Something You Should Know - How Medical Breakthroughs Really Happen & The History of Clothes

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

There are a lot of benefits to being a happy person. This episode begins by discussing one more reason to look at the bright side of life that can really pay off in your later years. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/421506/happiness-early-adulthood-may-protect-against-dementia The only way medicine makes advances is by testing new drugs, vaccines and procedures on people. It's very risky and comes at a steep price according to Dr. Paul Offit an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - and author of the book You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions, To Mass Vaccinations, The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation (https://amzn.to/3BXN4S6). Listen as he explains the history of medical breakthroughs and how many brave people have made huge sacrifices so you and I can live longer and healthier than ever before. It is a important story of unsung heroes you need to hear.  How long have people been making fabrics and wearing clothes? How were early fabrics and textiles made? How have fabrics changed history? These are all questions addressed by my guest Kassia St. Clair author of the book The Golden Thread How Fabric Changed History (https://amzn.to/3vq3ZdB) While we tend to take fabrics and clothes for granted, listen and you will be amazed at how important fabrics have been to human civilization.  Have you heard about this list of 20 official haunted houses and places put out by the U.S. Department of Commerce? It’s been mentioned in articles and on the radio - but does this list really exist? Listen and find out. https://www.hauntjaunts.net/officially-haunted-places-fact-or-faked/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.  Go to https://backcountry.com/sysk to get 15% OFF your first full-priced purchase! Get $15 off your first box of premium seafood when you visit https://WildAlaskanCompany.com/Something Grow your business with Shopify today - go to https://Shopify.com/sysk  right now! Omaha Steaks is the best! Get awesome pricing at https://OmahaSteaks.com/BMT T-Mobile for Business the leader in 5G, #1 in customer satisfaction, and a partner who includes benefits like 5G in every plan. Visit https://T-Mobile.com/business 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance! https://geico.com Happy GEICO-ween! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Today on Something You Should Know, how being happy when you're young can help prevent dementia when you're old. Then, how medical breakthroughs really happen. And should we be concerned about the long-term effects of vaccines? Not really. While there have been many serious side effects from vaccines, and by serious I mean

things that cause permanent harm, they invariably occur within six weeks to two months of getting a vaccine. Also, does the U.S. government put out an official list of haunted houses? And a fascinating history of fabrics. For instance, the controversy over who made the Apollo astronaut spacesuit. Because the subcontractor that NASA ended up using was Playtex. And there was a bit of a concern that it somehow undermined the grand mission of getting humankind on the moon to be using a company best known for women's bras and girdles. All this today on Something You Should Know.

This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know here's a question for you do you consider yourself to be a happy person i mean there there are a lot of reasons to try to find happiness in life, and now there's a new one.

A new study led by the University of California in San evidence that links depression and dementia, but most studies in the past have pointed to an association between depression and dementia in later life. This study showed that depression in early adulthood can lead to lower mental ability just 10 years later and to cognitive decline in old age. Generally, the study found that the more depressed a person was, the more unhappy they were, the lower the cognition and the faster the rate of decline. So finding joy and happiness certainly seems to be worth whatever effort it takes. And that is something you should know. All new technology comes at a price.

And when it comes to medical technology, sometimes the price is very high. Meaning that in the quest to advance and come up with new medicines and vaccines and procedures, it all has to be tested on people. And when those tests fail, people can and do lose their lives or suffer some other health consequence. As we've just witnessed, as medicine has learned to cope with COVID-19, the learning process is messy and there are victims. The story of how medicine moves forward is an important story you likely haven't heard, and you're about to hear it from Paul Offit. He is an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

He's author of the book, You Bet Your Life, From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccinations, The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation. Hi, Paul, welcome. Happy to be here. So when people think of medicine, when I think of medicine, it's all very scientific. It's all nailed down. It's all figured out. And yet we don't really think about what it took to get there. I mean, today you get a blood transfusion. It's pretty routine. But getting to the point where blood transfusions became routine is a pretty bumpy road and that we often don't really understand how medicine works. When it comes to medicine and science, we learn as we go. And I think that the fluidity of that

is disconcerting to people. And you see it now. You see it in our understanding of this virus, SARS-CoV-2, and how it's spread. Our understanding of the disease, COVID-19, our sort of fits and starts regarding vaccines and some serious adverse events associated with vaccines. And what I've tried to do in this book is to go through the nine major medical advances that have caused us to live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago to show that that's always true, that there's always a human price for knowledge, and we seem invariably unwilling to pay that price. Well, just as an example, and then I'd like to talk about some of the examples that you write about, but just as an example, you know, we've all heard

that it's important to know the long-term effects of something. And the vaccine for this virus has not had enough time to know the long-term effects. And that's, I think, part of the reason why people refuse to get it, because we don't know what's going to happen long term. Is that a fair statement? Not really. And I'll explain why. If you look at the last 200 years of vaccine development, starting from the smallpox vaccine in the late 1700s, while there have been many serious side effects from vaccines, and by serious, I mean things that cause permanent harm or hospitalization or death, they invariably occur within six weeks to two months of getting a vaccine. So although they might be very rare,

say occurring in one in 100,000, one in 500,000 people, so you don't really find out about it until the vaccine has been distributed into millions of people, they all occur within two months of a dose. Take your pick. I mean, the oral polio vaccine of Albert Sabin's was a rare cause of polio, roughly one per 2.4 million doses. So the polio vaccine could cause polio. That was rare, but it was real. Measles vaccine can cause a lowering of the platelet count and cause these sort of damaged capillaries of blood vessels. Again, rare, 1 in 30,000, but real. The narcolepsy, which is a permanent disorder of wakefulness, was a consequence of a swine flu vaccine that was used in Europe. The yellow fever vaccine can cause something that has the fancy

name viscerotropic disease, which is a nice way of saying yellow fever. In other words, yellow fever could cause the yellow fever vaccine in roughly one per million people. Again, rare but real. And those things, when they occur, always occurred within two months of a dose. So I can't think of an example of a long-term problem. There are certainly problems that last long-term, but when they first appear, they appear within two months of a dose. But then why in the normal development of vaccines, and when we heard that there was a vaccine in development for this, we heard it would take years before people would actually get it, which turned out not to be true. But that was what was being said. Right, because that's the rotavirus vaccine, Rotatec, which came onto the market in 2006 and was recommended by the CDC for use in all children then. That was a 26-year effort. I'd say the average length of time that

it takes to make a vaccine has been 10 to 15 years. The fastest vaccine ever made before this one was the mumps vaccine, which was made in the mid-1960s in four years. And that was at a time when regulatory burdens were far less difficult than they are now. So that we isolated this virus in January of 2020 and 11 months later had completed two large clinical trials using a novel technology, one that had never been used to make a vaccine before, messenger RNA, and that those vaccines were found to be safe and effective in 11 months is remarkable. I think it is the most dramatic medical achievement in my lifetime, and I am a child of the 1950s, which included the development of the polio vaccine. When there are those rare occasions when somebody gets some horrible side effect or gets the disease from the vaccine or whatever, and as you say, it's rare but real, what happened?

Is there any sense of why? So take the so-called messenger RNA vaccines, the one that's made by Pfizer, the one that's made by Moderna. That was a novel strategy. They were tested in about 30,000 people in one trial, 44,000 people in another trial. And then they were put out there into the real world. And they were then given to millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people. And it was then and only then that we found out that these vaccines were a rare cause

of something called myocarditis, which is inflammation of heart muscle. Not a trivial issue when you have inflammation of your heart muscle. It was rare. It occurred in about one in 40,000 people, but it was real. And so then what do you do? What do you do? Now, we still don't know why it is that those vaccines cause myocarditis. We don't know. We do know this. We know that the virus that causes COVID also causes myocarditis, and not in 1 in 40,000 people, but roughly 1 in 45 people. We also know that children who get this disease called multisystem inflammatory disease, which is part of COVID, have an incidence of myocarditis of between 50% and 75%. So again, there's no risk-free choices. If you think to yourself, well, you know what,

I'm going to avoid myocarditis by just not getting this vaccine or any vaccine, realize that if you get COVID, that you have a much greater chance of getting myocarditis. So again, there's no risk-free choices. And for the most part, every side effect that you see from a vaccine is invariably also a consequence of the natural infection, and usually far more commonly. So I mentioned in the beginning, and you write about it, and it's a good story, is the story of blood transfusions as an illustration of what we're talking about. So which is sort of an interesting story. The way I try and tell that story is, okay, so when would you be comfortable getting a

blood transfusion? So, we'll start at the beginning. A couple, a few hundred years ago in the 1600s, the first blood transfusions were made using blood from barnyard animals. So, sheep, goats, calves, you would take the blood from the animal and then transfuse it into people. And they obviously had significant transfusion reactions, meaning they fever, darkened urine, because obviously we were mismatching blood because we didn't know anything about blood types. So the way I tell this story is, okay, what would you get?

Would you get a blood transfusion then, even if you needed it? Meaning if you just lost blood from an accident, would you get a blood transfusion then, even if you needed it, meaning if you just lost blood from an accident, would you get a blood transfusion then? So then we sort of fast forward to the early 1900s when we actually discover blood typing, ABO blood typing. Okay, well, would you get a blood transfusion now? But we still hadn't discovered the so-called RH factor. So for example, if you're O positive, it's the positive. We hadn't discovered that yet. Okay, so now we've discovered that. Would you get a blood transfusion now? Okay, now what you find is that in the 1940s, we had this major disaster associated with one of the stabilizing agents that was used

to make blood contained hepatitis B virus, which we didn't know anything about and frankly took decades to actually test for. In the 1970s, we could now test for hepatitis B virus. We could test for hepatitis C virus to make sure that the blood wasn't contaminated with that. Okay, now it's the late 1970s. Will you get a blood transfusion now? And then AIDS comes into the United States and contaminates the blood supply and thousands and tens of thousands of people die from blood that contains human immunodeficiency virus. Okay, now we can detect human immunodeficiency virus. Would you get a blood

transfusion now? Remembering that there are many viruses that we don't test for in whole blood and that there's no doubt viruses that we don't know about yet. So it's always at some level of risk. If you need a blood transfusion, you'll get it because you correctly argue that the benefits outweigh the risks, but there's always at some level risk. Isn't it interesting how, as you explain that, there have been risks all along the way, and yet there's this sense that medicine knows what it's doing, that there should be no risks, and often there are no risks, but there are always risks.

I think that's right. I think you're almost pretty much never in a risk-free situation, or said another way, I think any medicine or any biological-like vaccines that has a positive effect at always at some level will have some negative effect. In fact, I think if you argue that there's a medicine or therapeutic that has no negative effects, it probably never had a positive effect. Talk about heart transplants, because it also illustrates this point that you learn as you go, but it's really amazing how little hope it offered, and yet it was revered as a medical breakthrough.

The first heart transplant, which made the surgeon who did it probably the most famous doctor in the world, a man named Christian Bernard, he was the first one to use a human heart and transplant it into a person. And he was celebrated. I mean, you know, there were movies made about him. He was, you know, he was feted around the world. That heart transplant patient, a man named Louis Washkansky, lived 18 days. Nonetheless, there was just the birth of this

notion of heart transplantation. And so, you know, many, many facilities across the globe started heart transplant centers. And then what we found was that, you know, people live two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, maybe a couple months if they were lucky. And ultimately, one by one, those heart transplant centers shut down. So we weren't doing heart transplants anymore. There was a Time magazine article that said, as the cover, whatever happened to heart transplants? And then we discovered key things. So, for example, a medicine that could suppress your immune system so that you wouldn't reject the heart,

but wouldn't suppress your immune system so severely that you had overwhelming infections. That was a medicine called cyclosporine. Then we figured out a way to sort of biopsy the heart muscle without hurting it to see when there were early signs of rejection. And so then you can, we found you could live a few years and now you can live up to 15 years with a heart transplant. That's average. But let's suppose you're on the heart transplant waiting list. There are 4,000 people on the heart transplant waiting list right now. 1,300 of them will die while waiting. Okay, you know that you may be one of those 1,300 who's not going to get a heart transplant

before it's over for you. So would you be willing to get a pig heart as a transplant? Now we can clone pigs. We can clone a pig so that you won't get a pig heart as a transplant? Now we can clone pigs. We can clone a pig so that you won't reject that pig heart. Do you want to be one of the first to receive a pig heart? I don't want to be the first to do anything because it seems like when you're the first, you're just a guinea pig. Right.

But so here's another example. So to argue that, I guess, in the other way, sickle cell disease is a single gene disorder. So because of that single gene disorder, people with sickle cell disease don't make normal hemoglobin. They make abnormal hemoglobin. Because of that, it causes the red blood cells in their body to sickle. And when those red cells sickle, they get stuck in the capillaries and cause these incredible painful crises. So the people with sickle cell disease often are admitted to the hospital several times a year with these so-called vaso-occlusive crises, which are enormously

painful, require pain medicine. So the many, certainly older sickle cell patients are addicted to opioids. Okay, well now we have CRISPR technology. CRISPR technology is a gene editing technology where you can take the bone marrow from people who have sickle cell disease, edit their cells so that now they can make normal hemoglobin, or at least a critical number of cells can make normal hemoglobin, put it back into the person, and see what happens. Now, there was a woman who just hit the two-year mark with having gone through that. And normally, she would be admitted to the hospital five times a year, seven times a year with these painful crises. She too was always taking pain medicines. Well, she's had two years of being pain-free because of that technology.

Two years. She was one of the first, if not the first, to do that. Okay, so do you want to do that? Knowing we probably will learn as we go. Again, a person with sickle cell disease typically lives about 40 years. So you know you'll live 40 years. If you try a new technology, you may find that because of that new technology, you live 70 years or 80 years. Or because there's something we don't know yet, you live two or three years. It's always at some level a risk, but sometimes the benefit is phenomenal. We're talking about medical innovations and the often untold story of the human price we pay.

My guest is Paul Offit. He's an attending physician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and author of the book, You Bet Your Life. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.

And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type.

With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Paul, when you chart these things on a graph, these medical innovations, and there's this learning curve for every single one, and as we learn, does there come a point where medicine says,

we got it. There's nothing more to learn. There are no more unknown risks. We're certain that things will go as planned. Or will there always be the potential for new risks to come along? So take antibiotics, for example. So the first antibiotic, the first broad spectrum antibiotic called at the time the magic bullet was sulfanilamide. It was a product of the German dye industry. And it now suddenly we had something to treat meningitis, something to treat gonorrhea, something to treat pneumonia, you know, something to treat, you know, a variety of other serious infections. It was a wonder drug. Nonetheless, when it first rolled out, one of the companies that made it wanted to make it palatable for children. So they suspended it in diethylene

glycol, which at the time, frankly, was known to be a cause of severe kidney failure. Nonetheless, they did that. And that really gave birth to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act because as historian Michael Harris says correctly, the history of drug regulation in the United States is built on tombstones. A hundred people died from that preparation, 34 of whom were children. So what do we know about antibiotics moving forward? We've learned as we go, the first, one of the first antibiotics after sulfur was penicillin. Penicillin was extremely effective against a bacteria called Staph aureus, Staph, a common

bacteria. 100% of those strains were susceptible. Now, it's a very rare strain that's susceptible. So what are we learning? We're learning that bacteria can become resistant. And it's gotten to the point now where some children are infected with bacteria that are resistant to all commercially available antibiotics, all commercially available antibiotics. So there is no antibiotic for that child. We have taken our first steps into the post-antibiotic era. So what do you do?

What we're doing now, and we've done it on a handful of children, is something called bacteriophage therapy, where you take viruses that kill bacteria and inject children with really billions of these viruses that kill bacteria, so children with really billions of these viruses that kill bacteria, so-called bacteriophage therapy. What's interesting is that that was done in the 1920s. There's a book by Sinclair Lewis called Aerosmith. And in that book, written a hundred years ago, they talk about bacteriophage therapy. So we're sort of back to where we started. I guess what I'm asking though is that with antibiotics, and now we know that there are resistant strains of bacteria, but we know all this now.

So do we put that in a box and say we pretty much have antibiotics figured out or not? No, I think you can fairly say that. I think the difficulties with antibiotics is they're not a terribly lucrative product for pharmaceutical companies. So very few pharmaceutical companies really work on antibiotics as we gradually take step after step into the post-antibiotic era. We certainly are learning things about the nature of allergic responses to antibiotics, but I think we have largely learned that. So I think really all the learning that comes now is what to do as we basically lose this remarkable technology because largely because of injudicious use of antibiotics. Let's talk, if we could, for a moment about chemotherapy because my sense, knowing very little about it, is that we don't have that nailed very well at all.

It seems like for a very long time it's been something that people do almost as a kind of a last resort, and I'm sure we learn as we go, but it doesn't seem to be overly effective. Well, it depends on the nature of the cancer. So, for example, when I trained in pediatrics in the late 1970s, acute lymphoblastic leukemia was a death sentence. It is. I mean, when we would walk into that parent's room with the oncologist and we would all sit down and the doctor would explain to the parent that this child had leukemia, they cried, the child cried. I mean,

as a physician, you're holding back tears because you knew that was a death sentence. And then St. Jude's Children's Hospital, really a research center, took the lead on trying to develop a series of chemotherapies, you know, sort of used in combination in the same way that we use combination drugs for tuberculosis to find that there was a combination that we're now more than 90% of children who have leukemia are completely cured and off chemotherapy. So it really depends on the disease. For some diseases, we have been able to make major strides forward and others not. I mean, brain tumors, specifically glioblastoma are a death sentence. Pancreatic tumors for the most part are a death sentence.

So there are certain cancers where we just aren't even close, but there are others where we're much closer. They're all different. Talk about x-rays, because it wasn't that like a really big deal when they showed up? Right. I mean, now suddenly you could see inside the patient. I mean, if someone had a bullet wound, the surgeon didn't have to take a gloved hand and reach in there and try and find it. You could actually look to see. You could look to see pneumonias. You could see ovarian cysts. You could see things that you didn't ever think you could see before.

The problem was that the original x-ray machines were these sparking, sputtering, smelly, awful devices which had logarithmically more radiation coming out of them than we use today. And the characteristic typically of radiologists was that they didn't have their fingers or they didn't have arms or hands because of the cancer induced by this radiation. There was one story in the book about a news reporter who goes to cover a radiology convention or a convention of radiologists like in the early 1900s. And, you know, when they served chicken dinner, many of them couldn't cut the chicken because they didn't have the hands and fingers to do it.

But there was a time when x-rays, that was part of a physical or a routine physical exam. You just got one, whether, whether you needed it or not. Yes, that's right. Or even to me, more interestingly, is that if you went to a department store and you wanted to buy shoes, they would fit your shoe by taking an x-ray of your foot. And those kinds of x-rays that existed in department stores

really were still around even into the 1970s. Not a good idea. And so where are we with x-rays now? Oh, now I think not a good idea. And so where are we with x-rays now? Oh, now it's, it's, we're, I think we've gotten there. I think that, that you are no more likely to have a radiation induced cancer if you're an, uh, if you're a radiologist, if you're an x-ray technician than someone in the general population. I think we can now say that they are, they are absolutely safe that, that when you get those, those, uh, those kinds of studies that you're, of studies that we've figured that out. I know for you personally, the story of the polio vaccine is a big deal. So talk about that.

Because I'm a child of the 50s, I certainly remember polio. When I was a five-year-old, I was in a polio ward for about six weeks. So I remember the iron lungs. I remember children in traction. It just is a vivid, vivid memory. I think the scars of our childhood invariably become the passions of our adulthood. And that's true for me here. But I think that part of the polio story that most got to me was that, and I remember this at some level, because I was a first and second grader in the 1950s. And those were the original test subjects, is when Jonas Salk made his polio vaccine, he took polio virus, grew it up in cell culture, purified it, and then inactivated it with the chemical formaldehyde. He then tested that vaccine

in 700 children in the Pittsburgh area, found that it induced excellent levels, high levels of neutralizing virus, neutralizing antibodies, and that it was safe. And he went back to his wife, Don, and said, Eureka, I've got it. And then what proceeded from that point on was the largest clinical trial of the medical product in history, a trial that broke his heart. He didn't want to do that trial. He didn't want to inoculate children with placebo, knowing that every year in this country, 20,000, 30,000 children would be paralyzed by polio and 1,500 would die. Nonetheless, that trial was done. So there were 420,000 children who were inoculated with his vaccine. 200,000 were inoculated with saltwater. And then when it was over, when the trial was over a year later, the person who headed that trial, Thomas Francis,

stood at the podium at Rackham Hall at the University of Michigan and said those three famous words, safe, potent, effective. And those three words were on the headline of every newspaper in this country. I mean, church bells rang out, synagogues held special prayer meetings, department stores stopped when that announcement was made, and everybody froze to hear what that result was. So how did he know it was effective? How did Thomas Francis know that vaccine was effective? He knew it was effective because 16 children died of polio in that study, all in the placebo group. He knew it was effective because 36 children were paralyzed in that study, 34 in the placebo group. I mean, those children were my age. If had they, but for the flip of a coin, they could have lived long, prosperous, healthy lives. But because of that flip of a coin, they didn't. And when I see those parents come into our hospital with their children in tow, I just

have an enormous amount of respect for them doing this because that's how we learn. Well, I have to admit, I've never thought much about this. And I love how you are bringing attention to all the people who have and continue to sacrifice their lives and their health for the greater good in order to move medicine along. And it's a really interesting story to hear. I've been speaking with Paul Offit. He's an attending physician at Children's Hospital Philadelphia, and he's author of the book, You Bet Your Life,

From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccinations, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation. And you can find that book at Amazon. There's a link to it in the show notes. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Michael. That was fun. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO

of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you

thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're

looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. You probably don't stop and think a lot about fabrics. Yet you wear clothes every day, and much of your world is covered in fabric and cloth, from your furniture to perhaps your floors. And the story of how humans use fabrics and textiles from thousands of years ago to the modern fabrics of today is a fascinating tale indeed. And here to discuss it is Cassia St. Clair. She is a journalist and author of the book, The Golden

Thread, How Fabric Changed History. Hi, Cassia. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much for having me. So take me back in time. Do we know when fabrics or textiles first showed up? So the origins of textile production are kind of shrouded in mystery because of the nature of textiles, because of the fact they rot away. However, there are these really tantalizing glimpses of very early textile production that have been uncovered by archaeologists. One of the examples I look at was found completely accidentally by a paleobotanist in a cave in Eastern Europe. And this seemed to suggest that around 32,000 years ago, textile production was actually really pretty sophisticated. They found evidence that textiles were being dyed lots of different colors, for example. And that's

incredibly exciting. And this discovery, which was in, I believe, around 2014, pushed the history of textile production back by about 8,000 years, which is incredibly exciting. That is exciting because it's amazing to me that they're able to find remnants of thread from that far back. You would think it would just disintegrate by now. Absolutely. You know, textiles do rot away. That's part of the reason I think why they've been

historically undervalued is because you don't see the textiles themselves, even if they are really sophisticated. You are only left with the tools and your imagination. And so it's hard for us to know exactly how sophisticated some of these textiles were. But these little traces, these tantalizing hints that we have, and of course, the odd lucky survivor do give us an indication that early textile manufacture was really quite wonderful and was capable of creating really beautiful textiles. And so when we talk about fabrics and textiles and things, the early ones that have been found are made from what? So this is something that really surprised me when I first began looking.

I imagined, possibly because I come from the UK, which obviously has a great wool tradition, I imagined that a lot of the early textiles would be wool. You know, wool sheep are wandering around with their fluffy coats just there. It seems very obvious to me that, you know, our early ancestors would see that and think, hmm, it seems really useful for sheep. How could I use this foot for me? However, the majority of really early textiles are actually often plant-based fibers and more specifically still are quite often made from from linen which is actually a really tricky fiber to work with you have to find a flax plant at the right stage of development if it's too old it'll be tough if it's too young it won't be strong enough and then you need to to break down the outer and the inner parts of the stem until you're left with a usable thread.

This is a long and quite complicated and intricate process. When I think of fancy, when I think of expensive clothes, I think of silk. So when did silk show up and why is it expensive and why has it become synonymous with the finer things in life? So there's a really lovely fairy story that is attached to the origins of the silk industry. The story goes that an empress was sitting in a garden in China, sipping a cup of tea, and all of a sudden there was a plink and she noticed that a silkworm cocoon from the mulberry tree above her had fallen into her cup of tea. She tried to fish it out but the hot tea had dissolved the silkworm cocoon and what

she was left with pulling out handful upon handful of silken thread that she put all over the garden until it looked a little bit like mist over the grass, which is a really wonderful story. But it does tell us something about the origins of the silk industry, which is that it began in China. Its origins are kind of, again, shrouded in mystery because the industry is so old and that it completely depends on the mulberry tree, which is the food source of the silkworm moth. And is that still the case today? That is still largely the case today. Obviously, today we're able to grow mulberry trees in

slightly different environments, but overwhelmingly, mulberry trees like to be grown in China. They thrive in China. And so that's where most of the silk is produced and in countries with very similar climate. But China kind of had a monopoly on silk production for thousands of years. And it was that in part that led to its prestige abroad because China controlled production. Very little of it was, you know, being exported. And so getting hold of it was very, very, very difficult. And it was also, you know, because it's so fine and has this beautiful sheen, it was considered, you know, one of the most beautiful fabrics, as well as being incredibly expensive because China controlled

production. Is there any sense of when wool became a well-used fabric? Seems that pretty early on, somebody must have looked at a sheep and said, you know, if we took that off of that sheep and made a coat out of it, that'd be pretty cool. Yes, so it was very early on, not quite as early as linen production. But again, we're talking tens of thousands of years ago. Like I said, it is kind of obvious. Sheep are wandering around, walking past trees and leaving little tufts of their woolly coats behind them. We know, for example, that Vikings were using wool to create the sails with which they were able to get all around the world, including to what is now the

United States. That's an incredible thing. When I discovered that these Vikings were sailing around in boats with woolen sails. I just couldn't quite believe it. It seems that wool is still around. I mean, wool's been around for a long time and a nice suit is often made from wool. It seems like an enduring fabric. I think all those initial fabrics, the sort of natural fiber fabrics are still classics, you know, cotton, silk, linen, and wool. They're still, you know, considered luxurious. They still work very well with the skin. And although in the past century, we've become much more accustomed to using synthetic fibers, I think still people have a real affinity for natural fibers,

even though they might sometimes be a bit trickier to wash. We still really love them. They still do a really great job at what we need them to do, particularly for clothing, keeping us warm, keeping us cool. Linen is naturally, it conducts heat away from the body, which is why people like wearing linen in the summer weather. So these are really useful fibers and I can't really see them going anywhere, no matter how sophisticated the synthetic fibers get become. When did cotton show up? Because that, like wool, it seems like it's probably been around for a long time. It's a natural fiber and is still used today. So cotton was being cultivated really early on.

It's quite a fussy plant. It only grows between a certain latitude and longitude. And it's quite difficult to handle. It's very prone to blights and diseases. Its use was really perfected in India. India has this incredible textile history with cotton going back centuries. But a lot of that was hijacked by colonial powers, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Let's talk about synthetic fabrics, because as you point out, natural fabrics have been made for 32,000 years at least. When did synthetic fabrics become a thing?

So it's really the 20th century. You get some kind of early synthetics like rayon, for example, which is still, you know, it's not based on a petrochemical. It's actually a little bit like cellulose. So it has kind of natural origins. However, it doesn't occur naturally in the same way that cotton or flax that is used to make linen do. However, you know, it really, this really gains pace in the 20th century. After initial skepticism by consumers, I have to say, you can still see, if you look at the archives of newspapers like the New York Times, it took quite a long time to persuade consumers that they wanted to try synthetics. But actually, they do offer a lot of advantages, particularly in terms of their care. And in terms of their price, you can create synthetics a lot more cheaply than say silk,

and they're much easier to wash and care for, even if they do fall down in some other areas. What are the most popular today synthetic fabrics? Polyester is a really popular one. There's lots of things, you know, lots of kind of stretchy fabrics, stretchy synthetics are really popular because they're very hard to reproduce with natural fabrics. You'll notice if you go into a sportswear store, for example, and you want kind of gym gear, almost everything will have a synthetic in it because it gives you, you know, it's easier to wash. It will stretch over the body in a way that you just simply cannot get cotton or silk to do. You can knit it, which gives it that little bit of stretch, but a synthetic can be created to give that stretch around the body, which is, you know, an incredible thing and is much easier to create in synthetic than with a natural. You talk about spacesuits, the spacesuits from Apollo 11.

And I'm sure that the fabric used to make spacesuits is pretty extraordinary. And I'd like to hear about that. But how does that fit into our discussion about the history of fabrics? Yeah, so it goes back to this idea that I really wanted to discuss ways in which fabrics have been used in unexpected ways to really move humanity forward. You know, the subtitle of my book was How Fabric Changed History. And that's quite a big claim. And you need to be able to back it up. the subtitle of my book was How Fabric Changed History. And that's quite a big claim and you need to be able to back it up. And I think the use of textiles and the creation of the Apollo 11

spacesuits is an area where you can really back up this claim. So the spacesuits, the Apollo Omega suit was created from over 20 layers of distinct fabrics or textiles, almost exclusively synthetics. And these operated like a kind of one man, flexible spacesuit. And they allowed human beings to survive in space and also to walk on the surface of the moon. And that is really incredible when you think about this being a sort of a flexible material that it can be fitted around the human form. I remember when we heard about spacesuits when astronauts first started going up and how this suit was supposed to protect them from all kinds of things.

And I thought, wow, how do they do that? How does a fabric, how does a piece of clothes protect you from whatever, radiation, extreme cold? I mean, whatever it was, it seemed like magic. Well, I think the answer is with great difficulty, which is why the spacesuits have so many distinct layers because often each layer is doing a slightly different job you need layers to cope with the extreme heat you need layers to help cool the

human body down because obviously if you're doing quite a lot of work and you're um and you're moving around and you're kind of on the on the light side or you're in the in the sunshine you can get incredibly hot you also need the body to be protected from the vacuum of space and from G-forces and from all these sort of hostile elements and experiences that you will go through in space. The suit needs to be able to do all of that. And creating the suit was absolutely essential to the Apollo 11 mission. And there was a bit of a culture clash, actually, because the subcontractor that NASA ended up using was Playtex, which obviously famously makers of women's underwear. And there was a bit of a, you know, a culture

clash between the two firms. But I think there was also a bit of concern from NASA that it somehow undermined the kind of grand mission of getting humankind on the moon to be using a company best known for women's bras and girdles. When I think of fabrics, it seems like they're relatively benign. And yet people have used clothes to make statements about themselves and about their group. And so I guess they're not benign. Well, definitely fabrics are not benign. Lots of cultural guilt has often been put on certain fabrics throughout history. Silk is a big one because it's seen as so luxurious and it's quite expensive. And so it's and lots of cultures at different times have sort of seen it, particularly for men, as being very problematic.

You know, having something that soft next to your skin, people, you know, cultural commentators worried that it was making men effeminate. And so they railed against it and suggested that men avoid it. The other fabric that often has kind of come with a kind of warning label was lace. You know, this is a fabric that is purely decorative and was often sort of, you know, really looked down upon as kind of just being for the sake of vanity and serving no practical purpose. And people who wore too much of it or wore it in the wrong way were often looked down upon. Yeah, you know, I never thought of that. But yeah, I mean, lace has no real function other than to look pretty, right?

Yeah, and it looks beautiful. And it's also a great canvas for human creativity. You can, you know, really work motifs, You can alter the style, the thickness, all these kinds of things. So it's something that's very, it was at the height of its fashion. It was very susceptible to changes in tastes. And so something, you know, one style of lace that was extremely fashionable one day could go out of fashion the next. And this would often leave whole industries of lace makers who are often women would suddenly be without work. The market would collapse for their type of lace and they would suddenly all be in the workhouse. But lace isn't a fabric, right? It's a technique. It's a style of,

but you can make lace out of a lot of things, can't you? You can. It's most commonly made out of linen or silk, lots of black lace that was very fashionable at particular times was made out of black silk thread. But you can also make it out of metal. And there are beautiful descriptions of gold or silver lace, or even copper lace being made as well. Is there anything you see that's really exciting on the horizon in the world of fabrics and textiles and things? One textile that I was quite excited about and I kind of really wanted to mention was spider silk, which is actually not that new an idea. There've been people trying to make textiles from spider silk for many

hundreds of years, usually using spiders themselves, which often wasn't very successful because spiders do not respond very well to attempts to farm them. However, since the millennium, people have been trying to create spider silk without the spiders. They've taken some of the genetic material from different spiders and put it into other creatures. At first it was goats, and now it's sort of bacteria and yeast. And so you're able to try and brew spider silk in the same way that you would brew beer. And that has been very exciting for people, although despite much promise, it has yet to really make it into a viable textile industry.

Well, I think it's safe to say that we tend to take our clothes, our fabrics, our textiles for granted. And yet they've been made for, as you point out, 32,000 years. And the stories that come from that history are really interesting. Cassia St. Clair has been my guest. She's a journalist, and the name of her book is The Golden Thread, How Fabric Changed History. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Cassia. Thanks for being here on Something You Should Know. know. Every year around this time, you'll hear on the radio or a podcast or you'll read on a website

or in a magazine about this list that's put out by the U.S. Department of Commerce of the 20 most haunted houses or places. Sometimes it's 30 haunted houses or places. Interestingly, if you go to the U.S. Department of Commerce website, you won't find that list. And the reason you won't find that list is, despite popular perception, the list does not exist. The U.S. government does not offer a list of haunted houses. And no one really seems to be sure where this legend started, but it is a myth.

The government does not recognize ghosts or haunted houses. Seems as if they have other things to do. And that is something you should know. I always enjoy reading the reviews people leave on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere about this podcast. And lately, people have been leaving some very nice five-star ratings and wonderful reviews. If you would like to leave one, it would certainly be appreciated. And if you could make it a five-star one, even better. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity the pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer

unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law her religious convictions and her very own family but something more sinister than murder is afoot and someone is watching Ruth Chinook

starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network

called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others,

in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.