Revisionist History - The Dog Will See You Now

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

If recent times have shown us anything, it’s that many problems can not be fixed by humans alone. In the season 6 finale, Revisionist History turns to another species for a little help. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. What's her name? Cooley. Cooley. Sorry, they've got some fun names. K-U-L-L-I. Cooley. Cooley is a Belgian Malinois.

Sleek, lean, dappled gray and black. Panting happily on a patch of grass way up in the hills of northeastern Alabama. This dog's probably from Hungary. Hungary. Hungary. And she's how old? She's not over two, but I don't exactly have her information. The 24 months are below.

The 24 months are below. We have all that paperwork at the office, but we don't have that right here. That is the biggest tongue I've ever seen. We're all standing in front of a cluster of concrete buildings spread over a large rolling wooded campus an hour or so from Birmingham, the headquarters of an organization called 360 Canine Group. The whole operation looks like a scaled-down army base, only instead of soldiers marching to and fro, there are dogs.

Dozens and dozens of them. Puppies stumbling playfully, chocolate labs chasing things, German shepherds looking for a job to do. And Cooley, one of the operation's newest recruits, a teenager in dog years, being put through her paces. A rubber toy for which she has acquired a certain affection was taken from her, and her job is to find it. You can see like where she slobbered right here. So she caught the over here, turned. Once she turned, she can see.

That one can't go visual. She has never done an exercise like this before, and the assignment has filled her with enthusiasm. She can't fizz the seat. She's got to use her toes. She can't point out where it is. Cooley is standing in front of one of the cabinets, tail wagging.

She's not sure how doors work, but she knew her toy was in there. Cooley's a good girl, alright. She follows her nose. And we have a lot to learn from her. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the

final episode of Season 6 of Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This has been a season devoted to fixing things. College rankings, laundry, the Little Mermaid. We have looked at many burning issues and said, we can do better. But there are some problems that we cannot fix on our own. Some problems are so big they can only be solved with the help of another species.

Okay, so this is our dark room test. Cooley's undergoing yet another test with the same goal as before. Find the hidden toy. Only now the lights are off, and the toy is not in the first room Cooley enters, but in a second, smaller room off to the side. This also tells us if it takes her a little while to try to find it, how much hunt drive she actually has. So it's not just immediate to make sure, even after she gets tired, even after she's hot, that she still wants that

toy enough to be looking for it. Cooley bounds in, sniffs the first room, everything, all four walls. Then she zeroes in on the closet. We can't see her, only hear her. Her trainers, Sean and Ashley, are grading every step of her performance on a long, detailed checklist. You can hear the difference in her breathing pattern. When she got in, she stopped breathing. Cooley walked across a mattress, didn't stop,

jumped on one end of a makeshift teeter-totter, didn't faze her. These are the dogs that people get as pets, and they eat their couch, and they're the worst, terrible pets that make the really, really good dogs, for the most part. We love all of that. She's a caterer. She runs down a hallway, sniff sniff. A large canvas bag is suspended from the ceiling, ready to drop and block her way. It's been pulled up to the ceiling. Big heavy bag. Here he comes. Here she comes. We all jumped when the bag dropped from the ceiling. Cooley didn't.

She paused, looked at the bag, sniffed it, and carried on. Dogs' noses are something like 100,000 times more sensitive than ours. A puppy, fresh off the boat, can find a hidden toy in a darkened room. Dogs can perform all manner of olfactory tasks using judgment, drive, and discipline. It's their superpower. That's why there are dogs at the airport sniffing luggage, or why it's always a dog who finds the hiker lost in the woods. Spend a little time at 360 K9 in the hills of Alabama, and every one of your preconceptions about the genius of dogs will be confirmed. we had a dog a black lab that we retired and we allowed the dog you know so we had a ceremony and we but we you had a ceremony and we hired you know there's a local bakery that makes dog friendly cake so we had a cake for the dog we were sitting in the 360 canine conference room

listening to jerry and John Pierce, two of the company's senior executives, two hardcore dog guys, talking about the best they ever saw. And we had the dog in the room and running around and just, you know, off leash and sniffing everybody, super friendly dog. The lady comes in to deliver the cake and she's got her boyfriend or husband with her

and he's standing there holding the cake and the dog keeps running up behind the guy and going behind him and basically like sniffing his rear end and sniffing the back of his uh you know his shirt and won't leave him alone and i remember who asked him but finally someone said all right yeah john said are you carrying a weapon and he was like no i i was carrying a weapon. I took it off and left it in the car just in prayer to walk it in here. And the guy had, you know, three minutes before taken his gun off and left it in his car, and the dog still found it.

And, you know, we were having a party. What was that dog's name? That was Cole. Cole and Cooley. Add them to the long list of doggy all-stars. But you already knew dogs could do this, right? Now it's time to go further. A few years ago, a Labrador named Florin flew in from London to Boston at the invitation of a research scientist at MIT named Andreas Mershin,

coming in on a winter's morning for a special One Dog exhibition. Flowing the famous dog flew first class to MIT, so I didn't have time to go through all the hoops, so we had to rent a hotel room, a hotel ballroom, right across the street at the Marriott. Mershin is a kind of scientific jack-of-all-trades. He's technically a physicist, but as he likes to say,

he operates in blissful ignorance of disciplinary boundaries. He's interested in solar panels, in quantum effects in molecular biology, not to mention something that I cannot begin to understand called cytoskeletal memory encoding. Mershin got interested in prostate cancer, one of the most common of all cancers. Mershin heard about the work being done by a British researcher named Claire Guest, who had been training dogs to detect diseases, the same way we've been training dogs for years to detect explosives. And Mershen and Guest ended up working together, which is what

led to Florin Guest's four-year-old Labrador flying into Boston one cold winter's morning to perform a special sniffing demonstration for the senior leadership of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. So wait, describe the scene. This is hilarious. You're in the ballroom of the Marriott. Yes. How many people? Oh, maybe a dozen people, maybe a few more. But they're all by invitation, okay? And there's a giant carousel in the middle about seven feet across, which has eight arms. And each arm is a glass jar of urine closed off by a metal frit.

Everything is stainless steel. Everything is disinfected. Everything is super clean. The jars have all been preselected from a biological repository. Some are filled with urine from people known to have suffered from prostate cancer. Others are controls. Florin's job is to sniff each jar. If she detects what she believes is a positive sample, she's supposed to stop and stare at the jar before moving on. Were the people from the Prostate Foundation skeptical?

Oh, yes, of course, and as rightly they should be. You must see this to believe it. Nobody should take these kind of things on just somebody's, especially when we're talking about people's lives here, right? It was early in the morning. Mershon looked at Florin and worried she wasn't up to the task. So they had brought Florin the dog on first class. Then the American customs had to, by law, deworm her, give her medicine. So she had to be vomiting and all sorts of other unpleasantness happened to the poor dog. And there's coffee smells everywhere, by the way, in the Marriott. People were serving breakfast. I'm like, oh my God, we're going to confuse this

dog now with all the coffee. And she's jet lagged and dewormed. And this poor dog is not going to perform. And she kicks it out of the park. The people from the Prostate Cancer Foundation are so blown away, they end up funding Guest and Merchant's research project to explore the idea that smell might be the best way to diagnose a dangerous cancer. To a layman like me, the idea that a cancer or a virus would have a smell is not intuitive. It's not the disease itself that has the smell. What happens is it changes your body's metabolic pathways, of which you have thousands going on. In every cell, there's different things happening. They change, and many of these pathways, many of these processes inside your cells, they have as a

byproduct odorants. Odorants are volatile organic compounds that tend to fly around and come out of your body. So cancer, for instance, likely leaves an imprint on every emission that you have, from sweat to urine to saliva to tears to you name it. Human beings are a sight species. Sight is our superpower. The biggest web of sensory connections in our brains is between our cortex and our eyes. We can differentiate colors in a way that few other species can. But as our eyesight evolved to get better, our noses got worse. As the biologist John Bradshaw puts it, there appear to be limits on how much information any brain can process. So if you optimize for seeing, you compromise on smelling.

Dogs make the opposite trade-off. Their eyes are mediocre. Their noses are amazing. To Florin, prostate cancer wasn't a clump of cells. It was an odor. An odor so distinctive that it made her stop and stare. Let's imagine that you and I both have prostate cancer at the same stage. Is it fair to assume that we, the way in which our body smell is, our odor is altered by that cancer? Correct. Might not be the same.

Exactly. So why can the dog generalize? For the same reason that you can generalize the gait, you can track my footprints. If I teach you what footprints look like on the wet sand and how they're distributed, so the dog learns to identify the footprints on the wet sand where it's easy to see and easy to see the gate. And then it generalizes, it extrapolates and says, oh, this smells like the stuff that they used to want me to find.

Human beings try to screen for prostate cancer by looking for it. Of course we do. We're a species that's in love with sight. We ask men over a certain age to take a blood test, to look for something called the prostate-specific antigen. And if we see a lot of that antigen, we take a closer look at the prostate itself. We take half a dozen or more little slices of the prostate

and look at them under the microscope. We look, and we look again. The problem is that only around a quarter of men who have elevated PSA levels actually end up having prostate cancer. You could have high PSA levels for some other reason. You could also have normal PSA levels and still have prostate cancer. And so the result of all that looking is an enormous amount of error. Lots of men are told they could have a dangerous cancer when they don't,

and lots of other men have cancer that gets missed. The prostate screening error rate is so bad that many men avoid it altogether. I'm not getting tested. Are you kidding me? All you have to do is spend a few hours reading the available literature and you realize that looking for early signs of prostate cancer is a fool's game. It's really, really hard. But Florin, the dog, didn't look. Florin bypassed all that nonsense. Florin just sniffed. And did Florin make any mistakes?

Oh, sure, of course. If something is 100% right, it's 100% wrong. So, yes, there's definitely errors in the samples, and the dog can definitely make errors. However, you should remember this. So do all of our tests. And currently, the dogs are better than any test. Notice how he said dogs are better.

It's not like Florin is some kind of super dog, the Usain Bolt of the canine world. Lots of dogs could do just what she did. A dog can do better than the tests you trust. And you don't trust a dog. And I'm glad you don't trust a dog. We have to not trust a dog. The dog is teaching us. No, dogs are definitely error prone, same as everything else. But currently, and this is a mind blowing statistic, of all the diseases that have ever been tried to be identified by trained dog, all of them have succeeded. That is mind-blowing. It should be, we should be paying attention to this. What the hell is happening where we can't make this thing not work? I mean,

shouldn't you be angry at this? I mean, come on, what are we doing? Well, exactly. What are we doing? The chief research scientist for 360K9 is a man named Bill Schneider, Dr. William Schneider. Schneider used to work at Fort Detrick, the Army garrison in Maryland, where the Pentagon does its top secret biodefense work. Schneider's specialty was plant virology, diseases that affect things like peach or cherry trees. I come from a plant background, but being at Fort Detrick, I had access to a lot of tools and toys that typical scientists didn't have in their repertoire, and I'd been playing around with those. But then, just like Andreas Merschen over at MIT, Schneider began to hear of the supposedly miraculous powers of dogs. So he decided to hold a sniff-off. Fort Detrick has a special containment facility where they could do an actual head-to-head challenge,

comparing detection results between a dog and one of modern science's highest tech tests. Schneider chose as the test case a plant virus called plumpox and bet against the dogs. He was a lab guy, not a dog guy. Yeah, you name it, we had access to it. Gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, all sorts of very deep sequencing, heavy-duty nucleic acid analysis, things that are pretty darn cool, actually, and not one single one of them can beat the dogs. In fact, the U.S. Army invested about $19 billion in trying to find a machine that could detect explosives better than dogs. And in the end, all these projects, nothing could come close to what the dogs can do. So I had to convert myself.

Bill Schneider, the convert, decided to change careers. He left government work, started making sophisticated canine training aids. I come to you, Bill, and I say, Bill, we have a new highly infectious virus out there. We know almost nothing about it. What do you do next? I say I need the genomic information. So that's a key step in practically any diagnostics these days and with good purpose. Because when you have genomic information, you can design assays or in my case, you can

design a training aid that will teach a dog to directly detect that. You're making a scent. Yes, exactly. You're looking at a blueprint and you're saying, ah, this gene, this protein, this protein, this protein, this protein, I can construct that in a lab. Yeah. Florin, the prostate cancer dog, was trained on samples taken directly from people with prostate cancer. Schneider was taking the next step, figuring out a way to extract the scent of the disease itself, refining the process, creating customized disease fragrances that could be shipped overnight to dogs anywhere in the world. I'm assuming you're avoiding everything

that has to do with actual virulence contagiousness it's an inert it's a harmless substance yeah you could eat it if you wanted to i wouldn't taste all that great but yeah it's completely safe it's completely stable you can make as much of it as you want yeah yeah now we have a little vial of something that has a characteristic odor. Correct. You and I can't smell that. Nope. No.

In fact, I would have bet you a lot of money that nothing could smell it because in our mind, none of these things had scent. The world's scientists were studying and refining the diagnostic power of dogs. Then COVID-19 happened. Breaking news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions more Americans into virtual lockdown. Over 75 million people in New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut ordered to stay at home.

Bill Schneider realized that his technique of making these little vials of disease fragrance might prove really useful. Is there any reason to believe that COVID might be the exception to this pattern? Not in my mind, no. No, once I crossed that threshold with the original virus that we'd worked on, which was that plum pox virus, I knew you could translate this not just to another virus in plants. I can take and transfer that to humans or cattle or swine or chickens or anything. And off you go. COVID first surfaces at the end of 2019. The novel coronavirus genome is published in early January of 2020.

The WHO declares a pandemic that spring. And across the country, there's demand for COVID-19 testing as positive cases are on the rise. Some people have had to wait longer than two weeks to receive results. While the world is in lockdown in the early summer of 2020, Bill Schneider's lab gets going, synthesizing the proteins that make up the smell of SARS-CoV-2. The trainers start training dogs on it. Hardworking, focused, unflappable dogs who really love the idea of sniffing nine to five. By the time we got to September 15th, we were starting to collect clinical samples from people who were confirmed positive. And we were checking the dogs on those clinical samples and they didn't miss a beat.

They were 99% accurate. And at that point, I was very confident that the dogs we were training could detect COVID in people's masks, on their socks, in sweat, in saliva. Labs, shepherds, Belgian Malinois. Flop a year, point a year, doesn't much matter. What matters is that they're a dog, they have a big, powerful nose, and they're perfectly happy to put that magnificent nose

to work in the service of helping all of us, their best friends. Let's think about some of the options we have when detecting a deadly new pathogen as it moves through a human population. One option is what we ended up trying with COVID in the United States. We make you come to a testing site. Stand in line with a lot of people who also think they might have COVID. Really good idea, by the way. Stick a nasty swab up your nose, charge you a couple hundred dollars, use an insanely expensive and complicated and high-tech system called PCR to give you an answer that may or may not be useful because it didn't always get

to you in time. Remember, sometimes it would take forever to get your test results, sometimes two weeks, and maybe in those two weeks while you were waiting, you were infecting everyone you met. The result of all the cost and inconvenience and hassle and imperfection of option one was that we've never done enough testing at any stage of the pandemic, and because we didn't do enough testing, the pandemic soared out of control. Someone has a wedding or a Thanksgiving dinner, and in a perfect world, everyone would get tested before coming, but of course they don't.

And one person ends up infecting 10 other people, and maybe one or two of those 10 will die. All these horror stories have at their core a failure of disease detection. I emailed Michael Minna at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was one of the big critics of the way we tested for COVID. And this is what he wrote back about the way testing works. It has to do with what epidemiologists call R-naught, which is the average number of people infected by an infected person. If an epidemic has R-naught above one, it grows exponentially. If R-naught falls below one, an epidemic dies out.

Here's what Minna wrote. This whole pandemic and all of the massive outbreaks we've seen have been with an R-naught of about 1.3. That means that every 10 people infected went on to infect, on average, 13 people. Well, in that case, if you have 100 people infected on day one, then 30 days later, you have about 600 new infections. Exponential growth, end quote. All we had to do to stop the pandemic was to test just enough people and prevent just enough new infections so that those 10 newly infected people only infected, on average, nine other people. We just had to move the needle a little bit. And we couldn't do it.

Option one was one of the most criminally stupid acts of public health incompetence in American history. Now, imagine another option. Let's move to a hypothetical. So I'm a high school. I want to reopen. We're in the middle of a raging pandemic. And I come to you and I say, I want to use your service. Are we talking?

How would you tell me how you would fix that up? I'm talking to Jerry Johnson, who runs biodetection at 360 K9. Dog at the front door? Yep. The first 50 kids come in, they stand on their spot. Dog searches them, they go on to class. The next 50 comes in. We could do that, you know, relatively quickly.

You know, and maybe you have some coming in the gymnasium, some coming in the cafeteria. It's all about having the real estate to get the children lined up. So, and you could do that with one dog or two dogs? You would want two dogs, particularly if it's a public health issue and school children, you want the dogs to be very, very thorough. So if the dog's conditioned to work 45 minutes, we'd want to stop at 30 just to make sure that the dog is not fatiguing at all. A PCR test costs somewhere in the range of $150, and you wait forever for the result. The cost of a dog test, once you've factored in the dog, the training, paying the handler,

is something like $2.50 a test. And the dog gives you the answer immediately. So the dog is, you've got these kids lined up, dog sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, finds a, dog has a positive right what is the dog doing at that point just sits just so when the dog goes down the line what we like to do is we line people up we have them we have the dog go down as they're facing forward the dog goes down the left hand side of the line and it just does a quick you'll see it's a it's a minimally invasive search the dog will put its nose on the back of

the person's hand they target the hand if you have open-toed shoes it might target your feet it makes quick contact with the skin but then it keeps going the dog won't really break stride if it gets an odor and there's the presence of virus then you'll see the dog stop it'll sniff more it'll investigate and then it'll go into the the sit response so that person who's been identified as a dog as positive is then pulled out for secondary screening. Then take him to the nurse's office and get a rapid test. The next time a pandemic hits,

we could have dogs at the front door of every school in America. We could have dogs at the front door of restaurants and dogs in bars and dogs in train stations and dogs at the airport. We could have dogs walking down the street, checking out everyone on the sidewalk. Your block could band together and have a dog come every night at dinnertime to sniff everyone.

You could hire a dog along with caterers at your daughter's wedding or your son's bar mitzvah or every Sunday morning at church to make sure you aren't holding a super spreader event. Dogs give us the power to move the needle from an R-naught of one to an R-naught of something less than one. That is option two, the canine option. But will we go down that path? Forgive me if I'm skeptical.

Because to take option two, we will need tens of thousands of dogs. And we don't have tens of thousands of dogs trained and ready. And why don't we have a whole National Canine Guard trained and ready, matched up with their handlers for any conceivable future pandemic? A strategic puppy reserve to call on whenever an emergency happens? Because at the end of the day, we don't really believe in dogs. We like them as friends, sure, but not as medical diagnosticians. Maybe you remain unconvinced that dogs could prevent the next pandemic. It sounds goofy, I know, panting Labradors everywhere. The dog does not wear a white coat.

She did not go to medical school or have a row of diplomas on the wall of her doghouse. She just uses her big wet nose. But allow me a brief final and hopefully persuasive digression on the indelicate subject of colonoscopies. Have you had one? You should. It might save your life. But if you're over the age of 50 and haven't gotten around to getting one yet, I think I know why. They're a pain in the you-know-what. You can't eat for 24 hours, then you go to a medical office and suffer the indignity of being impaled on something long and painful. But 10 guesses about who is really, really good at detecting colon cancer. Yes, dogs. May I refer you to the following research paper published in the prestigious journal Gut, volume 60, issue 6, first author Hideto Tsunoda of the School of Medicine at Kyushu

University in Japan, entitled Colorectal Cancer Screening with Odor Material by Canine Scent Detection, with the conclusion that a dog is just as good as any alternative modern medicine has come up with. When was that paper published? January of 2011. That's how long we have known that a dog with a few months of training can come trotting in and save the day. But when you go to your gastroenterologist, do you see a dog waiting there? No, you don't. Because we don't believe in smell. We believe in sight. We have more faith in the impossibly complicated and expensive and inefficient products of our own technological imagination than we do in the superpowers that nature has bestowed on other

animals. We are, as a species, narcissists. And with COVID, our narcissism caught up with us. We don't have to live in an imperfect world. We can fix things. We can mend the broken and upgrade the mediocre. But first, we need to get over ourselves. Let Cooley and Cole and Florin show us the way to a better future. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle, Lee Mangistu, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Ananai.

Our editor is Julia Barton, original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, and engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Daniela Laconde, Thank you. Coco, Finn, Dash, POTUS, Colette, Ninja, Dorley, Thunder, Lichtenberg, Linus, Zuzu,

Freeway the Poodle, Max, Sparky, Roxy, Rosie, Oslo, and mine. Biggie Smalls. A brilliant, irascible, adorable cat. I know, I know. After all that, I'm a cat person. Sorry, everyone. See you next season.

But is there a road here? Guys, we have to. There's not a road. I don't think there's a road here. I think this is... Yes, there is. Look. Oh, really? Okay.

Okay. Man, I could be wrong, but it looks like a road to me. Yeah, yeah. It's a road. It's a road. Let's follow it for a while. Guys, we're going to the land of the nose. How can you not follow your nose?

Does the doggy look on... Dogs do not look on Google Maps They're looking at waves Following their nose That's true Lassie did not have waves No