Science Vs - Superbugs: Apocalypse … Now?

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Imagine getting an infection, going to the doctor, and having no little pill to make you better. Welcome to a world of SUPERBUGS. For years we've been hearing that our antibiotics aren't working as well as they used to. But recently, it feels like things have really gotten out of hand — we’re told that these super scary antibiotic-resistant bugs are EVERYWHERE. In today’s episode, Wendy visits a freezer filled with superbugs to find out how worried we need to be, and what scientists are doing about this. We talk to ​​Dr. Fernando Gordillo Altamirano, Professor Edward Feil, and Dr. Tina Joshi.  Find our transcript here: http://bit.ly/3o914qb  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) What's up with superbugs?  (04:59) Are superbugs everywhere?  (08:32) How is antibiotic resistance spreading?  (14:33) Why aren't we all dead?  (20:52) Meet phages: superbug-killing viruses (30:33) What else needs to happen to fight superbugs? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Joel Werner, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, R.E. Natowicz, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Gimlet’s managing director is Nicole Beemsterboer. Fact checking by Carmen Drahl. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including Professor Evgeni V. Sokurenko, Professor Anton Peleg, Professor Jon Iredell, Dr Alejandro Chavez, Dr Branwen Morgan, Professor Asad Khan, Professor Ramanan Laxminarayan, Dr Vanina Guernier-Cambert, Dr Calum Walsh, Dr Claire Gorrie, Dr Marc Stegger. Special thanks to Dr Karl, Pierce Singgih, Flora Lichtman, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Science Vs is a Spotify Original Podcast and a Gimlet production. Follow Science Vs on Spotify, and if you want to get notifications every time we put out a new episode, tap the bell icon in your app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello! Shall we go up? Yes! Alright, let's do it. Here we go. I'm at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia with Dr Fernando Godillo-Altamirano and we're headed to a research lab attached to the hospital.

This is my first lab tour post-COVID. Oh really? I wonder if the beakers still look the same. They look exactly the same. They haven't changed. At first, this looks like any other lab. You know, the drill, test tubes, white walls, lab coats. But then Fernando walks me to a room filled with big freezers.

And in here, there's something that you don't see in every lab. What is inside these phrases? Superbugs. Superbugs. Bacteria that can't be killed by some of our strongest antibiotics. And I'm in a room filled with them. Whoa! And I'm not wearing a mask! Well, they are all frozen.

They are technically harmless in their current state. Technically harmless? Fernando carefully opens the freezer door and white fog snakes out. It looks like we're in Penguin's Lair, and white fog snakes out. It looks like we're in Penguin's Lair, you know, from Batman. When the fog clears, I can see shelves filled with thousands of vials.

Oh, okay. So this is like superbog central. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. And today we're pitting facts against infections as we look at superbugs. Okay, so you know how Fernando just said that we were safe because the superbugs were contained and frozen? Well? I just unfroze from our freezers that you just saw four of them. What? It's like the scariest cooking show you've ever seen.

I'm looking at some of the deadliest bacteria in the world. And I know I'm making jokes because that's kind of what I do. But looking down at these agar plates, it is freaky. I mean, just imagine getting an infection with one of these, a UTI or a nasty cough like pneumonia. Going to the doctor and having no little pill to make you feel better. One woman survived a suicide bombing in Brussels only to almost die because her wounds got infected with a superbug.

In fact, the bacteria that almost killed her was the same species that I'm staring at right now. The bugs have been recognized as the most dangerous ones in terms of antibiotic resistance. And when a patient gets infected by one of these bad guys, that patient is in serious trouble. For years, we've been hearing about this problem, that our drugs aren't working as well as they used to. But recently, it feels like things have gotten out of hand. Because if you've been watching the news, it's not only that these bugs are super scary, but they're also everywhere. It's as if they're ready to infect us when we take the train.

On the underground, they found traces of nine so-called superbugs, which are the... Or eat a chicken burger. Listen up. A recent study shows that nearly 80% of the meat in US supermarkets contains antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Or even get crapped on by a seagull. The meat in US supermarkets contains antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Or even get crapped on by a seagull.

Researchers finding one in five seagulls carry superbugs resistant to antibiotics. One headline screamed that if we don't do something soon, we're headed towards an impending superbug apocalypse. The end to modern medicine as we know it. So today on the show, is this for real? Are superbugs really everywhere? And what are scientists doing about all this? Because it turns out that here at this lab that I'm visiting, they're recruiting an unexpected soldier in this fight with the help of perhaps my turds. You're doing a good deed, a good deed for the patients here, 100%.

When it comes to superbugs, a lot of people are saying that we live in... Superbug central. But then there's science science bestest super bugs is coming up bumble knows it's hard to start conversations hey no too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

Welcome back. Today we're on the hunt for superbugs, bacteria that have learned to fight off our antibiotics. And we're asking, how bad is this? And to get to the bottom of that, we first want to know where these bugs are hiding. Because as you just heard in the news, it seems like they're everywhere. Is that true?

To find out, we called up Ed Fahl, a professor at the University of Bath in the UK, whose team recently went searching for superbugs in a city called Pavia. Here's Ed. It's beautiful. It's very typically Italian. Pavia is in northern Italy. Picture it. Cobblestone streets, great food. In fact, he told me that this is the region

where Gorgonzola is made. I don't know. What more can I say about Pavia? I recommend it. And so in this land of cheese, Ed got three very fastidious research assistants to go searching for superbugs, taking swabs all over the city. And I mean, all over. Swings and benches, samples from ATM machines, buses. They even sampled the holy water in the cathedral. The holy water? Like they snuck into the holy water in the cathedral. Okay, the holy water? Like they snuck into the cathedral with a little swabber? Yeah, yeah, they took a little sample of that.

And they went all over the hospitals too, sampling patients and surfaces. And then they went out of the city and onto the surrounding farms, to the pigs, chickens and cows. And how did you take the samples from the cows? So rectal swabs, mostly. Up the butt? Up the butt, yeah. I have a little game.

I try and make every academic say up the butt at least once during our interview. Yeah, okay. That's fine. I'm happy with that. Then they all got busy at the lab, genetically sequencing the samples, more than 3,000 of them. And basically, Ed and his team wanted to know, where are the superbugs? And for the real nerds out there, Ed was looking for superbugs within the genus Klebsiella. Okay, so first, some good news.

The holy water? Came up negative, I'm pleased to say. So the good people of Pavia can relax that that's fine. But then, the bad news. They found that around the town and on the farms, there were a lot of bacteria that had resistance to some antibiotics. Tricks up their sleeves to fend off drugs like penicillin or streptomycin these were found in the soil on poultry dogs cats so you see those basically everywhere

they're everywhere i mean that they're out they're out of the box now so i mean just think of it as a type of pollution really and it turns out that this isn't just happening in beautiful Pavia. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria really have been found all over the place. Yes, in subways, sausages and seagulls. But also hitching a ride on tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean. They've been found in the Arctic, and something that really blew my mind. They've even been found in an isolated cave in New Mexico. That's a thousand feet underground.

So how the hell did this happen? I talked about this with Dr. Fernando Gordillo Altamirano. He's the guy that showed us around the superbug freezer. And Fernando told me that this all started a very, very, very long time ago. Antibiotic resistance is not man-made, right? It is a phenomenon that occurs naturally. Bacteria started learning tricks to outsmart antibiotics way before we started popping them for our infections. And that's because bacteria have always had enemies,

things in nature like fungi that wanted to kill them. And so the fungi, they had their own antibiotics, chemicals to destroy bacteria. In fact, we got penicillin from fungus. Thanks. So this all means that from a bacteria's perspective, they need to come up with ways to fight back. And they've been doing this for thousands of years. I mean, literally, we have evidence in the permafrost that bacteria had this superpower 30,000 years ago.

So this is one reason why we're seeing antibiotic resistant bacteria all over the place. Because they've been doing this for ages. Where humans accelerate this process is when we start introducing antibiotics into the environment. And we are using on a massive scale. Around the world, we take billions of antibiotics each year, and it's only growing. We give a ton to our livestock too, not just to kill disease, but to make our animals grow faster. And each time we use antibiotics, we put bacteria in this very clear position, evolve some way to get around it, or die. And so bacteria have been evolving. And by the way, this isn't just happening in bacteria.

Ever since we started using antifungals, we've also been seeing more resistance with fungal infections. But of course, you guys all know that thanks to that HBO doco, The Last of Us. Okay, but back to bacteria. So now these bugs have all these tricks to outsmart our drugs. Like, for example, some of them make enzymes that chew up our antibiotics. And the way that these tricks have spread so quickly is partly because once a bacteria learns a new trick, they can share it with their friends. And one of the ways they do that is through this process called conjugation. And boy, is it interesting. Tina Joshi at the University of Plymouth in the UK.

It sounds very sexy because like conjugation sounds... It's like bacterial sex. When I teach about it, I say it's bacterial sex, right? It's bacterial sex. It literally is. When bacteria learn a new trick to fight off our antibiotics, Bacterial sex, right? It's bacterial sex. It literally is. When bacteria learn a new trick to fight off our antibiotics, it might start by just a random mutation in their genetics.

One little letter in their DNA flips, and this gives them an advantage. Conjugation is the process where some bacteria can then share those genes. And here's how it works. So picture it. Bacteria is swimming about, and then this appendage called a penis, sorry, a pillus emerges from the bacteria. Like a stick, a stick that comes out of it, and it's like a little thin strand that's

coming out. It's like a little thin hair, almost coming out it's like a little thin hair almost and that's really biologically incorrect so sorry for everyone who's a scientist listening but you know it's a bit like a hair moving through the pillus of the superbug finds a friendly bacteria and attaches on and meanwhile the superbug has copied part of its dna including the part that helped it fight off our antibiotics. So then what happens is that the superbug DNA moves through the pillus and into the friendly bacteria so that ultimately where we had one superbug

now we have two. And this bacterial sex, it can happen between different species. In fact, there was this case report of a guy who had a really scary superbug infection that was shrugging off our most powerful antibiotics. Doctors were freaking out. Anyway, the infection was caused by a bacteria called Klebsiella. But inside this guy, researchers saw that the superbug gene

had already jumped into an E. coli. And that superbug gene, it's since been found all over the world in more than a dozen different species. And the thing that I never thought about is that all this bacterial sex, it isn't happening at a seedy motel down the road. It's going on inside us. All the time, yeah, all the time inside us. That gene swapping between bacteria is always happening. Because wherever there are bacteria, there is bacterial sex and you know in just one bout of bacterial bonking they'll often pass on not just one trick to fend off our antibiotics but a whole superbug goodie bag

and the spread is just phenomenal and we can't control it i mean we can't control evolution we might think we can and We might think we can. I mean, we might think we're the most evolved species in the universe, but we cannot control bacterial evolution. All we can do is just look and think, oh, my God. Sorry, I don't want it to be scary. But it does sound scary. These bacteria are doing all this hanky-panky all over the place,

sharing resistance to our antibiotics, and they've been found all over the world doing this. Our next question is, I don't know, why aren't we all dead? Well, the thing is that even though these bacteria are special, they're not super in every single way. Like they're not necessarily nastier or more contagious than regular bacteria. So a lot of the time our immune system can actually keep them in check. In fact, what we're learning is that you can even be carrying a superbug like in your belly and not even know it. One study looked at more than a thousand poo samples and found that 9% of the turds had antibiotic-resistant E. coli in them.

I asked Ed about this, you know, the guy whose team was snooping around the holy water in Pavia. I think we assume that if a bug has a resistance to antibiotics or even multiple resistances, that it is inherently dangerous and nasty. But actually, you could just sit in your gut happily and not cause any disease. Those are two separate things. They're very much separate things, yes. So a superbug isn't any more likely to cause disease. It's just that if it does, it's harder to treat.

But where superbugs do become a real problem is in hospitals. And that's partly because you have people who are already sick, whose immune systems might be a little weak, and it's easier for any kind of bacteria, super or not, to take hold. And in fact, hospitals are a big superbug problem for another reason, because it's also where you find the scariest of the superbugs. Okay, so the bacteria that we're finding on our trains and meat, while they might be resistant to some antibiotics, we still have ways of killing them.

Even MRSA, which you hear about people getting in locker rooms. While the infections can be nasty, we haven't completely run out of ways to kill that bacteria. So while these bugs are bad news, they're not the worst news. The bacteria that are resistant to basically all the antibiotics we have, let's call them super, super bugs, you're most likely to run into those in one place.

And that's hospitals. Super, super bugs. They haven't made it out of the hospitals at all, as far as we can tell. That's right. When Ed's team ransacked Pavia for them, these super, super bugs were only in the hospitals. Other studies around the world mostly find the same thing, that hospitals are ground zero for this. And it makes sense that super, superbugs, the bacteria that we are really struggling to treat, that they would thrive in hospitals. Because that is where we use a ton of different antibiotics. Now, it is really hard to put numbers around your risk of getting infected by a superbug or a super superbug in a

hospital. If you're in a richer country, the risk is still fairly low. So for example, in the US, about 3% of patients get some kind of infection while they're in hospital. And depending on the type of infection, a fairly small chunk of those are superbugs. But away from rich countries, this can be a lot worse. So one study out of Rwanda found that more than three out of four hospital infections were superbugs. In Ukraine, before the war, it was even worse. It's all enough to freak out Fernando. I think that any time in the past five years,

since I've been working on superbugs and antibiotic resistance, any time a loved one is hospitalized for, you know, any reason, you know, minor surgery or anything like that, I immediately get paranoid. Oh my God, I don't want them to get an infection. And it is nerve wracking. I mean, the whole thing is really scary. Here's Ed again.

We're in this race against the bacteria and it feels like generally we're losing that race. And if we do lose, we are really screwed. Zooming out to all superbugs here, and not just the super super ones, already around 50,000 people in the US are dying each year from them. And worldwide, it's estimated that in 2019, around 1.3 million people died of a superbug infection, meaning that these bacteria killed more people that year than AIDS and malaria combined. And you know, this isn't just about some nasty cut on your leg. If you've ever had surgery, cancer treatment, a C-section, your wisdom teeth taken

out, all of this kind of becomes a roll of the dice if we don't have antibiotics to deal with infections. Here's Tina. The impacts are just colossal. You know, we have this thing where we just turn to antibiotics as being, like, they're always there. And what we're saying now is they're not going to always be there, so what do we do next? What is the biggest misconception that people have about superbugs? The scientists will solve it. It'll get solved.

You know what? We don't need to worry. They'll sort it out. Will you? Coming up after the break, my poo to the rescue. Welcome back. Today we are looking at the battle between bacteria and us. So far, it's been looking like the bugs are winning. But now, we're going to see what scientists are doing to fight back.

So we're going to take a deep dive into one of the buzziest ways of tackling this superbug problem. And this is what we're doing. Using viruses to kill superbugs. They're called phages. And Fernando, who is at the forefront of this research, he knows how it sounds. But aren't viruses supposed to be bad? Here's the catch. So phages do not harm humans. They cannot infect human cells. Instead, phages only infect and then kill bacterial cells. And so going back to my ancient Greek, phages to eat, phage means to eat. So are these viruses eating the bacteria? No, they're so little. They can nibble on them. They aren't eating the bacteria. They are killing them in a way, cooler way, in my opinion.

So phages, yeah, they are tiny. They are almost 100 times smaller than bacteria, right? And when you look at them, they look so cool. They look like an alien spaceship, right? So they have this head that is like a hexagonal or polygonal head, and then they have this thin neck and tail. And then at the end of the tail, they have these tiny little legs, right? Fernando tells me that these viruses use those tiny little legs to sense their environment. And they're hunting for one thing.

Bacteria. Once they recognize one they like, they latch onto it, inject their genetic material inside it, and then they... Hijack the bacteria. They tell the bacteria, you know what? You are going to stop doing what you were normally doing. You're only going to produce baby phages, baby viruses. They create heaps of these baby viruses inside the bacterial cell.

And eventually, those babies are ready to bust out. Boom, it explodes. So tens, tens, sometimes hundreds of these tiny viruses are liberated from the exploding bacterial cell and they will go on to infect the neighboring bacterial cells. So, yeah, they are not eating the bacteria per se. They are making it explode with hundreds of tiny baby viruses, which is perhaps a little bit more difficult to explain, but it is way, way cooler. So far, so good. Phages are viruses that make superbugs go...

Boom. And this might sound like sci-fi, but it isn't theoretical. We are doing all this in patients now. It's actually Fernando's job to find a phage that can be used to kill a patient's superbug infection. But first, he has to find the right phage. Because these phages, they can be really picky.

Often one kind of phage will only infect one type of bug, say an E. coli. So when Fernando has a patient that is sick with a superbug, he's got to find the right assassin for the job. Where does he start? Sewage. So sewage like Melbourne sewage. As in Melbourne sewage.

Fernando opens the door to a dark room. Ooh, OK, we're going into the cold room now. Ooh, it is chilly. And cold room now. It is chilly. And he shows me his pride and joy. The switch sample that I prepared for you. No one's ever said that to me. I prepared with a lot of love some switch for you, Wendy, and for the whole team.

So I hope you appreciate it. By the time I see it, there's no chunks in it, let's say. It kind of looks like an olive martini. Like a very dirty martini, yeah. And the reason that Fernando is looking for phages inside this very dirty martini is because wherever there is poo, there is bacteria living in it. And where bacteria live, there tends to be viruses that want to prey on that bacteria. So when Fernando has a patient who's sick, infected with a superbug,

what he's hoping is that someone in Melbourne will be carrying that specific phage. So then he can bottle it up and use it for his patients. And Fernando doesn't just go looking for phages in our crap, but also in water that's all over the place. So my partner thinks that I have this weird obsession with dirty water because every time we come across, you know, a puddle, a pond, something that looks gross and has water in it, I think, ooh, I bet I could get some really cool phages out of this. He thinks it's weird. He thinks it's completely weird. But

yeah, I guess it's one of my quirks now. Once he gets that dirty water to see if there's any superbug killing phages inside it, basically he'll mix a dash of superbug with a sprinkling of dirty sewage water, let it incubate, put it on an agar plate, bada bing, bada boom, he passes me a plate. Okay, okay. What do you see? I, oh gosh, I guess I see like little bubbles. They are like tiny little pinpricks. So what you're seeing there is bacterial death. There's nothing growing there. We just see a bacterial graveyard.

Really? So yeah, really cool. Seeing this bacterial graveyard is the moment Fernando thinks he's found a killer phage. And from here, him and his team will purify and test it, bottle it up and put it in a vial, ready for a patient. And he's been doing this over and over again, building up what he calls a phage library. Now that I've moved to Melbourne, it is possible that my craft helped create this phage library. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I feel so good.

You're doing a good deed, 100%. So this is all very exciting. My crap, saving lives. With phages, have we solved, have you solved the superbug crisis? I would love to say that I have, but no, absolutely not. By themselves, phages will not be able to solve this issue. One of the reasons that phages won't get us out of this mess is because, like a man, this one patient who had a superbug infection. And Fernando was searching for a phage that could kill it for months. You know, getting negative result after negative result and after negative result, nothing was a hit.

There were many times when I thought that it was pointless. And then there was one morning when I just opened the incubator door, took the plate out, and the moment I quickly glanced at the plate, I already saw, boom, that beautiful zone of clearing. And it's just the best feeling ever. What did you do as soon as you saw it? I, you know, I just jumped and said, yes. So that was amazing. That was amazing knowing that I had finally found a phage against this particular superbug. Amazing, yes. But it's not practical to

think that we could do this for everyone who gets some weird superbug infection. And that's why Fernando is building that phage library, in the hopes that he won't have to sift through my crap for every single patient. But there is another problem here. The jury is actually still out on how well this treatment works. For now, it's only given to people who are really, really sick, kind of like a last resort.

One analysis of 20 patients who had used phage therapy saw it was helping over half of them. The patient Fernando found that phage for, well, at first the treatment looked like it was going really well, but ultimately they died of other causes. And just quickly, there is one final wrinkle in this phage idea. You see, studies in rodents are showing that a very familiar problem may soon pop up. Bacteria or superbugs can also become resistant to phage.

Yeah, they're not taking this lying down, this phage attack. They will come up with ways to attack back. Oh, no. So it's this arms race between bacteria and phages. Researchers are trying to get around this by giving antibiotics and phages to patients because studies have found that this can help. Now, none of this means that phage therapy is a bad idea. You know, scientists are using this all around the world to save people's lives. But it does mean

that this shiny technology, it's not a silver bullet. And it's not a substitute for all those ideas that you might have been hearing about for ages to help us solve this superbug crisis. Like, we still need new antibiotics, ones that bacteria aren't resistant to... yet. And meanwhile, Big Pharma has been pulling out of this space because it's not worth it for them to make antibiotics. That's for a lot of reasons,

but one is that we'd only use these drugs to treat a disease quickly, rather than, say, a heart disease drug that you'd be popping for years. And as for the antibiotics that we do have, we've got to cool our jets with them. In 2019, the CDC estimated that almost a third of the antibiotics prescribed by U.S. doctors' offices and emergency departments were unnecessary. A third! And through the pandemic, this got even worse. Unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions jumped.

And now, superbug infections are on the rise too. We can try to keep coming up with new therapies or new solutions for the infections that are already happening, but the idea is to stop this evolution, this process from happening in the first place. So we don't want to focus too much on the band-aid. We really need to focus on what is causing the wound in the first place. So we need to stop taking antibiotics if we don't need them. Doctors, clinicians only prescribe antibiotics when you are sure that patients need them. So let's be rational about our use of antibiotics in general. If I was into poetry, I would be clicking you right now, but I really can't get away with that stuff.

That's Science Verses. Hey, hey. Hi, Joel Werner, our new supervising producer here at Science Verses. Hey, Wendy, very stoked to be on the team. It's, yeah, it's great to do my first citations chat. You've won awards, you've done all the things, but have do my first citations chat you've won awards you've done all the things but have you had a citations chat all of those moments have been building to this particular moment where i get to reveal the number of citations in this week's science versus episode

should i reach for the envelope all right so can i just say now i haven't done this before i'm not very good at it um this week on the show we had 138 citations 138 and if people want to see these citations where should they go they should click on the link in the show notes that will take them to the transcript where it's all laid out for them. It's very easy. It's very easy, yes. And while you are there, listener, looking at the show notes or looking at your podcast app, you should give us a review,

a five-star review. Next week we have our episode on pit bulls, asking are they dangerous dogs that should be banned or misunderstood cuddly pets? This one surprised me. I'm going to say I came into this episode with some strongly held beliefs about pit bulls, but they've been shaken up a bit. Thanks so much, Joel.

Thanks, Wendy. See you. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Joel Werner, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Ari Natavich and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Gimlet's managing director is Nicole Beamstier-Bohr. Fact-checking by Carmen Drahl. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, So Wiley and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all of the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Evgeny Sokourienko, Professor Anton Pellig, Professor John Iredale, Dr Alejandro Chavez, Dr Branwen Morgan, Professor Asad Khan, Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan, Dr Vanina Gelnier, Dr Callum Walsh

Dr Claire Gorey and Dr Mark Stegger A special thanks to Dr Carl Piers Singhi Flora Lichtman The Zuckerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson Science Versus is a Spotify original podcast

and a Gimlet production Follow Science Versus on Spotify and if you want to receive notifications every time we put out a new episode, which you do, then tap on this little icon of a bell. Yes, there's this little bell icon. And if you just tap that, then you'll get notifications every time Science Versus is out.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. So, okay. So I, to prepare for this interview, I was reading your CV and I noticed that you were the valedictorian of your high school. Congratulations. Thank you. And university. So when do you think you should take off your high school achievements from your resume? They'll be there until, I don't know, 40? That's 40, so good. Now you've made me really self-conscious. Now I'm going to go and edit my CV. The moment this interview is over, I'm going there and editing and I'm going to go and edit my CV. The moment this interview is over,

I'm going there and editing and I'm going to edit my CV. So thank you for that.