Pathogen Evolution

00:00:00: Avian flu in cattle in the USA worries scientists. Avian flu in humans? Pathogen also in milk.

00:00:08: Avian influenza detected in cows in the USA. Bird flu. Fourth known case in humans. Contact with dairy cows.

00:00:16: Bird flu is rampant in cattle. Concerns about a pandemic are growing. First human infected with bird flu without contact with animals.

00:00:24: Alarm bells are ringing. Memories come flooding back.

00:00:29: First, a virus transmitted from birds to cattle on another continent. Then, the first human infected with this virus. How could that happen?

00:00:40: The virus has evolved, adapted to a different host, and the development continues. Will people soon no longer infect animals, but each other?

00:00:52: It sounds like an apocalyptic scenario, but we have all experienced how real this scenario can suddenly become. And a few years later, life is back to normal.

00:01:05: Just with one more virus that can make us ill. This can and will happen again and again, but in order for us to be prepared and not have an apocalypse,

00:01:16: we need to know as much as possible about which viruses are on the move and how they are changing. And this is what Professor Sebastian Kalvinyak Spencer is doing at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald.

00:01:30: I'm sitting here in the library of the edge.i with Professor Sebastian Kalvinyak Spencer. Sebastian, you are researching the evolution of pathogens. What does that exactly mean?

00:01:42: So what it means is that basically my job is to understand how viruses, bacteria, eukaryotic parasites, like malaria parasites, things like that, been associated through time with the host and how that has changed.

00:02:01: And what are the determinants of these changes? And I do that mostly using tools which belong to the toolbox of genomics. So I sequence the genomes of these microbes and I use the variation that I observe.

00:02:17: So the differences between the genomes to try to ask these kind of questions.

00:02:22: When we think of evolution, we think of the development and adaption of life over millions of years. What time periods are you looking at?

00:02:30: So actually, from the perspective of the time frames that you can tackle when you study microbiological evolution, there's much more variety than what you just said.

00:02:43: So of course, we can study things which are antediluvian, like indeed that happened even hundreds of million years ago.

00:02:52: But at the same time, because many microbes actually evolve at very fast rate, so they accumulate mutations very fast, you can also apply evolutionary concepts and perform evolutionary studies on things that happens over days, weeks, months,

00:03:09: as we've all witnessed with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the variants that are evolving SARS-CoV-2 or what we see right now with the new M-POX emergency events.

00:03:25: So there's a full spectrum and all shades of gray. So we can investigate things that have happened a few months ago, but we can also investigate things that happened centuries ago or million years ago.

00:03:38: Which pathogens are you studying?

00:03:41: So my lab mostly focuses on viruses, all sorts of viruses. There's an incredible diversity of viruses.

00:03:51: But actually, we apply these kind of approaches to nearly every pathogen that you can think of.

00:03:59: So that also applies to bacteria such as those that cause leprosy or anthrax or also eukaryotic parasites.

00:04:08: I mentioned already malaria parasites. We do have projects on malaria. So that's really also a broad spectrum.

00:04:14: Actually, what I'm interested in is disease, right? What makes animals and humans sick?

00:04:21: And so whenever I find something that's weird, intriguing, then irrespective of what it is, I usually go for it.

00:04:31: You're looking into the past because you can learn a lot from it for the future.

00:04:36: Which historical epidemics or pandemics have you investigated and what did you find out?

00:04:41: So there are things about pandemics that we are able to monitor, past pandemics, which are within the reach of sampling activities.

00:04:53: So for that, one example is the 1918 influenza pandemic, so the so-called Spanish flu.

00:05:00: So in this case, that's really getting samples from during the pandemic and trying to understand what happened during this period,

00:05:09: how the virus evolved, etc. But then there's also related questions for which the pandemic event or the outbreak is clearly out of reach.

00:05:21: Like it happened maybe thousands of years ago, tens of thousands of years ago or even before that.

00:05:27: But we can still try to reconstruct parts of these events.

00:05:32: That's something that we've done, for example, for measles, it's a virus that causes measles, where we've asked a simple question,

00:05:42: which was, okay, knowing that the measles virus is likely of animal origin, when did it jump into humans and cause the pandemic?

00:05:52: Because it likely caused the pandemic at the time.

00:05:55: And so these questions we can also address.

00:05:59: We do not study the pandemic event itself with samples from the time period when it happened, but we can still reconstruct parts of what was this pandemic event.

00:06:10: And how do you actually look into the past?

00:06:13: In other words, how can you tell what has changed in a virus over the last 100 years?

00:06:18: So for those things which we can directly observe, and that would be the first part of my answer to your question,

00:06:25: we basically look for samples, because especially if you think of something like the Spanish flu, there are still samples available, specimens available,

00:06:34: in particular, for this specific case, in pathological collections.

00:06:39: You know, for a very long time, medical universities maintained pathological collections, which were really important for their, for pedagogical purposes.

00:06:50: So they needed their students to have seen how a disease affected human organs, right?

00:06:57: But they did not have the didactical means that they had later on, like photographs and these kind of things.

00:07:06: So they maintained biological specimens, huge treasure troves of biological specimens.

00:07:13: And that's something that has largely fallen in disarray when there were other means, you know.

00:07:22: So especially now there are tons of other ways to learn about diseases, even if you don't see a case when you study as a medical student.

00:07:29: So many of these specimens have actually been destroyed just to make space in the Department of Pathology and etc.

00:07:38: But there are still large collections where you can actually, some of them are even associated with museums.

00:07:46: There's a very nice one in Berlin. The medical history collection there is really amazing.

00:07:53: And you can have a look at these specimens and our lab samples these specimens.

00:08:00: So we take a small piece of this specimen and assuming it's a flu case, we will then try to identify the RNA of the influenza virus and sequence this RNA.

00:08:16: So that's how we do it practically.

00:08:20: The second part, which is about how do you investigate things that happened much earlier in the past.

00:08:30: It's actually through comparative means very often.

00:08:34: So for example, if I'm interested in understanding whether a virus has always been with humans or not,

00:08:41: I will actually try to find close relatives of these virus in other animal species, particularly in great apes that are closest relatives to chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.

00:08:54: And then by comparing the sequences of these closely related viral species to the human virus,

00:09:02: we can also try to reconstruct things that have happened in a much more distant past.

00:09:08: So there are these two arms getting direct sampling from interesting infectious events.

00:09:16: And the second one is getting samples from the variety of life and of hosts in particular and doing comparative evolutionary studies.

00:09:27: So yeah, to summarize, there are these two ways to try to tackle these questions.

00:09:35: One is based on directly getting samples from the events we're interested in, a recent pandemic.

00:09:43: Another one is to cast a broader net and to describe what has been the result of very long-term processes that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of viruses that we see in contemporary hosts,

00:10:04: like a series of hosts that capture a lot of evolution.

00:10:10: How old was the oldest pathogen you examined and what exactly was it?

00:10:15: So again, I can give a two-legged reply.

00:10:19: So for the direct observation, the oldest specimen from which we got a viral genome was a specimen from 1912.

00:10:31: It was a measles case actually.

00:10:35: But actually at the moment, we're also using other kinds of specimens, ancient specimens that are not pathological ones, but that come from the Antarctic.

00:10:47: So frozen penguin mummies that we used to try to identify much older viruses directly.

00:11:00: And then we have first hints that we can recover RNA viruses that are up to 2,000 years old.

00:11:09: So these are still like unpublished results at the moment.

00:11:13: We are still working on validating everything, but it looks like an interesting avenue of investigation.

00:11:20: So that's for the first part, direct sampling.

00:11:24: Then they're routinely using these comparative approaches that I mentioned earlier.

00:11:29: We estimate things about events, say the transmission of an animal virus to the human lineage, that are much more ancient.

00:11:40: So for example, for herpes simplex viruses, those that cause cold sores and genital herpes,

00:11:48: we've been in the position to clearly show that the human genital herpes actually arose from a transmission from the gorilla lineage.

00:12:02: The viruses that infected the gorillas more than a million years ago.

00:12:06: So this we can say with confidence.

00:12:10: That was not even our species, because homo sapiens is actually just from 300,000 years ago, ancestors of our species within our lineage.

00:12:22: Why is it important to know what a virus looked like decades or centuries ago?

00:12:28: How exactly does this help us today with disease outbreaks?

00:12:32: And what can we learn from the past?

00:12:34: So maybe I can start with an analogy.

00:12:39: You heard about planetary defense system.

00:12:43: So these are the systems that basically are built by an ESA, ESA DLR, since we're a Helmholtz, to just watch the sky for potentially threatening asteroids and etc.

00:12:57: And why do we do that?

00:12:58: Why do we have a surveillance system of the sky?

00:13:01: We do have a surveillance system of the sky, because about 66 million years ago, there was a huge impactor that hit our planet.

00:13:14: And that resulted in the extinction of many, many species, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

00:13:21: So that's one case where basically just by learning what happened in the past, you get an idea of what could be threatening us.

00:13:29: And that's very much one of the first part of the reply that I would give you, which is that I sort of do the same.

00:13:40: I don't look at geological history, but I look at biological history, one very particular aspect, infectious disease events in the past, just to have an understanding of what's possible.

00:13:52: What are the big catastrophes that can take the form of infectious diseases?

00:13:58: And when we know what's possible, then we are much better prepared to do surveillance right now.

00:14:04: So we do have pathogen surveillance systems, but the pathogen surveillance systems, they need to be focused on something.

00:14:12: And that's part of the significance of working in evolutionary biology with pathogens, to give indications to current surveillance systems, to tell them, OK, there are some things that are more likely to happen.

00:14:27: Than others. There are some very catastrophic things which are rare, but that we should still monitor.

00:14:34: Then the second part of the answer, I guess, would be to say that the past is a much larger catalog of possibilities than the present, right?

00:14:44: The present is just like it's a tiny slice of everything that life has experienced.

00:14:49: That also means that it's a much larger space where we can have a look at different kind of evolutionary processes, right?

00:14:57: And then flag interesting or intriguing evolutionary processes.

00:15:01: So I mentioned earlier that we worked on the 1918 flu.

00:15:05: When working on the 1918 flu, one thing that we noticed was that during the pandemic, there was likely a very noticeable acceleration of the evolution of the virus.

00:15:18: Something that actually echoes very much what we saw with SARS-CoV-2, because SARS-CoV-2, the variants, you know, they are characterized by accelerated evolution.

00:15:28: They had like short bouts of accelerated evolution.

00:15:32: And so basically the fact that we see the same thing in this pandemic, the 1918 flu one, indicates that maybe this kind of process, rate acceleration,

00:15:44: is something that we should be particularly careful about when we think about these kind of even pandemic scale emergency events, right?

00:15:54: So yeah, in the first place, that's informing about what we should look for now.

00:15:59: And in the second place, it's also informing us about another kind of very important piece of knowledge,

00:16:10: which is how pathogens evolve and which processes we should also be careful about.

00:16:18: You worked at the Robert Koch Institute for a long time.

00:16:21: You also studied the evolution of pathogens.

00:16:24: And in 2023, you joined the Helmholtz Institute for One Health.

00:16:29: What is different there and what exactly does One Health mean?

00:16:33: Okay, so to me, I will first reply to the question about One Health, what it is.

00:16:40: To me, One Health is just acknowledging that you cannot understand human and animal health if you do not take into account the fact that there are the results of ecological interactions.

00:16:57: So basically, that's putting the emphasis on the complexity of the natural world and we are part of the natural world and how the interactions between the different components of the natural world, as included,

00:17:11: ultimately, explain a large part of what we understand as health, right?

00:17:18: So to me, that's very much the big mouthpiece about One Health.

00:17:24: It's saying, okay, now we need to have a look at ecology.

00:17:28: We cannot just consider pathogens as something that happens outside of natural ecosystems.

00:17:37: ecosystems.

00:17:39: are just part of natural ecosystems.

00:17:42: Whatever the natural ecosystem you consider,

00:17:45: the natural ecosystem can very much be an urban population,

00:17:50: still a natural ecosystem.

00:17:54: Just a very derived one in the sense of,

00:17:58: in the sense that mankind chose to explore, right?

00:18:01: So to me, that's one health.

00:18:04: Then for the first part of your question,

00:18:07: about the difference between being at HADZEDI and RKI.

00:18:11: So the two institutions have very different mandates, right?

00:18:16: So HADZEDI is a research institution.

00:18:18: The RKI is also a research institution,

00:18:22: but it has another mandate,

00:18:24: which is to inform the government, the federal government,

00:18:27: and to be what you can call

00:18:30: the Public Health Institute for Germany.

00:18:32: And that means that, of course,

00:18:36: the way people see ecology in particular differs, right?

00:18:41: So I would say that what I found particularly interesting

00:18:46: at HADZEDI is that, okay,

00:18:49: there's not a ton of ecology happening at HADZEDI

00:18:52: at the moment, but people here are really interested

00:18:57: in us bringing in these aspects.

00:19:00: So they're truly aware of the importance of that,

00:19:04: which at HAKAI it was great.

00:19:06: I worked 13 years there.

00:19:08: I had wonderful colleagues,

00:19:11: but yeah, it fell less in the focus,

00:19:15: all these ecological questions, evolutionary questions

00:19:18: that I'm interested in.

00:19:20: I mean, it comes with the practical focus of the HAKAI

00:19:24: that has to provide practical information

00:19:26: about human health in Germany,

00:19:29: that then, okay, the big picture,

00:19:33: which is the one that I'm the most interested in,

00:19:36: which brings in these ecological interactions,

00:19:39: these temporal dimension,

00:19:41: that these ecological interactions,

00:19:42: they are changing their dynamic, et cetera.

00:19:45: It's less of a focus for the HAKAI,

00:19:49: which is totally natural.

00:19:52: And I find it great that at HADZEDI,

00:19:55: there's room for that.

00:19:58: There's many things that are happening.

00:20:01: And there is the will to also develop this big picture

00:20:06: that brings back disease in the context

00:20:11: of what happens in the natural world.

00:20:14: - How does this research approach help us,

00:20:16: for example, our society to cope with diseases?

00:20:19: - Wow, that's a tough one, yeah.

00:20:21: (laughing)

00:20:24: Yeah, so I think that

00:20:29: basically a big part of the answer

00:20:34: to that question is to say, okay,

00:20:39: there is this increased awareness

00:20:41: that we are part of the natural world.

00:20:42: So we have to consider things when we move a piece ourselves,

00:20:47: when we change something,

00:20:51: when we make a decision about changing something

00:20:54: in the environment,

00:20:55: when we want to develop an area, a region, et cetera.

00:20:59: We have to take into account these ecological questions.

00:21:05: And among the many impact that taking into account ecology

00:21:10: should really monitor are the impacts on health.

00:21:19: So I would say that's how it should influence society.

00:21:26: I consider that our research is here to just give

00:21:29: very good illustrations to policymakers

00:21:33: about how you can better plan change

00:21:39: and the impact of change on human health,

00:21:43: human and animal health, right?

00:21:46: So that said, to a large extent,

00:21:53: there's this need to provide illustrations

00:21:55: exactly like for climate change,

00:21:57: there was a need to accumulate a lot of data,

00:22:00: to model a lot, to convince policymakers.

00:22:03: But exactly like for climate change,

00:22:05: I would say many of the solutions,

00:22:09: they are common sense solutions, right?

00:22:12: So for about climate change,

00:22:14: we've known since the start that decarbonation

00:22:18: of our economies would be the key, right?

00:22:21: So it's not something that all of a sudden people realized,

00:22:26: we have this level, we had never seen it.

00:22:29: And that's a bit the same with one health.

00:22:33: There are many of the things that we can do

00:22:35: to minimize the risk of zoonosis are sort of common sense stuff.

00:22:39: So yeah, it's providing illustrations

00:22:44: at the same time knowing that we do have the levels

00:22:50: to a large extent, we would almost already know

00:22:55: how we can do things better.

00:22:58: - How did you get into your field of research

00:23:00: and what fascinates you most about it?

00:23:02: - I'd say that the big picture

00:23:06: that I'm really fascinated with

00:23:08: is this question of the complexity of life, right?

00:23:13: So that's really trying to understand

00:23:20: the many ways that cellular life

00:23:23: and its viral companions has explored

00:23:27: over the last four billion years of evolution, right?

00:23:32: So there's this part of my job that I like.

00:23:37: So this idea of okay,

00:23:41: making sense of this incredible diversity.

00:23:46: But then it always relates as well to smaller stories,

00:23:51: just like short stories.

00:23:52: It's a bit like when you're interested in history

00:23:54: and you look at large historical processes

00:23:57: that unfold over hundreds of years,

00:23:59: but then there's one episode

00:24:00: that you're particularly fascinated with,

00:24:02: the moment of the birth of the Roman Empire

00:24:05: or the French Revolution, et cetera.

00:24:07: And you have your favorite piece of history.

00:24:09: And that's the same for biological history.

00:24:12: And in my case, for this part of history

00:24:17: and evolutionary biology,

00:24:19: that relates to specific events.

00:24:21: So one example that we studied recently

00:24:26: was this measles pandemic

00:24:28: that I was mentioning in the beginning.

00:24:29: And we asked a very simple question.

00:24:31: We asked, okay, when did it happen?

00:24:34: And it happened at a time that had any specificity,

00:24:38: whether any correlate to this pandemic.

00:24:42: And it turns out that when we estimated

00:24:44: the date of the pandemic,

00:24:46: we found that it was largely compatible

00:24:48: with it having happened 2,500 years ago,

00:24:52: which is exactly the time when mankind

00:24:56: in multiple different regions,

00:24:58: in three different regions,

00:24:59: started building very large cities.

00:25:01: I was mentioning Rome,

00:25:03: so Rome, but also in South Asia, in India, in China,

00:25:08: there were very large cities.

00:25:10: And that's important for measles

00:25:11: because today, measles, which is very immunogenic,

00:25:15: so basically when you're infected,

00:25:17: you cannot be infected again,

00:25:18: and that's why the vaccine works so well.

00:25:20: Cannot persist in a closed population.

00:25:24: If this population is smaller than a given size,

00:25:29: it's called the critical community size for measles.

00:25:32: And this size is about a quarter to a half million people.

00:25:36: So basically, if you have a population on an island,

00:25:39: which is 100,000 people,

00:25:42: and you introduce measles once,

00:25:44: and then it never is introduced again,

00:25:47: then there will be a big outbreak of measles,

00:25:50: but it will go extinct after a while.

00:25:53: And the reason is that everybody will have had measles

00:25:55: and will be immunized.

00:25:57: And the size of this population is not large enough

00:26:00: that it would produce enough newborns

00:26:03: so that at some point, stochastically,

00:26:05: the virus does not go extinct.

00:26:06: So it can predictably go extinct, right?

00:26:09: And so basically this finding that we had

00:26:14: about this possible link

00:26:15: with between the emergence of measles in human populations

00:26:20: and urbanization makes total sense, right?

00:26:24: So that's a big change in the ecology of human beings.

00:26:27: They aggregate in very large groups

00:26:29: that live in a contiguous perimeter,

00:26:33: favorable to transmission of many infectious agents.

00:26:36: And that's actually totally in line

00:26:39: with what we know of the biology of measles virus today, right?

00:26:42: So these are conditions amenable

00:26:44: for the persistence of the virus.

00:26:46: So this combination of okay,

00:26:49: if you take a step back,

00:26:51: this little story that goes very well into,

00:26:56: that goes in the direction of understanding better

00:27:00: how things which are very complex processes

00:27:04: that involves billions of individuals

00:27:08: of different species in different,

00:27:11: at different special scales and etc.

00:27:14: Very complicated world, right?

00:27:17: Ultimately land specific events

00:27:22: that have a very important,

00:27:23: even a very important impact on human health

00:27:28: for a specific emergence,

00:27:31: for the specific emergence of a disease, right?

00:27:33: So I like this mix of single stories

00:27:38: that if you take them together at some point here,

00:27:42: of course, I hope that when I will be,

00:27:44: that in 30 years from now,

00:27:48: I'll write a book about everything

00:27:51: that this inspires me about the complexity

00:27:55: of the world in general, right?

00:27:57: - What is important for you in your free time

00:28:00: and how do you relax?

00:28:02: - So yeah, it's true.

00:28:07: That requires balance.

00:28:08: I have to say that like a number of my colleague researchers,

00:28:13: I'm not the best at keeping the right balance

00:28:15: because I mean, I could say that research is also my hobby

00:28:20: to some extent, you know,

00:28:21: where I do like to read, for example,

00:28:25: even popular science when I'm just of the job, you know?

00:28:32: I'm interested, I love physics.

00:28:34: I honestly do not understand much about it,

00:28:39: but I read a lot of popular science about physics.

00:28:42: I find that physicists are the ultimate scientists.

00:28:45: I'm very jealous.

00:28:46: - Oh no.

00:28:49: - But so this is part of my hobbies then, yeah,

00:28:53: of course I do keep time to do other things.

00:28:56: I like to run a bit.

00:28:58: I also read other things, right?

00:29:01: So I love to read in general.

00:29:03: And I spend time with my family.

00:29:06: I'm married and I have three daughters.

00:29:08: So we do stuff together, right?

00:29:11: So yeah, that's the balance in my life.

00:29:15: - So last but not least,

00:29:18: do you have a take home message on what we can do perhaps

00:29:21: each and every one of us to reduce the spread of pathogens

00:29:25: from animals to humans?

00:29:28: - So I mentioned earlier that I think that many of the things

00:29:33: that we can do to reduce the risk of zoonotic transmission

00:29:38: are sort of common sense stuff, right?

00:29:41: And I will give a specific example later,

00:29:45: but I just want to start here by saying,

00:29:50: okay, these are common sense stuff,

00:29:52: but at the same time, there are things that are not so easy

00:29:55: to implement in the everyday life of most of us.

00:29:58: Because most of us live in cities, et cetera.

00:30:02: We have a life that actually does not result

00:30:07: in a lot of interactions that are relevant

00:30:13: from the perspective of zoonotic emergence.

00:30:16: I do not believe that it's very, very likely

00:30:18: that there would be a very impactful event happening

00:30:22: in the middle of Brown-Schweig.

00:30:27: So that's the first point.

00:30:28: But the second point is still these common sense stuff.

00:30:31: I can take one example, which is intensive farming.

00:30:36: Intensive farming, it's something that of course we can suspect

00:30:42: and we have very good evidence of it influencing

00:30:47: and being favorable to zoonotic transmission

00:30:52: in both ways actually.

00:30:54: So we have the possibility that things emerge

00:30:57: in these intensive farming facilities

00:31:02: and then are transmitted to humans,

00:31:05: particularly those directly exposed

00:31:07: and their families and et cetera.

00:31:09: But we also have the possibility, the reverse possibility,

00:31:12: which is that these people would then introduce things

00:31:15: in these intensively farmed populations of animals.

00:31:20: We saw that, for example, with SARS-CoV-2, right?

00:31:24: With SARS-CoV-2, like mink farming in Europe

00:31:26: and in other places, we introduced SARS-CoV-2 in minks

00:31:31: and then it spread out in minks.

00:31:34: We see that right now with H5N1

00:31:37: that actually emerged in cattle,

00:31:42: then in the other direction.

00:31:44: We see that it will progressively infect exposed people.

00:31:49: That's unavoidable, right?

00:31:52: So you could say, yeah, maybe this mode of production of meat

00:31:57: in particular, or fur or whatever,

00:31:58: is not the best way to produce what we need, right?

00:32:03: And there's the possibility of leverage

00:32:08: for ordinary citizens, even those that live far from farms,

00:32:12: which is to just pick when they elect their policymakers,

00:32:18: the programs that do have a plan for intensive farming reduction,

00:32:23: which would be something that I would personally support, right?

00:32:27: Of course, you can also commit yourself

00:32:30: and become an activist in this direction, et cetera.

00:32:33: But to the very least, you can always think about it

00:32:37: when you make your political decisions.

00:32:40: And then, last point that I want to make is that, okay,

00:32:44: it's not about, when we think about these things,

00:32:47: and that goes back to the question of complexity,

00:32:49: we should always keep an eye on everything that this implies.

00:32:54: Okay, if we want to reduce intensive farming,

00:32:58: that means that we should be prepared to several things.

00:33:01: We should be prepared to helping farmers

00:33:03: to change their activities, right?

00:33:08: We should be prepared to say, okay,

00:33:10: then meat will probably be more expensive.

00:33:14: Then that means by repoll effect,

00:33:17: meat will become less affordable to many people,

00:33:21: and we have massive problems with inequalities

00:33:23: in our societies, right?

00:33:25: So that brings us then to the question of, okay,

00:33:28: how do we reduce inequalities in our societies,

00:33:31: and et cetera, and et cetera.

00:33:32: So we should also have a holistic perspective

00:33:35: on these kind of problems,

00:33:36: and just not pretend that these are not complex problems.

00:33:40: I do think that very often,

00:33:43: we just take the pretense of problems being complex,

00:33:46: just to ignore them, like we've done for climate change.

00:33:49: I actually also think that most of the time,

00:33:55: many people are ready to commit towards changing stuff.

00:34:00: If you come with a plan that is inclusive,

00:34:03: where you've thought about involving everybody,

00:34:06: and et cetera, right?

00:34:07: So my take on message for one has,

00:34:10: how you can do in your life as a lambda citizen,

00:34:15: how do I do it to take these kind of ideas

00:34:22: into consideration is to be open for change, right?

00:34:27: So we should be open to changing the way we live,

00:34:29: always caring for nature,

00:34:34: which is something very simple to do,

00:34:36: and for other human beings.

00:34:39: And I think that if we do that,

00:34:40: usually we are almost always on safe tracks.

00:34:45: - Thank you very much for your time.

00:34:47: - Thank you for having me.

00:34:48: - In our next episode,

00:34:50: we talk to Professor Catherine Delarosa

00:34:53: about our immune system,

00:34:55: why it works slightly differently in all of us,

00:34:57: and what research can learn from it.

00:35:00: And if you want to know what we can learn from bacteria,

00:35:03: viruses, and fungi,

00:35:05: then listen to our first episode of "Infect".

00:35:08: We spoke about exactly that.

00:35:10: (gentle music)

00:35:13: (gentle music)

00:35:15: (soft music)