Speaker 1: Pushkin. What's her name, Coolly? Sorry, there you got some
Speaker 1: fun names. Cooley, it's a Belgian malanois sleek, lean, dappled
Speaker 1: gray and black, panting happily on a patch of grass
Speaker 1: way up in the hills of northeastern Alabama. This dog's
Speaker 1: probably from Hungary, hung hungry, and she's held old ectly
Speaker 1: have her information twenty four months below below we have
Speaker 1: all that paperwork at the office, but we don't have
Speaker 1: that right. That is the biggest tongue I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: We're all standing in front of a cluster of concrete
Speaker 1: buildings spread over a large, rolling, wooded campus an hour
Speaker 1: or so from Birmingham, the head cos of an organization
Speaker 1: called three sixty Canine Group. The whole operation looks like
Speaker 1: a scale down army base, only instead of soldiers marching
Speaker 1: to and fro, there are dogs, dozens and dozens of them,
Speaker 1: Puppies stumbling playfully, chocolate labs chasing things, German shepherds looking
Speaker 1: for a job to do and cooling. One of the
Speaker 1: operation's newest recruits, a teenager in dog years, being put
Speaker 1: through her paces. A rubber toy for which she has
Speaker 1: acquired a certain affection was taken from her, and her
Speaker 1: job is to find it. You can see like where
Speaker 1: she slaughtered right here, so she caught the other here
Speaker 1: turned Once she turned, she can see. She has never
Speaker 1: done an exercise like this before, and the assignment has
Speaker 1: filled her with enthusiasm. She's got to use your boss.
Speaker 1: Coolie is standing in front of one of the cabinets,
Speaker 1: tail wagging. She knew her wasn't there. Coolie is a
Speaker 1: good girl, all right. She follows her nose and we
Speaker 1: have a lot to learn from her. My name is
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the final episode of season
Speaker 1: six of Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This has been a season devoted to fixing things, college rankings, laundry,
Speaker 1: the Little Mermaid. We have looked at many burning issues
Speaker 1: and said we can do better. But there are some
Speaker 1: problems that we cannot fix on our own. Some problems
Speaker 1: are so big they can only be solved with the
Speaker 1: help of another species. Okay, so this is our dark
Speaker 1: room tests. Coolie's undergoing get another test with the same
Speaker 1: goal as before, find the hidden toy, only now the
Speaker 1: lights are off and the toy is not in the
Speaker 1: first room, Coolie enters, but in a second, smaller room
Speaker 1: off to the side. This also tells us if it
Speaker 1: takes her a little while to try to find it,
Speaker 1: how much hunt drift she actually has, so it's not
Speaker 1: just immediate to make sure even after she gets tired,
Speaker 1: even after she's hot, but she still wants that toy
Speaker 1: enough to be looking for it. Coolie bounds in, sniffs
Speaker 1: the first room, everything, all four walls. Then she zeroes
Speaker 1: in on the closet. We can't see her, only hear her.
Speaker 1: Her trainers, Sean and Ashley, are grading every step of
Speaker 1: her performance on a long detailed checklist. She got an
Speaker 1: she's got an out. Coolly walked across a mattress, didn't stop,
Speaker 1: jumped on one end of a makeshift teeter totter, didn't
Speaker 1: FaZe her. These are the dogs that people get as pets,
Speaker 1: and they eat their couch and they're the worst, terrible
Speaker 1: pets that make the really really good dogs. For the
Speaker 1: most part, you love all of that. She runs down
Speaker 1: the hallway, sniff, sniff. A large canvas bag is suspended
Speaker 1: from the ceiling, ready to drop and block her way,
Speaker 1: and pulled up to the ceiling, big, heavy bag. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: here she comes. We all jumped when the bag dropped
Speaker 1: from the ceiling. Coolly didn't. She paused, looked at the bag,
Speaker 1: sniffed it, and carried. Dogs noses are something like a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand times more sensitive than ours. A puppy fresh
Speaker 1: off the boat can find a hidden toy in a
Speaker 1: darkened room. Dogs can perform all manner of olfactory tasks
Speaker 1: using judgment, drive, and discipline. It's their superpower. That's why
Speaker 1: they're dogs at the airport sniffing luggage, or why it's
Speaker 1: always a dog who finds the hiker lost in the woods.
Speaker 1: Spend a little time at three sixty Canine in the
Speaker 1: hills of Alabama, and every one of your preconceptions about
Speaker 1: the genius of dogs will be confirmed. We had a dog,
Speaker 1: a black lab that we retired, and we allowed the dog,
Speaker 1: you know, so we had a ceremony and we and
Speaker 1: we hired. You know, there's a local bakery that makes
Speaker 1: dog friendly cake, so we had a cake for the dog.
Speaker 1: We were sitting in the three sixty Canine conference room
Speaker 1: listening to Jerry Johnson and John Pierce, two of the
Speaker 1: company's senior executives. Two hardcore dog guys talking about the
Speaker 1: best they ever saw. And we had the dog in
Speaker 1: the room and run around and just you know, an
Speaker 1: a flash and sniffing everybody's super friendly dog. The lady
Speaker 1: comes in to deliver the cake and she's got on
Speaker 1: her boyfriend, her husband with her, and he's standing there
Speaker 1: holding the cake, and the donkey's running up behind the
Speaker 1: guy and going behind him and basically like snipping his
Speaker 1: rear ind and sniffing the back of his you know,
Speaker 1: his shirt and won't leave him alone. And I remember
Speaker 1: who asked him, but finally someone said, yeah, John said,
Speaker 1: are you carrying a weapon? And he was like, no,
Speaker 1: I was carrying a weapon. I took it off and
Speaker 1: left it in the car just prior to walk it
Speaker 1: in here. And the guy had, you know, three minutes
Speaker 1: before taking his gun off and left it in his car,
Speaker 1: and the dogs still found it, and you know, we
Speaker 1: were having a party. What was that dog's name? That
Speaker 1: was Cole? Cole and Cooley add them to the long
Speaker 1: list of Doggie All Stars, which you already knew dogs
Speaker 1: could do this. Right now, it's time to go further.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, a labrador named Floren flew in
Speaker 1: from London to Boston at the invitation of a research
Speaker 1: scientist at MIT named Andreas Mercian coming in on a
Speaker 1: winter's morning for a special one dog exhibition. Flowing the
Speaker 1: famous dog flew first class to MIT, so I didn't
Speaker 1: have time to go through all the hook so we
Speaker 1: had to rent a hotel room hotel ballroom right across
Speaker 1: the street at the Mario. Mercian is a kind of
Speaker 1: scientific jack of all trades. He's technically a physicist, but
Speaker 1: as he likes to say, he operates in blissful ignorance
Speaker 1: of disciplinary boundaries. He's interested in solar panels, in quantum effects,
Speaker 1: in molecular biology, not to mention something that I cannot
Speaker 1: begin to understand called cytoskeletal memory and coding. Mercian got
Speaker 1: interested in prostate cancer, one of the most common of
Speaker 1: all cancers. Mercian heard about the work being done by
Speaker 1: a British researcher named Claire Guest, who had been training
Speaker 1: dogs to detect diseases the same way We've been training
Speaker 1: dogs for years to detect explosives, and Mercian and Guests
Speaker 1: ended up working together, which is what led to Florin
Speaker 1: Guests for year old Labrador flying into Boston one cold
Speaker 1: winter's morning to perform a special sniffing demonstration for the
Speaker 1: senior leadership of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. So we described
Speaker 1: to see this. This is hilarious. You in the ballroom
Speaker 1: of the Maria. How many people, oh, maybe maybe a
Speaker 1: dozen people, maybe a few words people. That's they're all
Speaker 1: by invitation, okay, no. And there's a giant paris on
Speaker 1: the middle about seven feet across, which eight arms, and
Speaker 1: each arm is a jar glass jar of urine closed
Speaker 1: off by a mental frit. Everything is stamless. Still, everything
Speaker 1: is in fact that everything is super clean. The jars
Speaker 1: have all been pre selected from a biological repository. Some
Speaker 1: are filled with urine from people known to have suffered
Speaker 1: from prostate cancer. Others are controls. Floren's job is to
Speaker 1: sniff each jar. If she detects what she believes is
Speaker 1: a positive sample, she's supposed to stop and stare at
Speaker 1: the jar before moving on. Were the people from the
Speaker 1: Prostate Foundation skeptical? Oh yes, of course, and as rightly
Speaker 1: they should be. You must see this to believe it.
Speaker 1: Nobody should take these kinds of things on just somebody's
Speaker 1: especially when we're talking about people's lives here right. It
Speaker 1: was early in the morning. Mercian looked at Floren and
Speaker 1: worried she wasn't up to the task, so they had
Speaker 1: brought flooring the dog on first class. Then the American
Speaker 1: customs had to buy Lord de warm her gave her medicine,
Speaker 1: so she had to be vomiting, and all sorts of
Speaker 1: other unpleasantness happened to the poor dog. And there's coffee
Speaker 1: smells everywhere. By the way, in the Mariot people who
Speaker 1: are serving breakfast. I'm like, oh my god, we're going
Speaker 1: to confuse this dog now with all the coffee. And
Speaker 1: she's jet lagged, then dewarmed, and this poor dog is
Speaker 1: not going to perform, and she kicks it out of
Speaker 1: the park. The people from the Prostate Cancer Foundation are
Speaker 1: so blown away they end up funding guests and merchants
Speaker 1: research project to explore the idea that smell might be
Speaker 1: the best way to diagnose a dangerous cancer. To a
Speaker 1: layman like me, the idea that a cancer or a
Speaker 1: virus would have a smell is not intuitive. It's not
Speaker 1: the disease itself that has the smell. What happens is
Speaker 1: it changes your body's metabolic pathways, of which you have
Speaker 1: thousands going on in every cell. There's different things happening,
Speaker 1: they change, and many of these pathways, many of these
Speaker 1: processes inside of your cells. They have as a byproduct odorance,
Speaker 1: odorance or volletill organic compounds that tend to fly around
Speaker 1: and come out of your body. So cancer, for instance,
Speaker 1: likely leaves an imprint on every emission that you have,
Speaker 1: from sweat to urine, to saliba to tears, so you
Speaker 1: name it. Human beings are a sight species. Sight is
Speaker 1: our superpower. The biggest web of sensory connections in our
Speaker 1: brains is between our cortex and our eyes. We can
Speaker 1: differentiate colors in a way that few other species can.
Speaker 1: But as our eyesight evolved to get better, our noses
Speaker 1: got worse. As the biologist John Bradshaw puts it, there
Speaker 1: appear to be limits on how much information any brain
Speaker 1: can process. So if you optimize for seeing, you compromise
Speaker 1: on smelling. Dogs make the opposite trade off. Their eyes
Speaker 1: a mediocre, their noses are amazing. To Florin. Prostate cancer
Speaker 1: wasn't a clump of cells, It was an odor. An
Speaker 1: odor is so distinctive that it made her stop and stare.
Speaker 1: Let's imagine that you and I both have prostate cancer
Speaker 1: at the same stage. Is it fair to assume that
Speaker 1: we the way in which our body smell is our
Speaker 1: odor is altered by that cancer? Correct? It might not
Speaker 1: be the same exactly. So why can the dog generalize
Speaker 1: for the same reason that you can generalize the gate?
Speaker 1: You can track my footprints if I teach you what
Speaker 1: footprints look like on the web site and how they're distributed.
Speaker 1: So the dog will learns to identify the footprints on
Speaker 1: the website where it's easy to see and easy to
Speaker 1: see the gate, and then it generalizes, It extrapolates and says, oh,
Speaker 1: this smells like the stuff that they used to want
Speaker 1: me to find. Human beings try to screen for prostate
Speaker 1: cancer by looking for it. Of course we do. We're
Speaker 1: a species that's in love with sight. We ask men
Speaker 1: over a certain age to take a blood test to
Speaker 1: look for something called the prostate specific antigen, and if
Speaker 1: we see a lot of that antigen, we take a
Speaker 1: closer look at the prostate itself. We take half a
Speaker 1: dozen or more little slices of the prostate and look
Speaker 1: at them under the microscope. We look, and we look again,
Speaker 1: The problem is it only around a quarter of men
Speaker 1: who have elevated PSA levels actually end up having prostate cancer.
Speaker 1: You could have high PSA levels for some other reason.
Speaker 1: You could also have normal PSA levels and still have
Speaker 1: prostate cancer. And so the result of all that looking
Speaker 1: is an enormous amount of error. Lots of men are
Speaker 1: told they could have a dangerous cancer when they don't,
Speaker 1: and lots of other men have cancer that gets missed.
Speaker 1: The prostate screening air rate is so bad that many
Speaker 1: men avoid it altogether. I'm not getting tested, Are you
Speaker 1: kidding me? All you have to do is spend a
Speaker 1: few hours reading the available literature, and you realize that
Speaker 1: looking for early signs of prostate cancer is a fool's game.
Speaker 1: It's really really hard. But Floren the dog didn't look.
Speaker 1: Floren bypassed all that nonsense. Florence is sniffed. And did
Speaker 1: Florence make any mistakes? Oh? Sure, of course, if something
Speaker 1: is right, it's one hundred percent wrong. So yes, there's
Speaker 1: definitely errors in the samples, and the dog can definitely
Speaker 1: make errors. However, you should remember this, so do all
Speaker 1: of our tests, and currently the dogs are better than
Speaker 1: any test. Notice, how he said, dogs are better. It's
Speaker 1: not like flooring is some kind of super dog. The
Speaker 1: Usain Bolt of the Canadine World. Lots of dogs could
Speaker 1: do just what she did. A dog can do better
Speaker 1: than the tests. You trust, and you don't trust the dog,
Speaker 1: And I'm glad you don't trust the dog. We have
Speaker 1: to not trust the dog. The dog is teaching us. No,
Speaker 1: dogs are definitely error prone, same as everything else. But currently,
Speaker 1: and this is a mind blowing statistic, of all the
Speaker 1: diseases that have ever been tried to be identified by
Speaker 1: trained dog, all of them have succeeded. That is mind blowing.
Speaker 1: It should be we should be paying attention to this.
Speaker 1: What the hell is happening? Or we can't make this
Speaker 1: thing not to work? I mean, shouldn't you be angry
Speaker 1: at this? I mean, come on, what are we doing? Well?
Speaker 1: Exactly what are we doing? The chief research scientist for
Speaker 1: three sixty K nine is a man named Bill Schneider,
Speaker 1: Doctor William Schneider. Schneider used to work at Fort Dietrich,
Speaker 1: the army garrison in Maryland where the Pentagon does its
Speaker 1: top secret biodefense work. Schneider's specialty was plant virology. Diseases
Speaker 1: that affect things like peach or cherry trees. I come
Speaker 1: from a plant background, but being at Fort Dietrich, I
Speaker 1: had access to a lot of tools and toys that
Speaker 1: typical scientists didn't have in their repertoire. And I've been
Speaker 1: playing around with those. But then, just like Andreas Mershin
Speaker 1: over at MIT, Schneider began to hear of the supposedly
Speaker 1: miraculous powers of dogs, so he decided to hold a
Speaker 1: sniff off. Fort Dietrich has a special containment facility where
Speaker 1: they could do an actual head to head challenge comparing
Speaker 1: detection results between a dog and one of modern science's
Speaker 1: highest tech tests. Schneider chose as the test case a
Speaker 1: plant virus called pumpox and bet against the dogs. He
Speaker 1: was a lab guy, not a dog guy. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: name it. We had access to it. Gas chromatography, mass spectrometry,
Speaker 1: all sorts of very deep sequencing, heavy duty nucleic acid analysis,
Speaker 1: things that are pretty darn cool actually, and not one
Speaker 1: single one of them can beat the dogs. In fact,
Speaker 1: the US Army invested about nineteen billion dollars in trying
Speaker 1: to find a machine that could detect explosives better than
Speaker 1: dogs and In the end, all these projects, nothing could
Speaker 1: come close to what the dogs can do. So I
Speaker 1: had to convert myself. Bill Schneider, the convert, decided to
Speaker 1: change careers. He left government work started making sophisticated canine
Speaker 1: training aids. I come to you, Bill, and I say, Bill,
Speaker 1: we have a new, highly infectious fire us out there.
Speaker 1: We know almost nothing about it. What do you do next?
Speaker 1: I say, I need the ingenomic information. So that's a
Speaker 1: key step in practically any diagnostics these days, and with
Speaker 1: good purpose, because when you have genomic information, you can
Speaker 1: design assays, or in my case, you can design a
Speaker 1: training aid that will teach a dog to directly detect
Speaker 1: that you're making a sent Yes exactly, You're you're looking
Speaker 1: at a blueprint and you're saying, ah, yeah, this gene,
Speaker 1: this protein, this protein, this protein, this protein. I can
Speaker 1: construct that in a lab. Yeah. Florin the prostate cancer
Speaker 1: dog was trained on samples taken directly from people with
Speaker 1: prostate cancer. Schneider was taking the next step, figuring out
Speaker 1: a way to extract the scent of the disease itself,
Speaker 1: refining the process creating customized disease fragrances that could be
Speaker 1: shipped overnight to dogs anywhere in the world. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: you're avoiding everything it has to do with actual virulence, contagiousness.
Speaker 1: It's an inert it's a harmless substance. Yeah, you could
Speaker 1: eat it if you wanted to. I wouldn't taste all
Speaker 1: that great. But yeah, it's completely safe, it's completely stable.
Speaker 1: You can make as much of it as you want. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now we have a little vial of something that has
Speaker 1: a characteristic odor. You and I can't smell that. Nope. Yeah,
Speaker 1: In fact, I would have bet you a lot of
Speaker 1: money that nothing could smell it, because in our mind,
Speaker 1: none of these things had sent the world. Scientists were
Speaker 1: studying and refining the diagnostic power of dogs. Then COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen happened, ranking news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions more
Speaker 1: Americans into virtual lockdown. Over seventy five million people in
Speaker 1: New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut ordered to stay at home.
Speaker 1: Bill Schneider realized that his technique of making these little
Speaker 1: vials of disease fragrance might prove really useful. There's there
Speaker 1: any reason to believe that COVID might be the exception
Speaker 1: to this pattern. Not in my mind. No. No. The
Speaker 1: once I crossed that threshold with the original virus that
Speaker 1: we've worked on, which was that plump pox virus, I
Speaker 1: knew you could translate this, not just to another virus
Speaker 1: in plants, I can take and transfer that to humans
Speaker 1: or cattle or swine or chickens or anything, and off
Speaker 1: you go. COVID first services at the end of twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: The novel Coronavirus Genome is published. In early January of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, the Who declares a pandemic that spring, and
Speaker 1: across the country. There's demand for COVID nineteen testing as
Speaker 1: positive cases are on the rise. Some people have had
Speaker 1: to wait longer than two weeks to receive results. While
Speaker 1: the world is in lockdown. In the early summer of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Bill Schneider's lab gets going synthesizing the proteins
Speaker 1: that make up the smell of stars COVID two. The
Speaker 1: trainers start training dogs on it, hard working, focused, unflappable
Speaker 1: dogs who really loved the idea of sniffing nine to five.
Speaker 1: By the time we got to September fifteenth, we were
Speaker 1: starting to collect clinical samples from people who were confirmed
Speaker 1: positive and we were checking the dogs on those clinical samples,
Speaker 1: and they didn't miss a beat. They were ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent accurate. And at that point I was very confident
Speaker 1: that the dogs we were training could detect COVID and
Speaker 1: people's masks on their sack in sweat and saliva labs.
Speaker 1: Shepherds Belgian Malinois floppy yeared pointy year doesn't much matter.
Speaker 1: What matters is that they are a dog. They have
Speaker 1: a big, powerful nose, and they're perfectly happy to put
Speaker 1: that magnificent nose to work in the service of helping
Speaker 1: all of us. They're best friends. Let's think about some
Speaker 1: of the options we have when detecting a deadly new
Speaker 1: pathogen as it moves through a human population. One option
Speaker 1: is what we ended up trying with COVID in the
Speaker 1: United States. We make you come to a testing site,
Speaker 1: stand in line with a lot of people who also
Speaker 1: think they might have COVID. Really good idea, by the way,
Speaker 1: stick a nasty swab up your nose, charge you a
Speaker 1: couple hundred dollars, use an insanely expensive and complicated and
Speaker 1: high tech system called PCR to give you an answer
Speaker 1: that may or may not be useful because it didn't
Speaker 1: always get to you in time. Remember, sometimes it would
Speaker 1: take forever to get your test results, sometimes two weeks,
Speaker 1: and maybe in those two weeks while you were waiting,
Speaker 1: you were infecting everyone you met. The result of all
Speaker 1: the cost and inconvenience and hassle and imperfection of Option
Speaker 1: one was that we've never done enough testing at any
Speaker 1: stage of the pandemic, And because we didn't do enough testing,
Speaker 1: the pandemic sword out of control. Someone has a wedding
Speaker 1: or a Thanksgiving dinner, and in a perfect world, everyone
Speaker 1: would get tested before coming. But of course they don't,
Speaker 1: and one person ends up infecting ten other people, and
Speaker 1: maybe one or two of those ten will die. All
Speaker 1: these horror stories have at their core a failure of
Speaker 1: disease detection. I emailed Michael Minna at the Harvard School
Speaker 1: of Public Health, who was one of the big critics
Speaker 1: of the way we tested for COVID. This is what
Speaker 1: he wrote back about the way testing works. It has
Speaker 1: to do with what epidemiologists call are not, which is
Speaker 1: the average number of people infected by an infected person.
Speaker 1: If an epidemic has are not above one, it grows exponentially.
Speaker 1: If arnot falls below one, an epidemic dies out. Here's
Speaker 1: what men are wrote. This whole pandemic and all of
Speaker 1: the massive outbreaks we've seen have been with an art
Speaker 1: of about one point three. That means that every ten
Speaker 1: people infected went on to infect on average thirteen people. Well,
Speaker 1: in that case, if you have a hundred people infected
Speaker 1: on day one, then thirty days later you have about
Speaker 1: six hundred new infections exponential growth end quote. All we
Speaker 1: had to do to stop the pandemic was to test
Speaker 1: just enough people and prevent just enough new infections so
Speaker 1: that those ten newly infected people only infected on average
Speaker 1: nine other people. We just had to move the needle
Speaker 1: a little bit, and we couldn't do it. Option one
Speaker 1: was one of the most criminally stupid acts of public
Speaker 1: health incompetence in American history. Now imagine another option just
Speaker 1: moved to a hypothetical. So I'm a high school, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to reopen. We're in the middle of the
Speaker 1: raging pandemic, and I come to you and I say,
Speaker 1: I want to use your service. Are we talking? How
Speaker 1: would you tell me how you would fix that up?
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Jerry Johnson, who runs biodetection at three
Speaker 1: sixty K nine dog in the front door. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: first fifty kids come in, they stand on their spot,
Speaker 1: dog searches them, they go on to class. The next
Speaker 1: fifty comes in. We could do that, you know, relatively quickly,
Speaker 1: you know, and maybe you have some coming in the gymnasium,
Speaker 1: some coming in the cafeteria. It's all about having the
Speaker 1: real estate to get the children lined up. So and
Speaker 1: you could do that with one dog or two dogs.
Speaker 1: Would you would want two dogs? Yeah, particularly if it's
Speaker 1: if it's a public health issue and school children do
Speaker 1: with the dogs, be very very thorough. So if the
Speaker 1: dog's condition to work forty five minutes, we don't want
Speaker 1: to stop at thirty just to make sure that the
Speaker 1: dog is, you know, not fatiguing at all. A PCR
Speaker 1: test costs somewhere in the range of one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars, and you wait forever for the result. The
Speaker 1: cost of a dog test, once you've factored in the dog,
Speaker 1: the training, paying the handler is something like two dollars
Speaker 1: and fifty cents a test, and the dog gives you
Speaker 1: the answer immediately. So the dog is you got these
Speaker 1: kids lined up, dog sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, finds
Speaker 1: a dog has a positive, right, what is the dog doing.
Speaker 1: It just sits till when the dog goes downline. What
Speaker 1: we like to do is we line people up, we
Speaker 1: have them, we have the dog go down as they're
Speaker 1: facing forward. The dog goes down the left hand side
Speaker 1: of the line and it just does it quick. You'll
Speaker 1: see it's a minimally invasive search. The dog will put
Speaker 1: its nose on the back of the person's hand. They
Speaker 1: target the hand if you have Oaton toe shoes, and
Speaker 1: might target your feet. But it makes quick contact with
Speaker 1: the skin. But then it keeps going. The dog won't
Speaker 1: really break stride. If it gets an odor and there's
Speaker 1: the presence of virus, then you'll see the stop. It'll
Speaker 1: sniff more, it'll investigate, and then I'll go into the
Speaker 1: sick response. So that person who's been identified as the
Speaker 1: dog is positive is then pulled out for secondary school
Speaker 1: and take him a second go the nurse's office and
Speaker 1: get a rapid test. The next time a pandemic hits.
Speaker 1: We could have dogs at the front door of every
Speaker 1: school in America. We could have dogs at the front
Speaker 1: door of restaurants, and dogs in bars, and dogs in
Speaker 1: chain stations, and dogs at the airport. We could have
Speaker 1: dogs walking down the street checking out everyone on the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: Your block could bend together and have a dog come
Speaker 1: every night at dinner time to sniff everyone. You could
Speaker 1: hire a dog along with caterers at your daughter's wedding
Speaker 1: or your son's bar mitzvah, or every Sunday morning at
Speaker 1: church to make sure you aren't holding a super spreader event.
Speaker 1: Dogs give us the power to move the needle from
Speaker 1: an arnot of one to an arnat of something less
Speaker 1: than one. That is option two, the canine option. But
Speaker 1: will we go down that path? Forgive me if I'm skeptical,
Speaker 1: because to take option two we will need tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of dogs, and we don't have tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of dogs trained and ready. And why don't we have
Speaker 1: a whole national canine Guard trained and ready, matched up
Speaker 1: with their handlers for any conceivable future pandemic, a strategic
Speaker 1: poppy reserve to call on whenever an emergency happens. Because
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, we don't really believe
Speaker 1: in dogs. We like them as friends, sure, but not
Speaker 1: as medical diagnosticians. Maybe you remain unconvinced that dogs could
Speaker 1: prevent the next pandemic. It sounds goofy. I know, painting
Speaker 1: labradors everywhere. The dog does not wear a white coat.
Speaker 1: She did not go to medical school or have a
Speaker 1: row of diplomas on the wall of her doghouse. She
Speaker 1: just uses her big, wet nose. But allow me a brief, final,
Speaker 1: and hopefully persuasive digression on the indelicate subject of colonoscopies.
Speaker 1: Have you had one? You should? It might save your life.
Speaker 1: But if you're over the age of fifty and haven't
Speaker 1: gotten around to getting one yet, I think I know
Speaker 1: why they are a pain in the You know what,
Speaker 1: You can't eat for twenty four hours, Then you go
Speaker 1: to a medical office and suffer the indignity of being
Speaker 1: impaled on something long and painful. But ten guesses about
Speaker 1: who is really really good at detecting colon cancer? Yes? Dogs?
Speaker 1: May I refer you to the following research paper published
Speaker 1: in the prestigious journal GUT volume sixty, issue six, first
Speaker 1: author Hidetos Sonata of the School of Medicine at Kiyushu
Speaker 1: University in Japan, entitled Colorectal cancer screening with odor material
Speaker 1: by canine scent detection, with the conclusion that a dog
Speaker 1: is just as good as any alternative modern medicine has
Speaker 1: come up with. When was that paper published? January of
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. That's how long we have known that a
Speaker 1: dog with a few months of training can come trotting
Speaker 1: in and save the day. But when you go to
Speaker 1: your gastro entrologist, do you see a dog waiting there? Now?
Speaker 1: You don't because we don't believe in smill. We believe
Speaker 1: in sight more faith in the impossibly complicated and expensive
Speaker 1: and inefficient products of our own technological imagination than we
Speaker 1: do in the superpowers that nature has bestowed on other animals.
Speaker 1: We are, as a species narcissists, and with covid our
Speaker 1: narcissism caught up with us. We don't have to live
Speaker 1: in an imperfect world. We can fix things, We can
Speaker 1: mend the broken and upgrade the mediocre. But first we
Speaker 1: need to get over ourselves. Let Coolie and coal and
Speaker 1: Florin show us the way to a better future. The
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle, Lee Mingustu, and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Anai Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton, Original scoring by Luis Gera, mastering by Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams and engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gains.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Pushkin crew head of Fane Carl Migliori,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig, Daniello, Lacon, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nick Cole Morano,
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrell and of course Jacob Weisberg. And a special
Speaker 1: thanks to the dogs of Pushkin past and present, Coco, Finn,
Speaker 1: Dash Potus, Collette, Ninja Dorley, funder Lichtenberg, Linus, Zuzu, Freeway,
Speaker 1: the Poodle, Max, Sparky Rocks, Rosie Oslo and Mine Biggie
Speaker 1: Smalls a brilliant harascipal Adora Cat. I know, I know,
Speaker 1: after all that I'm a cat person. Sorry, everyone, see
Speaker 1: you next season. But is there a road here? Guys?
Speaker 1: We have to I don't think there's a road here.
Speaker 1: I think this is. Yes, there is, Look, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: it could be wrong, but it looks like a road
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah, it's road. Right. Let's follow up from guys.
Speaker 1: We're going to the land of the nose. How can
Speaker 1: you not follow your nose? Does a dog you look
Speaker 1: on the dogs do not look on Google Maps. You're
Speaker 1: looking at ways following the nose. That's true. Last he
Speaker 1: did not have waves. No