HS 405 FBF - The 6th Extinction with Author James Rollins

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario. You'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome James Rollins to the show. He is a veterinarian turned bestselling action adventure thriller, author of the six Sigma four series, and author of the new book, the Sixth Extinction. James, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing very well, thank you.

Well, good, good. Tell us a little bit about the book, if you would, and let's learn more.

Sure. Well, this is the 10th book in my Sigma 4 series. Not that you have to read them in any order. I don't think very many people have read my books in the order I wrote them in, but just hop in when you can and then fill in the blanks from there. But in this novel, it starts out with a frantic distress signal sent from a remote military research station on the shores of Mono Lake in Northern California. It ends with this chilling words, Kill us, Kill us all. The Marines rush in. They find that the scientists at this lab are all dead. And not just the scientists, but every living thing for 50 square miles is annihilated. Animals, plants, bacteria is sterilized and the blight is spreading. And to stop it, Sigma must face its greatest challenge to date, which is the coming extinction of mankind.

So how does this.

Well, the consensus among scientists today is that we're at the brink of the next great mass extinction event. Once a rival the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs, which was extinction event number five, but there are four more even prior to that. At this point, we're losing species at the rate of about one. I mean, sorry, three every hour, totaling out to about 30,000 species a year. And you know, again, as a thriller writer, I always got my antenna up for that next big idea. I'm always looking for that scientific concept that maybe has some bearing on today and then seeing where that science leads us to, what's over that horizon, and so that becomes the breadth of this novel, is that something goes awry in one of these labs that are seeking a way to stop this mass extinction event.

Okay, so they're trying to stop the extinction, but the unintended consequences, they actually cause it.

Yeah, so basically, the last five extinctions were caused by natural causes. Massive volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes. Only in this time, we are the asteroid. We are the ones causing this damage through pollution, urbanization, the global spread of invasive species. It's humankind that's causing the extinction rate to kick it to about 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction. And since we sort of caused this mess, maybe it's our problem to get out of it. Scientific America, just when I was writing this novel, it was one of the things that was hard to keep abreast of it. The information is coming in so quick and so fast, I actually had to keep changing parts of my story to match the science that was occurring. And Scientific American just two weeks ago had an article published stating that they believe we have one or two generations to turn this tide, this loss of species down before we go over this proverbial cliff.

Yeah, yeah, no question about it. Well, I mean, it's kind of, you know, forgive me, but generic to say that, you know, we caused the extinction. I mean, you know, certainly there are lots of issues and problems like that. I agree. But, you know, in the. I mean, as they're trying to stop the extinction, how do they cause it? I mean, I was thinking you were going to say something like, oh, you know, it's climate change or just pollution or something in general. And what does the extinction of all these species mean to us? I mean, 30,000 a year is an alarming, alarming rate, but how many are there to start with? I don't even know.

Well, there's billions of species, especially if you start counting bacteria and viruses. I mean, there's. I did a book about our human body. Our human body. We think we're human, but actually we only have one out of 10 cells in our body actually has human DNA in it. The other 90 cells in our body are foreign. They're bacteria, they're viruses. They're things that don't carry human DNA in them. That's how intimately we are combining into this planet. 90% of our cells is not us. It's that intimately is involved in the environment itself. So as we're changing and polluting this larger biosphere called the earth. Theoretically, since we are 90% not us, we are putting ourselves at great risk even just from that standpoint.

Okay, so you're just talking about all the bacteria and so forth in our bodies, right? Correct.

Bacteria, viruses, the things that share are also. There's mites and lice and we are basically our own little biosphere in and of ourselves.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. It's really quite amazing. Certainly they even ponder that idea. So they're trying to stop the extinction. I mean, what do they do that causes the extinction by trying to stop it?

Well, at this point there's like this accident, it's occurred in one of the labs that again, doing the research for this knowledge, found out there's a few camps when it comes to dealing with the environmental situation that we're in. There's the conservationists, those that are trying to preserve old species, and then there's a whole new group. So this is where a lot of the young scientists are playing. And this is in synthetic biology. These are the people that are playing with the genetic toolboxes and reading and writing DNA, trying to splice in extra hardiness into species, or even at this point creating species from scratch. There's a lab that produced designer yeast from basically just chemicals in a bottle. They were able to produce living, replicating yeast bacteria. And so that's where we're at again. I thought I was fairly, as background in veterinary medicine, evolutionary biology myself, I thought I was fairly abreast of what was going on in some of these labs. But I was startled at how far advanced some of this has gotten. And it's even spreading outside of these technologies and these big labs, these government sponsored or corporate sponsored or university run labs that we're now seeing exploration and fiddling with this genetic toolbox in garages, attic spaces, community centers. It's a whole movement called the biopunk movement where people are producing their own life forms and patenting them in garages. So it's because the cost of doing this genetic research, I mean, doing this genetic manipulation, has gotten so cheap and so fast that right now, similar to the rate of computers are able to process, we're seeing the same thing with genetic ability to process. Right now we can write DNA about 10 times faster every year. So 10 years down the line, we're talking about being able to read and write DNA to the point of millions of times faster than we can today.

This is amazing what you're saying. So first thing is the biopunk movement. I mean, how do you create a life Form I thought that would take. Even if it's. You can do it. I thought it would take some big giant lab. But people are doing this in the garage.

That's a startling thing, is that there's a whole plug and play system of genetic manipulation now where you can actually buy these products called bio bricks. They're like little pieces, almost like Lego pieces of genetic material. And with just a very. Again, novice can be trained to accomplish these goals within just a matter of a few hours. You can learn how to do this and you can add different types of these different bioblocks onto different bacterial genomes and produce these replicating plaques of bacteria. I'll give you one example, the Kickstarter program. Right now, for 40 bucks, this biopunk group will send you a set of weeds that have a glowing gene incorporated into them so that your weed will glow in the dark. This isn't future science. They've already done it. It's done. You can buy it. 40 bucks. And right now they have 5,000 backers. So basically, when they reach their maturation point with this program, they're theoretically going to be spreading about 500,000 of these glow in the dark weed seeds. And what they're recommending that people do with them, spread them far and wide. Which is a little disconcerting because nature has a tendency to take things that we put out there and steal it and manipulate it and mutate it. So again, I talked to a gentleman with the FBI Biological Countermeasures Unit after finding out what's going on in some of these labs, both in garages and in these big labs, to find out what type of oversight is there if something goes wrong in one of these facilities, what's the recourse? And he said, well, at this point we have 15,000 scientists that operate in these bio level four labs, the labs that deal with the deadliest of the deadly. And we have zero number of people that actually look over their shoulders. What we depend upon is self policing. We depend upon, if something goes wrong, hopefully somebody will tell us, boy, that's disturbing. That that's our level of bio containment for things that are rapidly changing and rapidly breaking out of mainstream labs and into some of these shadowy types of places.

Yeah, someone creates the next Frankenstein and it's self policing. Hopefully they'll let the authorities know.

Wow. USA Today just a couple days ago had an article stating that there's been 1100 accidents in these labs in the past couple years. So it's not like it's. And the chilling words of this gentleman I was speaking to basically said that it's not a matter of if something bad will happen, it's just when. If it's not bioterrorism, if it's not somebody sneaking a student in one of these postdoc programs in one of these labs, who's going to steal or learn some techniques they're going to take home, that's going to become a problem down the line. If simply lab accidents, that alone can wreak quite a bit of havoc, which is where this novel begins. If an accident occurs at the lab looks like an accident, but we find out down the line that maybe it is bioterrorism.

Oh, yeah. Amazing. You know, I looked up while you were talking, I looked up on Amazon.com biobricks I didn't get a match. And on Kickstarter, I can't seem to find that project by typing in Biopunk or Glowing Weeds or anything. But that's fascinating. Do you have a suggested keyword? Because I think our listeners would like to look this up themselves.

Yeah, just put in your Google search biobooks. It's B, I, O, B, R, I, C, K, S. It's all one word.

Yeah.

Okay, you can find out. They have 20,000 biobricks right now that you can order. And there's a whole IGEM program with high school students just to give you how easy this is. There's an IGEM competition which is international genetic. I can't remember, engineering module. And for so different high school students are competing to see who can create the most unusual life form using the biobic program. And there was a group of Slovenian students that produced a bacteria that generates a hormone, I mean, a drug rather, that can treat ulcers. And this was done by high school students?

You know, certainly. I mean, that's a good thing, right? That's good, you know.

Oh, yeah. I love the idea that. Right. The democratization of science and, you know, tapping into the brain power. I mean, I think one of the greatest strengths of this country is that, you know, we do think outside the box. Great. I wouldn't mind a little bit more oversight.

Right, right.

I wouldn't mind, you know, just a few more checks and balances.

Right. So, so, so what would happen potentially? I mean, someone would create something in their garage, they would spread it around in nature. What would they do? Plant it like a, you know, I mean, it might not be a plant or just release this bacteria out of a petri dish or kind of just. I know you have to go soon, but give us the mechanics of that real quickly.

That was the third element that this gentleman I was speaking to with the FBI was concerned about is the purposeful release of organisms like this Kickstarter program. And you can check it, by the way, just put Kickstarter. It should be able to just put Kickstarter growing weed. It probably will show up at some point. The back of my book, I have a what's true, what's not section that also can lead you to both the stuff about biobricks and about the biopunk movement.

Fantastic. Wow. Just very fascinating. The biopunks. I have not heard of that.

Yeah, that's basically the millennial equivalent of the cyberpunks who were dabbling and hacking into computer code. Now we've got the biopunks hacking into biological code.

Any comments on the longevity sciences side of this, the quest for immortality? I mean, Google's, you know, big in that. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of stuff about that.

The two books prior to this, I was a book that dealt specifically with that, which is the. Which is the search for immortality. Time magazine had an article just recently said 24, 2040, the year man becomes immortal. And that's probably not a. That's realistic.

Immortal forever or living to 150 or 200 or what.

Exactly. But basically just, you know, doubling our lifespan.

Incredible. It's just amazing. I mean, we're on the verge of so many amazing things. Let's hope that we don't mess it up with something really ugly and bad. As you certainly point out some of the downsides of this. It's amazing and scary at the same time. James, give out your website. Tell the listeners where they can find you.

It's jamesrolllins.com you can find more about the books. If there's any writers out there, I have a whole section in my website, sort of the tips of from a writer's life. I'm also on Facebook, very active on Facebook. Like to have that intimacy between the readers and the authors that I didn't have 15 years ago when I started.

You can get right to them and they can talk right with you. That's fantastic. Well, James Rollins, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much.

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