Patient Zero

24:02And to make a long story short, the picture they get is that AIDS entered the United States around 1966. At a time when Gaten Degas was still a virginal adolescent. From there, scientists were able to trace the virus back to Haiti, and from Haiti, back to Africa. It's been there the longest. It's had the longest time to become diverse, to mutate, to evolve. So if you want to really, if you want to get to the real patients here, as it were, the most interesting stuff actually comes from Africa. So one way to try to figure out its origins there is to go looking for the virus. Yep. And that takes us back to ZR59 and DRC60.

24:45Can we talk about them? Sure. What? These are the two earliest known HIV positive human specimens. And this is where, for me at least, the story gets way bigger than I imagined. Now, the first sample, ZR59, came to light in the late 90s. Somehow scientists unearthed a very old tube of blood from a hospital in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when they tested it, it had HIV. This had been taken from a Bantu man in 1959. 1959. Yeah, nobody knows his name. Nobody even knows, I think, what he died of. And that was the only one for a number of years. That was our one glimpse into the kind of deep history of HIV.

25:27But then along comes that guy, Michael Warby. He's an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. And a few years ago, Michael went back to Kinshasa and found a second HIV sample. He actually found the virus lurking in a tiny bit of human tissue that was preserved in paraffin wax. It's kind of like Han Solo in the Star Wars movie when he's kind of frozen in that carbonite or whatever that stuff is. In this new sample, it was from the same town, Kinshasa is the first, and also, more importantly, from the same time. 1960. And with the two of them, then you can kind of go back in time. Like we described before, you can measure the differences between the samples, calculate how long it would take for those samples to get that different.

26:10And in the end, you can use these two samples to wind the clock all the way back to the virus that started it all. And it turned out the most recent common ancestor of those two specimens goes back to about 1908. 1908. That is when it started in human beings. What? 1908? Is that what you said? Roughly. Give or take a margin of error. Early 1900s. Wow. So around 1908, give or take, something happened. That's right. That moment is the spillover. Spillover. Spillover is the term the scientists use to describe the moment when a virus in one species passes into another species. New diseases in humans tend to pop up from animals.

26:59So people said, okay, flu comes from birds, where does HIV come from? To get at that answer, you have to look beyond human beings. You have to look at other viruses that are like HIV. So the search was on. The inability to find a similar disease in research animals. Turns out right about the time that the HIV virus was discovered. Scientists at the New England Primate Research Center. Some researchers found a virus like it in macaque monkeys. In fact, it was so similar that they called it... SIV. Simian immunodeficiency virus. Yes, and that's where the origin quest started. This is Beatrice Hahn.

27:32I'm a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. And so after they found it in Macaques, what happened? Um, it took a couple years. But eventually, she says, they found SIV. And still another primate species, the Sudimangabe. And then a few more. The African green monkeys, mandrills. Pretty soon it was all over the place. There are now, I think, 40 different species of African monkeys known to have their own version of SIV. So then the question was, which one of these monkeys or primates passed it to us? Then, unexpectedly. A researcher named Martine Peters at the center in Gabon decided to test her chimps.

28:07Two orphan chimpanzees. And bingo, she found a very, very close match. A virus that was the closest relative of HIV-1. So? Everybody said, well, you know. It was a chimp. It was a chimp. Okay. Yeah, it came from a chimp. Yes. But then the question was, well, which chimps? Or rather, where? Where exactly? So? Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues started looking at chimps that came from different parts of western Central Africa. Now, getting blood samples from chimps in the wild is pretty much... It just isn't feasible. You know, because in the wild, they hide the moment they see us. So you get stuck with fecal samples.

28:47It's poop. Huh. Yes. Poop. There's lots of DNA in there. And viruses. So they would just go to where the chimpanzees would sleep at night, and they would just, you know, collect some poop. Bring it back to the lab, and Beatrice would analyze all the viruses. Over 90 different wild communities. From every part of Central Africa. Over 7 ,000 different fecal samples. And slowly, they were able to piece together which communities were infected and which ones had the closest to HIV-1. That's when it hit us for the first time. What exactly hit you? The geographic origin of these chimps. In 2006, her and her colleagues published that the human AIDS virus comes from a group of chimps, a very specific group that live in a very specific place.

29:32This little corner of southeastern Cameroon. Between the Boomba River, the Ngoka River, and the Sanga River. These chimps were essentially penned in between these three rivers. It's an area probably only of 100 square miles, not much more than that. So when we're looking at what humans have, and we're looking at what all of those chimps in Africa have, The most perfect match is this little territory up there in Cameroon. Yeah. There is no other virus that is any closer. So that's that. So can you reconstruct the spillover and the who that it spilled over into as best as we understand it? You can hypothesize.

30:13And the best hypothesis is the cut hunter hypothesis. The cut hunter? The C-U-T hunter? That's right. A hunter who gets cut. And what can we say about this guy? I mean, what do we know about him? If we had to guess, if we had to guess, that human was probably a Bantu man living very near the forest or in the forest in southeastern Cameroon. He was hunting. Maybe he had a bow and arrow. Maybe he had a spear.

30:45And he kills a chimpanzee. Bingo, here's a big pile of meat. And he starts to butcher it. He's cutting open the chest cavity, he's pulling out organs, and he cuts himself. And he gets blood-to-blood contact. Chimpanzee blood against his blood. What happens is that the virus in the chimpanzee blood found itself in an environment that was unexpected, that was alien to it, but was not too much different from the biochemical environment it had been in, chimpanzee blood, it could function. And that's the moment. That's the moment it begins. That human is patient zero. But why then? Why 1908? I mean, presumably people have been hunting chimps for a really long time.

31:39Why wouldn't this guy be patient seven million? That's another of the big questions. People certainly in Central Africa have been eating monkeys for thousands of years. I mean, David says there's really no way to know, but this could have just been the right virus. Maybe this particular virus evolved in a way that made it more transmissible in humans. Or maybe it just got lucky to come along at precisely the right time. What you're looking at... This is Carl again. ...is a time when this part of Africa was being heavily colonized. The French and the Belgians were building train systems. The populations were on the move.

32:17of Kinshasa, which was then Leopoldville, it was exploding. It was huge. The cities were attracting people from the boonies in those days. So by 1908, all the virus has to do is get from that tiny village where the Cut Hunter lived to one of the new cities. That happens almost certainly by river. I was stirred by the work of Beatrice Hahn and Mike Warby to see what this scenario looked like on the ground. So I went to southeastern Camerun and I chartered a little boat, about a 30-foot wooden boat with an outboard motor. And he traced the path of the virus. We went down the Ngoko River and we stopped at a few villages.

32:59There are a couple little villages there, one of which has a market where you can buy monkey meat and crocodile meat. And he says it wasn't hard to imagine how it all might have went down. Perhaps the cut hunter gave the virus to a woman who then passed it on to a fisherman. A fellow that I call the Voyager. Who then got in a boat, as David did, and carried it down the river. The Sangha River, which is the... The Ngoko is a tributary of the Sangha. Sangha becomes a bigger river, 200 meters wide, which then flows to the Congo River, the big river. And into the city. And I imagine him sliding into Brazzaville around 1920, the first HIV-positive man to arrive in an urban center, where there's a much greater density of humans, where there are prostitutes, a greater fluidity of social and sexual interactions.

33:59And that seems to have been the place from which the disease went global.

34:17So that's how it happened.

34:28Let me add another parenthesis. There are essentially 12 major groups of the HIV virus. What David means is that 12 different kinds of HIV viruses have spilled over 12 different times. Eight of them came from monkeys, three of them came from chimps, and one came from gorillas. Wow. And of those 12, only one of them is responsible for the global pandemic. There are 12 kinds. 12 times that we know about. It's probably happened dozens and dozens more times that we don't know about. So the spillover is not a highly improbable event. In most cases, those spillovers have not resulted in extended chains of disease in humans, let alone global pandemic.

35:14In a few cases, they've resulted in localized disease. And in one case, the sweepstakes-winning strain, HIV-1 group M, has infected 60 million humans around the world and killed 30 million.

35:47A lot of people to thank for this segment. Thanks to David Quammen, who's got a book called Spillover, which is all about diseases crossing over from animals to us. Also, thank you to Carl Zimmer, whose book on viruses is called A Planet of Viruses. And thank you also to him and to Michael Warby. Their interview was recorded on a podcast from Meet the Scientist And also to Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania. And to Katie Slocum from the University of York for letting us use her recordings of chimpanzees.

36:33I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits. Fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button.

37:05Hey, you want to know about one of my proudest moments of being a dad? Yeah. Happened this morning. Yeah. So you know how Emil's a little bit of an introvert, right? We're sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare, and he's taking his shoes off, and there's this little boy who's only there two days a week, and he's not adjusting well. And every time his mother drops him off, she has to literally pry him off her, and he's wailing. So Emil sits down on this little seat to take his shoes off. The mother of this kid puts this little boy next to Emil, and he is just crying.

37:40He's distraught. So then what happens is Emil turns to this little boy, looks at him, sticks out his hand, and says, high five.

37:54High five. Out of nowhere. That is amazing. Yeah, because it's like they're out in their own society, you know? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Okay, so let's do the introductions. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. This is Radiolab. We're calling this show... Patient Zero. Yeah, and for this next segment, no more patients. No more diseases. Exactly. Let's focus instead on invention, on the people who bring new ideas into the world. Yeah, the zero is behind the ideas. That doesn't quite sound right. You know what I mean. Yeah. And that guy you just heard? Hi, my name is John Mowallam. I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

38:28He's got his own high-five story to tell, though it's not about his daughter. I think we have kids around the same age. Or her first high five. It's actually about the first high five ever. Yeah. Ever? Yeah. See, one morning a few years ago. 2007 or 2008. John turned on his computer, opened up his email, and found... A press release about the true, undisputed inventor of the high five coming out finally. Who was the press release from? National High Five Day, which is a kind of a joke holiday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think. And they told the story? They told the story of Lamont Sleets, a college basketball player at Murray State in Kentucky.

39:08And the story in the press release went something like this. Sleets' father fought in Vietnam as part of the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry, which was nicknamed the Five. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying, Five, as a kind of prideful thing. And when Lamont was younger, they would all sort of hang out at the house in Kentucky, and he couldn't keep all their names straight. So when they'd walk in the door and go five, he would just sort of smack their hand. And go hi five. Oh, like hi, like hello five. Hello five, yeah. Hi comma five. You know, he has small hands.

39:38He likes to put them up against the big hands of the five guys. And it was years later that he started playing college basketball at Murray State and started high-fiving all his teammates. He really never stopped high-fiving. It was just something he did. But when he went around playing away games, other teams picked it up and it sort of spread out. So he was sort of both the inventor of the high five and the kind of Johnny Appleseed of the high five at the same time. And within a few weeks of John getting this press release, the story was everywhere. Went kind of viral. It wound up sort of all over the internet.

40:06There were some local newspapers who, you know, picked it up. You know, Murray State suddenly became very proud of the fact that they were the home of the high five. It became sort of part of the institutional lore in the athletic department there. And then you read this and you thought what? I thought, how sad. How sad. Why how sad? Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke. Turns out John had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high five, and he had stumbled on this photograph. You know what, maybe I don't have it. Black and white picture. Oh yeah, here we go. Two baseball players facing each other, afros, huge smiles, and their hands are in the air right about to connect.

40:47Which one of these is Glenn Burke? So Burke's the guy in the warm-up jacket. I think he's even got his hat on backwards. Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the L.A. Dodgers in the 70s. Big guy. He says he had 17-inch biceps, so I'll take his word for that. The other guy in the picture is Dusty Baker. He's an outfielder. But you can tell in the picture, just from the way that Glenn is sort of throwing his whole body forward, that he's the one initiating the gesture. I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers clubhouse. He just had that type of charisma. This is Luther Burke Davis, Glenn's sister.

41:18With Glenn, it was like he'd always be on the stage. He'd often said he should have been a comedian. He was always dancing around in the clubhouse. He used to do Richard Pryor stand-up routines just from memory. He just genuinely loved people. So much so, she says, that in the year that picture was taken, the Dodgers made him the sort of public face of the team. He was their ambassador of goodwill. He's the guy they'd sit down to all the press events. You know, like meet the youngsters or people, you know. That sort of thing. Here's the story about this picture. What was the date? October 5th, poetically enough, 1977.

41:5077. It's the playoffs. Dodgers versus the Phillies. Game four. Bases are loaded. Dusty Baker. Steps to the plate. And.

42:01Grand slam. Crowd goes nuts. Baker does his victory lap. In just disease. You know, round and third coming to the plate. Burke comes racing out of the dugout. And he's got his arm really high up. And Baker. Sees him instinctively raises his arm. And before you know it. Burke and Baker. Smack hands. Bam. There it was. The sportscasters that were, you know, announcing the game said they had never seen that done in sports before. And from there on, the Dodgers started high-fiving, and everyone all started high-fiving. The high-five. Became a thing. Mm-hmm.

42:36And it all began with that one moment. The platonic high-five right there. Unfortunately, that moment? That was actually both the beginning and almost the end of Burke's career. It's not that he wasn't good. He was actually really good, even in his rookie season. He was being talked about as the next Willie Mays by the Dodgers organization. But? He was gay. And he tried to keep that a secret while he was playing. Dusty Baker actually had kept trying to set him up with his wife's cousins. And Burke never liked any of them. And Baker was completely confused because he knew these were really good-looking women, apparently.

43:12So there were rumors circulating. and the rumors reached the front office of the LA Dodgers. And one day, Burke was called in by management and they offered him$75 ,000 to get married. What? $75 ,000? To get married? What is this, like the mob or something? Well, exactly. I mean, no, they didn't regularly offer their players money to get married. And Burke's response apparently was, he said, I suppose you mean to a woman. Shortly after that, the Dodgers traded him to the Oakland A's for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior. That was confusing for us, and I know it had to be confusing for him.

43:50It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded. And you think it was because he was gay? Yeah, yeah. You know, baseball is an all-American sport. Yeah. But, you know, at least he was still going to be able to play ball. Or at least he thought. He ends up in Oakland, doesn't get very much playing time. And when he did get on the field, it wasn't very pleasant. He used to get heckled a lot, you know, from people in the bleachers. And even worse, according to a couple of different people, his coach... Billy Martin. ...would often introduce Glenn Burke this way. This is Glenn Burke the faggot.

44:22Really? Yeah. And so Glenn Burke retires. Wow, and he was only like 26 or something, right? Yes, he was young. Within a year of his rookie season. Just walks away. God, that's like an aborted career. Exactly. From there, he ends up in the Castro District in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood. And things go okay for a while. But then one day when he's crossing the street... Three teenage girls in their mother's car... Come barreling down the road. And they hit him and broke his leg in three places. Oh, man. And that kind of ended everything when that happened. He starts taking painkillers.

44:58One thing leads to another. He gets hooked on crack, can't hold a job, he goes broke. Ends up living... On the streets. And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, I guess AIDS at that point. He ended up coming to live with me. A lot of times he didn't sleep well at night. And we would sit up and talk, put on music, and I'd dance and he'd move his arms around because he was in the bed. He was bedridden. And so you took care of him until he died? Yeah. Glenn Burke died in 1995. But what he's left with at this point is he's left with the original high five, right? That's his claim. Yes, yes.

45:45That defined him, to some people at least, at the end. And he believed it. A reporter had asked him if it was true about the high five, and he said, yeah, think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else did. Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release? So I called National High Five Day because I wanted to talk to Lamont Sleet. Even though I was sad, it seemed like, okay, here's another person's prideful accomplishment. Let's get his story. Hello? Hello? Eventually, he gets this guy on the phone. My name is Greg Harrell-Ledge.

46:22Greg is one of the founders, and he and John get to talking, and John asks him the sensible first question. Is the Lamont Sleet story true? He figured it was, but he thought he should at least ask. He's a reporter. And there was a pause and he said, no. Frankly, we've been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask. It's not true. This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would run with it. They made the whole thing up. They made the whole thing up and then they just went to go cast their protagonist. Yeah, so we sat down, we picked Murray State. That's just kind of a great sounding school.

46:53It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years. And they came across this guy, Lamont Sleets. Why him? Well, it was pretty close to random. They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleets' wife. Absolutely. His wife emailed us and said, some of the details that you have are flat out wrong. That implies that some of the things you've said are right, though. But Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high five. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What about Glenn? I was kind of like, hmm, kind of a bit blown away, you know? Yeah. You know, here was this guy who was proud of this. and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him.

47:30Do you feel a little guilty? Did I mean like, okay, it's a high five, it's kind of a silly thing. On the other hand, this guy's life, the way he died, do you feel like you robbed him? We do feel we wish that we had done things slightly differently and putting together this sort of collegiate prank, but we didn't really know of Glenn Burke at that time. Greg says they hadn't heard of the Glenn Burke story when they pulled this prank, and now that they know it, they really feel bad. In fact, they're now organizing a charity event they're calling The National High-Five-A-Thon Which will raise money for charity, including one chosen by Glenn Burke's sister, Lutha.

48:04I'm very proud. Anytime I see somebody do a high-five, it just really makes me happy. And that seemed like a good end to the story. But, uh, no. Because then John told us that If you really honestly want to get to the bottom of who invented the high-five, I mean, we didn't think we wanted to, but now that we're in it, what the hell? Well, you've got to go beyond Glenn Burke's story. I've wanted you to believe that he was the hero at this point, right? So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith, right? Even though Glenn Burke died believing that the high five was his legacy, at more or less the same moment that he invented it, a guy named Derek Smith, a basketball player for the Louisville Cardinals, was at practice.

48:42And a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was going to give him just an ordinary low five. And Derek Smith looked him in the eye. This is what Wiley Brown told me. And Derek Smith looked him in the eye and said, no, up high. That year's Louisville team, they were known as the Doctors of Dunk. You know, they're a high-flying team. They played above the rim. And John says when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA Finals. I haven't seen it, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high-five handshake.

49:15He felt compelled to explain it to America. Wow, and did the moment that Derek Smith did it, did an asteroid fall on his head or something? Well, in 1996, I believe, in the 90s, he had an undiagnosed heart condition. And he just died all of a sudden on a cruise ship. What? Yes. And he said explicitly to Wiley Brown, this is something I'm going to be remembered for. You know, our kids and our grandkids are going to talk about this. And in fact, our kids and grandkids do talk about it. And they're probably very proud. But. It was Kathy. Then we ran into this one. This is Kathy Gregory. She coached women's volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith.

49:55And she says with her girls, Everyone did it. All the time. So I do believe that it was volleyball that first started it. And interestingly, she says they would high-five more when a player screwed up. Yes, no, no, it isn't just about celebration. Because really, when do you need a high-five? Of course it's more when you're down. Yeah, it makes people so happy. So women's volleyball, there you go. Non, ce n 'est pas le fini. Pourquoi? Because then our producer Lynn Levy also discovered that in the movie Breathless in 1955, and exactly one hour, 18 minutes into the film, you will see two Frenchmen do a very distinct out of cinq, right there.

50:39Isn't this all like an indication to you that it's maybe, it's one of those things that probably was there, the dawn of man? Because it gives pleasure? Yeah, it's just like a... Like from an evolutionary point of view? No, I don't think so. I think this has the feeling of something that was born. I mean, who in this room wants Glenn Burke to be the original guy? Just raise your hand. Me. Me. It's the better story, frankly. So look at what's happening here. Every time we look for the original of anything, be it a disease, a contagion, a gesture, we find more than one. So what do you do in this situation?

51:11I think, you know, what you do is you just choose. You say, which one is the better story? Let's just go with the best high five. Forget the first, the best. And I think we can do that. Let's just call it Glenn Burke. Glenn Burke invented the high five. Done. All right, high five. High five.

51:32High five. Hi, I'm Josh, and I'm from Plainfield, New Jersey, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyanansambandam, Matt Kielty, Mona McGauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anissa Vitsa, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos and Maya Appleby Malamed.

52:22Our fact checkers are Nora Belblidia, Hilary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, and Sophie Samaini.

52:40Hi, I'm Maddie, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simmons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.