The Smell of Hell

Oh wait you're listening to radio lab radio from W and wife Hey, I'm Molly Webster. I'm Mack Hilti. This is radio lab and I have a cold and I don't know what we're doing Well come along Molly. You're in for quite a treat So little while back Who is ready for radio lab? A veer doctor of your METRA doctor of radio lab. Yeah, regular correspondent a little while back We went to Boston. Hello everybody. I did a live show there Okay, WBR at city space and I'm a veer METRA radio lab correspondent. They're very cool big performance space Got it coming out for our live tidying of our radio lab series viscera gripping tails from the body. Yes, and It's a show about one single element like on the periodic table element Yes, exactly an element that is going to be the theme of our show tonight I'm not gonna tell you what it is yet, but that element it's one of these things that when a veer and I start talking about doing this We realize it like it is one of the most underappreciated kind of forgotten elements underrated underrated That most people just associate with like disgusting gross awful smelly things Okay, we're gonna do a few stories to hopefully show you that this element that can induce Vomiting that in fact, it is a beautiful beautiful incredible thing that might be vital to our existence here on earth Hmm, so Molly Today, I thought what we would do is I would play for you this Boston show Okay, and just because I think it's like a pretty cool collection of stories that basically shine a spotlight on this overlooked Maligned element a maligned element that makes me Vom Let's get it fantastic. All right. Let's begin. So We're gonna begin with a little mystery story. Yeah, that's right If I didn't mention it before a veer is an ER doctor Yeah, so you know as an ER doctor the the question I get pretty much anytime I'm in a group setting is like Dude, what's the craziest thing you've ever seen in the ER? So I'm almost trying to think of answers But you know since I hugely respect patient privacy HIPAA and my retirement savings account I'm not gonna tell you the craziest thing I've seen But I think I've found the craziest thing that's happened in an ER like ever You guys want to hear that story? All right, here we go. So this story starts February 19th 1994 in an ER in Riverside, California A patient shows up by the name of Gloria of Ramirez young woman. She's just 31 years old mother of two And she had just been diagnosed with metastatic cancer hadn't even started treatment yet So she arrives in the ER and she's delirious. She's sweaty. She looks so sick and her vital signs are crashing And so the ER team jumps into action right away as we do they start bagging her with oxygen They put the paddles on her turn it all the way up. They shock her. None of it's working Of course, the nurse comes up to draw some blood So she puts the needle in the vein blood starts working its way into the tube The nurse takes the tube and passes it to the resident doctor behind her and next thing you know this nurse passes out Falls to the ground unconscious The resident doctor holding the tube starts to feel these crazy sensations Burning on her face skin tingling nausea lightheadedness and then she passes out falls to the ground unconscious The respiratory therapist who's bagging the patient with oxygen. She gets wobbly unconscious falls to the ground three people down. Yeah, exactly and of all the people in the ER There were 37 people in the ER that night within a few minutes 23 of them start experiencing these weird symptoms nausea tingling burning of their skin the incident that hospitalized six medical workers including one doctor Was so alarming to the staff at Riverside General Hospital that the emergency room was evacuated To the parking lot so the hazmat team arrives. They go get all gowned up go through the hospital search every pipe All the machines trying to find some sort of gas leak. Maybe there's carbon monoxide Maybe something but they find nothing and so now the ER staff is stuck outside in the parking lot trying to deliver medical care And they're all talking amongst themselves thinking like what the hell just happened. Yeah, and so they all start to say well You know, this all started right around when Gloria Ramirez appeared in the ER. What if this had something to do with Gloria? Investigators are speculating that the workers may have been exposed to a toxin used in pesticides Or that Ramirez took a suicidal dose of some poison, but family members disagree She didn't have the energy to even walk to the bathroom. Let alone go look for the look for any type of Pesticide or anything to drink while all this chaos is going on in the parking lot a Skeleton crew of doctors had actually stayed inside the ER to try and save Gloria But she did ultimately die that night. Oh, so the next step is they conduct an autopsy The autopsy was done in an airtight plywood chamber built inside the coroner's office the people who performed the operation War hazardous material suits and were hosed down with decontaminants when it was over Ultimately after this autopsy what they found is that Gloria died of kidney failure, which is weird kidney failure It doesn't mean like people start passing out exactly. So the mystery remained So at this point the state of California got involved. They decided to conduct their own investigation They interviewed everyone went through all the documents and after months and months they came out with this theory This was probably an episode of mass hysteria That's what they decided Shared stress right and their reasoning was, you know, look a lot of the people that passed out. They were women This is in the report I didn't write this You know, they hadn't taken a lunch break. You know, they're saying they were under a lot of stress Yeah, you know, I'm always passing out when I don't eat lunch. It's a weird So yeah, as you can imagine like nobody who worked at this hospital was happy with this You know why you know these nurses if you know any ER nurses They are some of the most grizzly season people you could ever meet that we never get lunch breaks like why would we all of a sudden have this episode of mass hysteria just makes no sense Mm-hmm even Gloria's family they weren't happy with this either didn't make much sense So ultimately they decided to do a second autopsy and this autopsy they sent to a pretty fancy lab at the liver more lab in San Francisco and they do something that's not typical for an autopsy they do something called gas chromatography So what that is is they basically take samples of glorious tissues all the different tissues in her body and they basically Melt away the solids so there's only liquid left they burn that liquid and depending on the color at which it burns and the Temperature at which it burns you can kind of get a sense of what's in there So it's a really good way of looking at a very molecular chemical level of what's going on inside of Gloria? What would Ramirez blood reveal? Every peak here is a different unique chemical that was in the blood of Mrs. Ramirez and Things stand out is very obvious. This is all Tylenol or acetaminophen is right here Cholesterol is here other drugs and a very unusual chemical we initially discovered which was right here We don't know what it is at this moment, but luckily we have libraries When you actually search a library in the computer it will print out what this chemical is What ever could our mystery chemical be so glad you asked that was the theme of the night Solfer oh, that's that's our mystery element This is the element the theme the theme of the show the theme of the night. I associate sulfur with like the environment Like I didn't know we could have sulfur in us. Yeah, so it turns out it's a specific type of sulfur called DMS-o2 Okay, now the interesting thing about DMS-o2 is you can find DMS-o2 in the human body because if you eat like a Sparigus or some raw milk you can get some DMS-o2 into your body. Oh, is that why is Sparigus makes your piece melt funny? Oh, that's a good question. Don't know But the amount of DMS-o2 that seemed to be in Gloria seemed to be way higher than you could like otherwise predict So they're confused like this isn't normal could there be a clue in here? And so they think and they realize there's a related chemical to DMS-o2 called DMS-o Now DMS-o completely different is an industrial degreaser Wait, what is a degreaser a degreaser is it's just like you often a spray You know you put it on greasy stuff to cut through the grease clean thing Wait, why was she using a degreaser on her body so potentially pain relief it turns out back in the day and for decades People have used this medicinally people used to rub this like a bomb on their heads when they had headaches or rub it on their joints if they have joint pain It's like an old-school icy hot. Yeah, exactly since falling out of favor, but people still use this off label Huh, so they start to think wait what if Gloria having cancer having all this pain May have been using DMS-o and the only difference between DMS-o and DMS-o2 is a little bit more oxygen So maybe that DMS-o turned into DMS-o to okay, but the problem is neither DMS-o or DMS-o2 or toxic So they got to go back to the drawing board. They find it another related chemical called DMSO4, so DMSO4 also related, but the interesting thing about this chemical is this was experimented on as a toxic gas agent. And guess what the symptoms were, nausea, burning of the skin, lightheadedness, fainting, and enough dose you could even die. So they think, "Well, wait, what if Gloria had been using DMSO on her skin for her aches and pains, came into the ER, was getting bagged full of oxygen, which converted some of that DMSO into DMSO2." And then something crazy would have had to happen. A lot of energy would have to go into this to turn DMSO2 into DMSO4, something like turning a defibrillator up to 360 jewels and shocking her. And then all that need to happen is a nurse comes up to draw some blood, just drop a blood on the skin, could release enough fumes to cause all the symptoms that we saw in the ER that night. So it's like, "Woman comes in the ER, turns into chemical weapon." That's a theory. But the truth is, there's a lot of issues. While these things can happen in a test tube, no one has ever shown that this could actually happen in a human body. It's also insane. It's also insane. That's number two. Number three. Good point. This day denies that she ever heard about or used DMSO. And so at the end of the day, the state of California has always stuck with the idea that this is an episode of Mass hysteria. While the Livermore Labs states the most likely thing was a airborne toxic event. And the truth is, I think this will always remain a mystery. I don't think we will ever know what really happened that night. But there is one thing that we do know from that night, which is that the medical staff who treated Gloria reported smelling an odor in the room. Now you all have a brown paper bag. If you open up that bag, you will find a Ziploc bag with a green dot on it. So we had everybody, we'd given them bags with little perfume blotter strips. We had basically had a perfumer make a lot of different scents that we were going to use throughout the night. And so we had them pull out this one blotter strip. That's what we call a blotter strip, take that out, wafed it a little bit. What are we smelling out there? Garlic? We're hearing some garlic? She said, specifically, Italian garlic. Okay. Love. I mean, to it. It's like, but it's really pungent. It's like actually very sharp. It's kind of harsh. Okay. And what is interesting is that one of the few things that we can definitely say about what happened that night is that people in the ER, when Gloria Ramirez arrived, reported smelling something sort of garlicky. Okay. Okay. So you are smelling that garlicky smell. Now, this is the important part about it is that what makes up a lot of that scent is a sulfur compound, which some people say is a confirmation that in fact, this crazy transformation had taken place that night. But it doesn't necessarily answer everything because it also sort of supports this idea that the state of California was presenting, which is that that smell in and of itself was kind of this like inciting event. An event that would cause this fear to ripple through an entire staff because the thing about sulfur is that we have evolved to be kind of terrified of it. In fact, like maybe of all the elements, it's the one that we are most terrified of because we are incredibly attuned to it. Our nose can pick up some sulfur compounds at as little as 0.5 parts per billion in the air. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, which am I not? If you were to imagine like 8 billion people of earth all squished together, that'd be the equivalent being able to pick out four individuals inside that massive humanity. Like that's how sensitive we are. And we've evolved to be that sensitive because sulfur is death. It is rot. It is decay. When you die, when bacteria starts eating your flesh, your organs, they start pumping out sulfur. And that idea has woven itself into culture, fire and brimstone. Brimstone is just an archaic way of saying sulfur. Like this is what we call hell. And in fact, when you smell it, we've evolved to smell it so that it's like a little alarm for us. Something's happening. So when you cook with natural gas, natural gas is actually odorless, they pump sulfur into the gas so that you can detect any faint leak inside your house. It tells you something here is terribly, terribly wrong. Or does it? So to pick apart that question, we're going to welcome out to the stage author historian, Jeanette Cohnant. Okay, Jenny, thank you so much. All right. So Jenny wrote this fantastic book, The Great Secret. And I remember when we first spoke, you had a personal connection to how this all began for you. Yeah, I was writing a book about my grandfather, James Cohnant. And he was brilliant chemist, President Harvard, and one of the famous warrior scientists of World War II. He was tapped by President Roosevelt to head the Manhattan Project. And he was up in Heimers boss, you know, he was personally oversaw the development of the bomb. Anyway, I finished the book and I found a really weird fact. After the war, he went on the board of a big hospital, which was weird. He just built a weapon of mass destruction. He really wasn't a warm and cuddly guy, but why a hospital? So I did some research and I found a crazy story about the barry disaster and it became my next book. Okay. So let's start that barry. Where exactly are we, when are we? So this picture, this is a Nazi photograph, aerial photograph. This is probably taken about the time of the book, which is December 2nd, 1943. And barry is a huge Italian harbor on the Adriatic coast. And it was a major staging area for the planned invasion of France at the Normandy Beach Hut. And it was just full of British and American ships. The Allies were relying on this to supply their troops. There had to be like 30 Allied ships packed in there like Sardines lined up one after another. And there were nine enormous American Liberty ships and they were carrying all kinds of vital supplies from ammunition, weapons, fuel oil. Anyway. Oh, preparing for like the invasion that's about to happen. Yeah, did it. So. And as we've already stated, this is a Nazi aerial photograph. Yeah. So. Unfortunately for us, the Nazis figured this out. And that night on December 2nd, they launched a devastating air raid on barry. And they rained bombs down on the anchored ships, which couldn't escape. So it was just horrific. One ship after another blew up within a minute. The whole harbor was consumed by thick black smoke and flames. And the surviving crew members had no choice but to jump overboard like a sea of fire. And they just swam for it. And it was just horrible. It was a huge success for the Nazis. They killed a thousand sailors in one night. They wounded that many. They sunk at least 17 ships. And who knows how many civilians were affected. And so the press immediately dubbed the disaster the little Pearl Harbor. Huh. You said a thousand people are killed. So what comes after this? Well, what the press didn't know was in the next 24 hours the scope of the disaster would widen horribly because they plucked hundreds of these young sailors from the water. And they did what, you know, it was a British harbor. The British did what they usually did in a disaster. They wrapped them in warm blankets. They gave them strong sweet tea. And they kept them comfortable until the ER doctors who were run off their feet that night could take a look at their wounds and their blast injuries. But, you know, very quickly it became apparent that these sailors didn't have the usual blast injuries. And instead of responding well to treatment, they took a turn for the worst. Then by the next morning it was really alarming because they had developed blisters the size of balloons. Their eyes had swollen shut. And they had all these really strange delayed symptoms like extreme nausea and vomiting. None of this was normal. And they didn't really know what to do. And in fact, they just labeled all of the injuries a dermatitis NYD, which meant not yet diagnosed. And, you know, within 12 to 48 hours, 12 men had died. And within three days, the wards were filled up hundreds of sailors who were blind and screaming in pain and panicked. And at that point, the British doctors knew that they were dealing with something really out of the ordinary. And they began to suspect that among the incendiary bombs, the Germans maybe had used some diabolical chemical weapons. A chemical weapon. Okay. We are going to pause right here because yet again, this is an opportunity for you to smell something. At this point in the show, we had the audience smell. This mustard gas, that is mustard, wait, you can do that. Well, we, I kept trying to tell him it was mustard gas. You're all smelly mustard gas. This will be our last. our last radio lab performance ever. It's not actually mustard gas, it's again, it's like a perfumer made a scent, based on the description of survivors of mustard gas attacks. - I'm just like thinking about the candle company that you would-- - Yankee mustard gas? - Yeah. - But I mean, it was really terrible stuff. - It was used a lot in World War I. World War I was called the chemist war. The Germans favorite weapon was chemical poison gas, biological weapons. Everybody's worst nightmare. Counting for over a million casualties in World War I, and as a result, everyone decided to ban it and in the Geneva Protocol of 1925. - This is too terrible to use. - Too terrible. The cost was too high. No one wanted to see it again. Unfortunately, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt really believed that the Germans wouldn't use it again. It had been their favorite weapon. They had made tons of it. They had tons of it. And they were afraid that if the war went badly and Hitler's back was to the wall, he would resort to using chemical weapons again. So the Allies had no choice but to study it, make it, and work on antidotes. General Eisenhower, who is head of the Allied forces in Europe, he insisted on having a chemical warfare expert on his staff. And all of the troops were trained in chemical weapons. They carried little detector kits and they knew how to smell it. I mean, if you caught a whiff of horse radish or something that tickled your nose in the air, it was mustard. If you smelled freshly moaned hay, that would be fuzz gene. So all of the troops kind of knew this, but it wasn't exactly comforting. - Right, and then so they call in, they're like, okay, Bari, Bari happens. You have soldiers with blisters, and they're like, okay, we're gonna investigate that. - Gotta be some kind of chemical weapon. But they don't know what, because nobody can recognize it. And the British, they had all the manuals from World War I. They knew what mustard gas looked like, and this isn't looking right, so they don't know. So Eisenhower sends in his chemical warfare expert, a young American doctor called Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Alexander. There he is. And he starts walking the wards of Bari Hospital. And right away, the place is wreaking of crude oil and black smoke and other chemicals, but he catches a whiff of garlic. And he's pretty sure mustard gas, right? You smelled it, you're not gonna forget it. Well, the British go no way. It's not mustard gas, there's no mustard in Bari Harbor. The port authorities say, no, we've studied the port, there's no mustard gas. So he doesn't know what to think. The British doctors say, no, we don't recognize these wounds. So he has to take them at their word. So he orders more tests, and he orders more autopsies. But at the same time, he doesn't entirely buy it. He knows the British have very good reason to deny mustard in Bari Harbor. After all, if Hitler has done it, this is gonna mean that America and Britain will have to retaliate in kind. Roosevelt and Churchill said they would, and this could trigger an all-out chemical war. So he's gotta be dead certain. So he starts investigating the harbor. He studies where all the ships were located. He does charts of the casualties, where most people died. And what happens is he pinpoints the fact that the epicenter of the contamination at Bari was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship. He can come to only one conclusion. The John Harvey had to be carrying a secret payload of mustard gas bombs, probably headed for a secret cash near the front so the allies could use them if they had to. So it was our mustard gas? And then a diver that he had ordered to search the harbor floor finds the fractured shells. The shells are not from a German bomb, which always has a yellow cross, but an M4700 pound American sulfur mustard bomb. - This is the great secret. So the tragic truth is that when the Luftwaffe bomb the Harvey, they bombed our mustard gas shells. We poisoned in effect our own men. So it's a tragic wartime accident. Even worse is that the nurses in wrapping the sailors in blankets, they unwittingly trapped the mustard and oil mixture from the harbor water close to their skin, allowing the men to marinate in the poison. So many more died than they needed to, hence the secrecy, the official cover-up, the need for denials. Bari could not have happened. There was no mustard gas accident. Nobody could discuss it because the Germans could not find out. - So you just cover it up, but then what comes out of that? - Well, the thing is Alexander by some crazy coincidence was probably one of the few doctors in the world that had studied the effects of mustard on laboratory animals. And he had seen something really striking. So he doesn't want all these men to die in vain. So he starts ordering autopsies. And he sees the same striking result in autopsy after autopsy. What he finds is the white blood cell count has virtually vanished. The lymph nodes are shriveled. As he said, it was like they melted away. And more than that, the bone marrow has been completely decimated. So what he is seeing, in effect, is that mustard gas has targeted and virtually decimated the body's ability to produce white blood cells. And he is a doctor in peacetime. And what he is wondering is can this poison in tiny doses be used to attack malignant white blood cells? For example, leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer is characterized by runaway white blood cell counts. So here's the age-old question. Can a harmful substance heal? We know throughout time dangerous voicens like arsenic and digitalis are used as drugs. Why not mustard? - Interesting. Okay, so he basically has a strange horrible human experiment which he can just pull all these results from. - He's got a more full of dead bodies. - Right. So, okay, so he then does that, writes it up. - He writes it up in a classified report and he sends it to his boss, Colonel Cornelius Rhodes, who is head of the Chemical Warfare Division's Medical Division. But in peacetime, he's head of a big hospital in New York. He immediately recognizes the significance of Alexander's report that it's a landmark study in improving that mustard is a cell poison. And this immediately propels all of the medical efforts to research cancer forward. There was a group of doctors at Yale that had done a small but very secret study injecting nitrogen mustard, which is a chemical cousin of sulfur mustard. - Right, you swap out the sulfur and nitrogen goes in its place. - Into a few human beings and they had received incredible results. They had managed to shrink tumors in a couple of advanced lymphoma cases. Unfortunately, the patients all relapsed and died. But together with the Bari report and the hundreds of autopsies, Rhodes now had what he felt was proof of mustard gas's curative potential. - So this is Cornelius, right? - This is him, Dusty Rhodes to his friends, believe it or not. - And I will just say Dusty Rhodes, medical savior also really, really racist guy like-- - Like beyond the beyond, yeah. - Yeah, bad stuff. But anyways, they have this sort of breakthrough with chemical weapons. - And then, incredibly, on August 7th, 1945, which is the day the world learned that the atom bomb had been dropped on Japan, Rhodes announces that they're gonna start a huge hospital in New York and commit like an all-out war on cancer and try and conquer this thus far and curable disease. And he says he's gonna recruit all of the chemical warfare experts to help carry out this revolutionary idea of using not just nitrogen mustard, but a whole array of toxic chemicals to attack cancer. And this would pave the way for a modern treatment known today as chemotherapy. - That's crazy. And this full circle, this is how your grandfather shows up on the board. Jenny, thank you so much. This is great. A little round of applause here. (audience applauds) You can find her book wherever you get books. I'm gonna put it off for you like this. - More on the element of sulfur after the break. - Yeah, sulfur in your head. - Oh, sulfur in my head after the break in a good way. - Yeah. - Okay. I'm in. - All right, back in a minute. We're back. - Sulfur and Matt. - And Molly. - End of year. - And Mona. - In Boston. - Good. - Okay, we got one more story. - Yeah, one more story. - How are you guys doing? Are you doing okay? One more? (audience applauds) Okay. This story is another bad smell. I'm not gonna make you smell it, but it's hydrogen sulfide, which is the smell I like to say of the Jersey turn pike. (audience laughs) Yeah, I'm from Jersey, so I can say this. You know, there's a funky smell around exit 13 on the Jersey turn pike. It's kind of the smell of like a sewer, you know, or if you're at the ocean and it's low tide, that kind of swampy smell. That's hydrogen sulfide, also known as swamp gas. All right, the interesting thing about this is that at high enough doses, it can kill you. Not if you're just smelling it on the road, but like let's say you're doing a 12 hour shift in a sewer or you're drilling for oil. Like if you get a new. enough hydrogen sulfide you can die. So third story starts in the year 1989 with a scientist named Werenitzia. And he wants to be the guy to figure out how does hydrogen sulfide kill? So he takes a bunch of rats, as you do, and exposes them to toxic levels of hydrogen sulfide gas. And then he kills the rats, dissect their brains, and looks in there. What he finds is that sure enough, there is this swamp gas in their brains. So that's interesting, fine. But like any good scientist, he has to have like a control group, right? Some rats that didn't get exposed, he kills them, dissect their brains, and he's surprised because he sees a little bit of swamp gas in their brains too. So he's thinking, all right, what? Like did I mess up my rats? Did some gas leak from here to there? You know, keeps running the experiment over and over, and every time his control rats have a little bit of hydrogen sulfide in their brains. So he publishes his results that pretty much go unnoticed, not too many people read the paper, but the few people that do are trying to figure out, well, why are these rats producing hydrogen sulfide? And they sort of just attributed to, like, best I can describe is brainfarts. (audience laughs) Every engine creates exhaust, right? Every motor creates fumes. And the brains do a lot of work, so maybe it's just creating fumes, it's farting, it's just doing what it does. And so that was sort of the state of play for like 10 years. That's what people just assumed. Until another scientist came along by the name of Hideo Kumura, Japanese scientist, and he looked at it sort of differently. He said, like, the brain is not just a normal motor. It's way too perfect. It's way too smart, you know? Why would a brain just be making farts and marinating in its own farts? He did not like that explanation. - She would never do that. (laughs) So he decides, I wanna figure out what hydrogen sulfide is doing. It has to be there doing something. So he decides to study neurons in mice. So as most of you probably know, but the way thoughts and actions and memories happen is neurons send messages to other neurons. Brain is just full of neurons, right? And so for something to happen, a neuron has to get a signal, pass that signal to another neuron, pass it to another neuron, and that becomes an action or a memory or a thought, right? So he's studying these connections between neurons, and he's realizing that the more a particular path of neurons gets activated by a particular repetitive thought or repetitive action, the more those neurons start to produce swamp gas. And the swamp gas, it turns out, goes back to that particular thread of neurons and strengthens the connection. So it's almost like turning a hiking trail into a paved road such that things happen faster, better, if that kind of makes sense. - Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. - So we got really interested in this. So we talked to like a researcher who works in this. This is what she studies. Her name is Bindu Paul. She did an experiment where she created mice that were incapable of producing hydrogen sulfide. So they had none. And she ran them through a maze. And, you know, when you run a mouse through a maze, basically the first time they run through the maze, they take some time to figure it out. Second time, they get a little better, third time better, and after 10 times, you know, they go straight to the place that they're supposed to go. You know, the little hole, the little hole. But as she runs these hydrogen sulfide depleted mice, these mice that can't make swamp gas through the maze, she's surprised to find out that every time they run the maze, it's like it's the first time they've ever done it. They don't get any better. She's looking at these mice and she's like, "Wow, it's almost like these mice have Alzheimer's." And interestingly, humans who have Alzheimer's produce less hydrogen sulfide than people who don't. So she does another experiment where she goes and gets some Alzheimer's mice, which you can buy online. You can buy mice with Alzheimer's. They're a version of Alzheimer's, so she buys some of these mice. And she takes these mice and exposes them to hydrogen sulfide gas. She pumps them full of hydrogen sulfide gas. We found that these same Alzheimer's mice, when you inject them with hydrogen sulfide, they are almost as good as the normal mice because, yes, they're learning and memory deficits are prevented or even reversed with hydrogen sulfide. Ooh, so hydrogen sulfide gas is essentially reversing and preventing the effects of Alzheimer's in these Alzheimer's mice. - Yeah. - Are we now doing it in people rather than just mice? - Good question. - It's still mouse studies, still a little early to do that, but-- - Whip it then, like, why did you fart on mat earlier? - Oh, well, that's just something we do. - That's just something we do. - I ask for that regardless of what it does to my memory. - Everyone warms up for a show differently, okay? - Sorry. - But yeah, not ready for human use yet, but there is this really interesting place where something's going on. I'm talking about Roto Rua in New Zealand. So this town naturally has a lot of like hot springs and there's just have lots of hydrogen sulfide gas. - Lot of gas. - Swamp gas everywhere. And when you run the people of this town through finger tapping tests, which are like how you can screen for like Parkinson's, stuff like that, they do better than the general population. So kind of interesting. Now that's not to say you have to move to Roto Rua. You don't have to move to, you know, the Jersey Turnpike or whatever, Alzheimer's please. - Law, you can come visit me there anytime. Maybe there's another way. - You can also consume foodstuffs such as garlic, broccoli, or, you know, shiitake mushroom. I can't have these sulfur compounds. So you're saying if you eat more sulfur in your diet, then your body's able to use those ingredients to make more hydrogen sulfide? - Yes, right now, for me, the safest way to boost your H2S protective. - It's pizza. - It's mushroom and garlic pizza. - Mushroom and garlic pizza. Why not? Why not? Yeah. - Incredible, you know, it just, I just think about this a lot. It just boggles my mind that the human body would use a toxic gas in the brain to do something so important as like encoding memory. It's crazy to me. What is the logic behind that? - Right. So to answer this question, we have to go back in evolution. So several years ago. So at that time, we don't have oxygen. We have hydrogen sulfide instead. So our body's still retained the ability to use hydrogen sulfide. So you're saying like this is like almost like an antique like ancestral process. - Yes. - It is a very ancestral process and it has been written throughout evolution. - Pooh. - Okay, so it turns out while a viewer was talking to Bindu, I was doing, as one does, reading about the origins of sulfur. And like Bindu said, if you go back about three billion years ago, you didn't have much oxygen in your satmosphere. And instead, and right here, you can grab your brown paper bag again. We also had people pull out a little smell strip. - Yeah. So what you are smelling is a sulfurous volcanic ash. - What did that one smell like? - Very earthy, earthy and smoky. And like there's a sharpness to it. - Now, what's going on is you had sulfur coming from the molten core rushing up, exploding out of the earth's crust and in to the atmosphere. But more importantly, if you went deep down, down, down to the ocean floor, you also had sulfur coming up in these deep sea vents. Now, you've probably seen these, these are kind of considered to be the origin of life. What you had is you had tiny little basic simple microbes that were hanging out near these vents. And what they were doing is they were using the sulfur that was coming out of them as their source of life, of energy in order to sustain themselves grow. And about 500 million years later, when oxygen does show up and kind of revolutionizes everything, sulfur manages to stick around. But sulfur, because it's so important, it gets incorporated into these complex cells. It becomes a part of like amino acids and proteins. In fact, it is a thing that gives hair that little curl, like a viewer in Mona's beautiful hair. It's also, it is a thing that helps your genes turn on and off. It's a part of a molecule that prevents yourselves from just breaking down, decaying too fast. So it kind of prevents you from aging too fast. Scientists have actually found sulfur literally in almost every matter of life here on earth, which is why there are astrophysicists currently using the James Webb telescope in order to look deep out into space, millions and millions of layers away. And they're looking for a faint trace of sulfur, this little signal possibly of life somewhere else out their universe. And so, the next time you find yourself walking around Maybe Central Park, if you want to come down in New York City, great city. Or you're walking through the Boston Commons, and you catch a width of just something that's like, whoa, you know, rotten eggs. Just take a moment, plant your feet, and breathe it in. And smile, knowing, mm, that's the smell of life, baby. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) Thank you, thank you, thank you, so much. Okay, these smells were brought to you today by Senior Producer, Matt Kilti, Doctor of Yermitra, Producer, Monomid Galker, with. Yeah, a special shout out. Thank you to our guest, Jeanette Cohnant, and check out her book, The Great Secret. Thank you to the Radio Lab team who helped make this live episode possible, Monomid Galker, Pat Walters, Sarah Sandback, Natalia Ramirez, Jeremy Bloom, Harry Fortuna, Molly Webster. - Did I? - I guess so, Gabi's not just Aryan Wack, David Gabel. Maya Abelby Milamin, Jason Saul, fact checking by Rachel Gross, special thanks to Dr. Sarah Seager, Justin Cox, Imran Umar, Chris Collin, Sophia Colette, Eric of Old Factory, Heritage Consulting, and Gus, who developed a lot of the sense that our audiences smelled in person. - We should tell people if they like this element show, they should go listen to our element show. - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna be so fun. - That would be so fun. - We're gonna be so fun. - Yeah, if you liked this element, Sulfur, we actually have a whole episode about other elements. - Called elements. - Okay. - Did we do everything? - We did everything for this episode, but we do have another viscera show coming up next month is November 5th, New York City. Go to www.wnwc.org/avents for details and buy some tickets. - Thank you for listening. - Bye. - Hi, I'm Maya, and I'm from London, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif NASA. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nynosambandan, Matt Keelty, Mona Mordgaulka, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kauri, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Stroghats, Anisa Vietzer, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young. With help from Maya Applebee Malamid, Laura Carpass, and Olivia Rose Greco. Our fact checkers are Nora Belblidia, Hilary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, and Sophie Smeyer. - Hi, I'm Monica, and I'm calling for Mexico City. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.