Listener Questions #10

How do prions infect healthy proteins? Someone please ask about Aunt Lion Queen's.

What does a concert sound like near a black hole? Can medical maggots help make a wound hole?

Biology, physics, archaeology, forestry. We like medicine, so thank you chemistry.

Do you have questions about particles or cats? We'll find answers to all of that.

Whatever questions keep you up at night. Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it right.

Welcome to another Listener Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Him Daniel, I'm a particle physicist with a growing interest in biology, and I love here feedback from listeners about the new podcast format.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study space and parasites. I also love hearing from the listeners, and I'm excited about the kind of creepy crawley stuff we're talking about today.

I am too. There's so much about our natural world which is amazing. Even if we don't understand quantum gravity and how all the particle bits come together to make this bizarre world, it's still totally worth studying. With so many incredible, gooey mysteries and the.

Non gooey mysteries are good too. I'm also becoming a budding physics enthusiast. You gave me the other day a pod in physics, and I'll take it.

Yeah. It turns out people can be interested in physics and in biology and and all sorts of crazy things about our extraordinary universe. And I just wanted to read a snippet from a listener who wrote to me and encourage anybody out there to write to us questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. Send us your questions, send us your feedback, send us your ideas, send us your hopes and dreams, send us your love letters from fifth grade, whatever,

And I'm so grateful for everyone who's given the biology a chance, everyone who sort of came for the physics but is staying for the biology and hopefully is enjoying it as well. And the listener mentioned the insulin episode. We are super lucky to have Katrina Whitson coming for a little guest appearance on the show again today. But yes, I read that email too, and it absolutely made my month. I love when we get emails like that.

Me too. And also, you can't mention Katrino without referring to all of her accolades. I know if you're aware she's the Whites And Endowed Chair at the Whites And Institute.

Oh my gosh, wow incredible. I have been dying to get an adjunct position at the Whites And Research Institute.

The review process is really strict. Yeah, a bunch of snobs over there.

I've met Katrina. I'm not sure about that. She seems very nice.

No, of course, we'd love to have you anyway. Today we are talking about your questions about this extraordinary universe, physics questions, black hole questions, weird protein questions. We'd love to answer your question on the podcast. Please do right to us questions at Danielankelly dot org. Again, if you write to dot com, you'll be sending your message to a very lovely couple who just got married, but that's not us.

Congratulations Daniel and Kelly. We wish you a beautiful forever together.

And Daniel and Kelly dot com. If you guys have questions, send them to us. We'd love to have you guys on the podcast.

Hey, Daniels and Kelly's.

Well.

Our first question today is an amazing question by Niall about pry on or pre on. I don't know I'm going to say it, however, you know it comes out of my mouth at the time, but let's go ahead and hear the question.

Hi, Kelly and Daniel, my name is Nile, and I have a question regarding preons and preon diseases. I understand that preons are misfolded proteins that are capable of causing significant damage to our nervous systems if we are exposed to them. However, I am particularly interested in understanding why

This is a fantastic question that I did not know the answer to, and you'll see that by the end, I spent five hours slamming my head against the lit and eventually we called in someone smarter than either of us, and that's where Katrina comes in. But let's back up a little bit, all right, So how do diseases usually

That's kind of creepy, right, You're being like colonized by some malevolent force.

It is pretty creepy. Yeah. And then if you get parasites, like you know, the parasites that I love to talk about so much, something like tapeworms or nematodes, what usually happens there is every single infection you get is because you have accidentally, for example, consumed an egg that was in the environment. And so the way you get more of those infections is you accidentally encounter and consume more

So gross, so gross.

Yes, yeah, I know I hate viruses and bacteria, but none of them are as bad as ticks. Ticks are the worst. Yes, So they inject genetic material into your own cells, hijack your cell's machinery, and your cell essentially makes more viruses for the virus.

All of these things have nucleic material, right, this DNA or RNA or something, and all these things. People argue about whether viruses are alive or not, but like they have this code inside of them. That's what they all have in common.

Right, Yeah, that's right. And so when the first person suggested that what's happening with what ended up being called prion diseases is that it's actually a protein that is essentially replicating, not by sort of copying itself using genetic material like you would expect, but is essentially touching other

Are you underplaying it a little bit, a bit controvert, Like, wasn't that sort of laughed out of the room for a while, People are like, that's impossible.

Yes, yes, no, we were all very skeptical. It took a while for that to be widely accepted.

And for those of us who are not biologists or biochemist, remind us what you mean when you say protein. You're using in a technical sense, not like chicken breasts or tofu on top of your salad. When your server asks if you'd like to add protein? You mean something about the chemical structure, right.

Yeah, so I mean chicken breast is made of proteins. So your genetic code contains the information that your body needs to make proteins. And proteins are strings of amino acids, and they essentially make up all of your body, and they help your chemical reactions happen, and they are ubiquitous, and.

They're incredible little molecular machines. Right, they do stuff. They come from the DNA and then they fold into these shapes. They're like little robots, right, They're amazing. The engineering here is just.

Astounding, delicious in your salad and fantastic in your body. So the listener to know about prions. So these are protinaceous infectious particles, is the fancy way of sort of saying it. And there's a couple different ways that proteins can transmit disease. So one of them is that they're sort of infectious in the way you might usually think of infectious material. So, for example, if you eat meat that has the mad cow prion in it, and you consume that meat, that prion can then move around your

And just to make sure I'm following, when you say prion is a protinaceous infectious particle, it's still just a protein. Is just like a weird protein in a particular shape, right, It's not like it's turned into a particle the way we talk about it.

Oh yeah, no, forget the physics, man, forget the physics. We're in bio world.

Right now, I'm listening to biologists talk about particles, but it has nothing to do with particles. That's great.

I don't know whether particles in biology are more confusing than particles in physics, but either we're gonna buddle through.

All right. So you can get these in your body and they can turn some of your proteins into preon's. What's another way that you can get one of these horrible diseases.

Another way you can get one of these horrible diseases, unfortunately, is if you end up with a mutation in your own genes, and then your genetic code now produces a protein that folds in a way it's not supposed to fold. And usually when you get this heritable gene that has this bad mutation, you don't start making these weird proteins until you're a little bit older, like sixties or more.

Did I ever tell you about the time I was accidentally c seed on an email where they were looking for a young ish professor to take on some roll and somebody said whites and is he youngish anymore? I'm not sure?

And I was like, oh, nice. Oh I thought I just had a little gray in my hair. And someone told me I was rocking the salt and pepper look, which was very nice. But that was the first time I realized that I had transitioned to salt and pepper. Anyway, you and I are aging, but hopefully we don't have this mutation.

All right, So this mutation just means that you produce a protein through the normal mechanism of like DNA RNA protein, But it's one of these bad proteins. Yes, you said that it doesn't fold the way it's supposed to. Is it that it doesn't fold the way the DNA tells it to, or that it folds in a way that's damaging.

It folds in a way that's damaging if you have this mutation. Mutations often result in changes in an amino acid in the sequence that makes up a protein, and when you have a change in that amino acid, it can change the shape of the protein. So the protein might be doing what the genetic code told it to do, but now it's folding up in a configuration that's bad for you and can go and cause other proteins to do it too.

All right, So you can either get through from outside the body or you can just have your genetic code do these terrible things. Is that it or is there another thing we have to worry about.

The third way is what they call spontaneous. So you've got proteins, and actually, something that I learned while doing this research is that sometimes your proteins will change shape and then go back to their normal shape. Wow, while they're in your body, and it doesn't seem efficient, just like be consistent, man, But so I guess sometimes they will sort of get out of their configuration and when they go back into their configuration, they don't go back correctly,

Weird. That's incredible that one protein can turn another protein bad. It's like the bad influence protein.

This spontaneous prion thing. This is like stay up at night worrying about what all your proteins are doing. I'm not worrying about my kids anymore. I'm worried about whether or not my proteins are behaving. But I'm sure it's fine.

This is a whole fascinating area though. Protein folding. We describe it as if it's like DNA RNA protein, but it's very complicated.

Right.

You build this sequence of amino acids and when they fold, they're like settling into a lower energy state. They're like relaxing into it. And it's really hard to know what that state is. You can look at the DNA code. It's not easy to predict the configurations of proteins that come out of that sequence. There was a huge result recently alpha fold where people were able to predict these things very well using AI. Really an incredible breakthrough. People have been working on that for decades.

Yeah, that is fantastic. Let's go into one real example. Fritz Feld Jacob disease. So sorry about my pronunciation, apologize ahead of time.

I'm not even going to correct you because I enjoy listening to your mispronunciations.

Okay, do you know how to pronounce it correctly?

I'm pretty sure it's quartz failed yakup disease, but I like the way you said it.

Oh okay, well thanks, I appreciate that.

Especially like the way you like tiptoe through it in a terrified.

But from now on, it's CJD.

Okay.

So for CJD, what happens is that in older people sometimes you sporadically get a protein that folds up incorrectly. Now you've got this abnormal form. And I read a bunch of papers that suggested that as various vertebrates age, our proteins are sort of more likely to fold the wrong way because aging is a real pain in the

No, I do not want my brain to turn into a smoothie.

No, no me either. I think most people initially started hearing about prions when they learned about bovine sponge of worn and cephalopathy BS bad cow disease, and this showed up in cows. Turns out cows were getting it from one another because we were feeding cows cow parts. And yeah, bad idea.

Cannible cows annible cows, right.

And you might remember from when we were feeding pigs pig parts that that was bad for the transmission of trick and ella. So in general, it seems like it's a bad idea to feed animals animal parts, although I do feed my chickens chickens sometimes. Oh I know, maybe I'm asking for it.

That's horrible. Yeah, there's something really creepy about that. I don't know why I like chickens eating pork whatever, chickens eating chickensoh.

They don't seem to mind. They love the nuggies. They love the chicken nuggies. All right?

What kind of sauces do they like to like? The dip it? Are they into the barbecue?

No, they don't. We have the dexterity for that. I don't know. If you've seen chicken claws, they're not real good. They can scratch and that's about it.

All right. So we know that getting these preons is bad. You get these terrible diseases and they spread from body to body, and even if you eat like meat that's been cooked. We're used to like cooking something to kill it. But if you cook a preon, is it then better? Is it like denatured or can you still get it from cooked meat? You know?

As far as I can tell. One of the things about these preons that is incredible is that they're really resistant to things like cooking, and so you can cook your burger and if it had bs, there's still some chance that you could get it.

I heard that even if you irradiate these things, like zap them with radiation, they're super dup or robust, which is one reason that they're able to spread from one to the other. And so it's like really hard to kill a preon. Like when they do brain surgery in hospitals, they just throw away everything that touched the brain because it might have a preon in it, and you do not want that stuff to spread.

We are so stink and lucky that preon diseases are not more common. Thank your lucky stars everybody.

So then let's get to the heart of the listener's question, right he's asking about the fundamental mechanism, like how does this happen? You were talking about one preon turning ou a normal protein into another preon. Do we know how that happens?

If by we you mean Katrina, the answer is yes. Let me quickly summarize the three problems that you need to understand to understand prions. So, one, an abnormal protein is made. This is pretty much what we've been talking about, the various ways that you start getting these abnormal proteins. Problem too, is that the prion starts causing more prion proteins to be made, so it interacts with the healthy proteins in the area and starts turning them into bad proteins.

That's just a cartoon.

It's just a cartoon. How does the circle turn the squares in? Anyway? Eventually I threw my hands up and we were so happy that we know a biochemist. And so Daniel, go ahead and introduce your amazing wife.

That's right, Katrina actually has a PhD in biochemistry protein folding DNA all this kind of interaction. She did her PhD on like how proteins cut DNA and interact with it. So she like has her head around all of this stuff. So I asked her, Hey, can you explain to us how this actually happens? How two proteins come together and both end up bad? Like why don't they both end up good? You know, all these arguments are like template this, template that, Like why did they both end up bad?

So proteins are just these chains of amino acids, and each block has different likeness for water, like some of them like to be near water, some of them hate water. The balance of those things forces the protein into a certain shape, so each protein makes a really unique shape. However, some proteins have more than one stable state, so they might be happy in a slightly different shape. And what preons do is they force the protein into an alternative shape.

I think that's the bit we want to dig into. When two proteins come near each other, why does the preon force the good one into a preon shape rather than the good one, forcing the preon into a good shape, why does the preon win?

And that shape is usually one that's a little hard to get itself out of, so they get stuck in that direction. So basically, if a protein forms the preon shape, which it usually does at a lower rate than the healthy correct shape, but if that happens, then when another healthy protein gets near it, it gets peer pressured essentially into forming that alternative but like disastrous and like disease

So the two come together, but the good protein is still flexible about its actual shape, while the preon is stuck into this deep local minimum. It's very stable configuration.

Yes exactly, And so if you get stuck in that deep local minimum, it's harder to get back out of it, and if another protein gets nearby, it gets tempted into that goopy minimum. And molecularly, what I mean is that a region of the misfolded of the bad shape that the preon is forming will have mirrored sites, like it'll have interactions with the other healthy protein that will force it into that shape, and then it stays there because it's a local minimum that's hard to get out of.

I see. So it's true that when the two proteins sort of try to fit together, they're more likely to end up similar. But the bad one, the preon one, is harder to pull out of than the normal one is to pull into the bad state, and so they both end up in the bad state.

That's my understanding.

So my takeaway from this is that it relates to the conversation we were having earlier about how proteins fold. But it's not easy to predict, like how a protein is going to fold, and it turns out sometimes they can fold in multiple different ways. And the preons are special and weird because they're like a very strong fold, like it's hard to get them back out of that. For people who like to think about optimization and minimum it's

Yeah, and to build on that a little, often, when your body ends up with a protein that's shaped the wrong way, you send in what are called proteases, and they essentially break the protein into pieces that are easier to clean up and remove from the body. But these proteases can't get into these clumps or into these abnormally folded proteins, and so rather than getting cleared out, they remain and they start clumping and they cause problems.

Amazing. Biology is incredible. What boggles my mind is all this stuff is happening all the time, and it mostly just works. I go about my day, I drink coffee, I think about particles, and inside all these little proteins and these molecular machines are doing their thing. Thank you, little biology particles.

When you work great, We thank you. But understanding how proteins get abnormal and start clumping up is important, we think for understanding neurodegenerative diseases because sort of similar things happen where proteins start accumulating and clumping and causing problems. So you've got amyloid beta in TAO for Alzheimer's disease, alphas and nucleon for Parkinson's disease, and huntington for Huntington's disease. So sort of understanding what's happening here is a very active research field.

All right, well, thank you for sending this question. In NIL it turns out to be a perfect union of our interests because not only is it biology and does it have the word particle involvement it. We also had to bring in Katrina sob.

Bum and the whole whitesn Research Institute with the adjunct faculty included.

That's right, Well, let's hear from Nile if we answered his question or just confused him further.

Hi, Kelly and Daniel, thank you for this response. You definitely answered my question. I think the most surprising revelation for me is that the reason prions are infectious has more to do with chemistry and the molecular structure of proteins rather than some other sort of active biological process. It was a really interesting discussion and super enlightening, although I do have to agree with Kelly that now knowing there's such a thing as spontaneous prem formation, this will

Okay, we're back and we are answering questions today from listeners who think deeply about the nature of space and time and whether their brain is infected by the meat they eat. So now we have a question from Owen and his daughter about concerts near black holes.

Hi, Daniel and Kelly, I was curious my daughter plays violin, and if.

She were to take a trip to a really deep.

Gravitational well like close to a black hole or a neutron star, and recorded herself playing violin and then brought the recording back with the time dilation cause a key change, would it make the frequency higher or lower? Or when we played it back here on Earth would it be the same.

Wow, that is a fantastic question. All right, let's start by talking about what is time dilation?

Yeah, time dilation one of my favorite topics and very confusing aspects of special relativity. And one thing that's really important to understand about it is that there are two types of time dilation that work differently. It's important to keep them separate, especially for this question. One is the one we hear about a lot when you're like in a rocket ship moving fast. And this is velocity based time dilation, which you can summarize very easily just by

I think a world runs up East coast time, my friends. But all right, moving on.

That might be true, Yeah, that might be true. High But the cool thing about this kind of time dilation is that it's symmetrical. Right. I see Kelly's clock is running slow because I see her moving quickly, but she sees my clock moving, which means she sees my clock running slowly. So we both see the other person's clock is running slower than ours. So it's symmetric, which is beautiful, but it also feels contradictory because you have this instinct to say, hold on a second, whose clock is really

Okay, all right, so now we've got our minds wrapped around velocity based time dilation. What is the other kind.

The other kind is gravity. You don't have to be moving fast to have your clock run slow. You just have to be near a massive object like the movie Interstellar where they land on Miller's planet, which is super duper massive. When you're in space that's curved, time runs slower. So, for example, if you're standing on the surface of the Earth, your clock will run slower than a clock that's in orbit or run the Earth, or out in deep space

So your clock would run much slower on Jupiter relative to Earth.

Yes, exactly, And it would run much slower on the surface of the Sun, and much much slower near the event horizon of a black hole. And the amazing thing about this one is that it's not symmetric. Everybody can agree on it. Like if I'm in orbit with the clock and Kelly's on the surface of the Earth or the clock, we will both agree that her clock is running slower. I see her clock running slower, she sees my clock running faster. This is the only time in

So if you could live near a black hole, could you live forever? Is this what biologists have been looking for?

Your time would still run normally, right, so you would still live eighty years or whatever in your time that might last eighty thousand years or eighty million years in the outside universe. So it's a way, definitely to fast forward to the future, but not to live infinitely long.

Physics keeps disappointing.

Sorry on, Okay, So those are the two kinds of time dilation that we need to understand to answer Owen's question about a daughter with a violin. But this one more piece we need, which is red shifting. Right. All this changing of time has consequences, like it changes how long things seem to be, because it affects when people measure the front and the back. And we can dig into the details of length contraction another time. But if you change the way clocks run, you also change the

We're near a black hole, so we're talking about gravity dilation, and we are thinking about waves because sound is a wave, and we've just established that waves get spread out near a black hole because of the gravity dilation. Okay, I'm on the same page.

Let's get to Owen's question, but there's a few versions here. Imagine that Owen is far away from the black hole and his daughter is near the black hole, and she's playing the violin and he's watching and he's listening. So what's going to happen, Well, her time is going to be slowed down for him. So he's going to see her or moving and thinking and drinking and breathing in slow motion, and the light and sound that come from

You said, key is key the same thing as frequency. These music words go past me.

Ooh, I'm so not an expert in that. But the wavelength will get longer and the frequency will go down, which I think means a lower key.

Okay, that's how I imagine whale sound.

But he's not asking about that scenario. He's asking about what happens if a recording is made near the black hole. Right, So now let's do another scenario. Let's say Owen is next to the black hole, also with his daughter. Right, she's next to the black hole. She's playing the violin he's there right next to her, what does he see? Everything looks normal to him because she experiences it normally

Okay, But what if they're recording it?

Yeah? Right? I love these versions of the questions. So if instead of Owen, you have Owen's video camera and it's there with her, and it takes a video of what's happening near the black hole, it's going to record what Owen would have seen, which is a normally occurring violin performance. Right, You then take the video somewhere else. The video hasn't changed. You play it back on your

Now, are you sure that's right? Because that sort of matches my intuition, which usually means it's wrong. So because I'm really good at this, But all right, I'll go with it.

There are other weirder versions of this question, you know, that depend on exactly how the information is encoded. Like we're talking about literally sending waves from the black hole and interpreting them literally. If instead you have computers and they're coming this in binary, then they can avoid the

Okay, well, let's go ahead and see what Owen thinks of this answer and if there's any follow up questions.

Wow, thanks for answering my question. You guys, you know I think you nailed it.

Thank you so much.

All Right, so we wrapped up a question that was beautiful playing music in deep space near a black hole, and now we are descending into the depths of biology to discuss magots. All right, what does Jonathan want to know about maggots?

Hi, Kelly, I remember reading about medical maggots five or ten years ago. As I recall, it was an experimental procedure back then, but showed real promise in the fight against drug resistant bacteria? Where are we today on this Can I stop worrying about superbugs now? Thanks?

I thought we had already reached maximum grossness on this episode. I didn't realize we were just in the foothills of grossness and now we're climbing to the peak.

Oh, Daniel, we have just begun.

All right, take us there, Kelly. What do we need to know about medical maggots?

All right? So, apparently for centuries, folks have realized that if you find maggots in someone's wounds, those people with maggots in their wounds tend to have faster healing wounds than people who don't have maggots in their wounds. So you might be thinking it would be better to not have maggots in my wounds, But if you want your wound to heal quickly, apparently it would be good to

You know, I think that's incredible because I think it's often included as like things we did before we really understood science, you know, leeches and maggots and drilling holes in people's heads and praying to the gods and whatever. But actually this is another example of sort of pre modern science experimental understanding. Right, you're saying, people like looked at the data and they're like, maggots are gross, but they do seem to help people. Maybe we should use maggots.

Well, so my understanding is that for a long time folks noticed that there seems to be this association, but they might not have had control over, for example, the fly life cycle to be ab to purposefully infect people with maggots. The first documented instance of someone purposefully placing maggots in someone's wound was in the American Civil War. And you know, can you imagine being the first person where someone's like, no, really, these maggots are gonna do you wonders.

But and this is gonna be great for a biology podcast in a couple hundred years.

Trust us, that's right. It'll all be worth it when Kelly and Danie'll get to gross out over there.

Here's the big payoff, all right, that's right.

And then an orthopedic surgeon in World War One named William Behar started applying maggots to wounds that wouldn't heal at Johns Hopkins University for a patient community of children. Wow, And from that, medical maggots kind of took off. In the nineteen thirties, you get medical maggots that are very

And so other than looking gross and being gross, what are these maggots doing in these wounds?

So the first thing they're doing that's helpful is what's called debridement. So essentially they are removing the dead and dying tissue in the wound. So they are secreting and excreting stuff that starts breaking down the dead tissue and it makes it into sort of like a slurry. And then the maggots suck up that slurry.

Yeah, yam, yum yum yum, yeh yum yum. Yes, I'm trying to get into this I'm like, let's go the non gross route. Let's just like really marinate in the biology.

Ganny. You No, I love the attitude and I appreciate the energy and the motivation you bring to these discussions. You're really trying and I like that.

Yeah, I'm like, let's get a nice big ice cube. We'll have like a you know, a slurry cocktail. This sounds fantastic. You can get into anything, So start.

Having themed drinks for some of these episodes, or themed meals like pasta for the parasite episodes. All Right, the stuff that if they release that starts breaking down the dead tissue tends to leave the living tissue alone. And so if you have a wound that's got a combination of dead and living tissue and you'd like to remove the dead stuff so you can specifically start working with helping the living stuff to recover. These are pretty helpful.

I'm just wondering, like why maggots would do this, Like I mostly see maggots in garbage or whatever. That they didn't evolve in garbage, right, They must have evolved like eating feces and rotting carcasses and stuff. Is that why they're good at this? Because they evolved basically eating dead flesh or near dead flesh.

So the horror truth is that there's lots of flies in this world, and they have lots of different life cycles, and so the carrion flies, what happens is that the mom comes along and she lays her eggs in dead tissue, and those eggs hatch and you get maggots that have to go through a couple different life cycles. And those maggots are competing with the bacteria who want to break down the dead stuff, and in some cases those bacteria release toxins that might not be good for the maggots.

So this is exactly what they evolved to do, right to I'll compete the bacteria and to eat all the dead stuff. Why don't they also eat the living flesh? Like, why do they leave that alone? That's awfully convenient.

I'm going to preface this with I'm spitballing because you asked me lots of great questions. I don't necessarily always know the answers too, So my first guess is that mostly what these guys are doing is the moms are laying their eggs on stuff that is like totally dead, totally dead, and every once in a while they opportunistically find an open wound with some dead skin and they lay their eggs in there too, And so they are specialists on the dead stuff and are less interested in

Yeah, all right, so they're lazy. They don't want to work hard. They just go for the easy dead stuff, and that amazingly works perfectly for our use case.

Right, yeah, and I mean I hate dipterance. So they go through a couple stages in the dead stuff. They have a wandering phase where they fall off of the dead thing and then bury underground, and that's thought to maybe help them avoid drying out or keep them safe from predators. So, like you know, crows will go around and they'll find dead insects in carcasses and eat them up, so they kind of and then they hatch as adults

The magots literally sprout wings and try to fly around. That's what they do. They'd call them flies, right, So that's.

Yeah, that's right, that's right. They're going through their insect stages. They transform it or metamorphose into adults. And yeah, then they go when they fly around and they're super gross.

Does that mean that if you have a wound with maggots on it, there's some like container that captures the flies. Then you have like dead flies on your wound you have to clean off all the time.

We're going to get there. I was looking on the website of companies who grow medical maggots. But I'm almost there. I'm almost there, I promise. So in the nineteen forties, antibiotics become widespread, and you know, quite frankly, if I had the choice between someone sprinkling maggots on my legs or giving me you know penicillin medication I can pop in my mouth. I'm going to go for the penicillin.

But is that just because of the size. Like you can see maggots and they seem gross because penicilla is like a fungus and it's like also growing and attacking the bacteria. If the fungus was like bigger, if you had like mushrooms growing out of your wound, would that be as gross as maggots.

Well, they're not like spreading fungus like you spread butter on a piece of bread, like onto your leg.

I'm thinking of marmite now, I'm like, mmm yum.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's like a pill that you take WHIRLI or you know, maybe it could be like a cream or something. But you know, the maggots they escape sometimes you can feel them moving around, and you know, I get that it's gross.

We should have a whole episode on the biology of grossness, like why do we think some things are gross and other things? Where does that come from? Anyway back to maggots.

So that would involve a lot of evolutionary psychology. I think I'm totally down for tackling that. But so in the nineteen forties, antibiotics come along, that solves a bunch of the problems. Maggots fall out of favor because they were kind of a pain in the rear. End. In the nineteen eighties nineteen nineties, antibiotic resistance starts becoming a big problem. People have non healing wounds and it's starting to get harder and harder to kill the bacterial infections

So people are still using maggots today.

Yeah, no, So maggots are making a comeback.

Amazing.

They're not incredibly widely used, and based on the surveys that I read, that is mostly from what everybody calls the quote yuck factor end quote, And I totally get that. Apparently like, sometimes you can feel them moving around a little, but mostly what they're doing is moving around in dead tissues, so you don't usually feel it a lot. But here's

So.

It contains the maggots while still letting the maggots breathe. And what happens is the maggots spend a couple days in their larval form going around eating dead tissue, and then when they get to the stage where they would usually fall off and try to bury themselves in the soil, you remove the dressing, you collect all of the maggots,

Sounds right?

Yeah? Nice?

Is there some tech bro out there making like tiny robotic maggots that like walk around and eat dead flesh and ooze out this.

Medicine maybe eventually, who knows what the future holds mag bots.

That's a billion dollar idea right there.

Somebody call me, yeah, well you should patent it while you're ahead. So there's other kinds of compounds that have

Bo. Yeah, amazing, good job maggots.

Yeah. But so our listener wanted to know if they can stop worrying about superbugs because we're all going to be using maggots. There's a couple problems with that. So, first of all, maggots tend to be used for a

And it's super weird to have maggots like eating a wound on the outside of your body. I can't imagine having maggots that crawl around inside you.

I don't think they'd survive for very long, but you'd feel them wiggling to their death and it would be unpleasant.

Yeah.

I also imagine that if we started using maggots to the same extent that we use some of our current antibiotics, it wouldn't surprise me if resistance arose to whatever the maggots were producing as well. And so I don't think this is a panacea, but it is a solution that seems to be working pretty well for certain types of non healing wounds.

Amazing. It's incredible how many times evolution has found the answer to a problem that we have. You know, it's just like, give it a billion years and so many mutations, they will explore the whole landscape and find an incredible solution.

Yes, this field is called Darwinian medicine. I believe where you go to nature for some answers. I found a doctor named doctor Ronald Sherman, and I loved reading his papers because he was so excited about the maggots. So I want to wrap this up on a quote from the conclusion of one of his two thousand and nine papers. He said, medicinal maggots are as precise in their debreedment as a highly skilled microsurgeon, as attentive to their host

So hearts and wounds is the title of his autobiography.

Yes, thank you for your enthusiasm, doctor Sherman, and let's go ahead and reconnect with Jonathan and see if we've answered his questions.

Yes, indeed, you have answered my questions. Thank you. It looks like what was old is new once again.

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