Speaker 1: Bushkin. What's her name?
Speaker 2: Cooly? Sorry there you got some fun names.
Speaker 3: K U L.
Speaker 1: Cooley. It's a Belgian melanoa sleek, lean, dappled gray and black,
Speaker 1: panting happily on a patch of grass way up in
Speaker 1: the hills of northeastern Alabama. This dog is probably from hungry, hungry, hungry,
Speaker 1: and she's.
Speaker 2: Held ill exactly have her information?
Speaker 4: Twenty four months or below?
Speaker 2: Twenty four months or below. We have all that paperwork
Speaker 2: at the office, but right her own.
Speaker 1: That is the biggest tongue I've ever seen. We're all
Speaker 1: standing in front of a cluster of concrete buildings spread
Speaker 1: over a large, rolling, wooded campus an hour or so
Speaker 1: from Birmingham, the headcore of an organization called three sixty
Speaker 1: Canine Group. The whole operation looks like a scaled down
Speaker 1: army base, only instead of soldiers marching to and fro,
Speaker 1: there are dogs, dozens and dozens of them, Poppies stumbling playfully,
Speaker 1: chocolate labs chasing things, German shepherds looking for a job
Speaker 1: to do and cooling. One of the operation's newest recruits,
Speaker 1: a teenager in dog years, being put through her paces
Speaker 1: a robber toy for which she has acquired. A certain
Speaker 1: affection was taken from her and her job is to
Speaker 1: find it.
Speaker 2: You can see, like, where is she slaughtered? Right here,
Speaker 2: so she called the over here. Turned. Once she turned,
Speaker 2: she can see.
Speaker 5: That wokake Ovisually.
Speaker 1: She has never done an exercise like this before, and
Speaker 1: the assignment has filled her with enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: Us.
Speaker 1: Yes, Coolie is standing in front of one of the cabinets.
Speaker 1: Tail waggings were but she never toldly was in there.
Speaker 1: Cooley's a good girl, all right. She follows her nose
Speaker 1: and we have a lot to learn from her. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the final episode
Speaker 1: of season six of Revisions History, my podcast about things
Speaker 1: overlooked and misunderstood. This has been a season devoted to
Speaker 1: fixing things, college rankings, laundry, the Little Mermaid. We have
Speaker 1: looked at many burning issues and said we can do better.
Speaker 1: But there are some problems that we cannot fix on
Speaker 1: our own. Some problems are so big they can only
Speaker 1: be solved with the help of another species.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is our dark room test.
Speaker 1: Cooley's undergoing yet another test with the same goal as before,
Speaker 1: find the hidden toy, only now the lights are off
Speaker 1: and the toy is not in the first room COOLi enters,
Speaker 1: but in a second, smaller room off to the side.
Speaker 2: This also tells us if it takes her a little
Speaker 2: while to try to find it, how much hunt draft
Speaker 2: she actually has, so it's not just immediate to make sure,
Speaker 2: even after she gets tired, even after she's hot, but
Speaker 2: she still wants that toy enough to be.
Speaker 3: Looking for it.
Speaker 1: Cooley bounds in sniff's the first room, everything all four walls.
Speaker 1: Then she zeros in on the closet. We can't see her,
Speaker 1: only hear her. Her trainers, Sean and Ashley are grading
Speaker 1: every step of her performance on a long, detailed checklist.
Speaker 1: You can hear the difference in a yes when she
Speaker 1: got it out him and she's gotten out for.
Speaker 5: Cans.
Speaker 1: Cooley walked across a mattress, didn't stop, jumped on one
Speaker 1: end of a makeshift teter totter, didn't phaze her.
Speaker 2: These are the dogs that people get as pets, and
Speaker 2: they eat their couch and they're the worst, terrible pets
Speaker 2: that make the really really good dogs.
Speaker 6: For the most part, you.
Speaker 2: Love all of that.
Speaker 1: She runs down a hallway, sniff sniff a large canvas
Speaker 1: bag is suspended from the ceiling, ready to drop and
Speaker 1: block her way, and pulled up to the ceiling, big
Speaker 1: heavy bag.
Speaker 5: Three guns.
Speaker 1: Here she comes. We all jumped when the bag dropped
Speaker 1: from the ceiling. Cooley didn't. She paused, looked at the bag,
Speaker 1: sniffed it, and carried on. Dogs noses are something like
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand times more sensitive than ours. A puppy
Speaker 1: fresh off the boat can find a hidden toy in
Speaker 1: a darkened room. Dogs can perform all manner of olfactory
Speaker 1: tasks using judgment, drive, and discipline. It's their superpower. That's
Speaker 1: why they are dogs at the airport sniffing luggage, or
Speaker 1: why it's always a dog who finds the hiker lost
Speaker 1: in the woods. Spend a little time at three point
Speaker 1: sixty k nine in the hills of Alabama, and every
Speaker 1: one of your preconceptions about the genius of dogs will
Speaker 1: be confirmed.
Speaker 3: We had a dog, a black lab that we retired,
Speaker 3: and we allowed the dog. You know, we had a
Speaker 3: ceremony and we bought we ceremony and we hired you know,
Speaker 3: there's a local bakery that makes dog friendly cakes, so
Speaker 3: we had a cake for the dog.
Speaker 1: We were sitting in the three sixty Knine 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.
Speaker 3: And we had the dog in the room and run
Speaker 3: around and just you know, an off leash and sniffing
Speaker 3: everybody's super friendly dog. The lady comes in to deliver
Speaker 3: the cake and she's got on her boyfriend or husband
Speaker 3: with her and he's standing there hole in the cake
Speaker 3: and the dog key's running up behind the guy and
Speaker 3: going behind him and basically like sniffing his rear in
Speaker 3: and sniffing the back of his uh, you know, his shirt,
Speaker 3: and won't leave him alone. And I remember who asked him,
Speaker 3: but finally someone said, all right, yeah, John said, are
Speaker 3: you carrying a weapon? And he was like, no, I
Speaker 3: was carrying a weapon. I took it off and left
Speaker 3: it in the car, just prayer to walking in here.
Speaker 3: And the guy had, you know, three minutes before taking
Speaker 3: his gun off and left it in his car, and
Speaker 3: the dog still found it. And you know, we were
Speaker 3: having a party.
Speaker 4: What was that dog's name?
Speaker 1: That was Cole Cole coolly add them to the long
Speaker 1: list of Doggie All Stars. But 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 Florin flew in
Speaker 1: from London to Boston at the invitation of a research
Speaker 1: scientist at MIT named Andreas Mershen, coming in on a
Speaker 1: winter's morning for a special one dog exhibition.
Speaker 6: Flooring. The famous dog flew first class to MIT, so
Speaker 6: I didn't have time to go through all the hooks,
Speaker 6: so we had to rent the hotel room, the hotel
Speaker 6: ballroom right across the street at the Maria.
Speaker 1: Mershin is a kind of scientific jack of all trades.
Speaker 1: He's technically a physicist, but as he likes to say,
Speaker 1: he operates in blissful ignorance of disciplinary boundaries. He's interested
Speaker 1: in solar panels, quantum effects in molecular biology, not to
Speaker 1: mention something that I cannot begin to understand called cytoskeletal
Speaker 1: memory and coding. Mershan got interested in prostate cancer, one
Speaker 1: of the most common of all cancers. Mershan heard about
Speaker 1: the work being done by a British researcher named Claire Guest,
Speaker 1: who had been training dogs to detect diseases the same
Speaker 1: way we've been training dogs for years to detect explosives,
Speaker 1: and Merchan and Guest ended up working together, which is
Speaker 1: what led to Florin guests four year old labrador flying
Speaker 1: into Boston one cold winter's morning to perform a special
Speaker 1: sniffing demonstration for the senior leadership of the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Speaker 4: So wait, described a scene.
Speaker 1: This is this is hilarious.
Speaker 4: You in the ballroom of the Marrion. Yes, how many people?
Speaker 6: Oh maybe maybe a dozen people maybe if you motif,
Speaker 6: But that's they're all by invitation. Okay, No. And there's
Speaker 6: a giant paris on the middle, about seven feet across,
Speaker 6: which has eight arms, and each arm is a jar
Speaker 6: glass jar of urine closed off by a metal threat.
Speaker 6: Everything is standless still. Everything is this in fact that
Speaker 6: everything is super clean.
Speaker 1: The jars have all been pre selected from a biological repository.
Speaker 1: Some are filled with urine from people known to have
Speaker 1: suffered from prostate cancer. Others are controls. Florin's job is
Speaker 1: to sniff each jar. If she detects what she believes
Speaker 1: is a positive sample, she's supposed to stop and stare
Speaker 1: at the jar before moving on. Were the people from
Speaker 1: the prostic Foundation skeptical.
Speaker 6: Oh yes, of course, and as rightly they should be.
Speaker 6: You must see this to believe it. Nobody should take
Speaker 6: these kinds of things on just somebody's, especially when we're
Speaker 6: talking about people's lives here, right.
Speaker 1: It was early in the morning. Merchen looked at Florin
Speaker 1: and worried she wasn't up to the task, so they.
Speaker 6: Had brought flooring the dog on first class. Then the
Speaker 6: American customs had to by lod dewarm her, give her medicine,
Speaker 6: so she had to be vomiting. And also some other
Speaker 6: unpleasantless happened to the poor dog. And there's coffee smells everywhere,
Speaker 6: by the way, in the myriad people who are serving breakfast.
Speaker 6: I'm like, oh my god, we're going to confuse this
Speaker 6: dog now with all the coffee. And she's, you know,
Speaker 6: jet lagged and dewormed, and this poor dog is not
Speaker 6: going to perform, and she kicks it out of the park.
Speaker 1: The people from the Prostate Cancer Foundation are so blown
Speaker 1: away they end up funding guests and merchants research project
Speaker 1: to explore the idea that smell might be the best
Speaker 1: way to diagnose a dangerous cancer.
Speaker 4: To a layman like me.
Speaker 1: The idea that a cancer or a virus would have
Speaker 1: a smell is not intuitive.
Speaker 6: It's not the disease itself that has the smell. What
Speaker 6: happens is it changes your body's metabolic pathways, of which
Speaker 6: you have thousands going on in every cell. There's different
Speaker 6: things happening. They change, and many of these pathways, many
Speaker 6: of these processes inside your cells, they have as a
Speaker 6: byproduct odorance. Odorance are volletilor gant and compounds that tend
Speaker 6: to fly around and come out of your body. So cancer,
Speaker 6: for instance, likely leaves an imprint on every emission that
Speaker 6: you have, from sweat to urine, to saliva to tears,
Speaker 6: so you name it.
Speaker 1: Human beings are a site species. Sight is our superpower.
Speaker 1: The biggest web of sensory connections in our brains is
Speaker 1: between our cortex and our eyes. We can differentiate colors
Speaker 1: in a way that few other species can. But as
Speaker 1: our eyesight evolved to get better, our noses got worse.
Speaker 1: As the biologist John Bradshaw puts it, there appear to
Speaker 1: be limits on how much information any brain can process.
Speaker 1: So if you optimize for seeing, you compromise on smelling.
Speaker 1: Dogs make the opposite trade off. Their eyes are mediocre,
Speaker 1: their noses are amazing. To Florin, prostate cancer wasn't a
Speaker 1: clump of cells. It was an odor. An odor is
Speaker 1: so distinctive that it made her stop and stare. Let's
Speaker 1: imagine that you and I both have crostake cancer at
Speaker 1: the same time. Stage.
Speaker 4: Is it fair to assume that we.
Speaker 1: The way in which our bodies smell is our odor
Speaker 1: is altered by that cancer? Correct might not be the
Speaker 1: same exactly. So why can the dog generalize for.
Speaker 6: The same reason that you can generalize the gait You
Speaker 6: can track my footprints if I teach you what footprints
Speaker 6: look like on the website and how they're distributed. So
Speaker 6: the dog learns to identify the footprints on the web
Speaker 6: site where it's easy to see and easy to see
Speaker 6: the gate, and then it generalizes, It extrapolates and says, oh,
Speaker 6: this smells like the stuff that they used to want
Speaker 6: me to find.
Speaker 1: Human beings try to screen for prostate cancer by looking
Speaker 1: for it. Of course we do. We're a species that's
Speaker 1: in love with sight. We ask men over a certain
Speaker 1: age to take a blood test to look for something
Speaker 1: called the prostate specific antigen. And if we see a
Speaker 1: lot of that antigen. We take a closer look at
Speaker 1: the prostate itself. We take half a dozen or more
Speaker 1: little slices of the prostate and look at them under
Speaker 1: the microscope. We look, and we look again. The problem
Speaker 1: is that only around a quarter of men who have
Speaker 1: elevated PSA levels actually end up having prostate cancer. You
Speaker 1: could have high PSA levels for some other reason. You
Speaker 1: could also have normal PSA levels and still have prostate cancer.
Speaker 1: And so the result of all that looking is an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of error. Lots of men are told they
Speaker 1: could have a dangerous cancer when they don't, and lots
Speaker 1: of other men have cancer that gets missed. The prostate
Speaker 1: screening air rate is so bad that many men avoid
Speaker 1: it altogether. I'm not getting tested, Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: All you have to do is spend a few hours
Speaker 1: reading the available literature, and you realize that looking for
Speaker 1: early signs of prostate cancer is a fool's game. It's
Speaker 1: really really hard. But Florin the dog didn't look. Florin
Speaker 1: bypassed all that nonsense. Florina just sniffed and did Florin
Speaker 1: make any mistake? Oh?
Speaker 6: Sure, of course, if something is one hundred percent right,
Speaker 6: it's one hundred percent wrong. So yes, there's definitely errors
Speaker 6: in the samples, and the dog can definitely make errors. However,
Speaker 6: you should remember this, so do all of our tests.
Speaker 6: And currently the dogs are better than any test.
Speaker 1: Notice how he said dogs are better. It's not like
Speaker 1: Flowing is some kind of super dog the Usain Bolt
Speaker 1: of the canine world. Lots of dogs could do just
Speaker 1: what she did.
Speaker 6: A dog can do better than the tests you trust,
Speaker 6: and you don't trust the dog, And I'm glad you
Speaker 6: don't trust the dog. We have to not trust the dog.
Speaker 6: The dog is teaching us Now. Dogs are definitely error prone,
Speaker 6: same as everything else. But currently, and this is a
Speaker 6: mind blowing statistic, of all the diseases that have ever
Speaker 6: been tried to be identified by trained dog, all of
Speaker 6: them have succeeded. That is mind blowing. It should be
Speaker 6: we should be paying attention to this. What the hell
Speaker 6: is happening where we can't make this thing not work?
Speaker 6: I mean, shouldn't you be angry at this? I mean,
Speaker 6: come on, what are we doing?
Speaker 2: 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, doctor,
Speaker 1: William Schneider. Schneider used to work at Fort Dietrich, the
Speaker 1: army garrison in Maryland where the Pentagon does its top
Speaker 1: secret biodefense work. Schneider's specialty was plant virology, diseases that
Speaker 1: affect things like peach or cherry trees.
Speaker 5: I come from a plant background, but being at Fort Dietrich,
Speaker 5: I had access to a lot of tools and toys
Speaker 5: that typical scientists didn't have in their repertoire, and I'd
Speaker 5: been playing around with those.
Speaker 1: But then, just like Andreas Mershin over at MIT, Schneider
Speaker 1: began to hear of the supposedly miraculous powers of dogs,
Speaker 1: so he decided to hold a sniff off. Fort Dietrich
Speaker 1: has a special containment facility where they could do an
Speaker 1: actual head to head challenge comparing detection results between a
Speaker 1: dog and one of modern science's highest tech tests. Schneider
Speaker 1: chose as the test case a plant virus called plum
Speaker 1: pux and bet against the dogs. He was a lab guy,
Speaker 1: not a dog guy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you name it. We had access to it. Gas chromatography,
Speaker 5: mass spectrometry, all sorts of very deep sequencing, heavy duty
Speaker 5: nucleic acid analysis. Things that are pretty darn cool actually,
Speaker 5: and not one single one of them can beat the dogs.
Speaker 5: In fact, the US Army invested about nineteen billion dollars
Speaker 5: in trying to find a machine that could detect explosives
Speaker 5: better than dogs, and in the end, all these projects
Speaker 5: nothing could come close to what the dogs can do.
Speaker 5: So I had to convert myself.
Speaker 1: Bill Schneider, the convert, decided to change careers. He left
Speaker 1: government work started making sophisticated canine training aids. I come
Speaker 1: to you, Bill, and I say, Bill, we have a new,
Speaker 1: highly infectious virus out there.
Speaker 4: We know almost nothing about it. What do you do next?
Speaker 5: I say, I need the genomic information. So that's a
Speaker 5: key step in practically any diagnostics these days, and with
Speaker 5: good purpose, because when you have genomic information, you can
Speaker 5: design assays, or in my case, you can design a
Speaker 5: training aid that will teach a dog to directly detect
Speaker 5: that you're making a cent. Yes exactly, You're.
Speaker 4: You're looking at a blueprint and you're saying, ah, ye, gene,
Speaker 4: this protein, this protein, this protein, this protein. I can
Speaker 4: construct that in a lab.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Florin the prostate cancer dog was trained on samples taken
Speaker 1: directly from people with prostate cancer. Schneider was taking the
Speaker 1: next step, figuring out a way to extract the scent
Speaker 1: of the disease itself, refining the process creating customized disease
Speaker 1: fragrances that could be shipped overnight to dogs anywhere in
Speaker 1: the world. I'm assuming you're avoiding everything that has to
Speaker 1: do with actual virulence, contagiousness.
Speaker 4: It's an inert it's a harmless substance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you could eat it if you wanted to. I
Speaker 5: wouldn't taste all that great, but yeah, it's completely safe,
Speaker 5: it's completely stable. You can make as much of it
Speaker 5: as you want.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now we have a little vial of something that
Speaker 1: has a characteristic odorit You and I can't smell that.
Speaker 5: Nope. No, In fact, I would have bet you a
Speaker 5: lot of money that nothing could smell it, because in
Speaker 5: our mind, none of these things had sent.
Speaker 1: The world. Scientists were studying and refining the diagnostic power
Speaker 1: of dogs. Then COVID nineteen.
Speaker 7: Happened, breaking news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions more Americans
Speaker 7: into virtual lockdown. Over seventy five million people in New York, California, Illinois,
Speaker 7: 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.
Speaker 4: There's really reason to believe that COVID might be the
Speaker 4: exception to this pattern.
Speaker 5: Not in my mind, no, No. Once I crossed that
Speaker 5: threshold with the original virus that we've worked on, which
Speaker 5: was that plumphaks virus, I knew you could translate this,
Speaker 5: not just to another virus in plants, I can take
Speaker 5: and transfer that to humans or cattle or swine or
Speaker 5: chickens or anything, and off you go.
Speaker 1: COVID first services at the end of twenty nineteen. The
Speaker 1: novel Coronavirus Genome is published. In early January of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: the Who declares a pandemic that spring.
Speaker 7: And across the country. There's demand for COVID nineteen testing
Speaker 7: as positive cases are on the rise.
Speaker 6: Some people have had to wait longer than two weeks
Speaker 6: to receive results.
Speaker 1: While the world is in lockdown. In the early summer
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, Bill Schneider's lab gets going synthesizing the
Speaker 1: proteins that make up the smell of SARS COB two.
Speaker 1: The trainers start training dogs on it. Hardworking, focused, unflappable
Speaker 1: dogs who really loved the idea of sniffing nine to five.
Speaker 5: By the time we got to September fifteenth, we were
Speaker 5: starting to collect clinical samples from people who were confirmed positive,
Speaker 5: and we were checking the dogs on those clinical samples,
Speaker 5: and they didn't miss a beat. They were ninety nine
Speaker 5: percent accurate. And at that point I was very confident
Speaker 5: that the dogs we were training could detect COVID in
Speaker 5: people's masks, on their sacks, in sweat and saliva labs.
Speaker 1: Shepherds Belgian Malona was floppy year pointy year. Doesn't much matter.
Speaker 1: What matters is that they're a dog. They have a big,
Speaker 1: powerful nose, and they're perfectly happy to put that magnificent
Speaker 1: nose to work in the service of helping all of us.
Speaker 1: They're best friends. Let's think about some of the options
Speaker 1: we have when detecting a deadly new pathogen as it
Speaker 1: moves through a human population. One option is what we
Speaker 1: ended up trying with COVID in the United States. We
Speaker 1: make you come to a testing site stand in line
Speaker 1: with a lot of people who also think they might
Speaker 1: have COVID. Really good idea, by the way, stick a
Speaker 1: nasty swab up your nose, charge you a couple hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: use an insanely expensive and complicated and high tech system
Speaker 1: called PCR to give you an answer that may or
Speaker 1: may not be useful because it didn't always get to
Speaker 1: you in time. Remember, sometimes it would take forever to
Speaker 1: get your test results, sometimes two weeks, and maybe in
Speaker 1: those two weeks while you were waiting, you were infecting
Speaker 1: everyone you med. The result of all the cost and
Speaker 1: inconvenience and hassle and imperfection of Option one was that
Speaker 1: we've never done enough testing at any stage of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: And because we didn't do enough testing, the pandemic sword
Speaker 1: out of control. Someone has a wedding or a Thanksgiving dinner,
Speaker 1: and in a perfect world everyone would get tested before coming,
Speaker 1: but of course they don't, and one person ends up
Speaker 1: infecting ten other people, and maybe one or two of
Speaker 1: those ten will die. All these horror stories have at
Speaker 1: their core a failure of disease detection. I emailed Michael
Speaker 1: Minna at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was
Speaker 1: one of the big critics of the way we tested
Speaker 1: for COVID, and this is what he wrote back about
Speaker 1: the way testing works. It has to do with what
Speaker 1: epidemiologists called are not, which is the average number of
Speaker 1: people infected by an infected person. If an epidemic has
Speaker 1: are not above one, it grows exponentially. If are not
Speaker 1: falls below one, an epidemic dies out. Here's what Minna wrote.
Speaker 1: This whole pandemic and all of the massive outbreaks we've
Speaker 1: seen have been with an or not of about one
Speaker 1: point three. That means that every ten people infected went
Speaker 1: on to infect on average thirteen people. Well, in that case,
Speaker 1: if you have one hundred people infected on day one,
Speaker 1: then thirty days later you have about six hundred new
Speaker 1: infections exponential growth end quote. All we had to do
Speaker 1: to stop the pandemic was to test just enough people
Speaker 1: and prevent just enough new infections so that those ten
Speaker 1: newly infected people only infected on average nine other people.
Speaker 1: We just had to move the needle a little bit,
Speaker 1: and we couldn't do it. Option one was one of
Speaker 1: the most criminally stupid acts of public health incompetence in
Speaker 1: American history. Now imagine another option. Just move to a hypothetical.
Speaker 1: So I'm a high school, Okay, I want to reopen.
Speaker 1: We're in the middle of the raging pandemic and I
Speaker 1: come to you and I say, I want to use
Speaker 1: your service. Are we talking? How would you tell me
Speaker 1: how you would fix that up? I'm talking to Jerry Johnson,
Speaker 1: who runs biodetection at three sixty K nine dog at
Speaker 1: the front door.
Speaker 3: Yeah, first fifty kids come in, they stand on their spot,
Speaker 3: Doc searches them, they go into class. The next fifty
Speaker 3: comes in. We could do that, you know, relatively quickly,
Speaker 3: you know, and maybe you have some coming in the gymnasium,
Speaker 3: some coming in the cafeteria. It's all about having the
Speaker 3: real estate to get the children lined up.
Speaker 1: So and you could do that with one dog or
Speaker 1: two dogs. You would want two dogs, Yeah, particularly if
Speaker 1: if it's a public health issue and school children doing
Speaker 1: the dog's be very very thorough. So if the dog's
Speaker 1: condition to work forty five minutes, we'd want to stop
Speaker 1: at thirty just to make sure that the dog is
Speaker 1: not fatiguing at all. A PCR test costs somewhere in
Speaker 1: the range of one hundred and fifty dollars and you
Speaker 1: wait forever for the result. The cost of a dog
Speaker 1: test once you factored in the dog, the training paying
Speaker 1: the handler is something like two dollars and fifty cents
Speaker 1: a test, and the dog gives you the answer immediately.
Speaker 1: So the dog is you got these kids lined up.
Speaker 1: Dog sniff snifsniff snif sniff finds a dog has a positive, right,
Speaker 1: what is the dog doing? It just sits just so.
Speaker 3: When the dog goes downline. What we like to do
Speaker 3: is we line people up, we have them, we have
Speaker 3: the dog go down as they're facing forward. The dog
Speaker 3: goes down the left hand side of the line and
Speaker 3: it just does it quick. You'll see it's a minimally
Speaker 3: invasive search. The dog will put its nose on the
Speaker 3: back of the person's hand. They target the hand if
Speaker 3: you have otn toad shoes, and might target your feet.
Speaker 3: But it makes quick contact with the skin. But then
Speaker 3: it keeps going. The dog won't really break stride. If
Speaker 3: it gets an odor and there's a presence of virus,
Speaker 3: then you'll see the dog stop, it'll sniff more, it'll investigate,
Speaker 3: and then I'll go into the sit response.
Speaker 1: So that person who's been identified as a dog as
Speaker 1: positive is then pulled out for secondary screen.
Speaker 3: They take them a second go the nurse's office and get.
Speaker 1: A rabbit tast the next time a pandemic hits. We
Speaker 1: could have dogs at the front door of every school
Speaker 1: in America. We could have dogs at the front door
Speaker 1: of restaurants, and dogs in bars, and dogs in train stations,
Speaker 1: and dogs at the airport. We could have dogs walking
Speaker 1: down the street checking out everyone on the sidewalk. Your
Speaker 1: block could bend together and have a dog come every
Speaker 1: night at dinner time to sniff everyone. You could hire
Speaker 1: a dog along with caterers at your daughter's wedding or
Speaker 1: your son's bar mitzvah, or every Sunday morning at church
Speaker 1: 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 are not of one to an are not of
Speaker 1: something less than one. That is option two, the canine option.
Speaker 1: But will we go down that path? Forgive me if
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical, because to take option two, we will need
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dogs, and we don't have tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of dogs trained and ready. And why don't
Speaker 1: we have a whole national Canine Guard trained and ready,
Speaker 1: matched up with their handlers for any conceivable future pandemic.
Speaker 1: A strategic poppy reserve to call on whenever an emergency happens,
Speaker 1: because at the end of the day, we don't really
Speaker 1: believe in dogs. We like them as friends, sure, but
Speaker 1: not as medical diagnosticians. Maybe you remain unconvinced that dogs
Speaker 1: could prevent the next pandemic. It sounds goofy, I know,
Speaker 1: panting 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 Hideto Sonata of the School of Medicine at Kiyushu
Speaker 1: University in Japan, entitled Coorectal 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? No,
Speaker 1: you don't, because we don't believe in smell. We believe
Speaker 1: in sight. We more faith in the impossibly complicated and
Speaker 1: expensive and inefficient products of our own technological imagination than
Speaker 1: we do in the superpowers that nature has bestowed on
Speaker 1: other animals. We are, as a species narcissists, and with
Speaker 1: covid our narcissism caught up with us. We don't have
Speaker 1: to live in an imperfect world. We can fix things.
Speaker 1: We can mend the broken and upgrade the mediocre, But
Speaker 1: first we need to get over ourselves. Let coolie and
Speaker 1: coal and Florin show us The Way to a Better
Speaker 1: Future Revisionist History is produced by Mea La Belle, Lee
Speaker 1: Mingistu and Jacob Smith, with Elouise Linton and Annanaye. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering
Speaker 1: by Flon Williams, and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew Hetephane,
Speaker 1: Carl Migliori, Maya Knigg, Daniello lacand Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg, and
Speaker 1: a special thanks to the dogs of Pushkin past and present, Coco, Finn,
Speaker 1: Dash Potus, Collette, Ninja Dorley, funder Lichtenburg, Linus, Zuzu, Freeway,
Speaker 1: the Poodle Max, Sparky, Roxy, Rosie Oslo and Mine Biggie
Speaker 1: Smalls a brilliant, harascible, adorable cat. I know, I know,
Speaker 1: after all that I'm a cat person. Sorry everyone, see
Speaker 1: you next season.
Speaker 6: But is there a road here?
Speaker 1: Guys? We have to I don't think there's a road here.
Speaker 4: I think this is this look.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, it could be wrong, but it looks like
Speaker 1: a road.
Speaker 4: To me, Yeah, it's road.
Speaker 1: Let's follow for guys, We're going to the land of
Speaker 1: the nose. How can you not follow your nose? Does
Speaker 1: a dog? You look on the dogs. Do not look
Speaker 1: on Google Maps. You're looking at ways, following your nose.
Speaker 6: That's true.
Speaker 4: Last season did not have waves.
Speaker 1: No