Radiolab - Patient Zero

Episode Date: November 14, 2011

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the case at the heart of an outbreak. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes from all over the map.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. And NPR. So have we said where we are? I ain't on tape yet? Uh. Starting us off today are our producers Lynn Levy and Sean Cole. Very pretty day to be on an abandoned island where victims of contagious disease were quarantined. and one in particular who lived here, died here,

never believing that she was, in fact, sick and dangerous. So this is a story that she begins when? Well, it's actually, it starts in 1906, and it doesn't start on the island, it starts in Oyster Bay. Oh, nice neighborhood. Very nice. There was this one rich family on vacation there. And their daughter gets sick.

She gets sick first. This is Judy Levitt. I am a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin. And she wrote a book about this story. So basically the girl, the daughter, has a fever. Then her sister comes down with it. And then her mom and a maid. About six out of 11 in the family get sick.

And with this disease, the fever is just the first part of it. Both diarrhea or constipation are reported. So it can go either way, I guess. What is it? Typhoid. And they couldn't figure out. what had caused the disease. So they called in this sanitary engineer named George Soper. With the public health department, he was a go-to guy for outbreaks like this. Back then, the Department

of Public Health was thinking, you know, you'd get sick because of something dirty near you. In the well or in the pipes. Yeah. So he looks into all of that. Did a whole test on the house and the water and everything. Couldn't find anything. And so he starts talking to the family. And he started quizzing them all. And they remember the event. Eventually, he builds up this whole picture of several outbreaks going back years. 1900. Mimarinek. A New York family had a house for the summer.

1902, Dark Harbor, Maine. 1904. Seven cases. Sands Point, New York. Autumn, 1906. Winter. 1907. New York City.

All these cases, and they all had one thing in common. What? Each of these families had employed the same cook. Really? Which is funny. Because when you cook food, you kill the bacteria in the food. Yeah. So couldn't be the cook then.

But this cook... Her most famous dish was Peach Melba, which is ice cream and fresh peaches. Fresh peaches. Raw fruit. That was a perfect medium. And the cook's name was Mary Mallon. Mary Mallon. Wait a second, Sean Cole.

Typhoid. Typhoid Mary is what we're talking about. Oh, so we know this story. No, you don't know. this story. What do you mean? Everybody thinks they know this story. I thought I knew the story and then when I looked into it I realized I didn't know the first thing about it and when you look into the details

they tell us some very difficult things about who we were and who we still are in a lot of ways. It's all in the details, all of the juice and problem like the juice. Like the peach juice. Just like the peach juice. We're still dealing with it. Wait, I'm Robert Crilwich.

Go ahead, go ahead. Do the year part. This is Radio Lab. And in this A series of stories that all hue to that delicious story archetype we call... Patient Zero. The first quad. We'll try to trace ideas and trends and massive social traumas like pandemics. Back to that one person.

Or one critter. Or the other way you call it, it's called the But For. If you didn't have this thing, but for this thing, you wouldn't have the rest of the story. I like the But Four. The But four. But. Meanwhile. Back to the peaches.

So George Soper's like, I've got to find this woman. And when he finds her... She's in New York City. Working for another family. The laundress had recently been taken to the Presbyterian hospital with typhoid fever. This is from an article Soper wrote called The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary. And the only child of the family, a lovely daughter, was dying of it. So he goes to the house, walks into the kitchen, sees this woman.

Five foot six. blonde hair, blue eyes. Had a good figure. I might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy. Irish immigrant, 36 years old. Not particularly clean. And he says, Mary Malin, I think you are causing disease in people, and I want samples of your urine, feces, and blood. Good afternoon. And she says,

What are you accusing me of being sick? Playing the role of Mary is Columbia Public Health Professor David Rossner. How dare you? I'm not a sick person. What does she do? She traces him out of the building. With a fork in her hand. A serving fork.

A serving fork, yeah. I felt rather lucky to escape. But did she have typhoid? I mean, did she outwardly have typhoid? Well, that's the thing. She never had any symptoms. She felt perfectly healthy. She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier,

which is to say someone who has the disease, and is contagious, but never actually feels the symptoms. The symptoms. So in one weird way, soapers thrilled. Like, he's only read about this, and then here she is in front of him. But think of how all of this must have sounded to Mary. I mean, some guy from outer space comes into your kitchen and says you're diseased and you're hurting people. I mean, she must have thought, what?

I feel fine. I'm living a moral life. I'm not a vagrant. I'm employed. I'm a good, solid citizen. You know, you would be crazed too, wouldn't you even today? You'd probably grab your knife, yeah. Yeah, you'd grab your knife.

Well, does he have any evidence, though, that she is spreading the disease? Not yet. That's why he needs her poop. So he goes back, finds her at a rooming house. She kicks him out, swears at him. She apparently had quite a temper. And then the health department sends in this female doctor. By the name of S. Josephine Baker, maybe she could ask for blood feces in urine a little more gently.

I just don't know how you ask for that gentler. But she tries. And when it doesn't work, she comes back a little bit later with cops. And they come to the house, and Mary Mallon, when she realizes what's happening, disappears. What do you mean disappears? She just vanishes? Completely vanishes. They end up searching the entire place, and they can't find her.

Finally, I think they're about to leave when one of them spots her. Her skirt at coming outside of a door. It's a little piece of calico hang. It kind of stuck in a doorway. They open the door and there she is. And so they drag her out and she comes out, kicking and screaming and kicking. Screaming and kicking. It takes all of them to drag her out.

Protesting. They get her in the ambulance and Josephine Baker sits on her. According to her, sits on her. And Baker later said something like, it was like being in a cage with an angry lion. So they take her down to the hospital. They tested her feces and urine, and they found that, yes, she was, in fact, a carrier of live typhoid bacilli. It's a weird island, man.

I spent a while on him. So they isolate her, and they ultimately move her. Okay, good. From Manhattan to North Brother Island. Let's have a bit of a haunted vibe. Yeah. And there she is. Thanks, man.

We went there to just to try to get our heads around what she must have thought. What do you think? What was the island like? Man, everything is completely overgrown. It was really creepy. Creepy because it was in such dissolution? Yeah, yeah. Just be careful where you step.

On one end, there are all of these medical, former medical buildings, including a giant hospital where they isolated tuberculosis patients. So a big brick, stately building. And then on the other side of the island, there's smaller wooden buildings that are crushed. This may be where her cottage is. Where her cottage would be if it was still standing, but it's not standing anymore. Well, it was one room, one room. It had a kitchen. It had, I guess, a sleeping area and a sitting area.

It probably wasn't so bad if you didn't have to stay there. You know, any places that you're not free to leave becomes like a prison. So we're marching around, and then Lynn says to me, hey, look at the view, and... Holy moly! Take a look at that. It's right there.

That's when it really hit me. If this is where her cabin was, then one window of it looked exactly on to Manhattan. She could have seen where she used to live. You can see the traffic on. the streets. This was like the most horrible seaside vacation. Almost the whole time they had her incarcerated, they took feces three times a week,

which is, you know, it's not pleasant to have to do that. And sometimes she was negative and sometimes she was positive. Wait. What? So that's another thing that they were figuring out at the time. So she was probably an interme. What does that mean? The disease is always in her, but sometimes she excretes it and sometimes she doesn't.

Oh, that must have been confusing for her. When I first came here, I was so nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble. My eyes began to twitch. This is from a letter that Mary wrote from the island. I have, in fact, been a peep show for everybody. But if you keep reading it, and in fact it's addressed to a lawyer, it's clear that she was fighting this. And she had been sending her own feces samples, her sands. to a private lab in Manhattan, and each one of those was negative.

Really? The tuberculosis men would say, there she is. The kidnapped woman. Yeah, that is poison ivy. She sues the city and loses. Still, there are all of these questions as to whether any of this is legal. I mean, even George Soper, the guy who hunted her down, said it was contrary to the Constitution of the United States to hold her under the circumstance. And how long was she on this island for?

Three years. Wow. And then what changed was a new health commissioner took over. And so he says it's just not right that we keep a healthy woman locked up like this. She was not dangerous to anybody if she didn't cook. He lets her go. He lets her go. Yeah.

Back to Manhattan. But he makes her promise. She did promise. She signed an affidavit. Saying she'll never cook again. And she was released. They gave, they set her up with a job as a laundress. And they went, here you go, Mary.

and then, you know, they kept track of her for a while. And then at a certain point, they kind of stopped keeping track of her. What happened? So how many years will go by? Five. Five. What happens next? There's an outbreak of typhoid.

Where? At a maternity hospital. Oh, you're kidding. Josephine Baker, who sat on her in the ambulance before. she says that she goes and pays a visit and walks into the kitchen and she says the first person that she encountered was typhoid Mary Malin. George Sober did some legwork on where Mary had been, and it turned out she had worked at a restaurant, two hotels, an inn, and a sanatorium,

as well as the hospital. And at least according to his account, two of the people that she made sick during those couple years were children. She was now a woman who could not claim innocence. She was known willfully and deliberately to have taken desperate chances with human life. She had abused her privilege. She had broken her parole. So then they put her back on North Brother Island, back in her bungalow.

And there she sits. She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly. Absolutely. She broke her problem. Yeah, I totally agree. She made a deal and she didn't keep the deal. But the thing is, is that at the time she was sent back to the island, there were hundreds of other healthy carriers identified all over New York, and some of them were cooks. What?

Really? Mostly men, by the way. And they were cooking? Well, they were barred from cooking, but not all of them always listened. And yet Mary was the only one who they isolated in this way. Why? Why only her? I think it was more about making people feel safe

than actually making them safe Oh look out for this stair It's all crumbled She was what we needed at the time We're in the hospital Where the tuberculosis patients were quarantined This was towards the end of Lynn and my visit to the island

Yeah, these must be the wards Yeah So when was she here? This is where they brought her After she had a stroke And this is where she was For the last six years of her life Did she die in here?

Yeah Rossner This is Judy Levitt Reading this message Radio Lab is funded in part By the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Enhancing public understanding of science and technology

Science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.floan.org. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Okay, that's it. Thanks. Bye. Hey, I'm Chadabumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab and today. It's Patient Zero.

That's our subject. Yeah, and this next story... It's so huge. It's the ultimate Patient Zero story, really. Many of us have lived through this. It's as recent an event, it's such a recent event that it still hurts and it still bleeds. Yeah. And in it somewhere is literally the patient that is called zero. So is this is.

Yeah. A lot of people are going to help us tell the story. But starting us off is science writer, radio lab, regular Carl Zimmer. So in 1981, doctors for the first time describe a mysterious newly discovered disease, a syndrome, which affects mostly homosexual men. The young man in Los Angeles were dying. The number of cases has been growing faster and faster. So far, more than 80 Americans have died. 258 people have died. 625 people have died.

Of course, this is the part we all know, how, from the first few cases in L.A., AIDS became one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen. More dangerous than the plague of the middle ages. The back at the beginning, there was a story that I have not been able to shake for the last 30 years, and it's a story that I want to reimagine right now. Right after news of this syndrome started to break. That's science writer David Kwan, who along with Carl will be one of our guides. Epidemiologists were trying to figure out where...

What did it come from? And they were thinking like, well, maybe it's a sexually transmitted disease. So the CDC launches a study. Of a group of about 30 patients... Gay men. In New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to see who had had sexual contact with whom. Is that just a series of interviews with people? Yeah, please name all the people that you've slept with.

The CDC eventually releases the results of this survey in the form of a diagram. Like a network drawing. With circles representing patients and lines representing sexual contact. And each patient, each little circle, was numbered. New York 7, Los Angeles, 12. So you didn't know who was who, but you could tell immediately when you look at this thing. That of all the 30 or so circles, there was one circle that was special. It had lines coming out in every direction.

Seven or eight emanating from him. Like the hub of a wheel. Except all the spokes on this wheel connected to other wheels, which then shot out and connected to other wheels, fanning outward. And at the center of it all was that one little circle numbered? Zero. Number zero. As far as we know, that was the first time that you ever get the term Patient Zero. Patient Zero was a man, a central victim and victimizer.

This is from a 60 Minutes special in 1988. That year, a reporter named R. Randy Schultz had written a book called And the Band Played On that for the first time revealed the identity of Patient Zero. He was a French Canadian. A very handsome airline steward named Gaitan Dugat. Gaten Dugat. A few minutes later in the report, Schultz comes on to describe a guy... A guy who has got unlimited sexual stamina.

This sexual athlete who would fly from one hotspot to the next because of his job, having sex with literally thousands of men. And as he knew he was dying, at least according to Randy Schultz, he became somewhat sinister and malicious. He would sleep with a male partner at a bathhouse in San Francisco or somewhere else. And then when the light came up, according to Randy Schultz, he would say, I've got gay cancer. Now you're going to get it, too. You talk to me. I talk to him, yeah. This is Dr. Selma Dritz. She was part of that CDC study.

I told him that he was getting other people sick with it. And he said, it's my right to do whatever. I want, my civil rights, I do as I please. I've got it. Why shouldn't they have it? They said, you can kill yourself if you want. You've got no right to take somebody else along with you. And he said, screw you and walked out. Really a chilling moment.

And pretty much from that moment on, Gaiton Dugat. He just took on this aura as single-handedly causing an epidemic in the United States. Now, I don't know about you, but I first bumped into this story in the movie version of In The Band played on. My friend, we're talking about thousands of men. It was faces I cannot even remember, and you want names. That's an actor playing Gaydnooka in the movie. Now, when I first saw that, AIDS had already infected two and a half million people, and to think that it could all go back to this one guy just seemed unreal.

It was a very potent story. There's no doubt. and he gave HIV to a lot of people. There's no question about that. But what we do know is that he was not patient zero. He was not patient zero. No. He was not the beginning point.

He wasn't. Not even close. So here's the question that got me started on the story. Okay, so the gay steward, that was the movie stuck in my head. But what's the real movie? What movie can we make about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? Because when you've got something so vast that, according to some mess, will have killed 60 million people by the end of the decade.

You need a beginning. You need some way of explaining how this disaster happened and how it might happen again. And how exactly do we know that Gaten Dugat wasn't patient zero? Well, there are a couple reasons we know it. So one thing that people started to do... Scientists. They started going back and looking at people who had died.

People who died mysteriously. AIDS-like things. in the past. Might some of them have been early cases? And they started finding a lot. Robert Rayford had AIDS 12 years before it was recognized in this country in 1980. In 1959, a sailor in Britain died of pneumocystis pneumonia. And so, for a while you had all these new patient zeros.

In 1961, a nurse in Chicago died of capusis sarcoma. But the real definitive blow to this old patient zero nonsense came by actually looking at the virus itself. In 1984, same year that Gaten Dugat died, Scientists isolate the virus. HIV, which is really just a little string of genetic code that gets into your body and into your cells and uses your cells to make copies of itself. But here's the thing. When it replicates within a single patient, it copies itself imprecisely.

It mutates quickly. It changes a lot. As the virus duplicates itself inside a person, the dupes often have little copying errors in them, little mutation. And it turns out those errors, they happen at a predictable rate. You can kind of almost predict how many you're going to see in a year or five years. And so the amount of changes that you see out there, the diversity, really, of the viruses in the AIDS population. Well, that becomes really good information. And so a group of scientists began to look at.

The amount of diversity among HIV patients in the U.S. And other parts of the world. And the more diversity, the longer the virus has been around. Right, right. And they could use that kind of like a clock. If you have a virus here and a virus there, you could measure how different they are, and you would know that it would take a certain amount of time

for them to get that different. And to make a long story short, the picture they get is... That AIDS entered the United States. Around 1966... At a time when Gaten Degha was still a virginal adolescent. From there, scientists were able to trace the virus back to Haiti, and from Haiti, back to Africa.

It's been there the longest. It's had the longest time to become diverse, to mutate, to evolve. So if you want to really, if you want to get to the real patients here, as it were, the most interesting stuff actually comes from Africa. So one way to try to figure out its origins there is to go looking for the virus. Yep. And that takes us back to ZR 59 and DRC60. Can we talk about them?

Sure. What? These are the two earliest known HIV-positive human specimens. And this is where, for me, it really. the story gets way bigger than I imagined. Now, the first sample, ZR-59, came to light in the late 90s. Somehow, scientists unearthed a very old tube of blood

from a hospital in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when they tested it, it had HIV. This had been taken from a Bantu man in 1959. 1959. Yeah, nobody knows his name. Nobody even knows, I think, what he died of. And that was the only one for a number of years.

That was our one glimpse into the kind of deep history of HIV. But then along comes that guy, Michael Warby, he's an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. And a few years ago, Michael went back to Kinshasa and found a second HIV sample. He actually found the virus lurking in a tiny bit of human tissue that was preserved in paraffin wax. It's kind of like Han Solo in the Star Wars movie when he's kind of frozen in that carbonite or whatever that stuff is. in this new sample, it was from the same town, Kinshasa is the first, and also, more importantly, from the same time. 1960, and with the two of them, then you can kind of go back in time.

Like we described before, you can measure the differences between the samples, calculate how long it would take for those samples to get that different. And in the end, you can use these two samples to wind the clock all the way back to the virus that started it all. And it turned out The most recent common ancestor of those two specimens goes back to... To about 1908.

1908. That is when it started in human beings. What? 1908? Is that what he said? Roughly. Give or take a margin of error. Early 1900s.

Wow. So around 1908, give or take, something happened. That's right. That moment is the spillover. Spillover. Spillover is the term the scientist used to describe the moment when a virus in one species passes into another species. You know, new diseases in humans tend to pop up from animals.

So people said, okay, flu comes from birds. Where does HIV come from? To get at that answer, you have to look beyond human beings. You have to look at other viruses that are like HIV. So the search was on. The inability to find a similar disease in research animal. Turns out right about the time that the HIV virus was discovered. Scientists at the New England Primate Research Center Some researchers found a virus like it in macaque monkeys. In fact, it was so similar that they called it.

SIV. Simeon immunodeficiency virus. Yes, and that's where the origin quest started. This is Beatrice Hahn. I'm a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. And so after they found it in McCauks, what happened? It took a couple years. But eventually, she says they found SIV.

And still another primate species to Souti Mangaby. And then in a few more? African green monkeys, mandrill. Pretty soon it was all over the place. There are now, I think, 40 different species of African monkeys, known to have their own version of SIV. So then the question was, which one of these monkeys or primates, passed it to us?

Then unexpectedly. A researcher named Martine. Martin Peters. At this center in Gabon, decided to test her chimps. Two orphan chimpanzees. And bingo. She found a very, very close match.

A virus that was the closest relative of a... HIV one. So? Everybody said, well, you know, it was a chimp. It was a chimp. Okay. Yeah, it came from a chimp. Yes. But then the question was, well, which chips? Or rather, where? Where exactly? So. Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues started looking at chimps that came from different parts of Western Central Africa. Now, getting blood samples from chimps in the wild is pretty much... It just isn't feasible. You know, because in the wild, they hide the moment they see us. So you get stuck with fecal samples. poop.

Oh. Yes. Poop. There's lots of DNA in there. And viruses. So they would just go to where the chimpanzees would sleep at night and they would just, you know, collect some poop. Bring it back to the lab and Beatrice would analyze all the viruses.

Over 90 different wild communities. From every part of Central Africa. Over 7,000 different fecal samples. And slowly they were able to piece together. Which communities were infected and which ones had the closest to HIV-1. That's when it hit us for the first time. What exactly hit you? The geographic origin of these chimps.

In 2006, her and her colleagues published that the human AIDS virus comes from a group of chimps, a very specific group that live in a very specific place. This little corner of southeastern Cameroon. Between the Bumba River, the Ngoca River, and the Sanga River. These chimps were essentially penned in between these three rivers. It's an area probably only of 100 square miles. Not much more than that.

Wow. So when we're looking at what humans have, and we're looking at what all of those chimps in Africa have, the most perfect match is this little territory up there in Cameron. Yeah. There is no other virus that is any closer. So that's that. So can you reconstruct the spillover and the who that it's spilled over into,

you know, as best as we understand it? You can hypothesize. And the best hypothesis is the cut, hunter hypothesis. The cut hunter? The C-U-T-Hunter? That's right. A hunter who gets cut.

And what can we say about this guy? I mean, is he, what do we know about it? If we had to guess, if we had to guess, that human was probably a Bantu man, living very near the forest or in the forest in southeast Cameroon, he was hunting. Maybe he had a bow and arrow. Maybe he had a spear. And he kills a chimpanzee. Bingo, here's a big pile of meat, and he starts to butcher it.

He's cutting open the chest cavity, he's pulling out organs, and he cuts himself. And he gets blood-to-blood contact, chimpanzee blood against his blood. What happens is that the virus in the chimpanzee blood found itself in an environment that was unexpected, that was alien to it, but was not too much different from the biochemical environment it had been in, chimpanzee blood, it could function. And that's the moment. That's the moment it begins. That human is patient zero.

But why then? Why 1908? I mean, presumably people have been hunting chimps for a really long time. Why wouldn't this guy be patient seven million? That's another of the big questions. People certainly in Central Africa have been eating monkeys for thousands of years. I mean, David says there's really no way to know, but this could have just been the right virus. Maybe this particular virus evolved in a way that made it more transmissible in humans.

Or maybe it just got lucky to come along at precisely the right time. What you're looking at... This is Carl again. ...is a time when this part of Africa was being heavily colonized. The French and the Belgians were building train systems. The populations were on the move. Kanshasa, which was then Leopoldville, it was exploding. It was huge.

The cities were attracting people from the boonies in those days. So by 1908, all the virus has to do is get from that tiny village where the Cuthunter lived to one of the new cities. That happens almost certainly by river. I was stirred by the work of Beatrice Hahn and Mike Warby to see what this. scenario looked like on the ground. So I went to southeastern

Cameroon and I chartered a little boat, about a 30-foot wooden boat with an outboard motor. And he traced the path of the virus. We went down the Ngoko River and we stopped at a few villages. There are a couple little villages there, one of which has a market where you can buy

monkey meat and crocodile meat. And he says it wasn't hard to imagine how it all might have went down. Perhaps the cut hunter gave the virus to a woman. who then passed it on to a fisherman. Fellow that I call the Voyager. Who then got in a boat, as David did, and carried it down the river.

Sanga River, which is the Angoko is a tributary of the Sangha. Sanga becomes a bigger river, 200 meters wide, which then flows to the Congo River, the big river. And into the city. And I imagine him sliding into Brazzaville, around 1920, the first HIV-positive man to arrive. in an urban center, where there's a much greater density of humans, where there are prostitutes, a greater fluidity of social and sexual interactions.

And that seems to have been the place from which the disease went global. So that's how it happened. We could take it back even farther, actually. What do you mean? Farther. Because if you want to make a movie about the start of it, this is not the start. Because we got it from chimps, right?

Right. So you could ask, who was chimp zero? What do we know about chimp zero? Right? Yeah, I mean, everything comes from somewhere. And again, by molecular work, scientists have been able to determine that the chimp virus is actually... It actually comes from...

Two monkey viruses. Two different monkeys from two completely different species. What? Would they have encountered each other? somewhere? I don't have a fight? They probably encountered each other in the stomach of a chimp. Meaning what?

Well, from the perspective of a chimpanzee monkeys, they look tasty. This is Nathan Wolfe. Professor in human biology at Stanford University. And he says to fully understand this part of the patient, or rather chimp zero narrative, you have to grasp how it is that chimps hunt. And this is something he witnessed. in the Kabali National Forest in southwestern Uganda. He described to us watching three male chimps converge on a tree full of colvis monkeys,

which are these very small black and white monkeys. And one individual managed to grab two juveniles, and then the three individuals all met up and began to eat the monkey while it was still alive. The chimpanzee was going after an organ that obviously was a tasty, morsel that he was going after and the monkey was screaming bloody murder. It is quite disturbing to watch, he says. But one of the things that struck me at that moment was the depth of contact between the blood and body fluids of this monkey and the chimpanzee.

The chimps are literally covered in blood. They have blood on their face and in their eyes. And from the virus's perspective, this is spillover heaven. Okay, so the following is the closest that we can get to a zero point in this entire narrative. We don't know where it happened. And we don't know exactly the time, say, some hundreds of thousands of years ago. From the molecular clock, we know it was less than a million years. That's all we know.

But whenever it was, Chimp Zero was hunting, and it comes upon a monkey called a red cap Mangaby. The red cap Mangabee, this is a larger primate. And these are tree dwelling, little guys? Tree dwelling. A little bit of red fur on their heads. Yes. Chip Zero spots one of these monkeys. eats it. And in the process, he catches a red-cap mangaby version of the AIDS virus.

Next, sometime after that first kill, weeks, months, we don't know, maybe it was the same day, Chimp Zero comes across another monkey. And this monkey was called a spot-nosed Gwennon. Yes. It's got a spot on its nose, I assume. There you go. Very small. One of the tiniest monkeys of all of the old world monkeys. And Chip Zero eats that monkey. and gets a spot-nosed-gwenin version of the AIDS virus or the S-I-V virus inside it. So you've got the Red Cap Mangabee and you've got the spot-nosed-Gwenan. So you've got a Gwinnon and a Mangabee. Two completely different kinds of S-I-V viruses inside the same chimp.

Now, under normal circumstances, according to Nathan, both of these S-I-V viruses would go nowhere because... When one of these viruses makes the jump, they go from a place they've adapted to, and that they know, to a completely foreign landscape. Like a human being dropped off on Mars, maybe without a space suit. I mean, they basically are entering a completely alien habitat. The cells don't look the same.

The environment is different. And the chimps immune system would normally kill them. But then once in a blue moon, something crazy happens. These two viruses will end up inside the same cell in the same chimp at the same time. Literally, there is a single cell simultaneously infected with both viruses. So suppose on one side of the cell you've got the macum. Mangaby virus. And on the other side of the same cell, you've got the spot-nosed-Gwenin virus.

And what happens is, literally... Inside the cell, you have an enzyme, it's called the polymerase enzyme, that's copying genetic information of the virus. This is what viruses do. They hijack these enzymes to make copies of themselves. Now, here's the problem. these enzymes, they're not necessarily that sticky. And while they're in the process of copying one virus,

every once in a while, they'll accidentally fall off mid-copy. And go whack. And latch on to the second virus. And just keep on copying. And so, what it ends up spitting out is a hybrid. Like that. Now, this new mosaic probably won't go anywhere

because 99.999.99999% of the time. When these hybrids happen, it's a dead end. The chimps immune system is pretty sophisticated. It has evolved defenses against these viruses, and it will destroy them. But again, once in a blue moon. So this is a blue moon after a blue moon after a blue moon to really get this. Finally, you get one particular mosaic virus. Between the Mangaby and the Gwitan.

That through sheer rift. Random luck. Works. It landed on the exact right combination of genes that allowed it to evade the chimps immune system. I mean, one of the amazing things to think about is how many hopeful monsters you had to have in order to get that one that actually survived.

Probably trillions. But then, boom. Suddenly, in a flash, from these two viruses that can barely survive in the chimp, you get a new virus. Little bit manabee, little bit wine in. Can not only survive in the chimp, but can thrive. In fact, for this baby virus, the chimp is the perfect host.

And that was the virus that ended up spreading, jumping over into humans, and has been this massive and incredibly dramatic sort of tear in the fabric of humanity. Let me add another parentheses. There are essentially 12 major groups of the HIV virus. What David means is that 12 different kinds of HIV viruses have spilled over 12 different times. Eight of them came from monkeys, three of them came from chimps, and one came from gorillas. Wow. And of those 12, only one of them is responsible for the global pandemic. Wow, there are 12 kinds.

12 times that we know about. It's probably happened dozens and dozens more times that we don't know about. So the spillover is not a highly improbable event. These sorts of viruses, they're constantly pinging at us. They're pinging at us and pinging it at us. We see it happening all the time. You see it happening? All the time. Nathan has set up a series of monitoring stations.

In places like Central Africa. And he and his colleagues have been tracking what he calls the viral chatter in the people who hunt these primates. We collected specimens from the animals that they were hunting. They compared that to blood samples from the hunters themselves. And guess what? We found a whole range of new retroviruses that were moving over into these hunters. For example, he's been tracking something called the Simeon phomy virus, which is... Virus in the same family as HIV. And he has seen it hop from an individual gorilla to an individual human who killed that gorilla.

Yeah, these are almost certainly what we call primary transmission events. Oh, so you really are looking at the potential beginning of something. Yes, so if you want a patient zero, really clear patient zero. It's some of these individuals that have been affected with these viruses. The real question is, how do we stop patient zeros? How do we avoid patient one and patient two? Exactly. So Nathan is developing a series of tools like...

Digital surveillance. I mean, some of these places... I work in some places in Democratic Republic of Congo. You basically have to fly in to get there. No roads, often no electricity. But... Many of these places, they still have cell phone towers. So Nathan has begun to track cell phone call patterns in these communities.

So if he sees a blip... of many calls to a medical center within a short period of time. Okay, boom, now we've got to investigate that. And we continue to find viruses that are completely novel, and we're looking to determine if these are the next HIV. Because something about it, he says, HIV landed in humans in 1908, but we didn't know about it until 1981.

We had decades of time when this was a virus before it spread globally. What if we'd been looking for it? A lot of people to thank for this segment. Thanks to Nathan Wolf. For being Nathan. And he has an awesome new book called The Viral Storm. Also thank you to Carl Zimmer, whose book on viruses is called A Planet of Viruses. And thank you also to him and to Michael Warby.

Their interview was recorded on a podcast from Meet the Scientist, which you can find at microbeworld.org. And thanks to David Kwan, who's got a book called Spillover coming out very soon, which is all about diseases crossing over from animals to us. And also to Beatrice Hahn at the University of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania. And to Katie Slocum from the University of York for letting us use her recordings of chimpanzees. My name is Brennan Novak, and I'm calling from Reykjavik, Iceland, where about half the country believes in elves. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Hey, you want to know about one of my proudest moments of being a dad?

Yeah. Happened this morning. Yeah. So you know how Emil's a little bit of an introvert, right? Mm-hmm. We were sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare, and he's taking his shoes off. And there's this little boy who's only there two days a week, and he's not adjusting well.

And every time his mother drops him off, she has to literally pry him off her, and he's wailing. And so Emil sits down on this little seat to take his shoes off. the mother of this kid puts this little boy next to Emil and he is just crying. He's just distraught. So then what happens is Emil turns to this little boy, looks at him, sticks out his hand, and says, high five.

High five. Out of nowhere. That is amazing. Yeah, because it's like they're out in their own society, you know? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so let's do the introductions.

I'm Jad. I'm Robert. This is Radio Lab. We're calling this show. Patient Zero. Yeah. And for this next segment, no more patients. No more diseases.

Exactly. Let's focus instead on invention on the people who bring new ideas into the world. Yeah, the zero is behind the ideas. That does be quite sound right? You know what I mean? Yeah. And that guy you just heard? Hi, my name is John Mowalim.

I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He's got his own high-five story to tell, though it's not about his daughter. I think we have kids around the same age. her first high five. It's actually about the first high five ever. Yeah. Ever? Yeah. See, one morning a few years ago. 2007 or 2008?

John turned on his computer, opened up his email and found a press release about the true undisputed inventor of the high five coming out finally. Who is the press release from? National High Five Day, which is a kind of Joe Colliday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think.

And they told the story? They told the story of Lamont Sleets. college basketball player at Murray State in Kentucky. And the story in the press release went something like this. Sleets' father fought in Vietnam as part of the first battalion fifth infantry, which was nicknamed the Five. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying, Fad, as a kind of prideful thing.

And when Lamont was younger, they would all sort of hang out at the house in Kentucky, and he couldn't keep all their names straight. So when they'd walk in the door and go, Five, he would just sort of smack their hand. And they'd go, hi, five. Oh, like hi, like hello five. Hello five, yeah, high comma five. You know, he has small hands. He likes to put them up against the big hands of the five guys.

And it was years later that he started playing college basketball at Murray State and started high-fiving all his teammates. He really never stopped high-fiving. It was just something he did. But when he went around playing away games, other teams picked it up and it sort of spread out. So he was sort of both the inventor of the high-five and the kind of Johnny Appleseed at the high-five at the same time. And within a few weeks of John getting this press release.

The story was everywhere. It wound up sort of all over the internet. There were some local newspapers who, you know, picked it up. You know, Murray State suddenly became very proud of the fact that they were the home of the high five. It became sort of part of the institutional lore in the athletic department there. And then you read this and you thought what? I thought, how sad. How sad?

Why how sad? Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke. Turns out John had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high five and he had stumbled on this photograph. You know what, maybe I don't have it. Black and white picture. Oh, yeah, here we go. Two baseball players facing each other, Afro's, huge smiles,

and their hands are in the air right about to connect. Which one of these is Glenn Burke? Burke's the guy in the warm-up jacket. I think he's even got his hat on backwards. Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the L.A. Dodgers in the 70s. Big guy. He says he had 17-inch biceps, so I'll take his word for that. The other guy in the picture is Dusty Baker.

He's an outfielder. But you can tell in the picture, just from the way that Glenn is sort of throwing his whole body forward, that he's the one initiating the gesture. I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers Clubhouse. He just had that type of charisma. This is Luther Burke Davis, Glenn's sister. With Glenn, it was like he'd always be on the stage.

I often said he should have been a comedian. He was always dancing around in the clubhouse. He used to do Richard Pryor stand-up routines just from memory. He just genuinely loved people. So much so, she says that in the year that picture was taken, The Dodgers made him their sort of public face of the team. He was their ambassador of goodwill. He's the guy they'd say that to all the press events.

You know, like meet the youngsters or people. That sort of thing. Here's the story about this picture. What was the date? October 5th, poetically enough. 1977. The playoffs, Dodgers versus the Phillies, game four, bases are loaded. Dusty Baker.

Steps to the plate. And Grand Slam. Crowd goes nuts. Baker does his victory lap. Injust disease. You know, round and third coming to the plate. Burr. Comes racing out of the dugout.

And he's got his arm really high up and Baker. Sees him instinctively raises his arm. And before you know it, Burke and Baker, smack hands. Bam, there it was. The sportscasters that were, you know, announcing the game, said they had never seen that done in sports before. And from there on, the Dodgers started high-fiving, and everyone all started high-fiving.

The high-five. Became a thing. Mm-hmm. And it all began with that one moment. The platonic high-five right there. Unfortunately, that moment? That was actually both the beginning

and also almost the end of Burke's career. It's not that he wasn't good. He was actually really good, even in his rookie season. He was being talked about as the next Willie Mays by the Dodgers organization. But? He was gay. And he tried to keep that a secret while he was playing.

Dusty Baker actually had kept trying to set him up with his wife's cousins, and Burke never liked any of them. And Baker was completely confused because he knew these were really good-looking women, So there were rumors circulating, and the rumors reached the front office of the LA Dodgers. And one day, Burke was called in by management, and they offered him $75,000 to get married. $75,000 to get married?

What is this like the mob or something? Well, exactly. I mean, no, they didn't regularly offer their players money to get married. And Burke's response apparently was, he said, I suppose you mean to a woman. Shortly after that, the Dodgers traded into the. Oakland days for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior. That was confusing for us, and I know it had to be confusing for him. It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded.

And you think it was because he was gay? Yeah, yeah. You know, baseball is an old American sport. Yeah. But, you know, at least he was still going to be able to play ball. Or at least he thought. He ends up in Oakland, doesn't get very much playing time. And when he did get on the field, it wasn't very pleasant.

He used to get heckled a lot. You know, from people in the bleachers. And even worse, according to a couple of different people, his coach... Billy Martin. Would often introduce Glenn Burke this way. This is Glenn Burke, the faggot. Really? Yeah.

And so Glenn Burke retires. Wow, and he was only like 26 or something, right? Yes, he was young. Within a year of his rookie season. Just walks away. God, that's like an aborted career. Exactly. From there, he ends up in the Castro District in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood.

And things go, okay, for a while. But then one day when he's crossing the street. Three teenage girls in their mother's car come barreling down the road. And they hit him and broke his leg in three places. Oh, man. And that kind of ended everything when that happened. He starts taking painkillers.

One thing leads to another. He gets hooked on crack. Can't hold a job. He goes broke. Ends up living. On the street. And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, I guess AIDS at that point.

He ended up coming to live with me. A lot of times he didn't sleep well at night. And we would sit up and talk, put on music, and I danced, and he moved his arms around because he was in the bed. He was bedridden. And so you took care of him until he died? Yeah.

Glimberg died in 1995. But what he's left with at this point Because he's left with the original high-five, right? That's his claim. Yes, yes. That defined him, to some people, at least, at the end. And he believed it. A reporter had asked him, you know, if it was true about the high-five.

And he said, yeah, think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high-five. I had that feeling before everybody else did. Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release? So I called National High Five Day because I wanted to talk to Lamont Sleets. Even though I was sad, it seemed like, okay. Okay, here's another person's prideful accomplishment. Let's get his story.

Hello, hello. Eventually. Hey, there we go. He gets this guy on the phone. My name is Greg Herald Edge. Greg is one of the founders, and he and John get to talking, and John asks him the sensible first question. Is the Lamont Slate story true?

He figured it was, but he thought he should at least ask. He's a reporter. And there was a pause, and he said, no. Frankly, we've been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask. It's not true. This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would run with it.

They made the whole thing up. They made the whole thing up. And then they just went to go cast their protagonist. Yeah, so we sat down, we picked Murray State. That's just kind of a great sounding school. It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years. And they came across this guy, Lamont Sleets. Why him?

Well, it was pretty close to random. They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleets' wife. Absolutely. His wife emailed us and said some of the details that you have are flat out wrong. That implies that some of the things you've said are right. though, but Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high five. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what about Glenn? I was kind of like, hmm, kind of a bit blown away, you know?

Yeah, you know, here was this guy who was proud of this, and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him. Do you feel a little guilty? Did I mean, like, okay, it's a high five, it's kind of a silly thing. On the other hand, this guy's life, the way he died. Do you feel like you robbed him? We do feel, we do feel, we wish that we had done things like. differently and putting together this sort of collegiate prank.

But we didn't really know of Glenn Burke at that time. Greg says they hadn't heard of the Glenn Burke story when they pulled this prank. And now that they know it, they really feel bad. In fact, they're now organizing a charity event they're calling the National High Fiveathon, which will raise money for charity, including one chosen by Glenn Burke's sister Luther. I'm very proud. Anytime I see somebody do a high five, it just really makes me happy. And that seemed like a good end to the story.

But no. Because Danjohn told us that... If you really honestly want to get to the bottom of who invented the high five, I mean, we didn't think we wanted to, but now that we're in it, what the hell? Well, you've got to go beyond Glenn Burke's story. I've wanted you to believe that he was the hero at this point, right? So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith, right? Even though Glenn Burke died believing that the high five was his legacy,

at more or less the same moment that he invented it, a guy named Derek Smith, a basketball player for the Louisville Cardinals, was at practice. and a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was going to give him just an ordinary low five. And Derek Smith looked him in the eye. This is what Wiley Brown told me. Derek Smith looked him in the eye and said, no, up high.

That year's Louisville team, they were known as the Doctors of Dunk. You know, they're a high-flying team. They played above the rim. And John says when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA finals... I haven't seen it, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high-five handshake. High five. He felt compelled to explain it to America.

Wow, and did the moment that Derek Smith did it, did an asteroid fall on his head or something? Well, in 1996, I believe, in the 90s, he had an undiagnosed heart condition, and he just died all of a sudden on a cruise ship. What? Yes. And he said explicitly to Wiley Brown,

this is something I'm going to be remembered for. Our kids and our grandkids are going to talk about this, and in fact, our kids and grandkids do talk about it. And they're probably very proud. But... It was Kathy. Then we ran into this one. You'll not fire what?

This is Kathy Gregory. She coached Women's Volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith. And she says with her girls... Everyone did it. All the time. So I do believe that it was volleyball that first started it. And interestingly, she says they would high five more when a player screwed up. Yes, no, no.

It isn't just about celebration. Because really, when do you need a high five? Of course, it's more when you're down. Yeah, it makes people so happy. So Women's Volleyball. There you go. No, it's not a finib. Because then our producer Lynn Levy also discovered that in the movie Breathless in 1955,

and exactly one hour, 18 minutes into the film, you will see two Frenchmen do a very distinct Ote-Sinck. Right there. Isn't this all like an indication to you that it's maybe, it's one of those things that probably was there, the dawn of man? Because it like gives pleasure? Yeah, it's just like, Like from an evolutionary point of view?

No, I don't think so. I think it's a, I think this has the feeling of something that was born. See, now we have to decide. Like, we have to confess. Like, who in this room wants the gay guy to be the inventor? I want to get, yeah. I'll raise my hand, sure. Yeah.

It's the better story of the two. And something in me says, like, just go, go with the narrative winner, you know? So I, you don't even have the narrative winner. What are you doing? here. I was bored at my desk. This is Pat. Walter is our producer. You guys clearly failed at finding the first high-five. And you're saying you have the best.

Yeah. There's no such thing as the best. There is. I'm about to tell you what it is. We've already beaten a dead horse here. All right. What is it? What is it? Hello? Hi. Features this guy named Tim. Tim Hama. This is him? Yep. Hello?

And that's his girlfriend, Katie. Katie Shaford. And this little mini story begins in 2004. One July evening. Beautiful night out. Tim's out riding his motorcycle. And about 10 minutes into my ride, Medeer jumped out in front of me.

He slammed on his brakes and his bike. And just kind of like skidded. And there was a mailbox. Just snap my neck. I woke up. I was laying in the hospital room. And I opened up my eyes. I went to lift my arm up because I'm itchy nose. Yeah.

And my arm wouldn't move. He was paralyzed from the neck down. And so for seven years, Tim hasn't been able to hug his daughter, or for that matter, his girlfriend. You know, we started the date after my accident. I've never been able to hold her hand or... Reach out and touch me.

I mean, I feel that I'm almost in a prison. But, fast forward a few years, Tim signs up for an experimental procedure at the University of Pittsburgh. Doctors open his skull, connect wires to the part of his brain that would move his arm if his arm worked, and they connect the wires to a

robot arm. I even Katie said or whatever, whenever she saw the wire's coming out, she's like, that just looks weird. Crazy. And there's a video of one of the first times that Tim actually moves this arm. What you see is him sitting in a chair,

doctors kind of watching, and his girlfriend, Katie, is just in front of them off to the left a little bit. They hooked me up to the arm, and the machine said, Up. Up. Tim kind of grimaces.

My brain was sending out that specific type of signal that means up. Yeah. And once a computer was able to read that, the arm started to go up in the air. All right. There you go. All right.

Not long after this moment, Katie stands up from the chair that she was sitting in beside Tim and walks over in front of the arm. And without even talking, she's held out her hand. And she says, And for a moment, there's this, like, stillness in the room. And then the robot arm jerks forward, just like a fraction of an inch.

Katie's hand holding up there. That was a target. It's a touch her hand. And then the arm jerks up a little bit more. You can see him going from looking at the arm. And then a little bit more. To looking at me and then looking at the arm. A little bit more.

Until they're touching. When I looked at him, like, I just started tearing up. And then he started tearing up. And in a way, this high five, if you can call it that, it was sort of like the first time they ever touched. In space and time, I was able to put this piece of machinery that looked very similar to a hand on her hand. You not only did I just touch her, but I pushed into her hand. It was weird too because the hand was actually warm.

The hand was warm? Yeah. Like, that's the one thing that I just kept saying to people. Like, it was warm. It wasn't cold. I don't know. It just... It still kind of, like, boggled my mind when I think about it.

We should say thank you to Pat Walters. Yeah. That was kind of... Not bad, Pat Walters. Not bad. Not bad. But let's remember we're after the first. That's right.

We're looking for the first. And we're going to take one big leap before we finish the show and try something really odd. Hi, how you doing? Oh, we met a guy. I'm Johnny Hughes. I'm a documentary maker from Britain, also science journalist. He's an author. He recently wrote a book called On the Origin of Teepees.

And it's about... Tepees. Why? Well, if I'm being honest, it was because it was a sort of pun on the origin of species. Nothing much rhymes with species. You see, Johnny wanted to write a book about the origins of ideas the same way that Darwin wrote his book about the origin of species. So I went chasing off. After TPs. Which brought him to the USA, and then he ended up driving across the country.

Straight across. Going west onto the Great Plains. As he did, the farms gave way to prairie and then to wide open fields. It was at that point that he noticed something a little different. There was a distinct change in headgear. Yeah, as soon as you get onto the short grass prairie. Right after Bismar... there's a very obvious transition from baseball caps to cowboy hats.

And Matt got him to wondering, like, how did the cowboy hat get to the West? Suddenly, there it is, and he's thinking, who designed it or created it or invented it? And he's decided to do some research. And at first, the answers seemed pretty obvious and actually quite simple. So here's his explanation, number one. So the answer won to the question, who invented the cowboy hat, it's straightforward. And it goes like this. 1865, The Gold Rush.

In Colorado, everyone's coming in from all over the world to make their fortune paying for gold. They bring their hats. So there's a sort of mixture of hats from all different parts of the world, from the north and the south, from the cities. Quite a ridiculous collection of hats, we might say. You've got silk top hats. No. Seriously. In the color in the gold rush?

In the gold rush. That would be your A. Blinken hat. Great in the East Coast cities. Pretty useless on the top of Pikes Peak. Why? Because it gets blown off by the wind? Blown off, it gets wet. So you've got Yerey, but you also have...

Raccoons. skin hats, the sort of Davy Crockett things. Great in the winter, but come the summer... They got full of fleas, and they made you really hot as well. That's not good. You also had straw hats from the plantations from the south. Which are, I don't know, kind of flimsy. There would have been some sombreros. Not bad, actually.

Yeah. Keep the sun off your eyes, keep you cool. But they have enormous brims. The problem is, when it rains... Water just collects and stays on there. There you are in Colorado with lots and lots of hats. But none of them were perfect. All of them were slightly unfit. Enter Mr. John B. Stetson. He was the son of a hatmaker in the East Coast,

and he came over looking for his fortune, and the story goes. When he landed in Colorado, he looked around and he immediately saw an opportunity. Went back to the East Coast, gathered his thoughts. And in a moment of unnatural and inspired inspiration, if you can be so inspired, he saw... The fully formed cowboy hat.

In his head. Yeah. So he had the model in his head. And what was it? So his model was it needed to have a wide brim. to keep the sun and the rain off your head. But not as white as a sombrero, because that was impractical, but also much wider than, say, a top hat, which was useless.

And it needed to be waterproof? Because he knew that it was wet over in the West. Needed to have a high dome on top to keep you cool up there. He knew what it ought to be. So after a little hammering and stretching and cutting, he had the perfect hat. And he called it, The Boss of the Plains.

Which everyone in the West wanted to be. So, picture the scene, Boss of the Plains arrives. It's gorgeous. You want one. You threw away your horrible raccoon thing and you went for one of those. It very quickly became a status symbol. That is story number one. Pretty straightforward?

Yeah. It was a guy. It's a guy. It's J.B. Stetson, he came up with the idea. He was a genius. He got it sold. Okay. What's the problem with that story?

Well, the problem with that, says, Johnny, and he realized at the moment he landed out west and he started to look into this. Close your eyes and imagine, you know, your quintessential cowboy hat. You asked me to do this? Yeah. Please just do it. Okay, got it in my head. Is it a high dome?

Yep. Broad brim. Very. It's got a dent in the top. Well, see, the picture that we have in our heads is not what Stetson invented. Really? Why? I mean, what did Stetsons look like?

Probably the dullest cowboy hat you could possibly imagine. No rolling at the edge of the brim. No dents on the crown. It had a little ribbon around it. A ribbon? Yeah. It's not very bossy. That's dainty.

So Johnny did some more research, and he now comes up. This is coming up now. Theory number two. to explain who or what designed the hat. Again, 1865, it's Colorado Gold Rush Time. People are coming in from all over. J.B. Stetson shows up. He makes the hat. But the hat was very expensive.

You couldn't afford more than one. So from then on, for the next 10 years, you would wear it like all the time. You'd be picking up the whole time with the crown, so you'd be pushing these dents into it every time you're sort of yehard. And you'd also be sleeping on your hats, you'd be folding over the brim. So within a few years,

The cowboy heroes, these guys are turning up at the railhead towns with these, what we might call in Britain, naked, boss of the planes hats. That looked like a completely different hat than the one they bought in the store. Yeah, they'll be battered. And, you know, think about this, if you're a young cowboy and you're looking for your first cowboy hat? Do you want one that looks like the guy who runs the hardware shop? Who's got the pretty dainty one? Or do you want the one with a dent in it, like your dad, the cowboy? And so hatmakers picked up on this, and they began pretty.

producing pre-dented, crumpled, knackered hats. Stetson responded as well. You can look through the order books of Stetson, and you will see the designs change over time. All of which is to say, if you want to tell the story this way, you can say, yes, Stetson was there, Stetson played his part. But when it comes to a true cowboy hat, the one we think of, when we think of a hat.

Stetson really didn't invent it. The cowboys did. The entire population of cowboys were instrumental in choosing the future evolution of the cowboy hat. It's almost like the market's deciding, which in this case is cowboys. And can I just plant my flag and say that seems like a very sensible theory? It does. But something about this story number two was still nagging, Johnny.

Oh, there's more. He's going to go one more round. Do you want to come with him? I will go. Here we go. The third answer to the question who invented the cowboy hat is no one did. Well, someone did. What I mean is that there were no mindful decisions.

going on here. Not even a community of people mindfully chose where the cowboy hat was going to go. Mindfully. Yeah. So What do you suppose he means by mindfully? This is where you get a little bit of science. You know that if you were say a mouse

and you were living in an environment happily and then all of a sudden things turn cold. If you have short hair you're going to shiver and then maybe die. But if another mouse happens to have longer, hair. You know, they're going to do better. They're going to do better in life. They're going to have more

baby mice. So over time in this community, you're going to get more and more and more mice with longer and longer hair. Makes sense. Now, these mice, they don't choose the length of their hair. They just have the hair they got. It is the weather. It is the local environment. That's what really shapes these mice. And you could think of the hat in the same way. We're looking at the hat shape itself. The hat shape is changing over time without any forethought. Thanks to that gold rush in the 1860s, you've got a whole bunch of very different hats showing up on the Great Plains. And all those hats show up on heads. And those heads and hats are going to have horribly cold winters, searingly hot summers. They're going to be in the

wind. They're going to be out of doors because the main occupation is going to be moving cattle across the plains, in this very competitive hat situation, the hat that's going to survive is the hat that keeps you comfortable, keeps you cool, keeps you dry. In other words, the cowboy hat. Therefore, in this third version of our story, it wasn't Mr. Stetson, it wasn't the cowboys. According to Johnny...

The environment created the hat. The wind created the hat. The rain. The sun. The snow. No. The weather created those hats. Absolutely right. This hat was just bound to appear in that place in that time.

It would have been invented by someone because the habitat was there. The environment was right. There's something kind of poetic about the idea that the hat was called the boss of the planes. And if your third movie is correct, then it's really the planes were the boss of the hat or something else. Chad, that's brilliant. I like that one. But see, on the other hand, I'm not sure I like it because, like, I'm just thinking about all the edits that we do as storytellers. Like, for the pieces in the show, like, the thing we're always trying to do is kind of get to moments.

And we're trying to always atomize everything, get down to the particular person who made the particular decision that resulted in the particular change. Like, that's what we want as storytellers. So in some sense, your scenario three is, like, the death of story. sense. It's the anti-story. Feels less glamorous, doesn't it? Well, yeah, it runs counter. Do you know what, when Darwin came up with the theory of, well, when he published his theory of evolution by natural selection, that felt like a death in a way, because it felt

like you were taking away the creator, this amazing being. You were diminishing life to sort of mindless process. So a lot of people criticized him for the same thing. It's not as romantic. It's not as, well, it is. is awesome. It's just not in the same way. Yeah. And come to think of it, we always end up screwing up our stories, but, you know, we start to ask questions.

And then all of a sudden you're sucked into this thing. Suddenly it's got complicated and you have to deal with it. You have to deal with the everythingness of everything. Let's just keep it simple. Once in my time, Chad and Robert came into a show and said, that's the end of it. And you know what? It was. No, see, it's always more complicated to that, isn't it? It's true. Yeah.

I mean, it's never really the end. When you think about it, what is an end? You get the next show, get the credits, people fall in and they read the things. You should just get me just listen. Hi, Radio Lab. This is Beatrice Hahn. Radio Lab is produced by Chad Abramrad.

This is Quaman. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Thoran Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Lynn Levy, and Sean Cole with help from John Mitchell, Rachel James, and Matt Filty. Special thanks to,

Mike Feller, Chris Condian, Sidney Smith, Ben Feldman, Marva Felchin, and Katie Slocum. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Okay, you all. Bye-bye.