 Thank you, Dr. Colwell. I really appreciate you doing this for me. I've got about, oh, I don't know, half a dozen interviews from all sorts of people, from oceanographers in Hawaii, to the Arctic, to sort of environmental historians. But I guess one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you especially was because when you're trying to explain to people how climate change can affect, like say COVID-19 or the spread of disease, what you've done seems like almost the purest example I've ever heard of. And so I just wanted to start that way. Using your research as an example, can you talk about how climate change can affect the spread of disease? I think the major component that is novel and new in thinking, I mean, not for people like myself who've been an environmentalist all my life, but for physicians who are practicing on a daily basis, the notion that the environment and weather and weather patterns can make a big difference is probably not something that they would readily accept. They can understand, of course, that influenza is seasonal. It's more likely to occur in the winter. But what they don't really understand is that the virus, the influenza virus, it prefers cold temperatures. And very likely, according to some research, the reason that it attacks in the winter is because our nasal passages when we're outside tends to be colder. So the attachment is easier. Now that's just one bit of data that's been published. But I think the notion that we can have epidemics spread from continent to continent on air currents, I think is something new. But for those of us who work in oceanography or in, let's say, some sort of weather related disciplines, that it seems quite natural and quite normal. We'll talk about what you found about warming oceans and the spread of color. Well, we did a very interesting experiment. It seems that the British Marine Station in Southampton, England, 40 years ago, he had done a really wonderful citizen science experiment. That is, they wanted to track over time the change in the warming sea water and the effect on the life in the oceans. So they collected samples of plankton. And they did this by sending plankton sampling devices to yachtsmen, shipping boat captains, to ferry boat captains, asked them to take samples of the plankton, provide the longitude and latitude of the sample site, and then mail it to the marine station. So they have this 40 years of plankton collected. We went together with the team at the University of Genoa in Italy, Dr. Carlo Prusso, and the team working on DNA in Germany at the Max Planck Institute. And then with the samples in England, we extracted the DNA. And then with very elegant gene probes or a mechanism by which we could determine the presence and the numbers of a group of bacteria that cause disease in humans. These are called vibrios. Vibrio cholerae, and we all recognize, it's the cause of the evasion of Asiatic cholera, of which we are currently in a pandemic, the seventh pandemic of cholera, it's global. But also some other vibrios, vibrio periheliticus, which is pathogenic associated with contaminated sepals. And then vibrio volnificus, which is a bacterium that's even more pathogenic, because when it goes systemic, the fatality rate is about 50%. So we were able to determine the increase over the past 40 years, year by year by year, in the increased numbers of vibrio with the water temperature going up with climate change. And then linking it, associating it with the increased, excuse me, infections of these different diseases occurring in England, Europe, and the North Atlantic of the US. So this is, I think, probably the first demonstration of an infectious disease linked to climate change. People got the disease color from both the water and from like the shellfish? Yes, it was from eating shellfish that hadn't been properly cooked. That was infected by the bacteria associated with plankton. You see, the key was that some 30 years ago, my students and I showed that vibrio cholera, the causative agent of cholera, is associated with plankton. Plankton, the zooplankton are its host. So knowing that, going back to the plankton that are stored from 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, we could then extract the DNA from the plankton, separate the plankton genomes, look at the bacterial genomes, and then with our detecting device, determine precisely the presence of vibrio cholera, vibrio perihemolyticus, vibrio lonicus, and then just link that. And we published this in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, showing this strong correlation with the warming of a sea surface temperature, the increase in the number of plankton that carry the vibrios, and then the increase in the number of vibrios, the increased cases of human infection. Wow, wow. Did you have a great moment when you saw that connection, those things connecting up? Yes, it was very exciting because I had been studying cholera for the last 40 years, and we had developed the data that showed that plankton carried the vibrios, and of course that was controversial because physicians like to think of diseases as being person to person and not having this kind of a host. You think of malaria with a mosquito as a host, but it's hard to think of vibrios as having the host, which they do, it doesn't fly, it swims, the copepod. Well, what do you think? I mean, speaking of why is it that much different to think of, let's see, vibrio, if I'm using the terms correctly, in phytoplankton, no, zooplankton in the ocean, why is that much different from a warming planet increasing the mosquito range up into higher latitudes and bringing mosquitoes to new areas? You put your finger right on it. It's analogous, it's parallel. It's what's happening in the aquatic system and what is happening in the air system that we live in and breathe in. So an increase in, in this case for malaria, it would be the increase in the mosquito habitat moving northward as the climate warms. So it's a migration, so to speak, but an effective and effective temperature. And are there other, again, I'm not sure I use the term like disease vectors that are being spread more widely because of a warming planet? I think we're seeing the evidence of it with the outbreak of Zika virus. It occurred in Texas and Florida. So that's one example. And then again, the Lyme disease, which has moved westward, it originated or at least was originally detected in Lyme, Connecticut, hence the name Lyme disease, but we now know that it has migrated the causative agent, which is a spirochine. And we have also the evidence of West Nile virus. We tracked an outbreak in West Virginia. It had originally been detected in New York. So we're seeing these changes in the epidemiology of infectious disease. And you think it's related to climate change? Indeed. It is related because we can see the northernmost reaches of these diseases moving ever northward to it warmer in our north of the equator in our habitat. What do you think some of the people I've been talking to have said another major factor in the spread of diseases, say like COVID-19, but others, has been other human activity that is related to climate change, but is somewhat different deforestation. And the idea is that we are bringing these disease vectors. We're getting closer to the disease vectors and it's getting closer to us in terms of like say bats or with kind of factory farms or farming out into the wilderness. What do you think about that there? Well, obviously, I'm very strongly supportive of the transmission of agents from the wild to humans. I serve on the board and have done for about 10 years of EcoHealth Alliance. And Dr. Peter Dazak is the president and he is, as we speak, he is in Wuhan, China, as a member of the WHO, the World Health Organization team that's looking into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the evidence is powerful because Peter and the EcoHealth Alliance team have been working on the transmission of coronavirus, including SARS and MERS, for the last 10, 20, 30 years. So it's no surprise. In fact, I think Peter and his team published a paper about a decade ago predicting another pandemic that could be more dangerous than the SARS and the MERS because we were right on it when the SARS occurred. The population of investigators was suddenly very concentrated on that particular disease and we were fortunate to evade a massive pandemic. But imagine what that would have been because the victims died very quickly. And I think Dr. Dazak even traced the origin back to a particular bat cave in Yunnan. I think he has, he and his team have pretty good evidence. I don't think it completely ties together, but I think the evidence does include an intermediary animal that the bat... Like a penguin or something. Indeed. And then men to humans. He's given a very detailed description of the market in Wuhan and the various kinds of animals that people will eat. Very strange indeed. And the likelihood is probably pretty good that even if it didn't originate in that market, material that was brought in as food source from elsewhere to the market and transmission in the market probably is quite likely. You think it goes back to bats again? I do because the bats carrying the whole family of corona viruses, the corona veridity as it's termed, that includes influenza as well as the SARS and MERS viruses. They're related, which unfortunately I think suggests that COVID-19 is going to be with us for a quite long time. Are you concerned about, and I don't know how to express it, whether you call it the politicization of science or the polarization of science? But basically we've had climate deniers and we've had COVID deniers. I do find it unsettling because it's an irrationality. It's a way of denying facts that are uncomfortable to really integrate into one's thinking. I find that discouraging because it doesn't really address what science can tell us and how it can protect us. Just think of this past year. This time last year we had no idea what was happening except that it was a virus. But within weeks we had the genome sequence because the genomes of the virus is relatively small compared to bacteria and obviously humans. So we now have hundreds of sequences. We now are tracking down variants which are mutations that can occur in one or two base pairs, for example, in the genome. And we know about the disease and how to treat it, how not to treat it, which is very important, and what works and what doesn't work. And so in this period of time we've come to an understanding which is hard to accept that we are in a pandemic. It's not going away, at least not overnight, and certainly not miraculously. So no, we understand that we are going to, well at least we should understand that we are going to have to continue to mask and distance and do all of the steps that we've been doing probably till the end of the year when the population of the world has been appropriately vaccinated and that control measures are fully working before we can really turn back to normal. Is it reasonable to think that humanity can change enough so that we won't inflict these crises upon ourselves? I think we will find ourselves in some pretty oppressive crises. I do think we'll find a way out of it and we will be changed and hopefully we will be more attuned to practicing science as it should be. Simply because it's survival. It's a pity to have to be driven to the point of living or dying in order to make the change that we could have made under circumstances that were much more beneficial and easier to accept and to work with. One other point I'd like to make about the work we've been doing is that we have developed a model for predicting outbreaks of color. We have used the relationship to rainfall and temperature because the bacterium responds as I just demonstrated in the example of becoming more abundant when the temperatures have risen in the water in the North Atlantic. We know that with a variety of these various environmental parameters we've been able to put this together into a model that allows us to predict a potential risk that is the risk of an outbreak of cholera for weeks and eventually we will get to about eight weeks ahead of time and so we've been working together with the British Aid Agency and with the British Meteorological Agency with NASA providing funding for us to do our work and collaborating with UNICEF to predict in Yemen where the risk will be the highest and then that allows the British Aid Agency and UNICEF to mobilize their medical supplies and personnel and locate them where they'll be most effective and this has allowed us to reduce the effects of a color epidemic that is to save lives and prevent illnesses and we've been modifying that model for COVID-19. We're just now using the kind of environmental factors that are associated with the virus, humidity, dew point temperatures and migration of populations when we do this by satellite sensing as we have developed the cholera moment and we can we can determine the movement of populations by satellite. Some of the more recently launched satellites are highly sensitive and can measure with the accuracy of a square meter compared to 20 years ago when I published our first satellite sensing data gathering. We had to use a mild quadrant off the coast of the Bay of Venga. Now we can measure the temperature in a Poland in a village in Bangladesh and we can measure the movement of populations very very easily. So using the model we're we're very exciting. I believe that this is going to be a powerful tool for public health in the next decade or two to be able to monitor and track infectious disease. Well I understand from the color example how you could look at ocean temperatures and impute algae movement but how does how do temperatures what's the relationship between what you can study and COVID-19? Well with COVID-19 it's important to monitor population movement. We can do that by the tracking of cell phones and cell phone tracking. We can do that by the sensitive satellite that can track crowds moving cell phones and we can couple that with the air temperature because as it gets colder people move inside that increases the risk of transmission. And we can also determine within a certain humidity range we now know from gathering the data that there's a greater likelihood of transmission as well. So these are put together in a very sophisticated mathematical construct that allows us them to provide this prediction of risk. And we've matched it up doing this with the United States on a county by county basis with the actual cases and the fit is between 60 and 80%. That's amazing. So what did you send out like amber alert warning like stay away from this area? Well more like the pollen index. Be prepared to be exposed to the virus when these conditions have all concatenated together. Yes. Wow. Wow that's amazing. So that's I mean one of the hardest parts in doing stories like these is when you get down to okay what kind of solutions have you got Mr. Journalist that you've been scaring us to death? Well that's the nice part of it but I've always been attuned to putting science to work because in Bangladesh when we had shown clearly that plankton were the host it became then well couldn't we just go to the plankton out of the water and reduce calorie and so that's what we tested. We tested all kinds of really cheap inexpensive filter material you know cloth and plastic and so forth and we found that the cheapest material of all was old used sari cloth folded four or five times gave a nice 20 micron micrometer mesh filter when we looked at it under the electron microscope. So we then trained women to in villages in a study we did to filter the water that we were taking from the ponds to the drinking water for the day to run it through a simple filter and we were able to reduce cholera by 50 percent almost 50 percent. We've talked about how climate change affects the spread of disease. I was also looking at that the other way around which is as COVID-19 and other diseases affected climate change and the closest I found was well I know that COVID-19 particularly affected the study of climate change in the sense of it it it pushed all the research vessels into port you know it's kind of shut down a lot of research and so yeah that's a practical way but is there any way in which this is affecting migration at all I mean it's the only example I could think of where and that might increase climate change because of people density I don't know it was just well no you're on the on the right track the whole reason that we must protect the tropical forest and diversity is to protect us because the forest absorbs greenhouse gases it it produces oxygen it it's a protective layer and it has kept us alive for centuries and centuries so indeed we can counteract climate change by by building the barrier so to speak or or or the sink for the greenhouse gases that increase the temperatures and so forth so if you turn that around just as you were asking if we cut down all the forests yes we biologically we are increasing climate change that's exactly what we're doing so we are controlling our destiny but we're not doing it the right way but one of the people scientists I was talking to in Hawaii his solution you know because because sometimes it gets down to individual solutions like what are you going to do and I hate to have to answer that question myself but one of the people I talked to said well you know I'm a scientist I had to sort of walk the talk so now I'm a vegetarian I have a solar panels and you know and I ride my bicycle and then but the other one also from Hawaii said he started planting trees he just got people to gather and he's got this mission to plant a million trees all of the above vegetarian I am going to be thinking a second thought when I'm invited to travel when the pandemic is over and we're back on airplanes I have found that I can attend many many more meetings by zoom it works very well I don't want to do it solely I mean I'm getting sort of come in claustrophobic I would like to get out and meet people again but but to do the kind of traveling I was doing I don't think I will I think I will be very selective have you had a vaccine yet I've been very fortunate as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland I received my first vaccination on 21st of January and I received my second on the 19th of the Johns Hopkins Hospital outpatient I was very well done and the whole vaccinations that day that I was there so it was very impressive well I want to thank you for taking so much time and being so articulate about these issues Dr. Colwell I've really enjoyed this it's a great pleasure and it's been fun