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This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Bradley Cooper talks with me about his lifelong dream of conducting an orchestra.

Which he does in the new film Maestro. That's the New Yorker radio hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hello, I'm Lulu Miller. If you joined us. Last week, you met the hidden body part stowing away inside your body, and today we have another hidden story about life.

Here we go.

Wait, you're listening, okay?

Okay.

Radiolab from.

WNYC.

Okay, okay, let's do that then. Hey, this is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad. We're gonna do something that's a little bit unorthodox today, at least for us.

It's not a we can get through this a lot faster than CRISPR, okay?

I really like Crispr, by the way.

So do i.

I'm into it. Crispr is, Yeah, it's the bomb.

Yeah, that's a perfect, perfect way to describe it.

Biological bomb.

Okay, so, chapter two.

Maybe you could start the story the once upon a time.

Sure, so, once upon a time being.

Okay.

We basically had two kinds of living things on Earth, we had cellular life and we had viruses, and it was nice and distinct and clear cut, and so cells included us. Because our bodies are made of cells and bacteria, which are single-celled, and all the other things that can grow and let their cells divide. They have DNA, they have proteins in them and all the other stuff. And then over here you had viruses, and viruses were just little packages of genetic material that would go from cell to cell and use the cell to make new viruses.

I mean, they seem like so preliminary that they don't maybe not even qualify as life, right?

They can't grow on their own, they can't generate their own energy. So us and all other cellular life. We make a kind of a fuel called ATP, and we need that to do every little thing in our body, and viruses don't make ATP. So they're-.

So couldn't we say that life is u.s. cells and multicellular beings, and then there's like sort of pseudo-life, which is these little things that live off of us?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of people, a lot of scientists, don't really think viruses are truly alive. They just sort of take advantage of life to make more copies of themselves.

Can I ask a dumb question? So viruses, they don't have a wall around them in the way that cells are walls, essentially are walled off areas.

They might have a protein shell.

They do have containers that contain them for a while. I see. Isn't that one of the somebody who had a list of rules that make you alive? and wasn't it? a container was one of those rules?

I yeah.

But they don't do the energy, they have the container at least.

Right, so the problem with viruses is that they have some of the things that we think are essential for life, but not quite all of them. So it's been convenient just to say viruses are not alive. Put them over there because they don't have everything that cellular life has. So we'll just say they're not alive, they're just viruses.

Gotcha and then?

So then what happened is that there was a scientist named Timothy Robotham in England who was investigating a outbreak.

Timothy Robotham.

Timothy Robotham Yes.

That's a good English name.

Robotham was a fuck.

Timothy Robotham was working in Bradford City in England and he was looking at the kinds of bacteria that might be growing in a hospital. Like they were having some problems with pneumonia outbreaks and so on, and he was like, Okay, well, what's growing around here? And so he went to sort of a cooling tower for water on top of the hospital. And he took a sample and he went and put it under his microscope. And he's like, Hmm, some interesting bacteria here. Oh, here's a very interesting bacteria that doesn't really look like anything I've seen before.

Wait a minute. This guy would just kind of crawl around to weird places and just snatch little snippets of scum, or what would he? Yeah, what was he? what was his job?

He's a microbiologist. Oh, of course, so, you know, it would be good to know, like, I mean-.

Is that what microbiologists do? They just go scrape little bits of rock or water tower.

They search the world. Yeah, I mean, microbes are everywhere, so microbiologists go everywhere to find microbes, so they're even, you know, in a water tower on a hospital.

Was he in a kind of an investigatory role? He was trying to help them figure out which bacteria are making people sick?

That was one of the hopes, but, you know, he was thinking of doing a survey. Because you know, there are diseases like Legionnaire's disease, which can, you know, grow in these sort of containers of water. You know, there's some concern about that, so you know, better to get to know what's growing.

That's why the Coccus name comes up. Are you just referring to the shape?

So he's trying to study this thing, and he's trying to. So, when you're a microbiologist, the way you study bacteria is you get them to grow, and he can't get this to grow. He's feeding it things and it's like, it's not growing, why is it not growing? I can't figure it out. And eventually, you know, he just hits a wall.

It wasn't dying, it just wasn't growing.

Yeah, so he gave it to a scientist named Bernard Lascola and his colleagues, and they kind of put him-.

Bernard Lascola.

And he just says, I mean, he just sets it aside for a while and doesn't, you know, it's just more bacteria? And for some reason, he decided to, you know, take a look at this Bradford Caucus, you know, like, what was this thing that Robotham was talking about? So he looks at it and he says, Okay, this is the size of bacteria, but it looks like a gigantic virus. Hmm.

What is a gigantic a virus is usually very small.

Exactly.

So a bacteria to a virus is like-.

Like, hundreds of times bigger.

Hundreds of times, okay?

So it's a Queen Mary to a small thingy.

So he looked up close and he was like, What is this thing? This doesn't look right? this? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was a virus.

He's saying this based on its internal orientation.

Its appearance?

It's because it had the protein thingy, it had the stuff.

So a lot of viruses, they have. A shell made of protein, and the shell is kind of composed of plates, so it's kind of looks like a soccer ball.

Ah, hmm.

So it's a very distinctive look.

Okay, and it looked like that.

It looked like that didn't look like bacteria.

Oh, interesting.

He's like, Wait a minute, could this be a virus?

So this would be like it may be like finding an enormous soccer ball in the woods.

Yes.

So he'd found the Leviathan equivalent of a virus.

Right, it didn't make sense. It was kind of crazy in that microscopic realm to say, maybe this is a virus.

Wait, so didn't? So Brad Mumford, what's his name again?

Timothy Robotham.

Robotham didn't have this realization. Nope, he hadn't looked at it closely enough.

He looked at it.

But he just didn't somehow put that this is a virus.

It didn't click for him.

It was a Tuesday, you know, Wednesdays are, that's a virus day, and this was Tuesday.

And it's likely that other people were looking at these same things in years before.

And thinking they were bacteria, not realizing, as you're saying.

Here's a big, here's something the size of bacteria.

Well, in fairness, because viruses are always small, then you wouldn't think a big thing would be a virus.

Well, viruses are always small in the sense that they were discovered because they were small. So basically, what scientists did was they discovered viruses by filtering fluid from a sick plant or a sick animal through a filter. Porcelain, actually, and it was so small that anything the size of bacteria got trapped in the porcelain and anything smaller came out. Oh, and lo and behold. They could find things that could cause sickness in that fluid that passed through the filter.

Oh so, the discovery of viruses meant it was innately small, because that's how you filtered for them.

That's what they were looking for.

Interesting.

So there were probably generations of scientists who were looking in through microscopes, saw some interesting round thing and assumed it was bacteria and it was probably a virus.

What the fuck is this giant, giant Leviathan virus? I assume that was his question.

Well, I mean, first he had to really establish that it was. And so what happened was that. He looked very closely at it and kind of worked out its chemistry. And the more he looked at it, the more it looked like a virus. He started actually looking at its DNA, which hadn't been possible before, turned out that its DNA resembled the DNA of viruses and not of any known bacteria.

Just like a virus.

Exactly like a virus.

So you need to change the name from Bradford Caucus to something else.

Right, so they named it Mimi Virus.

Mimi virus, mimi virus.

Because they were in France and Mimi's in a French opera, I believe.

Because it was a mimic.

It was mimicking, oh, it was a mimic, like a little like a mini-me.

Mimi is that like a French word for mimic?

I think they just took the beginning of Mimic and added it to virus.

Mimi Virus very nice.

I guess it's the same thing twice. Mimi, It's like, Mimic, Yeah, okay, I get it so interesting. wow.

So this was really bizarre when they published the report on this in 2003, and then people really scratched their head. Because, remember, ordinary viruses have maybe 10 genes, this one had 1,018 genes.

Wow, wait, when you have 10 genes, those are the genes that, so you have a protein capsule and so you can swim through the thing. So when you land on a cell, you can burrow in and then explode and then make babies. So there's not much to being a virus, so you just need a few genes for that. Why would you need 1,000? What did you say?

Does this thing have particular talents that the other viruses didn't have?

Yes, maybe it was like that.

It does.

Oh, it does okay.

Well, so one thing that's really interesting is what happens when it goes inside its host, an Amoeba. It goes in, but instead of kind of shedding off that protein code and just spilling out its contents, it actually goes in and stays as it was.

You mean, it stays in a container and everything.

Yeah, it's called a virus factory, once it's inside there, it's this thing they call the virus factory, and it basically is able to.

Oh, so, it doesn't have to go into the nucleus of the already existent cell.

No, it just floats in there.

Oh, interesting. So what does it do, like, open a portal and it sucks up some stuff?

Yeah, it has this beautiful sort of. They call it a stargate, because it's a doorway shaped like a star, and things come in and then out, another stargate. These sort of manufactured things come out, and then in the cell, they assemble into new giant viruses.

Oh so, it spits out the raw materials and then self-assemble into a giant Leviathan.

No baby giant leviathans, which then how do they get out of the do they explode through the surface of the cell?

Yeah, they just blow out.

That's like a totally that's a totally different thing than a virus.

Yeah, I thought, normally viruses just go into the machine that's already there because they're parasites, they just use the living thing.

Yeah, this thing is, I have a weird kind of respect for this thing.

Oh yeah, it's amazing. And one of the amazing things about it is that it can get its own viruses. It gets. There are, really, yes, so there are viruses of viruses. These things are called virophages, and they actually go into the virus factory and hijack it.

Oh, wow.

Oh yeah, as soon as you have a virus factory, that's what a virus wants. So now that the virus has its own virus factory, well, it's gonna get. It's gonna be infected, viralized by the other viruses, right? Weird.

Yeah, weird is the right word, I think.

Right now, in 2003, you know, you could say, Well, this is one weird virus, but the scientists said, Well, hmm, I wonder what else there is like?-.

Well, did that wait a second? So they said, Okay. It's got all this extra genetic power. But it's doing this sort of special circus act here. It's building its own factory and it's just behaving differently from it. So maybe it just needs all those genes to do this special thing it's doing.

The problem was that when they looked at these, you know, 1,018 genes, most of them didn't match anything anyone had found before.

Hmm, these are new genes.

Genes Yeah, that you couldn't even guess at what they were at.

This has gotta be from like, this is like an alien, this is from Saturn, this thing is that where you're driving with this story.

Not quite, but kinda, I mean.

So wait a second. So they look at all the genes, they look at the chemistry of life as it's known, and they don't find any matches. For this little thing, this big thing, really.

For most of the genes, they couldn't find a match.

Huh.

Wow, that's a double mystery.

Like, what is this and where does it come from? Because it doesn't seem to have the smell of Earth life.

Yeah, except that it uses DNA, I mean, it uses protein, it uses our chemistry, but it's doing something weird. And so these scientists said, well, okay, they looked in an English hospital, you know, water cooling tower. Let's go look at one here in France. And so they looked, and they found another giant virus, which is even bigger than the one that they had already found.

Where was it in the hospital in France, in the air conditioning unit?

It was in another cooling tower.

Jesus, this is a cooling tower phenomenon so far.

Rooftop biology. Well, it's excitement galore.

It's more like the drunk looking for the keys under the lamppost, you know, it's like, you know that.

Oh, this is, wherever you look, there it is.

We know there was giant viruses found in one water tower, so let's go look in another water tower. Like, that's our safest bet. And hey, look, we found an even bigger one. You know which they which had?-?

An even bigger one.

It was even bigger, yeah, so instead of 1,018 genes, it had 1,059 genes, so they named this one mama virus.

Mimi's first cousin mama.

Right, right, right.

Did mama do things in the cells that Mimi didn't do, or did it also build the factory?

Yeah, it was making a virus factory, so it was like, So there's something. There's a common theme here with these two. Now you have two giant viruses doing the same thing.

And it's the whole Stargate and everything.

Yeah, what's weird is that, you know, the MAMa virus has a bunch of genes that Mimi virus doesn't have. So it's like, and again, don't match anything that-.

So they don't know what these extra ones do.

Some of them look like they're involved in building proteins, which doesn't make any sense because viruses are not supposed to do that. So it's this is all completely confusing. But then they say, like, Okay, maybe we need to kind of get away from the whole water tower thing and, you know, widen our little-.

Where would you go like? So the opposite of a water tower would be like the bottom of a well, or is it? Or do you go to a library and look in the interior of old parchment books?

No, you start looking at places like you look in the ocean, or you look in sediment, or you look inside animals, or you look in the soil. And they start finding giant viruses over and over and over again. Really, yeah.

In all those places, in many soil, inside of animals, like in animal tummies or something.

Yeah, so they went to these researchers, went to Brazil and said, let's go look at animals and see if we can find giant viruses. And they found a new species in cows, and they found a new species living inside of a monkey.

And these were, were they finding gianter, giant viruses? Yeah, I mean, the numbers of genes were going up and up and up.

Yeah, they would keep finding new record breakers, so the biggest one right now is called megavirus.

That's the summer movie megavirus.

I mean, there's-.

Bigger than Mimi, bigger than mama.

Mega in a world.

In a world.

You got it, that's right, it's like the truckasaurus, you know? Like this is like, I'm wondering what they're going to do as they keep finding bigger ones because you keep having to find superlatives for these things.

Well, where was Mega found?

Mega, I believe, was found in the ocean.

And how many genes does Mega have?

Mega has 1,120 genes, okay, so we're so, it has the most genes, but it's not actually the physically the biggest giant virus.

Which was.

So this one is called a Pandora virus.

God, they're so. It was found in a box, let me guess, in a sealed box, and then they opened it, and oh my God.

Well, it has this bizarre shape like an urn, which is completely nuts. There's no urn-shaped viruses. This is crazy.

And the urn? Did that remind somebody of the myth?

So Pandora's box was actually an urn.

Oh, it was okay, Oh, it was. Oh, I see.

Oh, why did they call it Pandora's Box then?

God, that's a very learned-.

Just to make you happy because you love where they found it.

Where did they find it?

So what they did was these Russian scientists they were collaborating with. Dug up frozen tundra that had been frozen for 30,000 years. And they said, let's thaw this out and see what's in there. What kind of things have been asleep for 30,000 years?

And it sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi movie right there.

Among other things, they found-.

The Frozen Land.

They found Pandora virus.

It did its thing.

It did its thing.

Wow, and how much bigger if the first giant virus you introduced it to was like an elephant-sized mouse?

I need to look at the numbers, but you're kind of going from elephants to dinosaurs, you're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We're not talking about Pandora. Virus is bigger than a lot of bacteria.

Wow, so wait a second. So these things are now being found everywhere you look.

They are incredibly common, they've even been able to get giant viruses out of people.

Really.

Yeah.

Where do you find them in a person?

In our intestines or something.

I believe they found one sample in somebody's lungs and another sample was found in someone's blood. But it's really hard to tell whether they're actually actively invading us and making us sick. Maybe instead of invading amoebas, they can invade human cells because amoeba and human cells are surprisingly similar.

It strikes me, though you have a category problem here. Yes, if you've got a giant virus that's virus-like in its general shell, but it's making proteins, it's got a bunch of genes that viruses don't have. You're already bigger than some bacteria. Shouldn't we call it as its own separate thing at this point?

That's what people are arguing about right now. I mean, do we keep that line between viruses and cellular life and just put the giant viruses with the viruses, or do we kind of blur the line a bit?

This feels like it's on its way from one category to the other.

So that's one of the big questions is like, what way did this thing go in evolution?

What does that mean?

Well, how do you get a giant virus?

How do you?

How do you? Well? So....

We'll get to the potential answer to that question, which I think is totally fascinating after the break.

Hi Rebecca Murray, here from Mount Vernon, Washington. I'm a member of Radiolab's exclusive membership program, The Lab. My membership provides Radiolab with a steady source of funding. So the team can continue to tell stories about our crazy world. And I get access to exclusive live events and bonus content. Join me in supporting the show we love.

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I just love the opera.

Never been, then come with me.

I'm Rhiannon Giddens, host of AriaCode, the podcast where together we explore the magic of opera, one song at a time for diehard fans and newcomers alike. The best part? No tux or ticket or high heels required. Listen to AriaCode wherever you get podcasts.

Hey Chad, here Radio Lab. So we're gonna return to our conversation with science writer Carl Zimmer. It's an unedited conversation. And we were talking about giant viruses and what they can teach us about life. Which really starts with a simpler question of, like, where the hell did they come from?

How do you get a giant virus?

Like, how do you?

How do you? Well? So, one clue comes from those genes. So now that they're finding more and more of these giant viruses, they're finding enough variety of them. They can look for some common genes that they share, some common mutations in genes, and they're finding actually that it looks like giant viruses might actually belong to one lineage.

Oh, interesting, Oh so, they're cousins, they have a common ancestor.

Yeah.

So it's a tribe of a star.

And if that's true, it could be an incredibly old tribe. These giant viruses could be a lineage, conceivably, that goes all the way back to the early stages of life.

The dawn of time in a world.

In a world.

It's really old, like back to the very beginning of life on Earth.

To that era, Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe when cellular life was getting started. But the question is, well, what were the giant viruses like then? Now? Some people have said, well, no, giant viruses actually started out as teeny, tiny viruses.

Oh, you mean, they were from the other side of the road, they were cellular life and then what, they switched sides.

Yeah, they changed teams, yeah, how.

No, that, like, I can't have a plant that becomes an animal.

How did they? So they've started off as like what we would call creatures.

They started out truly alive, you know, they-.

Like freestanding out there, in the air or the water, or the ground o.r.-.

Yeah, just some, like some free living microbe.

Yeah, and then-.

Well, then why would they? Why would you go demote yourself?

This is, this is your problem with parasites. You keep saying mean things about parasites. well, how many years have we been talking about parasites? Did I tell you nothing?

If I had a choice between being a having my own integrity and choosing to make a living on my own or to suck off you, I would just live on my own. Excuse me for I know you like parasites, but honestly.

Could you not use that passage in the re-recording, please?

It's already been cut.

It stands true, nevertheless.

We have a microbe that is that is doing its thing and then something happens.

Okay, but-.

What is the something?

It becomes a parasite.

It becomes a parasite.

Or at least, you know, maybe a symbiont here. Basically, what it does is it starts living inside another cell.

You mean, it gives up its integrity as a free life form, a freestanding life form.

Just so we understand what that means. That means that it's got a shell, it's got a border, it's making its own energy, it's replicating in the way that-.

At the beginning.

At the beginning.

At the beginning, it can make its own energy, it can grow, it can divide.

It can do all the things that living things do.

Yeah, and then, for some reason. It chooses to require some other creature's existence for its own, it has to become dependent on some other organism for its very, very existence.

Well, let's flip it the other way and say it discovers a wonderful new home inside of another cell. It comes in and is like,-.

Just like I love leaving my Park Avenue apartment for a dark cave, No. It's a new and exciting opportunity real estate-wise.

No, no, no, au contraire, au contraire. Like, imagine, let's imagine you're like Bear Grylls. Okay, let's imagine you are like hiking around and killing your own food. okay, let's try to picture this, okay.

Robert doing this.

You're gutting your deer, you're starting your own fires, you're going on and on and on. And you do that for, like, a few years and then, and you're walking through the jungle-.

And you're very, very skinny because it's not going well.

So Robert Krowich, the Haggard Hunter, and let's say, you're doing this in Minnesota, right? So it's like, cold, okay? And then suddenly, like.

There is one thing you left out. When I walk into this magical kingdom of Minnesota, it doesn't let me out. I can't leave ever again. Sure, you can't. I have become so dependent on its natural wonders that I lose my independence. My integrity and the very, very thing that I walked in with is now gone.

I'm stuck inside. We did literally have this conversation a few years ago.

We did, it's true.

We did, and I did point out to you at the time that you are quite dependent on other species. Do you want me to bring up? No, no, no, no, no no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So I will just say, see episode 32 or whatever.

Jad's eyes will roll right out of their sockets.

So like becoming being able to take advantage of another cell.

Were they making their hosts sick?

Probably yeah.

Probably.

Yeah, because giant viruses are not good to get.

Well, see, this complicates your mansion metaphor just a tiny bit. Because what it means is that you go in the conveyor belt and you're feeding yourself and you're having a good time. But then your filth starts to muck up the place and it starts to collapse from within. That doesn't sound so nice.

To strain the metaphor a bit.

Go boy, go boy.

Robert Prohich Robert Prohich.

Don't even start referring to me now, it's going to him.

Okay, I'm starting to understand.

So you spend some time in this wonderful mansion, you rest, it's warm, it's comfortable, so on you eat.

You fill it with your filth.

You start a family, you know, and then all of a sudden you and your descendants, you know, leave the mansion. The mansion just collapses from all the damage you did to it. But you know, actually, you see in the distance there's another mansion, let's just go over there.

I still got to walk, so I need my legs, so to speak, to get to the next mansion. But I don't need the powerful muscles that I would have needed to kill the deer. I can let go of those.

You don't even need, you know, let's say that you're, you know, you don't even need the knowledge of how to kill a deer.

You'd be blind, dumb and fat.

That's where you end up, so these things, these things turn.

These things get, they get rid.

They start getting rid of these genes.

And how does that happen?

Just, you know, a random mutation comes along and just cuts out a bit of DNA.

Oh, because it doesn't need them.

You're fine, Yeah, you're like, that's okay.

Is it a moment where, oh, there goes a big chunk of me?

Gone, yeah.

I don't need that.

I mean, that's a regular kind of mutation that happens all the time, really, in cells. Oh, yeah, yeah.

But then your successor being just travels a little bit lighter and is able to succeed just as well.

Right, so, you know, if we are born, you know, with a part of our DNA that's deleted. That had some, you know, like hemoglobin genes in it. Like, good night, like, that's bad, I mean, but you know? But if you cut out a gene that this giant virus no longer needs because it's got everything supplied to it in its host, fine, so let's chuck that, chuck it out, so you have this. So the idea is that you, that these viruses, they're giant viruses, but they're actually been shrinking.

And at a How fast does a giant like the imagining? Back in the beginning, there was, there was not Mega, not Gyno, but like, no in the beginning.

It was a cellular being right.

Oh, a cellular being. Yeah right, okay, so this is, I mean.

A cellular being, a cellular being right, with all of the privileges and joys of independent life.

Size-wise, it's a blimp, it's a massive thing. And then suddenly it starts to shrink bit by bit, by bit by bit. At what rate does it start to shrink and shed itself?

Well, it could be that these giant viruses we're finding, that these giant viruses that scientists are finding could be shrinking very, very, very slowly. Could be that there are other viruses that made this transition that shrank faster.

Hmm.

So, maybe, maybe.

It's a race to the bottom.

Maybe some tiny viruses are just former giant viruses that just shrank really fast.

Race to the bottom. That's such a different way of thinking about life. You generally assume being a multicellular organism yourself, that little things, in some deep sense, though, you're not supposed to say this, want to be big things.

You don't want to say this.

I know, I know, but most people, unlike you, asshole, most people think that it's better.

I learned in the podcast.

It's better to be more complex than to be simple, but here you're talking about a different voyage altogether. It might just work out for you to be simple rather than complex.

Well, given that viruses are insanely abundant on this planet, I mean, there are, by some estimates.

It's their world.

So apparently nature has not agreed with you, but it is interesting thinking about how life gets smaller and simpler.

This is interesting, yeah, if it's true that this trajectory is as common as you say that things start out. Sometimes start out big and then learn to live inside other things and in the process get smaller and smaller and smaller. And this is actually maybe what happens to a lot of viruses, not just some viruses. In a way, it gives the virus an honorable history.

This boy isn't going to sign up for that.

No, he's not going to sign up for that and I don't.

That's okay. Well, an honorable history, but then, I mean, it abandoned its free-living past, right?

It did.

It gave in to the temptations of the mansion, full of steak and ice cream.

It's true, but I've always assumed, and this is not something. One should assume, that viruses were a kind of proto-organism. They were somehow at the beginning of something and they never quite got going. Yeah, but you're actually saying that these viruses are in a way at the end, not at the end, but they're at the. I don't know how to quite use the words that I want to use. They feel somehow at the end of something, not at the beginning.

Yes, an end.

And that's interesting, I never that's-.

Yeah, that's very interesting. yeah, very interesting.

So life can go in different directions.

And how far can that reverse journey go? I mean, can you go from? Like, how big did that? was it ever? Like a turtle with things or no, like a giant dinosaur? No.

No, sorry, there are things called, I believe they're called myxozoans.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Myxozoans, you say free-living animals, you don't mean animals in the way that-.

Animals, animals.

Anyone would think of an animal.

Like a jelly-.

Oh, look, my pet, my pet. fluffly, not like that.

Well, my pet jellyfish.

Really, really, yeah. So you're saying a jellyfish-sized thing has now reduced itself to a tiny speck.

To a microscopic parasite of fish.

Get the f.

That's insane.

Really.

Like, going from something you can see and would want to avoid while swimming, down to something that you might even just breathe in without even knowing it.

Mm-hmm.

Wow, oh, you're blowing my mind, shrinking my mind.

What was it called again?

Myxozoan.

Myxozoan.

I believe they're called myxozoan, a myxozoan, yeah.

How do you spell that?

M-y-x-z-o-a-n?

I'm trying in my mind to construct a scenario where we, like the Myxozoan, could begin to shed, like if we were living inside. Like, not the iPhone, but the iHome, the iUniverse.

Well, you know, but the fact is that we, you know, we have cast aside some things. you know, what have we cast aside? Well, we can't.

I mean, we used to smell better, I know that.

We could smell better. We used to be able to make our own vitamin C in our own bodies, our own bodies were vitamin C factories. Really, yes.

What changed that? Why did we want to let go of that? That sounds great.

Sunshine vitamin C.

Yeah, making your own supply of vitamin C well, if you are sitting around eating fruit all the time, fruit which is loaded in vitamin C. Then, if you get a mutation on your vitamin C gene, well, you're fine. Because you're getting your vitamin C from somewhere else. You don't feel that lack, you know?

I see.

You don't start getting scurvy because you're feeding yourself on fruit. And then that mutated gene may then spread out and end up being in every member of your species, which seems to happen to us. I mean, you can literally, like, See, we have these broken vitamin C genes.

So sometimes we shrink, too, yeah.

This is fact checker Carl Scolding rambling Carl.

Okay.

Okay, we were saying that this microbiologist, Tim Robotham, took his samples to France, but actually there was another microbiologist named Richard Bertels that did it. Gotcha, Small but important.

Sorry, Richard.

Our apologies, and MAMA virus turns out to have 1,023 genes, not 1,059 genes. My apologies. Then I started talking about megavirus at the time, in 2011, it was indeed the biggest virus known 1,120 genes. Okay?

How many?

It has 2,500.

Also, at a certain point, we do refer to Pandora virus as being the biggest virus in size, actually that distinction goes to pithovirus. And also it seems that since we talked, there's evidence that there might actually be a couple separate lineages of giant viruses. One may have evolved from big to small as we talked about, but another one might have gone in the usual direction from small to big.

There's one last thing that I see. So apparently I didn't quite spell myxozoan correctly.

I mean, I'd be lying if I say I didn't think a little bit less of you now. Okay, extra o back in.

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