From the Vault: Bill Schutt on the Heart

And at the end of the episode we actually discussed monsters a little bit. We talked about the Thing from Another World. Oh, I can see because of the day this would have been right and the edge of October last year, wasn't it, Yeah, but it it was. It was. It was weird because it was just after we had watched The Thing from Another World for Weirdout Cinema. But

I just organically asked him. I was like, hey, you know, you you obviously about you know, vampires and so forth, and you're very interested in sort of monstrous aspects of anatomy and in the biological world. Do you have a favorite monster movie? And he said, Oh, without a doubt, it's the thing from another world. So we chatted about about it a little bit and it was pretty fun all right. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the episode Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio.

Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and my co host Joe McCormick is away from the virtual workspace today, so it's just me, but I'm going to be joined by vertebrate zoologist and author Bill shut So. Bill is the author of two previous nonfiction books, There's Dark Banquet Blood and The Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. I know for a fact that I've I've mentioned that book on the show before.

He also wrote Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History. His latest book is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart, which is out right now and hard back, as an e book and also as an audio book. Now, we're mostly going to be talking about the weird and wonderful evolution of the heart, as well as humanity's attempt to understand it through history. But as always I have to stress that the book itself, pump Uh in this case goes

into far greater detail and includes so many more wonderful examples. UH. Case in point, we don't get into the horseshoe crab at all or blood transfusions, but there are great chapters in the book on these topics. Is a great read and I highly recommend it. So let's go ahead and jump into the interview. And hey, towards the end, we're actually going to chat a little bit about horror movies.

I'm not gonna spoil which one, but it just happens to be a film that I watched for the first time in recent weeks, so this was this is quite enjoyable. Welcome to the show, Bill, would you mind introducing yourself to our audience. Hi, Yeah, I'm nice to be here. My name is Bill shut and I am a vertebrate zoologist and recently took an early retirement from Long Island University,

where I taught for over twenty years. I taught anatomy and physiology to courses and evolution and dinosaurs, and my research interests for the past thirty years or so have centered around bats and UH, and within the four plus species of bats, I specialized on the three vampire bats and m so that sort of led to my first book after writing a bunch of scientific papers, and that was Dark Banquet, Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. And I followed that up with a book

on cannibalism called Cannibalism of Perfectly Natural History. And so here I am now having written a book on the heart, and that is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart. When did you know this is going to be your next book? Did you just seem like the next logical step or was there something in particular? Yeah, it really didn't seem like the first the next logical step because

of the top that I had covered initially. We're more macabre and and um, you know, you go from vampiresm to cannibalism into the heart and that's sort of there's sort of a jump there. And and really what I was lucky enough with the first two books to sort of find a niche between the sensationalized sort of garbage e stuff on the on one side and on the other side is sort of academic material that nobody would

read unless you were studying those topics. And so I so so I I sort of fit myself into the into the middle of that, and I've always been interested in taking complex or misunderstood concepts and demystifying them, putting a zoological slant on them, making it humorous, entertaining, and not using a whole lot of jargon, and and then going off on sort of side trips where I got to discuss what I thought and what I believe are important topics, whether it's history or or or or or biology.

So when I was starting to think about what I wanted to write from from my third nonfiction book, um my editors at Algonquin and my agent all suggested that I possibly look for something a bit more mainstream, and they gave me a short list, and and one of the things that I've did some preliminary research on was the Heart. And I gotta say, initially, I thought this has got to have been done before, because there are

hundreds of books. This topic is, you know, so widespread and popular, and I was really surprised to find that that that there was this space for the type of book that I wanted to write, where you move through the animal kingdom, you tell these interesting stories based on animals, and then you move into humans, go into myths and the history of of a particular topic. UM, and then UM sort of grab interesting stories about medicine past, present,

and future. And so I was really surprised, to tell you the truth, that there was so much there and a lot of it was really strange enough to satisfy that part of me. And I've always been into um horror movies and and books, and so I always had this kind of like weird bent as far as that stuff went. So UM. Once I figured out that that that there was enough interesting material they had to satisfy myself and and I think my readers that then it was a done deal that I was going to work

on the heart. So the heart, especially from the human perspective, takes on all of this additional symbolic weight, and you do you discuss this in the book. But but stripping away all of that, what what is a heart and why did it become necessary from an evolutionary perspective? Good question. Let me lead off by saying that there are all sorts of different things that you might call a heart, where some people might not consider it to be a heart because it doesn't have a specific lining that sort

of thing. Um. But a hard is really a pump, a muscular pump. So we're talking about uh involuntary muscle, so it's not under your conscious control. And when it contracts, it sends a fluid either blood or if you're an insect, hem a lymph around the body and there and what it's doing, and there's there's variation here as well, is it's carrying oxygen um to the body, and it's carrying carbon dioxide to a place where you can be eliminated.

By the same token, it's carrying nutrients that are either absorbed through the digestive track wool to the body and getting rid of waste products that are produced by the body. So it's a way to move that fluid around and to move around those substances. Now that is not a problem. If you're really really tiny, you don't need to have a special circulatory system because those those materials that I just mentioned that they just diffuse in and out of

your cell. If you're a single celled organism, or if you're really flat like a tape worm, then then that material just moves from a high concentration to a low concentration. So just for as an example, um, if if a single celled organism is surrounded by water, and that water has got more oxygen in it then is inside that cell. Then the oxygen is going to go from high concentration outside the cell right through the cell membrane into the cell itself. And and that's how that material moves. It

just goes high concentrations are low. That works great if you're tiny or or or flat, and it doesn't work at all if you have any kind of size, because it's very difficult and and and diffusion doesn't work efficiently. If you're talking about an organism with made of millions of cells and thousands of cell layers thick, the fusion just doesn't work, or it works, but it works really slowly.

So millions and millions of years ago, probably half a billion years ago, in order four creatures to get larger, they had to evolve systems that allowed those materials to move in and out and within the body. That had to take place, and so what evolved with these systems of tubes and pumps to to help distribute that liquid, which became the carrier for oxygen and nutrients and waste

and carbon dioxide. Um So, so it was in a sense organisms couldn't evolve to be as complex as they are now, um, if they didn't have this transportation system evolving inside them. I have to say I really loved the evolutionary journey you take us on in the book. UM. I think back to your your your book on vampires and blood drinking and the evolution of bats, and in a way, it's like, we kind of think, we already feel like the destination there is weird enough, so we

expect the journey to be weird. Um And with the heart, it's easy to take it for granted. But it's such a weird and wonderful evolutionary journey you describe. Thank you very much. Now, I love how you explain that we have to get away from the human centric view that the human heart is is like the pinnacle of design or anything of that nature, you know, the the ultimate In um An evolution, you describe a number of of wonderful um and if I guess from the human perspective,

strange hearts in the book. If you were to play favorites, which non human heart in the book impressed you the most, UM, probably the blue whale heart, for for reasons that that might not be readily apparent. And and so in the prologue in the first chapter, I detailed the um the adventure that my friends up at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto took when when unfortunately, nine blue whales died on the ice up in Canada, and usually these whales

sink and uh and three of them didn't. They washed the shore on in these remote spots, and and and these guys went in there and and and recovered one of the hearts. And the reason they did this is because you know, they were mammalogists, and they kept hearing this question from folks about what's the largest heart in the world. Well, blue whale heart, how big is it? They really didn't know. Well, it's probably as big as an su they but so so when they got the

chance to go get one, they did it. And it took five years, which I and heavy construction equipment to get to move these things around. There were four of them inside the whale, pushing the heart out through the ribs. And when the thing was when when they finally got it on the ground, it when I looked at the pictures of it, reminds me of like a four hundred pounds soup dumpling. It did not look like a heart that you might get it, uh, you know what a

butcher's for example. UM. And so there was so many strange things about the heart, and one of them was was this shape that it took because it we we think that it's able to collapse on the high pressure when they die, so we would They don't know, but this is what they hypothesized. The other thing is that it was a lot smaller than they thought it was gonna be. Now, this is the largest heart in the world, Yes it is, but maybe it's the size of a golf cart rather than an suv. And and that question

became really interesting to them and to myself. And and what it boils down to is if you were to look at the heart of a humming bird, for example, and this is an anim mold that can can can beat its wings eight hundred times a minute. To do that, it takes muscle and you know, it takes nutrients, It takes oxygen, produces carbon dioxides. So there's gotta be this massive amount of blood flowing into those flight muscles in

order to do that. Um. One thing you can do is have your heart beat as really fast, and hummingbird heart can beat twelve hundred beats per minute, and that is probably about the physical limit that a heart can beat. So we're talking about phil empty relax and then this whole thing taking place again twelve hundred times a minute is ridiculous. So so as a as a mechanical device, it's probably about topped doubt right there. I don't know if you can go any and beat any quicker than that.

The only other way to get more blood to these muscles, these wing muscles is to have a larger heart. So because of that, um, humming berries have a heart that's four or five times larger relative to their body size than a blue whale heart, whose heart maybe beats ten fifteen times a minute, and it doesn't have that high metabolic demand that the little guys like hummingbirds and shrews might have. That that to me was you know, that

was probably the most interesting. But you know, there was this long list that I had to sort of picture before I figured out how to answer that one. But but blue whale hearts and they are on display as far as gone through this plastination process. If you've ever seen the body's exhibit, it's like these guys with their cadavers who are posed and strange position drug dribbling the

basketball with no skin, which is trying to avoid that. Um. So so this, this this plastinated blue whale heart is now back on display at the wrong and that got a. They have an interesting exhibit on the whales and they so they pulled this thing back out of storage and it's just fantastic, awesome. I I'd love to see that someday.

And there's of course an illustration in the Book of Youth setting beside it like that than now on a similar no, you know, thinking back to you know, getting away from the human centric view of the heart, you stress that we also have to realize that the organ systems in the body don't function like separate chapters in a textbook. And uh that I found this really eye opening. Um you know, because I think to my own self and I'm thinking, well, that's exactly how I think about it.

I think of those clear overlays and anatomy books, and I think, Okay, this system, this system, um, and I fall into that trap of thinking about my own body that way. Can you can you get into this a little bit? Because I found this a rather insightful part

of the book. Sure as I might have mentioned. I taught anatomy and physiology for for about two decades and and and one of the things that I stressed in my students this is an extremely complex uh of course too semester course that I taught with a lot of

difficult concepts. And I think that that that the people fall into this trap, especially students, of thinking that Okay, I'm taking an exam, I'm studying circulatory system, and now I'm gonna take an exam and then I can forget that stuff before I get out to my car after the exam is over. And and that's just not the

case with when you talk about anatomy. So, for example, in my mind, there's no way to separate the circulatory system from the respiratory system, because if you're going to begin you know, we talked about the fact that one of the things that the hearts and circulatory systems too, is this circulate blood that carries oxygen. Well, how do you get that oxygen. That's the role of the respiratory system.

And then at a microscopic level, the circulatory system and the respiratory system come into contact and there's this transfer of either carbon dioxide from the circulatory system to the respiratory system or oxygen from the respiratory system to the circulatory system, and then we breathe out and the whole thing starts again. So so I always stress the fact that you can't that you really can't understand one without putting it into into the cons texts of the other.

And then you go into things like, well, how do how do these muscles contract? Well, that's tied into the nervous system as well. My students would laugh at me because this is something that I've just stressed over and over again, that they have to think of this as something other than a chapters in a book. I love that, Like I say, I feel like, even though I don't have, you know, this kind of anatomy background, I still flash back to those anatomy books from like high school and whatnot,

and and think of myself as decided that way. Now in the book, you also get into the history of humanity's understanding of the heart, and h I you stressed this in the book, and I realize our our understanding of this is imperfect. But can you talk about what the ancient Egyptians seem to understand about the actual functionality

of the heart and heart related pathologies. Yeah, well, well the ancient Egyptians, and so we're talking say from from what I have restort something like fift undred and fifty BC e so that would be the Egyptian Book of the Heart, which is written on papyrus and hieroglyphics, and and it appears to some translators that the Egyptians knew

quite a bit about heart attacks and aneurysms. And you've got to be careful there because these translations from papyrus um to English or to whatever language you might be using, you've got to be careful because that it's it's not precise.

They had a different way of thinking back then and there, and and our translations of ancient works you always have to sort of be careful about what you're about, what about what you're stating as a as a fact, what we do we we are more sure that the Egyptian physicians believe that at the heart was was the center of of things like emotion or what we would call

the soul. And then on a on a physiological level, and this is this got picked up by the Greeks, that that that there were really two circulatory systems that venus, blood was completely different than arterial blood, which was actually

air and so um. So it was initially thought by these guys that and and then passed onto the to the to the Greeks, and then and then the Romans who disproved the air part um that that the venus blood derived from the liver uh and and some of it seeped across into the into the left side uh and that mixed with air, and there was this magical material called numa in the air and and and so they got a lot wrong. Um. Not that's not to sort of mock them, because they were working with you know,

zero instrumentation and things that we take for granted nowadays. Um. But unfortunately that got picked up. The that that the idea of cardiocentrism and and and also their their ideas about um about the circulatory system were picked up by the by the Greeks because Egyptian medicine, that that type of information was held in high esteem by by the Greeks.

Up from their Hypocrates and Aristotle wrote about about the heart and the circulatory system, they stayed with this sort of cardiocentric view that that that that that the heart was the center of things like that like the mind and intellect, and they really thought of it the way

we now think of the nervous system. Um. So at the same time, now artists are jumping into play and their writing and uh, it's poetry and and and there are there's all sorts of plays and and and this idea that the heart is the seat of emotion became entrenched with artists and it's still there um and and then passed on to the Romans. And that when things take a downturn because of because of somebody who must

have been brilliant at the time, Galen. But uh, but that was that was problematic as as we might talk about event. Yeah, my next question concerns that because because Galen, of course is always this important figure that that we have to bring up and we discuss uh in anatomical history and the advancement of anatomical knowledge. But as you discussed in the in the book, in many ways that you put Western medicine back um d years tell us

about this. Yeah. So, so Galen was a Roman surgeon and uh, and he got to travel to um to to to Egypt and picked up methodology UM and then um worked in the gladiatorial school as a physician and and began to study anatomy. But there was a it was it was outlawed to to actually work on human cadaver.

So a lot of what he interpreted about the human body came through dissections of things like apes or dogs or pigs, and and he wrote a lot and and and some of the material, the three million words that were eventually recovered, may have been written by his followers years later, maybe even after Galen died. But the thing is that he um, he got a lot wrong. So this was all taking place in the second century c e and um after Rome fell hundreds of years later.

Galen's work was not was not initially translated into Latin, which was the language of sciences back back then, and so it sat around untranslated and and was not translated until the early Middle Ages, and it was translated by Christians. They were Syrians, and so when they translated Galen's work, they did it into Arabic, and they put their Christian

slant on that translation. Now, that work that had been translated into Arabic was eventually translated into Latin, and it reflected that Christian slant that the Syrian translators had put on it. And and the problem was is that that looked great to the leaders of the church and and that you know that we're talking about so the European Church and the Western Church, and so they looked at

it and said, well, this material is divinely inspired. And so it became in a sense the rule of law that that you had to follow in a lockstep fashion Galen's teachings and so I for a fifteen hundred years it was pretty much voting to do research and and and so. Um. So medicine stagnated and that became really and that was really problematic because so much of what of what was practiced was wronging this whole idea of the four humors, you have to lead people to balance

these four substances, one of them didn't exist. Um So that was a real that was really troublesome and you and that continued in some ways right up until the early twentieth century. They're still bleeding people. So so that was that was a bit problematic. Yeah, And like you put it in the book, speaking of the humors, that you know, we still talk about people being melancholy, So

we still have the linguistic legacy of of that system. Yes, thank Now skipping ahead more into the present and looking ahead to the future, you describe some amazing advances and medical science in the book. You get into what you get into the history of blood transfusion to where we are now. You you just got some hard transplants. How far are we away from what we I guess sometimes

roughly referred to as as lab grown hearts. Um. Yeah, this is to me, this was one of the most amazing things because I got to go to Harvard and and meet with a researcher by the name of Harold, and he is he is aware of the fact that that there's a real problem with with with people on waiting lists for organs and and and and thousands of people die every year, not necessarily waiting for hearts, but waiting for liver is waiting for kidneys, um, and and and so um. What he's trying to do is take

a very different approach. The reasons why the people wind up dying on a waiting list is because you have to have the right type tissue type, blood type. You've got to be able to move this thing maybe across the country, um, keep it refrigerated, and and so that's often times a crapshoot whether that's going to work out for somebody. So what he's done is, and and this is preliminary, he's taken to daver hearts and put them through in a sense of de turgent rents. And that

de turgent doesn't wash away the dirt. It washes away the cells in the heart that your body would reject were you to take up that hard and transplanted. So we're talking about the muscle fibers and and other associated cells. And so what's left is this ghost white framework of the heart. So now you've got something that that that looks like a heart but really has no other cells besides the connective tissue cells, which your body is not

going to reject. Okay, So now what he's done is, and this science does exist, he will take a sample a biopsy or a sample of skin cells from the person who's going to receive the heart, the recipient and and and so so we're not talking about something deep in the body. This is this just comes right from your skin. These these cells are called fiber blasts. The science now exists convert those fiber blasts into stem cells and stem cells depending on how the body stimulates them

can be converted into any type of cell. Now, so what they are able to do now still is to take these stem cells and stemmy like them to become muscle cells. And so his idea now is to take these muscle cells and embed them, seed them, as it were, onto this heart, to this framework, and grow a heart that is a match for this recipient. And and and it won't reject the recipient won't reject that that heart.

The immune system won't won't find it to be a foreign cells or foreign tissue because it actually is derived from the cells of that recipient. So when I asked them how long do you think this is going to take until it becomes commonplace? He said ten years. That's his hope. So I said, well, so, so how does that work? He said, Well, somebody comes in with a heart problem, they need a heart transplant. You take a sample from them, you do what I just described about

how you change them into stem cells. You take a cadab or heart, you embed it, and then you do this transplant and the person is you know, is up and walking in a day or two. Well, it's really exciting to match getting to that point. And uh, and like I said in the book, you know, there's this this wonderful evolutionary journey you take us on. I love the journey through our our attempts to scientifically and I

guess culturally understand what the heart is. Uh. Now I have to ask, we're getting since we're getting into October here, your previous books have dealt with vampires and cannibals. Um, now we do doing with the heart and blood. And I'm to understand you're working on a book about teeth. So I have to ask, what what what is your favorite movie Monster? Without a doubt it is the original,

So the nineteen fifty one version of the thing. Uh yeah, with um James Arness who's in gun Smoke in the nineteen sixties and I guess early seventies playing this uh walking carrot who lands crash lands in the Arctic, and how it's recovered by this research group and what happens when when it gets thought out by mistake. I just think it has The movie has everything to me. Um it is, it's got a great mood, it has wonderful that as a wonderful soundtrack. It's one of the first

films ever that has overlapping dialogue. So when you hear these these soldiers and these scientists and conversation, they're not waiting for someone else to stop talking before they before they talk. So this old has to do with the director, Howard Hawks and it's just to me is is a perfect film and stands up. Um even today, A lot of people are in love with the John Carpenter two movie,

which is a gore fest good movie, you know. Um, but um but I don't think that it that it Uh, I don't think it's it's it's it's quite as as a much of a classic as as as the original. I have to agree with you about the the the original holding up so well. I happen to just watched it for the first time a week or two ago, and um, yeah, the I totally agree on the dialogue.

It's it's it's snappy and and real and so many of the secret I feel like there there were those promo images of James R. Ness as the monster, and especially for people who came up uh you know, post Carpenter, we kind of looked at that and we're like, I don't I don't want to maybe don't want to see a movie with this old fashioned looking monster, but the way it shot in the film is so impressive, and you have that that really frightening sequence with the fire.

I think it totally holds up. Or when that door opens and it's standing on the other side of the door and it's just like slams the door frame. Uh yeah, the well, I think it's very it's really funny. Um and and it affected me so much that when I started to write fiction, and I've written three novels, I've based the characters in those novels on the characters in The Thing and especially the original, but but certainly some

of the characters in the Uh. You know, when I was looking for for a name of a character, i'd i'd go looking in in those movies, especially McCready. Who's Who's the hero in? In these three nine zero technical no thrillers that that I wrote with my co author Finch, I have to ask how old were you when you first saw The Thing? From an edit world? Young? Um? My parents, you know, back back when I was a little kid, we went to the drive in every week.

Now that that movie is older than I am, it's it's it's actually seventy years old this year and so I probably was five six years old, and uh, you know that type of of of film. And I've always been a huge film buff. And when I'm writing my my novels, I'm thinking about these big cinematic scenes and and and I think that when when I write nonfiction,

I'm able to go back. So I opened up the you know, cannibalism with with the story of a vent gain who was who was who was really the cannibal murderer. That that the that the that the Bates character or in Psycho was based on. You know, Alfred Hitchcock just took this real event and and got rid of the cannibalism aspect, uh and and kept the mother obsession aspect of it. And so that to me is that's another

perfect film that there are. There's about five of them, Psycho being one, and and and the Original Thing being another. In the Original the Thing, it also is more of a blood drinker. It is more of a vampire. Do you think that had any any impact on your eventual study of vampire bats? Uh? You know, I wish I could say, because that sounds so cool, that connects, But you know, I don't. But I've been into into vampire

movies as well. You know, I've been into the original Dracula and and then the hammer versions that came out in the in the sixties and seventies. So so I guess I'd always been intrigued by by blood feeding. But when when I started the study bats, that was my first semester as a PhD student at cornell Um, I've always been into strange animals and and and I've always kept a lot of animals as pets. When I was a kid, I had a monkey. That's how different things

were back then. Every snake, every type of lizard, whatever, whatever you could could find in a pet shop or collect under a rock or drag out of a log um. So so I'd always been into sort of offbeat type creatures. And and so when I started to work on bats, it probably took me abat five minutes to decide that within these fourteen hundred species that I wanted to work on,

the three vampires. And I just lucked out because in the early nineties of what it was known and the literature about vampire bats was known about the common vampire bat, and the other two were open books. So that allowed me to go in and do research on these because and I was really lucky because a lot of not wen't say a lot a number of really important, um influential back biologists took me aside and said, you know, bill a vampire, about as a vampire, about as a vampire,

but you're not gonna see differences. And I was fresh out of classes, thinking it doesn't that doesn't make sense, because if you have two animals that do the same thing and they live in the same place, then then then either one of them is going to adapt a different behavior, or it's going to migrate, or it's going

to go extinct. And so when so this this this little biologist Arthur Greenholfen Museum and Natural History, which I've been lucky enough to be there since the early nineteen nineties as well, took me aside and said, Candy got something, so shut up down, don't do it, um. And from there I was able to look at all these differences that were clearly apparent once we started looking at them, and just to sort of put a shout out there.

It's not that people didn't know about it, because when I went down to places like Trinidad, they knew from the start that there were these huge differences. One of them fed on birds, the other one is on the ground and feeding on cows and pigs. Um. And they knew about it, they just weren't publishing. And so I've made it a point to to bring these guys on as co authors and bring them up and make sure that they came to conferences and and got to do that.

I thought they deserved. Bringing back to pump for a second, I also love the bit where you get into the the bats that hibernate uh in the in the snow. Yeah. Um, not a whole lot is known about them, except that there's a species of bat that lives in Japan that

that that evidently hibernates in in in snow. And and so the researchers originally thought, well, this, this, and these guys in polar bears are the only the only mammals that do that, uh and so what since then, since this work was started, they figured out that polar bears might not really be card carrying hibernators because they wake

up off and during in the in the winter. Um. And so it's not known if these bats are If these bats wake up in the middle of the winter or enough and they make this little with their body. Hea they carve this little cone and the snow and then the snow covers them and you don't find them until until the spring, when it's either either somebody that digs them up by mistake or or or it thaws out and you know that they're cold. They're laying there for a while, like can start to crank some some

blood moving through them, and then they fly off. But yeah, that was just one of I don't know, dozens of really interesting stories that I've learned about because the learning curve was steep, which made it that much more interesting. You know. I don't go into these things as sort of experts on on the heart, for example, or cannibalism thankfully.

Of course, the bats also remind me of the thing from another world, you know, the organism is suspended in the ice, which I guess drives home no matter how weird. An idea is that we dream up about an alien creature, like there's something in the natural world that is already as weird or weirder, right, oh, yeah, no doubt, and and that you know, I try to bring that out in the book as well. And and then the fun thing is to try to tie that into modern medicine.

So you have uh, you know, you know, you have an aquarium fish, the zebra fish, which everybody's seen this little stripes, the horizontal stripes. It turns out that if you snipal its heart, the heart not only grows back, but it's completely functioned. Now, if you were to do that, you know, we don't really do that, and we're gladiatorial combat. You know a lot of people are upset about that.

But to be serious, if if you have a part of your heart is damaged because the blood flow has been cut off to it, and and it and in a sense that tissue dies when it grows back. It's scarre tissue. It's not contractile, good function named muscle tissue. That's not the case with the zebrafish. So how do we take that? What does the zebrafish have going for

it that enables it to completely repair? It's hard after being traumatically uh injured, And and how do you try in slate that into um into curing a sick heart that is undergoing a heart attack or multiple heart attacks. And there was a list of those that that I ran into. So that was kind of fun as well well. Bill, Thanks for taking time out of your day to chat

with us about the book. Well, it was really good to be here, especially to talk about the thing that's a that's a new one for me, that one I haven't spoken to, have been interviewed about. So it was a real pleasure to meet you and talk with your owner. All Right, thanks again to Bill Shut for chatting with me. You can check him out online at Bill Shut dot com. That's b I L L S C h U T T dot com. Uh. That website contains links to his

social media accounts as well. The website features information about his three non fiction books, That's Dark Banquet, Cannibalism, and Now Pump, as well as his three fiction books co written with J. R. Finch That's Hell's Gate, The him Alan Codex, and The Darwin Strain. I have not read these but yet, but now I'm super interested to check them out after after chatting with Bill. In the meantime, as you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind where you can find them

in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we give you our core science episodes. On Monday's we do Listener mail. On Wednesday's we do an artifact short form episode. On Friday's we do a little weird how cinema You know what that is. That's our chance to kick back and discuss a weird film. And yes, as luck would have it, we very recently discussed the Thing from Another World on the show. So hey, especially after this chat with Bill, go back and listen

to that episode if you haven't. Again, wonderful film. Oh and then on the on the weekends we do a little rerun that's a vault episode. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show and recording us here and if you would like to email us, as always, you can do so at con Thatt add Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind

is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows