The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Chimps Raised Like Humans, Blood Swapping, Polio & Candyland

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

This episode celebrates our latest digital issue going live! The weirdest things we learned this week range from a swapping blood with the Pope to the dramatic origins of the Monopoly board game. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Buy your Weirdest Thing virtual live show tickets here: https://www.caveat.nyc/event/the-weirdest-thing-i-learned-this-week-livestream-9-21-2021 Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Hey, weirdos, Rachel here. I just have a quick note before we get into the episode. So in the episode you're about to listen to, you're going to hear us reference the latest edition of Popular Science Magazine. Unfortunately, due to some unforeseen technical difficulties, the issue will not be going live today, Tuesday, September 21st.

Instead, it will go live on digital newsstands on Wednesday, September 22nd. So if you're interested in the youth issue of Popular Science magazine, keep an eye on popside.com on Wednesday, September 22nd. We're sorry for the delay and we really appreciate your patience, but we know you're going to love this episode regardless, and we couldn't wait to get it out to you. Speaking of which, don't forget to snag tickets to our virtual live show, which is tonight, Tuesday, September 21st at 7 p.m. Eastern. You can find the link in our show notes. Okay, on to the episode. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around.

the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Pribita Saha, and I'm Corinna Iosio. Welcome, everyone. As I said last week, we may be on hiatus, but we just could not stay away. So we are back in your feeds with a full episode. But before we get into it, there are a couple reasons for us dropping in unexpectedly. The first one, which you may have heard before, is that we have a virtual live show happening tonight, September 21st, Tuesday, this evening, unless you're listening late. But don't worry, I have good news for you in a second. Don't despair. But we are gathering at caveat to stream virtually with you at 7 p.m. Eastern. You can get

your tickets in the show notes. It's going to be great. We have a packed show for you. We have special guests. We have games. We have prizes, raffles, trivia, Q&A. It's going to be a really fun evening. And for just 20 bucks more, all of which is going to support caveat, by the way, one of our favorite venues, you can join a virtual happy hour this Thursday. And it's going to be really intimate and fun. You'll get a great chance to get to know us. We can get to know you. We did this for our last virtual live show. And it was just a blast to get to chat with some weirdest thing listeners. And if you missed the show or you're in a time zone where 7 p.m. Eastern is absolutely nuts for

you. Don't worry. You can still click that show note link for I think about 24 to 48 hours after the show goes live. And if you buy a ticket, you will be able to watch it. Watch a recording. It'll be just like you're there. So get your tickets.

Don't delay. Be there with us tonight. we would love to see you there. But that is not the only reason why we are in your feed on a random Tuesday while we're on a hiatus. Corinne, why else are we here? Well, it's my quarterly appearance, and that can only mean one thing, that there is a big old issue of popsy live today. But this time when I say a big old issue, what I actually mean is a big young issue. The youth issue of popular science is now live and it's full of really awesome stories that sort of

turn our most common held notions about the wisdom of years a little bit on their heads and take a step back and say, it's not that all of that stuff is wrong, but maybe sometimes looking to the way that young, fresh thinking can really change the conversation is something that we should do every now and again. And it's full of all kinds of great takes on that. But the big, big headline that I have to give major props to Rachel for is that we're so excited that our brilliant 10 franchise is back in this issue, which is 10 early career scientists who are just doing truly amazing work that is moving the needle in all kinds of individual fields, in interdisciplinary fields, laying new ground work all over the place. We're really excited about it. So if you go to popsye.com and you can get access to it if you're already a subscriber,

if you're not a subscriber, go to popsight.com slash subscribe. And that's how you make sure that you'll get these brand new issues as soon as they hit now and forevermore. Yay. The youth issue has been so fun to work on. So I am really excited for us to all be here with facts about young stuff, young things, young people, whatever. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Prabita, why don't you start with your tease?

Yeah. So my fact is that you can't raise a baby chimpanzee like you raise a baby human. darn. There go my end of summer plans. Corinne, what about your teeth? I want to talk about an interesting period in medical history where people were trading blood with lambs and goats. Oh dear. Reminiscent of an old school pops eye episode, I believe. Excited to hear more about that.

And my tease is that one of the first. of the most universally beloved childhood board games exists because of a pandemic. I can't. Silence. I know. I know. That's the response I love to hear. Because what was happening in my brain was that I think I know what game you're talking about,

but I'm not 100% certain. And the theme of the game made me crave something. And I didn't want to give it away. So I just kept my trap shut. You are correct. You are correct. Well, I don't know what more games make you crave what things, but I am talking about Candyland. Should I just start now that I've... I guess so. I think we just have to give it up now.

Okay. So shout out to Facebook group member Becca Griffin for posting a short story about this. A few months back, I think, at this point. If you're not a member of our Facebook group, search for weirdest thing on Facebook. It's just a secret, not-so-secret little group for members and non-listeners alike. I mean, like a lot of people are in there who just like weird things. And every once in a while, they're like, there's a podcast. And that's always very funny. But it's where everybody can share their favorite weird news stories. I do vet them to make sure that they are not patently false. So it's a great place to hang around if you love weird news that you can trust. So before I get into how Candyland came about,

a little bit about polio because it's one of those diseases that we're lucky enough to really have forgotten from a cultural perspective in the U.S. and in a lot of countries. Jonas Salk created an extremely effective vaccine for it that was released in 1955, and cases dropped by 85 to 90 percent within just two years of that initial rollout, just like really an incredible success. We actually haven't had a case of polio with U.S. origins since 1970. And the last time the virus was brought into the country, to our knowledge, was 1993. And that's not because polio has disappeared.

It's because our vaccination rates are so high. It's one of those classic things are like people have kind of forgotten that polio was a big deal, but it's only not a big deal because we have such a good vaccine for it. So it's really easy for us to forget that in the 1950s, polio was a devastating and terrifying disease in the U.S. Polio virus is no big deal. for most people who catch it. If it has any symptoms at all,

it's usually something like a sore throat and a stiff neck. But that also means that it has the chance to spread really widely as people just go about their business. So it's primarily spread by the ingestion of fecal matter, which might sound really easy to avoid, but poop particles, as we frequently remind you at pop-sci, are pretty much everywhere. They're always on your hands, in your water, in your food,

like seriously all over. And that's in places with, like, good sanitation. systems. Plus, it can spread through respiratory droplets too. Meanwhile, in around 1% of infections, polio attacks the central nervous system and it can lead to permanent paralysis of different parts of the body. And children under five are actually at the highest risk of catching it. So the height of the U.S. polio epidemic was in the 1950s just before Sulk's vaccine came out. And at the time, there was no cure and no understanding of how to prevent it. Something like 15,000 people were being paralyzed.

by polio every year in the U.S. alone. And there was no sense of what would actually help kids avoid polio. So a lot of parents spent the 1950s making their kids stay indoors all summer, which is when transmission rates would peak. It was a really scary time, which, again, we are very fortunate to have been able to forget. And it was also, crucially, a really boring time. So add to the fact that many kids who survived polio were stuck in. hospitals or at least at home in bed. Many of them needed breathing assistance that came from an

iron lung or they were now unable to walk unassisted. So add that to the kids who were stuck at home for preventative reasons. And you had a country with a lot of really bored children. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of parents listening can probably relate to this very deeply right now. But luckily, we know that masks work, that social distancing works, that good ventilation works. and hopefully we have vaccines for young children coming really soon. So it's important to remember that at the height of these polio outbreaks, parents didn't even have that. They were just terrified and it was not clear at all how to keep this from happening to their children or when it would end. Enter Eleanor Abbott, a schoolteacher from San Diego.

We don't know much about her, but we know she contracted polio herself in 1948. and sometime during or after her recovery, she designed Candyland. So let's pause for a second. What are everybody's experiences with Candyland? What are your memories? Tell me everything. I never owned it myself. I think I only played it at Friends houses.

But my best friend Maddie is Jewish and her parents had a Jewish version of the game. So like all the candy and treats were very different. I love that. Yeah, so I had a, I think my experience was quite, was not the norm. But typically the game has like gingerbread people and candy canes and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and like those little like spearmint or peppermint swirly things that I still love so dear. We also didn't own Candyland or Shoots and Ladders or any of those types of games, but it was always a,

literal and figurative treat to be at a friend's house who had them. Yeah. And then try to be very clever as five-year-olds love to try to be and tell them that if we were going to play Candy Land, we clearly needed to be able to eat the things too. Absolutely. Yeah, I had it growing up. And, I mean, I remember the characters and the art felt so vivid to me. I can remember, I don't really remember playing it with anyone.

one, but I remember looking at the board and being like, oh my gosh, we are, we are going on a journey to this chocolate bog with these beautiful peppermint fairies, whatever the frosty, the frosty fairy lady, I definitely had a big, big crush on that fairy. But, um, Queen Frostyne. Queen Frostyne. Thank you. Beautiful Queen Frostyne. So, yeah, definitely. And I don't have. numbers, but it is, like, widely accepted as being one of the most popular, like, ubiquitous board games. Oh, cool. It's so utopian. It makes sense. Yeah. Especially compared to like monopoly and

life. Oh, my gosh. I'm actually going to talk about monopoly really. It's not related, but I just came across some stuff about it that I was like, since we're talking about board games. So we'll circle back to that in a second. But yeah, I think part of what made it so great, for kids dealing with a really scary and boring, but really scary time, is that it's just like it's a very warm and simple game. For listeners who somehow don't know, the mechanic is basically that like you shuffle the cards and then there's no strategy. So it's very good for young children because you basically, you flip the cards over and

that tells you how many steps your character is allowed to take or like it might send you, you know, on a shortcut or backtrack you based on sending you to a particular character on the board. But so it's not just simple, but it's, it's like sort of a very like zen game in that like the outcome is determined as soon as you shuffle the cards. And it's just about each character revealing their fate. And so, um, it's not a very, a super competitive game by nature. Um, it's very colorful. It's simple enough for even really little kids or kids who are quite under the weather to pick up and understand. And also, the game mechanic is literally about taking a stroll, which is very poignant when you think about the kids

who Eleanor Abbott designed it for, who were bedridden. So yeah, Abbott brought a sketch of the board to Milton Bradley, and it just became a huge success. You know, definitely bolstered by the fact that it had been so thoughtfully designed for polio hospital wards full of children and for children bedridden at home. But also, you know, it stuck around because it's just a nice game. And yeah, I just thought that was a really, a really lovely story about, you know, somebody doing what they could to make the world, you know, a little friendlier and a little less dull for kids during a really tough time. which I think is something that we can all really appreciate right now. Okay. And just an aside.

I was going to say, are we going to talk about monopoly and capitalism now? Yeah, yeah, we are going to talk about capitalism. Okay, so yeah, I came across the history of monopoly while researching this. And I was just so gobsbacked by it that I had to share. It wasn't, this wasn't a totally new story to me, but it was one of those things where the details, I was like, this is so much more wild than the way I've heard this story told before. So Monopoly was also invented by a woman, an American writer and feminist named Elizabeth Maggi. She designed what she called the landlord game at the turn of the 20th century.

And it was designed to make people understand why it's bad for people to buy up all the land and make a bunch of money that way. She supported something called the single tax movement, which basically held that instead of taxing income, all land and natural resources. should be shared equally. And the way to make that happen was that if you owned more of that land, you should be taxed accordingly. And any of the funds that weren't needed to run the government should be redistributed equally to the people. So like, not quite socialism, kind of a capitalist take on socialism. I don't know. I had never actually seen the single tax movement laid out before. But she was a big proponent of it. And the landlord game, it was basically designed so you could either amass as much property as possible and get rich while other players went bankrupt.

Or you could play with like cooperative rules and taxes and see everyone prosper financially. And the point of one person winning at the cost of everyone else having zero dollars was to make people see how gross capitalism was, not to glorify it. I kind of feel like that's not the message people take for monopoly. No, it is not. It is definitely not. My father was ruthless. Yes. So how did it get away from her?

I mean, like she literally was quoted once as saying, let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system. And when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied. which actually reminds me of the AI story we have in the youth issue, kind of the same idea. We have a feature about battling the huge issues of ethical lapses in designing AI and algorithms and how one tactic is to basically have a summer camp where kids learn about AI ethics with the idea that, like, you just need to help, you need to make this part of the everyday curriculum so that one day the people who are writing these algorithms have actually thought about these issues.

So Elizabeth Maggi had this same idea about capitalism. Unfortunately for her, in 1934, during the Great Depression, this guy named Charles Darrow sold a game called Monopoly to Parker Brothers. It was literally the same as Elizabeth's game. But with a retooled goal of letting players who were broken, unemployed, enjoy the fantasy of becoming rich. The Parker brothers did realize the similarities between this and the landlord game, and so they offered Elizabeth a one-time payment of $500 for the right to print both

monopoly and the landlord game, which based on what I've read is why she said yes. She was like, great, whatever, they can make this monopoly thing, this gross capitalist riff on my game, but it'll also give a bigger platform to the landlord game. Unfortunately, they only actually produced the landlord game for a very brief. period. It was not as popular as Monopoly and then they quietly killed it in favor of the gross and ironic version we all know and love and own multiple copies of today. I had the, I had a Star Trek Next Generation themed Monopoly growing up. Really loved that a lot. Anyway, I loved this story not just because it reminds me of several of our stories in the youth issue about trying to

teach children a new way through play and games, but also just because the things you put out in the world can really get away from you. And yeah, that's the bottom line is maybe don't sell your anti-capitalist game to a major corporation. It might not work out. But Candyland worked out. Yeah, it's true. Candyland did work out. That's That's true. So good on them. Is there a video game version of Candyland? Is there a VR version?

Oh my gosh. There probably is. I know there are computer games for Game of Life, which was my favorite game as a kid. Yes. I played the Candy Land computer game and it ruled. Okay, great. Yeah, and I think I've played like Pass and Play. And I can't remember if it was Candy Land.

I feel like VR would be fun, but also maybe. nauseating. Yeah, that's true. I, yeah, I just feel like the kind of like the chocolate swamp guys would really scare me in VR. I found them really scary, even on the board. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. And I can't have one right now because I have

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your door. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Moody's 100-day satisfaction guarantee, and like I said, you can get 20% off with code weirdest. I'm eyeing Moot.com's Delta 9-THC buttercream caramels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also mellows me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, Moot.com has Delta9 THHC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to Mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Okay, we're back. And Perbita, you're going to tell me why I should not raise a chimp as my own child. Yeah, maybe that teases a bit of a red herring,

but it does help lead us into a very fascinating experiment that took place in the 1930s. that involves human learning and how much our environments shape our intelligence when we are at a very early age. So between the four of us, I don't think any of us are parents, but I have a few friends who have babies and toddlers now, and it seems really hard. So I've heard. And if you have a puppy or just a very busy or active pet on top of that, I feel like your life is kind of over. But take the story of psychologist Winthrop and Luella Kellogg. Winthrop ran a psychophysical lab first at Indiana State University and then at Florida State University,

where he basically looked at how external stimuli translates to sensations and behaviors that are cerebral cortex's process. And he looked at this among different animals like porpoises and how they transmit sonar. He also studied learning and conditioning in dogs and other mammals, and that's kind of where this famous experiment comes in. So in the early 1930s, Winthrop and Luella had their first kid named Donald. And when he was about 10 months old, they decided to adopt, adopt, quote, unquote, a seven-month-old captive-born chimpanzee from Cuba. Her name was Gua, and I might,

I don't think that's really a traditional name, so I wasn't able to find the pronounce. for it, but it spelled G-U-A. And apparently the couple was inspired by this sensational story from India about two wolf children. And I'm only repeating it here because there were actual psychological journal papers that were written about this case. So these two girls were found in a wolf den where they had supposedly spent like many of their early years growing up. And they kind of acted subhuman, like they couldn't walk on two feet. They couldn't run. They would chase down small animals and try to eat them.

And they would howl at night. So the girls were brought into regular society. And slowly they learned to walk and talk, but they still retain some of these beastly behaviors. And sadly, they ended up both dying at a pretty early age. So this case study was scrutinized by psychologists all around the world for good reason. I mean, people, I still remember like the National Inquirer front pages from when I was a kid about like the bat boy and stuff. I went through, I have to admit, I went through a phase of making my parents buy me the National Enquirer whenever we were on like a long car trip. I was like, I definitely, I think I was like eight years old and I really went through a phase around that age where.

I had enough reading comprehension to digest adult media, but I had no critical thinking skills. So I really love to like ponder over. And I was like, I know we don't know for certain it's true. But who can prove to me that bad boy doesn't exist. Anyway, that was a really fun era for me. And that was always what like set the National Enquirer apart from the sun, which was just like the National Enquirer would just put the weird monster thing. Oh, yeah. It was like Lockness, the while show. Yeah, I agree. And the thing with bat boy was, it wasn't, it wasn't like he acted like a bat.

He looked like one, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, he has a very point of years. Yeah. And the furry face. Yeah, anyway. So these girls did not look like wolves, but it was, it was all a behavioral study.

But yeah, so the psychologist who scrutinized this case, they made these hypotheses that the girls themselves were born with low intelligence. And therefore, when they were moved to a human society, they weren't able to adapt and shed those wolfish instincts. But Winthrop here in the U.S., he thought differently because he had this experience with a wide array of mammals. And he argued that their intelligence was probably on par with other humans, their age. But it was just permanently shaped by the wolves that they grew up with because, again, they spent some of their most important learning developmental years in this wild setting. So once those survivalist instincts took hold, they just couldn't shake them for life. So this was just a germ of an idea, but it kind of turned Winthrop and his wife's lives upside down. And it was kind of the loose premise behind this nine-month experiment that they ended up launching in their own house.

So they knew that it would be extremely unethical to release a human baby into the care of a wild animal and see if Winthrop's hypothesis. actually pan-down. You know, even for the 1930s. Yeah, which is saying something, because they, they were willing to cross many bridges. Yeah, I'm going to talk about some really questionable things in my segment, but I even think these guys wouldn't do that. So they decided that the less unethical thing would be to bring an ape into their own home to raise alongside their son. So they ultimately settled on either a chimp or an orangutang, which is interesting because chimps we know are apparently the closest living relatives to humans and we share something like, I think, 99% of our DNA with them. Whereas orangutans also part of the same family is chimps,

but they are probably the most distant relatives in that family to humans. But anyway, they ended up with a chimp because, you know, chimps are widely used in experimentation. And they wanted to see if they treated Goua, just like they treated Donald. So they talked to her like a human, they swaddled her in a blanket, bottle fed her. They wondered if that would change both her physical, like development and also her level of intelligence as she grew up in these important developmental months. And Donald, next to her, they would kind of be treated like siblings. He would give them some real-time comparison on how human develops next to a chip.

So they brought her home and, again, gave her the same affection care, learning exercises as Donald. And they got a lot of flack from the scientific community for doing this outside of a lab setting because it's like how much can you control methods within your own home. But they ended up writing a book about the whole experiment and outlined like all the methods that they did set. And it was pretty rigorous. They on a daily basis, they would test both Donald and Goua on things like blood pressure, how much they could scribble, depth perception. locomotion, their fears, which I don't quite know how you test that on a baby, sounds kind of

scary. Strength, how they would react to tickling. So like a long, maybe like 20 or so metrics like this on a daily basis. And again, this all lasted for nine months, which is maybe shorter than they had planned to do this. Because some of those people, developmental months go well into the second year of life for humans and for chimps. And the Kellogg's never really explained why they ended it, even though they wrote a whole book about it. But some of their peers have come up with ideas. And some say that they were probably just exhausted with raising both a tiny person and a tiny ape, which is probably why you should not try this. Only reason. The only reason. Others said that maybe they just got worried that

Goua was getting so big and strong that there might be, you know, some negative interactions between her and the human baby. So, yeah, again, unexplained. We don't have a firm answer on that, though it would be interesting to know. But we do have some answers on the hypothesis that Walter had put forward. So at the end of the... of the nine months, the Kellogg's were not successful in teaching Goua how to speak English. She couldn't imitate any human words, and she couldn't even babble like a baby, even though she was alongside Donald this whole time. But she did vocalize a lot like a chimpanzee should.

And she started vocalizing like well before Donald did. At the end of the experiment, Donald himself, he was, I think, one and a half years old. He could only say three words, which at that point in time, most babies are able to say like anywhere from 15 to 50 words. And one of the words he could say was GUE, which is kind of cute. But he also did start imitating the chimpanzees noises, which could have been another reason why the Kellogg's ended the experiment because they're like, oh, unintended consequence there. But what was more interesting is that the physical development of the chimpanzee just went on as it should. Goua grew just like a normal captive-raised chimpanzee wood. And her motor and muscle development was like well ahead of Donald's.

So she could walk like a bipedal and like grip and hurl objects much quicker than he could. So she never really ended up acting like a human despite her. environment and this meticulous baby school that the Kellogg's design for her. Ultimately, she went back to a primate lab run by Yale. And Donald grew up to be a regular person, not a half feral one. But the idea that Winthrop had that an environment helps shape our intelligence, that's still widely held, at least among humans, but maybe not so much among other mammals. And other people have tried to actually raise chimps in their homes since then, not, again, alongside a human baby of the same age.

And no one has been successful in teaching them either words or human mannerisms, which is interesting. So it really comes down to some, like, physiological differences there. Although chimps have been, they do, they can learn a lot. through sign language and ASL. They just can't talk like a human, which is a big deal. It just bums me out so much to think about them sending her back to a lab. I know.

I like, I'm so attached to like my cat, you know, who is not a great ape of tremendous intelligence. Yeah. With a brain comparable to a human, even if not the same. And so I'm just like trying to imagine having a living creature who like desires the same affection as a human baby and is so clearly so closely related to us and like caring for them for months. And then being like goodbye wild animal who was never my child. That really makes me sad. But I it's heartbreaking.

Yeah. And I'm not surprised that people, I mean, it's a good thing that people questioned. their experimental methods because, like you said, there's this whole emotional attachment. Like they built that in on purpose to see if it would change the ape's behavior. But then it's like that also, as you as the person running the experiment, that also changes how you're coming at this, you know, scientific procedure. So, yeah, it's been, the experiment's been written off as like sensationalism. But I don't know, there's a 12-minute movie you can watch about it.

I'll make sure to put it in the article. I hope Donald had a good therapist when he grew up. Yes. Going to need a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if you remembered anything. Do you all remember things from when you were? No, not from like true infancy.

I don't feel like I remember feelings. I don't remember things. No, I don't have conscious memories for my first year and a half of life. But I feel like it's the kind of thing that like once you found out about, which surely he must have, because it was like a quintessential part of his parents' careers, that then I feel like then he would have been like, wait, wait, yes, my hairy sister who then disappeared. Like he'll see a picture and be like, wait a second. Like it's a really, I don't know why, but my brain is just going straight to.

It's like the guy who found out he was the Nirvana baby. Just like, wait, what? I'm glad, I mean, you know, like you said, there were bridges even they wouldn't cross. But I'm glad that in this day and age, even this experiment, people would be like, what's wrong with you? We have a long way to go, but we have come very far. Yes. All right.

Let's take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. All right, we're back. And Karan, talk to us about blood. Oh, my God. This is a bloody, ridiculous story. I've been dying to say that, and now I immediately regret it. But here we go. So there's a great story in the youth issue written by Kat McGowan about the contemporary science

and a little bit about the history of using blood trading between animals, between humans, in order to try to change the systemic state of a body, right? Like, can a young, can blood from a young body make an old body not suddenly young again, but not be weathered by things typically associated with age? and Cat, of course, went back into the history books, but I went even further because some of this is just too good to not read more about as we know of so much early medical science. Humans have a not surprisingly long history of trying to take healthy blood and use it as a cure for unhealthy blood, as in can we fix a broken or ill or somehow otherwise unwell person by giving

them blood that is not those things. The earliest accounts we have are not surprisingly from very early on around first century Rome. People suffering from epilepsy would drink the blood of gladiators to try to cure their seizures. There's not a ton of mention of it over the millennia that follows that, but we really start to see an uptick in the beginnings of transfusion science around the Renaissance in the 15th century. The first mentions that are really poignant to this story around, or in the 15th century, an Italian scholar and priest named Marcillo Ficino. And he posited that if you took an aged person and they, quote,

suck the blood of an adolescent. and this adolescent would be then clean, happy, temperate, generally, unimpeded by the ravages of age, the older person would be able to restore their vitality. And people were kind of into this notion to the tune of there was a very sick Pope at the time, Pope Innocent the 8th, and he was transfused with the blood of four young boys, all participants of this particular transact. did not survive. The Pope sounds like probably wasn't going to survive anyway, but, you know, not great news for the boys. And this kind of medical vampirism maintained a steady pace for the next

couple hundred years. Folks were doing things like drinking diluted blood to cure their ailments. They were sprinkling dried powdered blood on wounds to help them heal. And the thing to note here is that the Pope aside, no one's really talking about or doing what we'd consider a transfusion at this point, at least not yet. But it didn't stop people from musing about the notion. There was one German physician who wrote in the late 1500s that the practice might, quote, bring him the fountain of life and drive away all languor. But even he, after saying that summarily dismissed it as probably a foolish endeavor, until. Not so. The mid-1600s, a British physician named William Harvey, was the first person to map the circulatory system, and this really cracked the notion of what blood carried and what blood could

do wide open. And it started something of a wave of like, it's a blood trading fad, we'll call it. And there was a lot of experimentation. Animals to animals, animals, animals, animals to animals. people and we'll get into some of the more acute experiments as we go on. Most of this was happening in England and France. Both countries had what they called royal societies, which were basically clubs backed by the government to accelerate scientific pursuit, scientific endeavor, because again, it's very early on. We're still trying to figure all this stuff out. So the first transfusions, literal just taking blood from one living thing and shunting it into another living thing, these first experiments were done by a physician named Robert Lauer and he used dogs. And it was a little bit gruesome, as you could imagine, basically what he would do is he would take quills and you would attach them to the cartoid arteries of the two dogs from the donor to the recipient.

then he would use a string that he would tie around that conduit in order to control the flow. And everything, you know, was fine with most with these experiments until it suddenly wasn't and the donor dog inevitably would die, which is a total bummer. And it's just, I would look at this and think, because a lot of these experiments, we weren't really clear about what exactly he was trying to do other than prove that he could do a thing. Okay. Oh, it's a great way to set out an experiment. Yes, yes.

No hypothesis, just vibes. Yes, but then another member of the Royal Society, a natural philosopher named Robert Boyle, basically helped to articulate what it is that we are trying to figure out here. He said, what if trading blood might generate some sort of physical, mental, or behavioral changes from one living thing to another, as in if you have a very, aggressive or fierce dog that isn't maybe very social and you take the blood of a docile dog and transfuse it into that aggressive dog. Can you chill that dog out? You know, and this thought experiment continued if you have a dog that is very, very well fed can transfusing its blood

into a dog that is malnourished help improve that dog's health. And then it gets just even a little bit more absurd again, just clearly following this thought experiment down, if you took my dog's blood and put it into somebody else's dog, would that dog then think I was its owner? Yes. With questions like this just swimming around their minds, members of the Royal Society really, really pressed themselves. They wanted to try this on humans. But what they knew from the dog experiments, at least, was that in the dog-to-dog transaction, the dog that was doing the giving of the blood never survived.

So they didn't want to do that to a person, which good on you. So they started to think about animal to human transfusions. And the members of the Royal Society in England were looking for a very particular type of human to try this experiment on. First of all, they wanted someone who was unwell, particularly mentally, not totally there. but they also wanted someone who had a history of being intelligent so that they would, A, know what was going down, but if the experiments worked, also have the ability to articulate their feelings and their general state to the doctors after that. So they found a dude. They found their guy. His name was Arthur Coga. He was mentally unwell man who was once a member of the clergy. So he was well read. He spoke him some Latin. And they thought this was our guy. And so the question was, could hooking him up to a lamb, quote, cool his mind? So they paid him 20 shillings and they infused him with about nine or 10 ounces of sheep's blood,

obviously a very docile creature. I've never encountered an aggressive sheep, but I feel like it must be a thing. I would say, I mean, maybe a ram. I have any sheep could probably be aggressive, but sure. I feel like you could. Generally. You should be able to piss a sheep off, is all. I'm saying, but nobody talks about it. We should dig into that. So transfusion one, the reports were

pretty good. The doctors found Koga's speech, quote, very reasonable. And he even delivered some of his own personal accounts to them in Latin. So they were like, cool, this seems to be working. But then Koga became a little bit of a local celebrity in London. So the second transfusion thing started to go awry. Because the public nature of the experiment and the fact that Kogo was a little bit of a local celebrity, he took his 20 shillings and he went to the pubs and the people at the pubs were like, you know, they wanted to hang out with him. They wanted to. It's the sheep guy. It's the sheep guy. Let's do a shot with the sheep guy, except nobody's doing shots in London in 1667. But you take the meaning. So that kind of put the kibosh on things after the second transfusion because first of all,

alcohol has goes into the bloodstream, which they seem to have figured out. So they thought it was going to impact the effects of the transfusion. They've lost their control. Also, a drunk slurring subject is perhaps less able to demonstrate that he has any kind of improvement. So that kind of put the end to things in London, which was like, you know, not great, but not catastrophic, right? however across the channel in Paris things didn't go quite as well so also in 1667

there was a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis and he transfused first transfused lamb's blood into a feverish young boy and the boy survived he then went on to transfuse it into the butcher who also survived and then he was just emboldened like this is going great So he then sought out his own mentally ill adult to see if gentle lamb's blood could also calm him.

Scientific historian Holly Tucker has a pretty good recounting of this story in her book, Bloodwork. So the first transfusion that she writes about, they noted that Maroy started to sweat and his arm, and armpit became very hot. Now, we now know that this is something of a normal immune response, like white blood cells charging to the site of a disease to attack, but the 17th century scientists, obviously not having the benefits of all we've learned about, all we've learned over the course of modern medicine, flipped out and stopped. But of course, he did it again. And the second infusion went along

very well. Maroy seemed somewhat calmed. After the third infusion, however, he died. So that's not so great. That's not so great. So there, Dini was put on trial for murder. He was ultimately found not guilty because the cause. Because really it was the sheep that had killed it. Well, really, really there was foul play afoot. What? Yes.

So the actual culprit was turned out to be arsenic poisoning. Because at the same time that there were all of these transfusion scientists going around being very, very excited about the prospect of this new treatment, there of course was another group of scientists who thought that this was all very, very bad, that we were on the precipice of creating human animal hybrids and it was unnatural and it was dangerous. So they, they sabotaged. Oh, my goodness. So all of this, not necessarily Moroy's death, but the fervor around it and all of the contention triggered a halt to all the 17th century blood trading. It It was outlawed in France and the pope, a different pope, a different innocent, an innocent

with a bigger number than the last innocent, forbade it. Now, that's the end of the history section of our tale, because I want to now talk about why we're talking about this now. Because the fact of the matter is that, like, yes, all of this is gory in hindsight, and it is very, very dangerous. but these early physicians, like, they weren't totally wrong, right? We've, as we've learned more and more about blood and what it carries and how to work with blood to give it, to move it between humans and between animals, that it won't just like,

you know, keep killing people and stuff like that is that there's all these soluble factors in our blood that regulate all kinds of system-wide states, right? healthy, ill, young, old, not least of which of these things is aging. And we've learned a lot. First and foremost, that there are blood types and that transfusing A's and B's and O's and A-Bs and A-Bs, willy-nilly, like, you're going to end up with some dead people. We also got the actual hang of transfusions around the turn of the 20th century in the late 1800s, first for wounded soldiers and then to transfuse blood into mothers who were having excessive bleeding in childbirth. But what's got the Silicon Valley people and the Peter Teals of the world all excited

is that there's been a wave of research rolling out over the last decade from really reputable places like Stanford and Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco. And these researchers, which is primarily what Kat talks about in her piece, use a technique called paribiosis, which is the sustained co-mingling of two living creatures' blood supplies, and they've been able to reverse the signs of aging in lab mice. Like, whoa. Yeah, like probably in the neighborhood of a dozen studies, right, about watching these little dudes and ladies when they're conjoined and sharing a bloodstream with their younger counterparts,

the old mice act younger than their years. The researchers have documented, like, little critters. suddenly healing faster, moving more quickly, thinking better, remembering more. You might ask, how do you figure out if a mouse remembers stuff? Good question. They use a test. It's basically a Lego test. They put them in a little habitat and there's stacks of Legos around. And a mouse is not like a goldfish, right? It shouldn't care about the same stack of Legos multiple times unless there's something different about it. So the older mice sort of like old barflies as cat puts it in the piece, get this like bleary-eyed thing and they keep

going back to the same Lego like, oh, wait, what's that? Whereas they should be like, oh, whatever, I've seen that thing before. So through a particular type of paribiosis, which is called heterochronic paribiosis, they've seen signs that this is fixing all kinds of stuff, signs of heart failure, it improves bone healing, it regrows pancreatic cells, it speeds repair and the spinal cords. And what the researchers are trying to figure out, right? Just to get all, to get the obvious thing out of the way, nobody's talking about like hooking up a young person into an old person to make the old person heal, right? What we're, what the scientists are really working on figuring out now is what is like the soluble thing in the blood that is actually doing this, right? Because blood isn't just one thing. It's a cocktail. There's red blood cells and white blood cells and clotting factors and platelets and hormones and proteins and all sorts of systemic signals. coursing through our veins. Or, so is it one of those things or several of those things that makes this work? Is it just that we're sort of flushing out the system with the younger blood and making

whatever's making somebody act or feel old, less dense in the bloodstream? So they're starting to zero in on some potential candidates, but we're not there yet. But regardless, the importance of that. thing is to remember that we're not talking about a fountain of youth here. Like, if you're thinking about it that way, you're really, really missing the point. This isn't about living forever. It's about helping people live better while they're here. We're not talking about reversing aging. We're talking about like people's knees not hurting and all of those other illnesses and conditions that come along with age. So again, the folks trading the blood 500 years ago weren't wrong, but they weren't

quite right and we're starting to figure out what is right, but we're just not there yet. In the mouse experiments, was it like one dose just kind of transformed this old mouse or was it like a constant supply of transfusions? Excellent question. Let me tell you how paribiosis works. You take two mice and it's a surgery, you cut them down their flanks and then you stitch them together. And in the healing process, all of their blood vessels connect. And so effectively what's happening is that the two mice are like a Franken mouse. Got it. And they're conjoined, but in doing so, they're sharing the different factors in the blood between the two of them. So the older mouse, like, it will clean its coat better. It will put its nest together faster because

it's in this weird three-legged race with a younger mouse. Hmm. Okay. I feel like that's not the answer. No, and you're like, oh, gosh. That answered it. I'm just like, yeah, I don't know. Now I have a lot more questions. There's so many questions. It's so gruesome and fascinating.

Was there any negative effect on the younger mouse's behavior? Like, it's not like they just like swapped bodies. Like the younger mouse didn't just start acting old again. No, no, not at all. It seems that whatever was going on, like the effects were much. greater if not exclusive to to the little old dudes got it well listeners will have to get a digital copy of the youth issue to learn more I suppose it's a great feature definitely a lot of great stuff in there yeah go cat so what was the weirdest thing we learned this week I think the blood transfusions for me

it is it's hard to beat it's a wild story there was there was there was a lot to impact there. The sabotage? Yes. I would, you know, I'm ready for Corinne's upcoming true crime podcast all about that arsenic situation. Oh my God. The dream.

So listeners, that is it for our bonus episodes for now. You will see us again in your feed for season five of the weirdest thing I learned this week in late October. Very exciting. But in the meantime, get your take. for tonight's live stream show, September 21st, Tuesday, 7 p.m. Eastern. Link in the show notes, you definitely don't want to miss it. And we will be back soon. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever

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