The animal employment agency

10:10Simon Watt:What Willow will do is she'll sniff each in turn. If she comes across the odour of cancer, she'll stop and indicate to us that she can smell it. And Willow does this by sitting down.

10:19James McKay:Talking me through it is co-founder and chief scientific officer, Dr Claire Guest.

10:24Simon Watt:She's now indicated position four. It's called and it's correct.

10:30James McKay:I'm finding this quite traumatic because you've got a dog that's better behaved than all of my children. But it's just so instant. One sniff it seems and then it's sitting down. We leave Willow to it and retire to Claire's office. There are framed photos of champion sniffer dogs on every wall. Dog toys all over the floor. And no surprises here. A few dogs too.

10:50Simon Watt:So this little guy, he's the new... Oh dear, Ashley's going to get to a list. He's the new guy and he's called Dibble and he's actually a working wire-haired dashing. He hasn't been given a disease yet because he's only five and a half months, so he's learning the ropes.

11:08James McKay:There's also Asher, a fox red Labrador with a little grey in the muzzle. He's retired now, but he was a Covid dog during the pandemic. Then there's Florin, a chocolate-coloured spaniel and a prostate cancer champion. Just how dogs are able to sniff out disease in humans is still emerging science. But Clare has been involved since the very beginning.

11:28Simon Watt:Some of the things the dogs were telling us about the odours, we had no idea of those things before. I mean, it was completely revolutionary to think that cancer had an odour. It wasn't something that people talked about. But of course now, you know, it is well understood that diseases do have an odour.

11:44James McKay:An interest which started out as purely academic became very personal for Clare in a sudden and unexpected way.

11:51Simon Watt:I had a dog called Daisy, a Foxford Labrador, who was the first dog to be trained on prostate cancer. But during her training, she started to behave a bit strangely around me. She kept on staring at me and nudging at me. I sort of felt where she'd been nudging, and I thought, well, perhaps I could feel a lump. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I finally went to my GP, was referred, and I was actually diagnosed with early stage breast cancer, which my consultant said that had Daisy not drawn my attention to it, I probably wouldn't have known I had the tumour for some time and probably my prognosis would have been very different.

12:28James McKay:What makes this poorly behaved little guy actually tremendous at his job?

12:38Simon Watt:Well, firstly, it is the incredible sense of smell. You know, we're talking about 300 million sensory receptors. Us humans have 5 million. so we could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of tea. Dogs could do it in two Olympics-sized swimming pools, so that's the equivalent. Also, the sort of nose that's there sniffing you is incredibly designed, so not only can Asher take air in like he's sniffing now, but he's able to exhale air and also intake air again to go into the epithelium, whereas humans, if you try and sniff and breathe out at the same time, it doesn't work for us, but it does for them.

13:15Simon Watt:It's an incredibly sophisticated system.

13:19James McKay:But there's another important quality that makes these dogs fantastic at their jobs. It's all about motivation.

13:26Simon Watt:The dogs' wish to do these things, I believe, goes beyond the treats that they get. I really do believe that the dogs have a wish to keep their owners safe. One of the recent bits of research has shown that when we are with our dog that we know, when we're stroking a dog, we know we release oxytocin, so that love hormone that was previously believed only to be seen between, say, a mother and child or close partner. But what's even more amazing, I think, is that the dog mirrors us and releases oxytocin back. It's a complete, full attachment from both sides. The dog is as attached as we are.

14:06James McKay:A robot can't give you a serotonin-bisting nuzzle. An AI can't care about you. There's no way that dogs are going to be replaced by tech any time soon. But perhaps surprisingly, Claire's actually fully on board with the idea of dogs teaching AI how to do what they do.

14:23Simon Watt:There is a pattern that the dogs can recognise and therefore could be recognised in the future by a machine with artificial intelligence. Now, if that is possible, that can make a huge difference to millions around the globe.

14:35James McKay:And you must need masses of data, because in the cases of your samples, it's different urine from different people. And different dogs or different noses.

14:43Simon Watt:Exactly. And different people with different conditions, apart from the one condition that we're looking for. So what we're hoping is that those profiles jump out of the dog, and the dog can then grade it, if you like, and say, yeah, really good example. Not such a good example. And that's how the AI will learn. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic and bursting with flavour. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt. Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese. Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce.

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16:00James McKay:At this facility, they're training dogs for all kinds of jobs. The ones we've met, like Willow and Little Dibble, are bio-detection dogs who work by identifying samples, usually urine or sweat. But here in sight, they also train medical alert assistance dogs. These live and work with one human and one human only.

16:20Simon Watt:Mabel, don't go to bed.

16:22James McKay:They are trained to raise the alarm when a medical emergency might be on the horizon.

16:27Simon Watt:Hi, you've exhausted yourself. My name is Lauren and I have a condition called POTS, stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. And Mabel is my alert assistance dog, so she'll give me an alert, whether that is like licking, nudging, jumping up on me, whatever she needs to do to get my attention and tell me that I'm about to be unwell and have an episode.

16:47James McKay:Mabel can smell Lauren's plummeting blood sugar levels. She can smell seizures too, before they happen. These things, not diseases, but transient conditions, also have chemical signatures that dogs can pick up.

17:01Simon Watt:I also have a condition called FND, which stands for functional neurological disorder and that causes non-epileptic seizures and Mabel alerts to those. She was not trained to alert to those. She was only trained to alert to POTS but when she first came to live with us I was having a lot of seizures and she sort of picked up on what that scent was and now she alerts to those as well which is really helpful.

17:20James McKay:I'd love to know if there's about to be an incident and Mabel's doing her job properly what does she do?

17:26Simon Watt:It could be her putting her head on my lap when I'm trying to transfer and her saying no I'm not moving out of the way you're going to sit there until I tell you you can move. It could be her nudging my leg, licking my hand, crying at me. I will then put my head down on my lap. I will pass out, have my episode. When I come to, I will then put my hand out to see if I can find Mabel's nose. If she is to start licking my hand and alerting again, I know I need to stay where I am because that means I'm going to have another episode very, very soon.

17:55James McKay:Can you tell us maybe a little bit what it was like before and how things changed thanks to Mabel?

17:59Simon Watt:Yeah, I was about 16 years old when I was diagnosed. I was in school, I was doing well academically, I was a dancer, and went from that to being unable to sit up in bed without somebody there to make sure I didn't fall and hurt myself, being able to dress myself, wash myself, feed myself, and felt like my world just had gotten really small. And so having Mabel has completely changed that. I'm able to get out and about on my own. I'm able to go and sit in a coffee shop and do a bit of work and go do the food shopping. I can just go off and do my own thing, and it's absolutely incredible.

18:33James McKay:If there was a machine which could do all the jobs that Mabel does, it could alert you whenever you're going to have an episode or something. I'll cover Mabel's ears so she doesn't hear, but would you choose the dog or the machine?

18:45Simon Watt:I would choose Mabel every time over robot, because there's so much more to them just doing the alerting. It is that emotional connection with her as well. You know, if you think about the worst day you've ever had, you have someone who's sat next to you who's there, it's going to make you feel better, And there's nothing as special as waking up in the morning and having somebody be so happy to see you every morning. I wouldn't replace her with a robot ever. Oh, I love dogs. Oh, my God. I love dogs so much. You have this superpower walking around with you and you have no idea what this thing can do.

19:20James McKay:Andreas Mershin, physicist, research scientist, entrepreneur and massive dog fan.

19:28Simon Watt:Dogs are the number one diagnostic tools on this planet for every disease that they have been trained for. There is nothing better than a dog currently in diagnosing, let's say, COVID. 99.5 % precision in 0.4 seconds. And what brings me out of bed every morning is like, why is this technology locked inside of these beautiful creatures? It should be inside of our smartphones and our smartwatches and our environmental monitoring. We should be smelling everything around us because it's a superpower.

19:54James McKay:Andreas is the CEO of RealNose.ai.

19:58Simon Watt:RealNose is a company that creates electronic machine noses that can diagnose disease. I want to remove the need for invasive biopsy such as a prostate caster biopsy which involves a 20-inch needle going into the rectum and then through the gut into the prostate and biting it 15 times. We should not be diagnosing disease by digging holes and cutting up humans when the signal is already on the outside. It's just truly, truly upsetting to me that we are still doing this.

20:24James McKay:One of the most amazing things about what the dogs do, and what the AI has to learn to do, is that identifying a smell isn't as simple as identifying the chemicals that make up that smell. Two prostate cancer samples, for example, might smell completely different. And yet the dogs know, yep, that's cancer. That's the trick that Andreas's nose has to pull off too.

20:46Simon Watt:So the smell is conferred by odorants. Odorants are volatile compounds that are wafting about in the air. I say the word conferred. I didn't say is. The same way that the experience of a shape is conferred by photons, by light, but it isn't light. If I show you a picture, let's say of the Mona Lisa, and you learn to recognize that. And then I have, let's say, the cartoonist of The Simpsons draw a cartoony version of Marge Simpson as the Mona Lisa. You'll be able to recognize the cartoon picture as being the Mona Lisa, even though not a a single brushstroke is the same, not a single photon that came into your eyeball is the same, yet you interpret it as being the same.

21:26Simon Watt:If I did the same with sound, if I did ba-ba-ba-bam, I didn't even sing it correctly, but you know that's Beethoven's fifth. Now, if I go, it's still Beethoven's fifth. Not a single frequency was the same. So the main lesson I learned from four and a half million dollars worth of research is that what something's made of is not the same as asking what is something smell of. What something's made of is a list of ingredients. What something smells of is a perception, a sensation.

21:54James McKay:That's amazing. We are in complete alliance that dogs' noses and their brains, the process, are incredible. How do you teach a computer from that?

22:04Simon Watt:Well, actually, that's the easy part. Fundamentally, it's a very simple process. You need to have two different batches of sample. One is the thing you're looking for. So in that case, it would be urine from people who have been diagnosed for having prostate cancer. And the other batch is urine from people who have been cleared of prostate cancer, so we know for sure they do not have it. And we sniff those with our machines, record these data, and then we let the machine learning figure out handles via which to separate the two signals, and we work hard to make these handles generalisable.

22:35James McKay:Once the tech is perfected, Andreas' vision is that it might soon be embedded into something that most people keep even closer to them than our beloved dogs, our mobile phones. Your phone already has an eye in the form of a camera, and ears in the form of microphones. Why not give it a nose too? As well as giving you clues about your own health in real time, this kind of tech might help keep wider society safe too.

22:59Simon Watt:If we had this technology before COVID, and everybody had it in the smartphone, do you think COVID would have gone the same way? It would be incredibly easier to manage. You won't need to shut down whole cities. You will now have a fine-grained resolution of who is carrying what, where is the infection, where is the threat. So this is coming. I mean, the technology is there, the AI is there, and the need is there.

23:23James McKay:So we've got animals doing engineering, working medical miracles, and keeping us company too. What about humanitarian work?

23:32Simon Watt:Just before dawn is when the working day starts for the rat. And the first step is actually just to weigh them and make sure that they're healthy and comfortable. And then we apply sunscreen to their ears and their tails to protect them from that exposure. And then they search an area as much as 400 square metres in about 20 minutes or less. And then their working day is done.

23:54James McKay:This is Dr Cindy Fast. She's in charge of training some fairly extraordinary working animals at the non-profit humanitarian organization Apopo.

24:03Simon Watt:Our mission is to protect people and our planet with trained scent detection animals. and the animal we use most frequently is the African giant pouched rat.

24:13James McKay:Okay, then let's dig in. What actually is an African giant pouched rat? How giant are we talking?

24:20Simon Watt:About the size of a small cat. So they are quite large and they get their name pouched rat because they have these really large cheek pouches, kind of like a squirrel or a hamster, where they like to hoard food.

24:32James McKay:These great big rats are doing great big things too. They're clearing landmines in some of the most troubled parts of the world.

24:39Simon Watt:So we currently have rats deployed in Angola, Azerbaijan and Cambodia, and we previously had rats working in Mozambique. To date, they have cleared 120 million square metres of former minefields.

24:54James McKay:These guys are perfect for the job. Long-lived, intelligent and highly trainable. Big enough to handle large areas, but small enough to scamper right over the top of a pressure-sensitive landmine without triggering it. Epupu has never lost a rat in the line of duty.

25:11Simon Watt:The rat is much more efficient than something like a metal detector if there's a lot of scrap metal around, because the rat completely ignores that. So they can search an area the size of like a tennis court in about 20 minutes or less. That could take a manual deminer working with a metal detector up to four days.

25:30James McKay:Once the rats smell the whiff of TNT they scratch at the surface of the soil That's the cue for the handlers to mark the spot and a human D-miner with tools and tech can come back in later and dispose of it safely Cindy says her rats have never missed a mine Not once in over 25 years But despite this impressive track record a team of rats doesn't immediately inspire confidence among the communities they work with even with the high of Izbests.

26:00Simon Watt:In the early days, I think there was a lot more skepticism. And in fact, when we tried to have these land release ceremonies where we were handing this land back to the communities, they refused to even step foot on that land. So they didn't trust the rats at all. So one of the things that we implemented early on is that we would host a soccer match on that former minefield to see that we were willing to go out there and play a game on this land, that we trusted our rats that much and they could as well. And we now, you know, in communities like in Cambodia, we have people from the community coming and saying, when are you going to bring a rat over here by my rice field?

26:39Simon Watt:Because I'm afraid that there might be some mines here. Can you get your rats over here, please?

26:44James McKay:The Apopo hero rats, as they're known, don't just clear landmines. The team is experimenting with using them for search and rescue missions too, finding and assisting people buried under the rubble after a natural disaster.

26:57Simon Watt:So here we see the rat's advantage is their small size, that they can get down and actually penetrate the rubble where someone might be trapped. What we're doing is also developing a technology-enabled backpack for the rat. The little backpack also has a camera and a microphone. So if that survivor is conscious, we can even have real-time two-way communication with that survivor. And we've been quite aware of the fact that most people will not be expecting a giant rat to save them, right? and they've already been very much traumatized and they're now trapped, hoping someone will find them. We don't want to add to that trauma by having a giant rat come up to them.

27:38Simon Watt:So the backpack is now programmed to speak out while the rat is even searching. I'm a rescue rat. I'm here to help you. And hopefully that will mitigate any of that sort of additional fear that might come by being trapped and having a giant rodent approaching you.

27:56James McKay:If all these high-achieving animals have left you feeling a bit glum about your own abilities, you should know this. Not all rats can be heroes. If you can't get the high-profile frontline position, you can always work in PR.

28:10Simon Watt:Some rats just really aren't cut out for scent detection work. So we have some rats stationed at the visitor centre, and they've found new careers as sort of our ambassadors. And you can meet a rat, you can hold a rat, And they're super kind and will just lick you.

28:54James McKay:if they're good, bad or just another billionaire.

28:57Simon Watt:Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

28:59James McKay:Listen now or search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

29:07James McKay:How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos?

29:11Simon Watt:On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to 100 ,000 on camera. And even recreated Squid Games, all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man$10 ,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.