Okay, we're going to start in about half an hour. We had to restart our YouTube feed because apparently Grant's music is way too popular with certain people and so this This is not only a mic test that you guys have to put up with but it's also encouragement to check out the awesome picture books that are backed by the projector as well as Encouragement to talk to the Oakland Public Library who will be back on back on that table issuing library cards Telling you all the great services they have as well as to check out the awesome parasites that we have It's gonna be great, and we'll hopefully be back in half an hour Hope you enjoy the show So the last talk tonight's on snakes and one of the things that didn't make it into my intro talk for that was that the original working title for snakes on a plane was Pacific Flight 121 and Samuel L. Jackson said I signed on for this movie because there are snakes on a plane. We should call it that I Welcome to nerd night East Bay number 23. We're just about two years old I'm really excited about tonight. We do have other administrative details besides like birthday celebrations to do So I'm gonna keep my intro incredibly short and just say I'll take a survey. How many of you have been to the hot monk in Nevada? Oh So there are a handful of very enthusiastic hands the rest of you should be ashamed But you should also go up there soon and to hear why you should go up there soon here is Sarah I'm Sarah And I'm the new co-boss for nerd night North Bay, which is at the hot monk We're just starting October 7th is our first event doors at 7 It's just like all the other nerd nights the nice thing about this nerd night Is that the venue is right next to a giant shopping center where you can go to Costco and Target and demo Before the top and there is ample parking that is free, which is also good So highly encourage you to come take a look. It's not as far away as you might think It's actually pretty close once you get over the bridge It's about a 20-minute drive at the most in horrible traffic or 10 minutes if you speed like I do So we've got a Facebook page up. We've got a Twitter account and a website And our talk on October 7th is going to be really interesting. We've got three semi-related topics We're talking about sustainable brewing including the use of poop and brewing. So that fascinates you Come come here about that. We're also talking about Sustainable culture sustainable farming including ancient Andean civilizations Who also used to get high as balls and then engrave images of them being high as balls on their pottery And that ties us into our third topic the grateful debt So those are our three topics for our first event And so here's our info you might want to join either the Facebook group or the mailing list And the reason you want to do that is that we will give you free beer. So if you sign up for either the the mailing list or for Our Facebook site we're going to be choosing one person per event from each the mailing list and the Facebook so you can enter twice and win twice And we will buy your alcohol all night long So do sign up do come on and check us out and I'm going to introduce our first speaker and So I'm going to give a little semi-related talk to the first the first speaker So I'm going to talk about a brief history of the first old English white dude After whom we named an American Children's Book Award and our next speaker is going to actually talk about the second one So the first one was John fucking Newberry So that is a likeness of John Newberry. We don't have any really good engravings or likenesses of him in existence That's his his award that people get for having wonderful children's books And one of the first books that then he published was this pretty little pocket book And they would give toys away to the kids with it and his innovation was really creating books for children That children would actually like up until that date They'd only done children's books that were kind of prescriptive about behavior Like don't lie to your parents because they'll beat the crap out of you with a stick So this was a real turn in children's literature to actually have stuff that was fun to read So we had abc books and and other things that taught taught children how to enjoy learning as opposed to beating them over the head with it He was a very interesting fellow for a couple of reasons one is that The the person who he studied under To learn how to be a bookseller and a print maker He he actually Worked under that guy that guy retired and then he started working under another guy And was we're only working with that guy for a couple of months when he died under mysterious circumstances And then John Newberry married his widow And again, this is the guy we name a children's book award after The other interesting thing that he did was that he figured out cross marketing cross promotion And that people wanted to buy things other than books in bookstores. So he sold drugs This was his most famous sale it's dr. James fever powder Which was actually responsible for killing one of his friends later in life, which is fascinating But the the other thing that he sold that he was really well known for Was dr. John Hooper's female pills So this was advertised as curing hysteria curing that time of the monthly season And it actually became known as the first abortion pill And it was used for about a hundred years as an over-the-counter abortion pill And again, this is the guy that we named the children's book award after so John fucking Newberry is a very interesting character And to to talk to us next about the callicott award We have Sharon McCuller who's a community relations librarian for oakland public library And she has chickens in her backyard that are very cute and cuddly And she's an excellent speaker and she's going to talk to you next so well, please welcome Sharon Hi everybody Sharon So my talk is called cats kids and callicott a brief history of the picture book Dog people. I'm sorry. It's gonna be cats in this one So Yeah, sorry So starting with this quote by Maurice Stendak one of the most beloved picture book creators and definitely one of my favorites I really like his philosophy about picture books and you'll see some of that coming through later in the talk He was around from 1928 until just a couple years ago may of 2012 And in his obituary the new york times called him the most important children's book artist of the 20th century So you can agree or disagree with that, but it's probably true. He wrote 21 books. He illustrated more than 80 books And he had one caldecott winning book and seven caldecott honor books. So he Did a lot for children's literature All right, so back to the beginning way way way for Maurice Stendak We have the very first ever published children's picture book this book So printing was invented in 1461 and that's when the first book with words and pictures came out It was another 200 plus years before one came out that was meant for children So this is called urbis Sensational Pictus or in english the world of things obvious to the senses drawn in pictures very descriptive title It was originally published in nuremberg It was written by a cheque edgis educator and its purpose was to teach children's things Teach children things it was basically an encyclopedia Had 150 chapters describing all kinds of things children needed to know Things like how to brew beer how to slaughter animals All of the most important things So this um This book was pretty much a bestseller. It was a mega hit. It was published in all kinds of languages all over the world So up here you can see some of it in english and I have a whole pile of picture books in the back and I do have like a reproduction of this entire book If you're interested in looking at some of the other things in there So uh For the first several hundred years of picture book making it was all instructional It was mostly things about the bible and morals and ethics and values in um 1744 sarah talked about this book a little bit john nuremberg published The first picture book that was intended for amusement and instruction for children So this is the pretty little Pocket book little pretty pocket book. Sorry Uh, it was republished in america in 1762. It was also a pretty big hit the illustrations in this one were woodcut as Was everything pretty much at this time Um, so sarah already told you it came with toys if you were a boy you got a ball if you were a girl you got a pin cushion And each of those came with a letter from jack the giant killer as part of the package Which was part of the fun for children part. I also have um a reproduction of this book in the back that you can check out The page I'm showing here is the first known reference to the game of baseball and print which was in this book So there are other references to similar games, but this is the first place. It was actually called baseball Next one of my favorites, um So first of all we have color so up until the 1930s color had to be added by hand And it wasn't very popular to see it in Books in general and certainly not in books for children But in 19 third and 18 30s 18 35 printing color from wood blocks became more popular So you got to see things like this, which is der strühelepeer I don't speak german Which came out in 1848 it was written by a Psychiatrist named einrich hoffman And you know what they say about psychiatrist, right? So He it was published originally in england in germany and it did get published in other places He wanted uh to tell kids lessons in a little bit of a less didactic way So he thought everything in the past had just been too Moralistic and didactic so he decided to tell these cautionary tales I like the sort of edwards scissor hands look of peter on the cover Mark twain actually brought this book to the united states Under the title slavin peter And I do have a copy of this in the back Also, it has the german and the english as well as the illustrations that you can check out My favorite story in this book is um You can read it in its poetic form back there, but basically Mother tells her son. She's going out.   This happens Mom comes home and and the little boy is standing there with no thumbs and she's very very disappointed in him So that is slavinly peter Again 1848 So we move into the late 19th century the victorian era And it's way more common to see color and picture books We're still mostly retelling old tales or telling sort of moralistic stories A lot of the images of children they kind of look like many adults which is pretty typical for the victorian era These are two of the more uh Notable illustrators and authors from that time. They were both published by a publisher named edmund evans in britain So we have walter crane Who published this version of little red riding hood in 1882? And on the right is cake greenaways a apple pie and that one's actually Eight 1886. So these are both late 1800s Edward edmund evans was a pretty well known publisher at the time the printer and the publisher were kind of one of the same so he didn't have sort of Everything separated so he would find authors. He would print their materials He would publish them and he would sell them and he pioneered an application of using a photographic process To publish wood blocks. So you got to show off this kind of art in picture books way better He had one other artist who is very well known Good old randolph caldicott. So randolph caldicott Only live for as you can see 40 years from 1846 to 1886 I think he looks very much like he could be hanging out in tennis-scale alley today He is was english He was a writer and an artist He was pretty sickly as a child and his parents didn't really support his art So he left home pretty young To pursue that and he did a lot of illustrations of books not for children And at some point he fell in love with the idea of publishing books for kids So he turned his attention to that Unfortunately, it wasn't long after that that he passed away from heart disease of some sort But in the meantime, he did put out eight picture books He did two a year that came out at christmas time over the course of four years and they Were very well known at the time and they remain very well known. I do also have copies of all of those Actually, they're up here because I stole them out of our library's rare book collection And so you can only look at them when i'm near you but you can definitely look at them You didn't hear that Kathleen This Maurice Sendek quote about Caldecott is a favorite line I think it really describes what the picture book is and why Caldecott is so known for it So he devised an ingenious juxtaposition of pictures and word a counterpoint that never happened before Words are left out, but the picture says it pictures are left out, but the words say it In short, it is the invention of the picture book This is one of his more famous illustrations Keep your eye keep your mind on the picture of the man on the horse. You'll see him again in a couple of minutes But before we get to the man on the horse again We have the golden age of picture books the late 19th and early 20th century Um at this point images started really playing a key role in the experience of picture books These ones Just some of the earliest uses of lithography, which is basically how printing worked Forever more until we get to the digital era So, uh, William Nicholson's clever bill here on the left was 1926 And of course, most of you recognize Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which was from 1865 They sort of epitomized this era of picture books and again, you'll notice that these are Both British artists and authors. So we're still really in Europe at this point Then we have millions of cats Cats here cats there cats in kittens everywhere hundreds of cats Thousands of cats millions and billions and trillions of cats Wanda gag of gag. I always say gag. I really know We're bringing it to america. This is no this is thought of as basically the first real american picture book Wanda gag actually won the newberry honor for this in 1929 It's one of the few picture books to win a newberry award Really in history The caldecott award, of course didn't exist yet. So that wasn't that wasn't an option She pioneered this sort of double spread and Words in use with picture in a double spread and I do also have this one back there where you can look through it There are a lot of really beautiful uses of that. It's also hand lettered her brother did the lettering So that's all hand lettering which I think is pretty cool It's also one of the longest running picture books to still be in print. So it has been in print continuously since it came out in 1928 Now we see the horse again This is the caldecott medal So the caldecott medal the first year was 1938 So it was awarded to picture books that were published in the previous year Was named after caldecott who we heard a little bit about And it's an award that goes to the most distinguished american picture book for children each year To and including this year the award goes to the artist not the author if they're two separate people and It's pretty prestigious. It's pretty important people care about a lot librarians. We really care about it But I think you know people in general care about it. You recognize the seal you see it around So um So the award does go to the illustrator, but it is for the most distinguished picture book So it's not just an award for illustration. It's an award for the merging of the two and for a book that is presented to children in a way that that works for them So Now we get to the cats I thought a fun way to show you sort of the history of The caldecott because there are just so many winners and honors is to show you the cats of caldecott So here you can see the very early era of caldecott books. We're still Using really just black and white illustration They kind of have a similar look In the post-war years people started journey for color more it was still pretty complicated To add color the way printing was done in the u.s. And it was often Had to be added by hand after the black and white So you'll see a lot of books where it's primarily blacks and grays and then maybe a single or two colors added over on top of it So There were a lot Of cats in 1951 Don't know why Good year for cats Uh little later into the 50s and 60s Designers and artists started seeing this picture book thing and they're like, yeah We kind of wanted on that we could do this so you start to see a lot Of interesting developed developments in how the art and picture books were done Some veering from the sort of classic look and some more artistic designs We also start to notice is the printing gets a little better that you can actually see things like brush strokes in the art and different different techniques Diversity in the illustration diversity of the styles and again plenty of cats So there weren't a lot of cats in the 70s and 80s it turns out But conveniently I don't have a lot to say about the 70s and 80s other than that it was my childhood But basically the 70s through the 90s. It's just sort of more of the same The the printing techniques got better Illustrators designers artists got more creative about what they could do with picture books and you start to see A lot more creativity in the format So for example the smoky night one you can see There's you know painting but it's over the top of what looks like almost collage rumble paper. You could really Show that kind of work in a picture book by this point in time And then we have the 20th century and you know by this point we can really do a lot with digital technology and printing to make books And illustrations really have endless opportunity I love having mr. Waffles at the end just from last year because that one was really children's comic book in a way I mean it was it was a full picture book But the style was really comic book it had the only words are in an alien language Really the pictures really do the job of telling the story I have that one in the back as well along with some of these other ones so that's um That's some cats So who picks these winners? It's a good question um people like this The year 15 members of ALSC which is the association of library service to children Which is a division of the american library association pick the winner So seven people are appointed seven people are elected and then there's a chair So this is the committee the 2015 Randolph caldecott award committee of which I am a member So the 2015 committee is looking at books from the 2014 publication year So right now in my house. I have hundreds and hundreds Of picture books sort of like the movies of cat book, but with picture books and I am looking at them all really really closely along a certain set of criteria and along with my fellow committee members Who you see above here the ones without the heart around their faces And in january we will meet at the midwinter meetings which are in chicago this year Which is unpleasant Libraries are cheap we go where it's inexpensive And we will basically be locked in a room for three days Coming to consensus about what is the most distinguished picture book of this year. There can be only one winner There can be honors And it's up to the committee how many books they feel are distinguished enough to deserve an honor The whole process is pretty secretive So we can talk about what books we've liked even what books are our favorite, but nobody can really ever know What goes on in the discussions What books were nominated what we're really choosing from so Pretty intense and pretty exciting These are just some of the animals i've looked at over the past year so far Sloth cows and chicken with arms Our barks moose And of course there are always cats So are we there yet? We're pretty much there. That's basically the end Does anyone have questions Yeah So the question was she noticed in the picture that the committee is mostly women And is has this been an issue is there concern that there might be a bias towards books that are more for girls Is this common so it's a kind of complicated question the librarian profession is pretty dominated by women um, the committees do look for diversity and so we have three dudes, which is actually pretty good We try to find library we the american library association and al's try to find librarians working in different kinds of libraries and different parts of the country people of color Women men, but you also have to have people who are able and willing to attend conferences and all that In terms of the second part of the question Is it a concern in terms of picking books that would appeal more to girls? I don't think so one of the things that's really interesting about being on these committees is you sort of realize the process works So we have a manual that's about 80 pages long And we're picking the best book that meets the criteria of this manual over the course of really long and intense discussions So while every committee may not come to the same conclusion Every committee does come to the right conclusion if that makes sense And librarians tend to not think of books as for girls and boys anyhow, please. We do our best not to so yeah Is there like any say that children have in the outcome of the So is there any say that children have for the outcome of the award for this award? No This is not a popularity award. So there are other Um lists that come out and different kinds of awards that are for children to to have a say in But this one is really based on distinguished amongst certain criteria. So as long as it appeals to Some child between the age of zero and 14 the book qualifies and it can be the most distinguished Now committee members may choose to share books with children to see how they work, you know Um, there's a book that I was looking at that I really like that when I shared it with children I realized like a problem that I hadn't noticed just on my own. So Children certainly come into play in a way, but they don't have any say in Who wins this one? Yeah What's the criteria? It's a good question. I happen to have it right here I mean again, there's a there's a 70 page of definitions and terms and criteria But the basic criteria and identifying a distinguished american picture book for children defined as illustration committee members need to consider excellence of execution and the artistic technique employed excellence of pictorial interpretation of story theme or concept Appropriateness of style of illustration to the story theme or concept Delineation of plot theme characters setting mood or information through the pictures excellence of presentation and recognition of a child audience So that's the I mean there's more but that's I think the one that matters Two more questions Okay Totally no in fact when I was She asked if there's a preference in this committee or previous committee towards cats versus dogs When I was trying to fight all the cats I kept finding dogs and be like no I'm looking only for cats So there are lots of dogs too And lots of children and lots of chickens and all kinds of things. I just have a preference towards cats So that is why my slideshow has them. Thank you. No problem one more Way back there Question I totally can't answer. What's the ratio of books that have animals versus human You know, it's you know a ratio to me I Well, yeah, that I know too that that is not really the question Uh, I you know, I would say based on the ones I've looked at this year I would put it at maybe close to 50 50 Maybe 60 40 towards animals, but it's it's not it's not actually that heavily Towards animals. What Amy pointed out is that there are more books with animals than with children of color in them Which is true, which is another whole other talk One more quick question. I saw someone up top. I feel like I'm ignoring the balcony. No Okay, I don't know who to pick. I'm bad at this. Okay Okay So she's saying it's a hugely political war must be a hugely political award because you make so much money and I mean, I would say it's as unpolitical as possible and that that is why we are Conducting our everything in a cone of secrecy And we sign all kinds of agreements about you know, not letting it be a political award but of course For the illustrator and the author even though they're not the one who received the warrant and the publisher It does mean big money and that's that's a piece of why it's it's Serious and we take our job so seriously and we really follow the manual and follow the criteria and make sure that everything is totally copacetic All right Thanks to Sharon. She's going to be around right there. So if there are any Last questions you could ask her you should definitely check out all of the awesome picture books that are in the back near the projector and the camera you should also talk to our lovely Librarians from opl get yourself a library car if you don't already have one The next talk is going to be on parasites if you haven't already we have examples of those parasites in the lobby It's awesome. Uh, we'll be back in 15 Welcome back Our next speaker kelly weiner smith is going to talk about Parasites So obviously I gathered a bunch of images from science fiction featuring mind controlling parasites My first instinct here was to Do some kind of analysis of the deeper meaning of this trope in film and television So you feel like in the 50s, there's something about communism, you know But then you still get this going on in the 80s and even more recently Uh, and you think what I don't know So it's sort of some sort of assault on american ideals of individualism You know your individual agency being co-opted, but also there's just element of bodily invasion Just like some kind of like infectious disease fear or maybe maybe AIDS. I don't know But I decided not to go that route. I wanted to be more positive. So I decided to look up A little research on parasites that might be good because we generally think of them as being a negative thing So I'm not an expert on this, but I found a few interesting things Mistletoe, which we think of as being very romantic Christmastime kiss under it and all that business is a parasite. It attaches itself to trees branches and It digs in there and steals the trees water and nutrients And it sounds really horrible But in the end, it's really great for an ecosystem For a number of reasons Including many animals depend on the mistletoe for food birds eat the berries And the enriched leaf litter when the mistletoe falls Increases the insect species in the forest which attracts more bird species. So it's great for biodiversity Yay mistletoe Next one I have are cuckoos Which could be considered to be parasites because they lay their eggs in other birds' nests And then when the cuckoo hatches it competes with the other birds offspring For survival for food and all that stuff. So it's parasitic in that sense, but Recent research has suggested that it's possible that some nests survive better when they have the cuckoo The baby cuckoo in there because it might protect them from predators. It secretes some kind of stinky secretion that uh that Apparently keeps away predators And some researchers have found that crows nests that are invaded by cuckoos survive better than those that aren't So good work cuckoo And lastly we have I think they're called helmets Am I saying that right? Uh, which are parasitic worms that do infect humans Yeah Brody, right? I mean Nobody wants this But there's been some recent hypothesizing that they may actually be very helpful They have been found to suppress the immune system, which sounds like a really terrible thing But scientists or some scientists now think that maybe they do more sort of like Balancing the immune system and since our hygiene practices have improved over the Decades and centuries And the frequency of these infections with these parasites have decreased auto immune diseases have increased significantly also allergies things like Crohn's disease and Irritable bowel syndrome and all kinds of things that could be caused by an overactive immune response That might have been previously mitigated by this grody parasite So go get some worms. Yay Um, so parasites can do good things. They're not all terrible But sometimes they control your mind and make you go get eaten by predators And that's what Kelly Wienersmith is going to come and talk about. So here's Kelly So first off it is pronounced wienersmith and I also think that's hilarious It's important to have a sense of humor about everything All right, so The introduction was awesome because it talked about how parasites can be good Parasites in this case aren't necessarily good in the examples They're going to talk about today But they can teach humans about things that we didn't know about previously and that could be good for us Even if it's bad for the hosts So parasites Unlike you and I can't just like stroll or roll over to where they need to get next Instead they need to wait until their host eventually does what has to happen for the parasite Or if the parasite is particularly clever the parasite can manipulate the host into doing what it needs to do And so there are some really cool examples of parasites through the process of natural selection that have been able to Manipulate their hosts into doing some cool stuff and by understanding how parasites are able to do this to their hosts We can better understand links between the brain the immune system and behavior And maybe we can even understand our own culture a little bit better So let's start by talking about Zombie ants So this work is done by the absolutely amazing david hues at penn state and his collaborators And they study an ant that lives up in trees and is infected by a fungus called ophio cordyceps unilateralis This fungus is super cool. So when the fungus is ready to do its breeding thing or its reproducing thing It causes the ants to sort of stumble down out of their tree home They go down to the leaf litter in the rainforest where they're found They crawl around in the leaf litter a little bit until they find a sapling Then they crawl up the sapling to like the northeast side or something and this is happening at solar noon They crawl up about 25 centimeters And then they clamp down around a leaf vein and by they I mean they cause the ants mouth The mandibles to clamp down around a leaf vein And now the fungus makes it so that the ant no longer has control of its mouth The ant is clamped down there and will stay there for the rest of its life And I know right?  It doesn't grow quite right So it looks like temperature and humidity are bad if you get out of this 25 centimeter zone And that blows my mind right because people people ask me like hilly. What's 25 centimeters? I'm like I don't know but like this fungus I'm really bad at that kind of stuff But this fungus by remote control is able to get the ants up to about 25 centimeters That is super cool to me. Yeah, and so that's awesome But the parasites have a benefit of millions of years of natural selection So as I mentioned the ants bite down around the leaf thing and they leave what's called a death grip So everything in this system is like epic leading the zombie ants death grips You might ant graveyards because they all die in the same places, but anyway So this is a death grip on a fossilized leaf that's 48 million years old Estimate on how long this kind of manipulation has been happening So 48 million years is a long time for the hand of natural selection to be guiding The fungus along to figure out how to manipulate the host And so if you were to bring an ant into the lab and say okay neuroscientist make the ant do what the fungus does We can't do that Like we don't know how an ant brain works even though it's like you'd think it's relatively simple But this fungus hasn't figured out and we don't and that's because it has had 48 million years So chorissa de becker and working with a bunch of her collaborators They're trying to figure out what is the fungus producing? How is the ant brain responding and they're essentially trying to figure out what this fungus has quote unquote learned Over 48 million plus years of evolution with its host And so maybe we can understand ant behavior by figuring out what the fungus has learned about ant behavior And so I feel like that's that's cool for the potential to make like leaps and bounds in our understanding of behavior by studying these crazy parasites Okay, so ant brains like that's fairly simple. Certainly more complicated creatures can't be manipulated like this not so All right, so I study trimatodes The trimatode I study is you have lurkis californiaeensis, but I'm kind of lazy. So I call it you hop It has three hosts in its life cycle the adults live in the guts of predatory birds They reproduce sexually they produce a bunch of eggs that pass with the bird species into the salt marsh Where california horn snails get infected these snails eat the poop to get infected and as if that's not unfortunate enough The parasite then goes on to castrate the snail So the snail will not be producing any more offspring All of the gonad tissue that would have gone towards producing snails is now making babies And these snails can live for a long time and they can produce thousands and thousands maybe millions of these parasites over their lifetime And so the parasites are reproducing asexually when the parasites are ready They leave the snail they swim around in the water when they encounter a california killy fish They burrow through its skin and they follow nerves up to the brain and they hang out on the brain And in order to complete the life cycle this fish needs to get eaten by a predatory bird So in order to facilitate that the parasites are inducing what we call conspicuous behaviors So i'll show you those in a second But this is the life cycle and when they get back into predatory birds the cycle can start again So this is Well, all right. I'm going to ask you what you think this is so for a little bit of perspective. These are fish eyes So there's my parasite on here somewhere. Where do you think the parasite is? Yeah, right. Okay on the brain. I'll be more specific Can you uh, so this is like the brain where what what what on here do you think is the parasite? So these blacks the spots are actually like a coding that we think reflects UV radiation So the brain doesn't get mutations. So actually this is kind of a trick question because it's hard to see the brain through all of the parasites So the parasites like here is one right here They're kind of clear ovals with like a white spot They're oh no, I love this response Covering the brain and so the only spots that you don't find it are like up here and here And that's because i'm a little bit clumsy and my finger touched the brain and I scooted them off to the side So they should be there too And not only are they covering this brain, but they're like filling this cake Like this is the space between the brain and the skull and they're like crowding into the open spaces because there's just like there's more room So there's 1,000 to 8,000 of these parasites on adult chili fish brains And so yeah, if you're an adult in this population, you're almost certainly infected I've caught fish that still like they had just come out of their egg They still had a little bit of yolk and they had like 10 and in some cases 100 parasites already So it's it's rough being a chili fish So the more parasites that a fish has the more frequently it does what we call conspicuous behaviors And these include things like shooting up to the surface of the water real quick Turning around on their back and flipping their silvery bellies up towards the sun which then reflects light And I've got a little bit of a video of what this looks like in the field So this is a school of fish. This is what my little guys look like hamming it up for the camera And when you see the school you see these like flashes of light in the school And there's going to be a fish who does two of the surfacing behaviors here in a second where the red arrow is There's one and there's two And so it really draws your attention and it also seems to draw the attention of predatory birds Because infected fish are 10 to 30 times more likely to get eaten than uninfected fish So like these parasites are really good at what they do I I think it's really cool. Uh and they're kind of cute, right? They've got these little eye spots. They're photoreceptors. They really only see like shadows And if you want to see what these guys look like, this is on the brain.  So when you stress out a fish They have a very predictable chemical signal in their brain so that you know that they're stressed out But when these fish are infected that chemical signal gets really dampen. It's much less pronounced So we don't exactly know what that means But we think what's happening is that the parasite is causing the fish to respond inappropriately to stressors like a predatory bird So it's like the parasite is being like no no chill out. It's not a predator. It's just like a shadow whatever And and I've done some work looking at a hormone called cortisol Which we release and fish release when they're stressed out and it looks like the parasite is also manipulating cortisol levels But I mentioned that those conspicuous behaviors are done by the fish some of those conspicuous behaviors are actually breeding behaviors And so it looks like the fish is reducing Or the parasite is reducing fish anxiety, but increasing sexual behavior It doesn't that sound like a medication that would be really useful Great great like fear or something and so So The part of the brain where this stuff is happening is a part of the brain that's fairly well conserved Which which means that we have a part of the brain similar to what the fish have and that seems to be what the parasite is manipulating So my collaborators that I are looking to see if the parasite is producing some compound that reduces anxiety while increasing Or maintaining sexual activity in the hope that maybe we can find some sort of chemical That would be useful for treating anxiety and this is way far in the you know in the future And I think it's super cool just to understand how the parasite is manipulating behavior But we're wondering if this parasite might have some neuroactive compound. We've never seen before I don't know if we're lucky Uh, okay So that's fish, but everybody really wants to know what about humans And so when people ask what about humans the perhaps more obvious example is rabies But rabies when people get infected they become really afraid of water. They get a little bit Uh a little bit aggressive. They become hypersexual They're actually stories of people who are like furiously masturbating and they're about to die But they just like can't help themselves And so the parasite is really weird But when you have this parasite It's really obvious right and so it's interesting that it manipulates behavior But you know that someone has it what's maybe really interesting is if someone's infected by a parasite It's changing their behavior and you don't know they have it because it's less obvious And so it's sort of taking the wheel and you don't really know about it So there that here comes toxoplasmosis So this is a protozoan parasite that reproduces sexually in cats So the goal of the parasite is always to get back to the cat where sexual reproduction can happen So cats when they're infected produce what's called oocysts and these get pooped out either into your litter box Or into a garden. So say for example the people who let their cats outside those cats will catch Bird or a rat that's infected and then they'll produce oocysts and they'll poop in your garden And then you'll go to pick your vegetables and now you have toxoplasmosis Maybe you can guess how I feel about cats being indoors or outdoors So anyway, uh, and this is also why when women are pregnant You're not supposed to be changing the litter box because you can get infected Okay, so the oocysts can infect just about any organism And humans can get infected either by like I said litter box gardening blah blah blah But you can also get infected if you eat an animal that's infected So this parasite is really good at just waiting until it gets a chance to get into a cat So if it happens to be infecting a pig or a cow and you don't cook that meat through all the way You can get infected and this is why france with their affinity for undercooked meat has 80 prevalence of this parasite So 80 percent of the population is infected by this parasite Uh, okay. So when the cat Eats an animal that's infected. It eats the muscle tissue. It becomes infected We maybe were hosts at one point, but we're sort of dead ends now But animals like rodents are good for completing the life cycle. So let's first talk about how rodents get manipulated So joanne webster has done some awesome work looking at how the parasite is probably manipulating rodents in order to increase transmission So what i'm going to call our talk about is called fatal feline attraction so Usually when you have a rat and it smells cat urine It responds appropriately and freaks out and gets the heck out of that area because there's a predator around But when they're infected not only do they not leave but they actually seem to be attracted to that area And then they slow down They move a little bit more slowly and they essentially hang out in areas where risk would be really high for getting eaten So it looks like the parasite is able to Get the the uh, the rodents to go to areas of high risk But what's really cool is that cool for my in my opinion is that The response to other predators stays totally normal So there's lots of different kinds of predator urine that freak out rodents. It's only cat Urine for which the response has changed so they only approach cat urine And again if you were to say to a neuroscientist Whoa, how how can you do that? Can you change the response to one particular urine smell like do that in the lab? No, no, we don't know how to do that, but this little parasite has figured it out So again, maybe we can understand how responses to smell work Various other things by understanding this parasite additionally We've recently discovered that the parasite can be passed by sex We don't know if that can happen in people yet Or maybe i'm just not up to date on that particular bit of literature But we know that in rodents when rats mate males can give it to females And then she gets it and her pups get it So from the perspective of a parasite usually when an organism is sick They sort of act sick and look sick and maybe that decreases their likelihood of having a chance to mate But with toxoplasmosis Females prefer infected males the parasite is doing something to make these infected males sexy And the infected males have the same number of offspring And so from the perspective of mating being an infected male might not be such a bad deal unless you get eaten by a cat Which case it's definitely a bad deal So anyway, uh, this is super interesting. So then But what you really want to know is about people and because of ethics We can't do the kind of controlled experiments that you can do on rodents And so the best we can do is surveys and this is the king of surveys in this field So this guy is yarislaw flager and this is a story that I've heard as being a person in the field I haven't met him but yarislaw one day heard that there's this brain infecting parasite that changes behavior And he was like, you know, or sorry, this brain infecting parasite He's like, you know, I bet that that changes behavior. And you know what? I'm like really weird Like I don't respond normally or I don't respond the way most people respond to situations I wonder if I have it and he does and so So he got the blood test and he found out that he has it And so then he went to the nearest army and was like, okay I want it to give your army folks, uh, these psychology tests Then I want to draw some blood and figure out if, uh, the Prevalence of the parasite tells you anything about personality and what he found was that men who are infected. They have higher testosterone They're less rule-following They're more jealous. They have different ratios and lengths between their fingers Which is probably because of the testosterone levels. That's a trait tied to testosterone Where uh, and then they've also done like outside of army studies on like college students and other people have gotten into this game And females are More warm, more caring, more nurturing. The females who are infected have lower testosterone than Uninfected females. So it's changing a bunch of stuff. And maybe you're thinking what sounds like a lot of like gender stereotype stuff And so Kevin Lafferty realized that also and so he said and this is a professor at University of California Santa Barbara So he went and he collected psychology surveys from a bunch of different countries and looked at aggregate country scores So for example, how neurotic is a particular country? And then he looked at the prevalence of the parasite and we have pretty good estimates for this because as I mentioned If you're pregnant, you don't want to be changing the cat litter So we often draw blood from women and figure out if they're infected or not because if you're already infected You can't give it to your offspring because your immune system is controlling it But if you're not infected and you become infected when you're pregnant Then your offspring can get it and it causes neurological problems So often we'll check women to see if they have it and if they don't have it we tell them to be extra careful So anyway, we have a pretty good sense of what percent of populations are are infected based on these surveys And what he found was that so this is the national prevalence of the parasite so these are countries that have a lot of the parasite And countries that score high on masculine sex roles So countries where it's important that the man is bringing home the bacon and the woman is At home making dinner taking care of the kids. They tend to be heavily affected. So there's a correlation here additionally Countries that are particularly neurotic have a lot of the parasite Yeah, these are significant trends And then countries that are where people don't really like uncertainty and they try to avoid situations where there's someone Certainty about what's going to happen. They're also more likely to be infected But it is important to note that these are observational studies So it could be that countries that really care about masculine sex roles are countries that are for example Eating more raw meat or the women are doing more gardening And so it could be these psychology traits that are driving the trends in infection and not the other way around but It's hard you will never probably know because you can't do the controlled infections as I said, but it's interesting to consider that It's interesting to consider that maybe a parasite is driving cultural differences between various countries So I told you about some examples that I particularly like I was going to mention briefly the hygiene hypothesis which was already touched upon and so There's a lot of different things that the parasite that parasites are starting to teach us about how our brain works How our brain interacts with the immune system and additionally just how the immune system works And there's a book by Dixon de paumier called parasites people in plowshares And it's all about how parasites can do amazing things to our body and how Scientists are trying to figure out how the parasites do those things So we can then use those things as tools for treating human diseases So these parasites have been just horrible for a really long time Hopefully we can bring them to some benefit by understanding them better and using the tricks that they've acquired Over millions of years of natural selection and evolution to treat human diseases and sort of try to make our lives A little bit better or to try to understand the world that we live in a little bit better So real quick i'm going to plug an event called bothfest Yeah, yeah, some people excited already. Okay, so bothfest is the festival of bed ad hoc hypotheses Yeah So people have submitted their best sort of plausible sounding scientific hypotheses that are actually just absolute rubbish So, uh, for example, the the idea that sort of spawned this was the idea that babies are sort of particularly aerodynamic And maybe they're aerodynamic so that you can catapult them long distances because the goal of evolution is to spread your genes far and wide And so there was a lot of different talks about evidence for this hypothesis But clearly we all know that that's crazy And so this is going to be a whole night of people presenting ridiculous hypotheses that sound plausible when given the right evidence It should certainly be hilarious. So our keynote speaker for the night is matt in men of the oatmeal And we've got six other Yeah, no, it's going to be awesome. So anyway, you you should you should come and you should look for tickets We're actually selling out pretty quickly. We're pretty excited And so yeah, so check it out part of the bay area science festival Uh, and this is my this is information about my corner of the weiner smith empire So, uh, you could find me on twitter at fooshmoo It's a poorly chosen twitter handle from many years ago. I used to have a blog called fungillish smungilus I study fungillish part of the penis, but anyway, you didn't need to know that So, uh, I also have a science blog called weiner smith and you can find my scientific papers there also And I have a podcast with my husband called weekly weiner smith dot com My husband is this orange fellow who doesn't wear his shirt. He does a comic quote saturday morning breakfast Yeah, and so uh, so if you want to come to my corner of the weiner smith empire, which is not the comic Then you can you can hang out over here with me So, thank you very much On the trimitone system that you're studying it look like, um, the Snail and the fish are fairly specific species specific hosts Is that true of the the predatory birds? So the question was uh, the snail and the fish are very specific It's just one host species is that also true of the predatory birds and the answer is uh, no So lots of different predatory birds can get infected, but it's just california horn snails In california killy fish. There are other trimitone parasites that are able to infect more than one fish species But this one seems to have specialized specifically on killy fish Which is maybe not super surprising because they're the most abundant fish out there So if you had to like take a shot at a fish that you hope you encounter killy fish is Probabilistically the one you're going to run into Yes, so no ethics are kind of preventing us from doing these kinds of tests on humans I'm just frustrating What about human analogs? Were there primate studies that are happening or other mammals that are being uh tested So the question was we don't have toxoplasmosis studies in humans, but what about in primates? So at the moment most of the research has been focused on rodents And I think that that's because from an ecological perspective That's probably more relevant and more interesting because the rodents are going to complete the life cycle Whereas you're less likely to have a primate. And additionally This is like we didn't necessarily talk about all the nastiness of the disease It's associated with brain tumors in some cases and the biological problems in babies and so I I think that you probably I think a lot of people probably would feel squeamish about infecting primates with it And so I'm sure there's some primate literature I don't happen to be familiar with it because as an ecologist I'm focusing on Like predator-prey interactions Balcony, sorry. Yeah you So, uh, it is fairly easy to scan for so you you're not actually finding the parasite when you remove blood You're finding antibodies to the parasite So you know that the immune system is responding to its presence And yes, uh, the parasite seems to change dopaminergic activity. So it's a neurotransmitter in the brain And we think that that explains the fact that infected individuals are about two and a half times more likely to get in a car accident than uninfected individuals and so these people aren't like Swerving all over the road obviously infected, but it reduces reaction time just a little bit So if you're in that situation where you need to make a split second move to get out of the way If you're infected, you're probably less likely to be able to do it So, yeah, I that's right No, no, so once it's in your brain, there's like there's not really much you can do It's really hard to treat stuff that's in your brain Because you've got that blood-brain barrier and you know, so you You're mostly stuck if you're infected, but the immune system usually controls it It it becomes a bigger problem if you end up having Like HIV or AIDS and your immune system isn't able to respond anymore So your immune system usually controls it from replicating unless something goes wrong Another balcony question. Oh, I thought I saw him never mind Yeah, and you're testosterone driven country scale The United States law Yeah, you know, I I thought ahead of time It was a mistake to not label the u.s. Or to label like france because we know has high prevalence and stuff like that I don't I don't remember off the top of my head. Which one was the u.s. Sorry No So that's an excellent question We we don't know the answer So there is definitely evidence in our past where we found like human bones In areas where like big cats have been eating So we have been eaten in the past by big cats that can be infected But now not so much like it happens pretty much never like even the crazy cat ladies are probably not at high risk so like So I it doesn't look like at the moment we're dead end hopes so a parasite that ends up in us is screwed So maybe it's really fine tuned to things like rodents And we're just kind of getting the side effects because the parasite is like, I'll give it a shot Okay, sorry the one up there question Good good. I'm doing my job So the question was Do the question is do you have it? Very specific so without drawing blood. I can't tell you for sure So so in the u.s. We're getting really good at screening our meats and making sure that none of the animals that we're Bringing out to supermarkets or whatever are infected So whether you cook it through thoroughly or not you shouldn't be getting getting infected by tatsuba osmosis And then for you specifically do you you know, do you have a cat who roams outdoors? Do you change a litter box? Do you do some gardening? Good good that might be like evolutionarily advantageous to hate cats So the answer is uh prevalence varies a lot depending on the country and depending on the behaviors So I don't know if you have it, but you can talk to a medical professional They can tell you One of your pictures showed a Bag of blood that could you could could you be infected from Infected from a blood transfusion Uh, I think that that used to be more common. I think we know to screen for that now But I believe that yeah, that was a way that you could previously get infected If you happen to be getting blood from someone who had recently been infected So they still had it circulating in the blood it hadn't become dormant So there's a small window of time and now I think we screened for it So it shouldn't happen anymore and I've been told that I can't answer any more questions But there are amazing parasites in the lobby and you can come talk to me out in front of amazing parasites. So thank you So again, Kelly is going to be that way along with lots and lots and lots of parasites Thanks again to Cell Scope Based on UC Berkeley as well as the California Academy of Sciences And uh Santa Barbara for providing some of those specimens in addition to that again Oakland Public Library back there our email sign up list is also back there if you want to give a talk Sign up and let us know. Also, we only send out two emails a month to remind you to come to cool stuff like this We're going to be back in 15. So you'll still have plenty of time to check out the books and talk to our speakers Once again, I'm Rick Karnesky one of the co-bosses of this we're just about two years old We'll have to have some awesome anniversary party later Our last speaker Kelly was fantastic everyone do a hand She was also she was also far too humble because not only is she involved in Boffest she's involved in other Bay Area Science Festival madness Including an event that we're going to be running that next month Keith is going to kill me For some reason the UCSF Media relations people thought that was really bad idea. So the name of the event is actually the near night block party However, we're going to have Kelly and the other science sort of podcasters Talking to people from a motorcycle Hacker space bar. It's a fantastic place. The owner is like a jaded ex-chemist. She is like surly I would lose enough like to her There's going to be game night at the Folsom Street Foundry the phenomenauts as well as a chiptunes band and Zeke cost over now the exploratory and the physics Teacher are going to all be at slums. That's where I'm going to be hanging out if you want to go You should get tickets now. They're only $15. It's a great bargain Show up in your nerdiest t-shirt and Kishore and I will pass all of you to go and We also have a nerd night speed dating at some street food park Nerd night field trips I love this hobby of mine because I got to do things like wander around soma knocking on random doors and asking people What do you do here and giving answers like oh, I'm an old Italian guy who wants to tell you all about leatherworking I'm like, that's awesome. We're totally going to have a tour of your leatherworking facility We have other tours field trips lined up with Especially coffee roasting and some other fun stuff The nerd night Madison boss Lee Bishop is going to be running those.  It's gonna. So it's gonna be crazy With that plug out of the way. I'm happy to introduce our next speaker Matt. We wouldn't Matt's gonna be talking to us about snake bites and carrying them Another nice thing about this gig is that there are a lot of awesome resources in the bay area One of which is atlas obscura. It tells you about all the places you want to visit in this case, perhaps not Snake island is off the coast of brazil It is so named because there are between three and five Snakes per square meter Weeding weeding one researcher to say on snake island, you're always three feet away from death And to the brazilian navy quarantining the island Matt's going to tell us about one potential way we will treat snake bite in the future Which is really nice because the way we have cheated in the past is so fantastic I'm sure many people Remember the clusterfuck that came after 9 11 our airspace closed down Except for the one plane Which carried anti-venom to a hospital who knows of course escorted by nice jets That's still better than this guy the host Some people apparently are bill host fans He lived to be 100 years old, which is pretty awesome considering he had 173 snake bites over his life He actually injected himself with anti with a snake venom every day for about 60 years So tough motherfucker almost as tough as this guy valentine gemaldo valentine got bit by A coral snake in texas coral snakes are vicious Many of you Yellow on red or red on black or something You don't want to be bit by a coral snake But when this guy got bit by a coral snake he bit off the head of the coral snake Skinned it and then formed a tourniquet from the snake skin His brother kept the head as like a souvenir As if I needed this warning now, we do often like We we often have like a kitten or bunny the covering in size is like a warning for like adult content We schedule talks like these late at night Obviously, you're going to soon see pictures of snake bites or kind of gruesome However, it's a really big problem and one that matt is helping to address so Everyone welcome matt to the stage I'm one of the the exposition doctors for exposition physician for the uh, california academy of sciences And uh, see there's been a couple Right up to my chin I've spent a couple minutes just describing my Basic job, which is to work as an exposition physician um parasites or sometimes a problem mostly in returning expeditioners and And getting people ready for expeditions And and really what uh, a lot of what I do is just emergency medicine or applying what I learned is an emergency physician To travel exploration medicine One of the things you have to think about is that trauma is your biggest problem on expeditions This is really what I think about a lot. How am I going to get my expeditions ready for trauma for environmental emergencies? we had Rollover in patagonia with potholes in ulaanbaatar people are taking the the manhole covers Selling for scrap metal at the chinese border. There are no street lights and we kind of wouldn't got to just plummet into a The manhole That's so other pictures of draining a broken Draining the blood out of an elbow with his exhibitions over he's got a broken elbow There places that we work with uh former current or former areas of political unrest and unexploded munitions You can see dr. Clark has her gps in case she gets blown into orbit She will find her way back to camp What's going on here? Anybody there's they were in the middle of the goby desert and we're driving down the road and there's water chase us What's going on Who said that who said that I have some door prizes Somebody will distribute these tickets two of these are for General admission and tour for nightlife the answer the question was what is going on here and All right, well that was a flash flood there the next picture that should have come up there is a picture of the entire Plane completely covered in water and then the third picture was a tornado All and and that's some kind of stuff that we have 2005 we're working in In Iqab peru next year was the paracus earthquake here really subject to the Degrees of the weather and In the environment this is Just an illustrious spin a lot of time treating people who are not on the expedition the leather come into the camp if they seeking medical care This is a patient that I treated in mongolia. He had he was septic. He had a blood he had a blood infection from a wound And I think we're actually going quite well, but I Switched them from IV antibiotics to oral antibiotics and then he had a life threatening allergic reaction Not the easy kind to treat which we had a flactic shock. You treat it. You're done But he had actually a stevens johnson syndrome, which is like a burn to treat like a burn So But the take-home lesson is if you're going to treat people in the field You have to be able to finish the job and we haven't we were there we were there for a couple weeks So I had a week of burn care in the goby desert Uh, let's see more trauma this fellow Oh, he was the recipient of machete His colleague his buddy threw a machete to him and he caught it with his hand by the way There's one more minor trauma. Let's see booty booty islands nowadays. We have iPhones one of the One of the field scientists cut her leg in the hold of the ship and here they are I phoning me from booty booty island off the coast of New Guinea And I'm talking dr. Jack nunbacher through a stapling procedure And finally, uh, not so not so uh inspiring case, which is which is really terrible Is this uh, it's a fellow that worked? Uh, I'm one of the academy expeditions as a local Field hand. He's got necrotizing stoma stomatitis untreated. This is a hundred percent fatal Described in the ear of hypocritees and so often as you can't do anything. This this is a surgical problem There's no place in Madagascar where this operation can be performed Just saying the main thing I was saying mostly what we see on the way on returning explorers in malaria By the top four in the last few years. We've had cases of nathostomiasis lechmanonis is a lot of malaria Oftentimes, I just have no idea what's going on. So I guess how to treat it And so that's mostly what I do Uh, get people ready or treat problems as they as they arise a few years ago. I was on expedition To the philippines and we were in an area which has neurotoxic snakes, which are cobras and crates primarily In that area and in about 10 years earlier One of our scientists had died from snake bite in the field and so I was very worried about this And so I was thinking about this problem and and that's the origin of this project, which is the search for the universal Uh antidote to snake bite.     They either paralyze you or they cause bleeding and clotting So that's the The whole thing is the answer. All right, the question is For the door for the big door brides, what is the difference between Venom and poisoned He saw that in first Sorry, I can't be the referee for this Balgony Is Excellent I need somebody to deliver this So the question is what is the difference between venom and poison if you leave none if you leave with no other bit of information from this talk The difference between venom and poison is that venoms are a subset of poisons that must be injected poisons are generally ingested They're put on the skin Is We'll get there good question. So the question is how do the snakes cause bleeding and clotting at the same time? We will we will get there. I think So Just just to give you another feel for what happens on expedition uh reaching into a lot of places you can't see is uh Excavating a uh some a titanosaur in argin patagonia You can see this little snake right there So where where proper footwear? Snake bite is a global problem I actually wasn't really aware of this until I started researching this problem That snake bite is a really a global epidemic and during the monsoon By 10,000 people a month died in india. So by 800 million people in india who are at risk living in the countryside And uh, there are about a million bites a year and in india About 50,000 to 60,000 deaths during the five months in the monsoon Disease of poverty 98 percent of the people who die from snake bites Are living in poverty. We don't really hear about it in the united states for north america We're really privileged. We have five six deaths a year in a bad year And so we don't really think about snake bites. Where else do we send our kids out to play? We don't pay attention to that go out and play you don't think about you don't worry about venomous snakes so That's that's the main point of this that this uh This is actually a banned practice, which is training training snake charmers from a young age. This is a child who's been bitten by Uh, almost certainly a crate or a cobra. He's got the broken neck sign. He's so weak. He cannot lift his head He just pops six backwards Exits so weak and as it turns out anti-venom don't work against paralytic venoms The way that the patient survives as they get to the hospital if they're the percentage of patients that get to the hospital in time But we treat it with with mechanical ventilation. It's been known since the 1870s If you just breathe with the patient for several days or several weeks in some cases They they will turn around and breathe Uh, what am I doing? So a couple more bit of perspective landmines kill 25 to 3500 people a year Snake bites 20 to 20 times that many So but uh, usa and gates and who zero dollars for snake bite research Landmines get about 700 million dollars a year still This is another child with the broken neck sign It's a very stereotypical syndrome the most common places where snake bites are Our prevalence are in sub-saharan africa india and southeast asia This is uh, this is actually the picture that inspired my Uh, the research project it's really captured my attention. I've published on a bunch of different Subjects. I my mentor's always criticized critiques my prognosis as a As an academic this poor because I'm too promiscuous. I like this I go from this idea to this idea I've published on about 20 different subjects, but this project has really gripped me for the last few years and Probably be my uh, my main project for the next decade Uh, I was explaining my homemade anti-paralletic snake bite kit to one of the The uh, herpetologists as I was leaving the expedition is Because your eyes will get weak if you have bitten and then the the bigger muscles will get weak So your eyes will get weak and then your tongue will get heavy And then you can't breathe And I was um falling asleep on the airplane when I looked was looking at this picture and I wonder if this Which is a better way. What if you could just do this as a nasal spray or just get rid of the needle And so that idea stuck in my head for a long time as it turns out this drug Neostigmine, which has been known to reverse paralysis from cobras and crates Since the 1970s Can be administered through the nose Um, so I guess that's that's really the punchline, but that the uh, the way I was thinking about this problem is what would have my solution look like anti-venoms are are They require refrigeration and it's not they're very expensive You have to have you take venom to make anti-venom from snakes, but it's really kind of weird It's 2014 you can dictate a message into your iphone and send it to your friend in the in the um In the upstairs of the theater But we still have to milk a snake And then Check that into a horse or a sheep and then extract the serum And then try the serum and find out which parts of that serum are active against the snake that you're thinking about And then put it into 20 or 30 bottles that will be required to treat the snake bite at extreme expense And 80 of those patients will have an allergic reaction to the venom because when you inject a horse or a sheep into somebody That means the system doesn't like it Um, so so my idea was to take something like neostigmine, which we've known about since for 80 years It's been around and see if we could get that through the nose It's heat stable. It's dirt cheap and uh, and uh, potentially useful So I wasn't getting any funding for this. It's quite hard to keep this funded And so I was expressing my frustration to my colleague at UCSF. I got this idea The basic invention. I can't just hide behind a bush and Indian waivers We're going to get bitten and leap out with my neostigmine and And treat them I'm I'm not quite willing to get invent them to test it And uh, and Phil says hey, we should just paralyze you And so uh, actually one of my one of my colleagues who helped in that is up in the I'm here to tell the tale. There's dr. Lance Montauk Um Among his important roles during the experiment about to describe was keeping me from being petrified by fear Uh in this experiment, uh The experiment is is was quite clever and Phil is so casual about this. Hey, we'll just paralyze you It turns out that neostigmine, which is a this drug that I'm describing. I don't want too much detail But Mary Walker first used it in 1935 to treat a paralyzing neurological disease And this drug became the basis for the treatment of a disease called myesthenygrabis, which is is Not rare, but not common and And it turns out it The mechanism by which this disease paralyzes people Is the same as cobra venom Right And so, uh, in fact the story really goes back over 140 years In in the 1870s this fellow Sir Joseph Ferrer who was in the Indian Medical Service realized that cobra venom works the same way as curary Which is the South American plant toxin And They behave exactly the same way, which is really remarkable. He didn't have the internet. He had to know form from the from From South America. He's working in India, but he actually did experiments demonstrating Aggression of paralysis between curary and neostidium And cobra venom was exactly the same And then in 1935, as I said, Mary Walker treated myesthenygrabis And then in the 1940s and 50s People were using curary to paralyze patients in the operating room And sometimes the cure I didn't wear off and then somebody said, well, we're trying neostigmine It's a reverse paralysis and that is how neostigmine became a drug that is now used 200 300 million times a year in operating rooms all over the world It's very inexpensive. It's it's very well understood Um The kind of extending this story in 1970s Uh, Banerjee in India treated A crate bite and a cobra bite Two separate patients using neostigmine intravenously In a hospital Now the drug is a little bit complicated intravenously because and and then uh And then in the 70s people realized they figured out how myesthenygrabis works with cobra venom And then in the 1990s people were experimenting with shooting neostigmine Up myesthenia patients noses and reversing their symptoms and so actually my my search to figure out If this could work or not work after I had this idea It was not very long because the literature was already there And so we convinced completely kosher the ucsf Ethics committee to let them paralyze a healthy human volunteer And and we published this paper which was a reversal of experimental paralysis in a human Using a nasal spray Suggesting approach to the treatment of snake bite now this alone doesn't really cover all the snakes that would would Kill you but it suggests an approach that's a little bit different than the standard approach And so in this experiment we used clinical parameters To to demonstrate the progression of paralysis time On this axis in minutes, and then these are different clinical parameters such as the ability to see as I got more Paralyzed I couldn't see I could just barely see the hands waving and then I can't swallow And then I can't lift my neck down here And then and that's having a little bit tickled some time breathing while while My anesthesia colleagues were casually debating the whether Hank Williams jr. Or Hank Williams senior was the better country singer But dr. Montauk never left my side And it's a hey, why don't we give him the drug? I think he's ready And so and so so and so it was Part of the part of the worry about using just clinical parameters is you worry that people will evaluate this though. It's just like a trick in a in a A televangelist thing get up and you rise from the bed because it from after a stable process we gave the drug and then and then It all it all reversed and we didn't use venom We use the same basic drug as these in the operating room, which is a curary derivative To establish a stable paralysis this this was the most painful part of the experiment to prove that it could not cheat We attached a electrode to my thumb. It was shocking my thumb Every four seconds for two hours and as the paralysis set in the thumb can't flick against the shock of the electrode And then as the as the strength returns it would return So there you have it Oh, I didn't even I'm sorry. I didn't even know there was a clear picture. I did not remember that there was a clear picture So this is this is the basic thing Getting weak getting strong in between nasal neo-statement. It's just administered as a nasal spray This is a after we did the experiment on me. We got a little bit of money to do the experiment on mice My parents reaction to this was this you're a schmuck I'm hoping this gives me some immunity from PETA in the future because I've promised my parents I will never try a stunt like this again But just to give you an idea what what we did we we gave high-dose cobra venom to mice And and then and then treated them several minutes later With uh with neo-stigming and 100 of those mice out of the controls of which 100 died and 10 out of 10 out of the 15 Mice that got intranasal neo-stigming survived and were completely normal um A few months ago. I was I was I'm gonna be completely candid because I'm just that way I was writing an email to the gates foundation for the 200th time saying come on guys This is what you know, they get billions of worthy causes being Solicited and and they have to make some decisions. They haven't responded To uh to this in in the way that I would like which was to put out a Innovations challenge whether it's my idea or somebody else's and I they have a new director of of the gates foundation And I nobody would give me her email And so in a moment of frustration I sent it to the new york times And they said lots would be a great editorial And so this is the this is what the uh the editorial looked like but it really it started off as an email and uh And then they said oh, you're gonna love the art. We're not going to show it to you. It's a surprise. It's really It's really striking and and I actually I I was genuinely surprised. I was relieved I was relieved that it was a cobra which is a parallel paralyzing snake, but I think that this This woman does not look like one of the 98 percent of the usual victims in poverty She looks she looks as if she just walked out of the new york room But a lot of people read this we got a very nice response and so So they're just gonna I'm gonna actually just really keep things short um I do often wonder why every uh medical virtually every medical society as as The snake on its staff and you have no idea. We have no good treatment. There is no good field treatment for snake bite You cannot give anti-venom in the field. It is too dangerous It is too expensive. You have to get the right anti-venom if you're in southern india It's great because the anti-venom for russell's vipers may be in southern india, but if you're northern india It's not going to work because snakes are a little bit different the outside coatings of these Venoms are a little bit different from season to season from region to region and so So the fundamental mechanisms on the inside are basically the same the snake kills you by paralysis It's going to be one of two of these salivary enzymes. It kills you by bleeding It's going to be a variation of one of the two paralytic enzymes Um same basic enzyme. It's got the same inside and has a little bit different outside And then there the enzymes that cause tissue destruction So probably there are only four or five really fundamental mechanisms That can cause death and all of them can be inhibited by small molecules that can be absorbed that can be dissolved in water and um And are probably inexpensive and probably heat stable I think the the basic thing is whether the nasal spray is the way to go or an epi pen for snake bite or an eye drop for a sublingual Lozenger, I don't know um, that's suppository um At the end of that I don't know but I think we've been successful in changing the way people think about the problem which to which is to me Satisfying outcome irrespective of whether this project or somebody else's like it pans out The real one of the real reasons to go an expedition is every so often You'll be hanging out in the field and you will find a dinosaur egg with an embryo in it I'll take questions Hi, hi, um, so I read an account about your colleague the uh, Academy since you died in Burma because of the state fight um wasn't a lot of the reason that the problem is financial because If Cal Academy had had more money Dedicated to that combined Research project they could have brought a smart person like you along with them And then they could have also paid the Burmese military to Netta back the guy out of there. Um, was it like money like what partly like What uh, or lack of money prevented him from being saved? The question is is was a was was it money that prevented Dr. Swinsky from being Saved um the answer is not number one. I wasn't there so I don't Know the details. I think there were a lot of things that go into Went into this from what I understand. There's a lot of bad luck 9-11 happened that day. There was no way that they had no communication They didn't know about 9-11 It's not clear that anti-venom would have worked Okay, so the answer is I don't know exactly either and A little bit reluctant to discuss publicly what I do know or don't know but I think that For the most part it was there was a lot of bad luck involved They were very very far from oh, I think I think in a lot of ways There's a lot like the people that die from state by their hours and hours away from care if you're in india, which Here we've nearly a billion people at risk on top of a billion snakes It's still average of six hours to get to the hospital for for these people. The other thing is this really expensive And and so if you're bitten and there's only a three percent chance that that's going to be a lethal bite Are you willing to risk six or eight years of your family's income to get treatment? That probably doesn't make a difference just so it's almost it's a you're making a huge decision To get treated when you don't even know if the snake bite is it's going to be a lethal one So people go to traditional healers by the time they get symptoms Now it's too late to get to the hospital. So we're we're trying to come instead of a three years income solution of three days income type solution I think I think I answered the question I wished you asked We'll move on. Thank you. It's a fair question. I just don't have the answer You said that people both bleed out and it's coagulating But how do you get both at the same time? So the question is is how can venom Create bleeding and clotting and paralysis at the same time So the all the venoms are derived from saliva. These are salaried glands and there are different types of enzymes and So for one thing the venoms are complex mixtures. There's not just one flavor of Thing in the spit. It's got maybe have a paralytic enzyme. It might have a digestive enzyme And it might have something that causes bleeding or clotting part of what will decide what happens is As I said regional or small genetic difference in the outsides of the anti venom of the venom rather Which will dictate whether it ends up in a nerve or ends up in the bloodstream but the but the fundamental Core of these enzymes will be very similar. So for example Crate venom has a very high activity of an enzyme called phospholipase And when that phospholipase attacks a nerve it destroys the nerve eventually Or inhibits the release of nerve transmitters And that will cause paralysis But in the blood it will cause clotting or derangements of of clotting and bleeding Which might occur simultaneously such as we see with patients who have Who have too much consumption of the blood clotting components from diseases like satin shock And the venoms will promote these abnormal Cycles, but the the the basic enzyme is the same on the inside So so that's why I think that the the approach Could be that instead of generating antibodies To venoms so the anti-venom is an antibody made by horses or sheep To the outside of the venom We should be trying to find ways to find the Lowest common denominator of what's on the inside of these venoms. It's really only going to be a few enzymes Is my prediction So the question is do we have a do we have agents that will work against the bleeding and clotting disorders induced by venoms In nasal spray form and the answer is we have some candidates But even even the even the anti-paralytic Is really we're embryo, you know, it's embryonic experiments. We've done in one human Few mice, but we're getting funding now to test a wider Variety, so these are really proof of principle experiments. I wouldn't consider them to be proof of anything We hope to get there I'm gonna let you call The question is what can you do to help The question that that that that um, I say it's been the philanthropic route has been really difficult Um, I can just keep them the ball in the air be aware of it If you if you find somebody who didn't funding the research would be delighted to know about it But I think I think the the main thing is awareness. Um, I think in a way To me, this is a problem a governmental problem. For example The Indian government subsidizes the production of anti-venom It's incredibly expensive. It's a high dollar industry And so maybe some of that some money should be going to to coming up with with uh With alternative solutions it the solution doesn't I don't think it needs to come from here or from from me or or It doesn't really matter where it comes from But I think that the the the place where it should come from is we're most likely to Have success would be someplace like India where lots of fantastic chemists and lots of candidate compounds and And a billion people on top of a billion snakes much easier to test it than here so Yes I would just like to say that you've given me a new found respect for what one has to do to be first author on a paper I hope I never have to go to those lines A number of the examples you've used are um, snakes in uh in India uh, venom globally venom Venom of snakes in australia say or in the americas or africa what are there a lot this is a lot of diversity in the functionality of the venoms or You know what a what a uh, are the are the same issues? Does venom work the same way in venomous snakes in other parts of the world? So the the question is do do venoms work by the same basic Negative whether you're in australia or the southern u.s. And rooting around for coral snakes Um the answer is yes. I mean the the coral snake venom is very susceptible to neo stigamine So so for example the the basic again the basic enzymes are The same on the inside that that what makes them active is the same Now australia is a great place to test what we've got so far because all the snakes in australia are killed by paralysis And so that would be a great place to to try something like this and and maybe the place to try it is an animal husbandry A lot of door a lot of veterinary cases So I guess to answer your question. What can we do in the united states? I think the way to do it would be test it and And dogs are a lot of dog bites in the southern united states um, and I don't know about cats, but dogs and dogs get bitten by uh By coral snakes pretty frequently in the south so something like that So maybe maybe in the animal husbandry is the way to try it Thanks to matt if you have any last Questions for him. He'll yeah, he'll he'll be in the lobby. I did want to give One last sort of administrative plug first of all, uh, there's a whole mess of nternights coming up apparently, uh, our Brothers and sisters in the uh north bay and san physico. You'll notice that we aren't on the list We're actually off next month I was expecting more of an all but I'll just say odd to myself that no and odd um The reason we're off is that we're going to great lengths to help out with the block party, which is right before us So go that side Sign up. It's gonna be awesome You could pay anywhere from free to like 15 bucks depending on what you want to do. It's gonna be great Kelly plug boss fast. We just opened up sales of our $10 balcony seats They're gonna go really fast because people like matt and men are tweeting about it The people that are going to be Right here in this theater instead of us next month are basics the bay area art science interdisciplinary collaborative sessions Um, they're phenomenal. I saw their show in san francisco, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it here So come out Kelly is also going to be at creatures of the nightlife at the cal academy along with a lot of other cool content She's giving a talk and having another science sort of thing Um, you should also just check out the cal academy because they have great skulls exhibit If you read more about the back when you give like one last wave to the librarian And sign up on our email list and all that stuff, but we will be back in november Uh, that's the monday before Thanksgiving.  I know whatever and I'm really really glad to get her Serena agnew was a suggestion from a past internet speaker. She's a neuroscientist. It's great. And uh, christin sel wrote a book about science fiction interfaces and he picked a particularly salacious talk that has sex in the title twice So it's going to be awesome So I look forward to seeing most of you at the block party and the rest of you here in uh, november Thanks