>> the major seven. rape, robbery, murder, grand larceny and great larceny auto. [inaudible] >> yeah. the question is, what is it -- the police commander is encouragingdowngrading of major crimes and also encouraging arrests were smaller crimes. that's it backley what they are doing. there's something called ac simon, which you know what it

is. it's basically an arrest for an open container, public. but if you get a seven come you've got to go down to court. they are encouraging those kinds of arrests. the thing is more than 50% are dismissed. so it's kind of an exercise in bureaucratic craziness. but it's part of the agenda. i [inaudible] >> yes, sir. >> it sounds like they have two showed that crime is down while showing that they are doing from being. now? >> yeah. he said showing crime is down -- [inaudible] >> so if you were a point of pride -- [inaudible] >> rate. but it also has to do with promotion and ambition and careers. the get a piece of it.

one more question, sir. >> or any of these tapes available to actually listen to in the media? >> the village voice website, there are some. we are working on a more comprehensive thing. if you want to see me later can talk about if you're really interested. thank you very much. i really appreciate it. [applause]

>> next, peter doherty, a nobel prize in immunologist and chairman of the immunology department at saint jude talks about the history pandemics and discusses examples of current ones, including sars, h1n1 and hiv. this is about an hour 15. [applause] >> thank you. i'm the only one wearing a tie. i'm just enough for us to spend, so i seem to be of the better quality person. this kind of a surprise to be here, launching two books. how did i come to be writing two books? well, the book on pandemics, this one i was asked to write by oxford university press. it appealed to me, but i was wondering whether his really

quite the right person to do it. pandemics are pandemic infections are enormous topic. it could've been written by epidemiologists, and one with the spread of infection. a particular interest is in the nature of infectious disease, how we deal with infectious disease, how are immune response deals with and how disease causes the ecology and the damage that can lead to an outcome. so that really turned me on. so i thought about it. i thought, whoever writes a book on this would be very different, depending on their particular background. this is my pandemic. it's kind of an unusual book. it's a question-and-answer book because his party's series called what everyone needs to know. this series has titles like food for the world, what everyone needs to know.

the catholic church, what everyone needs to know. i bought that one, haven't read it yet. i know "pandemics: what everyone needs to know" it's really interesting to read a question-and-answer book. i'm a research scientist. being a scientist is a very collegial at dvd. we do research. someone like me works with a lot of young people. we work on the last 20 or so years we worked largely on immunity to influence the. of course i'm influenced that is their main pandemic threat, the name of a know about. but if you do research and work with young people in that you read the papers, do the experiment, there's a constant back-and-forth between you and the people in the lab and work it on the manuscript in asking questions. on the other hand, writing a book like the pandemics spoke is a different experience.

you lock yourself away in a room and you don't talk to anybody and you just write. and that's bad enough. but if you think about it, locking yourself away in a room is inventing questions and then inventing the answers is a very strange it. , but it's fun. it was fun to write and it's hopefully a very clear exposition. editing. when a scientist like me write the book, one of things we have to avoid discharging. i know from talking to my world attorney and friend noticing the same counts for a piece of tactical jargon, but the end of the book. they don't read any further. immediate need very, very complex topic.

writing for a publishing house to by the press, editors are all literary types. they're not scientists. if you get stuff that's been communicated across pretty much everybody. they are very accustomed to making people write clearly and easily. i had to do a lot more work than i expect it. i thought this to be an easy book to read. as i went into it, a lot of things i didn't know that much about. that's often an experience we all have. we think we've heard things and then when we go in greater depth, we realized how much our knowledge to actually superficial. i had a lot of hope. in the lab type guy. i had a lot of help from people in developing countries because that's where a lot of these

issues are likely to trace the rise. so kind of an interesting book to read. i'll tell you a little bit more about it later. the other book, how to fratello threats to our will is a very different type of book. it was a book i read for my own interest. i'm in my 70s now. i've been a very focused, dedicated researcher. one of the things that happen as we get older as they tend to back off a little, behave a little less in an obsessive-compulsive manner and they stop and smell the roses a bit and got a bit more interested in what going on around me. the other factor is because i'm trained originally as a veterinarian, i get to go to a lot of schools. i was hearing all sorts of interesting stories.

go to medical schools, which has been my life the last 40 years, talking to medical researchers come to you hear interesting stuff. but if you go to the vet schools are monday totally different stories. i started to get some very interesting stories. the stories i was sort of talk to people, talk to friends interested in infectious disease and they would know anything. and then i talk to other friends and they didn't know anything about the disease aspect. so i thought it might be time to put this together. there was another motivation for writing the book and not as they wasted after writing two books mentioned earlier, i've wasted about 18 months trying to write a novel. and it turned out to be the worst novel ever written. that was my climate change murder mystery going to make it out of the bottom drawer.

it actually had the experience -- everything i try to do to fix it it worse. it was a classic example of perverse alchemy. you start with which you think might be a piece of gold and you slowly and progressively turn it into a piece of lead. surviving the bird book was the writing so to speak. now this book was published last year in a straley and is published under the title, sentinel chickens, better health in our world. the sentinel chickens book on the cover had a too can peek. now the publisher started new outfit called the experiment hated the title and they hated the cover, but they liked the book. and so it's a new name. i was pleased when they told me it was going to have an english à la macarthur. and then when i saw the book it

has a pigeon on the cover. it is an ornamental pigeon. i think it's quite a nice cover and i quite like the title. if a pretentious. what is a sentinel chicken? box of birds that we park around the countryside to monitor the spread of is that when viruses that transmit viruses to birds and then mosquitoes -- new mosquitoes feed on birds and sometimes transmit to us. this is west nile virus of course. so little flocks of them in the public health authorities put them out they are and if they are bitten by a virus carrying west nile virus, it doesn't kill the chicken, but the chicken

recovers and makes antibodies. and then you come along and you could tell how the virus is spreading. we used them in australia and is well known. now, i don't know why our american publisher didn't like sentinel chicken. i thought it was a pretty good title. i think maybe because it could be chicken sentinels, which is totally unacceptable. i'm not sure. anyway, that's where it stands. so the pandemics spoke deals a lot with influenza, tuberculosis, the express that are out there. influenza and also the chicken book has three chapters on influenza. in both cases, the influenza virus within nature as diseases and the bird book tells the story of how that story was put

together. we didn't know this before the late 1960s. it was put together by two friends of mine who worked out that these viruses maintained. why is that? influenza virus decembers grossness in the gastrointestinal tact. wildly on symptomatic. but the virus survives very well in water. it infects about all waterbirds and managed pcs of mammals as well. we can get influenza viruses that of wales, but birds. now we just found one and it's about 16 different types of these things in birds, whereas only three circulated nice. having a virus that survives all in water, that affects different species of waterbirds is a fantastic way to maintain it in a chair. even though the virus changes, when they change a lot of these viruses as we know because we

have to keep developing vaccines against the standard strains of influenza circulate because they mutate them i have to get a new vaccine and so forth. even if it changes, if you kill them as happened with the h. five and one bird flu in 2005, it will only kill some species, waterbirds because birds of different species are as different are as different as we are between each other as pixar versus. so a virus mutated, it changed -- it killed jesus. it killed swans. account flamingos, but it didn't kill.and the ducks. typewriter crossed into western europe and then to north africa where it's still going actually north africa and marketing bird flu. the bird flu is a big scare for us of course. you know, we went through this whole exercise they could miss extreme virus, which was killing

60% of the people in fact did they change so it started to spread between us, rather than just spread from birds to us. fortunately, that hasn't happened in. i was still killing the occasional person. the whole story was no place in the bird book, some of the pandemics spoke, but much more detail in the bird book. ..

>> so they can at least get a meal out of them. so they give the bird to the son, for instance, who stuffs it down his shirt, pedals off on his bicycle and gets an enormous dose of virus up his nose, gets deep into his lung, and that can be lethal. so hasn't materialized into the disaster we possibly expected. we worry about the moment about a virus called h7 and 9 which is in china and has been coming out of live bird markets and infecting humans, and it's been killing about 20% of the humans it's infected, but we're very much on top of it, and i don't think it's going to be a major problem, but who can tell? influenza viruses are very unpredictable. now, we don't normally get flu from birds. we get it from other people. they jump very occasionally across from birds and other species into us. we transmit virus, i mean, virus

flies, but it flies in airplanes, it flies with us. if you've got someone on the airplane with influenza virus, the problem with flu is that you can be infected and pushing out a lot of virus, but early on you don't feel sick. so you're very infectious, but you still feel good enough to take that trip you're supposed to take for work or vacation. the virus doesn't go through the air-handling system on the plane, but it can infect people that are, say, two or three rows away. and it, the main thing, though, is people who are infected going to new cities and then infecting people there. and that's really how flu gets around. so the influenza virus that came out of pigs, the swine flu in 2009, was probably in australia before we ever isolated it in the united states. and it went round the world in a matter of months. the flu viruses in the u.s. will go around the whole country in

six weeks. they're transmitted very readily. the west nile virus, on the other hand, that came into the u.s. in about 1999 which was killing birds in new york city, causing occasional cases of fatal encephalitis, brain disease, in humans is maintained in a bird/mosquito life cycle with us being occasionally infected. and that virus rather than getting around the united states in six weeks as in influenza does being a respiratory infection, that virus in its bird/mosquito lifestyle took four years to get from new york to the west coast. so a much slower transmission process than the influenza viruses. so there's various stories about west nile virus and the infect-borne viruses, of course, are not likely to be pandemic pathogens because pan pandemic s global, and they're lowered by the distribution of mosquitoes.

nothing defines what is a pandemic x there's not that many definitions out there really. there's a sort of confusion. the world health organization which is the organization that monitors these pandemic infections has a definition for influenza which depends on spread between different geographic -- different regions or different who regions. the world health organization has the planet divided up into different regions. they're not strictly geographic. they're where the various officers are. and when you get an influenza virus that starts to spread, say, within one region quite widely, we call that a level five pandemic. when we get it spreading between two different regions, we call it a level six pandemic. so when it was announced that the 2009 swine flu was a level six pandemic, everyone became terrified because they thought this was some terrible, terrible disease which is going to kill

us all off, and we all think of the pandemic where 50-100 million people died. but the actual definition of pandemic for the world health organization is a definition of spread, it's not a definition of severity. so there's a confusion in the public mind about what actually pandemic stands for. and it really needs to be put straight. we need to have some better distributive that also -- drink scriptor. the swine pandemic of 2009 went around the world very fast. it was a virus that came out of pigs, an american virus, american pig virus got together with a eurasian pig virus. we don't know how the eurasian pig virus got to mexico, whether it was a pig on a package holiday that was infected or whatever, but what happens with flu virus is the genetic material is in six different bits. and if a cell gets inflected with two different flu viruses, you can get a completely new virus out.

so this pig virus, part of which was the same as the 1928 virus which was in humans, went into pigs and stayed relatively stable in pigs. that pig virus, by bringing two pig viruses together, we suddenly got a virus which was incredibly infectious to humans. there was a lot of upset because people said you're calling it a pandemic, but it's really not that bad. people over 50 who were born before 1950 actually had cross-reactive antibodies that protected them against it, because there was a similar virus circulated back before 1950. so the elderly, who are normally the people who suffer most from influenza, weren't particularly infected. it infected a number of heavily-pregnant women, a number of young people had to be brought through the crisis on the heart-lung machines, and also it was very bad in some indigenous communities in

australia, in the united states, and it caused a very bad outbreak in india. so what is a severe pandemic in one type of culture is not nearly so bad in others. and, of course, the populations that are always most vulnerable are those in the poor countries where there's problems of poor nutrition and so forth. so there's quite a bit about influenza because it is really the biggest pandemic threat we know about. now, of course, there are enormous numbers of other hideous viruses out there. did anyone see the movie contagion? now, this is a bat virus that comes out of nowhere, and we didn't know until 2002 that, actually, bats, fruit bats are maintaining a whole spectrum of viruses. we learned that when science came along. before that we knew that the rabies-like viruses were carried by vampire bats in south america, for example, and we

knew there'd been some cases elsewhere of very closely-related viruses being contracted as a result of bat bite. but before 2002 that's all we knew. and then suddenly science comes along. it gives us an enormous shock because here's a respiratory pathogen, we think it's influenza, it's not. it was the world health influenza network that actually worked it out. it turned out in the end what it was was a virus that came out of bats, it went into himalayan civic cats which were a little animal that was in southern china who was being used for food. it comes out of the forest areas. and it infected humans in those live animal markets, and then it was chinese new year, and it spread very quickly. it spread to hong kong, it spread to singapore, and it spread to toronto. and they were the main areas infected. in east asia, the only area infected out of asia was, actually, toronto. and still -- and it killed about

800 people. now, normally in the united states 25-40,000 people die every year of influenza. this killed 800 people in total because it was a new infection and because it was not identified initially, and because people were dying horribly and particularly people in hospitals were dying. the medical personnel were dying. there was a great deal of fear. in the end, it cost about $50 billion in economic loss due to people not traveling, to people not using hotels and to people not buying stuff. and so it was a major economic problem. and that's really what alerted the world to the fact that respiratory infections or reminded the world of the fact that respiratory infections can be extremely dangerous. and that really convinced various governments that we have to take them very seriously. it also convinced the people in real power that it's not just the poor who get infected with these, even they can get infected, so they're willing to spend money.

that was one of the reasons why we took the r5n1dh5n1 flu so seriously. in contagion, we have a virus that infects a pig. the pig is then butchered by a chef, the chef shakes hands with gwyneth paltrow who then -- [laughter] even though she's not feeling too well, takes it back to the u.s. she stops off a bit in chicago where she has something of liaison, and then she goes back to the family in minneapolis. and this virus is worse than any virus we've ever seen. anyone who even opens a car door for her gets infected, dies and infects lots of other people. it's the most hideous virus in the world, but it's actually a very good film about infectious disease because it's well made, it's made by steven coder burg, and the actual control of the science segment was given to ian

lipkin who's a very good virus disease medic at columbia university. so it's generally pretty realistic. there's a few things that are unrealistic like the fact that they're killing hundreds -- thousands of people are dying, and their dying horribly and very quickly, and they seem to have about three people working on the problem. [laughter] but with it shows the cdc at work, it shows how important the cdc is, and that's a big thing in my pandemics book. what's really important is we maintain the stature of our public health services. because they're extraordinarily important in protecting us against these various infections. and so i think in these cost-cutting times one of the things we could all do as citizens, particularly in the u.s. where democracy so strong, is to make sure that the public health services are fully maintained. because they're the sorts of things that can just be knocked off by cost cutters and people don't even notice until something goes wrong, and then it's a real problem. so poor old gwynnie dies, and we

see the top of her head taken off. it's a plastic dummy, i think he was voted the world's most beautiful woman which means she's not dead -- [laughter] but it's kind of entertaining in a macabre sort of way, for people interested in disease and death. so anyway, so infectious disease, of course, when the west nile virus got right across to the states, it almost wiped out the california yellow tail magpie which was the state bird that year. and also we had a bad west nile outbreak last year which was really kind of surprising, because it was a very dry year. but it turned out because it was so dry, all the birds were coming together on the same water sources. the mosquito that was transmitting it very readily was relatively resistant to the dry conditions, and the mosquitoes were also breeding in the sewers in cities. and we got a bad human outbreak.

and when you get these viruses and it goes back to malaria and west nile at the turn of the 20th century in the united states and in the 19th century, malaria and west nile in the summer would go up as far as the st. lawrence waterway, so they really did go right up the east coast. and so these insect-borne viruses and insect-borne pathogens and malaria we really keep at bay with spraying, and, of course, that was ramped up with this kind of incursion. the other mosquito story is about the birds in hawaii. it turns out that the wild species that were in, the bird species that were in hawaii say at the turn of the 19th century, about half those are gone. and they've been largely wiped out by avian malaria. now, this is not a disease that transmits to us, it's only a disease of birds. and it seems that the malaria was probably there at the turn of the 18th, 19th century,

probably been there a long time. but what happened was a mosquito was introduced that transmated it -- transmitted it very readily. and there's an account by a missionary who was in the hawaiian islands from about 1820 or something like that. the ship watering, it brought its water barrels ashore, they emptied them out, and then he says there were paradise that was hawaii came to an end because they had to swap mosquitoes. of course, they made no connection between mosquitoes and disease at that stage. in fact, we didn't even understand infectious disease at that stage until louis pasteur comes along in the mid 9th centuries and shows -- mid 19th centuries and shows the story of infectious disease. that story's in the book. also ronald roth, who's the guy who worked out malaria, worked it out largely by a study of birds. roth was a british medical

doctor working in the british indian civil service when the brits controlled india and controlled the world and the 'em press of india was queen victoria or whatever. so roth got very interested in malaria, and he was studying malaria in some of the coastal cities where there are a lot of malaria cases. and he'd just kind of worked out that the bug was multiplying in mosquitoes, and then he got transferred to a town where there was very little malaria, calcutta, i think it was. and so what was he to do? well, he realized, he knew that birds also had their own malaria strains. so he actually studied the disease in birds and worked out malaria in birds. that won him the nobel prize. he won the nobel prize in about 1905. he was a really interesting cardiac. if you read his lecture, you can read all nobel lectures that vive given and all the biographic details provided. you have to write a lecture, and

you have to give a biographical sketch. and you can realize roth's, and it's very interesting. and it really reads almost as though it was written today. it's just a fresh account of the science and his enthusiasm and what he did and the intellectual process he went through, and it's really wonderful. roth was also quite a character. he wrote plays, and he wrote poetry. he wrote some of the most god-awful poetry you can possibly imagine -- [laughter] but it's in, i actually found some of it, and i put it in in the book. i lived in scotland for a while, they had some of the worst poets in the world. [laughter] terrible. there's another poem in the bird book that's written by the wife of one of my colleagues which is very nice, nice little poem. he was supposed to be in the book, too n a chapter on how to cheat at pigeon race, but the editors took it out. i thought that was quite a pity. [laughter] birds and -- we talked a bit about birds and infectious

diseases. there are a number of other stories about birds and infectious decides, some about birds and immunity and how they've informed us about immunity, others about how birds have told us so much about cancer. there's a little bird virus that was discovered by a man called payton route in about 1910. he was working at the rockefeller institute in new york. he was a medical doctor, and he found he could transmit this tumor to other birds after the ground-up tumor had been filtered. that is the, all the tissue bits had come out, and you just had a fluid. and he transmitted it. and nobody took much interest with a sarcoma. they thought it was a bird thing, and they weren't very interested really. and then another person came along called dick shope in the 1930s, and he isolated a couple of viruses that caused disease in rabbits. and then that, people got really quite interested because they

realized that in mammals there were also transmissable tumors. and then there were a whole lot of viruses discovered in mice by various people and leukemia viruses and sarcoma viruses and so forth. so people got very sold on this idea of viruses being, of viruses causing cancer. the sarcoma virus, though, has its own particular story. couth got the nobel prize, and then the virus was used by a guy called howard -- [inaudible] who discovers with david baltimore reverse transcriptites. and knowing about those told us about cancer viruses and also told us a tremendous amount about hrvas because that's what happens. even though it comes along later. so they get the nobel prize s. and then another couple of scientists, harold and mike

bishop, used the sarcoma virus to work out the genes that are transformed to cause a number of cancers. and so three nobel prizes for one little chicken virus that tells us about cancer. there's a lot in the bird book about birds monitoring the world. the reason i wanted to write this book is i've been very engaged by the debate on climate science and climate change. it's kind of a false debate in a way because we all know what's actually happening, i think. but as a biologist, i'm not really -- i don't really have any true expertise in the type of science that informs the climate change discussion. because that's really in the realm of the physical scientist. it's the oceanographers and the cloud specialists and all these people, the astrophysicists who are really telling us about the science of what's happening with climate change. but biologists, on the other

hand, are looking at the readout of what's happening with climate change, and we have a lot of people, for instance, in the marine science community who are looking at what's happening with planktons and various calcified organization nhls in the -- organisms in the sea. co2 going into the sea water and acidification occurring, so you're getting decreased calcium. it's actually, evidently, quite a big problem already on the washington coast where you're having real problems with oysters because the water is too acid. and so we're getting those readouts. but if you think of the readout that's most obvious and it's best studied, it's really what's happening with birds. and so people -- because with birds they're not only everywhere and they're obvious, they're also very large -- there are also very large numbers of people who are observing them because we have the bird-watching community. we have great enthusiasm.

we have the awed done, we have the backyard bird projects and so forth. and there are lots of people who have extreme interest in understanding what's happening with birds. i started to talk, and i thought, well, if i'm going to write about environmental damage and environmental degradation and the if i'm going to write about climate change effects chls one of the things i wanted to do, then birds are obviously the species to look at. because we see them all the time, they're being observed, and we can see what's happening with them. well, in general what's happening is the birds with warming are tending to move away from the equator, the ones that migrate towards the equator are tending not to come as far south. or the subsets of a particular species are tending to become more dominant. if they normally did not migrate as far south. also the birds are becoming a little smaller related to an effect called bergen's rule which sort of says if an animal's in a hotter climate, it

will tend to be smaller than the comparable species in a cooler climate. and then the other thing, though, is i hadn't really connected with how this data's put together. there's a lot of money available for medical research because, you know, congressmen and senators want to live forever. but there's no real money for studies of birds. and so the way this is done is the ornithologists, the scientists get together with the birding organizations who then pull their volunteers in to accumulate the data sets that are so important for understanding what's happening. it's the sort of observations that are done, but it's also people volunteering in the summer to go out and do -- [inaudible] for instance. you take four cannons with cannonballs, you tie a net to the cannonballs, you fire them off, the net goes up in the air

and settles gently over the birds, and you can then weigh them and band them and record them and let them go. and you can track them. because you now put tracking devices where you can track them by satellite, and you can see where they're going. and some of these birds are doing incredible migration patterns. we're very concerned, because the numbers of sea birds globally are down by about 50%. and this is, this is all over. whether this is overfishing, whether it's habitat degradation, in australia we're extremely worried about the developments along the coast of the china sea. it's industrializing, they're doing the same sort of thing we did, they're filling in marsh lands, turning them into golf courses, factories and all the rest of it. and we have birds that come right down from the arctic almost to the antarctic in the various seasons for breeding and for food and so forth, and we're extremely concerned about what's going to happen with those. there's a story in the book that may be familiar to many of you of the red knot, a little bird

that goes from the argentine to the canadian arctic, and it breeds in the canadian arctic. and it gets there right at the beginning of summer. but it stops off in delaware and refuels on horseshoe crab eggs. and we're starting to use the horseshoe crab as bait for welk. and the numbers, the density of crab eggs in the bay just dropped dramatically and so did the numbers of these little birds. so it's a classical example of how you do one thing, and you modify an ecological system, and it has disastrous consequences. and we've got these sort of stories emerging from all types of situations. another story about -- and the bird book is really a lot of stories. another story is about what's happened with the vultures in india. 95%,98% of the vultures in india

have gone over the last 20 years. if you look at pictures taken in india in the 970s and someone's photographed, there's usually a bunch of vultures hanging around behind them. and you think, well, dud it really -- does it really matter? vultures are actually enormously important in india because with their culture, they let the cattle just die, and they leave them. they don't use them for anything because of the sacred cow thing. they use them when they're alive. they'll use them for milk, and they'll use them for traction. so it's not that they're not part of the economy, so to speak. and they will get treated with various drugs because they're of some value. so why were all the vultures dying? and they were dying with a very, very strange situation. because when they opened up these vultures, they found instead of the usual color that you see inside a dead animal, they were totally white. and they were white because they

were loaded with your rick acid crystals. they had visceral gout. and this is a condition that's just extraordinary. and, of course, the bird reexcrete uric acid which is soluble. the bird excretes uric acid which is crystal rised. that's why the bird dropping is white. and, of course, they've got no control. i mean, the fact that you get bombed by a bird doesn't mean the bird's malevolent, it doesn't have a bladder. it just drops when it drops. [laughter] so what was happening was the kidneys of these birds were being totally destroyed. so what was doing it? well, they thought initially it must be a virus. so they tried to isolate a virus. they sent viruses from all over the world, people from india working on it, pakistan, people from, i think, from oregon, actually, working on it. all sorts of people, veterinary-type institutions. they icelated some viruses, but it wasn't a virus. so what could be happening? well, then they thought, well,

what has changed with respect to the cattle? because what the vultures do, of course, is they're the clean-up service for india. they clean up the dead car cutses. they take all the -- car cutses. they -- carcasses. if you go to the washington salmon streams when the salmon have run can and they've all died, the cleanup is being done by the bears and the bald eagles. we think of the eagle as a symbol of temporal might from rome and the middle ages, even the nazis carried eagles, the u.s. has the eagle prominently displayed. actually, the eagle is a sanitary worker -- [laughter] and that's not generally emphasized. but they are, and they do a wonderful job. and so the vultures, what was happening? so they thought, well, maybe something's been done to the cattle. and what they found is that when the cattle got sore joints, the

vets started to treat them with a drug. some of you may have had it, it's a nonsteroid anti-inflammatory. perfectly good drug in us, but in birds as can be the case with drugs, it's totally toxic. totally toxic. not for all species, but for the vulture and some other birds. and so what was happening is that a cow that had been treated with the drug which is just symptomatic treatment would die from whatever its problem was, the vultures would strip it, and one dead cow loaded with this drug could kill about 900 vultures. so that was what was happening. the indians tried to withdraw, they got, of course, trying to get anything done in india is not necessarily easy. but the other consequence was because there are now all these dead cattle and there are no vultures to strip them, then the number of dogs increased, the number of wild dogs increased. and for a time -- and there's rabies in india. so in the initial years, they had something like 50,000 excess

rabies deaths. then they got onto that, they started vaccinating, sterile sterilizing dogs and all the rest of it, so they brought that problem down. you still don't see any vultures when you go there. the other consequence was when they die, they dismember the corpse, and they put it out on a stone table of signs to be stripped by vultures. and so friends of mine who worked in india in the 1960s would say, you know, you could be waiting for a bus, and suddenly a human hand would drop as the vulture sort of dropped it next to you. no vultures, nothing to get rid of the parasites. so it was worked out. i heard this story when i went to talk in south africa at the veterinary college there in pretoria which is a very famous institution because that's where they worked out a lot of the diseases of africa. and the guy who told me it was a pharmacologist who'd been central to helping work it out because what they'd done is they'd taken the drug, and

they'd given it to african vultures who weren't having the problem, and they'd reproduced it, a very simple experiment. and it just shows how all these sort of things come together. the other great toxicity story is the effect of lead in the bald eagles, in the condor, almost wiped out the condor, damaged the bald eagles numbers massively. with water birds lead shot is banned. it -- at least in wet areaings. because, you know, when people go duck hunting or something, they shoot the gun in the air, very little of the lead shot hits the bird. in fact, maybe none of it. and if you did hit the bird with a whole load of lead shot, of course, you wouldn't have any bird left. so something like 70,000 tons of lead are being deposited on american fields every year. and birds pick up stones to grind in their gizzard. they grind food in their gizzard, and they'll pick up stones to help that. and if they pick up lead shot,

it kills them. or if they pick be up lead sinkers as the loons were doing, it will kill them. so lead shot and lead sinkers below a certain size have been banned for a certain time. and the ducked unlimited organization which is the bird hunting organization has actually worked with the ecologists and the birders to make this happen. and it's one of the examples where, actually, a hunting organization or an organization that's there to do something that most birders would not think great -- which is shooting birds -- would actually help to sustain numbers and keep the, keep the population numbers up. other stories i heard about birds, the bird is wonderfully different from us. one thing i didn't know, we haven't as vet students very interested in birds. we all wanted to go out, it was very much about animal production, and we all wanted to go out and grapple with cows and

horses and do dramatic things and be manly and all that sort of thing. and the girls do it now. i think they grapple with cows and horses and all that sort of stuff. there's a lot more girls doing vet science than there were then. but, so we didn't take much interest in birds. but reading into it, you know, a bird -- a goose can fly over mount everest no problem at all, whereas, of course, we can't climb it unless we're exceptionally fit without oxygen and a physiology guy i was talking to about that -- actually was the doctor on the hillary expedition when they first climbed everest and then took an american medical expedition back in the 1980s, said nobody climbs everest whether they're fit or not without some brain damage. so the effect if you're worried about your brain function. and the other thing, actually, for humans to climb everest evidently the most important thing is to naturally

hyperventilate. the people who naturally hyperventilate when they're asleep can climb much higher than people who don't, and it's not something you can train yourself to do. nothing to do with birds, of course. the bird has a different type of lung. the bird lung is a flow-through lung. in our lung the air comes in and mixes internally. so we always have in our lung a mixture of inspired and expired air. the bird, on the other hand, has a tubular lung, and it breathes fresh air in so some air comes straight into the lung, some of it bypasses the lung and goes to the posterior air sacs. then it forces air through the air sac through the lung. so the bird is always breathing fresh air whereas we're breathing a mixture of air. and having that flow-through lung which doesn't have to expand and accurate because the air is just flowing through it, the actual structure of the lung

can be more rigid which means the epithelium across which the oxygen has to go can be much, much thinner. so the bird lung is much more efficient than ours and much more like a dinosaur lung. and, of course, birds are probably the survivor of the dine sour. so i was -- dinosaur. there are lots of bird stories in the bird book. as i traveled around, i kept collecting them. and i was in cambridge, and i said, you know, what are the good bird stories? i was there to talk to a friend of mine who's worked on the immune systems of birds, and there's a story about that in the book. he said, oh, you've got to talk to nicky clayton. i said, who's that? he said, she's really something. she took me to her college, claire college. she's a very elegant lady, a fellow of the royal society, and she's a bird psychologist. she's also a ballerina, and she

writes ballet choreography. she wrote one about charles darwin. and she's also in her somewhat more mature years, she's still a very fine-looking person. also a very keen rumba dancer. [laughter] so she tells me about the experiments she's doing, and they're really neat experiments. a lot of people in the broader community think science is all so complicated and difficult, and you can't understand it. everyone can understand this experiment. what she does is she's interesting in behavior in birds. so, you know, some birds fly these enormous migrations in search of foot food, and they avoid winter, essentially. so, you know, they'll go from south to north. terns, we have the red knots that go up to canada, we have lots of birds that fly these great distances. they're often quite small birds. but the other birds who stay put

in the cold of the northern winter have to hide food. and she studies crows and so forth, particularly western scrubjays. so she told me that a bird can hide 2,000 pieces of food and then in winter it can go back and find them. and i can't find my car keys, so i think that's pretty impressive. [laughter] and the experiment she told me about, and she's got a number like this, was very simple. what she had, she would get a cage and fill it full of these western jays, and then she'd have another cage with just a single bird. and the single bird would be right next door. the single bird would be given a tray of pebbles and a tray of sand, and it would be given some food. now, if the -- and then the birds, the large group of birds either had that bird in sight because they were right next door, or there was a curtain put down between them. so the single bird was aware

that the other birds were there and was aware whether it was being, it could be seen or not. so if the curtain is down, the bird with the food hides the food in the sand silently. if the curtain is not done, the bird with the food -- knowing it's being overlooked -- hides the food in the pebbles. because if you're going retrieve that food, you're going to make a noise. so it's just, i think, a fantastic demonstration of how smart birds really are. and so a lot of things in these books. i think one of the great things that came through to me from the bird book particularly was the theme of citizen science, of people becoming involved in science from a passion. people who have no training in science, people who are, would never think of taking a science course can be passionate about birds and are actually contributing to real science. and i think those of us in

science are very concerned about science communication, trying to get people intrigued in science. but a lot of the time we're trying to tell people all the time. and if we can get people rather to approach it from the bottom -- and this is an expanding movement, i think, the citizen science movement, it's being used by various organizations, and more and more people are using it. because if you've got a cell phone and a camera and you organize into some sorts of study, all things are possible. you can report on environmental changes. people who are interested in particular coastal species or getting groups of volunteers to sort of report bark on numbers do rell -- report back on numbers do studies. we have the july butterfly count and so on. so i think citizen science is something we really want to promote to the future to get more and more people feeling that science is something they understand, and it's something that's really part of their life. the pan dem cantics book -- pandemics book i talk about a

lot of different types of infections, and there's a tutorial on infection and immunity which, hopefully, you'll read. but i told people at the beginning, you know, read at different levels. i've read things on string theory, i have no idea what it's about. so you can read it superficially, seriously. i talk about bioterrorrism. i don't think bioterrorrism with infectious agents is an effective weapon, quite frankly, they're rotten weapons. anthrax is a great weapon but not as pan dem cantic weapon, because the problem is if you develop a bioterror pandemic weapon, how can you be sure it's not going to kill all your people off as well as those people? so unless you want to depopulate the planet, i'm not fairly worried about that. i talk about two major cases of bioterrorrism. we all know about the stories about smallpox being given to the american indians. but the real bioterrorrists have really been the australians.

but it's not directed to humans, it was directed at rabbits. the country was totally overrun with rabbits. we introduced a virus which killed off most of the rabbits, and that was very good, but then they gradually became resistant, and it only kills about 50% of the rabbits. someone brought it back to france thinking they could keep it just on their property, and it got all over europe. and, of course, people in europe like rabbits. we kind of don't like rabbits. [laughter] then, of course, the rabbit numbers climbs, so they got another virus, and they released that, and that killed a lot of rabbits. anytime l new zealand which is next door decided they're not going to bring in the virus to kill off the rabbits. the farmers brought it across and released it. so that's bioterrorrism against rabbits. but those viruses wiped out about 98% of the rabbits at one stage, but the numbers recovered. we're not in danger as a species of being with wiped out by some

infectious pathogens, no matter what it says in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. the other thing i emphasize in the pandemics book is we've got awfully good at the science of this. new technologies and new ways of doing things, we're infinitely better prepared and better able to diagnose and identify a dangerous pathogen now than we were ten years ago. there are all sorts of horrible viruses on there. the ebola virus, another bat virus, there's all the hemorrhagic fever viruses down in south america, the virus which caused the outbreak in yosemite last year. they go from, say, rodents or various other species to us. but they don't spread by respiratory routes, and until that happens -- and viruses rarely change the way they're spread except some of the bird viruses and the influenza viruses in birds with. unless that happens, we're not at that great a risk of them. sars, when we worked it out, we didn't ever make a vaccine, we

didn't ever make a drug, we just practiced good barrier nursing and good control at the stage we knew that the people were highly infectious. we're looking at another virus of the same sort in the middle east at the moment. it's being very, very closely monitored, and we're really on top of where that thing's going. and so we're getting very, we are good scientifically. and science, undoubtedly, protects humanity in this sense. if we hadn't had the science to work out what sars was, we would have had a global pandemic. it would have developed slowly, and we would have had a pandemic. there are different types of pandemics. there's the pandemic-like flu which is acute and very obvious, the aids pandemic which probably started back in the 920s or 1930s probably in belgium, probably by someone who cut his hand when he was -- [inaudible] a chimp, and it's been a very, very, very slow pandemic first detected in 1981 in san francisco and new york, and we

all know how that has progressed. and it goes on. it's a continuing pandemic situation. doesn't affect most of us, but it still kills very large numbers of people each year, including about half a million kids. then we have pandemics which are a bit below the radar. we've had over the last year or so we have had a norovirus pandemic. it's the virus that makes everyone sick on a cruise ship so that everyone throws up, and you have a really rotten holiday. but the thing is -- well, not as bad as the cost of whatever it is that ran into the island. [laughter] but the thing is that it doesn't kill people, it very rarely kills anyone. so even though, of course, it's quite a bit of economic loss, it doesn't kill people. so that's kind of beneath the radar pandemic. and so i think -- oh, i've actually talked too long, i think. you've heard enough of me. i think i should stop, and you should ask some questions and tell me where i'm wrong, because if i revise the book, i need to

straighten it out, so thank you. [applause] so c-span want you to come up to the microphone if you're asking questions. you have to come up to the microphone and speak into the microphone. sure, come up, but come up to the microphone. so people just come up, don't ask for permission, just feel free. and make any -- any question you want. >> well, i must say one of the nice things about science is that you communicate very well. >> thank you. >> and i think that's very important. >> it's not easy to get messages across, yeah. >> i was wondering, you mostly have been talking about how these get identified and spread, but pandemics after a while go away. >> yes. >> i was wondering, what are the mechanisms by which they do? otherwise, indeed, line you started to say at the -- like

you started to say at the end here, we'd be all wiped out. >> well -- >> so what's the general idea, what's going on? >> well, with a pandemic, we think of the rabbit viruses, the rabbit plagues, what happens there is completely up to nature. and what happens is genetically resistant strains of rabbits emerge. we select for genetically-resistant rabbits that can survive. and so that's what would have happened classically in evolutionary, in developmental time. we would have selected species that survive. so, for instance, a virus really devastated the pacific islands in the 18th, 19th century. it would be great, and i don't think we have the material, but it would be great if we knew what the genetic composition was of the islanders before and after the measles. influenza, the virus kind of moderates. so we thought for a number of years that the 918 influenza

virus had just gone away but, actually, it had just become a lot milder, and it just gradually became less damaging and less virulent. but we didn't isolate. i mean, 1918 and '19, we didn't isolate the first influenza virus until 1931 or '32, and that was actually, again, dick shope, the guy that isolated the virus working at the rockefeller labs in princeton. and he isolated a pig virus. he was an iowa farm boy, so, you know, that's obviously into pigs. and then the brits isolated it at mill hill in london in 1953 from londons. and the way they isolated was they were working on this thing trying to isolate influenza, and someone in mill hill -- which is a big medical research institute -- had a lot of ferrets. and they said does anyone want or need ferrets? and this happens, or it used to happen before animal ethics got a lot more strict, you know? we got a few extra ferrets,

would you like them for something? so they said, yeah, we'll take the ferrets, and they dropped some of the stuff from one of their sneezing colleagues, a guy called christopher andrews, down the nose of the ferret, and the forgets sneezed. mcfarland burnett was actually visiting, and he came across this guy rushing down the corridor shouting, the ferrets sneezed! the ferret sneezed. and i always tell graduate students you better hope the ferret sneezes at least once in your life, because that's it. the ferrets not only sneezed, they transmitted the virus back to one of the young researchers. so you made the first transmission. all the guys were all knighted, they all became whatever, sir christopher and sir charles and all the rest of it. but the forgets, i don't think, got much credit. [laughter] and you know, of course, of the caption to ferrets, the gain of function experiments and the big controversy that's caused recently, and we're still going

through that. sure. i've talked too much. nobody's got any questions. [laughter] please ask a question. >> first of all, an observation. i think your next nobel prize might be in storytelling. [laughter] >> it won't be for literature. [laughter] and it's certainly not going to be for poetry. and for poetry, i mean, one of the great tragedies of this year has been the death of seamus -- [inaudible] the poet of spades and root vegetables. we were all brought back to stockholm for the 100th anniversary of the nobel prize in 2001, and shea miss sought to me out because i was the only other guy with an irish name. so i got to know him. he's a wonderful, wonderful man, and he died very suddenly not long ago. >> my question is this: with the

effects of climate change that are so very obvious now, does that change the way that the science prioritizes things? do you see big shifts in the possibility of pandemics occurring in correlation with climate change? >> that's a bit of a wash. we don't really know, of course, because, you know, as i think it's owe -- yogi berra who said prediction is difficult, especially if it's about the future. something like that. [laughter] the future's a ahead of us. so, for instance, we expect insect-borne virus to move further away from the equator. so we think japanese encephalitis is just hovering above australia, it'll probably come down to the north. but there are all sorts of other factors. the the reason we're seeing a lot of these novel infections is

because we're invading more and more into the habitat of wild species. and so we're getting much closer to some of these animals, and the virus is coming out. and, of course, we're destroying so much native habitat. we may discover a lot more left to come out, in a sense. i think, you know, we know how to control mosquito-borne disease, and there are various other scientific programs to get rid of mosquitoes, the other is breeding sterile mosquitoes and letting them fly. there's also something which makes them sterile and will transmit between moss mosquitoe. with other infections, i'm not sure that climate change is going to be the main factor. i mean, population density's a factor, behavior's a factor, but i'm not so sure about climate change. i think the threat from climate change really to human beings is heat and when we get real heat stress in places that don't have

much air-conditioning, so we get a lot of deaths. we're already seeing contamination of the aquifers in low-lying countries like bangladesh with saltwater. and the effects on agricultural production with climate uncertainty, increased droughts in some regions, flooding rains and others. but a lot of this is very hard to sort of predict in a sense, you know? so climate change will affect us as human beings in a big way, but i think not so necessarily by infectious disease. >> i wonder what you feel the role of social media will be in the future in terms of disease control, because my friend and fellow pediatrician stopped kuru in new guinea by simply talking to the 500 chiefs and showing them the deceased -- >> yes. >> what do you think -- >> well, i think, you know, the cell phone has become enormously important in africa, and i'm

sure this organization knows all about that, because you can get into -- everyone's got cell phones, you know? you go to the, you go to the middle east, i was driving north doing a bit of tourism, and here's the bedouin on his camel doing his traditional thing talking into his cell phone. they've been trying to settle the bedouin in more permanent housing, they've all got satellite tv dishes. so, you know, when we think of these cultures, we're not really incorporating that often in our thinking. so a lot of information now gets around very, very quickly by cell phones and go back the other way, of course. so that's enormously powerful. social media is a two-edged sword. with the decline of newspapers which has happened because of the online, we're losing a lot of our investigative reporters, so that's a problem. and there's great stuff on the web, but there's also the nuttiest stuff on earth. if you look up vaccination on

the web, you'll find some of the most insane material you can imagine, and we're all familiar with that. we've wiped out recently, we've eliminated two viruses from the planet. we've eliminated smallpox, and that was finished back in the '80s i think it was now. and frank -- [inaudible] and d.a. henderson and so forth. and more recently we've eliminated the veterinary disease -- [inaudible] both were done by clever vaccination strategies. and thought through very carefully, one through who, one through the food and agricultural organization. so it got rid of these two pathogens, and the next one is another veterinary disease. now, two of these are very closely related to measles virus. the viruses diverged we think about a thousand years back, so that's not very long in the history of humanity, you know? even 10,000 years a lot of

viruses come across into humans because of animal agriculture starting. that's only a thousand-year divergence. we've eliminated one, we could eliminate measles, but people will not vaccinate their children, and we're getting repeated measles outbreaks. we just had one in my home state. it tends to be focal groups of people who are not vaccinating, otherwise you get pretty good vaccine coverage, and this whole issue of vaccination is becoming so difficult. you can see why it's difficult. you're asking a young mother who's never seen measles or polio or mumps or whooping cough to take a perfectly normal child to the doctor where it's going to be injected with something, it'll maybe be grumpy for a couple of days and then, of course, the social media means that if that child develops anything other the next six months, it's blamed on the vaccine. so it's really a very difficult

situation. and it's tragic, because we could eliminate measles. and there are very strong passions in this area, and it's paul offat who wrote a book on autism, very good virallologist who wrote a nice and honest book about this and laid out all the evidence saying there's no correlation between measles, mumps, rubella and autism. a lot of work's been done, tremendous amount of work has been done, and he gets death threats after he publishes this book. so it's a very, very weird situation. now, we've always had this with flour i'd in water -- fluoride in water, now vaccination. so here you've got a liberal, educated community, you know, in some ways are backing down. [laughter] >> how do you feel about flu shots? >> um, i always take as many flu

shots as i can get. [laughter] i get the northern hemisphere one and the southern hemisphere one. the flu vaccine is not our greatest vaccine. and it's, and there's a lot of debate about it at the moment. we're trying very hard to develop much better vaccines and get vaccines we can get out there much more quickly. we had a situation. children should be vaccinated. they must be vaccinated between measles, mumps, rubella, polio and these things, and that's really important. but influenza, even the pediatricians have their concerns. particularly as in europe this last year, we had a flu vaccine which had a lot of a particular type of -- [inaudible] and may have been involved in some neurological things that are not so great. and so even the pediatricians are wondering. i think the -- no, i think we have a pediatrician in the awed quince, but i think many pediatricians now believe we should go to the live,

attenuated vaccine for kids. it's knotts dangerous, and -- it's not dangerous, and it does a reasonably good job in kids and not be injecting them with lots of virus material. we had a situation in australia last year, year before last, i think it was, where flu vaccines are made by kind of standard protocols. until recently, most of them were made in embrey onnated hens eggs. we only do limited testing for a novel flu vaccine. and they used this vaccine made in the completely standard way, but it actually caused a lot of fever in young kids. if you get fever in young kids, you get convulsions, and some of them -- there's at least one child who looks as though he's had some permanent damage. so that vook seen was withdrawn very quickly. but there's a debate about which vaccine should be used, but we do need better flu vaccines, no doubt about it, and it's happening very quickly that we are getting better vaccines. we're getting flu vaccines we

can make a lot, lot quicker, and we really need to be able to make a lot of flu vaccine very quickly in the face of a pandemic. this last one, we had no vaccine out for six months. by that time it had gone all around the planet. so we need to get better with flu vaccine. >> since we're asking about vaccines, how about the shingles vaccine? >> i've been meaning to get it. i should get it, you know? i'm at that shingles age. i don't want to get it, have you had it? >> no. >> i'd get it. >> haven't had the shingles or the vaccine. >> i'd get it. i must go to the drugstore. i think you can -- you can get it at the drugstore? i should get it. >> could you also speak about chicken -- [inaudible] because i was working in india where i think it was a pandemic. >> very interesting. chicken, some of these insect-borne viruses have wonderful names. chicken gugna means he who bends

over. and he bends over because he's in such pain. and it's an african disease that was kind of in africa, and then suddenly for some reason -- it's insect-borne, mosquito-borne, and it's only in humans and the moss cue toes, so it's like dengue or malaria. so it starts to spread. suddenly it's going across the india ocean, it's in malaysia, singapore, just off the australian coast. we have two very similar viruses in australia. they're what's called epidemic polyarthritis with rash, and you can get a very nasty, chronic arthritic condition. people eventually recover, people rarely die from this thing, but they're pretty unpleasant infections. so chicken gagna has gone up into italy, and people are keen to make a vaccine. now, it's an interesting thing about species. like this virus and often, say, plant species will sit in a

botanic garden, exotic specieses will sit in a garden for years, and then suddenly they'll be everywhere, they'll start to spread. this actually happens. and we don't know why chicken gugna has started to spread like this. other insect-borne viruses we're pretty certain that was brought from africa to the americas in the slave ships. then the other virus that spread enormously since the second world war is dengue virus. it was only in about, i think, 14 countries, it's now in most countries. again, it's insect-borne. how did it get round the world? one possibility is infected travelers that then got to their destination bitten by a mosquito. maybe that's how west nile came into the united states. ..

>> so don't know, but we think that might be the case. >> could you speak on the effects of global transportation like airplanes? >> airplanes get influenza

around the world very quickly. they brought gwyneth paltrow back from hong kong to chicago and minneapolis. [laughter] and so it's an interesting question, actually, it's a good question because, you know, in the past we had all these quarantine stations. and we have none of them now. they've all gone. you know, ellis island and so forth. so there's none of that. so what happens if someone on a plane develops a very bad fever and looks horrible and they worry that it's going -- it's transmitted to other people on the plane? well, basically they'll want to confine those people. so where are they going to confine them and how are they going to do it? well, there are planes out there that say use an aircraft hangar, and you could bring in portable showers, portable toilets, heating and all the rest of it and confine people -- there could be no morester lille space -- sterile space than a tarmac. so the chinese and the sars outbreak built very rapidly,

within a week they built separate tented hospitals, and they confined people in those spaces until they knew. so it would be rapid reaction. but it's really important to if you feel very sick on a plane to really let people know because if there is a contagion and people spread and then you would get a lot of secondary spread, then that could be a real problem. so it is an issue, and sars was carried by air. it was, it went -- they had -- there's an element we still don't understand called the superspreader, people who infected a lot of people, and one person took sars to toronto, and one person -- a girl who was up on a shopping trip in hong kong, took it to singapore. and it wasn't recognized initially, so a lot of people who had sars were actually put in, say, critical care facilities or various things. ..

my sun is with rockefeller refunded the creation of the mekong and delta disease surveillance center. as a layperson, the take away d'agata from this is that that disease surveillance network has been instrumental in stepping up early the development of viruses that can jump.

want to ask you to comment on that because i guess there are five or six of them around the world. as i said to come is it correct that these are going to play a very vital world in early kedging of viruses before they develop the mutation to jump? >> i think it is instrumental important. really influence, that china is doing vastly better. there were four who is around the world. very rapid diagnostics. london, millburn, tokyo, atlanta. another is one in beijing as well. china has done one of the well. and they are very, very open about what is happening which is really a great advance.

so it is technological training, bringing people up to speak to my having proper the network. it has been going a long time. and so when cooperation, interaction, not concealing anything, tremendously important with infectious disease. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> you are watching book tv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> the chapter on capitalism i broke because of his story did people in business -- first of all, they're very few people in government that had ever been in business because it is hard. it is easy for an academic c-span2 the business.

they can leave and go back. it's easy for a warrior to go into government and the amount. is very hard for a business person. they are a small business person is their business and they have to be there. to run a larger corporation then they get knocked off the ladder and arab. it is very hard to re-enter. as a result yet people in business to -- i will limit to my confession is good for this all my wife tells me. if you are in government looking at business you understand it intellectually, but it is one-dimensional. you don't have any idea what delay does. you're in government, what government to let test of business. the have any at the western leaders to business. you don't really feel the impact of the regulations. and i send my taxes in every year and always at the letter, to have it may concern.

here are my taxes. i want you to know, i have not the vaguest idea if they're accurate. [laughter] i said, i went to college, you know, average intelligence. my wife went to college. she won't even read them because she knows she is understand. i just warn you to know that that is the case and that the money to an accountant, and he loves me. alterra right. yet the question, just give us a call. but can you imagine this country with a lousy texas to mike that? it is inexcusable. how many people here understand there taxes? i don't see many hands going on. the root the chapter because i felt that i was in business. i know that a businessman has

shareholders, customers and employees. the shareholders, customers demand employees are all across the spectrum in political views, ideas, parties. and therefore business people are very reluctant to challenge the government, to criticize the government. they don't want to devise their stockholders other employees or their shareholders. they also worry about the irs. [laughter] but if you don't understand your taxes you want to worry. i worry. i know that i don't know. and they also interfere in the pharmaceutical business committee of the food and drug administration. they all have the securities and exchange commission and all these alphabet regulatory organizations. to the extent someone criticizes the government or challenges an

approach they're taking, they worry that the government could be turned on. that is in my view why this current iras thing is so critical that no one to philip their government is their government could be turned in the and the way the tories people it doesn't matter if you're a liberal, conservative, republican, democrat. that's why that's essential. what i like to do is have said you're somebody -- where are these people, do you have a microphone? i think they do. there you are. i would be happy to respond to questions, as i say, and even answer some. i will do my best. what you need to do, i suppose, is raise your hand. sandy will bring a microphone.

the zero with hate the first question. pops up with the jacobites scares me to-. boy, those lets a bride. make it a good one. i'm going to embarrass you if you don't. [laughter] >> here is where we will do. >> someone has to turn is my gun . >> mr. secretary, i have to put questions. >> no. eighty-one in july. betty not need multi per questions. it is 715 here, 1015 in washington.

>> the first question -- >> now, you only get one. >> would you read a book for republicans? with of some sort of cut in the bill. hair remember when i was your interview on the letterman show the well went crazy. >> it was in the presidency of lyndon baines johnson.

and everyone just gasped at the thought. >> now does a semi -- >> now we have trillion dollar deficits. >> and it does not but republicans are openness. for how was speaking about my other but at 411 from, the military base, not the prison. and there were 1490 majors from mostly our country, but around the world. it's a big school there. someone asked me of the biggest problem was. and the answer was american

weakness. the signal being sent up to this country is that basically where modeling american economy and air. the debt we are encouraged with the sending out a signal to the world of this country is that going to be what it was in the past. when i went to washington eisenhower was president. i can have the navy and served during kennedy, johnson and the congress. sibila is spending less than 4%. our allies in europe were spending less than 2%. the signal that goes out to the

world is that we have cut for under $93 billion out of the pentagon budget. the signal with that is that the mistakes his staff going to be in a position to intervene to a more peaceful and stable world. >> she can once this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> book tv continues million jones from the 13th annual national book festival on the national mall must in d.c. this is about 45 minutes.