Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything (2020) s01e02 Episode Script
Poop
1
[Nasser] Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
Are we alone in the universe?
What if I told you that scientists at NASA
may have found a new clue
to these cosmic mysteries,
and that potential clue
is buried where you'd least expect it,
right under our noses,
in stuff that's inside you,
in stuff that's inside me,
in stuff that dates back
to our prehistoric past,
stuff that projects forward
to our galactic future,
stuff that, along the way,
connects a school of daredevil fish,
Buckingham Palace,
a dog wearing goggles,
and a primordial weapon
that might just save your life.
This is a story about poop.
[toilet flushes]
[upbeat music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show about
the astonishing connections all around us,
connections
between you and me and our world
that'll make you see that world
in a whole new way.
I'm so out of shape. [chuckles]
I'm about to take you
on an odyssey of excrement.
An up-close look
at the stuff we normally recoil from.
The journey begins
at the mouth of this cave.
Oh, my God. Oh, wow.
-It's so deep.
-[woman chuckles]
-[Nasser] Shall we go?
-Yeah, sure.
-Okay, let's go!
-Let's go.
[Nasser] This cave in central Portugal
isn't just any cave.
It's a portal to the past.
For thousands of years,
humans have found shelter here.
This is like we're going down
different number of years?
Yeah, exactly. You are traveling in time.
[Nasser] Literally every level you step
down, you time-travel back 5,000 years.
These archaeologists have uncovered
hundreds of thousands
of human and animal bones.
But recently, at the very bottom,
they found something
that they'd never seen before.
And that's where Ainara Sistiaga comes in.
Ainara is a molecular archaeologist,
which I had never even heard of before.
She analyzes molecules like DNA
and proteins in archaeological finds
to see what they can tell us
about ancient people.
-So, this is the spot right here?
-Yes, just right here.
This is where it was found, actually.
What exactly got found right here?
Small things,
like round pieces of something.
Like rocks but, like, very porous.
I have a picture here.
-That's That's a poop.
-Yeah. [chuckles]
-I thought it would look like a rock.
-No, it really looks like poop.
You can see this is broken.
It's the first one we found.
This is the second one
and then the third one.
Does it smell?
Oh, no. [chuckles]
It's, like, almost 50,000 years old so
-Fifty thousand years old?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] You see, Ainara is a world expert
on extremely old excrement.
So, you found poop. It's 50,000 years old.
How do you know whose poop it is?
Hey, we could see
that it was very homogeneous.
It looks more like an omnivore.
It was like, yeah, that has to be human.
If it finally is confirmed
that it's human,
it will be the oldest human poop.
[Nasser] The oldest human poop ever found.
It's astonishing
that we could find something,
and it's so well preserved.
Before this, the oldest stool sample
dated back less than 9,000 years.
I have been studying these feces
in the lab at MIT,
and one of the things that we have found
is when you eat plants and you eat meat,
those molecules get degraded
by bacteria in your gut.
-Very specific bacteria.
-Yeah.
And then they go in the poop,
and it tells you things interesting
about the microbiome of these peoples.
[Nasser] The microbiome is the rainforest
of trillions of microscopic creatures
that live on and inside you,
and that even outnumber your own cells.
The ones that live in your gut,
they wind up in your poop.
And by analyzing a given poop,
we can learn a lot about who pooped it,
even if they pooped it 50,000 years ago.
What have you been able to tell
about the pooper?
[chuckles] So, interestingly,
one of the things we have found
is that it's probably two poopers.
-Two poopers.
-Yeah. [laughs]
They probably were not very shy.
Did one of them have a way healthier gut
than the other one?
That's what it seems. Both of them
have high content of cholesterol,
-so they were having a heavy meat diet
-Oh. Interesting.
but also plant material in the feces
points to a more diverse or complex diet,
not only meat.
So, it's two people,
and you've found three poops?
Yes. The first one,
it looks really like a human for me,
and the second one,
it could be something different.
Oh, my God.
What if it was a human-Neanderthal couple?
-And a dog. [laughs]
-And a dog?
-Imagine, that would be awesome.
-Oh, my God. Is that in your fantasy?
-In your mind, that's what it is?
-Exactly.
Like a human-Neanderthal,
their little dog.
-Exactly, yeah.
-That's so cute.
Wow, that's crazy
that you could tell that much.
Do you study any contemporary poop?
Yes. I have done control studies
in animals and humans, too.
I have reference samples
from American donors in the MIT area.
Feces from people that live
in a sort of pre-industrial lifestyle.
So, they are not eating
this processed, ultra-processed food.
-Not that much--
-Right, no Twinkies.
Yeah, exactly. [chuckles]
[buzzer]
So what are you finding from these people?
What's in their poop?
They have a higher diversity
in their microbiome
-Uh-huh.
-and that Western populations,
they would have
about a 30 percent loss of biodiversity.
If we think about, like, globalization
and how Western food
is advancing in the world,
in less than 50 years probably,
we will have lost
that biodiversity forever.
Okay, so you're finding
pre-industrial people,
you're taking their poop,
and you're saying they have
more useful things living in their gut
-than in the rest of our guts.
-Mm-hmm.
-Yeah.
-[chuckles]
[Nasser] So, from studying
this incredibly diverse poo-poo platter
across times and civilizations,
Ainara can definitively say
that prehistoric people
had more diverse, and so probably
healthier, insides than we do.
That means that we're the weird ones.
We've put so much new and processed stuff
into our bodies
that we've remade ourselves
from the inside out.
A lot has changed since our days
of pooping together in caves.
We just don't often talk about any of it.
For good reason.
We have spent
our whole modern journey of public health
to try to flush it and forget it,
to try to not think about it.
But it turns out,
now, it's a kind of poop renaissance.
Scientists have finally started
to give a shit
about shit.
And what they've found is that
there are all kinds of surprises in there.
It's not just a turd
sitting on the sidewalk.
It's a chamber of secrets.
It's something that you can use
to see our whole society.
It's a lens
through which to see the world.
So what actually is in our poop?
For that, we gotta go to London, England,
the birthplace of
"flush it and forget it."
[police siren]
[indistinct chatter]
[organ playing]
[man] Welcome to Abbey Mills.
[chuckles] Why does it look so pretty?
If you think of the miles
of London sewers,
what do you actually see of them?
-Nothing.
-Nothing.
So this was built as a statement.
[Nasser] For over a century, Abbey Mills
has been pumping Londoners' raw sewage.
I'm here to meet Leon Barron,
a scientist who collects that very sewage
to answer that very question
of what's in our poop.
And what he's finding
is revealing all kinds of dirty secrets
about Londoners, and about all of us.
So these pumping stations
actually were really important
to save a lot of people's lives in London,
weren't they?
Yeah, the reason it was built
was because of the year
of the Great Stink, 1858.
It's literally called
the year of the Great Stink?
[Sullivan] Absolutely.
[Nasser] In the 19th century, raw sewage
flowed straight into the river Thames.
Hitching a ride
was a little comma-shaped bacterium
that caused massive cholera outbreaks,
-killing up to 10,000 people a year.
-[gasps]
In 1858,
the smell of sewage was so bad
that it forced Parliament to commission
one of the first modern sewer systems.
[Nasser] Can I ask a question?
Very important question.
-[Sullivan] Right, okay.
-Does the Queen's poop come through here?
Yeah, but we have to salute.
It has a flag on it,
-so we salute as it comes through.
-[laughs]
Yes, of course it does.
Can you show me the journey
of the Queen's poop?
Uh I don't know
where Buckingham Palace is on here. Um
-There you go, that's it.
-Palace Gardens. Okay.
So it's only pumped once,
so it runs by gravity here.
-Yeah.
-All the way along to Abbey Mills.
Pumped up 14 meters
into the northern outfall sewer.
It then joins poo from north London.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-Yeah, so
It mixes in with all the poos
coming from east London, north London
That's so democratic.
Everyone's poo is just mixing together.
-[chuckles] Yeah.
-It's kind of beautiful.
[Sullivan] The sewers
were designed for the three P's.
-Have you heard of the three P's?
-No.
[Sullivan] So, the three P's are pee,
poo, and paper.
[Nasser] And paper. Oh, like toilet paper?
So, are you seeing all the weird non-pee,
non-poo, non-paper things
that people are flushing?
Yeah. There's all sorts of,
uh, horrible stuff that goes in the sewer.
Sometimes, we get things
like shopping trolleys in there.
-Shopping trolleys?
-Yeah, yeah.
Things like horses and cattle and sheep
have been pulled out.
Sorry, would a person flush a sheep
or would a sheep accidentally fall in?
No, probably accidentally
fallen in somewhere.
That's so weird.
It's kind of cool because it's like
this is almost like an extension
of the intestines of,
like, 8.5 million people. [chuckles]
-It's like our gut is continuing.
-[Sullivan] It is.
We'd like to be known
as London Intestines now.
-London's intestines.
-[chuckles]
So, it's places like this
that makes our science possible.
So, if you treat London
like a human being,
-this is the way out, right?
-[giggles]
And I want to see what's in that.
[Nasser] The pumping station would seem
the most obvious place to take samples,
but for me,
Leon has something more scenic in mind.
[Barron] Welcome to the beating heart
of London, the Thames river.
You can't get more iconic than this,
I think.
-Let's get ready and take a sample.
-Okay. Let's do it.
I feel like I'm wearing
parachute pants here.
[Barron] It's never glamorous, I'm afraid.
[laughs] Are you kidding?
We should walk down a runway.
[Nasser] It's pretty shocking,
but even a century and a half
after the Great Stink,
raw sewage still flows into the Thames,
especially after major storms.
And that means that even this river
is full of information
about what Londoners
are putting in their bodies.
It's like a drug test,
but for a whole city and in real time.
You can find stuff out
that people themselves don't even know.
[Barron] Here, I've got a Huh
-What is that?
-Quite literally
What is that?
We've got a little wrapper
that more than likely
contained some form of--
-Oh, you literally found drugs.
-[giggles]
So, there's the first evidence
of drugs in the Thames.
Okay. Right. Let's take our sample.
-[Nasser] How full do you want this?
-[Barron] Full full.
-[Nasser] Full full.
-[Barron] Yeah.
[Nasser] Oh! That's not a good feeling.
[chuckles] Oh! Man.
So here you go. There's Thames water.
What would happen to me if I drank this?
Like, would I die?
You wouldn't be very well.
Uh, okay,
so what are you gonna find in there?
So, we're gonna take this back
to the laboratory and do a test.
We use mass spectrometry
to screen for over 200 compounds in here.
Um, that includes drugs, uh, medications,
all sorts of industrial chemicals.
I'm almost certainly going to find
antidepressants,
antibiotics, even pain medication.
-For something like ecstasy, MDMA
-Yeah.
we'll find the equivalent
of a teaspoonful
in 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools
of water.
-Whoa. But you're able to measure that?
-We're able to measure that.
So literally, if people are taking
these medications, these drugs,
we find them.
Poop knows your deepest darkest secrets,
and it never lies.
[Nasser] Are there things
that you're finding in the poop
that you wouldn't have expected otherwise?
About how people are using drugs
or what drugs they're using?
So for example, London's cocaine habit
has been steadily rising
over the last few years.
But what happens if you look at every day
across a week or every day across a month?
You can start to see trends
for things like methamphetamine, for MDMA.
They're party drugs.
You might see Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, oh, there's Friday
and the concentration spikes.
And it comes back down again
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, and oh, it comes up on a Saturday.
Cocaine is quite high across the week
all the time.
And it rises just a little bit
at the weekend and comes down.
So London's actually
an everyday user of cocaine.
So could you say like post-Brexit,
this many people
started taking antidepressants?
-You've read my mind. Of course.
-Oh, my God!
So, yeah, we currently are monitoring
antidepressants in the wastewater
to see really, "Does Brexit have
a very depressive impact
on people's mental health?"
[Nasser] It's like Londoners'
emotional interior lives
are just out there in chemical form
floating down this river.
But what's even more surprising
is that it changes the river.
[Barron] You have to take responsibility
that if you're going to be taking all
these things, that they end up somewhere.
So next time you think about popping
a pain medication to cure a hangover,
maybe just think twice.
Maybe this is something
you can actually do for the environment
just like recycling plastic is.
Wow.
I've never heard that argument before.
Oh, look at the duck! It's a duck.
-Wow.
-Seems happy enough.
I mean, but maybe
that's because it's on ecstasy.
[Nasser] Thing is, it's not just London
that's leaking raw sewage.
It's major cities from Tijuana to Toronto,
from New York to New Delhi,
from Sydney to São Paulo,
which means our druggy poo water
is getting into rivers, lakes, and oceans
all over the world.
So what's that doing
to all the creatures that live out there?
[soft music playing]
[man 1] If you're a small fish
in the wild, you should be afraid.
You should be very afraid
because everyone wants to eat you.
And if you remove that fear,
then you're in big trouble.
[man 2] I'm sort of a fish nerd.
I was always super fascinated
with what's happening under the water.
And it's really difficult to know that
because you can't really see.
[Nasser] Gustav Hellström
and Tomas Brodin,
from the Swedish University
of Agricultural Science,
are trying to figure out
what happens to fish
who end up swimming
in our poopy, druggy runoff.
Antidepressants, antihistamines,
we have antibiotics,
painkillers.
[Nasser] There's pretty much
an entire pharmacy down there.
Fish and other wildlife are exposed
to these simultaneously in the water,
and we don't know what that does to them.
[Nasser] So, to find out, Gustav and Tomas
have been running a series of experiments,
experiments that might seem
a little strange.
They stock two super remote fishless lakes
with the same type of fish.
One is the control lake.
The other is for the experiment.
They tag every single fish in both lakes
with trackers.
And then Now this is the part
that sounds a little crazy.
They spike one of the lakes
with an extra high level
of benzodiazepine,
a super common type of tranquilizer
that includes drugs like Valium and Xanax,
trace levels of which
have actually been found in the ocean.
They're still waiting for the results
of this latest experiment,
but the last time they ran a similar one,
they found something
completely unexpected
I expected the effects of exposure
to benzodiazepines to be sedative.
But I found the completely opposite.
They got more active,
they got more risk taking.
And they also used
the pelagic zone of the lake more,
which is the open water zone of the lake,
which is more dangerous and more exposed,
which in turn changed the risk
of getting eaten.
It removed their-- their fear.
You would expect the school,
after the predator attacks, to get denser.
They would seek refuge with each other,
whereas if you're exposed
to benzodiazepine, they're not as social
so they might not actually care
about benefiting from the group effect.
[Nasser] And while the fish
on tranquilizers
acted like, you know,
little Evel Knievels with fins,
all the drug-free fish acted like
their normal, rightfully paranoid selves.
The unexposed fish were never eaten first,
not in one single location.
It didn't happen.
[Nasser] And it's not just
benzos affecting fish.
It's birth control affecting frogs,
ibuprofen affecting shellfish,
cocaine affecting eels.
Long after we flush and forget,
we're unwittingly drugging
creatures downstream
via the substances in our waste.
[Brodin] People often say,
"Why do you study this?
This is ridiculous. They are fish."
But it matters for the fish
because it will affect their ability
to survive and grow and reproduce.
But it also affects ecosystems.
I mean, one tiny little behavioral change
in one species
could completely change an ecosystem
if it is an important key species.
It could also affect consumption of fish.
Like recreational fisheries would go down.
You couldn't fish as much
and what you catch you can't eat
because it's full of chemicals.
[Hellström]
Anxiolytic drugs, antidepressants,
they do have a role in society, right?
They do help people, save lives of people.
So maybe the way forward isn't really
to reduce consumption of these.
You shouldn't blame the user.
But the way forward is probably
to attack the treatment of the wastewater.
[Nasser] But not all poop is bad for fish.
In fact,
some kinds are downright nutritious.
[adventurous music playing]
[Nasser] University of Washington
scientists Deborah Giles and Sam Wasser
are on a mission to figure out
what's killing the killer whales.
In just a couple of decades,
the resident population
has fallen by a quarter.
When I turned 18,
my sister and some other girlfriends
surprised me with a trip
up here to the San Juans
to see the whales for the first time.
We spent six nights watching these whales
go back and forth and back and forth.
And at that point, I was just like,
"I want to work for these whales."
We have to be answering questions
that are going to help
recover the population
or the ecosystem
that that population relies on.
[Nasser] And they need to do it in a way
that doesn't harm the whales.
So the team came up with
an ingenious, non-harmful way
to help them solve this mystery.
Fecal samples are like gold.
Whales poop floaters.
And that poop just beckons researchers
to come and scoop it out of the water.
I can tell every single thing
that animal ate from the DNA in its feces.
Then I can get stress hormones,
reproductive hormones.
I can get microbiome from the animal.
The list goes on and on.
[Deborah] We know from fecal samples
the whales are not getting
enough fish to eat.
Thirty years ago,
there was so much fish here
that the whales would eat,
and then they would
just kind of play with the food.
They would catch a big salmon
and just drape it across their head.
We don't really know why,
but kind of like bling or something.
These massive, massive Chinook salmon,
they're just not here anymore.
[Nasser]
So what are the whales eating now?
Let's look in their poop.
There's just one slight problem.
It's not like looking for dog turds
on the sidewalk.
Even whale-sized waste is hard to see.
Enter Eba.
Her job is to track down orca caca.
[Wasser] Our dogs can actually smell
the sample over a nautical mile away.
And all you have to do is be able to read
the excitement, the changes of behavior,
and they can direct you
right into the sample.
[Nasser] It takes a special kind of dog
to do this work.
Eba is a rescue, with a ton of energy.
Because she loves to play,
the reward of a ball
is all it takes to motivate her.
[Wasser] Time to go to work.
[Nasser] Suddenly, Eba is all business.
The boat follows her nose.
[Giles] She's sniffing.
Look at her nose go.
[Nasser] And then Eba makes good.
There's whale poop nearby,
but it's not an orca.
It's a humpback.
They've never managed to collect
humpback whale poop before.
[Wasser] Oh. Beautiful.
Humpbacks were gone for a long time,
and now they're back.
So the question is "why are they here?"
It's just quite a mystery.
But we just need a few samples
and we'll know.
If this animal poops,
we will find it in these conditions.
What is this?
It's poop! It's poop! It's poop!
For sure.
[thuds]
Oh, my God. You just ran over it.
-God damn it. Get that big one!
-[Wasser] I've got a good one right here.
[Giles] Ah! Yes! Eba! Eba! Eba!
[claps]
Yeah!
-Good girl, Eba! Yeah.
-[dog growls]
Yeah. [clapping]
Whoo!
Give me that thing. Give me that thing.
[dog growling]
Yeah, yeah, Eba.
Good girl. [rolls tongue]
Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it.
-It smells like a cow shit.
-[Giles] It does.
[Wasser laughing]
[sighs] Oh, my God, no glove.
It's just so gross.
[laughing]
[Giles] Vial number one.
-Oh, there's the chunks.
-Yeah.
[Gilles] Vial number two.
[Wasser] One more after this.
Okay, I think that we could stop
before I puke.
[Giles chuckles]
[Nasser] The team can now head back
to the lab
to see what their sample can tell them
about the future of the humpbacks.
But here's the thing about whale poop:
it's way more than just a scientific tool.
[Giles] There are even critters
that specifically eat whale poop directly.
Poop does serve, um, an essential function
for a healthy marine ecosystem.
And without whales it might end up being
that we have a collapse
in different areas.
[Nasser] A whale's poop
can nourish the whole food chain.
Whales dive down,
and they eat up all these nutrients,
and then they swim to the surface
and poop it all out.
So they are this, like, pump
that's basically taking nutrients
from the bottom
and bringing it all to the top.
It is this life-generating force.
It's this secret sauce
that, like, animates our oceans.
[Nasser] We used to poop on cave floors,
but then we invented the sewage system.
We flushed our poop
right out of our homes,
but into the homes of fish
and other underwater creatures,
many of whom rely on
a whole other kind of poop:
whale poop.
But whales aren't the only ones
with life-saving poop.
Yours might have some superpowers too.
A new report out
from the US Centers for Disease Control
highlights that we are still losing
the battle against so-called superbugs,
bacteria that are resistant
to nearly all the antibiotics
[woman] One Pennsylvania woman
marking the first case in the US.
[man] A dire warning from medical experts
say we're living in a post-antibiotic era.
[Nasser] More and more
we're seeing news reports
about new strains of bacteria
that can't be killed by antibiotics.
We're in a really scary place right now.
The UN called it a global crisis.
Superbugs kill someone every 15 minutes,
and that's in the US alone.
But what if
Hold on. Hear me out.
What if poop is the answer?
Poop has something in it
that is more valuable
than all the precious metals put together.
It's It's a potential secret weapon
that we could use against the bacteria
that are trying to kill us.
[sinister music playing]
[Nasser] I'm here to meet the CEO
of Adaptive Phage Therapeutics,
Greg Merril, who's trying to save us all
from these nightmarish superbugs.
-So we start with a shower?
-No.
We do not start with a shower.
-Hopefully we can avoid the shower today.
-[Nasser] Okay.
[Merril] Everyone has a story,
either for themselves
or one of their friends or family
that's suffering
from a drug-resistant infection,
and so they get it right away,
that there's a big problem.
[Nasser] Greg and his team are developing
an alternative to antibiotics:
viruses.
Most people think of bacteria and viruses
as these two different things
that are designed to attack us.
But it turns out,
they also attack each other.
Bacteria and viruses
have been locked in mortal combat
for billions of years.
Now, one kind of virus in particular
targets bacteria.
It's called a bacteriophage.
It literally just means "bacteria eater."
And some of these bacteriophages,
or "phages" for short,
can kill the very superbugs
that are killing us.
If we can find and harness those viruses,
we might just be able to save ourselves
from impending doom.
[Greg] One of the first challenges
with treating a patient
is figuring out which phage will kill
the patient's
particular bacterial infection.
There are 10 to the 31 phage on earth.
[Nasser] Ten to the thirty-first power.
That means one, zero, zero, zero,
zero, zero, zero,
zero, zero, zero [voice speeding up]
zero.
That's the equivalent of a trillion phages
for every grain of sand on earth.
So Greg is on this ultra hard,
ultra high-stakes scavenger hunt.
If he can find just one of those viruses
that targets one
of those deadly superbugs,
he could potentially
turn it into a lifesaving medicine.
Guess where to find them.
If you do not know the answer,
you have not been watching.
Our poop is loaded with bacteria,
which means it's also loaded
with phages that prey on them.
[Greg] What we can do to find a new phage
is we pour some poop water
inside the petri dish.
Within a few hours,
if you're lucky, it will look like this.
-Do you see those spots?
-Yeah.
You're looking at millions of phage
killing millions of bacteria.
It doesn't look that dramatic,
but there's tons going on in there.
Exactly.
It's like gladiatorial combat.
You're pitting up these viruses,
these bacteria against one another
in that little petri dish,
and they're duking it out,
and you're watching
to see who's gonna win.
There's something in that water
that's killing the bacteria,
and that something is phage.
So, where do you get the poop water from?
The US Department of Defense
started collecting wastewater
from hospitals all over the world
-to do this type of phage discovery.
-Huh.
I'm picturing a tank in a closet
in a military base with just like
[chuckles]
It just says, "Poop water. Do not touch."
The phage in that poop water
might be the answer
to saving soldiers' lives
who've been exposed
to some of these superbugs,
and also, potentially, be a solution
to a terrorist attack using superbugs.
[Nasser] It's already saved lives
in individual cases
that couldn't be cured any other way.
But now Greg wants to scale it up.
[rhythmic music playing]
[Greg] So, this is the beginning
of the manufacturing process
to make a large amount of phage.
We start with bacteria.
It's warm, and it's wiggling
to expose the bacteria to all the food,
and it's happy.
-Bacteria like to be wiggled?
-I guess they do.
This flask is filled with bacteria food.
When we put the bacteria
from this test tube into this flask,
it will grow a lot of bacteria.
It's like you gave it a buffet
and now you're putting it in a sauna.
It's like it's having
the best day of its life.
And then we put in just a few of the phage
that we know will host
on that particular bacteria.
So, the amazing thing
is that with antibiotics
you need a large dose
to kill all of that bacteria.
But with phage, a single phage can kill
the entire bottle filled with bacteria,
because the phage
will replicate inside the bacteria,
making hundreds of copies of itself,
bursting the bacteria open, releasing
those hundreds and hundreds of phage.
That process repeats over and over again
until all the bacteria's dead.
[Nasser] It's high drama
'cause you're taking the bacteria,
you're making it super happy,
and then you're killing it.
[Nasser] Bacteria versus viruses.
It's
the biggest tiniest rivalry on Earth.
But in this lab,
Greg is harnessing their feud to save us.
And the fact
that they keep fighting each other
gives phages an extra benefit
over antibiotics.
This phage collection
will never become obsolete.
It's always changing.
We can always stay ahead of the bacteria
as it evolves.
And this system here could make
single-dose vials
of highly purified phage.
And we could put those in storage
so that they're ready
to be used in a patient.
[Nasser] Antibiotics were this miracle
drug of the twentieth century.
They came in
and they solved so many problems.
They saved so many lives.
But now, they're not working
like they used to,
and the thing
that might rush in heroically
is a virus that we can find,
actually, already within ourselves.
Poop may just save the day.
Actually, uh
Just I-- I need a second.
Give me a second.
[astronaut 1] Is it out of spec?
[astronaut 2] No,
it's in the nominal range, 3.9 to 4.6.
[astronaut 3] Ooooh, who did it?
-Who did what?
-Who did it?
-Get me a
-Where did that come from?
Get me a napkin quick.
There's a turd floating through the air.
I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.
I don't think it's one of mine.
Mine was a little more sticky than that.
Here's another Goddamn turd.
What's the matter with you guys?
I don't know whose that is.
I can neither claim it nor disclaim it.
-God almighty.
-[laughs]
[Nasser] There's one last place
we need to visit to fully appreciate
the unexpected wonders of poop,
and that place is not on Earth.
Do you know the phrase "leave no trace"?
Yeah, well, doesn't sound like
the Apollo astronauts did.
They left behind
all kinds of junk up there:
empty food bags, seven hammers,
four pairs of space boots,
six American flags,
a TV camera, six pairs of tongs,
two golf balls
You get the idea.
[Nasser] Where are we exactly?
This is the Apollo mission control room,
slightly restored.
It's the "Houston"
in "Houston, we have a problem."
[Nasser]
We all know that everyone poops
Literally, there's a book with that title.
and that includes astronauts.
To lighten their load
for the trip back to Earth,
the astronauts dumped a load,
as it were.
Six different moon missions left behind
as many as 96 bags of human waste,
which includes urine, vomit,
and, yes, poop.
Today, 50 years after the first astronauts
dropped a deuce on the moon,
NASA scientist Mark Lupisella
wants to go back up there
and take a look at it.
So, you basically want to
go dumpster diving on the moon?
[chuckles] Well, that's
I haven't thought about it that way,
but, yes, essentially, that's it.
Yeah. So, let's say you or somebody else
gets to go back to the moon,
go back to that site,
get one of those bags, tear it open,
what are you gonna find inside?
Those bags are inside a bigger bag,
meant to protect and contain
the material that was in there.
So we want to find out
how well was it contained?
Did anything survive inside?
There's plenty of evidence to indicate
that things have probably not survived.
But bacteria can form spores,
they can protect themselves
from harsh environments,
and they can be revived.
And so, one question is
whether or not we would find
revivable organisms, microorganisms.
[Nasser]
Sounds kind of far-fetched, right?
Like, how could anything survive in space?
But turns out, bacteria thrive in a lot
of places you'd think they couldn't:
lakes of acid,
arctic permafrost,
volcanic vents miles deep in the ocean,
even in places with no oxygen whatsoever.
So bacteria on the moon?
It's a long shot,
but not out of the question.
Maybe it's dead, maybe it's alive.
If it was revivable, what would that mean?
That's a
Minimally, that's another big data point
in the data set that says
life is extremely tenacious.
So, if life is very tenacious,
for example,
the panspermia hypothesis has come up.
[Nasser] Panspermia is the theory
that life on Earth
actually started
somewhere else in the universe,
and then hitched a ride here
on a comet or meteorite.
But how do you even test that?
Well, if the bacteria
in Neil Armstrong's poop
survived for 50 years on the moon,
it helps make the case
that life could have survived
the journey here
and planted the seed for all of us.
If there's something alive
in the bag even, and it's revivable,
you could argue that technically speaking,
we have seeded life on the moon.
[Nasser] That's some mind-blowing shit.
There could literally be
extra-terrestrial life out there in space,
right now.
But it just so happens
to be life that we put there.
That then could imply
that we need to be very careful
about our own contamination,
our own biological contamination,
particularly when we go to Mars,
because at Mars, we're probably
gonna be searching for life,
and we want to make sure
that we don't have our contaminants
compromise the search
for what might be indigenous life.
Ah. So, if we're looking for life,
we don't want to accidentally just find
our own poop life
that we just happened to sow there
by accident. [chuckles]
Now the moon is different than Mars,
but it still seems like it would be
reasonable to study this experiment,
because it's the only one we've got.
[Nasser] The crazy thing to me
is that seemingly we just were like,
"Ah. We don't need the extra weight.
Just throw it away."
Fifty years ago.
We didn't really think about it.
And now it's like, "Oh, wait.
There might be something in here
that gives us more insight
than anything else
we might have even done up there."
Hopefully in the future we can be
more intentional about what we do.
That's kind of the point
of doing this kind of work
so that we don't necessarily inadvertently
do stuff we don't want to do.
In this case, we could mask
the life that's on Mars.
We could conceivably cause its extinction.
Learning what we did on the moon
is one of the ways that we can
get smart about doing things on Mars.
[Nasser] With NASA planning
to land back on the lunar surface
in just a few years,
we may get the chance to go
dumpster diving on the moon after all.
And what we might learn
is that although we think of ourselves
as these space travelers,
maybe what we really are
are the spaceships.
We started this whole episode
in a dirty, poopy cave.
But I want to end it here,
in one of NASA's clean rooms,
where they prep pristine parts
of telescopes to shoot them into space.
It's a germophobe's paradise.
The pinnacle of our modern obsession
with cleanliness.
But recently, here,
in one of the squeaky-cleanest rooms
in the world,
scientists found some microbial life
that wasn't supposed to be here.
Surprise!
Our modern world
isn't as neat and tidy as we wish it was.
But that's okay.
Every time you poop and flush your toilet,
you're launching something
off into the world
and changing it just a little bit.
You're dropping a little truth bomb
about what you've done in the last day,
one that may even last
tens of thousands of years.
You're dispersing life-giving nutrients
and life-taking poisons
to countless creatures,
possibly even some an ocean away.
You're even giving a ride
to billions of tiny viruses
that one day in the near future
might save your life
or the lives of your loved ones.
As if all that was not astonishing enough,
it turns out that after a century
of flushing and forgetting,
we've learned
that the most disgusting part of ourselves
might just be our most significant
contribution to the universe.
No shit.
[upbeat music playing]
[Nasser] Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
Are we alone in the universe?
What if I told you that scientists at NASA
may have found a new clue
to these cosmic mysteries,
and that potential clue
is buried where you'd least expect it,
right under our noses,
in stuff that's inside you,
in stuff that's inside me,
in stuff that dates back
to our prehistoric past,
stuff that projects forward
to our galactic future,
stuff that, along the way,
connects a school of daredevil fish,
Buckingham Palace,
a dog wearing goggles,
and a primordial weapon
that might just save your life.
This is a story about poop.
[toilet flushes]
[upbeat music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show about
the astonishing connections all around us,
connections
between you and me and our world
that'll make you see that world
in a whole new way.
I'm so out of shape. [chuckles]
I'm about to take you
on an odyssey of excrement.
An up-close look
at the stuff we normally recoil from.
The journey begins
at the mouth of this cave.
Oh, my God. Oh, wow.
-It's so deep.
-[woman chuckles]
-[Nasser] Shall we go?
-Yeah, sure.
-Okay, let's go!
-Let's go.
[Nasser] This cave in central Portugal
isn't just any cave.
It's a portal to the past.
For thousands of years,
humans have found shelter here.
This is like we're going down
different number of years?
Yeah, exactly. You are traveling in time.
[Nasser] Literally every level you step
down, you time-travel back 5,000 years.
These archaeologists have uncovered
hundreds of thousands
of human and animal bones.
But recently, at the very bottom,
they found something
that they'd never seen before.
And that's where Ainara Sistiaga comes in.
Ainara is a molecular archaeologist,
which I had never even heard of before.
She analyzes molecules like DNA
and proteins in archaeological finds
to see what they can tell us
about ancient people.
-So, this is the spot right here?
-Yes, just right here.
This is where it was found, actually.
What exactly got found right here?
Small things,
like round pieces of something.
Like rocks but, like, very porous.
I have a picture here.
-That's That's a poop.
-Yeah. [chuckles]
-I thought it would look like a rock.
-No, it really looks like poop.
You can see this is broken.
It's the first one we found.
This is the second one
and then the third one.
Does it smell?
Oh, no. [chuckles]
It's, like, almost 50,000 years old so
-Fifty thousand years old?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] You see, Ainara is a world expert
on extremely old excrement.
So, you found poop. It's 50,000 years old.
How do you know whose poop it is?
Hey, we could see
that it was very homogeneous.
It looks more like an omnivore.
It was like, yeah, that has to be human.
If it finally is confirmed
that it's human,
it will be the oldest human poop.
[Nasser] The oldest human poop ever found.
It's astonishing
that we could find something,
and it's so well preserved.
Before this, the oldest stool sample
dated back less than 9,000 years.
I have been studying these feces
in the lab at MIT,
and one of the things that we have found
is when you eat plants and you eat meat,
those molecules get degraded
by bacteria in your gut.
-Very specific bacteria.
-Yeah.
And then they go in the poop,
and it tells you things interesting
about the microbiome of these peoples.
[Nasser] The microbiome is the rainforest
of trillions of microscopic creatures
that live on and inside you,
and that even outnumber your own cells.
The ones that live in your gut,
they wind up in your poop.
And by analyzing a given poop,
we can learn a lot about who pooped it,
even if they pooped it 50,000 years ago.
What have you been able to tell
about the pooper?
[chuckles] So, interestingly,
one of the things we have found
is that it's probably two poopers.
-Two poopers.
-Yeah. [laughs]
They probably were not very shy.
Did one of them have a way healthier gut
than the other one?
That's what it seems. Both of them
have high content of cholesterol,
-so they were having a heavy meat diet
-Oh. Interesting.
but also plant material in the feces
points to a more diverse or complex diet,
not only meat.
So, it's two people,
and you've found three poops?
Yes. The first one,
it looks really like a human for me,
and the second one,
it could be something different.
Oh, my God.
What if it was a human-Neanderthal couple?
-And a dog. [laughs]
-And a dog?
-Imagine, that would be awesome.
-Oh, my God. Is that in your fantasy?
-In your mind, that's what it is?
-Exactly.
Like a human-Neanderthal,
their little dog.
-Exactly, yeah.
-That's so cute.
Wow, that's crazy
that you could tell that much.
Do you study any contemporary poop?
Yes. I have done control studies
in animals and humans, too.
I have reference samples
from American donors in the MIT area.
Feces from people that live
in a sort of pre-industrial lifestyle.
So, they are not eating
this processed, ultra-processed food.
-Not that much--
-Right, no Twinkies.
Yeah, exactly. [chuckles]
[buzzer]
So what are you finding from these people?
What's in their poop?
They have a higher diversity
in their microbiome
-Uh-huh.
-and that Western populations,
they would have
about a 30 percent loss of biodiversity.
If we think about, like, globalization
and how Western food
is advancing in the world,
in less than 50 years probably,
we will have lost
that biodiversity forever.
Okay, so you're finding
pre-industrial people,
you're taking their poop,
and you're saying they have
more useful things living in their gut
-than in the rest of our guts.
-Mm-hmm.
-Yeah.
-[chuckles]
[Nasser] So, from studying
this incredibly diverse poo-poo platter
across times and civilizations,
Ainara can definitively say
that prehistoric people
had more diverse, and so probably
healthier, insides than we do.
That means that we're the weird ones.
We've put so much new and processed stuff
into our bodies
that we've remade ourselves
from the inside out.
A lot has changed since our days
of pooping together in caves.
We just don't often talk about any of it.
For good reason.
We have spent
our whole modern journey of public health
to try to flush it and forget it,
to try to not think about it.
But it turns out,
now, it's a kind of poop renaissance.
Scientists have finally started
to give a shit
about shit.
And what they've found is that
there are all kinds of surprises in there.
It's not just a turd
sitting on the sidewalk.
It's a chamber of secrets.
It's something that you can use
to see our whole society.
It's a lens
through which to see the world.
So what actually is in our poop?
For that, we gotta go to London, England,
the birthplace of
"flush it and forget it."
[police siren]
[indistinct chatter]
[organ playing]
[man] Welcome to Abbey Mills.
[chuckles] Why does it look so pretty?
If you think of the miles
of London sewers,
what do you actually see of them?
-Nothing.
-Nothing.
So this was built as a statement.
[Nasser] For over a century, Abbey Mills
has been pumping Londoners' raw sewage.
I'm here to meet Leon Barron,
a scientist who collects that very sewage
to answer that very question
of what's in our poop.
And what he's finding
is revealing all kinds of dirty secrets
about Londoners, and about all of us.
So these pumping stations
actually were really important
to save a lot of people's lives in London,
weren't they?
Yeah, the reason it was built
was because of the year
of the Great Stink, 1858.
It's literally called
the year of the Great Stink?
[Sullivan] Absolutely.
[Nasser] In the 19th century, raw sewage
flowed straight into the river Thames.
Hitching a ride
was a little comma-shaped bacterium
that caused massive cholera outbreaks,
-killing up to 10,000 people a year.
-[gasps]
In 1858,
the smell of sewage was so bad
that it forced Parliament to commission
one of the first modern sewer systems.
[Nasser] Can I ask a question?
Very important question.
-[Sullivan] Right, okay.
-Does the Queen's poop come through here?
Yeah, but we have to salute.
It has a flag on it,
-so we salute as it comes through.
-[laughs]
Yes, of course it does.
Can you show me the journey
of the Queen's poop?
Uh I don't know
where Buckingham Palace is on here. Um
-There you go, that's it.
-Palace Gardens. Okay.
So it's only pumped once,
so it runs by gravity here.
-Yeah.
-All the way along to Abbey Mills.
Pumped up 14 meters
into the northern outfall sewer.
It then joins poo from north London.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-Yeah, so
It mixes in with all the poos
coming from east London, north London
That's so democratic.
Everyone's poo is just mixing together.
-[chuckles] Yeah.
-It's kind of beautiful.
[Sullivan] The sewers
were designed for the three P's.
-Have you heard of the three P's?
-No.
[Sullivan] So, the three P's are pee,
poo, and paper.
[Nasser] And paper. Oh, like toilet paper?
So, are you seeing all the weird non-pee,
non-poo, non-paper things
that people are flushing?
Yeah. There's all sorts of,
uh, horrible stuff that goes in the sewer.
Sometimes, we get things
like shopping trolleys in there.
-Shopping trolleys?
-Yeah, yeah.
Things like horses and cattle and sheep
have been pulled out.
Sorry, would a person flush a sheep
or would a sheep accidentally fall in?
No, probably accidentally
fallen in somewhere.
That's so weird.
It's kind of cool because it's like
this is almost like an extension
of the intestines of,
like, 8.5 million people. [chuckles]
-It's like our gut is continuing.
-[Sullivan] It is.
We'd like to be known
as London Intestines now.
-London's intestines.
-[chuckles]
So, it's places like this
that makes our science possible.
So, if you treat London
like a human being,
-this is the way out, right?
-[giggles]
And I want to see what's in that.
[Nasser] The pumping station would seem
the most obvious place to take samples,
but for me,
Leon has something more scenic in mind.
[Barron] Welcome to the beating heart
of London, the Thames river.
You can't get more iconic than this,
I think.
-Let's get ready and take a sample.
-Okay. Let's do it.
I feel like I'm wearing
parachute pants here.
[Barron] It's never glamorous, I'm afraid.
[laughs] Are you kidding?
We should walk down a runway.
[Nasser] It's pretty shocking,
but even a century and a half
after the Great Stink,
raw sewage still flows into the Thames,
especially after major storms.
And that means that even this river
is full of information
about what Londoners
are putting in their bodies.
It's like a drug test,
but for a whole city and in real time.
You can find stuff out
that people themselves don't even know.
[Barron] Here, I've got a Huh
-What is that?
-Quite literally
What is that?
We've got a little wrapper
that more than likely
contained some form of--
-Oh, you literally found drugs.
-[giggles]
So, there's the first evidence
of drugs in the Thames.
Okay. Right. Let's take our sample.
-[Nasser] How full do you want this?
-[Barron] Full full.
-[Nasser] Full full.
-[Barron] Yeah.
[Nasser] Oh! That's not a good feeling.
[chuckles] Oh! Man.
So here you go. There's Thames water.
What would happen to me if I drank this?
Like, would I die?
You wouldn't be very well.
Uh, okay,
so what are you gonna find in there?
So, we're gonna take this back
to the laboratory and do a test.
We use mass spectrometry
to screen for over 200 compounds in here.
Um, that includes drugs, uh, medications,
all sorts of industrial chemicals.
I'm almost certainly going to find
antidepressants,
antibiotics, even pain medication.
-For something like ecstasy, MDMA
-Yeah.
we'll find the equivalent
of a teaspoonful
in 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools
of water.
-Whoa. But you're able to measure that?
-We're able to measure that.
So literally, if people are taking
these medications, these drugs,
we find them.
Poop knows your deepest darkest secrets,
and it never lies.
[Nasser] Are there things
that you're finding in the poop
that you wouldn't have expected otherwise?
About how people are using drugs
or what drugs they're using?
So for example, London's cocaine habit
has been steadily rising
over the last few years.
But what happens if you look at every day
across a week or every day across a month?
You can start to see trends
for things like methamphetamine, for MDMA.
They're party drugs.
You might see Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, oh, there's Friday
and the concentration spikes.
And it comes back down again
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, and oh, it comes up on a Saturday.
Cocaine is quite high across the week
all the time.
And it rises just a little bit
at the weekend and comes down.
So London's actually
an everyday user of cocaine.
So could you say like post-Brexit,
this many people
started taking antidepressants?
-You've read my mind. Of course.
-Oh, my God!
So, yeah, we currently are monitoring
antidepressants in the wastewater
to see really, "Does Brexit have
a very depressive impact
on people's mental health?"
[Nasser] It's like Londoners'
emotional interior lives
are just out there in chemical form
floating down this river.
But what's even more surprising
is that it changes the river.
[Barron] You have to take responsibility
that if you're going to be taking all
these things, that they end up somewhere.
So next time you think about popping
a pain medication to cure a hangover,
maybe just think twice.
Maybe this is something
you can actually do for the environment
just like recycling plastic is.
Wow.
I've never heard that argument before.
Oh, look at the duck! It's a duck.
-Wow.
-Seems happy enough.
I mean, but maybe
that's because it's on ecstasy.
[Nasser] Thing is, it's not just London
that's leaking raw sewage.
It's major cities from Tijuana to Toronto,
from New York to New Delhi,
from Sydney to São Paulo,
which means our druggy poo water
is getting into rivers, lakes, and oceans
all over the world.
So what's that doing
to all the creatures that live out there?
[soft music playing]
[man 1] If you're a small fish
in the wild, you should be afraid.
You should be very afraid
because everyone wants to eat you.
And if you remove that fear,
then you're in big trouble.
[man 2] I'm sort of a fish nerd.
I was always super fascinated
with what's happening under the water.
And it's really difficult to know that
because you can't really see.
[Nasser] Gustav Hellström
and Tomas Brodin,
from the Swedish University
of Agricultural Science,
are trying to figure out
what happens to fish
who end up swimming
in our poopy, druggy runoff.
Antidepressants, antihistamines,
we have antibiotics,
painkillers.
[Nasser] There's pretty much
an entire pharmacy down there.
Fish and other wildlife are exposed
to these simultaneously in the water,
and we don't know what that does to them.
[Nasser] So, to find out, Gustav and Tomas
have been running a series of experiments,
experiments that might seem
a little strange.
They stock two super remote fishless lakes
with the same type of fish.
One is the control lake.
The other is for the experiment.
They tag every single fish in both lakes
with trackers.
And then Now this is the part
that sounds a little crazy.
They spike one of the lakes
with an extra high level
of benzodiazepine,
a super common type of tranquilizer
that includes drugs like Valium and Xanax,
trace levels of which
have actually been found in the ocean.
They're still waiting for the results
of this latest experiment,
but the last time they ran a similar one,
they found something
completely unexpected
I expected the effects of exposure
to benzodiazepines to be sedative.
But I found the completely opposite.
They got more active,
they got more risk taking.
And they also used
the pelagic zone of the lake more,
which is the open water zone of the lake,
which is more dangerous and more exposed,
which in turn changed the risk
of getting eaten.
It removed their-- their fear.
You would expect the school,
after the predator attacks, to get denser.
They would seek refuge with each other,
whereas if you're exposed
to benzodiazepine, they're not as social
so they might not actually care
about benefiting from the group effect.
[Nasser] And while the fish
on tranquilizers
acted like, you know,
little Evel Knievels with fins,
all the drug-free fish acted like
their normal, rightfully paranoid selves.
The unexposed fish were never eaten first,
not in one single location.
It didn't happen.
[Nasser] And it's not just
benzos affecting fish.
It's birth control affecting frogs,
ibuprofen affecting shellfish,
cocaine affecting eels.
Long after we flush and forget,
we're unwittingly drugging
creatures downstream
via the substances in our waste.
[Brodin] People often say,
"Why do you study this?
This is ridiculous. They are fish."
But it matters for the fish
because it will affect their ability
to survive and grow and reproduce.
But it also affects ecosystems.
I mean, one tiny little behavioral change
in one species
could completely change an ecosystem
if it is an important key species.
It could also affect consumption of fish.
Like recreational fisheries would go down.
You couldn't fish as much
and what you catch you can't eat
because it's full of chemicals.
[Hellström]
Anxiolytic drugs, antidepressants,
they do have a role in society, right?
They do help people, save lives of people.
So maybe the way forward isn't really
to reduce consumption of these.
You shouldn't blame the user.
But the way forward is probably
to attack the treatment of the wastewater.
[Nasser] But not all poop is bad for fish.
In fact,
some kinds are downright nutritious.
[adventurous music playing]
[Nasser] University of Washington
scientists Deborah Giles and Sam Wasser
are on a mission to figure out
what's killing the killer whales.
In just a couple of decades,
the resident population
has fallen by a quarter.
When I turned 18,
my sister and some other girlfriends
surprised me with a trip
up here to the San Juans
to see the whales for the first time.
We spent six nights watching these whales
go back and forth and back and forth.
And at that point, I was just like,
"I want to work for these whales."
We have to be answering questions
that are going to help
recover the population
or the ecosystem
that that population relies on.
[Nasser] And they need to do it in a way
that doesn't harm the whales.
So the team came up with
an ingenious, non-harmful way
to help them solve this mystery.
Fecal samples are like gold.
Whales poop floaters.
And that poop just beckons researchers
to come and scoop it out of the water.
I can tell every single thing
that animal ate from the DNA in its feces.
Then I can get stress hormones,
reproductive hormones.
I can get microbiome from the animal.
The list goes on and on.
[Deborah] We know from fecal samples
the whales are not getting
enough fish to eat.
Thirty years ago,
there was so much fish here
that the whales would eat,
and then they would
just kind of play with the food.
They would catch a big salmon
and just drape it across their head.
We don't really know why,
but kind of like bling or something.
These massive, massive Chinook salmon,
they're just not here anymore.
[Nasser]
So what are the whales eating now?
Let's look in their poop.
There's just one slight problem.
It's not like looking for dog turds
on the sidewalk.
Even whale-sized waste is hard to see.
Enter Eba.
Her job is to track down orca caca.
[Wasser] Our dogs can actually smell
the sample over a nautical mile away.
And all you have to do is be able to read
the excitement, the changes of behavior,
and they can direct you
right into the sample.
[Nasser] It takes a special kind of dog
to do this work.
Eba is a rescue, with a ton of energy.
Because she loves to play,
the reward of a ball
is all it takes to motivate her.
[Wasser] Time to go to work.
[Nasser] Suddenly, Eba is all business.
The boat follows her nose.
[Giles] She's sniffing.
Look at her nose go.
[Nasser] And then Eba makes good.
There's whale poop nearby,
but it's not an orca.
It's a humpback.
They've never managed to collect
humpback whale poop before.
[Wasser] Oh. Beautiful.
Humpbacks were gone for a long time,
and now they're back.
So the question is "why are they here?"
It's just quite a mystery.
But we just need a few samples
and we'll know.
If this animal poops,
we will find it in these conditions.
What is this?
It's poop! It's poop! It's poop!
For sure.
[thuds]
Oh, my God. You just ran over it.
-God damn it. Get that big one!
-[Wasser] I've got a good one right here.
[Giles] Ah! Yes! Eba! Eba! Eba!
[claps]
Yeah!
-Good girl, Eba! Yeah.
-[dog growls]
Yeah. [clapping]
Whoo!
Give me that thing. Give me that thing.
[dog growling]
Yeah, yeah, Eba.
Good girl. [rolls tongue]
Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it.
-It smells like a cow shit.
-[Giles] It does.
[Wasser laughing]
[sighs] Oh, my God, no glove.
It's just so gross.
[laughing]
[Giles] Vial number one.
-Oh, there's the chunks.
-Yeah.
[Gilles] Vial number two.
[Wasser] One more after this.
Okay, I think that we could stop
before I puke.
[Giles chuckles]
[Nasser] The team can now head back
to the lab
to see what their sample can tell them
about the future of the humpbacks.
But here's the thing about whale poop:
it's way more than just a scientific tool.
[Giles] There are even critters
that specifically eat whale poop directly.
Poop does serve, um, an essential function
for a healthy marine ecosystem.
And without whales it might end up being
that we have a collapse
in different areas.
[Nasser] A whale's poop
can nourish the whole food chain.
Whales dive down,
and they eat up all these nutrients,
and then they swim to the surface
and poop it all out.
So they are this, like, pump
that's basically taking nutrients
from the bottom
and bringing it all to the top.
It is this life-generating force.
It's this secret sauce
that, like, animates our oceans.
[Nasser] We used to poop on cave floors,
but then we invented the sewage system.
We flushed our poop
right out of our homes,
but into the homes of fish
and other underwater creatures,
many of whom rely on
a whole other kind of poop:
whale poop.
But whales aren't the only ones
with life-saving poop.
Yours might have some superpowers too.
A new report out
from the US Centers for Disease Control
highlights that we are still losing
the battle against so-called superbugs,
bacteria that are resistant
to nearly all the antibiotics
[woman] One Pennsylvania woman
marking the first case in the US.
[man] A dire warning from medical experts
say we're living in a post-antibiotic era.
[Nasser] More and more
we're seeing news reports
about new strains of bacteria
that can't be killed by antibiotics.
We're in a really scary place right now.
The UN called it a global crisis.
Superbugs kill someone every 15 minutes,
and that's in the US alone.
But what if
Hold on. Hear me out.
What if poop is the answer?
Poop has something in it
that is more valuable
than all the precious metals put together.
It's It's a potential secret weapon
that we could use against the bacteria
that are trying to kill us.
[sinister music playing]
[Nasser] I'm here to meet the CEO
of Adaptive Phage Therapeutics,
Greg Merril, who's trying to save us all
from these nightmarish superbugs.
-So we start with a shower?
-No.
We do not start with a shower.
-Hopefully we can avoid the shower today.
-[Nasser] Okay.
[Merril] Everyone has a story,
either for themselves
or one of their friends or family
that's suffering
from a drug-resistant infection,
and so they get it right away,
that there's a big problem.
[Nasser] Greg and his team are developing
an alternative to antibiotics:
viruses.
Most people think of bacteria and viruses
as these two different things
that are designed to attack us.
But it turns out,
they also attack each other.
Bacteria and viruses
have been locked in mortal combat
for billions of years.
Now, one kind of virus in particular
targets bacteria.
It's called a bacteriophage.
It literally just means "bacteria eater."
And some of these bacteriophages,
or "phages" for short,
can kill the very superbugs
that are killing us.
If we can find and harness those viruses,
we might just be able to save ourselves
from impending doom.
[Greg] One of the first challenges
with treating a patient
is figuring out which phage will kill
the patient's
particular bacterial infection.
There are 10 to the 31 phage on earth.
[Nasser] Ten to the thirty-first power.
That means one, zero, zero, zero,
zero, zero, zero,
zero, zero, zero [voice speeding up]
zero.
That's the equivalent of a trillion phages
for every grain of sand on earth.
So Greg is on this ultra hard,
ultra high-stakes scavenger hunt.
If he can find just one of those viruses
that targets one
of those deadly superbugs,
he could potentially
turn it into a lifesaving medicine.
Guess where to find them.
If you do not know the answer,
you have not been watching.
Our poop is loaded with bacteria,
which means it's also loaded
with phages that prey on them.
[Greg] What we can do to find a new phage
is we pour some poop water
inside the petri dish.
Within a few hours,
if you're lucky, it will look like this.
-Do you see those spots?
-Yeah.
You're looking at millions of phage
killing millions of bacteria.
It doesn't look that dramatic,
but there's tons going on in there.
Exactly.
It's like gladiatorial combat.
You're pitting up these viruses,
these bacteria against one another
in that little petri dish,
and they're duking it out,
and you're watching
to see who's gonna win.
There's something in that water
that's killing the bacteria,
and that something is phage.
So, where do you get the poop water from?
The US Department of Defense
started collecting wastewater
from hospitals all over the world
-to do this type of phage discovery.
-Huh.
I'm picturing a tank in a closet
in a military base with just like
[chuckles]
It just says, "Poop water. Do not touch."
The phage in that poop water
might be the answer
to saving soldiers' lives
who've been exposed
to some of these superbugs,
and also, potentially, be a solution
to a terrorist attack using superbugs.
[Nasser] It's already saved lives
in individual cases
that couldn't be cured any other way.
But now Greg wants to scale it up.
[rhythmic music playing]
[Greg] So, this is the beginning
of the manufacturing process
to make a large amount of phage.
We start with bacteria.
It's warm, and it's wiggling
to expose the bacteria to all the food,
and it's happy.
-Bacteria like to be wiggled?
-I guess they do.
This flask is filled with bacteria food.
When we put the bacteria
from this test tube into this flask,
it will grow a lot of bacteria.
It's like you gave it a buffet
and now you're putting it in a sauna.
It's like it's having
the best day of its life.
And then we put in just a few of the phage
that we know will host
on that particular bacteria.
So, the amazing thing
is that with antibiotics
you need a large dose
to kill all of that bacteria.
But with phage, a single phage can kill
the entire bottle filled with bacteria,
because the phage
will replicate inside the bacteria,
making hundreds of copies of itself,
bursting the bacteria open, releasing
those hundreds and hundreds of phage.
That process repeats over and over again
until all the bacteria's dead.
[Nasser] It's high drama
'cause you're taking the bacteria,
you're making it super happy,
and then you're killing it.
[Nasser] Bacteria versus viruses.
It's
the biggest tiniest rivalry on Earth.
But in this lab,
Greg is harnessing their feud to save us.
And the fact
that they keep fighting each other
gives phages an extra benefit
over antibiotics.
This phage collection
will never become obsolete.
It's always changing.
We can always stay ahead of the bacteria
as it evolves.
And this system here could make
single-dose vials
of highly purified phage.
And we could put those in storage
so that they're ready
to be used in a patient.
[Nasser] Antibiotics were this miracle
drug of the twentieth century.
They came in
and they solved so many problems.
They saved so many lives.
But now, they're not working
like they used to,
and the thing
that might rush in heroically
is a virus that we can find,
actually, already within ourselves.
Poop may just save the day.
Actually, uh
Just I-- I need a second.
Give me a second.
[astronaut 1] Is it out of spec?
[astronaut 2] No,
it's in the nominal range, 3.9 to 4.6.
[astronaut 3] Ooooh, who did it?
-Who did what?
-Who did it?
-Get me a
-Where did that come from?
Get me a napkin quick.
There's a turd floating through the air.
I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.
I don't think it's one of mine.
Mine was a little more sticky than that.
Here's another Goddamn turd.
What's the matter with you guys?
I don't know whose that is.
I can neither claim it nor disclaim it.
-God almighty.
-[laughs]
[Nasser] There's one last place
we need to visit to fully appreciate
the unexpected wonders of poop,
and that place is not on Earth.
Do you know the phrase "leave no trace"?
Yeah, well, doesn't sound like
the Apollo astronauts did.
They left behind
all kinds of junk up there:
empty food bags, seven hammers,
four pairs of space boots,
six American flags,
a TV camera, six pairs of tongs,
two golf balls
You get the idea.
[Nasser] Where are we exactly?
This is the Apollo mission control room,
slightly restored.
It's the "Houston"
in "Houston, we have a problem."
[Nasser]
We all know that everyone poops
Literally, there's a book with that title.
and that includes astronauts.
To lighten their load
for the trip back to Earth,
the astronauts dumped a load,
as it were.
Six different moon missions left behind
as many as 96 bags of human waste,
which includes urine, vomit,
and, yes, poop.
Today, 50 years after the first astronauts
dropped a deuce on the moon,
NASA scientist Mark Lupisella
wants to go back up there
and take a look at it.
So, you basically want to
go dumpster diving on the moon?
[chuckles] Well, that's
I haven't thought about it that way,
but, yes, essentially, that's it.
Yeah. So, let's say you or somebody else
gets to go back to the moon,
go back to that site,
get one of those bags, tear it open,
what are you gonna find inside?
Those bags are inside a bigger bag,
meant to protect and contain
the material that was in there.
So we want to find out
how well was it contained?
Did anything survive inside?
There's plenty of evidence to indicate
that things have probably not survived.
But bacteria can form spores,
they can protect themselves
from harsh environments,
and they can be revived.
And so, one question is
whether or not we would find
revivable organisms, microorganisms.
[Nasser]
Sounds kind of far-fetched, right?
Like, how could anything survive in space?
But turns out, bacteria thrive in a lot
of places you'd think they couldn't:
lakes of acid,
arctic permafrost,
volcanic vents miles deep in the ocean,
even in places with no oxygen whatsoever.
So bacteria on the moon?
It's a long shot,
but not out of the question.
Maybe it's dead, maybe it's alive.
If it was revivable, what would that mean?
That's a
Minimally, that's another big data point
in the data set that says
life is extremely tenacious.
So, if life is very tenacious,
for example,
the panspermia hypothesis has come up.
[Nasser] Panspermia is the theory
that life on Earth
actually started
somewhere else in the universe,
and then hitched a ride here
on a comet or meteorite.
But how do you even test that?
Well, if the bacteria
in Neil Armstrong's poop
survived for 50 years on the moon,
it helps make the case
that life could have survived
the journey here
and planted the seed for all of us.
If there's something alive
in the bag even, and it's revivable,
you could argue that technically speaking,
we have seeded life on the moon.
[Nasser] That's some mind-blowing shit.
There could literally be
extra-terrestrial life out there in space,
right now.
But it just so happens
to be life that we put there.
That then could imply
that we need to be very careful
about our own contamination,
our own biological contamination,
particularly when we go to Mars,
because at Mars, we're probably
gonna be searching for life,
and we want to make sure
that we don't have our contaminants
compromise the search
for what might be indigenous life.
Ah. So, if we're looking for life,
we don't want to accidentally just find
our own poop life
that we just happened to sow there
by accident. [chuckles]
Now the moon is different than Mars,
but it still seems like it would be
reasonable to study this experiment,
because it's the only one we've got.
[Nasser] The crazy thing to me
is that seemingly we just were like,
"Ah. We don't need the extra weight.
Just throw it away."
Fifty years ago.
We didn't really think about it.
And now it's like, "Oh, wait.
There might be something in here
that gives us more insight
than anything else
we might have even done up there."
Hopefully in the future we can be
more intentional about what we do.
That's kind of the point
of doing this kind of work
so that we don't necessarily inadvertently
do stuff we don't want to do.
In this case, we could mask
the life that's on Mars.
We could conceivably cause its extinction.
Learning what we did on the moon
is one of the ways that we can
get smart about doing things on Mars.
[Nasser] With NASA planning
to land back on the lunar surface
in just a few years,
we may get the chance to go
dumpster diving on the moon after all.
And what we might learn
is that although we think of ourselves
as these space travelers,
maybe what we really are
are the spaceships.
We started this whole episode
in a dirty, poopy cave.
But I want to end it here,
in one of NASA's clean rooms,
where they prep pristine parts
of telescopes to shoot them into space.
It's a germophobe's paradise.
The pinnacle of our modern obsession
with cleanliness.
But recently, here,
in one of the squeaky-cleanest rooms
in the world,
scientists found some microbial life
that wasn't supposed to be here.
Surprise!
Our modern world
isn't as neat and tidy as we wish it was.
But that's okay.
Every time you poop and flush your toilet,
you're launching something
off into the world
and changing it just a little bit.
You're dropping a little truth bomb
about what you've done in the last day,
one that may even last
tens of thousands of years.
You're dispersing life-giving nutrients
and life-taking poisons
to countless creatures,
possibly even some an ocean away.
You're even giving a ride
to billions of tiny viruses
that one day in the near future
might save your life
or the lives of your loved ones.
As if all that was not astonishing enough,
it turns out that after a century
of flushing and forgetting,
we've learned
that the most disgusting part of ourselves
might just be our most significant
contribution to the universe.
No shit.
[upbeat music playing]