0:15

Pushkin. What's

0:25

her name, Coolly?

0:28

Sorry, there you got some fun names. Cooley,

0:32

it's a Belgian malanois sleek, lean,

0:35

dappled gray and black, panting happily

0:37

on a patch of grass way up in the hills

0:40

of northeastern Alabama. This dog's

0:42

probably from Hungary, hung hungry,

0:44

and she's held old ectly

0:49

have her information twenty four months below

0:52

below we have all that paperwork at

0:54

the office, but we don't have that right. That

0:56

is the biggest tongue I've ever seen. We're

1:00

all standing in front of a cluster of concrete

1:02

buildings spread over a large, rolling,

1:05

wooded campus an hour or so from

1:07

Birmingham, the head cos of

1:09

an organization called three sixty Canine

1:11

Group. The whole operation looks

1:14

like a scale down army base, only

1:16

instead of soldiers marching to and

1:18

fro, there are dogs, dozens

1:21

and dozens of them, Puppies stumbling

1:24

playfully, chocolate labs chasing

1:26

things, German shepherds looking

1:28

for a job to do and

1:33

cooling. One of the operation's newest

1:35

recruits, a teenager in dog years,

1:38

being put through her paces. A

1:40

rubber toy for which she has acquired

1:42

a certain affection was taken

1:44

from her, and her job is

1:47

to find it. You can see like where she slaughtered

1:49

right here, so she caught the other here

1:52

turned Once she turned, she can see.

1:56

She has never done an exercise like this before,

1:59

and the assignment has filled her with enthusiasm.

2:02

She's got to use your boss.

2:12

Coolie is standing in front of one of the cabinets,

2:14

tail wagging. She

2:18

knew her wasn't there.

2:21

Coolie is a good girl, all right. She

2:23

follows her nose and we have

2:26

a lot to learn from her. My

2:30

name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to

2:33

the final episode of season six

2:35

of Revisionist History, my podcast

2:38

about things overlooked and misunderstood.

2:41

This has been a season devoted to

2:43

fixing things, college rankings,

2:46

laundry, the Little Mermaid. We

2:50

have looked at many burning issues and said

2:53

we can do better. But there are

2:55

some problems that we cannot fix

2:57

on our own. Some problems

3:00

are so big they can only

3:02

be solved with the help of another

3:04

species. Okay,

3:13

so this is our dark room tests. Coolie's

3:19

undergoing get another test with the same

3:21

goal as before, find

3:23

the hidden toy, only now the lights

3:26

are off and the toy is

3:28

not in the first room, Coolie enters, but

3:30

in a second, smaller room off to the

3:32

side. This also tells

3:35

us if it takes her a little while to try to find it,

3:37

how much hunt drift she actually has,

3:40

so it's not just immediate to make sure

3:43

even after she gets tired, even after she's

3:45

hot, but she still wants that toy enough

3:47

to be looking for it. Coolie bounds

3:49

in, sniffs the first room, everything,

3:52

all four walls. Then she zeroes in on

3:54

the closet. We can't see her, only

3:56

hear her. Her trainers, Sean

3:58

and Ashley, are grading every step of her

4:00

performance on a long detailed

4:02

checklist.

4:09

She got an she's got an out. Coolly

4:16

walked across a mattress, didn't stop, jumped

4:18

on one end of a makeshift teeter totter, didn't

4:20

FaZe her. These are the dogs that

4:22

people get as pets, and they eat their couch

4:25

and they're the worst, terrible pets that

4:27

make the really really good dogs. For the most

4:29

part, you love

4:31

all of that. She

4:38

runs down the hallway, sniff, sniff. A

4:41

large canvas bag is suspended

4:43

from the ceiling, ready to drop and

4:45

block her way, and pulled

4:47

up to the ceiling, big, heavy bag.

4:50

Hey, guys, here she comes. We

5:00

all jumped when the bag dropped from the ceiling.

5:03

Coolly didn't. She paused,

5:06

looked at the bag, sniffed it, and

5:08

carried. Dogs

5:15

noses are something like a hundred

5:17

thousand times more sensitive than ours.

5:20

A puppy fresh off the boat can

5:22

find a hidden toy in a darkened room.

5:25

Dogs can perform all manner of

5:27

olfactory tasks using judgment,

5:29

drive, and discipline. It's their superpower.

5:32

That's why they're dogs at the airport sniffing

5:34

luggage, or why it's always a dog who finds

5:36

the hiker lost in the woods. Spend

5:40

a little time at three sixty Canine in

5:42

the hills of Alabama, and every one

5:44

of your preconceptions about the genius

5:47

of dogs will be confirmed. We

5:53

had a dog, a black lab

5:56

that we retired, and we

5:58

allowed the dog, you know, so we had a ceremony

6:00

and we and

6:02

we hired. You know, there's a local bakery

6:04

that makes dog friendly cake, so we had

6:06

a cake for the dog. We were sitting

6:09

in the three sixty Canine conference room

6:11

listening to Jerry Johnson and John

6:13

Pierce, two of the company's senior executives.

6:16

Two hardcore dog guys

6:19

talking about the best they ever saw. And

6:21

we had the dog in the room and run around and just

6:24

you know, an a flash and sniffing everybody's

6:26

super friendly dog. The lady comes in

6:28

to deliver the cake and she's got on her

6:30

boyfriend, her husband with her, and

6:32

he's standing there holding the cake, and the donkey's running

6:34

up behind the guy

6:37

and going behind him and basically

6:39

like snipping his rear ind and sniffing the back

6:41

of his you know, his shirt

6:44

and won't leave him alone. And I remember

6:46

who asked him, but finally someone said, yeah,

6:48

John said, are you carrying a weapon? And

6:50

he was like, no, I

6:53

was carrying a weapon. I took it off and left it

6:55

in the car just prior to walk it in here. And

6:57

the guy had, you know, three minutes before

6:59

taking his gun off and left it in his

7:02

car, and the dogs still found it, and you know, we

7:04

were having a party. What was that dog's name? That

7:06

was Cole? Cole and

7:09

Cooley add them to the long list

7:11

of Doggie All Stars, which

7:13

you already knew dogs could do this. Right

7:16

now, it's time to go further. A

7:23

few years ago, a labrador named

7:26

Floren flew in from London to Boston

7:29

at the invitation of a research scientist

7:32

at MIT named Andreas

7:34

Mercian coming in on a winter's

7:36

morning for a special one dog

7:39

exhibition. Flowing

7:42

the famous dog flew first class to MIT,

7:45

so I didn't have time to go through all the hook so we had

7:47

to rent a hotel room hotel

7:49

ballroom right across the street

7:52

at the Mario. Mercian

7:54

is a kind of scientific jack of all

7:56

trades. He's technically a

7:58

physicist, but as he likes to

8:00

say, he operates in blissful

8:03

ignorance of disciplinary boundaries.

8:06

He's interested in solar panels,

8:09

in quantum effects, in molecular

8:11

biology, not to mention something

8:13

that I cannot begin to understand

8:16

called cytoskeletal memory

8:18

and coding. Mercian

8:21

got interested in prostate cancer, one

8:23

of the most common of all cancers. Mercian

8:26

heard about the work being done by a British researcher

8:28

named Claire Guest, who had

8:30

been training dogs to detect diseases

8:33

the same way We've been training dogs for years to

8:36

detect explosives, and

8:38

Mercian and Guests ended up working together,

8:40

which is what led to Florin Guests

8:43

for year old Labrador flying into Boston

8:45

one cold winter's morning to

8:47

perform a special sniffing demonstration

8:50

for the senior leadership of the Prostate

8:53

Cancer Foundation. So we

8:55

described to see this. This is hilarious.

8:58

You in the ballroom of the Maria. How

9:00

many people, oh, maybe maybe a dozen

9:02

people, maybe a few words people. That's they're all by

9:04

invitation, okay, no. And there's a giant

9:06

paris on the middle about seven feet across,

9:08

which eight arms, and each arm

9:11

is a jar glass jar of urine

9:13

closed off by a mental frit. Everything is stamless.

9:15

Still, everything is in fact that everything is super clean.

9:18

The jars have all been pre selected

9:20

from a biological repository.

9:22

Some are filled with urine from people known to

9:24

have suffered from prostate cancer. Others

9:27

are controls. Floren's job

9:30

is to sniff each jar. If she

9:32

detects what she believes is a positive

9:34

sample, she's supposed to stop

9:37

and stare at the jar before

9:39

moving on. Were the people from

9:41

the Prostate Foundation skeptical?

9:44

Oh yes, of course, and as rightly they should be.

9:46

You must see this to believe it. Nobody

9:48

should take these kinds of things on just

9:50

somebody's especially when we're talking

9:52

about people's lives here right. It

9:54

was early in the morning. Mercian looked

9:57

at Floren and worried she wasn't up

9:59

to the task, so they had brought flooring

10:01

the dog on first class. Then the American customs

10:04

had to buy Lord de warm her gave her

10:06

medicine, so she had to be vomiting, and all

10:08

sorts of other unpleasantness happened to

10:10

the poor dog. And there's coffee smells everywhere.

10:12

By the way, in the Mariot people who are serving breakfast.

10:14

I'm like, oh my god, we're going to confuse this dog now with all

10:16

the coffee. And she's jet lagged,

10:19

then dewarmed, and this poor dog is

10:21

not going to perform, and she kicks it out of the park.

10:24

The people from the Prostate Cancer Foundation

10:26

are so blown away they end up funding

10:28

guests and merchants research project to

10:31

explore the idea that smell might

10:33

be the best way to diagnose a dangerous cancer.

10:36

To a layman like me, the idea that a

10:39

cancer or a virus

10:41

would have a smell is not intuitive.

10:44

It's not the disease itself that has

10:46

the smell. What happens is it changes your body's

10:48

metabolic pathways, of which you have thousands going

10:50

on in every cell. There's different things happening,

10:53

they change, and many of these pathways,

10:55

many of these processes inside of your cells.

10:58

They have as a byproduct odorance,

11:00

odorance or volletill organic compounds that tend

11:02

to fly around and come out of your body. So

11:05

cancer, for instance, likely leaves

11:07

an imprint on every emission

11:10

that you have, from sweat to urine,

11:12

to saliba to tears, so you name it. Human

11:15

beings are a sight species.

11:17

Sight is our superpower. The

11:20

biggest web of sensory connections in our

11:22

brains is between our cortex and

11:24

our eyes. We can differentiate

11:27

colors in a way that few other species can.

11:29

But as our eyesight evolved to get better,

11:32

our noses got worse. As

11:34

the biologist John Bradshaw puts it, there

11:37

appear to be limits on how much information

11:39

any brain can process. So

11:41

if you optimize for seeing, you

11:44

compromise on smelling. Dogs

11:47

make the opposite trade off. Their

11:49

eyes a mediocre, their noses

11:52

are amazing. To Florin.

11:54

Prostate cancer wasn't a clump

11:56

of cells, It was an odor.

11:58

An odor is so distinctive that it made

12:00

her stop and stare. Let's

12:03

imagine that you and I both

12:06

have prostate cancer

12:08

at the same stage. Is it fair

12:10

to assume that we the

12:13

way in which our body smell is

12:16

our odor is altered by that cancer? Correct?

12:18

It might not be the same exactly. So

12:21

why can the dog generalize for

12:23

the same reason that you can generalize the gate? You

12:25

can track my footprints

12:27

if I teach you what footprints look like on the web

12:30

site and how they're distributed. So

12:32

the dog will learns to identify the footprints on the website

12:35

where it's easy to see and easy to see the gate,

12:37

and then it generalizes, It extrapolates

12:40

and says, oh, this smells like the stuff that

12:42

they used to want me to find. Human

12:44

beings try to screen for prostate cancer

12:47

by looking for it. Of course we do. We're

12:49

a species that's in love with sight. We

12:52

ask men over a certain age to take

12:54

a blood test to look for something called

12:56

the prostate specific antigen,

12:59

and if we see a lot of that antigen, we take

13:01

a closer look at the prostate itself. We

13:04

take half a dozen or more little slices

13:06

of the prostate and look at them under the microscope.

13:09

We look, and we look again, The

13:11

problem is it only around a quarter

13:14

of men who have elevated PSA levels

13:16

actually end up having prostate

13:18

cancer. You could have high PSA

13:21

levels for some other reason. You could also

13:23

have normal PSA levels and still

13:25

have prostate cancer. And so the result of

13:27

all that looking is an enormous amount

13:29

of error. Lots of men are told

13:31

they could have a dangerous cancer when they don't,

13:34

and lots of other men have cancer that gets

13:36

missed. The prostate screening

13:38

air rate is so bad that many

13:41

men avoid it altogether. I'm

13:43

not getting tested, Are you kidding me? All

13:45

you have to do is spend a few hours reading the available

13:47

literature, and you realize that looking

13:50

for early signs of prostate cancer is

13:52

a fool's game. It's really

13:55

really hard. But

13:57

Floren the dog didn't

13:59

look. Floren bypassed all that

14:01

nonsense. Florence is sniffed.

14:04

And did Florence make any mistakes? Oh? Sure,

14:06

of course, if something is right,

14:09

it's one hundred percent wrong. So yes, there's definitely

14:11

errors in the samples, and the dog can definitely

14:13

make errors. However, you should remember this, so

14:17

do all of our tests, and

14:19

currently the dogs are better than any test.

14:22

Notice, how he said, dogs

14:24

are better. It's not like flooring is

14:26

some kind of super dog. The Usain Bolt

14:28

of the Canadine World. Lots

14:30

of dogs could do just what she did.

14:34

A dog can do better than the tests.

14:36

You trust, and you don't trust the dog,

14:38

And I'm glad you don't trust the dog. We have to not

14:41

trust the dog. The dog is teaching us. No, dogs

14:43

are definitely error prone, same as

14:45

everything else. But currently, and

14:48

this is a mind blowing statistic, of all

14:50

the diseases that have ever been tried to

14:52

be identified by trained dog, all of them have

14:54

succeeded. That is mind

14:56

blowing. It should be we should be

14:58

paying attention to this. What the hell is happening?

15:00

Or we can't make this thing not to work? I

15:03

mean, shouldn't you be angry at this? I

15:06

mean, come on, what are we doing? Well?

15:09

Exactly what are we doing?

15:26

The chief research scientist for three sixty

15:29

K nine is a man named Bill Schneider,

15:31

Doctor William Schneider. Schneider

15:34

used to work at Fort Dietrich, the army

15:36

garrison in Maryland where the Pentagon does

15:38

its top secret biodefense work. Schneider's

15:41

specialty was plant virology.

15:44

Diseases that affect things like peach or

15:46

cherry trees. I come from a plant background,

15:49

but being at

15:51

Fort Dietrich, I had access to a lot

15:53

of tools and toys that typical

15:56

scientists didn't have in their repertoire.

15:59

And I've been playing around with those. But then,

16:01

just like Andreas Mershin over at

16:03

MIT, Schneider began to hear

16:06

of the supposedly miraculous powers

16:08

of dogs, so he decided to hold

16:10

a sniff off. Fort Dietrich

16:12

has a special containment facility

16:15

where they could do an actual head to head challenge

16:17

comparing detection results between

16:20

a dog and one of modern science's

16:22

highest tech tests. Schneider

16:25

chose as the test case a plant

16:27

virus called pumpox and

16:29

bet against the dogs. He was a lab

16:32

guy, not a dog guy. Yeah,

16:34

you name it. We had access to it. Gas chromatography,

16:38

mass spectrometry, all sorts

16:40

of very deep sequencing,

16:43

heavy duty nucleic acid analysis,

16:45

things that are

16:47

pretty darn cool actually, and not

16:50

one single one of them can beat the dogs. In

16:53

fact, the US Army invested

16:55

about nineteen billion dollars

16:57

in trying to find a machine

17:00

that could detect explosives

17:02

better than dogs and In the end,

17:05

all these projects, nothing could come close

17:07

to what the dogs can do. So I

17:09

had to convert myself. Bill Schneider,

17:12

the convert, decided to change

17:14

careers. He left government work

17:16

started making sophisticated canine

17:19

training aids. I come to you, Bill,

17:21

and I say, Bill, we have a new, highly

17:24

infectious fire us out there. We know almost nothing

17:26

about it. What do you do next? I

17:29

say, I need the ingenomic information.

17:31

So that's a key step in practically

17:34

any diagnostics these days, and

17:36

with good purpose, because

17:38

when you have genomic information, you

17:41

can design assays, or in

17:43

my case, you can design a training aid that

17:45

will teach a dog to directly

17:47

detect that you're making a sent Yes

17:51

exactly, You're you're looking at a blueprint

17:54

and you're saying, ah, yeah, this gene,

17:56

this protein, this protein, this protein, this protein.

17:59

I can construct that

18:02

in a lab. Yeah. Florin

18:04

the prostate cancer dog was trained

18:07

on samples taken directly from people

18:09

with prostate cancer. Schneider

18:12

was taking the next step, figuring out

18:14

a way to extract the scent of the

18:16

disease itself, refining

18:18

the process creating customized

18:21

disease fragrances that

18:23

could be shipped overnight to dogs anywhere

18:26

in the world. I'm assuming

18:28

you're avoiding everything it has to do with actual

18:31

virulence, contagiousness. It's

18:34

an inert it's a harmless substance.

18:36

Yeah, you could eat it if you wanted

18:38

to. I wouldn't taste all that great. But yeah,

18:40

it's completely safe, it's completely

18:42

stable. You can make as much of it

18:45

as you want. Yeah. Now

18:47

we have a little vial of something that

18:50

has a characteristic

18:54

odor. You and I

18:56

can't smell that. Nope. Yeah,

18:59

In fact, I would have bet you a lot of

19:01

money that nothing could smell it, because

19:04

in our mind, none of these things

19:06

had sent the

19:09

world. Scientists were studying and refining

19:12

the diagnostic power of dogs. Then

19:15

COVID nineteen happened, ranking

19:17

news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions

19:20

more Americans into virtual lockdown.

19:22

Over seventy five million people in New York,

19:24

California, Illinois, and Connecticut

19:26

ordered to stay at home. Bill Schneider

19:28

realized that his technique of making these little

19:31

vials of disease fragrance might

19:33

prove really useful. There's

19:36

there any reason to believe that COVID might be the exception

19:38

to this pattern. Not

19:41

in my mind. No. No. The

19:43

once I crossed that threshold with the

19:45

original virus that we've worked on, which was that

19:48

plump pox virus, I knew

19:50

you could translate this, not just

19:52

to another virus in plants,

19:54

I can take and transfer that to humans

19:57

or cattle or swine or

19:59

chickens or anything,

20:02

and off you go. COVID

20:05

first services at the end of twenty nineteen.

20:08

The novel Coronavirus Genome is

20:10

published. In early January of twenty

20:12

twenty, the Who declares

20:14

a pandemic that spring, and across

20:17

the country. There's demand for COVID nineteen

20:19

testing as positive cases are on

20:21

the rise. Some people have had to wait

20:23

longer than two weeks to receive

20:25

results. While

20:28

the world is in lockdown. In the early summer

20:30

of twenty twenty, Bill Schneider's lab

20:32

gets going synthesizing the proteins

20:35

that make up the smell of stars COVID two.

20:37

The trainers start training dogs on it,

20:40

hard working, focused, unflappable

20:42

dogs who really loved the idea of

20:45

sniffing nine to five. By the time

20:47

we got to September fifteenth,

20:49

we were starting to collect clinical

20:51

samples from people who were confirmed positive

20:54

and we were checking the dogs on those clinical samples,

20:56

and they didn't miss a beat. They were ninety

20:58

nine percent accurate. And at

21:00

that point I was very confident

21:02

that the dogs we were training could detect

21:05

COVID and people's

21:07

masks on their sack in sweat

21:10

and saliva labs.

21:14

Shepherds Belgian Malinois floppy

21:17

yeared pointy year doesn't much matter. What

21:19

matters is that they are a dog. They have

21:21

a big, powerful nose, and they're

21:23

perfectly happy to put that magnificent

21:25

nose to work in the service of

21:27

helping all of us. They're best

21:29

friends. Let's

21:38

think about some of the options we have when

21:41

detecting a deadly new pathogen

21:43

as it moves through a human population.

21:47

One option is what we ended up trying

21:49

with COVID in the United States. We make

21:51

you come to a testing site, stand

21:53

in line with a lot of people who also think

21:55

they might have COVID. Really good idea,

21:57

by the way, stick a nasty swab up

22:00

your nose, charge you a couple hundred dollars,

22:02

use an insanely expensive and complicated

22:05

and high tech system called PCR

22:07

to give you an answer that may or

22:09

may not be useful because it didn't always

22:12

get to you in time. Remember, sometimes

22:14

it would take forever to get your test results,

22:16

sometimes two weeks, and maybe in those two

22:18

weeks while you were waiting, you were infecting

22:21

everyone you met. The result

22:23

of all the cost and inconvenience and hassle

22:26

and imperfection of Option one

22:28

was that we've never done enough testing

22:30

at any stage of the pandemic, And

22:33

because we didn't do enough testing, the

22:35

pandemic sword out of control. Someone

22:38

has a wedding or a Thanksgiving dinner, and

22:40

in a perfect world, everyone would get tested

22:42

before coming. But of course they don't, and

22:45

one person ends up infecting ten other

22:47

people, and maybe one or two of those

22:49

ten will die. All

22:52

these horror stories have at their

22:54

core a failure of disease

22:56

detection. I

23:02

emailed Michael Minna at the Harvard School

23:04

of Public Health, who was one of the big critics

23:07

of the way we tested for COVID. This

23:09

is what he wrote back about the way testing

23:11

works. It has to do with what epidemiologists

23:14

call are not, which is

23:16

the average number of people infected

23:19

by an infected person. If

23:21

an epidemic has are not above one,

23:23

it grows exponentially. If

23:26

arnot falls below one, an

23:29

epidemic dies out. Here's

23:31

what men are wrote. This whole pandemic

23:34

and all of the massive outbreaks

23:36

we've seen have been with an art

23:38

of about one point three. That

23:40

means that every ten people infected

23:43

went on to infect on average

23:46

thirteen people. Well, in

23:48

that case, if you have a hundred

23:50

people infected on day one, then

23:52

thirty days later you have about six

23:55

hundred new infections exponential

23:57

growth end quote. All

24:01

we had to do to stop the

24:03

pandemic was to test just enough

24:05

people and prevent just enough

24:08

new infections so that those ten

24:10

newly infected people only infected

24:13

on average nine other people.

24:16

We just had to move the needle a

24:19

little bit, and we couldn't

24:21

do it. Option one was

24:23

one of the most criminally stupid acts

24:25

of public health incompetence in

24:28

American history. Now

24:31

imagine another option just

24:35

moved to a hypothetical.

24:37

So I'm a high school, Okay, I want

24:39

to reopen. We're in the middle of the raging

24:41

pandemic, and I come to you and

24:43

I say, I want to use your service.

24:46

Are we talking? How would you tell me how you

24:48

would fix that up? I'm talking to Jerry Johnson,

24:50

who runs biodetection at three sixty

24:52

K nine dog in the front door. Yeah,

24:55

the first fifty kids come in, they stand on their spot,

24:57

dog searches them, they go on to class. The next

24:59

fifty comes in. We could do that, you

25:01

know, relatively quickly, you know, and maybe

25:03

you have some coming in the gymnasium, some coming

25:06

in the cafeteria. It's all about

25:08

having the real estate to get

25:10

the children lined up. So and you could

25:12

do that with one dog or two dogs. Would you

25:14

would want two dogs? Yeah, particularly if it's if

25:16

it's a public health issue and school

25:18

children do with the dogs, be very very thorough.

25:21

So if the dog's condition to work forty

25:23

five minutes, we don't want to stop at thirty just

25:25

to make sure that the dog is, you know, not fatiguing

25:28

at all. A PCR test

25:30

costs somewhere in the range of one hundred and fifty dollars,

25:33

and you wait forever for the result. The

25:35

cost of a dog test, once

25:37

you've factored in the dog, the training, paying

25:40

the handler is something like two

25:42

dollars and fifty cents a test, and

25:45

the dog gives you the answer immediately.

25:48

So the dog is you got these

25:50

kids lined up, dog sniff, sniff, sniff,

25:52

sniff, sniff, finds a dog

25:54

has a positive, right, what is the dog doing. It

25:56

just sits till when the dog goes downline.

25:58

What we like to do is we line people up, we

26:01

have them, we have the dog go down as

26:03

they're facing forward. The dog goes down the

26:05

left hand side of the line

26:08

and it just does it quick. You'll see it's

26:11

a minimally invasive search. The

26:13

dog will put its nose on the back of

26:15

the person's hand. They target the hand if you have Oaton toe

26:17

shoes, and might target your feet. But it makes quick

26:19

contact with the skin.

26:22

But then it keeps going. The dog won't really break stride.

26:24

If it gets an odor and there's the presence of virus, then

26:26

you'll see the stop. It'll sniff more, it'll

26:28

investigate, and then I'll go into the sick

26:31

response. So that person who's been

26:33

identified as the dog is positive is then

26:35

pulled out for secondary school and take him a second go the

26:37

nurse's office and get a rapid test. The

26:40

next time a pandemic hits. We could have

26:42

dogs at the front door of every

26:44

school in America. We could have dogs

26:46

at the front door of restaurants, and dogs

26:48

in bars, and dogs in chain stations, and

26:51

dogs at the airport. We could have dogs

26:53

walking down the street checking out everyone

26:55

on the sidewalk. Your block could bend together

26:58

and have a dog come every night at dinner time

27:00

to sniff everyone. You could hire a

27:02

dog along with caterers at your daughter's

27:05

wedding or your son's bar mitzvah, or

27:07

every Sunday morning at church to make sure

27:09

you aren't holding a super spreader event.

27:12

Dogs give us the power to

27:15

move the needle from an arnot

27:17

of one to an arnat of

27:19

something less than one. That

27:25

is option two, the canine

27:27

option. But will

27:30

we go down that path? Forgive

27:32

me if I'm skeptical, because

27:34

to take option two we will need tens

27:37

of thousands of dogs, and we don't have

27:39

tens of thousands of dogs trained and

27:41

ready. And why don't we have a whole

27:43

national canine Guard trained and ready, matched

27:46

up with their handlers for any conceivable

27:49

future pandemic, a strategic

27:51

poppy reserve to call on whenever

27:53

an emergency happens. Because

27:56

at the end of the day, we don't really believe

27:58

in dogs. We like them

28:00

as friends, sure, but not

28:03

as medical diagnosticians. Maybe

28:23

you remain unconvinced that dogs could prevent

28:25

the next pandemic. It sounds goofy.

28:28

I know, painting labradors everywhere.

28:30

The dog does not wear a white coat. She

28:33

did not go to medical school or have a row

28:35

of diplomas on the wall of her doghouse.

28:37

She just uses her big, wet

28:40

nose. But allow me

28:42

a brief, final, and hopefully

28:44

persuasive digression on the indelicate

28:47

subject of colonoscopies. Have

28:50

you had one? You should? It

28:52

might save your life. But if you're over

28:54

the age of fifty and haven't gotten

28:56

around to getting one yet, I think

28:58

I know why they are a pain

29:00

in the You know what, You can't eat

29:03

for twenty four hours, Then you go to a medical

29:05

office and suffer the indignity of

29:07

being impaled on something long and painful.

29:10

But ten guesses about who is really

29:13

really good at detecting colon cancer?

29:16

Yes? Dogs? May

29:18

I refer you to the following research

29:20

paper published in the prestigious journal

29:23

GUT volume sixty, issue

29:25

six, first author Hidetos

29:27

Sonata of the School of Medicine at

29:30

Kiyushu University in Japan, entitled

29:33

Colorectal cancer screening with

29:35

odor material by canine

29:37

scent detection, with the conclusion

29:40

that a dog is just as good

29:42

as any alternative modern medicine

29:45

has come up with. When

29:47

was that paper published? January

29:50

of twenty eleven. That's how

29:52

long we have known that a dog with a few

29:54

months of training can come trotting

29:56

in and save the day. But

29:59

when you go to your gastro entrologist,

30:01

do you see a dog waiting there? Now?

30:04

You don't because we don't

30:06

believe in smill. We believe in sight

30:09

more faith in the impossibly complicated

30:11

and expensive and inefficient products

30:14

of our own technological imagination

30:17

than we do in the superpowers that nature

30:19

has bestowed on other animals. We

30:23

are, as a species narcissists,

30:27

and with covid our narcissism

30:30

caught up with us. We

30:41

don't have to live in an imperfect world. We

30:44

can fix things, We can mend

30:46

the broken and upgrade the mediocre.

30:49

But first we need to get over

30:52

ourselves. Let

30:54

Coolie and coal and

30:56

Florin show us the way

30:58

to a better future. The

31:14

Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle,

31:16

Lee Mingustu, and Jacob Smith, with

31:19

Eloise Linton and Anai

31:22

Our editor is Julia Barton, Original

31:24

scoring by Luis Gera, mastering by Flawn

31:26

Williams and engineering by Martin Gonzalez.

31:30

Fact checking by Amy Gains. Special

31:32

thanks to the Pushkin crew head of

31:34

Fane Carl Migliori, Maya

31:36

Kanig, Daniello, Lacon, Maggie

31:39

Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nick Cole Morano,

31:42

Jason Gambrell and of course Jacob

31:44

Weisberg. And a special thanks

31:46

to the dogs of Pushkin past and present,

31:49

Coco, Finn, Dash Potus,

31:52

Collette, Ninja Dorley,

31:54

funder Lichtenberg, Linus,

31:57

Zuzu, Freeway, the Poodle, Max,

32:00

Sparky Rocks, Rosie

32:02

Oslo and Mine

32:05

Biggie Smalls a brilliant harascipal

32:08

Adora Cat.

32:11

I know, I know, after all that I'm a cat

32:13

person. Sorry, everyone, see

32:15

you next season. But

32:36

is there a road here? Guys? We have to I don't

32:38

think there's a road here. I think this is. Yes, there is,

32:41

Look, okay,

32:43

okay, it could be wrong,

32:45

but it looks like a road to me. Yeah,

32:47

it's road. Right. Let's follow

32:50

up from guys. We're going to the land of the nose.

32:52

How can you not follow your nose? Does

32:54

a dog you look on the dogs do not look

32:57

on Google Maps. You're looking at ways

33:00

following the nose. That's

33:03

true. Last he did not have waves. No