about this for quite some time.
	I can't get it just seems to me that a lot of people are going around with their with their heads underwater not
	caring about What's happening?
	Tell you an interesting little secret When you do an interview like this, there are a number of, you know, suggested, scripted interview questions that you can ask a guest.
	But some of the more interesting ones come not from there, but sort of just the thread of the conversation.
	And in this case, we've really stumbled into one here.
	When you hear a doctor, like Dr. Garretson, respond to a question about this possible bird flu thing by saying, I've got a family plan.
	You don't have to read between the lines there.
	Obviously, she takes this very, very seriously, as do I. And so therefore, I'm most interested in what your family plan would be, doctor.
	Withdrawal from society, I'm afraid to say.
	We have a son in college right now.
	And we had told him that as soon as he gets the word from us, and you know, we're watching.
	We watch the WHO bulletins.
	We watch what's happening in Asia.
	We are waiting to see human-to-human transmittal.
	And we told him that as soon as he hears from us, he has to leave school immediately.
	And come home.
	And come home.
	And we are expecting, you know, our nuclear family, at least, to be together.
	We have a certain amount of food put aside.
	We have wood to burn in case it's cold.
	And, you know, you have to accept the possibility that there will be no public services, like water, for instance.
	I mean, where's your water going to come from?
	Where's your power going to come from if those things shut down, if people don't show up for work?
	We think very much alike.
	Yeah, and luckily we do have a cottage that is on a lake, so that we can always get water.
	We can always keep ourselves warm.
	The question is, are you going to have enough food to go for the three months it'll take to... Alright, that was going to be my next question.
	You're estimating three months.
	That could be a little optimistic, couldn't it?
	It could be a little optimistic.
	And you know, as you said, in 1918, the bird flu had several, several surges.
	There was one surge where people died, and then it seemed to go away, and then it came back again and killed even more people.
	So you may think that it's over with, but it actually is just sort of like taking a little breath and it comes right back.
	Right.
	So I think that it's important for people to have that sense of, well, I have water, I have food, I have heat, I have shelter.
	Because you're not going to really want to be out in public.
	You're certainly not going to want your kids to go to school.
	It's going to take probably six months for them to manufacture enough of a vaccine.
	So that in that particular time a lot of people could die.
	And it's going to be too late for millions and millions and millions and this could potentially spread so quickly that I'm with you.
	I've figured that the first time I see a legitimate Human-to-human transmission really... I've seen several such stories, and I'm sure you have too, Doctor, which may not be true.
	And I don't know how you're going to discern when you get the one that is true, because by then, by the time they really cop to it, it could be way too late.
	Well, that's certainly possible.
	I think that what will happen is it's going to break out somewhere in Asia, and news may not get to us right away.
	But before it actually gets on a plane and hops here, it'll probably spread within local villages.
	And that should give us enough of a chance to know.
	I mean, I've seen that the computer-generated model of how long it would take to get to the United States, it's going to spread locally first.
	And so we're probably going to have, you know, days, weeks to know ahead of time when to be cautious.
	Because those local villagers are not going to be getting on planes.
	It's going to be health care workers or tourists who are going to bring it home.
	Doctor, is it like Ebola?
	What is it like, this bird flu?
	If it does get loose, what does it do?
	What does it do?
	It turns, if you're young and healthy, it can turn your own immune system against you.
	And that's the scary part about it.
	I mean, if you're older, it probably will Kill you in the way that flus have killed in the past, which has turned into a bacterial pneumonia.
	Right.
	Or just kill you from a viral pneumonia.
	But what was frightening about the flu in 1918, which, by the way, started off as a bird flu then as well, it actually causes us to have what they call a cytokine storm.
	It makes our immune system turn against our own lungs and destroys lungs.
	You know, the descriptions from 1918 of the soldiers who died, the American soldiers who died, was that they would feel a little bit ill and then a day later, two days later, they were coughing up blood and dead.
	And that was not necessarily the virus itself, it was actually the virus causing the body to come up with a very strong immune response.
	So once your immune system is gone, anything gets you virtually?
	Well, yeah, but in that particular case, it was actually the immune system causing damage to the lungs.
	Well, we know something, I guess, about the way the people are dying, because there have been X number of victims of it already.
	So, that's the way they're dying, huh?
	And how quickly?
	You know, it does vary.
	It can happen within a day.
	It may take longer, because some of these people are being put on respirators, so they're lingering a while.
	But, you know, we're talking about hospitals being overwhelmed in the U.S.
	We don't have enough ventilators to keep everybody alive.
	So death could come very quickly if you don't have ventilatory support.
	You don't have enough doctors and nurses on the front lines.
	I think that the medical personnel, they're going to probably have access immediately to things like county flu.
	Alright, here's another one for you.
	This is so frightening, the prospect of this is so frightening, that if we became aware That a certain province in China had or the Chinese government became aware that a certain province in China had indeed all the worst fears had come true.
	It had mutated, it was spreading from human to human and it was seventy percent fatal.
	It was killing everything it came in contact with and fast.
	And this is all very conceivably possible.
	Do you think the Chinese government Or whatever government would be in question here, would consider the possibility of sanitizing the entire area where it's occurring with something like a nuclear weapon?
	No, no, never.
	No, no, never, huh?
	I don't think they would do that.
	You don't?
	And even then, you have to ask yourself, it might have gotten out already.
	Well, it might have.
	I'm just wondering if it came to that point of decision.
	And, you know, as you point out, the computer models are quite specific about how quickly it would spread.
	Yeah.
	If they had that one moment in time when they could deal with it, would they?
	I don't think there's a country on Earth that would make that political decision.
	I just can't imagine it.
	So, you know, they can try quarantine, but they don't work.
	People will slip out.
	And the other thing you remember is that birds migrate.
	So, I mean, is it a possibility that actually birds may bring it around the world?
	Is that a possibility?
	In other words, the human form of it, could they become somehow carriers of what would be this new human form?
	Well, I'd be more concerned with people, because people are closer in contact with people.
	But you have to ask yourself, if they can pass it to us, is it possible that we could pass on a version back to the birds?
	I think that it's more of a concern, air travel.
	Now, you live in a fairly isolated area, and I live in an area that's not on a common travel route, or we're up at sort of a mid-coast main.
	Yes.
	So I think that we would have a little bit more warning than, say, somebody in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco.
	Perhaps.
	You think, again, that three months would be a reasonable effort to make at absolutely closing yourself off from the world, and I mean nobody?
	I think that's a minimum.
	I think that's what you should have enough food for.
	That's not hard.
	Enough rice and beans, you could stock that away and be careful with your food.
	As long as you have water.
	In some areas of the country, that's a tougher thing.
	To have access to water.
	And if you have all of those things, doctor, you also probably should have a gun.
	Well, okay, that's a personal choice.
	It's a personal choice, but for the kind of woman who writes the kind of books you do, if that didn't occur to you, I would be very shocked indeed!
	Yeah, well, I'm not going to talk about guns.
	Alright, that's fine.
	That also answers it just fine.
	Thank you.
	Getting back to evil for a moment, Doctor.
	I interviewed a great man named Father Malachi Martin.
	He was very close to two popes.
	He was a very fascinating, very deep, very believable man.
	He's done exorcisms, hasn't he?
	Oh, you betcha.
	He believed deeply, completely, absolutely in the presence of real evil.
	The real McCoy evil.
	Yes.
	And he suggests that it is far more widespread than you can possibly believe that many people walking down the street that you meet every single day and go by you on the street have made silent deals with the devil.
	He called it perfect possession.
	And so what about that brand evil doctor?
	Do you go that far with it?
	I believe.
	Well, I'm not sure I believe in Satan, but I certainly believe that evil exists.
	And it's interesting because it's actually the topic of the book that I'm working on now.
	Evil as a matter of behavior, Doctor?
	No, Satan.
	Satan.
	That one.
	Whether or not, you know, who is Satan?
	What has been our impression of Satan over the centuries?
	Who is he and whether or not This is what the explanation is for evil.
	I don't believe in, as I said, I'm an agnostic on all issues, particularly this.
	Including Satan?
	Including Satan, but you know, if you're going to believe in God, you're going to have to believe in the light.
	You're going to have to believe in the dark, right?
	Well, I almost thought for a second there you were declaring a belief in Satan.
	It almost sounded that way, and I was going to spring it on you.
	No, I think I'm looking at it just from a curiosity, from a scholarly point of view, just because You know, if you're interested in good, you also have to be interested in evil, and how it has been viewed through the years.
	And frankly, the biblical view, or the ecclesiastical view of Satan has gotten a bad rap in some ways.
	I think that, you know, you go back to what is the meaning of Lucifer?
	How do you translate that word?
	It means a bringer of light.
	Knowledge.
	A bad rap.
	You know, it's because of the way... Who was Lucifer?
	Who was the snake?
	What did the snake do that was so wrong?
	It opened Eve's eyes.
	So, a lot of what our view of Satan is has to do with the fact that the Church, through the centuries, has not been happy with people asking questions.
	Well, you talk with much more animation about Lucifer than you do about God.
	It's because Lucifer is a very, um... Dark?
	Dark?
	Well, it's not just dark.
	I think it's a very controversial topic, and it fascinates me.
	I don't believe he exists, but I like to look into what people have considered to be satanic, or where is the background of Lucifer.
	But, you know, when we're talking about evil, I think of evil as being something completely different.
	To me, evil is causing human misery.
	That's what evil is, whether you want to say it's caused by Satan or whether it's caused by people being bad.
	As far as your friend, my own feeling is that we carry evil within ourselves.
	That people are capable of worse things than we could ever, ever imagine.
	Because I write crime thrillers now, I encounter people sometimes who really kind of freak me out.
	I was on book tour once, and this was for the book, The Surgeon, which is about a serial killer who does what Jack the Ripper once did.
	He cuts women open and removes their sexual organs and gets a great deal of pleasure out of this particular practice of his.
	So I'm sitting there signing books, and a very ordinary, nice-looking man comes up and bends over, and he whispers in my ear, he says, thank you for writing this book.
	And I said, why?
	And he said, you allowed me to indulge in my fantasies.
	Oh my God.
	And he took a signed book and he walked out, and I thought, how many people are walking the streets with these fantasies?
	Now, I'm not saying that he did anything wrong, but my feeling is that there are a lot of people who have.
	You had to imagine that as a possibility.
	Yeah, who think about these things, who enjoy these things, who maybe love to fantasize about these things, but never actually act on their impulses.
	So, luckily, most human beings are able to, you know, put a clamp down on the inappropriate things they know they could do.
	What is scary, though, is when you get into a situation such as after the bird flu, or when civilization breaks down, or when there are no police forces, and then these crazy people, these, well, not necessarily crazy people, but evil people, feel free to do what they want to do.
	Yes.
	And that's why, you know, you talk about guns.
	I can understand the logic of having one, yes.
	Well, if you have all the other things you named, you're going to need a gun.
	I could keep your family safe.
	Yes.
	You know, as quickly as the bird flu would spread, I think that man beginning to cross that line between fantasy and action would be even faster.
	Well, desperation leads people to do some pretty horrible things.
	I mean, here you're taking care of your family.
	Well, that man over there is taking care of his family, too.
	And if it involves Getting rid of you, then he'll do it.
	Yes.
	Regarding evil, from a scientific point of view, do you think that it is hereditary?
	Do you think it is past, from father to son, or skips generations like some other things that evil is inherited?
	It's just in the genes.
	There are some really kind of disturbing cases of families who do stuff together.
	You know, I think we talked about this once before.
	There was a case in Oregon of a young man who called up the police and said, you know, my dad raped my girlfriend and, by the way, I think my dad is capable of some worse things.
	And they dug up the father's backyard and found some dead girls.
	Apparently he had been a serial killer.
	He'd been killing girls in the neighborhood.
	Yes, and so this came out in the news and then What followed up was interesting, was that this serial killer's father was in jail at that moment for having killed girls and burying them in exactly the same way.
	So, here you are, this young man, your father's a serial killer, your grandfather's a serial killer.
	It's got to make you wonder about whether or not there's any genetic stuff going on.
	Well, do you wonder hard about that?
	Well, you know, there are cases of people who, um, there is a Dutch family, Uh, who apparently every male in that family had been in prison and it appeared to be a genetic defect.
	I mean, you know, you mentioned about killing the women in that certain horrible way and then burying the bodies and grandfather and father and son.
	I mean, just that much alone, it would seem the odds against that, they could probably do that, work that up in a computer some place and find the odds, but they'd be so astronomical.
	They would be, that's right.
	But, you know, Was it childhood influence, or was it genetics?
	That's hard to tease apart, except for that one Dutch family.
	I think if we just go back through the centuries, you can find families that they make their living off being predators.
	There's a whole Scottish family called the Sawney Bean family.
	I think it was back in the 1500s.
	They would get people who were traveling.
	The family would just descend on these people, would drag them back to their cave in Scotland.
	It was like on the seashore, so at high tide you could not see the mouth of the cave.
	And there were, I believe, like 70 members of this family living there.
	And they would rob these travelers, and then they would take them back and eat them.
	So they would eat them.
	And this was just the most feral kind of creatures you could imagine.
	And what ended up happening was they set upon One couple, and there were other people who were traveling the road and were able to fight them off, and the authorities sent soldiers out.
	They realized we have a real problem here.
	There were people disappearing constantly in this part of Scotland.
	And they located the cave, they went into the cave, and they found thousands of human body parts.
	Thousands?
	Yes, just, I mean, things have been eaten, bones, leftover remains, and they found these people and they They dragged out the whole family and they were all executed pretty quickly.
	I think it was clear to them that they were dealing with a family of monsters.
	But, you know, that was the 1500s.
	But then you get America.
	America has them.
	All right.
	So, Dr.
	Gerritsen's books are, you know, they're not just great.
	They're incredible.
	They're absolutely, I mean, Gravity for me was in the top five books and near the top of that list indeed.
	I mean, just a fantastic book.
	I recommend everybody go get that.
	That's me.
	My wife has read your mysteries, some of them twice.
	So we love your work.
	Where are you going?
	Are you going to stick with mystery now?
	Are you going down that road for a little while?
	Will you eventually come back?
	Will you ever do anything on the paranormal?
	I am fascinated by the paranormal.
	You probably know that since I grew up with it.
	And I'm continuing with my Crime Thriller series.
	It stars two women whose lives have changed since I wrote the first book about them, The Surgeon.
	But this recent book that I'm writing, it is a crime thriller.
	It involves the same two characters, a forensic pathologist and a detective.
	But they are tracking down whether or not, as I said, Satan really exists.
	And it involves a number of crimes with sort of these occult It works on me, too.
	So that's the road you're going down for a while.
	Yes, I'm going to continue.
	you know that kind of stuff creeps me out it just really does anything to do
	with history and and and the occult
	frightens me it works on me too so that's the road you're going down for a while
	I'm gonna continue you know I have to tell you about art even though gravity was
	probably my favorite book of all it sold the fewest copies and I've learned that lesson
	in publishing that if you write a book that is very technical very scientific it it's kind of difficult
	for a lot of the general public to understand
	And...
	And I have a lot of, especially female readers, who told me that there was too much technical stuff in there.
	That depresses me.
	Doesn't that depress you?
	Because I am such a fan of the space program, and there are a lot of people in America who don't care.
	That depresses me, too.
	Yeah.
	It really does.
	Because I want more of that, and you're telling me it doesn't sell, and if it doesn't sell, it's dead.
	Yeah, and you know how I got started on the crime stuff?
	Actually, I was on book tour for Gravity, and a woman stood up at a book signing, and she said, I really don't care about the space program.
	I want you to write a book about a subject I am interested in.
	And I said, what's that?
	And she said, serial killers and twisted sex.
	And I thought a long time about that, and I thought, well, maybe I should give that a try.
	And that's how The Surgeon came about.
	It was serial killers and twisted facts.
	All right.
	You describe this family of cannibals in Scotland, then you start to say something about America, too.
	Yes.
	You know, America, well, we're a big country.
	We have a couple centuries of history to have accumulated some pretty weird stories here.
	There's a family, it was in Kansas, and it was in the 1800s.
	I don't know if you've ever heard of the Bloody Benders, but it was a family that, again, killed for its livelihood.
	No, I have not heard of them.
	Oh, well, apparently, I've never been to Kansas.
	I hope to go one of these days, but if you go down one of these highways, there's actually a Kansas historical marker on the highway showing where the Bloody Benders lived.
	It was on the prairie.
	They had sort of a ramshackle inn.
	Yes.
	And if you were a traveler going down this Inn, there was nothing, no place else to stay, and they would kind of wave you in and say, oh, why don't you spend the night here, because you've got a long travel distance to travel.
	So the traveler would come into the house.
	You checked in, but you didn't check out.
	Exactly.
	It was a mother, a father, a daughter, a beautiful daughter now, and a son.
	Yes.
	And they would talk to him, and they would place him with his back to a curtain, and The daughter was the one, apparently, who did the killing.
	She would come up behind him and smack him over the head with a hammer, and they would finish him off, and they would just open a trap door and roll him into the cellar, where he was left to rot.
	So, there were a number of bodies that were found in the cellar when this was all done.
	The interesting thing about the whole Bloody Bender family... They weren't eating them?
	No, they were not eating them.
	They were just stealing.
	They were just, oh, stealing?
	They were just robbing these travelers.
	But what was fascinating was a woman who actually stopped the whole thing.
	Her husband had disappeared down this road months before, and so she went searching for her husband, and she ended up in the same place, and was led into the house, and she was going to spend the night.
	They were going to kill her, and then she noticed a piece of jewelry on a table that belonged to her, and realized that her husband had met an end there.
	Gotcha.
	Excuse yourself and sneaked climbed out a window and ran across the prairie and got to authorities and they came the next day and the bandit had disappeared.
	Their family was gone.
	They were never seen again.
	Um, but that was when they found the dead bodies in the cell.
	They found more bodies buried.
	And they got away?
	You're telling me they got away?
	Well, that's the story.
	They got away.
	There is another story that, uh, townspeople took care of them, dispatched them, and didn't tell anybody.
	It was a, you know, a vigilante act.
	Which are you inclined to believe?
	I'm inclined to believe they got away.
	It sounds like, you know, they knew what they were doing.
	Uh, but they were never seen again.
	So, you know, all of this suggests, doctor, that this, that, that this evil is... It is evil.
	...is hereditary.
	Well, this was a family, you know, you don't know if you, if you were to raise a child If you were to raise a child saying that this is a normal way to live your life, to kill other people, maybe they would grow up feeling that way.
	Maybe, maybe, maybe they would.
	Maybe they would, yeah.
	But I still say the odds against, say, three generations of one particular horrible kind of serial killer, the odds of that are just not calculable.
	That's true.
	You know, I think that what you need to do is look at serial killers who did not raise their own children and see if their kids ended up Despite the fact they had no contact with their old dad.
	If it proves out that it is genetic, what would you do?
	And there becomes a test for it, which inevitably there would, because once we've already unraveled the genome and now we're looking at these smaller pieces, parts, right?
	Within the genome and eventually perhaps we'll discover it is a genetic thing and then what?
	That's a good question.
	What does society do with it?
	Um, you know, do you punish somebody before they've done anything wrong?
	Do you, you know, take away their civil liberties?
	Even if you're sure they're going to do evil?
	Well, you're not sure.
	But even if you, if, what if we become sure?
	You don't know until they actually do it.
	What you know, all you would know is that they have the genetic tendency towards violence.
	Now, that can be controlled by other means.
	You can make sure that they are Perfectly, they're completely supervised, that they are told what the consequences are.
	These people that we're talking about, we're not talking about stupid people, we're not talking about mentally ill people, we're talking about people who have the capacity to control themselves when they need to.
	And that was what I was talking about, that man who came in and enjoyed my serial killer book.
	He had the desire, he probably had the fantasies, but he was well-behaved enough to know that if he did something like that, there would be a consequence.
	And that is where society comes in.
	That's why we need our police force.
	It's why we need, you know, to be orderly.
	We need to have social controls on people because there is a certain sub-segment of human being who enjoys hunting other human beings.
	How concerned are you that you will encounter the wrong kind of fan?
	The really wrong kind of fan?
	I think about it.
	I mean, you know, Anne Rice used to be You know, I think everybody who is a public figure has to be concerned about it.
	I know Patricia Cornwell travels with bodyguards, and she packs.
	So, it's something, and particularly when you get the kind of story that I sort of dig up out of forensics.
	I was told recently that there's a particular prison somewhere where they house people who are getting ready to go out under the Witness Protection Program.
	Yes.
	They're just sitting there waiting for their identities to be remade and so they just sit in this area of the prison.
	And I've been told that I'm their favorite author.
	Great!
	I'm just waiting to be contacted by one of them.
	You know, you write about a subject matter that kind of incites people to think about the dark side.
	And you do worry about it.
	But this is the research I do.
	This is the kind of stuff I am fascinated by.
	I had mentioned earlier, I think in my email, that I had come up with various weird ways to die.
	Strange ways to die.
	What are the most bizarre ways that people have died?
	Recently in the forensic literature, this is just the kind of stuff that I tend to suck up.
	Well, I hate to say this, but I watch, for example, Law and Order on TV, and they've done a number of episodes about exactly the kind of author that you are, meeting her end in the most disagreeable way she ever wrote about.
	Uh-huh.
	That somehow this interest, this association, even though you don't know what's happening, is made, and they feel they know you, and boy, what a scary life to lead.
	I mean, you've got to wonder every time you open up some email.
	Yes, you do, and Stephen King also has to struggle with the same thing.
	He has even weirder people because, you know, he deals with sort of supernatural and horror stuff, and that kind of stuff actually seems to attract people who are mentally ill.
	I think people who read crime thrillers are not necessarily crazy, but they have strange
	interests.
	And, uh, I do welcome people letting me know about their own personal crime stories that
	they have to tell me.
	And I've collected a number when I go on book tour, people who say, let me tell you about
	the serial killer in my family, for instance.
	Let's take a few phone calls.
	A lot of people want to talk to you, and I can see why.
	You're a fascinating lady.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Tess Gerritsen.
	Hi.
	Oh, hello.
	Am I on, Art?
	Yes, you are.
	Oh, I've been waiting here patiently.
	It's an honor to get to talk to you, Art, you and your doctor friend.
	My name is Chuck, and I'm calling from Bronxville, Pennsylvania, near Allentown, and I'm a retired physics teacher.
	And also a radio ham operator.
	I understand you're a ham operator, too.
	Yes.
	The thing I wanted to bring up was your doctor friend there wasn't quite sure about a creator.
	And some time ago, I got thinking about Einstein's Law, which says that a small amount of mass times the speed of light squared is a tremendous amount of energy.
	And of course, 60 years ago, as you know, we took a small amount of energy, or mass, rather, converted it to energy and destroyed two cities in Japan.
	So when you realize that light is a big part of this equation, and your radio, which we're not talking on in your ham radio and my ham radio, is made up of three fields, which you probably know.
	They are the electric field, the magnetic field, and the gravitational field.
	Yes, and your point being, because we don't have a lot of time... Yes, well now when you study every atom, Art, every atom, has an electric field, a magnetic field, and a gravity
	field. In other words, light is in mass.
	Einstein's law says that. It says that light is energy over mass,
	and which shows that light is in mass. And how does all of this end up as proof of creation?
	Well, I'm getting to that now. Okay. Now, there are six places in physics that
	show that this is true. First of all, it says that light is energy over mass.
	We don't have time for all six, sir.
	You're going to have to crush the point in here.
	Okay, well anyway, these six points prove that light was used to make mass.
	That's a big factor in mass.
	Alright, well we'll have to hold it right there.
	and that the strong and the weak nuclear forces to make it atomic mass
	never tried to cut it coming until we had these other two forces
	so the issue is could like all by itself
	pick up these other two forces to become the master of the universe
	all right all left all right there do you make anything out of that
	dot you know i don't i don't know how that leads me to a creator
	I didn't get it either.
	I mean, science is wonderful, and physics is... we're always learning something, and we are... that's sort of the basis of science, is that we can test, and we make hypotheses, and we try and find the evidence to back that up.
	Do you think it's possible that in our lifetimes, or perhaps future generations' lifetimes, science will, in fact, Prove a creator.
	Prove a creation force beyond any shadow of a doubt.
	After all, it's got to be possible.
	Well, it's possible.
	I don't foresee it happening in the near future.
	Certainly not the creator that we imagined an almighty sentient being, okay?
	I don't know how you're going to prove that.
	Well, there was this unaccountable Big Bang, and truly unaccountable.
	Well, you know what?
	We wouldn't have thought of that.
	Einstein wouldn't have thought of his theorem 200 years before.
	Who would have thought of that?
	So every year we make new discoveries.
	We discover smaller and smaller particles.
	And it still doesn't lead us back to the Creator.
	That is something that's just going to have to be taken as a matter of fate.
	That's the definition of fate.
	Until the right discovery is made.
	I mean, one never knows.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Garrison.
	Hi, Arthur.
	Hi, Dr. Garrison.
	The reason I'm calling is, when I was working in the medical school at a well-known university in Ohio, there was an incident in which some two policemen, I don't want to knock off policemen, but they're bad apples in every profession, An evil in a person and racism are a bad combination.
	And when they were bringing in an African-American gentleman who they presumed was dead, but wasn't, to the coroner's office, they decided to entertain themselves with his body on the way.
	And the results of the injuries that he accrued then caused him to die after he recovered from his presumed death.
	And the reason I bring this up is sometimes hormones in very trace amounts are taken from bodies during autopsies, and then used by genetic engineering to be amplified in large quantity, and then used in therapies.
	And the question is, just like some people question the use of Prinkopf books, you know, the dissection book which has paintings of oppressed corpses, and this was made by a Nazi doctor in Auschwitz, and this has been covered up for years, that's how the book was obtained, and now that we know, People say, even though you don't have to do further harm to get more copies of the book, the book should be banned.
	And similarly, one could question the use of hormones in therapy unless it is known that these hormones were not obtained from a person who was abused by the police when they were presumed dead because they were African American.
	And I brought this up to a doctor once when she wanted to do An operation on me to remove my thyroid that had a tumor and put me on hormone replacement for the rest of my life.
	And I said, where'd the original sample come from?
	He said, oh, because you don't have to go back to the well.
	We can turn a blind eye.
	I said, no, thank you.
	I refused the therapy and cured myself.
	Well, you know, this is true.
	I think maybe what you're talking about was growth hormone, because that was obtained from cadavers.
	A great deal of growth hormone was.
	And there were actually, I mean, The problem with that was they were able to pass on diseases because they were harvesting it from people who had, say, Kreutzfeldt-Jakob disease or mad cow disease.
	That was being passed on by the use of cadaveric growth hormone.
	Nowadays, I think most hormones are synthetically produced, so that is not so much a problem anymore.
	Have you ever heard of this phenomenon of cellular memory?
	Is this the one where heart transplant patients... Yes, utter the name of the person who donated and have the habits and irritations.
	They'll pick that up.
	Yeah, I've heard that.
	It doesn't make any sense to me, but I suppose that if you were to somehow transplant somebody's messenger RNA, which is, you know, RNA is where we store our memories, that they might be able to access that, but I can't think of any good explanation for cellular memory, frankly.
	Well, I can't either, but it appears to be true.
	Stories seem to be true.
	Again, we keep brushing up against these areas, don't we?
	Well, we do brush up against these areas, but you know what you also find out, though, is when you do further investigation, a lot of them are urban legends.
	A lot of them are explainable for some other reason, and you have to be very careful.
	I try not to be gullible.
	I think of myself really very much as a skeptic, but it doesn't mean I'm any the less less fascinated by these
	things Once again, dr. Tess Gerritsen
	Tess, welcome back.
	Good to be here.
	All right.
	Many people want to talk to you, but I do get these computer fast blasts, and I have a particular feeling about this one.
	I could be wrong, but it's just the way it reads or something, so I won't read the name, even though it's included.
	From Connecticut.
	All right, ask Tess Gerritsen what she would do if someone contacted her with, oh, let's say a crime committed.
	Would she get the story first?
	Would she then call the cops?
	Would she call the cops right away?
	What if it was, say, 20 years ago, and the person got therapy, and the person was remorseful, and maybe even now dying of a disease?
	Twisted, I know, but... Oh, that's a tough question.
	I mean, if I felt that a crime had been committed, I would certainly tell the authorities.
	It's one of these things where I'm not their therapist.
	If I'm a therapist and somebody tells me about a crime, I really can't.
	I'm not supposed to break confidence unless there's somebody who is in danger.
	You mean confidence, doctor, patient, confidentiality, it would not apply here?
	It would not apply because I'm not their doctor.
	So I am free to call the police.
	And you would?
	Above all, I consider myself a good citizen and I certainly would.
	In fact, that was one of the first things that I did when I got my first idea for a medical thriller, which was way back with Harvest, and I had been talking to a cop who had heard rumors in Russia that there were children being kidnapped from the streets and sent to the Middle East as organ donors.
	Yes.
	And, you know, that's a terrible thing.
	The first thing I thought was not, I was going to write a book about it.
	It was, oh my gosh, I've got to do something about this.
	This has got to be known.
	And so I called the press.
	I happened to have a friend who, a brother-in-law, who was going to To Russia to do a story for Newsweek.
	And immediately said, this has got to be uncovered.
	And it turned out that the press was already there looking into the whole allegation.
	But that's always my initial feeling, is that if I hear something that outrages me, I'm not going to just write a book about it.
	I'm going to try and do something about it.
	All right.
	That in mind, Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Gerritsen.
	Morning.
	Hello, both of you.
	Art, doctor?
	Yes.
	This is Steve in Detroit.
	All right.
	Okay, here's my situation.
	Some time ago, about 20 years ago, you know, I was a kid back then.
	I was watching a show on serial killers.
	They profiled them and said these are the likelihoods of being a serial killer, and they had 10 or 12 or 15.
	I fit most of them to a T. Oh?
	And, you know, people even to this day tell me that I seem like a killer.
	A serial killer?
	Yes.
	I look like it.
	I act like it.
	Hey, what's wrong with this guy?
	Um, so I guess I'm just wondering, you know, my brother, he's, uh, you know, been in and out of jail.
	My dad's a little crazy.
	You know, we were abused as children.
	So I'm just wondering, what is the, uh, triggering mechanism that would, uh, you know, make me snap?
	Am I going to go crazy someday and just start serial killing?
	That's a hell of a question.
	You have to remember that you are in control of your own life.
	That this is not something that's beyond your control.
	And that you don't have to do anything bad if you don't want to.
	So, clearly, you're concerned about this.
	I mean, you've come from a family that has had problems, and I'm not sure what you're talking... I mean, which... I do torture animals.
	You've got fires.
	I mean, this is the kind of thing that people have always considered to be dangerous signals.
	Well, I did like setting fires.
	I had never had any animals.
	Fires were always fun.
	Blowing up things, that was always a good time.
	But I outgrew that.
	I don't know.
	You know, and again, you should also know that boys in general are fascinated by stuff like that, by blowing up things, and firecrackers, and fire has always been fascinating to a lot of people, so it doesn't necessarily mean that you carry the genetic propensity to kill somebody.
	Caller, do you think you do?
	Do you think, I mean, you know your inner feelings more than either one of us on the phone right now.
	Do you think you have that in you?
	Um, there's probably a suppressed piece of it in there.
	Do you ever feel like you want to hurt somebody or you'd get a high?
	No, no.
	I mean, but... I know it's there.
	I mean, self-defense for sure.
	I wouldn't blink an eye.
	You know, some people might be hesitant on that.
	Well, I think that the real clue to somebody having the tendency to become a serial killer is that they get either immense sexual pleasure out of hurting somebody, Or they have a great deal of pleasure out of having control over another human being.
	How often is it connected to sexuality?
	For male sexual killers, a great deal.
	A lot of them will actually have a sexual release when they kill somebody.
	And that's why it's hard for them to resist, because sex is part of what we live for, right?
	And these people, unfortunately, get their hide out of that.
	But if you don't have those particular tendencies and you're concerned about it, it sounds like you really don't have to worry so much as long as you feel you're in control.
	East of the Rockies, you're on there with Dr. Gerritsen.
	Good morning.
	Yes, Dr. Gerritsen, this is Michael in Norfolk, Virginia.
	You've been very honest as a doctor and as a woman married to the president of the Maine Medical Association.
	You have come forth to this audience and told us that it was professional arrogance, in so many words, that caused the death of many pregnant women because doctors wouldn't wash their hands.
	That's right.
	And you've also been honest in saying that your own background is Chinese, and we often hear The question raised, why are so many flus and epidemics given the Asian or China label?
	And the answer that has been brought forward by some health professionals is the fact of the common pot that's used in China, and you alluded to some practices of just being around the birds yourself.
	My question actually goes to The real heart of this.
	3,500 years ago, Moses taught his people to wash their hands in running water because that was communicated to him by superior beings.
	And the logical deduction is that whoever gave them that information, even though 150 years ago our own arrogant physicians were unwilling to do it, 3,500 years ago, whoever these superior beings were that told Moses to wash their hands carefully and gave them other very strict and prescribed laws that make perfect sense to us with today's science, whoever did that must have understood that washing and running water would
	carry away the germs.
	They knew that there were germs before they had microscopes, thousands of years before that.
	To go to the root of the question, you have your own family plan for the avian flu.
	Why don't we go more to the root of customs, arrogance, not just in professional arrogance among doctors, but arrogance in communities and traditions, even churches that That, uh, follow a practice of using a common cup where, uh, hundreds or thousands, even, of strangers will, uh, will be, uh, taking food out of the same cup.
	He makes a good point.
	Why don't we, why don't we come to the point of a kind of family plan for all mankind?
	A worldwide plan that will make sense, that will strip away the professional arrogance, the pride, the The religious and traditional and superstitious pride... Gee, don't ask for much.
	Listen, in South Africa, they have traditions that say, look, if they just have sex with a virgin, they'll get rid of AIDS.
	And so where do we have the great AIDS epidemic?
	Let's have an authority on this earth.
	That will bring common sense to all mankind and enforce laws in a rational way.
	Okay, we could call him a health czar.
	First of all, mankind is not granted common sense automatically.
	And we do things, we do things because of tradition that have very often been very bad for us.
	For instance, this idea of having sex with a virgin, being able to cure AIDS.
	I mean, who knows where that came from?
	Some urban legend, but it is spread like wildfire.
	And you know what?
	It's not the doctor's responsibility for curing disease.
	The number one thing we can do to cure disease around this world is just to give people clean water.
	That doesn't require doctors.
	That requires a public health movement.
	And it's not the arrogance of doctors that causes bacterial diarrhea, for instance, which kills so many people.
	It's just a matter of resources are not spread equally around the world.
	So, I think that if we were just to, you know, go with public health measures, we would save a lot of people.
	I mean, look at what has killed people over the years.
	Malaria.
	I mean, that's still killing people.
	So, it's simple measures like just clean water and mosquito netting at nighttime.
	That would save a lot more than any number of doctors being in the third world.
	All right.
	All that said, the family plan still kicks in the moment you hear about human-to-human.
	Yes, it does.
	And, you know, the reason that this stuff all rises in Asia is simply that they live with their livestock.
	Throughout mankind, the history of mankind, we've lived with our livestock.
	Think about in Europe, we've slept with our pigs.
	It's interesting how many diseases we actually get from animals.
	You know, it's not just that.
	We used to get TB from cows, for instance.
	Tuberculosis from drinking infected milk.
	Some question about whether or not multiple sclerosis comes from the animal world as well.
	But on the other hand, too much cleanliness is a bad thing.
	There has been some recent, one little small piece of research that showed that people who have inflammatory bowel disease may actually be cured by giving them parasites.
	Giving them the larvae of parasites because the parasites hatch in your gut And you get, say, a tapeworm, and that seems to calm down ulcerative colitis, for instance.
	Now, where did that come from?
	Well, it may be that the human gut has evolved so that we are used to having parasites.
	We're supposed to have parasites, but we've become so clean that we've gotten rid of that, and maybe inflammatory bowel disease is a result of too much cleanliness.
	If the bird flu, in its worst form, became spreading in the United States, how long, in your opinion, would our health care system stand up to it?
	You know, it depends.
	If you live in a large city where you're going to have a great deal of transmission, I have a feeling those hospitals are going to go down pretty quickly.
	You're going to completely fill your capacity of your intensive care unit beds.
	Are you going to have patients lying in gurneys and hallways?
	And the other question is, how many nurses are going to go down?
	That was a big problem during the so-called Spanish Flu.
	Yeah, the healthcare workers, it seems to me, would be the first to go.
	The nurses, yes, definitely.
	They were dying very quickly.
	The second, anyway.
	Yeah, but at least they will be prioritized for antivirals.
	So they'll be getting their tummy flu first.
	We hope that we have enough stockpiled for healthcare and the other There are many stories going around right now questioning the effectiveness of Tamiflu.
	Well, we don't have anything else right now, do we?
	I mean, there are some antivirals, but the front line is still going to be Tamiflu until we get the vaccine up and running, and that's going to take a while.
	The trouble with Tamiflu is that there is some resistance coming up.
	But until we come up with something else, that's all we've got.
	And good hand-washing, and avoiding crowds, and wearing masks and gloves.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Garrison.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Art.
	Yes.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	It's an honor to speak with you.
	Thank you.
	I'm listening to you in Northern California.
	I listen to you on KEX in Oregon.
	Portland, Oregon, yes, of course.
	Okay.
	I wish you'd get your show back.
	Listen, buddy, I had it 20 years.
	I made this decision because I wanted to spend more time with my family, and I'm extremely happy with the way it's going.
	Thank you.
	Go ahead, if you have a question.
	I do.
	Dr. Garrison, in your younger days, when you were studying snakes and lizards, did you kill these creatures?
	No, I never killed them.
	I don't kill anything.
	I'm so proud of you.
	Believe me, I lived in a big canyon behind my house, and there were plenty of dead animals to find just lying around on the ground.
	The things that I used to do with lizards, these are the kind of lizards, if you agitated them, they would drop their tails just as an escape mechanism, and the tails would continue to wiggle because the muscles were still working.
	And this is probably not nice to the lizards, but I would grab a bunch of them, and I would put them in a bucket, and then you'd shake the bucket, and their tails would all fall off.
	And then you'd let the lizards go, and you'd have this bucket full of tails that would continue to wiggle for several minutes.
	And that, to me, was great fun, but I never killed an animal.
	How come they can grow them back?
	They, that's their genetics.
	They just have the capacity of doing that, and it wouldn't have been nice if we could do that with arms and limbs.
	Doesn't it imply that if we have the right genetic combination, or they flip the right switch, that we could grow a new arm?
	It certainly doesn't imply that, doesn't it?
	I mean, that's where genetic research would come in.
	Yes.
	Regrow limbs.
	Do you flinch at all, Doctor, when you consider where we're going, and we're very close to right now, with this genetic research?
	We can begin to, I don't know, kind of play God.
	We have to be careful.
	I am not against cloning research as long as it has to do with improving our lives, our health.
	But once it comes to reproducing ourselves as a matter of vanity, that has to be stopped.
	Can you imagine?
	Would you want to grow a clone of yourself from babyhood?
	No.
	No.
	No, I wouldn't.
	Neither would I. But there apparently are people of means and plenty of intent who do.
	Exactly, and I think that that is a misguided use of cloning technology.
	You don't really doubt it, though, do you?
	No, I don't doubt it.
	You can have your cat or your dog cloned for, I don't know, $50,000, whatever the current going price is.
	And think about how many pets you could have saved for that $50,000.
	I'm not going to get into that argument.
	I'm with you.
	I'm just saying whether we like it or not.
	It's happening and whoever has the money can pay for anything.
	There are a lot of things, Art, that we know are wrong and that people know are wrong and we can't do anything to stop them.
	That's all.
	Well, there's the obvious old thing about people cloning themselves for body parts.
	And I'm not saying that's going on either, but... You can see why they would do that.
	These are evil uses of cloning.
	The idea that you would grow a parallel human being who is actually a human being with thoughts and feelings to use them as spare parts.
	But then, you know what?
	I mean, what do we do with human beings who are already alive on this earth?
	People are constantly being killed in battles.
	Well, we're on the edge of the ability to be able to do it much better, much more efficiently, and it'll seem like magic.
	We're on the edge of all this stuff, and I just wonder, who's in control?
	Who's heading the committee who will make the decision about, wait a minute, this is going too far?
	There are prohibitions against human cloning and making embryos beyond a certain stage.
	Here in America?
	Well, in America, unfortunately, the laws against federal funding of cloning are very strict.
	You can still, I believe California still has... You're able to do cloning research there.
	How about China?
	Do they have laws like that in China?
	I'm not aware of that.
	Certainly they're doing a lot of research in Korea.
	That seems to be where a lot of the You know, the breakthroughs are happening.
	Hey, you know what?
	We're out of time.
	God, it just flies by.
	Look, your book, your current book, again, is?
	Vanish.
	Vanish.
	Yes, it's about corpses waking up in the morgue.
	And you should be able to find it in Walmart, that sort of place, right?
	Any major bookstores and everything.
	All my titles are still on Amazon.com.
	You are a total pleasure to have on every time we do it.
	Thank you.

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