^B00:00:13 >> Hello there and welcome back to National Book Festival Presents, brought to you by the Library of Congress. My name is Marie Arana and I'm the literary director of the Library of Congress. Our program today is part of a topical series called Understanding the Pandemic. We hope these conversations will add context, background and a great deal of clarity to this COVID-19 pandemic we're living through right now in real time around the globe. Our featured author today is David Quammen, a distinguished science writer and journalist. His books include The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, The Song of the Dodo. His most recent is The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. Today we're focusing on his fascinating book Spillover, a deeply researched and engagingly written work that explores the animal to human impact of emerging diseases, especially viral diseases. Spillover, apart from having won prizes when it was first published in 2012, has reemerged as a bestseller for obvious reasons. There is much we can learn from it. David Quammen will be interviewed by David Rubenstein, himself the author of a recent book, The America Story: Conversations with Master Historians. David Rubenstein is a great friend of the Library of Congress and the cochair of our very successful National Book Festival. Welcome back, David. >> Thank you very much, Marie. I'm here in Bethesda, Maryland and I have the privilege of interviewing now David Quammen about his book Spillover. David, thank you very much for agreeing to let me interview you. >> David, thank you. Very good to be with you. >> Thank you very much for writing this book. It came out in 2012 but the essence of your book was that there would be a pandemic of significant amounts. Now when you wrote this in 2012, did your friends say you're a little bit crazy? >> They did. ^M00:02:14 ^M00:02:18 They thought that this was sort of an eccentric interest of mine, something that was sort of off at the medical fringe, yes. These zoonotic diseases, they may be real, they may be horrific. You've described them very vividly, but those are things that happen to other people. I think that was the general reaction. Not that the book did poorly or was dismissed. But there was some tendency to think that this was -- this was not a hugely central important topic. >> So do you take any delight in what's happened? Have you called any of your critics and said, "By the way, have you read my book lately?" Or you haven't done that? >> I haven't had to do that, frankly. I did have a friend who I saw on the street about three weeks ago and he essentially asked me how it feels to be prescient. And I said, "I'd rather be wrong right now." >> Right. So let me take you through the essence of the book, if we could for those who haven't read it. I highly recommend people read it if they really want to understand that's going on. But the essence of your book, as I understand it -- I'm a layman, not a scientist -- is that we have 7.5 billion people on the face of the earth. And these 7.5 billion people are now crowding closer and closer to a lot of the animals on the earth. And as a result we are interacting maybe more than we should. In some ways we're interrupting their food supply chain and they're interrupting our food supply chain. And the result is diseases or viruses are escaping from animals and getting into humans. Is that the essence of it? >> It is, David, yes. I mean, we humans have always interacted with wild animals. And for as long as we've been a species which if you take maybe 200,000 years as a reasonable estimate, that long, we have not only been interacting with and capturing and eating wild animals, but presumably getting some pathogens from them, having some spillovers. It didn't matter as much until we got to be so concentrated on this planet, you know, 7.5 or 7.7 billion of us as you say living, many of us in dense aggregations in cities. And coming in contact with wild animals for food, and as we destroy habitat. And also traveling so much, so interconnected ourselves. So that's what has -- those are the factors that have turned this into a really global problem. >> So let's make sure we understand what happened in this particular pandemic. This is, COVID-19 is a disease that many people think, a virus that escaped from a wet market in China. Do you agree with that? >> Well, not quite. There is some interesting work from the very beginning. I've been rereading some of the papers and one of the very earliest coming out of China says that there have been 41 cases of this strange, abnormal pneumonia. And most of those cases are directly associated with the Guanan wholesale seafood market, most of those cases. But it turns out only 27 of those 41 have any traceable connection with the market, including -- well, not including the very first case which was a person who showed symptoms on December 1st. And that case and 13 others seem to have come from somewhere outside of the market. So the virus was perhaps circulating in the city of Wuhan before December 1st. And then possibly humans carried it into that notorious wet market as well as carrying it out of that wet market. >> Now for those who don't live in Asia, what is a wet market? And why are they thought by many people to be dangerous? >> Right, well a wet market is essentially a fresh food market. It might contain seafood. It might contain cuts of, you know, of beef and pork, lots of fresh vegetables. A wet market is not inherently bad. But in some cases wet markets also contain wild animals captured from the wild, brought in live in cages. And that is an excellent way of bringing new viruses not only closer to humans, but closer to all aspects of our food source. >> So if you were -- let's say you go to a wet market and you see a porcupine that people might want to buy to eat. Or you might see a bat that some people might want to buy to eat. If the bat or the porcupine is sick, wouldn't it be dead by now? Why wouldn't the virus have killed it? How does a virus live in an animal and then it escapes to us and hurts us but doesn't hurt them? >> Very good question. And the answer is that that virus may have been living in that species of bat for a million years and may have come to an accommodation with that kind of bat so that it no longer causes disease. It may be living at low concentrations, low viremia, low -- just low numbers in what we call the reservoir animal, the natural host or the reservoir host. So the virus is carried by that kind of animal asymptomatically. And then when it spills over, that's the term we use, spills over into a new kind of host, then all bets are off. The accommodation no longer exists. The virus may replicate rampantly, may find a way to transmit individual to individual. And at that point it becomes a disease issue. >> Now it seems as if there are a lot more bats in the world than I ever realized from reading your book. It seems like -- I think you said a quarter of the mammals are bats. I didn't realize there were that many bats. >> That's right. Yeah, it's counterintuitive, but bats seem to be overrepresented as the reservoirs of these viruses. And one possible reason for that is bats are overrepresented in the diversity of mammals on earth. As you say, one in every four species of mammal is a species of bat. >> Why are bats so likely to have a virus that will spread? Why is it not some other animal? What is it about bats that make them spread these viruses? >> A couple of other things about bats that make them special and make them possibly objectively overrepresented and don't just seem to be overrepresented as reservoir hosts. First of all, bats are a very old group of animals and they have been carrying viruses for a long time. Individual bats can live a long time. A little bat the size of a mouse might live 15, 18 years. A mouse is lucky to live one or two years. And they roost together in dense aggregations, in huge colonies. I've seen a patch of bats on the wall of a cave that contained about 60,000 bats. It looked like a buffalo robe hung as a decoration in a Montana living room. But it was 60,000 bats, according to our estimate. And so social aggregation, living long individual lives gives an opportunity for viruses to recirculate in the bat population. And then finally there is evidence that bats have evolved immune systems that are less sensitive, have higher thresholds of reaction to viruses. And that may contribute to this also. >> Now do humans have viruses that we spread to animals? ^M00:09:37 ^M00:09:38 >> We do. We can spread our viruses, our pathogens generally in the other direction. The people who control mountain gorilla tourism in eastern Congo and in Rwanda for instance are very careful that when people go up to spend their precious hour or so in the presence of a habituated group of mountain gorillas, those tourists are not allowed to go if they're showing respiratory symptoms or some kind of an infection. Because God forbid that somebody should get just a garden variety cold or some worse kind of respiratory infection into the mountain gorillas. Then the entire subspecies might be killed off. >> Now when a virus spreads from an animal to a human, that's called zoonotic. Is that right? >> Yeah, zoenetic or zoonotic. >> Okay. So let's talk about a couple of these things. Let's first make sure we understand, what's the difference between a bacteria that comes from an animal and a virus that comes from an animal? >> Right, right. A bacterium -- bacteria are cellular creatures. There is a living cell with a cell wall and internal organs and complex -- relatively complex processes going on inside that cell. All bacteria are cellular. We are cellular, animals are cellular, plants are cellular, fungi are cellular, bacteria are cellular. Viruses are not living cells. Viruses are just genomes, either DNA or RNA, genetic material wrapped in a protein coat and sometimes with a lipid envelope around it. So viruses can only live a parasitic life history. They cannot replicate themselves unless they have penetrated the living cell of some other creature. >> So I want to go through some of the zoonotic diseases you talked about. Before I want to talk about your background a moment. Because you seem to be one of the few people I know who did something as a little boy and you've been able to continue to do that the rest of your life. As a little boy you were interested in biology and you were interested in writing. >> It's true. >> And you have a career that does both. Is that true? >> It is true, absolutely. Since the age of about 11 or 12, I've bene interested in two things. Interested in the natural world and interested in writing. As a little kid I was one of those little kids who wrote poems and stories and things. But I spent much of my time in the woods, you know, adjacent to my house in the suburbs of Cincinnati. There was a hardwood forest. I just lived in that hardwood forest. And then, I think, David, what decided the path through life for me is that I had some great teachers. You know how important great teachers are. I had some great teachers who were English teachers, and I had good teachers who were biology teachers. But I never was sort of -- came into the ambit of a great biology teacher who inspired me and who turned me into a biologist. Otherwise I probably would have been one. >> So you went to a Jesuit high school and you were probably going to go to Jesuit or Catholic college. And all of a sudden somebody said, "How about Yale?" How did that come about? ^M00:12:50 ^M00:12:51 >> One of those great teachers, the second of the three great teachers in my life was a Jesuit priest named Thomas Savage, taught me English as a senior in this Jesuit high school. And one day he sort of threw his arm over me and said, "So where are you applying to college, David?" And I said, "Well, Georgetown, Holy Cross and Boston College, Father." And he said, "Fine, yeah, okay. Those are good Jesuit schools. Have you thought about Yale?" And I said -- you know, I was a very Catholic kid, a very pious Catholic kid. And I said, "Yale? That's a non-Catholic college, isn't it, father?" "Well, yes, but it's a great school and they have a great English department." "What's so great about their English department?" "Well, they have Penn Warren for starters." I said, "Who's Penn Warren?" And four years later the third great teacher in my life was Robert Penn Warren who became my mentor and friend when I was a junior in college. >> So you did get into Yale, you went there. You became very close to Robert Penn Warren, a great writer, wrote All the King's Men among other great works. And you worked for him in the summertime as well, in his place in Vermont. But how did you become a Rhodes Scholar? Were you a superstar athlete as well? Or what did you do? A student leader? >> No. No. I was -- the notion that you have to be a varsity athlete to be a Rhodes Scholar is a misconception. It doesn't hurt. They look for people who have some sort of a prowess or a strong interest or an accomplishment in addition to good grades. The way I became one was that one time again in my senior year, Robert Penn Warren said to me, "Are you applying for a Rhodes Scholarship?" And I said, "A Rhodes Scholarship? What's that, Mr. Warren?" He said, "Well, it's two years at Oxford." And I said, "Well, I don't want to spend two years doing graduate work at Oxford. I want to be a writer like you." And he said, he literally said -- came out of his chair and said, "Well, of course you don't want to spend two years at Oxford, because you'll be three hours form Paris, man." ^M00:15:00 ^M00:15:01 And I said, "Yes, sir." And so he said, "Well, fine, I'm going to write you a recommendation." The next thing I knew, I was at Oxford. Well, there were a couple of stages, a couple of things. >> There are 32 Americans that are picked every year to be a Rhodes Scholar. You graduated from college in 1970. You're a Rhodes Scholar. You got your degree from Oxford in between doing some political work, you came back and decided to become a writer. Did your family tell you that's nota great way to make a living? ^M00:15:27 ^M00:15:29 >> I had a saintly family. My parents were very, very supportive. And it didn't hurt that I had already published one novel by that time. I published a novel that I wrote while I was an undergraduate. It was published by Alfred Knoff three months after I graduated. So while I was at Oxford, I had a little bit of extra money from this novel. So that when I left Oxford and moved to Montana in '73, I thought, "Okay, I've published a novel. I get to be a novelist in Montana now." And then I paid my dues between the first book and the second book instead of more conventionally before the first book was published. >> So you did some bartending or other things? >> I did all -- yes. I was a bartender. I was a waiter. I was a fishing guide. I was sort of a ghostwriter for a while. And then finally caught on as a freelance writer. >> You did some writing for about a dozen years for Outside Magazine and other things. And so you really know the outside world and you know conservation pretty well. In preparing for your book, in writing this book, you spent some time traipsing around the world looking for some of the sources of some of these diseases. What was the most dangerous experience you had? ^M00:16:42 ^M00:16:43 >> Well, I suppose in retrospect -- I mean, there were some -- there were some days in the Congo when we were looking for gorillas to draw blood samples, hoping to find Ebola antibodies. And some other time I spent looking for Ebola, never finding it. But in retrospect, probably the most dangerous thing I did was climb into a cave in southern China with a young scientist who was looking for the reservoir host of SARS. And once we were in this cave, we started catching bats with butterfly nets. Or he was catching them, and his colleagues were and they were putting them in cloth bags and handing the cloth bags to me inside this cage. And we were not wearing PPE of any sort. We were not even wearing surgical masks. >> This was not a Lindblad tour, I guess. >> This was not Lindblad. This was the Alexei Chumora tour of southern China. >> Okay. So you did some of these dangerous things, but let's go back to some of the diseases you've written about. So you've mentioned a few. Let me take you back a moment. Where did smallpox come from? ^M00:17:46 ^M00:17:47 >> Smallpox presumably came from a pox virus of animals a long time ago. But by the time we discovered it with modern science and started looking at it as a human disease, it had evolved to the point that it was no longer a zoonotic disease in the narrow sense, passing repeatedly from nonhuman animals into humans. It was our virus alone. But it's related to cow pox and chicken pox and some of the other pox viruses. >> Is that the same with polio as well? >> Yes, correct. Yes. The reason that we could eradicate smallpox in the human population and that we have been coming close to eradicating polio is that both of those viruses are human-only viruses. >> I see. >> So once we get them eradicated, they're not going to be spilling over into us from animals again. >> Now there wasn't many years ago an effort to figure out the source of the Nile river. And people went to Africa to figure out where that was. When you tried to figure out where Ebola comes from, you were not as successful as the people who found the source of the Nile, were you? >> No. It was -- oh, who was it? Alan Moorehead who wrote those great books about the search for the Blue Nile and the White Nile. No. I mean, I followed the scientists who were looking for the reservoir host of Ebola, and I interviewed a lot of scientists who had looked for it. And for years and years it remained a mystery just where Ebola virus lives when it's not killing humans. >> But Ebola scared so many people a few years ago in the United States, and also in Africa because it's so deadly. 80% of the people who get it die. Is that more or less true? Or something like that? I think it's more like 60%, but yeah, it's got a horrific case fatality rate. >> Okay. So another disease that you mention is HIV. Where did HIV come from? >> Well, this is a story very different from what we commonly think we know about the origins of HIV. People think of 1980, 1981, there's this strange disease, an immune malfunction infecting people, hemophiliacs and men who have sex with men. And San Francisco and New York in the early '80s. But as I describe in Spillover, there's a deeper story and it goes back to 1908, give or take a margin of error. And to the southeastern corner of Cameroon. There is wonderful and very persuasive molecular work that's been done particularly by two groups. One led by Beatriz Han, one led by Michael Waraby that has shown that the ecological origins of the AIDS pandemic traces back to a spillover of a simian virus, a chimpanzee virus from a single chimpanzee into a single human in the southeastern corner of Cameroon, central Africa, back around 1908, give or take a margin of error. And then for decades it percolated slowly out of southeastern Cameroon to some of the big cities of central Africa such as what was then Leipoldville. And then later when Leipoldville became Kinshasa under a liberated Congo, it got from there to the New World and to the rest of the world. >> Where did SARS come from? ^M00:21:10 ^M00:21:11 >> SARS we now know came from a reservoir host, a kind of bat in southern China. Spilled over into humans in Guangdong province around the Pearl River delta, some of the big cities like Guongzhi in late 2002. Got to Hong Kong, got into a hotel then called the Metropol Hotel. It was spread on the 9th floor of the Metropol Hotel. And then people got up, having finished their vacations and flew home to Toronto and to Singapore from the Metropol Hotel, taking this virus with them. It also got to Beijing and a few other cities. >> Now there was a discoverer, an explorer many years ago, Ponce de Leon who was trying to find the fountain of youth. He never found it. Is that the same with vaccines? Are we going to find vaccines? We don't have one for HIV. We don't have one for Ebola, do we? Are there vaccines? >> We do. Yeah, we do have a couple of vaccines for Ebola now. >> What about HIV? >> No, not for HIV. >> I see. >> But that's because HIV evolves so quickly. That's one of the reasons, anyway. It's been very difficult. >> And do you think it's realistic to find a vaccine in the near term for the current pandemic we have? >> As long as you define near term as a year or more, yes. I'm very hopeful, based on what I hear from the scientists, Tony Fauci and others, that we will get a vaccine for this. This virus doesn't evolve as quickly as HIV. It doesn't evolve as quickly as the influenzas, although it evolves relatively quickly. So we should be able to get a vaccine for this virus. And once we have it, that vaccine should be good for -- I would just a rough guess, for a few years at a time at least. We wouldn't require a new one every year. >> When SARS arose or the bird flu arose, people were injured and killed but not quite as much as we are now experiencing. What was done with SARS or bird flu that is different than is being done now? Or is this virus just much more lethal? >> Well, this is the most insidious virus we've faced in a long, long time. This virus is more dangerous than the SARS virus, although the SARS virus had generally a higher case fatality rate. It didn't spread as well as this virus. It wasn't as infectious and most importantly it didn't spread to any great degree through silent transmitters, cryptic transmitters, people who felt fine, were going to work or going to public places. And yet we're shedding the virus. That's one of the things that makes this virus so dangerous. >> So what is the lesson in your study of all this that you would give to government officials when these kind of things arise? What should government officials do? And do you think in this case government officials in China or the United States could have done more realistically than was done? >> Well to answer the second part of that first, yes, absolutely. This is a huge failure of -- failures of imagination, failures of preparedness. We had the science. We identified this virus fairly quickly. We had the technological capacity to develop diagnostic tests, accurate ones, quickly and in great number. We didn't do it. It was a failure at the policy level and leadership level to -- to imagine how bad this thing could be. And one fellow told me -- a public health official told me that he thought that the main problem is that politicians and leaders are risk-averse, particularly risk-averse to spending a lot of money on preparedness that might not turn out to be necessary during your term of office. You know that the next pandemic is coming. Are you going to spend $20 billion, $80 billion in preparedness and then find out, well it didn't happen during your term of office? And you're going to have to answer for that expenditure. That seems to be one of the things that was at play here. People were not able to imagine how important it was to invest in preparedness against something that might not happen in the next four years, but was going to happen eventually. >> Based on your study, do you think there will be a reappearance of this virus in the wintertime of this year? ^M00:25:42 ^M00:25:44 >> Well, I don't think this virus is going away. I don't think this virus is ever going to be out of the human population now. So there may be a second wave after some states and some governments start to open up. That might happen well before this fall or this winter. That could happen this summer. There might also be a wave when people are staying inside again in the northern hemisphere and the air is drier and cooler just as we see with influenza. There may be a synergistic wave of influenza, seasonal influenza plus this virus. So I think it's going to be hitting us over and over again in the coming years. And probably stay with us the way measles has stayed with us. >> So if somebody is a hunter killing animals or somebody is working on a farm, what should they do to prevent themselves from getting one of these type of viruses? ^M00:26:40 ^M00:26:42 >> Well, if you're a hunter killing wild animals for food, you are inherently putting yourself at some risk. Now I say that -- you know, I live in Montana. People hunt and kill animals for food all the time here. We don't call it bush meat. We don't call it wet markets. We call it game. And it bears no, you know, onerous connotation. So I don't know if it's fair to condemn that. A lot of the -- for instance, in Africa there's a lot of subsistence hunting, people living on the edge of the forest, people living in villages, eat wild animals for food. That is -- I don't think that we can say that's across a moral border that, you know, eating deer and elk in Montana is not across. ^M00:27:26 ^M00:27:28 But it's inherently risky. And the more diverse the ecosystem is, the greater the risk, the more virus diversity there will be in there, the greater the chances that something will spill over into humans and then be passed human to human. >> Now what are you personally doing and your family to protect yourselves against getting this virus? Are you walking around with a mask all the time? Are you isolating yourself? What are you personally doing in Montana now? >> We have the luxury of isolating ourselves in a very comfortable house in a neighborhood on the south side of Boseman, Montana. The state until a couple days ago was under a closure order by our governor Steve Bullock. Now that is being lifted because we have very, very few cases. But we're still isolating. I haven't been in a building other than my house for a month. Not a single building. ^M00:28:20 ^M00:28:21 We walk the dogs around the neighborhood. We're allowed to do that. We're not hugging or having cocktails with friends. We're staying away from everybody. It's just my wife and I and our animals inside the house. We have the luxury. We're not put out of work because we're staying in our houses. I've got great sympathy for the people who are unable to make a living right now because they're self-isolating. We're the fortunate ones. >> Well, you seem to have a lot of books you could be reading in your house, right? >> I'm catching up on my reading, yeah. >> So what is the main message you would like to give people about this book? This book was written in 2012. What was the message you wanted to give then? And what's the message you would like to give today eight years after you wrote this? >> Well, actually one of the messages -- "messages", I'll use your word there -- is that a book about science, a book even about gruesome diseases can be literary. Can be a pleasure to read, can be surprising, can be, I hope, a literary work of art. You know, if I were just interested in delivering information to people, I would write nothing but op-eds. I write books because a book is a work of literary -- literary construction and I care about that. But on the other hand, yes, this book has a serious message. And that is that these outbreaks, these epidemics, these -- in this case a pandemic -- these are not things that are simply happening to us. These are not independent events. These are part of a pattern and that pattern reflects things that we 7.7 billion humans are doing in the way we interact with the rest of the natural world on this planet. And we need to change that or there's going to be more of these and they will be just as bad as this one. >> So should I be worried if I ask you what your next book is about? Because you might be so prescient about another problem coming. What is your next book going to be about? >> You know, sometimes I'm coy, but I can't be coy about this book project. I was working on a book about cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. And my publisher Simon and Schuster has asked me if I would please push that aside for now and do a book for them on COVID-19. So I know there will be lots of books about COVID-19, but Simon and Schuster has said to me that they want theirs to be by me. And so I don't know if it's an opportunity, but it's a responsibility. I'm going to try and write the best book about COVID-19 I can and try and write a book that other people wouldn't write. >> And when do you think that might be out? ^M00:30:59 ^M00:31:00 >> Well, they want me to deliver in two years. >> Two years. Okay. Well, I'll look forward to reading that. And I highly recommend that people read this one in the interim period of time. It's a really fascinating read and scary at times, but it's really got information I think people should have. So David, thank you very much for being part of this program. >> Thank you very much, David. Really good to talk with you. Stay safe, be well. >> Bye. >> Bye-bye. ^E00:31:26