The Best Way To Test For Zika Virus & Beyond: One Single, Very Inexpensive Test That Can Measure EVERYTHING - An Interview With Army Microbiologist & Virus Expert Dr. Charles Wick.

Good morning, afternoon, evening. Depending on where and when you happen to be listening to this. That's actually the crazy thing about podcasts is, you know, I've recorded, gosh, I think I've been podcasting since 2008, maybe 2007, possibly, and all of these podcasts are out there. People might be listening to these a hundred years from now. That's a crazy thought. And, you know, the more podcasts I do, the, the wider the range of diverse topics that I dive into. And today is no exception. Just yesterday they found the Zika virus in Miami beach. The first local mosquitoes with the Zika virus. And there's this whole, I don't know if you would call it a conspiracy theory or what, but there's this whole idea that if you eat crops that are Monsanto glyphosate ridden crops, that it might make you more susceptible to the Zika virus. So perhaps you could just stop, I don't know, eating Wonder Bread and GMO based corn to protect yourself against the Zika virus. Or you could listen to today's podcast. Because today's podcast features a guy who is developing testing protocols that would allow you to just wander into any pharmacy or health center or heck, even like a gym or your own basement and just test yourself for anything. Not just microbes, but viruses, bacteria. And we also talk about colony collapse disorders and bees. And it's a very, very interesting interview. I think you'll get a kick out.

Of it.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

With that sort of ability to track down, you'd be able to say, I've identified microbes that seem to be associated with the following items. And if Alnheimer is one of those items, well, there you go. You have a very interesting path. So then what do you do to control those microbes? It's using differential mobility to basically separate viruses from the rest of the particles in the world. And it's a fancy particle counter and it looks just at the particle size of the viruses.

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Hey, folks, Ben Greenfield here. And today's guest on the show is a guy who could save and be saving more lives than just about any guest I've ever had on the show. This guy worked for the army as a microbiologist, and during that time, he developed a couple of really unique methods of what's called microbes detection. So one of the things he developed is called a universal and physical virus counter. And the other thing that he helped to develop is a computer program that identifies protein fragments and detects them within a sample of anything and then spits out all the microbes in that sample. We're talking about anything from Ebola to influenza to Zika to West Nile virus to AIDS and beyond, including, like, known or unknown or mutated viruses. And if you feel like turning the podcast off now because you don't have Zika virus or Ebola and you don't concern that you have aids, I would caution you not to turn the podcast off because there are some very interesting applications for these technologies that could make your life much, much better in the near future and could go above and beyond simply some of these strange African diseases. Now, my guest name is Dr. Charles Wick. You may have seen him in a New York Times article. That article was called Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. And it was actually about work that Charles did in the bee population to shed light on colony collapse disorder, which if you love things like honey and royal jelly and bee pollen and just bees in general as well as nature, is something that should concern you. This issue with colony collapse disorder and bees disappearing, we're going to talk a little bit more about that today. But the promise of what Charles does goes beyond bees and when it comes to health and fitness, in the right hands, these programs that he's developed and these technologies that he's developed could help scientists and physicians study everything from gut to infection to a whole bunch of other elements of health. I mean, just imagine if you had one very inexpensive test that could see everything, literally everything, and beat the pants off old school methods of disease detection. So we're talking about, like, fast acting, really portable, user friendly, very accurate and efficient systems for detecting the presence of screening, identifying, and characterizing things like viruses and microbes. So Charles is based out of a tech firm in Montana that's working to develop these type of applications for airports and drugstores and homes, along with developing technologies to help save the bees. Charles himself and I will put a very extensive bio, because his bio is very long. I'll put an extensive bio if you want to learn more about him, his website, some of the videos we reference, et cetera. All of that will be over in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wick as in Charles's last name W I C K. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wick but he basically is a retired senior scientist from the US Army Chemical Biological center where he was a manager and a research physical scientist for years. He has a 40 plus year professional career that spans the public sector, military, forensic science. He's got four different collegiate degrees, a ton of publications, international recognition in everything from the United States Army Ballistic Research Laboratory to the Department of Defense to the United States army and beyond. Very decorated and intelligent and well educated gentlemen. We have with us today Dr. Wicked. Thanks for coming on the show, man.

You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm stoked to talk about this stuff because I am at heart a nerd and I love to delve into the nitty gritty science of things that can make our lives better. But first of all, I'm curious. Let's start here because you've studied colony collapse disorder in bees. What got you interested in studying the bees?

It started. I was given a challenging assignment to invent and create a new method for detecting microbes. And we were successful with that. And this is a method that doesn't require growing them or complicated processes. Physically based, particularly the virus detector. And the microbe detector is a little more complicated, but it ends up with a. Basically it ends up with a software file that you can then analyze.

Okay, so we, and if I could interrupt you real briefly just to highlight the importance of being able to detect microbes. I mean microbes are technically like bacteria, fungi, archae, protists. Like we're pretty much surrounded by these things 24, seven microbes. So we're not just talking about viruses. Am I correct?

You're right. Part of the challenge is what do you do when you have a virus or bacteria or fungi and they're all large groups of critters, if you will. So from our point of view, one test to test all of that was the goal and we achieved it.

And was that the army that tasked you with that, The Department of Defense or the United States army that tasked you with figuring out a way to identify microbes?

Yes, it was the army. And you can imagine the Army's worry about that because remember, there's like a trillion microbes. Oh yeah.

I mean, absolutely. I mean there's, there's there's microbes. Sorry to interrupt, but you know, have you, have you read Hugh Howey's book Silo?

Oh, yes.

Okay.

Some of those are really good.

Yeah. And it's basically about how invisible variables wipe out the freaking planet. So, you know, and I know that, you know, biological warfare is certainly a concern here as well. Right.

Well, you could have things that are made on purpose and you can have things that are accidental and you can have naturally evolving bugs. But the point is, with a trillion or more microorganisms, only a small fraction are identified. So what do you do with the rest of them? And which ones are good and which ones are bad and how do we live among them? That's a good question. So the Army's question was basically, okay, we need some sort of universal detector. We need something that we can put in a truck and drive around and, and detect samples and do things that, you know, other people don't want to, don't. Don't have to do.

And prior to that point, how would the army have detected microbes or a lot of these, these little invariably invisible variables that you were testing for?

Well, I love the comment historical methods. We, we have made a lot of progress and the last 30, 40 years and we used to grow them and now we have a little bit better with some of these gene, gene based methods and other, other, other wet methods, if you will. They require processing. And my great comment is, are you still growing these things in the laboratory? So the point is, we got past all that. I haven't grown a microbe in a lab for a very long time. It's unnecessary.

What do you mean? Why would you grow a microbe in a lab in the first place?

Well, one of the issues, One of the issues, you grow up an organism and I learned how to do all this. You grow them on different augers. You grow them for different reasons. Organisms grow up, particularly bacteria. You get different colors, you get different margins around the colonies. You have things that tell you what they are. Staphylococcus. Is it a Streptococcus? Big names. But the point is you can put them in their phylogenic grouping simply because how they grow on how you look them up. Now the problem is when they're very similar looking and you have large families, for example, you talk a lot of things you commented on in other places is E. Coli. There's lots of kinds of E. Coli. Some are good, some are bad. Something we've seen over the years is serum resistant E. Coli, which is not a good thing. And so how do you classify all those? Well, this gets to be a lot bigger problem when you have hundreds of microbes or thousands of microbes that are very similar but not the same. And then the point is, how do you separate them? So my comment is software replaces glassware. And I ask people the question, you still growing microbes in the lab? Okay. You don't have to do that. So the answer, particularly the looking for peptides, you can identify microbes using software for a clear, unambiguous identification of bacteria.

Okay.

Okay. So you asked the question, how did I get into the bees? And we had. We were ready to try this technology out. And just about that time, someone came to me and they said, well, you know, there's a bee problem, and we think it might be microbe related. Can you help us out? Well, I'd never looked at bees before, so issue? Sure, send me some samples. And I remember very well when I got a little baggie of bees and crawling around in the bag on my desk.

They sent you a baggie of bees?

They sent me a bag of bees. So they're crawling around on my desk there. And I laughed a little bit because I'm a bit of allergic to bee stings. And that's another story. But there it is in a bag and I've got to see if they got any microbes on them. Right. So we looked at that, we took these bees and we basically smashed them up. And there's a bit of a story there. How do you smash up a bee? Well, particularly if you're trying to smash up maybe 20 bees. So we took an old coffee grinder, the type with a. And we put them in there and we ground them up. And that was not very successful. Particularly all the little eggs were sticking out around the edge. And so we just, we went to a stainless steel blender and we made what we call a boost, a bee smoothie.

That's actually, I was going to joke that you used a blender, but you actually did use a blender.

We did use a blender.

So you take these bees that you're supposed to be detecting microbes in to see if microbes could be causing colony collapse disorder. The first thing you do is you blend them. And then what?

Well, let me. I'm going to expand on that a little bit. We can take anything and put it in a blender and then you take it and you filter out the big pieces with cheesecloth and. Not very complicated.

No, it sounds like how my wife makes almond cheese and almond milk is With a blender and a cheesecloth strainer.

That's great. Well, no, but that's right. I mean. Okay, so then what do you do? On my website, it's actually a page and it has the procedure for actually doing that.

What, for blending up bees?

Not for blending, for actually running them through the process. Okay, running through the process to prepare them for. I got two things I'm thinking here. So hold on for a second, I'm going to run this one down. Let me talk briefly about the two methods. The physical virus detection is called the IVAD technology, and the new, improved version that's coming out probably this year is going to be called the Rapid X. And it's. What it is is a physical way. It's using differential mobility to basically separate the viruses from the rest of the particles in the world. And it's a fancy particle counter. And it looks just at the particle size of the viruses from about 15nm up to 800nm, which includes all. Includes all the families of viruses, everything. So if you run a sample through that and it has a virus particle in it, it'll come out, you'll see it. If it has. You know, there's some questions there about how many viruses do you need? Well, we looked at. I was able to get Bacteriophage to resolve out of seawater, which is pretty low volume. You know, took a couple gallons, but I found bacteriophages, seawater. Okay. The other process is, once you've discovered a new virus or a virus of interest or something you want to identify, what do you do? Well, the process there is. We go back to what I'm going to call msp, which is mass spectroscopy. Proteomics. Now, you could laugh at the acronym. There's some changes you could make there. Yeah, it's a mouthful, but MSP worked fine. So what we're talking about here, once you've identified a sample and you've run it through the cheesecloth, then you can take the sample and add basically a milliliter, and you take it and you can centrifuge it. You can take that supernatant and you run it through another filter, centrifuge it again to remove the liquid, and you retain basically the proteins using this method. And then what you do is you dissolve the proteins and then you take that other part, you vortex it, and you basically end up with 30 microliters of material and you dissolve the proteins in using trypsin, which takes a few minutes. And the trypsin cleaves it at a particular place every time. And then that protein digestion, you can take it, you can do it over a period of time, and you do it fast. If you have really good trips, and it takes a little longer if you don't have really good trips. It's an enzyme. And then the answer, you take that material and you basically introduce it into a high pressure liquid chromatograph column. And that's getting to be the part of automatic. And that you now, you now have a solution that's now put into the mass specific.

Okay.

And what the mass spec then does, all it's doing is just an instrument. It actually identifies the peptides that's in the sample. So then that's it, that's the process, and that turns into a file.

Okay, so if I could back this up for just a second, what you're saying is a microbe, whether we're talking about a virus or whatever, influenza, Ebola, anything. I even know there's some things now we could talk about later on that are implicated in Alzheimer's, for example. You can take anything and you can identify the specific peptides, the specific protein fragments that make that up. But rather than say, getting a bunch of microbes in glassware in a lab and identifying them using some old school method that makes it difficult to differentiate quickly and effectively between microbes, you're instead using software combined with this, this mass spectrometer to identify microbes extremely accurately and quickly.

Absolutely. Now, interesting part about that, and this is a change from our whole paradigm of detecting microbes. Any mass spectroscopy anywhere in the world that can resolve peptides can be brought into play immediately. You can send by the Internet the file to run on the software, and you can maintain the software at a central place. You can have it in multiple places. You can actually have it where you want it.

So, so what you've designed is the software to go with the hardware that you can find like at universities, labs all over the place, this spectrometers, right?

Or, or say you had a problem in another country, you could take a sample, grind it up and run it through the cheesecloth and follow the simple process there. It doesn't take very long. Go into a university or some facility, use their mass spec, get a file, send the electronic file to your lab, and then your lab would basically run it in about two or three minutes, Give you an answer back, wow. It'll tell you all the microbes in the sample and put them in their correct phylogenic relationship. And then from that point of view, you know exactly what you got.

That's amazing. I want to ask you in a little bit about how we can use this to detect specific things in humans, because I know viruses are related to, from not just your insides blowing up with something like Ebola, but even things like Alzheimer's and influenza and chronic fatigue and stuff like that.

I'm excited to talk about that because there's some really good ideas.

Yeah. But first, before we get to that, what'd you find out with the bees? After you put these bees through a blender and you did your microbe analysis on them, what did you discover?

Right. So the question we have now is, what do we do about the bees? And I had to give that a little bit of background on what we were doing because it was quite involved. It took 10 years to invent it until we had an actually working, capable application. Right. So after that, we were ready to take this and test it somewhere. Okay. There's two things we did to kind of get it ready to test. And I'm going to tell you a little story, and then I'm going to answer your B question. We were asked to look at some potato samples because they were worried about salmonella in the potatoes. And we were able to detect the salmonella, but we were also able to detect the thermophils that were in the water, that was in the hot water tank were that they used to boil the potatoes in. So from that point of view, we knew we were accurate and we were very sensitive. And then. And then I got this request. I had these little bees sitting on my desk, right. So we. We ground these. We ground these bees up, made a little bee slurpee there. And we ran it through that process, we run through the mass spec, and then what we found, we found a relationship between a microsporidium and a virus. And the virus was an iridescent virus, which is not very well, what'd you call it? It's an iridescent virus.

Okay.

Now, the iridescent virus is not very well characterized. There's a family, and they put a lot of things in there. But the issue was we were able to identify clearly along with an association with this nosema, and there's a couple varieties of nosematistically, they came out in the samples where the bees were collapsing from those hives where they were falling down. Now, the interesting part about that is, statistically it was there very high level of confidence. The other viruses we found were not in that same relationship. So the result was. Okay, well, that's really interesting. So this was a head start for people working on colony collapse disorder to basically, here's where to look. And it's taken a long time.

So you did find that it was a microbe that was responsible for some of this Colony collapse disorder.

Two microbes in association with each other.

Why, why would bees suddenly be dying from some kind of a microbe? Like what was it? The, was it similar to like antibiotic resistance where we're slowly creating new resistant types of bacteria? Is it some kind of an environmental fluke related to, you know, whatever global warming or some type of environmental fluctuation or what would cause this?

Yeah, these are excellent questions because. Okay, now that we've identified these two, by the way, if you keep your bees dry and keep them well fed, both these organisms don't do well in dry, warm conditions. They're both like it wet and kind of cool. Okay, so from our point of view, why these two organisms? Could they be opportunistic organisms?

Possibly.

I don't think we fully understand the life cycle of the honeybee in the aspect of environmental impacts, nutrition, all the things that you talk about about people. We don't particularly understand all that about the insects either. They could have been weakened. And these two organisms, which are fairly common, I believe they don't show up a lot because you don't see them often because they're not responsible for infection very often. The. So you may be slight exception. It's big and you can see it all the time.

That's actually, it's interesting that you talk about how perhaps these microbes are something that the bees are increasingly susceptible to due to weakness. Because the other argument, or at least the argument that I hear quite often when it comes to Colony Collapse disorder is, is that it is related to things like cell phone use and radio towers and some kind of changes in the earth's electromagnetic field due to industrialization and you know, these type of things that it makes me wonder if those are variables that aren't necessarily killing bees, but are making bees more susceptible to these microbes that you've discovered. Have you given that much thought or do you know much about these alternative explanations for colony collapse disorder?

Well, I have and I've had a lot of discussion with a lot of people, a lot of beekeepers, a lot of other people that are having trouble finding the iridescent virus, for example, because the current historic methods are not very set up to look for co infections and particularly by two not very familiar microbes. That's a very interesting question. So when the bees are out working, there's a couple things here. Bees are happy, they're in their colony there, they're getting ready to go, they pack them up, they transport them across the country, they set them out on places and they put them to work. There's a lot of stressors there. The transportation, the change in what they're being fed, the places they're set up are sometimes not very well coordinated with other activities in the area. So there's a lot of things going on. But. So from that point of view, these two organisms may have popped up and basically got them when they were weakened by something else that at this point I think is unknown.

Okay, gotcha. Were bees dying like this before the. Again, playing devil's advocate here. Like before the advent of cell phones and electromagnetic pollution, stuff like that. Was this an issue? Or were bees originally being transported and moved around and stressed in the ways that you've just described? But it wasn't until after we saw cell phones and stuff like that.

I don't see any correlation with cell phones and radio frequencies and things like that, so.

Well, I wouldn't have guessed that because you didn't whip out your cell phone to kill the bees that got shipped to you. You instead used a blender.

The blender was kind of physical there. But I have some new information for you which is really exciting. We have discovered using the iPads method just recently, in the last couple weeks, a new unreported particle size in the virus category that is related to an outbreak right now that's going on in Wisconsin where the bees are flying away and the big ones are leaving. The young ones are trying to fill in the gap. Classic colony collapse disorder. And we've identified a brand new particle in the virus range that may be related to that only found in those bees, which is quite exciting. So we, we don't know what it is at the moment, and we're in the process of, of writing that down and maybe identifying that. So first time for, for your, for your listeners, we may have found something new. So.

So this, this is a new microbe that's never before been observed in bee populations, right?

As far as we know right now, yes. Huh.

But bees are already dying, so wouldn't these other two microbes that you found already have been established as reasons for colony collapse disorder?

Right. We may have found a third vector, a third thing.

Okay, all right, gotcha. By the way, Charles, why is it a big deal if bees die off? I mean, why should people care about.

Let me Answer that. But let me follow through on your original question. We've looked at 10,000 samples and not seen this one particle before, so that's exciting. Okay. Now, why is it important? A big deal. The bees pollinate everything. We eat a lot of things. We. Well, everything's a big number, but a lot of things. We eat all the fruits, the vegetables, our crops. As pollinators, we need the pollinators. Without the pollinators, we're. We're probably in big trouble. So it's important to find out what's going on and provide a solution.

So we're talking about the actual health of plants in general. Like the plant kingdom in general is intimately tied to whether or not bees are there taking on the task of pollination.

Right. Well, probably more important is our food supply. Without the bees, our food supply would take a big. A big.

Right. Specifically, our agricultural food supply.

Right. So, okay, the plants would probably find a way, but we probably wouldn't find a way to replace the food.

So we're not. We're not just talking about, like, a disappearance of honey in grocery stores. We're talking about an actual subpar existence of plant matter on Earth. Bees die out. So. So in terms of this microbe detection, I mean, like, when you find microbes like this, Charles, are you. Are you pretty much just the guy that's tasked with identifying and testing for microbes, or do you know if you know, let's say you find this third microbe that you just found that could be responsible for colony collapse disorder. Like, what do you do with that? I mean, how do you figure out how to actually kill that microbe or how to make bees less susceptible to that microbe? Like, what action can you take?

Well, the first action there is to find out what it is, and then. Then the second action is, what do you do about it? Some of these things are really easy, like the nosema and the iridescence. Keep it warm, keep it dry. That's pretty easy. Directions. Right. From a point of view of that's.

How you kill the microbe. You keep it warm, you keep it dry.

Both nosema and the iridescent, like, cold, cool places, wet, cool places. So if you keep it warm, you keep it dry, and you feed them. The answer is the bees are happy and they appear not to get an infection, so that leads.

Interesting. So you keep the area that bees actually live in dry and somewhat warm, and they're not susceptible to colony collapse disorder.

They appear not to collapse. That's correct.

Are beekeepers doing this now? Do people know this?

Well, some are doing it and they're doing okay. Some are not, and they're not doing okay.

Interesting.

Okay, I think that's really funny. I mean, you know, all they got to do is so complicated, you know.

Yeah, it seems like a very simple, simple solution in terms of how one would save the bees. And I know, like, again, back to the folks listening in. You know, let's say that you don't care about bees, or perhaps you. You don't care about plants, but you are interested in how this technology could be used in your own. Charles, can you talk a little bit about this? Because obviously, I don't think it's very difficult for people to wrap their heads around how this technology could be used to identify microbes that would cause infections in humans. But my first question for you is, is this being used currently in health technology or in humans or in hospitals.

Or anything like that, what it's being used for? Right now, there's a company that is using. Actually there's two companies. One company is looking at insects, and they're looking at. They monitor the virus load over a period of time. And they reported a. From that point of view, the beekeepers are able to make managerial decisions on what to do with their bees based on their virus load, if you will. There's another company that is using the software to identify and monitor microbes in food, and it's being used quite widely.

Okay.

If you think about that, I mean, back to potatoes question that was very interesting that we did that, and we were able to do it really easily. A question that you were interested in was, what's another application? We got a sample from a dentist, just a saliva sample, a mouth sample, and we were able to detect the bacteria in cavities and other things in the mouth. And he had done an examination and had not seen anything. So he was really surprised. And going. And looking closer, he found out there were two caries that he was able to then go do something with. So we were able to predict that basically on the microbe identification. An unfamiliar microbe, by the way, unfamiliar microbes can be sorted out easily.

Now, how are you doing this, though? Because obviously there's millions, probably billions of microbes. When you get something like saliva or you get blood, it's just this huge boatload of microbes. How do you even know what you're looking for or.

Or environmental? We found over 800 organisms on the honey base. And from that point of view. I'm going to answer your question. Let me explain a little bit. 800 different organisms on honeybees. We had a hive that was in a, it was a observation hive in a building. And there were other places in the building where they were using microbes. For various reasons, we were able to off the honeybees, detect every microbe in that building because the bees got it from the stacks. Wherever they went, the bees were able to find those microbes. Okay, so if you have a. Remember I mentioned the peptides, what the software is looking for are unique peptides for an organism. Okay. That. It turns out that organisms have many unique peptides. I'm going to step through the process a little bit because it takes a moment to explain. We have grown a lot in the last several years sequencing everything, microbes, people's genomes, we sequence it. We have a national repository for things that are sequenced. So all the gene based methods are based on the knowledge of what's available in the sequence. So if you have a traditional method like pcr, you're going to take little pieces of that information and if you can get it to match up, then you have an identification. What I've done here is we've taken that one step further. Instead of looking for three pieces or a couple little pieces, an organism might have 80,000 different unique peptides. And we only need like five of those unique peptides for a statistically relevant identification. So. But often we get a lot more than that. Okay, but the point is, it's a lot easier to find four or five peptides than it is to match up three particular primers on a pcr. So step one step further. So we have the ability to download those sequences from a microbe sequence. You can calculate all the proteins that microbe can make ever. This is all that's available from the genetic makeup of that microbe. These are the proteins they can make. And if you know the proteins, you can calculate all the peptides that those proteins are made of. All of them. So by calculation, we have all of the peptides of organism A, all the peptides of organism B, compare them and you'll find differences.

Got it.

And if you compare all the microbes that we have sequenced, which are thousands, you can have, you sort that matrix and you'll find unique peptides popping up for all the microbes.

But the software is doing all this.

The software does that? Yeah, it's great. It used to take months to do that by computer. The advent of the new computers and the new mass specs, we were able to shorten that time down to minutes.

Yeah. That's great. It kind of. Kind of sounds similar to when I was doing a biomechanics practicum and we had to manually digitize each different movement. In this case, we were studying the bench press. And for every single frame, hundreds of frames in one single bench press for one subject, for one rep, in just one part of the study, you would have to sit there in front of the computer with your mouse clicking away and digitizing each point on the shoulder, the elbow, and the wrist, and then repeat for the next frame. And I remember finishing that entire internship, coming home, and then someone showed me a piece of software that could do it. I spent the entire summer. We plugged in a new computer in minutes.

We plugged in a new computer. What we were doing in weeks, we did in minutes. You asked me a really good question. How does this apply to the body? And what are we doing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what I want to ask now.

From a point of view, and I've read a lot of your things on your talks and what you've written on gut bacteria. Well, you know, it's complex to do all the organisms in a stool sample, right? But how easy is it to grind it up in a blender and run it through and get an identification of all the microbes in that stool sample? That's easy. So suddenly we turn something that's messy and complicated into something that's a file that can be analyzed.

So you could take all of the microbes in my stool sample with a very, very small amount of stool and identify any microbe nearly instantly and extremely inexpensively.

Right? Exactly right. In one sample. So you can actually collect data over time and say, this is my microflora in the gut over time. And I was feeling good this day. I wasn't feeling so good that day. I traveled from Los Angeles to Singapore, and it changed. And this is what happened.

But I still have to send each of those samples off somewhere to, like, a lab, right?

Well, you have to send it to. You have to get it to a mass spec so they can run it through the sample.

How realistic is it that we would be able to have mass specs in our homes, for example?

They're getting smaller and they're getting more reasonable.

Because I think that would be cool to just be able to take any sample, a saliva sample, a stool sample, blood sample, et cetera, and be able to test yourself for influenza, bacterial balance, anything like that, at the drop of a hat.

I totally agree with that. We have. The software is already made. Doesn't Matter the size of the mass spec. All you have to do is be able to resolve the peptides. Okay. So if you designed a mass specifically designed just to give you the peptides, the point is, you could make that fairly unique and small, and then I can see it being portable in the future.

Interesting.

Okay, so let me follow the other piece.

Yeah.

Because we're looking at the peptides. We see all the peptides in the sample.

Okay.

We go and look for the unique peptides for microbes, and we basically are. The software will sort out the other peptides. And right now we're not particularly using them, but if you think of all the proteins in the body, we can calculate all the peptides that are in the body, we can figure out where they are, and we can figure out that list and sort out whether that's meaningful information on your health or not. I think that would be really easy to do.

Now, what about specific microbes that are responsible for some of these things that we see causing chronic infections in people? Right. Chronic fatigue syndrome has been blamed on infectious diseases in the past. There's even talk now. I don't know. Are you very familiar with the idea that all Alzheimer's can be an infectious disease?

I've heard that.

Okay. Yeah.

I haven't seen really good evidence yet.

Yeah. The idea is that there is a pathogen and that Alzheimer's is partially caused by imbalances in the sinus microbiome and that there's different types of Alzheimer's. Right. There's one that's glycotoxic, where you have a bunch of different fluctuations in blood sugar, and that can eventually cause insulin resistance and advanced glycation end products in the brain.

And then you'll.

Oh, go ahead.

All of those cycles are huge cycles. There's a big chemistry cycle going on for basically everything. The body's made up of huge cycles. So you could have an imbalance here that's causing an imbalance in the cycle.

But you'll also see things like chronic viral infections as being something that could potentially be related to, like a toxin exposure or an infection that can cause similar types of neuronal inflammation that could potentially be related to Alzheimer's. And the potential, I guess, for some kind of like an antimicrobial treatment for dementia or for Alzheimer's versus just like controlling blood sugar or something like that. Can you walk me through if something is microbial related? How. Like, what would be the steps via which someone might test and address something using this software and microbial detection system that you've developed for something like that.

Well, the first thing people have asked me that question before, this is not a simple answer, but I'll try and summarize it here. When you're looking at something like that, that may be a result of a, of something that you're not measuring, if you will. Right. You have to look at the whole system. I don't know if I'm saying that quite right, but remember what I said on microbes. I can literally grind up a rat and tell you everything that's in it. Right. It's a pleasant thought, I know, but that was a. I gave that at a talk once and everyone understood that right away. Well, but you could tell every microbe that's in that, in that sample. So from a point of view, if you have something that you suspect, you need to take a look at the sample and you need to see if there's any microbes in it. And if there are microbes in it, you need to identify which ones they are. And remember there's trillions of microbes. That's a daunting go about. But I'll refer you back to a paper I did on, it's in Nature Proceedings where we looked at the influenza outbreak that we had in 2008. We found 65 different strains of that influenza. And we could look and see where people were moving around because someone was strain A moved over to a different city and he was picked up over there and gave it to other people. So with that sort of ability to track down, you'd be able to say I've identified microbes that seem to be associated with the following items. And if Alheimer is one of those items, well, there you go, you have a very interesting path. So then what do you do to control those microbes? But going back to the bees, we found two microbes. They were always associated. So maybe it was an indirect measure of some environmental stressor that was actually causing the bees to collapse. Likewise, in the body system, which is complex, but you can break it down into its systems, we may be able to use the microbes as an indicator of a symptom or a condition that's going on. I mean, why do some systems tend to stop working? Well, you know, you can go into a lot of discussion about that, but sometimes you can go back to I want to use the environment. Nutrition is a good one, Toxins is another one. You know, what do you, what's the system doing? And from a point of view of you kept, have you kept it in shape?

Right.

And I don't, I don't know that everybody attends to those things very well. So if you could identify the microbes or the peptides associated with something, well then you can backtrack that and make the proteins and you begin to sort out what the. From a forensic diagnostic sort of capability that. I don't think we have that right now.

I don't understand how this actually works fully. But in terms of pharmaceutical or natural, such as say essential oil or plant based medicine treatments for something like a specific microbe, how difficult is it to say, okay, this disease or this condition or this b collapse is associated with microbe X and this is the molecule or this is the compound that can actually kill or deactivate or destroy microbe X. So we can therefore develop a patented or targeted delivery mechanism to fix a microbe that appears to be associated with a certain condition.

Are you familiar with the essential oils used to treat bees? No. Okay. They've actually tried that and there's a study that's been done that showed the effect of essential oils on bee health. Really? Those that were treated with essential oils tend to have low microbe populations.

Yeah, well, I mean that makes like I travel with, for example, like one blend of essential oils called thieves essential oil. And I'll do everything from like put that on any type of open wound when I'm getting on an airplane or I'll put a few dabs in my mouth. That or another one I use quite frequently is oil of oregano. And it seems to help quite a bit, knock on wood with keeping me from getting sick when I travel. And so what they've found is that when you give these type of microbe killing essential oils to bees, you see a disruption in that microbial occurrence. But do you also see less bees dying? Do you see less?

Yes. And you don't tend to have collapse. So. But is it 100 due to the essential oils or the essential oils just making it tolerable? I don't know the answer to that. But, but the answer is when you do use essential oils, it's successful.

So can you, can you take a microbe and test it and say, okay, these are the compounds that, that this microbe would be sensitive to?

I'm not sure those tests have been done. Not, not in the sense that you're, you're asking. But the essential oils don't tend to, as, as I've seen them around some of the microbes, they don't tend to be toxic to the microbe. It's more improving the health of the bee. So the bee system can actually tolerate the microbes.

Okay, got us. You're basically making. Making the bee a little bit more resilient.

Yeah. Making it be healthy.

Now, in terms of other applications of. So you've basically got two technologies. You've got this mass spectrometry and you've got this integrated virus detection. And when you put both together, you're basically able to identify anything that has a microbe in it extremely quickly when it comes to disease detection or anything else. Tell me about ways that. Because you know your product, so to speak, pretty intimately, what are some other ways that you are most excited about in terms of applications of this technology that I haven't touched on?

Well, something that would be. Well, Ben, you're so excited. You do a lot of cool things. And how do I. The same enthusiasm. It would be really terrific if this could be made portable to a point where anyone could use it, because it's suddenly not complicated for people to run their own samples. And you get a computer printout or just on the screen. Shoot. It could be on your smartphone and it would tell you what you have today. It would separate the difference between influenza, infectious diseases, common microbes. You could color code them to basically be. It's possible with a blood sample to even tell you what you're immunized against. And when was your last immunization, almost because of the level of information you can get. Easy. So you could have a printout. I say print out. I'm an old guy, remember? You could have a thing on your cell phone that would tell you print.

Out from now on. By the way, the thing on the.

Cell phone from your. Yeah, that's right. Your personal little thing you carry around from a point of view. You could get a printout, a list that would tell you, these are the organisms that I have going on today. And it would priorit number and it would tell you how you know relative number you have. And it would tell you which ones are dangerous, which ones are not dangerous, which ones are benign. You could color code them to ones that are important to have and ones that are not important to have. You could compare them over the list of the last week or year. And you say, I'm missing these. These are new and that sort of thing. You could correlate those to your health readouts and statistically analyze that. All that on your smartphone. Wouldn't that be neat?

How close are we? I don't really know too much about mass spec technology in terms of the size of current mass Specs versus how small we can make them. Obviously computers used to fill an entire room and now we can fit them into a teeny tiny element smaller than a smartphone. But how close are we to teeny tiny little mass specs that could be incorporated into say, a cell phone?

Absolutely excellent question. The mythology of mass specs. Chemists love to think that they have a monopoly on mass specs. Right? I've just got to get my thing in there on chemist. Mass specs are on the Curiosity rover that's on Mars. DARPA agency there in Washington had them so that they were almost as size. They fit in the palm of your hand and all you have to do is make them long enough so that they would resolve your peptides. And remember what I said about making these focus on peptides. You could make it a save a lot of room on other places. The hardware is not very big, the electronics is not very big, and that's it. So you would basically take a sample. You got to run it through the little procedure there to liberate the peptides. But once you've that doesn't take very long. It's not a very big thing. I had one of those that was basically the size of a quarter and the whole thing fit in my hand. So the issue is, and the mass spec could be the same size if we put a little effort on it. And you would literally have something right now, I think within reach. Now if we wanted to build it be the size of a big lunch.

Pail, that would be a pretty cool project. I mean, if you're listening in and you're in the technology sector, feel free to pipe in in the comments section over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and my comment to them, go make it. Yeah, I mean that's what I'm thinking. I know that I would personally be very interested in being able to keep a running tab on my personal microbe balance 24, 7 or at least be able to check in every day.

Well, that would get you asked where I was thinking this would be incredibly useful. You'd have lots of people looking and we could network this stuff. We could put it up on the Internet. People would be talking, saying, I saw this, I saw that, I have this. And then suddenly you would have a lot more information to tell us what's going on in our microbial world. For example, the Zika virus, where is it at? How common is it? Are you going to walk down the street and find it? I don't think it's that common. And I don't. We're not. People are having a hard time tracking it down.

Absolutely. And one could theoretically detect a food. Right. I can take a food similar to you took the bees. I could blend that up and put it onto such a device in the same way that I would test, for example, my saliva to assess the microbial content of food.

Right. Food would be food compared to the environmental samples, like the insects outside. Food's really easy.

Interesting.

And people systems are really easy. I mean, saliva, all the, all the fluids that people have. And I'm very excited, very interested on the discussion on the gut microflora, because I think we mess with that a lot. I don't think it's in necessarily a positive way.

Yeah. And I mean, even the human gut project, which I took part in and sent my. My saliva and cheek swab and stool samples off to, it was weeks and weeks and weeks before I got a result. And I also know that that type of technology is not applicable yet to the masses or instantly accessible on one's phone, for example.

But the point is, that whole test, if you were getting samples back the next day, it would tell you you could monitor things and change the variables and adjust it and see what the results are.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So you're talking about. You're talking about weeks. You're talking about, you know, days for a couple. Oh, boy, that's a hot topic. You're talking about minutes to maybe an hour or so or maybe overnight.

Yeah.

For samples that are taking, you know, up to 10 days or two weeks or longer to do.

Yeah.

And. And we're talking about, we can see not too far away where people could do this themselves. And then you change everything.

Absolutely. I love it. And you've got books on this too, for people who really want to geek out, so to speak. One book that Charles has is called Integrated Virus Detection. Another is called Identifying Microbes by Mass Spectrometry Proteomics. I will put a link to those in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com WIC along with Charles research page, this New York Times article about how scientists and soldiers solve the bee mystery. A couple of YouTube videos in which Charles answers questions about everything from how this could be used to stop terrorists using Ebola to more questions about the universal microbe detection system and how we really can detect every microbe in a single sample using this technology. Whenever I put out a podcast like this, it's because I see the application and the potential help that this could give to the world. And the assistance it could give all of us in terms of making our bodies and our brains and our lives better through the process of self quantification. And so if you want to jump in and add your own thoughts or you have ideas about how we could, for example, get mass spec incorporated into a cell phone app that could then be paired with Charles's software to allow for instant microbe detection, anything like that, go to the comments section@bengreenfieldfitness.com wikk Leave a comment and let's get a discussion going about this stuff, because this is the type of technology that can change the world. So, Charles, thanks for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us, man.

Well, I appreciate it. I can get very passionate. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Awesome. All right, folks. Well, until next time, this is Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Charles Wick signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam. Sa.