Funky Hand Jive

Radio Lab is supported by the Johns Hopkins Cary Business School, helping to advance careers with the flexible MBA that is 100 online Johns Hopkins Cary Business School. Build for what's next? Learn more at cary.jhu..edu.

On the next, notes from America, finding optimism in unexpected places.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay.

All right, okay.

All right.

You're listening to radio lab, radio lab.

Jack Gilbert.

Jack Hey, hi Jack, Jack Gilbert is director of the Microbiome Center at the University of Chicago. And then I don't have President Kennedy around anymore, so I got myself, you're going to be President Kennedy for these purposes.

Cheers.

This is Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. Have you ever been, have you ever had your hand shaken by a person who you that you feel like you'd like to have his or her stuff sustained? Yeah, I'm not that weird or creepy. OK, fair enough, no, there's no part of anyone else that I just want to purge.

What about if you got Carl Sagan's underwear? Would you keep Carl Sagan's underwear?

No, sorry, but I have come to love and embrace all bacteria that want a part of my body.

You are awesome.

So am I your man for this? You are absolutely the man for this? And and and are you kidding me? I will so pick up food that fell on the floor and eat it.

Me too.

Which is always we knew it was bullshit anyway. All right, so let me explain what it is I want to do. I don't think no one exactly knows the answer to this question. But if a person shakes another person's hands for an ordinary interval, then the question is how much of person A lands on person B, and how much of Person A stays on Person B? But, most crucially, for how long?

They're all over. So every mucosal surface in your body, so your mouth, your gastrointestinal tract, all the way down your skin, your fingernails, your urogenital tract, your ears. Every part of you. That's your butt. Your butt, especially your butt, is covered in bacteria. And just sitting here, you're actually releasing into the air around. You think Pig Pen from the Peanuts cartoon, remember?

How do they come off of me?

They are literally leaving off on the surface of your skin cells that you're shedding and through your respirations, coming out of your nose and your mouth. Okay, also detaching, so a lot of them, they dry out on the surface and they can literally just drift off as dust.

But just so I understand the anatomy of the room. All over this room. On the doorknob, on the table surface, on his pants, on the desk and on the chairs, there's neal everywhere.

A lot of them are colonic neal, so a lot of them are actually coming out of your pants. And they are on the surface of the chair, and they deposit a fine patina of cells.

Colonic is a multi-syllabic word, but I think we understand what you mean.

Yeah, yeah, they are poop bacteria.

Why would that be?

It's the largest resource. But he's not able to get out of me, and he does quite all the time.

All the time, even though this is not a bathroom.

Even though this is not a bathroom.

The surfaces of chairs would have them most.

Yes.

All right, so now let me just time question real quick. So Jack needs about 20 minutes for us to do this handshake experiment, that's by the way. Producer Kenny Malone.

Why don't we start the experiment now? That's a good idea, and then we have time to talk in between, talk about it.

Okay, all right, what are you going to do?

So what we're going to do is we have little test tubes here.

By the way, I'm not offering you my butthole for this experiment. it doesn't matter. it doesn't mean I am offering you my butt microbes. Just stand up.

So, in each one of these.

We're going to do hands.

Absolutely so. We have these little sterile tubes, so each tube, little green cap tube has a sterile swab in it, with a completely sterile tip. We're going to open that up and very quickly. Rub very vigorously each of your hands, so your palm the inside of your fingers.

So this is your control sample.

This is the starter, the starter, okay, and then you are going to shake hands with the young man over there, right with Robert, and we're going to. Definitely. I'm trying to see how many you have received from Neil and how many Neil has received from Robert.

Wait, he is swabbing your hands before you handshake so that he can figure out what's the baseline that you've got on both your hands pre-handshake. Right? And he's sure you're going to have different bacteria on your hands, you and Neil.

So this is where it gets very interesting. So you have very specific types of bacteria, and he has very specific types of bacteria, but they're unique to you.

I mean, I guess, like, I mean, like, if I just think about it for a second. Like the two of you had different days. You arrive in this office, you've probably touched different places, you've eaten different things. So okay, maybe you have a little bit of difference. But in general, you are both men living in New York City, breathing the same air, riding the same subway. Yes, exactly, so why would you be that different from one another?

Right, exactly.

Because at this point, you're this pristine, unadulterated hunk of biomass, the bacteria. They're like, give me a ride, I'm going to jump on.

Yeah, the bacteria colonize that surface, because that's what bacteria do.

And so finally, when the baby's born, the doctors, they take it. You make sure they're stable breathing. And then right up onto mom to start to immediately promote the bonding and the skin-to-skin.

It's a very dynamic hug.

And bacteria go pew, they leap from the mom's skin onto the baby.

I did this for both my children, I took both of them onto my bare chest at birth.

You wanted to compete against your wife, huh?

Absolutely, maybe a little bit of daddy was a helpful thing, you know, who knows? So yeah, that was the reason I did it.

And the thing is....

We'll start, so I'll do your first one.

The strains of bacteria that we get in those first few hours....

Okay, so give me your right hand.

And then, to a lesser degree, the bacteria that we meet later in the first year of our life. When we stick weird things in our mouth that the dog comes by. You ready, those strains of bacteria stick with us, ready, set, forever go.

So we're going to swab it as much as possible.

Even the bacteria that Jack will find it tickles now on Neil's hand, and now we'll do, Robert, and on my hand, all over the fingers, okay, in between.

There we are and we'll pop that back in there.

And crazily enough, even if you try to get rid of your bacterial inheritance, you know, put a salve on, get rid of all your skin bacteria, take lots of antibiotics and get rid of all your tummy bacteria. And then move to some completely different part of the world, where the food is different and the temperature is different. Still, the bacteria you got from your mom will come creeping back. Why? why would that be? Well,...?

There's something in ecology called the founder effect, whereby the first organisms to get there and to be successful in an environment. They alter the trajectory of the rest of the ecosystem and change how it develops, right? So, you know, if a tree species, certain type of tree, lands on an island and becomes dominant, then it will support the types of birds and the types of monkeys, and the types of insects that love that type of tree. And so the same is true in the microbiome, so you know, you have a lifelong partnership with the bacteria you interacted with.

So we know that Neil and I each have a unique mix of microbes, almost to the point where they're like a fingerprint. But if we shake hands, just a mere hello, hello, handshake. How much of his is going to get on me, how much of mine is going to get on him? And most important of all is, how long will the exchange microbially last?

So next step, you guys got to shake hands, I want you to shake hands. Just as if you were meeting in a hall and you were like, Hey Neil or Hey Robert, nice to meet you and just shake hands.

Okay, ready? Now? I have to, like, think about how to actually shake hands. It's like, wait, wait, how did that work?

Ready?

One, two, three.

Robert, good to meet you.

Hi, how are you? Good to see you again? Good to see you again, All right.

Okay, now, Neil, right hand, you can feel it there, I feel it.

I'm going to grab something. Oh yeah, get my index finger too, because you got a little, because the palms didn't touch as much as the fingers. And so every five minutes for the next 20 minutes....

And then we're going to swab your hand again.

Jack swabbed both Neil's hand and my hand.

I'm actually pulling off a slight patina of bacteria, but.

Just checking to see if any bacteria moved and for how long. So wait, what happened? Did you wait what happened? Well, why would I tell you now when we have the advantage of a short break?

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. Sign up at radiolab..org. Slash join.

On this week's On the Media.

Tales from the trenches of the digital news business a failure, a success, and a couple of hopefuls, as the editor-in-chief of Defector told me. When you aren't determined to grow at a rapid pace and you aren't beholden to corporate bosses, running a media company really isn't that complicated.

Don't miss this week's On the Media from WNYC.

Find on the media, wherever you get your podcasts.

One minute after the handshake, and then around every five minutes for about 25 minutes.

What exactly does he do? After he swabs them? Well, he takes our bacteria back to the lab, and he identifies our bacteria by their DNA.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

It strikes me this is a whole new science, isn't it? There are a thousand things you could wonder about.

Well, yes, it is a whole new science, it's a science that's on the cutting edge. We're still researching and developing it, and it will take many years before we're ready for prime time.

But Jack says they are now at the phase where they can look into all kinds of different applications for this new microbiome detecting ability. Take, for example, forensics. Imagine if somebody comes into a room and does an evil deed.

Right now, we know that when somebody interacts with that space for 15 minutes, they leave behind enough of a signature for us to be able to detect 30 minutes later. If I had to pick between three people or four people that were to break into a room, there's a good possibility that I could detect which one of them had broken into that room. Wow.

And they're only going to get better and better, he says. Do you think maybe one day you'll be able to track somebody outside moving around purely based on the bacteria that they leave behind?

That's exactly what we're investigating.

He also says being able to identify bacteria in a town sewer system.

Will be really useful in helping us to predict a potential outbreak.

By noticing that there's a disease-causing bacteria right in the sewage, so you can go to town. And before anyone begins to show symptoms, you could say something like, wait a second, we've got to quarantine, vaccinate, we've got to do something here.

And nip it in the bud, if you will, before it becomes a problem.

And as you may have heard, there's plenty of research looking at the microbiome inside of you.

It's revolutionizing medicine, I mean, we already have evidence that we can determine whether somebody will have a bad response to a drug based on the bacteria that are present inside them. So we can screen them using their microbiome to determine if they have that likely outcome.

But for now, back to this absolutely crucial and breathtaking experiment. So let me just quickly remind you of the situation where we last left you. So a couple of weeks later, we got the results from Jack and so I decided to go to Neil to deliver them and just to set up expectations. Here. Jack told us what he expected was immediately after our handshake. A little bit of me would be on Neil, a little bit of Neil would be on me, and that pretty fast the bacteria would die and be gone.

There was essentially nothing.

Huh, nothing from Neil? Yes, nothing.

It's just, it's just, it's just odd, should I put it that way? I mean, that was quite shocking. We were expecting there to be a lot more bacteria being transferred and to have an exchange of microbes. So that, you know, one person picks up 10 bacteria, the other person picks up, you know, 10, 12 bacteria.

Do you think you might have washed your hand immediately previous? I don't think so. No, no, there was no, no, no sabotage or anything.

He definitely picked up bacteria from you, yes, and that led to quite a substantial disruption.

It turns out I swamped your hand. You're telling me you were skank, nasty. I ruled you. I don't know what happened, they don't understand what happened.

Post-shake, you were more than 75 correlated.

Well, I see you made him more you by 15 at least. I was swarming all over him. I'm slightly proud and kind of troubled at the same time. Not only did you get my microbes, but mine kept staying and staying and staying. Every time they swamped, I was still there.

Yeah, I mean, there's no indication that they were in decay.

When I left, you were covered with me. That's a record show. He beat his chest in that moment.

It looks like there is a possibility that some of them could have gone on ad infinitum, ad infinitum.

What do you mean? You think that I might stay on him?

What I think is that there's a high probability that some of those organisms, once they set up shop on his hand in those initial 20 minutes, could stay on his hand.

What you mean like forever, like forever and ever.

There is a possibility. Wow.

There is a possibility.

Precisely.

Do we have any idea whether what we've just described is typical of a common handshake experience?

My gut feeling is this is atypical.

Why?

Because they may be at all out competed.

Jack says To understand just how strange this result is, think about it this way, two hands coming together.

It's like taking a rainforest from Bolivia and dumping it on top of a rainforest in Brazil. And wondering whether any of the trees from the Bolivian rainforest will take root and adapt and become prolific in that environment.

Oh, so, the invaders don't really have a huge shot here then.

No, your bacteria have home field advantage, they are abundant and they are dominant in that environment. So we would generally suspect that very quickly, the invading microbes start to die, they're killed off.

So it happens, and it's over and nobody wins.

Precisely, there's mutual decay.

So am I now a successful invasive species on his hand?

Some of your microbes are successful invasive species. But yeah, absolutely.

How would you explain my success?

What we think actually happened is that something disrupted Neil's ecosystem. And we think, based on the analysis, that there was a streptococcus, which is usually quite rare.

That doesn't sound so good. Streptococcus.

Well, there are lots of species of streptococcus, but not all of them are pathogenic, so there was a streptococcus that was very abundant on your hand at the beginning. That was transferred to Neil's hand, and we see that transfer occurring. And that streptococcus somehow disrupted Neil's ecosystem and allowed for a greater transfer of bacteria from your hand to his hand.

Oh man, that's so interesting. So you have a little band of murderous little bacteria that went and cleared away the forest so that the rest of you could come in and colonize. I don't know, I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question. All I know is that I'm all over the man.

Do you feel any defensiveness towards the fact that he managed to conquer your microbiome and yet yours was unable to do the same to him?

That, by the way, is producer Simon Adler. So the word conquer. In that context, I would reword the sentence and say my microbiome was perfectly content, staying where it is.

Hi, my name is Michael Smith, I'm calling from Pennington, New Jersey. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from. Whether it's Bruce Springsteen or QuestLove, or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So, join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.