The Shark Inside You

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Speaker 2 to Radio Lab. Lab.
Radio Lab. From

Speaker 11 WN Weiss.

Speaker 8 The one thing I have to apologize for is I'm still kind of stuffed up, so you're going to hear noses being blown frequently, but I will do it off-mic.

Speaker 12 Oh, that's okay. I'm not particularly sensitive to nose-blowing.

Speaker 8 So this is Radio Lab. I'm Lulu Miller.
And today is day three of our week of sharks.

Speaker 7 Do you feel good? You in a zone? You feel. I'm in a zone.

Speaker 8 And today's story comes to us from producer Becca Bressler.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Well, I do think that this is maybe the most interesting story I've ever worked on. Ooh.
And it's actually kind of weirdly fitting that you're sick right now. Okay.

Speaker 12 But okay, so first couple of episodes, we were swimming in the shark-infested waters of Australia. Today,

Speaker 12 I'm going to take you somewhere different. Great.

Speaker 8 Where are we going?

Speaker 12 Buckle up. Buckled.
We are going to

Speaker 12 Wisconsin.

Speaker 7 Okay, Midwest landlocked.

Speaker 2 This is not where I'm thinking you're going to encounter a shark.

Speaker 12 No, as I wasn't expecting it either, but I was going to see this scientist.

Speaker 2 Hey, Aaron.

Speaker 12 His name's Aaron Matthew LeBeau. How's it going?

Speaker 3 And he's the least sciencey person I know.

Speaker 12 Has a kind of funny way into this.

Speaker 3 I originally went to the University of Arizona as an undergrad to play football, have fun, and party.

Speaker 12 Took a chemistry class.

Speaker 3 Absolutely fell in love with chemistry. And then from there on, I just became a scientist.

Speaker 12 But did you party too? Important question.

Speaker 3 I partied a whole lot.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 I've consumed my body volume and tequila many times.

Speaker 12 Anyway, he gets his PhD.

Speaker 8 Dr. Lebeau.

Speaker 12 Dr. Lebeau ends up at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he has his own lab.
So can you say where we're headed right now?

Speaker 2 We're headed to my laboratory.

Speaker 3 I'm the seven.

Speaker 2 Oh, I can't say that.

Speaker 12 A secret lab. Ooh.
Oh, we're going to hop on the shuttle now. Yes.
Okay. So we took a bus about five to ten minutes across campus.
So I stopped right here.

Speaker 12 Got off and walked over to a nondescript location.

Speaker 3 I can't tell you where it is.

Speaker 12 I won't ask again, I swear.

Speaker 12 Went into this building and down a flight of stairs

Speaker 12 into the basement. The room we're in right now looks kind of empty.
It's into this big abandoned lab.

Speaker 3 It was, I think, last used about 15, 20 years ago.

Speaker 12 Empty cabinets, dusty black counters.

Speaker 3 It's been abandoned since.

Speaker 12 And then we turned around a corner into this other room where oh whoa

Speaker 12 in the middle of it can you just describe to me what i'm looking at right now yeah you're looking at a state-of-the-art 7 000 gallon saltwater tank there is a huge huge huge fish tank basically and a above-ground pool of whoa

Speaker 12 sharks

Speaker 8 so how many sharks are in here five five sharks so you're in like an unmarked bunker with a pool full of sharks yes specifically nurse sharks Nurse sharks.

Speaker 2 So they are

Speaker 2 the littler ones.

Speaker 12 So these ones were only about like two feet long.

Speaker 3 But these guys are also not full-grown yet.

Speaker 3 In the wild, you have nurse sharks that are, you know, eight, nine, ten feet long.

Speaker 12 Big, okay. And they look shark-like, but maybe not exactly what you're thinking.

Speaker 3 They don't have the large jaws like a great white do.

Speaker 12 They've got these tiny little mouths that suck up food. That's the sound of the suction.
They also have whiskers, so some people call them cat sharks. Okay.
But maybe most importantly, these sharks.

Speaker 3 These are like swimming fossils.

Speaker 12 They're ancient. Ooh.
They come from a line of sharks that date back 400 million years ago.

Speaker 2 Ooh.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 hidden inside of them, scientists like Aaron believe there is this very ancient key.

Speaker 12 A key that could unlock our ability to fight off some of the deadliest threats we face on Earth. And that's, that's actually the, that's really the story that I want to tell.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 8 Keep us going.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 12 First, to get to Erin's lab, we have to go from sharks.

Speaker 8 Sounds kind of strange when you've got the headphones on actually talking.

Speaker 12 Back to us.

Speaker 2 I can't hear her now. Hello.
Oh, there we go. Hi.
Hey, Caroline. Hi, Becca.

Speaker 12 Because to find this key, scientists first had to figure out something very deep and mysterious about humans.

Speaker 12 So I guess to just start this off, Caroline, can you tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Speaker 13 Yeah, sure, Becca. So, yes, so I'm Caroline Burrell.

Speaker 13 I've always been passionate about life sciences, kind of set off my career at university studying biochemistry, then moved on to a PhD.

Speaker 12 She runs a biotech company now. Yeah.
And she spent a ton of time researching and studying the immune system.

Speaker 13 And in particular, antibodies. Oh, oh, they're formidable.

Speaker 12 One of the most incredible parts of our immune system.

Speaker 13 That are protecting us non-stop 24-7 from the onslaught of what's going on in our daily lives.

Speaker 12 So let's say you're out in the world, like at a park or something, and

Speaker 12 some guy coughs right in your face. And let's say a little bit of that cold virus he has goes

Speaker 12 into your body. And what happens is just wizardry.

Speaker 12 These immune cells show up.

Speaker 12 And each one of them starts pumping out hundreds of thousands of these antibodies so that quickly your body is full of this army of billions and billions of antibodies that are specifically designed for their target that virus and an antibody that looks like a big Y so this army of Ys cone in surround this virus and the two arms of that Y reach out and

Speaker 12 latch onto the virus and just kind of hold on to it really tightly until other cells can come in and kill it.

Speaker 13 It's just, it blows your mind.

Speaker 12 It really does. Because Caroline points out, it's not just that your immune cells are doing this for a virus.
It can be something like a fungus, like a bacteria, maybe a parasite, a toxin.

Speaker 13 You know, you may get a small cut. You may get dust in your eyes.
You may get something going on.

Speaker 12 Whatever it is.

Speaker 15 You can make antibodies against almost anything that's out there.

Speaker 12 Taylor made bespoke antibodies for anything.

Speaker 15 Anything, even if it's never existed in our environment before.

Speaker 14 Wait, what?

Speaker 12 Yes. Even for things that don't exist, your immune cells can make antibodies for it.

Speaker 7 That is so cool. cool.

Speaker 11 It's amazing, actually.

Speaker 11 Sorry,

Speaker 11 it almost sounds religious. The Pope just died, and I don't know.

Speaker 12 So, these two new voices you hear.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm Helen Dooley.

Speaker 12 One is Helen Dooley. The other.
Martin Flanick. Martin Flanick.

Speaker 15 I work for the medical school here at University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Speaker 12 So does Martin.

Speaker 11 Almost 30 years at Maryland.

Speaker 12 And the two of them, they study the evolution of immune systems.

Speaker 15 To try and understand how the immune system that we have evolved.

Speaker 12 So this this is where the story really picks up. Okay.

Speaker 12 Because Helen and Martin explain, when we first discovered antibodies, there was this real puzzle as to how they could even exist, how an immune cell can even do what it does, how it can generate billions of different antibodies.

Speaker 12 Like that's something a cell shouldn't be able to do. It didn't make sense.
Because if you think about, say, a hair cell, it has DNA in it that tells it how to make hair.

Speaker 15 And we thought that was the same with antibodies, but then it turns out if you can make antibodies against all these different things, you would need so much DNA in your cells that the whole system just wouldn't work.

Speaker 12 Your cells literally can't contain that much information.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so then in the 1970s, a group was looking at antibody genes, the genes that encode antibodies or part of antibodies.

Speaker 12 And while they were looking at the genes in this immune cell, what they realized was that in it, it was something really special.

Speaker 12 There seemed to be a gene in there that was going around and snipping up DNA and then shuffling those bits and then stitching them back together.

Speaker 15 And what that meant was the cell could mix and match.

Speaker 12 Different pieces of DNA. And by virtue of that, the immune cell could create billions of different combinations in order to create...

Speaker 11 Billions of different antibodies.

Speaker 13 It just is incredible. It's incredibly complicated, but it's just amazing.

Speaker 12 It's a sort of magic.

Speaker 13 That bit is genetically just wizardry.

Speaker 12 That no other cell in our body can do, just our immune cells.

Speaker 2 But when they saw that, they thought, hmm, okay, that's interesting.

Speaker 13 And of course, the beauty of academia is that they will then dive down and they will start asking more questions, trying to answer more questions, researching it. And

Speaker 13 that really was the start of the whole thing.

Speaker 12 Because what scientists wanted to know now was when did this happen? Like, when did this one cell, the immune cell, suddenly get this superpower?

Speaker 12 So for years, what you had were groups of scientists, like this team down in Miami, basically looking at the animals that were there in the waters off Florida and taking blood samples, looking for antibodies, evidence of this superpower, and when it first showed up.

Speaker 15 So they were basically going back to other creatures to see if these antibodies were present or not at that point in time.

Speaker 12 So the idea being they would take blood samples from these animals, comb through whatever it is they find in there.

Speaker 15 And see if any of them kind of had the same like weight or characteristics as a human antibody. Classic why.

Speaker 12 Right, the Y shape. So first up.
Birds. Birds split off on the evolutionary tree about 300 million years ago.
Okay. Turns out researchers already knew this, but birds have the little Y antibody.
Yes.

Speaker 12 And so next step.

Speaker 11 They went back to reptiles.

Speaker 12 320 million years ago.

Speaker 15 They have antibodies.

Speaker 12 So back further.

Speaker 2 Amphibians.

Speaker 12 About 360 million years ago. Antibodies.
Even further back to fish. 430 million years ago.
Antibodies again. 450 million years ago.
Sharks. They have them too.
And then

Speaker 12 it stopped.

Speaker 11 So animals without backbones. Everybody would know the sea urchin.

Speaker 12 Which is about 500 million years old.

Speaker 11 When you look at those creatures,

Speaker 11 there are no antibodies.

Speaker 12 What they have are much simpler immune cells that can defend against far fewer things. That's right.
And so sharks are really.

Speaker 2 Wait, hold on.

Speaker 8 Literally, sorry. I have to stop talking.
I have to blow my nose because I can't hear you.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, sure.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 8 Like, are there antibodies in that snot?

Speaker 12 I, I think so. I, I, I mean, that's not really.

Speaker 2 Okay, keep going. Okay.

Speaker 12 Anyways, so sharks are the oldest living things on earth that have an immune system like ours. It's like pretty much where our immune system began.

Speaker 2 Does anyone know why?

Speaker 8 Like, why

Speaker 8 were sharks the place where this immune system first showed up?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so around that time.

Speaker 11 There were some interesting things that happened 450 to 500 million years ago.

Speaker 12 Through the randomness of evolution, the branch that had sea urchins suddenly split.

Speaker 12 And now you started to have animals with backbone, a tail, fins, a head, a jaw,

Speaker 12 and teeth. A large brain.
complex neuronal circuits, you get fish that lead to bigger fish, and eventually

Speaker 12 a predator that the world has never seen before. And once you have a predator, pretty much everything else becomes prey.

Speaker 11 And there is going to be a ratio that you have to maintain.

Speaker 12 Like, there has to be some sort of balance.

Speaker 11 Yes, you can't have too many predators with prey.

Speaker 12 If you did, all the predators would eat all the prey. There would be nothing left to eat.

Speaker 11 And so what you see, Martin says, often in nature, is predators in general don't have very many offspring.

Speaker 12 They have fewer babies. So it maintains this balance.

Speaker 11 Now, this is heavy speculation.

Speaker 2 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 12 But Martin's theory is if you have fewer offspring, then those offspring will need every defense they can get. Such as little Y-shaped molecules with two arms.

Speaker 3 Antibodies.

Speaker 12 And what scientists piece together is that right here around that split, when you have jawed predators with teeth, that simple immune cell in sea urchins the idea is it was this lucky event where this little rogue piece of DNA that you can find in all animals just so happened to make its way into that simple immune cell and tweak one of its genes and give it this property where now it can mix and match different pieces of DNA.

Speaker 11 The ability to generate billions of different antibodies.

Speaker 12 It's almost like MJ, let's go. the way that I think about it is

Speaker 12 the spider that bit Peter Parker like bit this immune cell, this like proto-antibody, and suddenly you have this

Speaker 12 superhero

Speaker 12 immune cell

Speaker 11 that can defend against anything that has come in from the outside.

Speaker 12 That's one theory. On the phone, you said there are others, and you very funnily suggested they're all raw.

Speaker 12 But do you know what they are? Are there any other

Speaker 12 big theories out there?

Speaker 11 I can tell you one. I can tell you one.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 11 So this one's called the jaws hypothesis.

Speaker 12 Jaws. So once jaws emerge, you have these species that can eat things with bones.
They can munch on their bones.

Speaker 11 And the bones during digestion could cause scarring of the digestive tract and therefore, you know, cause potential infections.

Speaker 12 So some people think it evolved because you are now exposed to so many more things and you need to fight off those different infections that could arise.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 8 That makes sense. Like the more opportunities there are to be exposed to things that kill you, therefore defeating things that kill you must be better.

Speaker 12 Right, exactly.

Speaker 12 But the funny thing is, is that once scientists started to really put put this whole puzzle together of how we got this immune system, when they found it in sharks, they were just like, meh.

Speaker 15 Okay. The prevailing thought was that sharks had a very simplistic version of our immune system, almost like the, you know, the model T Ford of our Ferrari immune system.

Speaker 12 Like we can make antibodies in three to four days. Sharks.
We're looking at three to four months. They thought it's not that efficient.

Speaker 15 Its immune responses are very slow.

Speaker 12 It's like 400 million years old. Of course it's not as good as ours.
Yeah. But that idea would

Speaker 12 sorry. It's okay.

Speaker 12 That idea would be proven to be very,

Speaker 12 very wrong.

Speaker 2 Dead wrong.

Speaker 12 We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Stick with us.

Speaker 14 Pardoner.

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Speaker 8 Lulu, Radiolab back with Becca Bressler, sharks and the things inside them that keep them from getting sick.

Speaker 12 Immune systems are just insane. I mean, just the fact that we can create antibodies against things that don't even exist in nature.

Speaker 2 Like that.

Speaker 14 That's so cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Okay, wait. So let's zoom way out.
Okay, so just a recap.

Speaker 12 Go ahead.

Speaker 8 We meet a guy named Aaron. He takes you to a bunker.
He's curious in immune responses. We're learning about like,

Speaker 8 you know, probably there was this big bang around 500 million years ago that goes hand in hand with complexity. And now, yes, where are we going next?

Speaker 12 Yeah. So so where we left off, scientists had discovered sharks have an immune system, but thought it was pretty simple compared to ours.
Right. You know, the Ford to R.
Ferrari, as Helen put it. But

Speaker 12 that all started to change in the late 80s when Martin showed up.

Speaker 11 I got my first job in 1987 at the University of Miami.

Speaker 12 In an immunology lab.

Speaker 11 And there they worked on sharks, obviously.

Speaker 12 Looking at their immune cells that make their antibodies.

Speaker 11 We wanted to isolate the cells from the shark and then study their functions.

Speaker 12 So when they started playing around with these cells, they saw, of course, they made shark antibodies. Right.
Obviously. That's right.
But then he also saw this other thing that the shark was making.

Speaker 12 That sort of looked like an antibody.

Speaker 11 But a little different.

Speaker 12 It had the same Y shape, the two arms, but it was smaller.

Speaker 11 And that was weird.

Speaker 12 Hadn't seen that before. No.

Speaker 12 So. He grabs some of these itty-bitty Ys, puts them under a microscope.

Speaker 11 It's called electron microscopy.

Speaker 12 And what he sees is that the arms on these things were highly mobile, like really flexible.

Speaker 11 They move from zero degrees to 180 degrees, like a, you know, a cheerleader with her arms out.

Speaker 2 Hmm.

Speaker 12 And this was something completely new. We've never seen it before in a shark, in us, in any immune system.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 It just smelled to me like this was something interesting.

Speaker 15 I think that's kind of where...

Speaker 15 I think that's kind of where I came in.

Speaker 12 So over the next few years, Helen and Martin, they would do these experiments where they would take something that didn't belong in a shark, put it inside of it, and watch these little whys surround this thing in the shark.

Speaker 12 And with their flexible arms, they would get into it and they would hold it super, super tightly.

Speaker 11 Just amazed.

Speaker 12 And the two of them were like, It's amazing.

Speaker 12 Oh, these are antibodies. These are like a whole new type of antibody.

Speaker 11 That was fantastic.

Speaker 12 So, when you discovered this, did you understand the implications of it?

Speaker 11 No, I probably should have.

Speaker 11 I probably should have.

Speaker 12 But, you know, so Martin, he's just seeing something new.

Speaker 8 Basic science.

Speaker 12 He just saw a thing. He just saw a thing.

Speaker 2 However,

Speaker 12 because these antibodies are so tiny and so flexible and so sticky, scientists today actually think that they might be the key to

Speaker 12 what's the word I'm looking for? Not solving, but like

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 12 key to curing cancer.

Speaker 8 In humans?

Speaker 12 In humans.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 2 Wait, what?

Speaker 2 How?

Speaker 12 Okay, stick with me. So, can I take photos or is that a no-no?

Speaker 12 Okay, this is actually where I want to take us back to Aaron's lab.

Speaker 4 In a basement in Madison.

Speaker 12 In a basement in Madison.

Speaker 3 Big boy there is Mr. Stamper.

Speaker 12 Because Aaron is one one of the few people who is developing these antibodies to try to cure cancer. So we've got nets out and you're using the nets to...

Speaker 3 To corral the sharks in a place so we can catch them with a big net here.

Speaker 12 And so how this works is,

Speaker 12 they catch a shark. So we got a shark.
Oh, should I move? I should move. They dump them in this bucket full of anesthesia to put them to sleep.

Speaker 12 If you weren't putting pressure on the top, would it like fly out of the bin? It would fly out of the bin, yes. And once it's out,

Speaker 12 okay, we got a sleepy shark. They inject a little piece of the surface of a cancer cell into that shark.

Speaker 9 Is this any kind of cancer?

Speaker 8 Is this a particular kind of cancer cell?

Speaker 12 Prostate cancer.

Speaker 3 This is prostate cancer that is resistant to all forms of current chemotherapy.

Speaker 12 Okay. And where are you putting this injection?

Speaker 2 Last time we did the left fin, so this time we're doing the right fin.

Speaker 12 And once they have this little bit of a cancer cell in the shark.

Speaker 3 You have a huge immune response.

Speaker 12 The shark starts producing millions of antibodies. And then you deliver repeat booster shots of these people.
They do it again and again.

Speaker 3 For a terrible analogy.

Speaker 12 Getting these sharks to make these antibodies over and over.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like playing basketball. So if you practice more, you're a better shot.
Same with the immune system.

Speaker 12 This is immunotherapy, training antibodies to be really good at latching onto a target. Because once you've trained it to say, latch onto a cancer cell, you can attach a little like radioactive bomb.

Speaker 12 to the antibody.

Speaker 3 You basically use the antibody as a delivery system to efficiently deliver this little bomb to the cancer cell. To kill it.
Yes, correct.

Speaker 12 And this is also something we do with human antibodies, even for like certain types of cancers. But sometimes human antibodies are not very good at sticking to cancer cells.

Speaker 3 But shark antibodies with those small, flexible, wiggly arms, they can essentially do molecular yoga and adopt many different shapes.

Speaker 3 And by adopting many different shapes, they can get into nooks and crannies of targets that human antibodies can't access.

Speaker 12 Like certain parts of cancer cells. Yes.
So Aaron said that it takes about two months to train these antibodies and that the first time they went to test one of these things,

Speaker 12 they took the shark antibody, injected it into a mouse with a tumor, through the tail vein of the mouse, did some fancy imaging.

Speaker 3 And I thought, wow, I've never seen this before. Within a day, we saw.
the antibody homing to the tumor and just collecting there.

Speaker 12 They were just latching on to these tumor cells and nowhere else. They didn't find it anywhere else in the body.

Speaker 12 It like laser focused right to the tumor.

Speaker 7 It moved like we think sharks move, like where they like detect stells,

Speaker 2 like detect a drop of blood and then boom.

Speaker 12 What? Were you surprised by this or were you expecting these results?

Speaker 3 I've been doing mouse radiology for 20 years and it knocked my socks off.

Speaker 2 Really? Honestly, yeah.

Speaker 3 I've never seen anything, I've never seen an antibody work that well.

Speaker 12 And they would follow up that study with another where they attached a little bomb to the antibody and it worked.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 12 They eradicated the cancer.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 12 Do you see any immune response to the antibody?

Speaker 12 Because I guess I would just expect that a shark antibody for a mouse is like a foreign invader that the mouse would then, you know, produce antibodies against.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So for some reason, we do not see an immune response and we don't really know the concrete reason why.

Speaker 3 We've done studies in mice and other rodents and there are a few other people working on shark antibodies in the world.

Speaker 3 And that's one thing that we all talk about is how we don't see an immune response against them.

Speaker 12 I mean, I think that's so fascinating because like even for a human, if you're growing a fetus that's half genetically yours, your body will launch an immune response.

Speaker 12 Like that's the, you know, the purpose of the placenta and the sort of struggle of pregnancy. I just can't even grasp that a shark antibody would not trigger an immune response.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's one of those things that you have to see to believe. And we've seen it many times.
And we're going to do a primate study.

Speaker 3 We're going to do an imaging study to see where this antibody goes in the body of a non-human primate.

Speaker 3 And then we're going to also repeatedly dose the primate with the antibody to see if we do generate an immune response against it.

Speaker 3 And my hunch is we won't see any antibodies against our shark antibody.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 8 I mean, I don't know if we should do any

Speaker 8 meaning making here, but can I just like, yeah, go for it.

Speaker 8 I mean, I think so much of what we learned in the first couple days of our week of shark is like

Speaker 8 that a monster

Speaker 8 maintains its fear by being unknown, unseen, sort of other.

Speaker 8 And there's something like,

Speaker 8 if at the molecular level, we can embrace these things as us,

Speaker 8 there is like profound molecular

Speaker 2 entanglement.

Speaker 8 Like they are so much closer than I ever thought.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I mean, like it's that entanglement is precisely why they can heal us, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 12 Like these animals that we don't even want to share the water with because we're afraid that they'll harm us could actually save us. Oh, wow.
So each shark you're using for different

Speaker 3 each shark is fighting a different disease.

Speaker 12 And not just from cancer.

Speaker 3 The shark we have right here is being injected with proteins that are expressed when we sense pain.

Speaker 12 So with one of of those sharks, they're developing antibodies against pain receptors that you find in humans. So, they can help us find where that pain is in the body.
Wow.

Speaker 3 We had one shark that was pumped full of fentanyl to make anti-fentanyl shark antibodies.

Speaker 12 They're developing antibodies against lung cancer, breast cancer, Alzheimer's. Okay.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 8 So, you're saying just like there's this burgeoning hope of potential for what these antibodies could heal or make clear.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. What do you think about that?

Speaker 3 It's pretty cool. It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Do you think that sharks, like these antibodies, could be the most powerful tools we have to fight these diseases?

Speaker 3 Never say never, potentially.

Speaker 3 Potentially.

Speaker 3 I like to think that the future is shark, personally.

Speaker 12 The future is shark. Yes.
I feel like that's a good place to end.

Speaker 3 The future is shark.

Speaker 8 This episode was reported by Becca Bressler. It was produced by Becca Bressler and Matt Kilty.
Original music from Matt Kilty. Sound design contributed by Matt Kilty, Jeremy Bloom, and Becca Bressler.

Speaker 8 Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and edited by Pat Walters. Special thanks to Guihan Gunrothnan, Jay West, Kendall Ott, and the entire LeBo Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Speaker 8 Ghost Sharks, not actually their mascot, but maybe it should be. One more thing, we want to give a big thanks to everyone out there who is a member of the lab, our membership program.

Speaker 8 Your support makes big projects like this possible, and we are so grateful.

Speaker 8 And if you aren't a member or you've been thinking about giving more,

Speaker 8 This is a great moment to take the plunge because if you join or re-up right now, you'll receive a very cool gift, a limited edition Week of Sharks hat designed by the awesome Maine-based artist and surfer Ty Williams.

Speaker 8 It's so beautiful and fun, and it gives you a chance to show the world you support public radio in the form of Radiolab, but also support seeing sharks in a new way.

Speaker 8 The shark hat is available to everyone who joins the lab this month, even for as little as $7 a month. You can join at radiolab.org/slash join.

Speaker 8 Existing members check your email for details, and thank you so much. Swim on back over to us tomorrow morning, where there will be yet another episode about sharks surfacing in the Radio Lab feed.

Speaker 19 Hi, I'm Georgina and I'm from China and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Aberd and is edited by Sharon Willer.
Lou Miller and Latip Nasser are co-hosts.

Speaker 19 Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brassler, W.

Speaker 19 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Rebecca Lex, Malia Padzkutieras, Sundunanam Sambadan, Natch Kilchi, Annie McKeewan, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Litzer, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young.

Speaker 19 With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Piujo-Mazzini and Natalie Niddleton.

Speaker 20 Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from RadioLab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Telponto Foundation.

Speaker 20 Foundational support from Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Slaung Foundation.

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