Does anyone know anything about the guitar riff / music which begins at 49:28 and can be heard most clearly from 50:12 to 50:17? Thanks.

Nice hypothesis about the origin of HIV... No one has mentioned the possibility of crossover into human populations via earlier, poorly prepared vaccines using many species of animal organs... has this been considered? And what would the liability implications be if... say a pharmaceutical company cut corners financially say in maintaining adequate refrigeration systems in developing country clinics... say in West and Central Africa and a new pandemic was a result... Just a thought.

IT'S NOT HIV-Virus. It's just HIV (V=Virus)

IT'S NOT HIV-Virus. It's just HIV (V=Virus)

but what is the guitar music at the end of this podcast Patient Zero?

Dear Radio Lab (and NO need to post this publicly, I'm just passing this on "FYI"): I think you have a fantastic show, and I enjoyed listening to the segment the other day on the viral history of HIV. Also, FYI much of the material seemed(eerily?) similar to our recently published book on the AIDS epidemic (Tinderbox; Penguin Press, 2012), and I wondered if perhaps that was just a coincidence? Anyway, no biggie, it was a good (and accurate) show... Thanks for airing it.... Sincerely, Daniel

Daniel Halperin, PhD
Adjunct Associate Professor
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

No no no....the "high five" originated in Mel Brooks' 1968 film "The Producers" -- watch the Springtime For HItler musical and you'll see it, 7 years before Rocky Horror.

I'm in the midst of listening to the "high five" story, hoping you mention this 1975 source of the high five, the Rocky Horror Picture Show:

http://www.rockyhorror.com/

Perhaps this movie helped popularize it, and the baseball player, Glen Burk(?) saw the movie?

And on the "high five" the volleyball reference is somewhat inaccurate as they do a "high ten". It is done in good or bad situations and often is just acknowledgment of each other to refocus for the next play. Most commonly seen when players sub in.
The only reason I think the "high five" and "high ten" should be distinct is because the "low five" is as equally similar yet vastly predates the others.

I can't believe I'm posting about this. :)

This is exactly the reason I enjoy this program. You take something as complex as AIDS and make it easily accessible.
My own look into the spread of HIV had also led to chimps when people were looking at me like I was crazy for suggesting that. But the "how" was more specific and somewhat sinister. Forgive me as my memory for the specifics has faded but there were people making vaccines, I'm pretty sure for polio, from chimps. There eventually became debate on their methods as they had to kill the chimps to access the material necessary to produce the vaccine. Despite this debate they continued to produce this vaccine in the same method and 'could' be the source for human infection.

This is a very interesting show. It is very entertaining but not enough scientific or critic to my point of view.
It would have been very informativ to speak about the HIV in itself and the difficulty of recognizing it (microscopy, molecular biology etc), the difficulty about HIV testing, the controversy around the aids statistics, the difficulty of linking HIV to AIDS, the effects of new antiretroviral drugs etc...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p-ttLfkZHQ

Once again, fantastic work. I've listened to the AIDS story a dozen times now.

Dread Pirate Clinton from Montreal, if you're still looking for it, the network referred to in the AIDS story is in:

Auerbach D.M., Darrow, W.W., Jaffe, H.W, and J.W Curran (1984) Cluster of cases of the acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome-patients linked by sexual contact, American Journal of Medicine, 76, 487-492.

Listening to the high five segment in "Patient Zero," I recalled biking late one night along 14th Avenue in Manhattan back in 2007. As I pedaled mid-block, a tall, jacketed man stepped out between parked cars to hail a cab. Without thinking, I rose out of the saddle and raised my arm to give his cab-hailing hand a high five. He shouted with delight. Thanks, Glenn Burke.

can anyone give me a summary of this

This story is soo COOL!!

One of the best episodes I've heard. I recommended it to my family and they loved it as well. Keep up the great work!

Comparing Typhoid Mary's situation to the story of AIDS raises some disturbing questions about our "modern" way of dealing with pandemics. If simian aids was ever as fatal to chimps as HIV is to humans, it would have eventually wiped out all of the chimp population, except possibly for a few if they had some natural immunity, or were at least able to resist aids long enough to reproduce. Many of their offspring would have also had this resistance, some even stronger than their parents. In the course of evolution, their offspring would quickly come to dominate, while the others would die off (and the existence of these stronger individuals would be a hazard to the rest of the population, especially if they were only "healthy carriers", and not fully immune). Before modern medicine, that was the only way a species had to survive a pandemic of a fatal disease.

But when Typhoid Mary was found, we immediately quarantined her "for the safety of others". That means there was no way for her genes, which gave her natural resistance, to spread. Of course, today we'd study her genetics and biochemistry in the hopes of learning how to fight the disease, but it raises the disturbing issue that if that attempt failed, continuing to quarantine her would also mean giving up on a "last hope" option for keeping the human population alive.

Several years ago I read that a population of prostitutes somewhere in Africa had been found that seemed to have a stronger than normal resistance to HIV.

Is it just me, or are there the faint strains of the eerie screechy music from the shower scene in the movie Psycho at 35:53 where the Nathan Wolfe describes a chimp going after an organ of another chimp "that was a tasty morsel".

If so...kudos to you Radiolab......if not...score one for an over active imagination.

This has to be one of my favourite episodes, alongside Parasites and Ooops. Oh, and all the others of course

scratch that. 1960

Breathless was 1959, not '55. Just FYI from a movie nerd.

Perhaps chimps should get some credit for being the first high fivers?

Hand-clasp grooming!

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/box/nature04023_BX2.html

http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/hcg.html

best. episode. ever. period.

Almost five years ago, I lost the love of my life to complications from AIDS. My husband passed away and every day since, I have lived with a great loss. Listening to the HIV story, there are so many "what ifs" running through my mind, and tears running down my cheeks. A truly emotionally wrenching story. Thank you.

This was one of those episodes that reminded me why I fell in love with RadioLab in the first place. The AIDS story was downright phenomenal.

Although I normally like your show, I have to say that this one was pretty disappointing. First, the way in which you introduce the patient zero idea, using a contagion network as a visual aid, is misleading. One thing is to have a highly connected individual (which in the case of sexual contacts, could simply be a very promiscuous person) and another is to trace the origins of the disease, which could be traced back to a not necessarily promiscuous person. Second, while searching for the origins of a disease is definitely interesting, I find the high five story pretty silly - I mean, this gesture is so simple that it could have been used anywhere, multiple times, not necessarily being "invented" by anyone.

Here is a related interesting and sordid tale. Really worth a read, especially for Radiolab listeners who have heard Patient Zero.
I would LOVE to hear RL do a closer look at this guy...
http://goo.gl/ZkMWk

Rafael, the song is a variation of "Infinite Love" by Dustin Wong.

First: what is that song that comes in and out during minute 50 when Glenn Burke "invents" the high five?

Second: What a great episode! I'm always pleasantly surprised by episodes I click on out of strength of habit more than strength of interest. I thought the theme "Patient Zero" might be a bit heavier than I was in the mood for... but wow. Riveting. This is why tuning in has become a reflex.

slightly odd coincidence that if you use Roman numerals for the 5 in HI 5 its HIV. Tenuous I know, but a coincidence none the less!

In the book "El Birdos" by Doug Feldman he puts forth the theory that Orlando Cepeda was patient zero for the High 5 back in the 1960's. Also in baseball! The book is about the 1967-1968 St. Louis Cardinals.

It would be intriguing to hear about the patient zero of Chuck Norris jokes!

Hail Mary Mallon = Aesop Rock + Rob Sonic. Makes sense now!

I was surprised that "Deadly", the recent fictional revival of the Typhoid Mary character by author Julie Chibbaro was not mentioned.

If you enjoyed the segment about Gaetan Dugas, read more about Robert Rayford. Fascinating stuff! Well done Radiolab!

We all gonna act like that guy didn't know what Carbonite was?

Robert from Bucharest, the song you are looking for is called Articulate Silences, by the band Stars of the Lid, from the album "And Their Refinement of the Decline". Highly recommended band. I wish Radiolab would give credit to the musicians who create the music they use.

As the child of an epidemiologist, I was familiar with Typhoid Mary's story from an early age--in fact, because I tended to harbor a strep throat (i.e., carry it but not get sick), my nickname was "T-Mary" (epidemiology humor).

I also learned from my father that fads spread in the same pattern as epidemics, and that both can be plotted on a bell-shaped curve.

In case anyone else wants to track it down, I found the high five from Breathless at 1:14:26 in the Google Video copy of Breathless at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=154265816642125228

I came here looking for a one of the songs played during the podcast and I'm shocked to find there's no list of them.
I really want to identify the song that was played during the "High five" segment, when they all get teared up because the robotic arm works.
Can anyone please help? I know it's silly, but I would really appreciate any help.

To avoid disputes in a RadioLab episode decades hence, I would like to stake my claim here and now to being the originator of the heterodyne kiss.

In regards to the Patient Zero Story and the spread of ideas - I guess you never heard of William S. Burroughs ideas as language as a virus ( or the Laurie Anderson Song derived from these ideas?)

This episode (one of my favorite recent episodes) reminded me of the book Bellwether, by Connie Willis - a great book about the "patient zeros" of fads. It's a fictional book, and though it has a lot of interesting facts about fads, so don't read it expecting a factual answer to the question of where fads come from. But Willis' fictional hypothesis about the origin of fads is very interesting...

I would encourage you guys to follow-up on some of those closing remarks about Darwin and the impact that his "Origin of Species" had on the prevailing narrative about "creation".

The contemporary "culture war" between evolutionary science and creationist religion is something which actually manifests _after_ Darwin's theory takes hold. Prior to 19th Century advances in biology and cosmology, the prevailing religious understanding of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis were far less literal than what we think of as the "traditional" understanding today. That "tradition" is actually about 200 years old, at the most, probably far less. Much more ancient views on these passages are far less literal and experience the "truth" being conveyed as being far less about history (or pre-history) and far more about _purpose_ and _causation_.

In much the same way that you've shown how hard it is to find Patient Zero once certain compelling (almost always apocryphal) narratives become conventional wisdom, in the same way it can be very difficult to recover truly traditional religious perspectives once certain compelling replacements set themselves up as "fundamental" and "mainstream".

Almost nothing of contemporary, Protestant Christianity as it is practiced in the USA is actually "traditional" if you look at the history of the church and yet these views have a dominance in our culture that makes it seem impossible to imagine anything else as normative.

There have _got to be_ some good stories you could unearth in this area and Darwin may in fact be a good place to start.

Great episode!

Does anyone have a link to the original CDC AIDS diagram tracking the sexual history of the 30 or so patients?

That HIV investigation was the most fascinating and chilling story, beyond Biblical. It's the combination of scientific engagement and symbolism--the most terrifying and evil scourge of nature is something that originated with the consummation of inter-primate consumption! Chimps are definitely the Cain of the family.

Peabody?

I'll start by saying I loved this episode especially but two things annoyed me:

1) Complete emotional pandering by throwing in the robotic arm story. Seriously, what did that have to do with the origins of the high five?

2) You said when you started the high five story that it had nothing to do with diseases, but AIDS came up probably as many times as in the previous story! LIES!

Oh radiolab, who else could ever convey the alchemical in the biochemical--geniuses, all of you!

Oh radiolab, who else could ever convey the alchemical in the biochemical--geniuses, all of you!

I stumbled on Radiolab some time ago (via Krulwich's blog), and now after listening a number of episodes it's fair to say I'm thoroughly hooked. Thank you guys for such a fascinating, inspiring show! I will surely spread the word up here..!

Poetic indeed. The whole interplay between mindfulness and the environment, it's just beautiful.

As always, thanks for the journey. Hi five!

On cowboy hats: On a trip to Tibet, I was impressed that some Tibetans were wearing "cowboy hats". I commented on this to a friend, who said that it was in fact a very traditional design worn by Mongolians. It made me wonder whether the design was brought to the west from the Asians who worked on the railroads. I like the conclusion that it was designed by the environment & interesting the parallels between the American West and the Asian highlands.