Ask Dr. Drew - Murder & Fraud in the Name of Science with Sam Kean – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 61

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Sam Kean spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a kid, and now he’s a writer in Washington, D.C. His stories have appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, and Psychology Today, and his work has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab”, “Science Friday”, and “All Things Considered,” among others. He is a New York Times bestselling author of several books, including "The Disappearing Spoon" and his newest book "The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy and other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science." Follow Sam Kean at https://twitter.com/Sam_Kean and visit his website at https://samkean.com/  Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). SPONSORS • BLUE MICS – After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew’s iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don’t need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue’s lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew’s Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue  • HYDRALYTE – “In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market.” Dr. Drew recommends Hydralyte’s easy-to-use packets of fast-absorbing electrolytes. Learn more about Hydralyte and use DRDREW25 at checkout for a special discount at https://drdrew.com/hydralyte  • ELGATO – Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato’s Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew’s streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato’s lights transformed Dr. Drew’s set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/  THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Our present guest is Sam Kean. His new book is The Ice Pick Surgeon, which I have some very special sort of relationship to the icepick surgeons. I think it will surprise him. Murder, fraud, sabotage, I think piracy and other dastardly deeds perpetrated in the name of science. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to a specific topic, not necessarily all human investigation with science, but I want to get into most of this stuff. It's very interesting. He's written for many different organizations and publications, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Slate, Psychology Today, NPR Radio Lab, Science Friday.

Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f***'s sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. I want to give a shout out to our good friends at Blue Mics. If you've heard my voice on this show anytime over the past year, including right now, you've been listening to blue microphones. And let me tell you, after more than 30 years in broadcasting, I don't think I've ever sounded better. But you don't need to be a pro or have a fancy studio to benefit from a quality mic. You may not realize it, but if you've been working

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Hydrolyte Plus Immunity comes in convenient, easy-to-pour sticks that rapidly dissolve in water, make a great-tasting drink, has 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink, uses all-natural flavors, gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and even vegan. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity is also now available in ready-to-drink bottles at the Walmart next to the pharmacy, or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolite.com slash drdrew. Again, that is h-y-d-r-a-l-y-t-e dot com slash d-r-d-r-e-w. Be sure to use the code DrDrew25 for a special discount. Sam, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me.

You betcha. So I want to get into your book first of all. And I thought, one thing did strike me though, have you been writing about COVID at all? I'm surprised I don't see more of that flying around. No, it came up in a few places in the book here and there,

but I was fit to write it with the pandemic ruling, so I didn't really plan on having anything like that in the book. Got it. It didn't quite have a spot. Got it. Have you been writing about COVID in any other publications? Because I think you seem like such a great science writer. I would just be curious your thoughts.

Not really. I mean, it's been covered so heavily and I just kind of, yeah, I read a little bit more about history and things like that. So I just kind of let that go for other people. I get it. I get it. So let's get into history. A lot of people don't know that Abraham Lincoln was the target of body snatchers, I believe twice, and so was Mary, I believe, or at least they had to hide Mary with Abe at one point. That's one chapter in your book. Tell us about that. Yeah, so that was a little anecdote that I mentioned in there. Abe Lincoln was the target, actually, of some body snatchers. This was a little bit of a tangent, actually, of some body snatchers.

This was a little bit of a tangent, but, you know, I love tangents in my books. It was kind of fun to do. Basically, there was a group of counterfeiters who decided that one of their buddies in jail, they wanted to get him out of jail, wanted to spring him. And they came up with, excuse me, kind of a cockamamie plan, which was to break into Lincoln's tomb, which was not very well guarded, steal Lincoln's body, and hold it for ransom until their buddy got sprang from jail. And I kind of put that in the context of body snatching in general in the United States and Great Britain, because it was a pretty big problem for a very long time, especially among doctors, anatomists, medical students,

people who needed to basically have bodies to dissect to understand how the human body worked. And there was a lot of body snatching going on. This was just one sort of a kind of fun anecdote side note to that. So most of it was in the name of science. It's funny. I'm remembering, I've forgotten now, many, many years ago when we were in second year medical school, we did a skit for the incoming first year students that they were going to have to each find a body to do their anatomy lab.

And we had planted in the audience you know other second year students going you know my uncle really sick i mean how soon do you need the how soon do you need the body this kind of stuff but we that would not have been a joke a few hundred years ago actually yeah i understand uh and so uh yeah the the body statue and my understanding is the reason those dudes got caught is one of them went to a bar, got drunk and started bragging about what they were doing. And they nearly pulled it off. And I don't remember the details, but they ended up hiding Mary and Abe in like somebody's basement for a long time. And then what they finally decided to do, there's a whole possibly apocryphal story about how they eventually, now he's under concrete, like three stories of concrete.

They decided they were just going to put an end to all this. But there is a story of a 13-year-old being told by an old farmer in Springfield going, hey, you may want to go over to the cemetery. Something's going on. You may want to take a look at what they're doing. And what they were doing was doing the final viewing of Lincoln's body to identify him, to make sure it was him before they put him under all the concrete. And this 13-year-old reported years later as an old man that there was Abe Lincoln completely intact with the mole on his face, the the everything was completely there he would he said he looked in the coffin it was shocked to see old abe sitting there uh just himself and now to keep him safe he's under concrete um and the idea of an ice pick surgeon

are you talking about the uh nobel prize winners that developed the uh the frontal lobotomy? Yes. Agnes Moniz was the Nobel Prize winner, but especially in the book, I talk about Walter Freeman, who was the very notorious doctor associated with the lobotomy. Moniz actually called it a little different procedure. He called it a leucotomy, I think. And it was really Freeman, the one that made the lobotomy the notorious procedure that we all know today. So the chapter touches on both of them, but Freeman is really the focus of the chapter. So I worked in a psychiatric hospital

from the early 80s on and took care of a number of lobotomy patients now in their 80s, 70s, and 80s. Singulotomy, lobotomy, it was a freaking disaster. They developed gliosis around, so they get scarring or called gliosis around the wounds. And so they'd all develop progressive dementias and weird inability to take care of themselves. Very protean, weird syndromes, but complete devastation from the lobotomies. And it was also clear to me, getting to know both the patients and their history, they were either or and drug addict alcoholics or borderline personality disorder. That was it. Troublesome people.

Oh, interesting. Troublesome people, essentially. Yeah. Which is really what they were. And there's a story on the lobotomies that, of course, Rose Kennedy had a lobotomy, right? Rosemary, yep. Rose Kennedy. JFK sister, yeah. That's right. Go ahead. Yeah, so she um was the she had kind of a harrowing birth in that i mean it sounds kind of crazy today but when her mother was giving birth to her there

was no doctor around and at the time they were very differential the doctors you know there had to be a doctor there and the midwife actually started pushing the baby back up inside her mother in order to wait for the doctor to get there. Sadly, the umbilical cord ended up getting wrapped around her neck. Oxygen got cut off to her brain for a while, and she ended up with some brain damage. She was always a bit slow, had trouble riding a bike, a little bit clumsy with utensils, things like that. But overall, she was okay. She just had a few, you know, sort of slow developmental issues. Unfortunately, the father, Joseph Kennedy, considered her an embarrassment. At the time, he figured he had to have a perfect family. There

was no room for any sort of issues, things like that. And so he decided to lock her away in a convent. And naturally, she didn't like this. She started rebelling, started escaping at night, running around, and they got very worried that she was going to essentially embarrass the family. And so Joseph Kennedy got in touch with Walter Freeman and arranged for Rosemary to have a lobotomy. And as you said, it was basically a complete disaster. I don't know what you saw for you noticed this in the patients. Maybe if you didn't know them before. But the thing they really mentioned with a lot of the patients that Freeman worked

on was that they lost what he called their spark in that they just didn't have much initiative afterward. You couldn't really get them to do anything. If you asked them, hey, you want to go for a walk or something? They would say, oh, okay, fine. They would just go along with you, follow along with you. But they would never initiate that on their own. And that was the big symptom that Freeman talked about, that a lot of them lost, was this initiative, this spark.

They just sort of existed instead of having volition and things that we would normally associate with a full functioning human life. Right. They were no longer a problem. Crazy. Super crazy, I got to tell you. And the mom, Rose Kennedy, said in her very advanced years that worse than losing her two sons was what they did to Rosemary.

She said that was the most dramatic moment for her. Isn't that interesting? I remember JFK actually had to. He had to? JFK on the campaign trail actually had to sneak away at one point just to visit Rosemary. They had locked her away in an institution in Wisconsin, and essentially no one was allowed to visit her or acknowledge her. So it's a very sad story. And the reason Dr. Brown, who was the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, or created the National Institute of Mental Health, was able to manipulate Kennedy into signing the Community Mental Health Act was because of Rosemary. He felt so much yeah that was a big influence on him that's right and so freeman was a

nut he would carry the ice picks in his coat pocket not sterilized in his coat pocket he would pull them out he'd hold the patient's head you maybe they'll find i can probably show you a picture of it caleb you can put up there it'll freak out. You drop the head over the side of the bed. He put the ice pick above the eye here, take a hammer, hammer it in, and then sweep it up and back to make sure to disconnect the frontal lobes of the brain. If the patient wasn't confused and vomiting, he would do it again, which is an unbelievable story that I, this kind of thing I heard. Yeah. It's unbelievable. The little piece that I could read between the lines, sort of reading the history, it was history I was very interested in because I was seeing these patients.

The neurosurgeons at the time were freaking the hell out. I could, I could see it in what they were writing and their lack of willingness to communicate with Freeman. They were like, oh my God, he's doing neurosurgery with an ice pick. You got to be kidding me. The neurosurgeons just went into like freeze mode, much like primary care doctors during COVID. They just stopped talking and they sort of were mumbling amongst themselves. You could see that they were like mortified. And psychiatry, which has always had this problem where they want to be doctors, they want to be medicalizing mental health care.

And so psychosurgeries, and I'm not against that. I think that's a viable sort of pursuit, but in their enthusiasm to do that, they did some crazy stuff, and psychosurgery was one of them. Am I characterizing that about right? Yeah, in the book, you can actually see there's a famous picture of Freeman where he is operating, doing neurosurgery without gloves, without a face mask, and there is just a zoo of people around him. There are probably 20 to 30 people in the picture because

he would go to these asylums. He has his hammer. Yeah, and he's hammering it right in there. He would go to these asylums, usually in rural places where they wanted to essentially empty them out, and he would call up reporters. There'd be people right there. He would line up 15, 20 patients. He would sometimes see how many of them he could do in a day his record was 25 in a day there are also stories he was fairly ambidextrous so he could do two of them at the same time yeah two at once to be more effective i mean basically just to show off to reporters people would say is this the one you're looking for hold on they're gonna put it's like a diagram that's the that's the article no no no well that's he's showing where the ice pick goes from the eye up if you just look at freeman

ice pick yeah just look at freeman ice pick and uh you will see him in the a bunch of pictures the picture if you go to images the picture in the lower left corner with him in his shirt sleeves with a hammer you'll see the picture i want to show that Sam's talking about. When Faces Made the Case for Le Bon. Do you have it there, Caleb? I'm looking for it. I don't know if I could... How do I get it to you?

Well, anyway, were there any... I mean, I'm sympathetic to so many of the things that you are writing about. Were there any surprises for you as you wrote the book? I was a little surprised that, you know, there were a lot of different fields where these kinds of things came up. I expected it, you know, to happen in medicine because you're dealing with individuals, you're dealing with people. It's sort of a human science, but there were stories in the book about, you know, physics, botany, just all sorts of different areas of science where you see people basically abusing their privileges like this. Do you have a way of thinking about that?

That's the one. You got it. So there he is in his shirt sleeves taking the pic and pushing it into the patient's eye on the same page where you found this, uh, Caleb, look at the second row of pictures on the far, the furthest to the right where he's got his finger over an eye and a thing jammed into somebody's eye.

Can you see that? Anyway, I don't want to get too crazy with all the, somebody on restream said that picture looks very similar to the COVID home test instructions. I thought that's really funny. Who said that? That's clever. Let's see. It's MewMew911 on Twitch. Oh, MewMew. That's very funny. Let's even get the other picture up there, Caleb. In any event, so what do you think is going on? Because these are not people who go out with the intention to harm people uh their intention is to help but it always feels like their their enthusiasm their insulation by their professional societies that sort of fawn over new techniques no no no no i'm

talking about the one was a person that they're doing that to and their ego, right? I mean, those are the things that seem to happen. Do you have a way of thinking about why people go down these paths? Yeah, I think that that's a pretty good sustained characterization of it. I do talk about some of the common psychologies that you see with the people who do essentially commit these crimes in the name of science. Ego is a big one. They're very good about sort of tunneling. They have tunnel vision. They kind of everything else gets blocked out and they're just focused on getting results, getting research. They tend to sort of dehumanize their patients in some way. I remember there was a quote from a doctor who studied syphilis where he said his idea of heaven was unlimited syphilis and unlimited means to

experiment on it. So people to him, essentially, they were just these biological systems where he could run experiments on them. And he, in fact, pushed back against the idea of using penicillin on people, even though it cured it, because he got to the point where he just wanted to see how far things went with syphilis. He wanted to see the end stages of it. So really, they were blocking out the people involved in it. And yeah, I shake my head too. It's kind of a hard thing to imagine when you're a doctor and you care more about the biology than you do the patient behind it. I can imagine people with like the Nick, the TV show to me was another sort of version of this, which is these guys didn't have much to do. Everybody was dying.

So they were trying everything they could, you know, and they, and in doing so, they tried some wild things. I think it kind of started there because so much of this was a 20th century phenomenon where, where I don't know the, the, the physician or particularly the surgeon became deified in certain ways. And the reality is there wasn't much to be done. People were dying all over the place. and so if you could do anything you were doing something and if they died sooner oh well uh you know what i mean it was a weird psychology that was taking hold i thought that nick i thought the nick portrayed that very very well go ahead yeah and you i mean you mentioned the nobel prize winner agos moniz when lobotomies got started they were in a way defensible

in that there was essentially no other treatment for people in asylums. They were locked away in straitjackets, in padded rooms. A lot of them were seeing things. They could not be around other people. They could not go outside. It was a very sad life and doctors were desperate. They had no way to help them. And lobotomies, as you said, it was kind of a desperate gamble, but they had no other options. And so at the beginning, in some cases, lobotomies were somewhat defensible. Freeman just took things way too far. And essentially, someone once called him the Henry Ford of lobotomies, and he loved that. He was mass producing them. He wanted to bring them to the masses.

And that's what he did. He was too ambitious. He went way too far. And so when we think about, again, I'm trying to figure out why people do this and, you know, how science can go wrong and what we need to sort of buttress ourself against, you know, be prepared to see these excesses develop. Same thing happened with the opioid epidemic. You know, when there were, what happened was there was a woman named Foley, who was an excellent physician and brought palliative care to cancer patients in the, really it was the early 80s. And so, I mean, we weren't treating cancer pain. Can you imagine that? We were not treating it. It's just unthinkable. She brought it in. It was the right thing to do. She thought Purdue Pharmaceuticals was a godsend because we

could more effectively treat cancer pain. The problem is the enthusiasm came in. Pain became whatever the patient says it is. Pain became the fifth vital sign. Pain control became whatever the patient says it is well now you have these giant mills where you don't even need doctors because it's the patient's decision what pain control is so just get a menu and have the patient pick what they want that's where we ended up from treating cancer pain to having a counter where you could get your dilaudid isn't that crazy yeah yeah you can see basically how where things started in each step, how at each step you can see why they made the decisions they made, but you look back at the end

where you started and you there's a big gap there and you can see all of the sort of the mistakes that were made along the way and you can see the commonalities in case after case. My deepest fear is that we're doing something like that in the present moment with our pandemic. A lot of silly decisions that are being just jammed down people's throats and accelerated through with enthusiasm without any discussion or temperance. And to me, this feels the same. Having been through the opioid crisis, having been through these, you know, having taken care of the lobotomy patients and been aware of how

that went down on patients, so to speak. So I am gravely concerned. And by the way, in none of those cases, I don't think in any of the cases, maybe Mengele, but I don't really think in any of the cases that you review was really the government involved with any of it. It really was the medical profession or the scientific community that perpetrated things without the help of government. Is that accurate? Accurate for the most part. a few cases such as the Tuskegee study and then the Guatemala syphilis study after that, where it was a government agency, the public health service, and then it became the CDC, who were actually running the experiment. So in that case, you do have a government entity running it. But for the

most part, you are right. It was usually individual doctors who were kind of working on their own, and the medical profession was the one who policed them or failed to in some cases. Yeah, I always thought before the present moment, I always thought of the CDC as just advisory to the medical profession. I saw them as funded by the government, but really part of the medical community. So that's kind of interesting. So tell them about the Tuskegee experiment. There's a word that's hard to get a second word out after. That's amazing. You can't pronounce something. And the misconception that people often sort of throw out there in relation to the Tuskegee experiment is they will mention the Tuskegee Airmen, which have nothing to do with this. Oh, right. Yeah. Actually, I talk about that a bit in the book. It is sad that the Tuskegee experiments kind of besmirched

the name of Tuskegee because it was once a source of pride in the black community. You had the Tuskegee Airmen. You had a lot of civil rights movement in the area. I believe Rosa Parks even was from there. I mean, it was a very, very proud name. And now, unfortunately, it's infamous because of this experiment. Basically what they did was they had very high rates of syphilis in the Tuskegee area. And they went in and they decided what they were going to do is they were going to monitor the syphilis basically until it got to the end stages. And in a way, again, at the beginning, they did have some good intentions. They were trying to look

at whether syphilis affected black people versus white people in different ways. There were some indications at the time that maybe syphilis was a little better left alone in that the drugs used at the time to treat syphilis were things that had mercury in them, things that had arsenic in them, very harsh drugs. At the beginning, it was just an observation study. Where it went bad was later in that penicillin came around, which was obviously much less harsh than mercury or arsenic drugs, but they didn't tell these people- And more effective. Yeah, and more effective too, definitely. But they didn't tell the people that penicillin

was available. They didn't tell them that they could maybe cure this disease. In some cases, they didn't even tell them they had syphilis. They would lure them into the clinic by saying, hey, we're going to give you this free special treatment. Well, it turned out it was just a spinal tap because they wanted to monitor the syphilis and they weren't treating them at all. So they lied to them, they withheld information from them, and didn't give them the best standards of care. And that's why it became such a big scandal when it was finally exposed in the 1970s. And was it the nurse that exposed it?

I thought there was a young researcher that came upon it and went, hey, we got to, this is not okay. There was a kind of a weird mix. There was a, someone I think on the advisory board, I'm trying to remember now, someone who was involved with the public health service, basically was reading about these experiments and said, this is crazy. We can't do this. Went to actually the New York Times and the Washington Post, and they said, ah, you know, whatever. They blew him off. Finally, he convinced an AP reporter in the early 70s to write a story about it. She wrote a story about it, and that's when it kind of exploded. So they were actually publishing this in medical journals. New York Times, Washington Post blew it off. There were people out there who knew about it, but just no one really cared for a while. So there are a couple of things I don't know much about that you wrote about.

Talk to me about John Mooney and his work with transgender. Yeah. So John, is it Mooney? I thought it was money, but it might've been. Money, money. I beg your pardon. it's money yep okay money um so john money was a scholar he's from new zealand who was very big in the uh i guess he got his name really going with uh transgender people so uh people who are biologically one sex but feel themselves to be another gender i should say uh biologically one sex feel themselves to be another gender, I should say, biologically one sex feel themselves to be another gender. And he was really the first person to champion these people and to say, you know, they are just normal everyday people and we shouldn't, you know, they were often called freaks before, very, very harsh treatment for them. And he was the one who kind of normalized them. Unfortunately, like the other cases in the book, he often took things way too far, and

he was linked to a notorious experiment involving two twins from Winnipeg in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Essentially there was a botched circumcision on one of them, and this poor little kid lost his penis. It burned off, fell off, and the parents didn't know what to do. And so John Money heard about this case and essentially told the parents that based on his expertise, on his research, that sex, gender, all of that had no biological basis whatsoever. And that what they should do with this boy who had lost his penis was that they should raise the boy as a girl,

but without telling her anything about her past. So essentially raise her as a girl and she would be completely fine. I think they did a little genital reassignment surgery or something too, didn't they, on this one? They did, yes. They removed the scrotum and the testicles. They tried to fashion sort of a rudimentary vagina. And then they basically tried to raise the boy as a girl. And according to John Money's theories, there would be no problems whatsoever. And you can imagine what happened.

The little boy had all sorts of problems. Never quite felt right, always felt kind of strange, and ended up having a harrowing, terrible, awful life until finally, around the age of 14, the parents broke her life, understood what was going on. But these psychological scars ran very, very deep. And actually, both she, later he, and his brother ended up killing themselves because of the deep psychological scars they had from their treatment, not only being raised by that, but they had to go into Money's office all the time. And Money was frankly kind of a monster to them. He would make them, you know, pose in sexual positions to try to train them in the proper way to like masculize or feminize them. I mean, he was really, really an awful manipulative person, but he just had this

kind of cachet and people trusted him and just let him do whatever he wanted again just beware excesses and medicine anything excessive whether it's just where guys um and oh I just I just just taking my breath away you mentioned brother. Why was he involved with that? The brother was involved because essentially money, as we were talking about, did not view them as people as much as an experiment. And he viewed the brother, he thought, aha, twin brother, a perfect control for my experiment. That's why he was so excited about this because they could raise one as a girl one as a boy and according to his theories that uh gender had nothing to do with biology had no basis in biology that they that they would essentially both both be raised as perfectly healthy normal functioning

adults i believe there are at least two other similar stories. They were male-to-female problems due to misadventures and whatnot and ambiguous genitalia. And they usually ended suicide. Why isn't that being discussed anymore today by the community that's trying to find the right treatments for transgender individuals? I'm not sure. Money was also involved in a lot of intersex or what used to be called hermaphrodite people where they have ambiguous genitalia. And one of the reasons that he's vilified today, even in the intersex community, is that he was big on pushing them to, as he said, correct their genitalia in order to make them look all male or all female. And he, I mean, there were thousands of cases around the world based on his theories where he would push people to get this unnecessary and often mutilating surgery. And I'm not sure why

this isn't more of a big scandal. I mean, he really, really ruined a lot of people's lives, even beyond that dramatic case I mentioned of the boy who lost his penis and was raised as a girl. It just feels like it's a piece of history that should be studied very, very carefully. Because you can learn so much from these excesses, whether it's the, again, opiates, ice pick. There's a lot to learn here. And I would argue, and any of you listening to us now have this conversation, that the main lesson you should take is excess. Excessive enthusiasm, excessive certainty, excessive. If it just seems like it's an inflated idea that's new, Be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful. I mean, I'm sure there's a million examples in plastic surgery as well. You know, just be careful.

That's all I'm saying. Not that I'm certain, you know, here's probably the irony of this, Sam. I bet there are histories of breakthroughs that happen this way and our breakthroughs and help humanity for years to come? Yeah, I mean, it's tough to judge at the time what is going to be seen as, you know, a breakthrough, what's going to be seen as something that's excess, where people took things way too far. But I do think that, yeah, that is a good sort of guideline when you have people going way, way farther than everyone else and pushing things very hard, very fast, kind of the move fast and break thing. Pushing. Idea.

Pushing, yeah. Yeah. Pushing is, I think, the thing. The enthusiasm, the pushing, the certainty. In medicine, you have to have humility all the time. Biology, just in biology generally, you have to be very humble. Or science in general, yeah. We think we know what's going on.

Yeah, but especially biology. I mean, I guess you can have a little less humility in physics if you really have command of the math and you're certain of the – The consequences are a little – Different. Yeah. The consequences are a little worse. Yeah. Less worse, yeah.

Yeah, maybe. It depends on what we're working on. But just biology is infinitely – I say it all the time. It's infinitely complex. It's like trying to predict behavior of clouds. And you've got to have a lot of humility and don't use words like always and never. You just don't use them because they don't really apply. So let's take a quick break. I have a lot more. I want to talk

to you about, we also have, I think some calls people. I don't know if they're for you, Sam or not. Um, I want to talk, uh, about this interconnection you make between slavery and science. Am I getting that correct? Is that, is that, am I saying that correctly? Okay. Slavery and early science. We'll talk about that. And we will take your calls. And we are watching you on Restream as well, everybody. So we'll see you in just a minute after a quick break. I want to give a shout out to our good friends at Blue Mics.

If you've heard my voice on this show any time over the past year, including right now, you've been listening to Blue Microphones. And let me tell you, after more than 30 years in broadcasting, I don't think I have ever sounded better. But you don't need to be a pro or have a fancy studio to benefit from a quality mic. You may not realize it, but if you've been working from home or using Zoom to chat with friends, you probably spent a lot of time in front of a microphone. So why not sound your best? Whether you're doing video conferencing, podcasting, recording music, or hosting a talk show, Blue has you covered. From the USB series that plugs right into your computer to XLR professional mics like the mouse or the blueberry we use in the studio right now. Bottom line, there's a Blue microphone to fit your budget and need. I can't say enough about

Blue mics, and once you try one, you will never go back. Trust me. To take your audio to the next level, go to drdrew.com slash blue. That is drdrew.com slash B-L-U-E. Anyone who's watched me over the years knows that I'm obsessed with Hydrolyte. In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market. I literally use it every day. My family uses it. When I had COVID, I'm telling you, Hydrolyte contributed to my recovery, kept me hydrated. Now, with things finally reopening back around the country, the potential exposure to the

common cold is always around. And like always, Hydrolyte has got your back. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity, my new favorite, starts with their fast-absorbing electrolytes and adds a host of great ingredients. Plus, each single-serving, easy-p Pour Drink Mix contains 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, 300 milligrams of elderberry extract. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity comes in convenient, easy-to-pour sticks that rapidly dissolve in water, make a great-tasting drink, has 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink,

uses all-natural flavors, gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and even vegan. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity is also now available in ready-to-drink bottles at the Walmart next to the pharmacy, or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolyte.com slash drdrew. Again, that is h-y-d-r-a-l-y-t-e.com slash d-r-d-r-e-w. Be sure to use the code drdrew25 for a special discount. So Sam, talk to me about this connection with early science and slavery. So basically way back in when science was getting going, European science in the 1700s or so, there were a lot of people around the world,

especially natural historians, who wanted to go visit places like South America, wanted to visit Africa, places like that. But there was really no good way to get down there except on slave ships because governments back then didn't really sponsor scientific voyages. You just had no way to get to the places that they wanted to get to. So essentially, you know, if you were a botanist, you were a zoologist, you wanted to go to these places, you had to hitch rides down on slave ships to get there. And then once you got there, most of the people there, most of the economy in those places

was based on slavery. So you had to start trading with slavers. You had to work with slavers. You really had no choice but to be involved with slavery. And so in the book, I kind of talk about, you know, that sort of general picture, but then also look at one particular case, an entomologist, a bug guy named Henry Smithman, who was so obsessed with termites, he loved them, wanted to go down and study them in different places, but he was an abolitionist. And he went down there as a determined foe of slavery, but got so drawn in to the first economy and then, you know, hitching rides on slave ships, things like that, that he eventually started dabbling in trading slaves himself. And he dated himself for it. He didn't like that he

was having to do this, but he figured he had no other way to get the science done because he needed to trade supplies and do things like that. And slaves, sadly, were essentially a commodity that he knew he could trade quite easily for things that he wanted. So it's really a step. You watch somebody break bad step by step by step and kind of cover your eyes in horror at what they are doing to themselves. And I'm sure he convinced himself that he was doing... Go ahead. Yeah, he convinced himself that there was a greater good or that he really wasn't doing it because he wasn't owning the slaves. He was just kind of dabbling or trading them and other people were the ones doing it. And eventually he sort of dropped

that self-justification, but you can see again how he breaks bad step by step. And I do talk a little bit in the book about how he wasn't sadly an exceptional case, that especially in certain fields, you just see this over and over where a lot of the science would not have gotten done had they not been reliant and basically taken advantage of the infrastructure of slavery. And probably the most dramatic example of this was the British Museum, which was essentially the core collection of it was gathered by a man named Hans Sloan, who owned plantations in Jamaica and would pay doctors and other people who were traveling on slave ships to collect specimens for him around the world. So even something like the British Museum,

one of the great cultural institutions in the world, their core collection was built and founded on things that were gathered via the slave trade. And obviously, it's not something I like to talk about nowadays, but you can see this with a lot of different museums and a lot of different scientific collections where they were built on the backs of the slave trade. Hmm. And I don't know, I'm sort of speechless after that. It's so sad. And to the same,

I guess, to the same degree, there were some scientific advances as a result of the Holocaust. And I believe we may even sort of be, are we still deploying some of those to this day? There are debates about that. I do discuss it in the book because it's sort of, I mean, you think about scientists going bad, that's one of the big, big ones that sort of flashes up in neon

is the experiments they did, doctors did on people during the Holocaust. And most of the experiments that they did on doctors did on people during the Holocaust. And most of the experiments that they did on patients were, I mean, there's no even way you could call them science. They were just cruel. They were torturing them, essentially. They deserved to be buried and forgotten. But there were a few cases where they did experiments on people, gathered data that for obvious reasons there's really no other good way to get. One example, probably the most prominent example, was experiments they did on people about hypothermia, where they would hold them down

in ice baths, let their body temperatures drop by 10 or even 15 degrees sometimes, and then try to revive them. And there were all sorts of untested folk theories about how to revive people, that you had to give them alcohol, that you had to, you know, wrap them in a blanket, stuff like that. They even at one point tried putting them in bed with prostitutes to see if they could warm their hearts, get them going that way. I mean, all sorts of ridiculous theories they were trying out. That's where the term light my fire came from. Maybe, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, it was just these ridiculous folk theories that they were trying out because no one really had an idea of how to revive people when they were that far advanced with hypothermia.

Turns out that the Nazis did figure out some of the better ways to revive people. And after the war and even it comes up nowadays, still, there's a debate about how much we should use this information because it was gathered in a horrific way. It was essentially torture. People died from these experiments but we do have the data so do we ignore it and pretend that we don't have this data or do we use it and try to save people's lives right now i don't know that there's a good answer

but there are good arguments to be made on both sides. Yeah. What is the ethics against? Because it seems like if there were a way to make those lives not have suffered in vain, it would be to apply it to a greater good. That is the argument a lot of people make. The other argument, though, against that is, well, essentially you are not maybe forgiving, but you're sort of justifying those experiments. And people in the future might look at that and say, well, you know, you got to break a few eggs. That's the price of progress. I hope. Well, I've witnessed so much in the last few years. I'm open to anything that humans are capable of, frankly, but I hope that's not true.

Well, let me see if we have a calls for you. We have some questions lining up. Casey, is this a question for Sam or is this something else? If you can get them up here. Casey. I have the damnedest time with this. One, two, three. Here we go.

There you are. Hey, Doc. How's it going? Good. Great. Yeah, actually, I have a question. Actually, for both of you, the first thing that comes to mind is how in the hell did these guys figure out that you could stick a pick into somebody's brain and give them

a lobotomy and they would live? Well, yeah, that's an interesting piece. i forget that history that's a great question i still don't really understand it you know why how they didn't hit arteries and cause massive bleeding sam do you know that well i mean they did freeman freeman killed several patients on the table because he would nick blood vessels all the time and they would bleed out um essentially what they were trying to do they don't bleed out they they bleed in they bleed in and squishes the brain because the brain is a yeah the brain is a control is a fixed uh space and if you get bleeding it squashes everything bleed in there yeah um my god essentially the idea at the time was they the theory about mental illness was that you had

the frontal lobes, which basically control reason, planning, things like that. And then you have emotional centers deeper inside the brain. And the theory was that the emotional centers were getting so revved up that they were overwhelming the reasoning, controlling, planning parts of the brain. So the point of a lobotomy was to sever the connections between the emotional centers and the reasoning centers at the front of the brain. It's not how doctors would think about it nowadays. Psychiatrists would think about it nowadays, but that was the theory at the time. So the ice pick essentially was just to sever the white matter connections

between those two parts of the brain and uh disconnect them that was the that was the goal of what they were doing do they was there you know was it based on phileas you know there's a famous case named a guy named phileas gage that had a bar that went through his eye and cut off his frontal lobe and had all kinds of strange changes as a result over years as time progressed. How did they, I just, I don't really understand where they came up with the idea that they felt they could do it. Were they experimenting on animals or something?

Or how did they get to that point, do we know? Well, no, that was one of the reasons that a lot of neurosurgeons were horrified is that Moniz and Freeman basically refused to do any experiments on animals. They were so eager to get to patients that they just jumped right in. Essentially, I mean, this was a time where doctors like Wilder Penfield, who was a very famous surgeon, could go in and remove large chunks of the brain to treat epilepsy and other disorders. And, you know, people would have some maybe some odd symptoms afterward, but they would live. So they knew at the time there were certain parts of the brain, the brainstem, things like that, that you couldn't touch. But the rest of the brain, you know, there were a lot of things that you could take out

and people would change afterwards, but they would still be alive and still function. So they're basically jumping off of legitimate surgeries and just saying, hey, let's take a risk and see what happens here. God, I just, to me, the astonishing thing is the bleeding, that there was not more, how they missed arteries, how they, even the veins that they must have torn through. I just, it's just astonishing to me that there wasn't more catastrophe.

But certainly the surgeons were holding their breath, waiting for the catastrophes. Man, they, I can just imagine you're a neurosurgeon and some psychiatrist is sticking ice picks up somebody's eye. And that was in a time of gentlemanliness, right? You didn't address your peers in public. You didn't criticize them in public. Today, woo-hoo, a little different. Yeah. Yeah, Freeman did partner with a neurosurgeon at the beginning,

but they eventually parted ways because Freeman wanted to do these quickie in-and-out outpatient neurosurgeon neurosurgery essentially just unbelievable uh let's uh get more calls in uh Leopold let's see if we can get you up here hey there hey Dr. Drew how you doing I thought you might under you might appreciate Sam and his book oh my god yes and i i was thinking about back in the 80s when i was at uc urbana in the psychobiology neurobiology department department in a class there was they were talking about this study that was done in the 50s regarding the pleasure uh region in the brain yeah brain and where they were talking about how,

when they were- So I'll finish it for you. So this was the work of James Olds at Caltech. That's right. And I actually went to college and high school with his son and he actually did a bunch of research on neurobiology. And what they did was

they were looking around for the pleasure center with electrodes and what they found was when they hit this one area which was the nucleus accumbens essentially and they fired things off the rats would push the lever for the stimulation until they died what they missed was there is a disconnect between the part of the brain that experiences pleasure, like good euphoria, versus the motivational system that says, do that again. These are distinct and overlapping systems. So Olds kind of got it wrong. He found the nucleus accumbens in this incredible, powerful do-it-again system, but it probably doesn't have much to do with pleasure. Now, there was, wasn't there a, where they actually did this on some human subjects,

and I think they were trying to cure something, and the human subjects were begging the doctor not to close his brain up. They wanted that implant in that region so and they would do nothing else but uh stimulated electrically because and to the extent of not doing anything else no bathing no taking care of the kids nothing that was the only thing they wanted was let's check with sam sam do you i remember some story like that i don't think it was that clear but sam do you know of a specific event i don't i had not heard this story But Sam, do you know of a specific event? I don't. I had not heard this story about doing it on humans. I'd heard the RAD study from old, but I had not heard it with humans.

So I think what you're referring to is something that was done intraoperatively on humans. And they did have this intense desire to do things to keep going. But again, that is not necessarily pleasure, guys. Cocaine is the greatest example of the do things, to keep going. But again, that is not necessarily pleasure, guys. Cocaine is the greatest example of the do-it-again stimulation. And trust me,

they're not even having pleasure anymore, and they're still behaving like that lab rat. And no matter how psychotic and miserable they get, they keep going. They're not having pleasure. By the same token, the opiate addicts have almost strictly pleasure, and the do-it-again system is involved there, but they are having some pleasure involved with it. Wasn't there some sort of edict in medicine, Dr. Drew, that talked about that they would never, ever allow that type of stimulation in that area again? In other words, they realized back then that it was so dangerous. These are all, this all sounds like echoes of things that I, sound familiar to me, but I not quite remember them specifically. So were you a student then?

Yeah, back in the 80s at UC Irvine, yeah. I don't know if you knew some of the, Richard McGaw. Well, my uncle ran a pain medicine program there then that i used to consult with i used to consult for and uh so i was over there doing some of that stuff there was a big uh neuroscience department it was a great great operation yeah yeah gary lynch and uh james mcgaw and over at the medical school uh dr. Zornitzer. McGaw being the grandfather of all that. Arlie, I'll put you back. Thank you, buddy.

He always sounds like he's in a tunnel or something. We have lots of strange sound problems. I know. If you guys, okay, so if you ask these guys a question and- Put them back in the audience? No, no. Just mute your mic while Drew and the guest is talking so that we don't hear the reverb and also your breath.

And by the way, I didn't mention you can follow Sam on Sam underscore Keen. Am I pronouncing your last name correctly? I haven't even asked yet. Keen? It is, yes. It's Keen, yes. Okay, good.

It's K-E-A-N. Facebook is Sam Keen Books. You can follow his website at samkeen.com. And the podcast, The Disappearing Spoon. Tell us about that. Yeah, so basically, I've come across all these really cool, interesting stories all the time that I want to tell, that I enjoy, but they just don't fit in my books. Because the books, you know, I do enjoy meandering sometimes, but they usually have a central theme. So I've written books about

the periodic table. I've written books about the human genome. I've written books about the human brain. And yeah, so they are pretty focused on one topic. And I come across all these other great stories and the podcast is just a way to put them out there, have a little bit of fun and yeah, make these stories just something that I want to do. I wonder if you'd be willing to share a couple of stories with this group that you've potted about

that stay with you or that trouble you or surprise you or... Yeah, I mean, so I give a lot of book talks. And one question I always get is, you know, are there any stories you found that you wanted to include in the book that you just didn't for whatever reason? And in this season of my podcast, I talk about one, one big story that I would have included in my genetics book, which is about a very rare and unusual type of cancer. There was a doctor named Percival Pott in the late 1700s

who noticed that there were a lot of chimney sweeps, sort of the classic, iconic London chimney sweeps, who were coming down with a type of cancer. Mary Poppins, yeah. But as I explained in the podcast, Mary Poppins sadly was misleading, a fraud, because most of these chimney sweeps led lives that were short and awful, because they would come down with a very specific type of cancer in a very specific part of the male anatomy. They would come down with scrotal cancer. And it's a very rare, very unusual type of cancer. But they would get it based on the fact that they were often in chimneys from the time they were four or five years old, scrambling up and down inside these chimneys. Often they were naked when they were doing this because they were filthy dirty. And they figured, well, you know, why get

these boys clean? They're just going to be dirty again the next day. Why dress them up in clothes? Their clothes are going to get filthy. So they would spend all day going up and down chimneys naked and the coal soot from the chimneys would get ground into their skin. And it turns out sadly that there are certain carcinogens in coal that affected cells in the scrotum more than other cells, and they would come down with this unusual type of cancer. So I talk about, you know, the fact that cancer is a, it's a very rare disease. And no, very, people don't get it anymore. It was a very specific timeframe where they were coming down with it, essentially, because it was an occupational hazard. This was kind of the sort of occupational medicine where your job would give you a certain disease. that asbestos yeah asbestos that came later uh i'm pulling up another call here to see if there's

something more for sam uh as usual having trouble getting the calls up have i missed anything or mischaracterized or left anything out from the book that you want people to know about it well um i mean there are a lot of dark stories in the book, but there are a few fun stories, I think, in the book as well. Cases where scientists got a little nasty, but they got a little, but quickly became enemies because they had very different, very clashing personalities. And basically, they went out west at a time when people really didn't know much about fossils, didn't know much about the past. And especially, as I discuss in the book, this was a time when dinosaurs were just an obscure taxon of lizard. No one knew anything about dinosaurs except until Marsh and Cope came along and they were the ones who made dinosaurs dinosaurs. They discovered triceratops, they discovered stegosaurus, they discovered brontosaurus or

apatosaurus as we now call it. They were the ones who made them this iconic species. And part of the reason they were such good paleontologists is because they had this rival always looking over their shoulder. The rival pushed them. The rival made them work harder. They ranged farther. They stayed out later in the season because they knew their rival was going to get them if they didn't. And so you see them do kind of terrible things to each other where they would sabotage each other, they would send their diggers around to throw rocks at the other people, they would blow up their dig sites with dynamite. But in the end, paleontology in general ended up benefiting because of their rivalry. They died penniless, they died bitter,

they hated each other, but science in general benefited from their rivalry. And was that the 19th century? When was that? Late 1800s and they both died right around the turn of the century. So late 1800s, you know, Cope and Marsh, the Bone Wars.

Where were they doing that work? I'm just curious. They were doing most of it out west so they started off on the east coast what's that did you write that book out in the west basically from yeah they were it was called the bone wars yeah it's basically from western south dakota out through utah and i mean i don't think a lot of people understand just what a bonanza this was for fossil hunters. There's an anecdote out there, apparently true, that there was a shepherd in Wyoming who wanted to build a house for himself, and he essentially built it out of dinosaur bones that were just lying around on the ground.

There were so many dinosaur bones lying around that he essentially built himself a log cabin out of dinosaur bones and lived in it. I mean, there were fossils everywhere out there. It was just a bonanza. And Martian Cope were the ones who swept in and kind of took advantage of that. Incredible. Well, listen, it's been a privilege to talk to you. The book, I suggest everyone go get it, read it. Let's put it up on the screen again there. There it is. The Ice Pick Surgeon, which is also murder, fraud, sabotage, piracy, and other dastardly deeds perpetrated in the name of science. And I think you get a taste of how crazy it's gotten, particularly in biological and medical circles.

You can follow Sam on his website at samkeen.com. Podcast, The Disappearing Spoon. I assume wherever you get podcasts, yes? Yes. Yep. Stitcher, Apple, I do whatever. Sam underscore, Sam underscore K-E-A-N. Sam, it's been a privilege.

Thank you so much for spending a little time with us. Well, thanks for having me. You got it. Farewell to Sam. I'm going to go back over to our restream and see if you guys have any questions over there. So Susan, you're laughing about something. I don't know. Just, he's cute. So that was interesting. I want to read more of his books because I,

I like the way he puts things in historical context. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Michelle. Well done. Michelle Poe, having booked that one. Very, very good. She's a big bookie. Do you guys like that one?

There was a lot of buzz on the restream like, this is, well, this is a different show. We've got to work on the clubhouse callers, though. Just like if we're talking and you're you're not talking just put yourself on mute and then you can unmute yourself when you're ready to talk okay it just helps the sound okay sounds weird uh i think caleb couldn't fiddle with it but it would be easier and then no speaker phones i like that your picture always appears next to me there when we're talking i know it's fine i'm always like you could you could we could, you could, we could set up a camera. We could set up a camera for you. I want the long shot though. I, I don't like the little square. Don't be silly. Yeah. But

I like to see shoulders and the long shot. Uh, no, I'm kidding. It's fine. Whatever. All right. So anything else, guys, I'm looking at your restream. Any questions? This is live. New temp phone, Ash. This is live. When am I going to be a guest on How Did This Get Made with Chris? Is that for Sam? Are you asking me?

I don't know. I don't know that I have any answers to a lot of these things. Is that just a show that... I don't know that show. Who is the second lady? That is Susan Pinsky. It is live. We're live right now. Is that just a show that I don't know that show? Who is the second lady? That is Susan Pinsky. It is live. We're live right now.

If you guys have any questions. We have a new person on Twitch. Welcome, welcome, welcome to our 22 people on Twitch. See, Fred Cauliflower says I'm way out of your league. You're way out of my league, rather, which I would agree. That is true. Oh, thank you fried cauliflower and we had there uh what's the best oncology unit southern california jeanette's mom oh boy oh boy oh boy uh leopold um it depends what she has uh you know obviously city of hope is a major center. UCLA would be the other one.

Those would be your two. The fact that we're talking about lung, adrenal, and head, it's probably lung that we're talking about. And I would bet UCLA might be your best bet there. I'm sorry to hear about that. That is a rough one. All right. Eight-year-old and COVID vaccine. What are my thoughts?

These are tough decisions. I would ask you to make it with your pediatrician. That's what I would suggest. We did a whole pot on this two days ago. Yesterday or day before yesterday. I can tell you. No, is it yesterday? No. I don't believe it was yesterday. Day before yesterday with Dr. Jessica Hockman. Yeah. And you can watch that. And she talks a lot about making the decision as a pediatrician. It's not an easy decision. Yeah, it would be hard for me. But it looks safe. I'm still a strongly vaccine advocate. But I don't know if you noticed today, the FDA appealed to a federal judge to lock away their proceedings around the vaccine for 50 years to hide from us whatever it was that went into their decision-making. You can't help but think whatever is in that,

those documents is not good. Talk about the Streisand effect, man, I cannot imagine a more powerful way than that to create that kind of interest in something that we shouldn't be thinking about. The FDA should have just done their thing. They should have been transparent with all of us about what their thinking is. I understand there are risks. The risks are worth it. You're saying that. I'm with you.

I'm with you on that. But to not share your thinking. But then they're also putting it on the doctors to make the decision. Well, but we're sort of in a better position, even without that data. Even without it, we can say we get a sense of how it's working and not working and who should get it, not get it. um what's that 30 degrees outside kid was crying quiz chris i don't know what you're telling us about a kid with no coat i don't know why that's a sad story uh roy i don't know what was a decade ago we're talking about the vaccine research done two years ago uh the mr and aps and how they... Remember, two FDA officials resigned over those negotiations. My suspicion is there was a lot of bad stuff, and they decided it was worth it to get the world going again.

I think they were right. I think they were right. Steve Kirsch thinks they were maybe not right. I think they were right. I still had my family vaccinated. Susan revaccinated and got a booster. I'm recommending were right. I still, I had my family vaccinated. Susan revaccinated and got a booster. I'm recommending boosters to many of my patients. I was recommending the boosters before the FDA approved it because it looked like, I knew there would be approval for people, particularly over the age of 75.

There's no doubt in my mind that that would be the case. So it was clear that people who are higher risk should be more thoroughly vaccinated. It's also clear that all the vaccines wane over time. It's also clear that natural immunity wanes over time, though it's probably the case that hybrid immunity is something we should be looking towards. So again, Steve Kirsch disagrees strongly with me on that.

I had my Adatex score done again. It's something you've heard me talk about over the last year or so. And my immunity has gone up since I was last tested about two, three months ago, which suggests I was re-exposed to COVID. So probably, yeah, that's what that suggests. It probably suggests somewhere along the way I was re-exposed to it. My body fought it off and raised the immune level as a result of that subclinical infection. Did you give it to me? No, I did not give it to you. I didn't give it to anybody because I didn't get infected.

I didn't get infected, but my immune system charged up in response to it. I don't know. It's a theory. That's a theory. Maybe your test was just right one time. Or maybe I've just gone up. Is that the one where they lost a vial of blood and you had to give some more? Yes, but the one I gave was just right one time. Or maybe I've just gone up. Is that the one where they lost the vial of blood and you had to give some more? Yes, but the one I gave was just right.

And there was, my neutralizing antibodies went up, which is, and so did some of my spike protein and whatnot. So it's possible there's been some data about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine having a really sustained, even increasing immunity over time. Maybe it's because I got the J&J. There's a lot of unanswered questions. Again, humility when it comes to biology. Sam's conversation today was a perfect reminder of that. So again, what's coming up next week? Mr. Toby77 said, Drew, if this is live right now, I apologize, but I still can't think this is real.

Can't think it's real? He just can't believe it's real yeah he just can't believe it's right it's live uh it is because i just said it yeah we're reading your restream we're reading your chat entry there so uh and then and then uh caleb just put up a little live bar on the screen um but we have coming up next week jay badasharia the following week alex berenson and he always pulls that stuff out of his and uh we're thinking about if you guys have suggestions But we have coming up next week, Jay Bhattacharya. The following week, Alex Berenson and Vinay Prasad. He always pulls that stuff out of his personal life. And we're thinking about if you guys have suggestions for other guests you'd like me to talk to, send it over to contact at drdrew.com.

We are thinking about other ways of doing this and other people to talk to. No, just write it on the restream. It's easier for me. Well, if we see it on the restream here. But if you think of it later. I get so many emails. It's just like, ugh. Lindsay loves dogs.

We've been on Twitch for quite some time. Yeah, we've been on for a while. Yeah, Twitch is not, you know. It's just, it goes away after a month, so you can't see our whole list of shows. If you want to see our other shows, they're on YouTube and Twitter. Well, Twitter doesn't have the Periscope list anymore, so you can find them on YouTube or Facebook unless we were censored on YouTube. And sometimes we've been censored on YouTube and so we will come off and just go over to Rumble.

Ask Dr. Drew. This show is also on Rumble. And we have a podcast. So if you want to hear it in podcast form, go over to iTunes or whatever, wherever you get your podcast and look up Ask Dr. Drew. And all of the platforms are at drdrew.tv. Oh, thanks. Thanks, God. Dr. Drew.tv. You the platforms are at drdrew.tv. Oh, thanks.

Thanks, God. Dr. Drew.tv, you can get it all there. It's the voice of God or Caleb Nation, as we like to call him. There's one last thing I was going to say, which is that we find that it seems like controversial guests or guests with sort of non-mainstream opinions

interest you guys. So I'm happy to interview them. I may not adopt their point of view, but I do, you know, I'm strong believer in the First Amendment. I am interested in hearing some of these ideas. And so that's, you know, that's sort of what we try to do here.

So if you have any ideas, we will happily talk to that person. So thank you, Caleb. Thank you, Susan, for producing this. Thank you to Michelle Poe for booking it. And we will be back again, I believe it is, yes, on tuesday that is our next show uh oh no susan you have monday with uh dr patterson yeah dr patterson's coming back on

to talk about their you know covid covid long haulers dr yo and dr patterson have been doing tons of research on long covid since we last talked to them. They're coming up with lots of very interesting, complicated observations, but it's time for them to give us a little report. So that is going to be an exclusive here. We've got a suggestion for a guest on there. Did you see it? No. Where is it? It's a porn star. Oh, who is it? I don't know. I'm not going to say it. Can you guys put it up there again so I can say it? Unless there's a doctor with the same name as a porn star. That could be.

I don't know. Maybe you blocked that person where I can't see it. No, it's scroll up. It was a while ago. Very funny. Well, I mean, we could talk. Oh, no, that's not a. So, oh, by the way, been and ilana went to great lengths

to get this going let me see if i get it where it's over here they're sitting in the port just put in front of your face okay here it is there it is there it is it's coming out for the holidays if they can uh unload the container with it in there. So in the port of long beach with the other 50, it's a bobble. I can't believe those ships are just sitting out there and past Christmas. I mean, think of a pollution and the, just the,

well, that's how we got our, our, uh, but I mean, even that, like there's just so much petrol in the water and, and they flush their toilets in there.

And, uh, uh, that's it guys. Thank you for being here. We will see you on Monday with Dr. Patterson, in the water and they flush their toilets in there. That's it, guys. Thank you for being here. We will see you on Monday with Dr. Patterson, Bruce Patterson. Sorry, I had to throw that in. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky.

As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger,

don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.