Enlighten Me

Lane Fortenberry (00:07):
I am Lane Fortenberry.

Jeremy Thomas (00:08):
And I'm Jeremy Thomas and this is Enlighten Me Podcasts.

Lane Fortenberry (00:12):
Jeremy, what's your relationship to apocalyptic media, post apocalypse? Do you enjoy that kind of storytelling or do you find it hard to engage with?

Jeremy Thomas (00:23):
It's hard to engage with. I don't seek it out, but I have found very recently that I can't really avoid it because no matter what I'm doing, whether I'm reading a book or watching a movie or just playing video games, it's always just kind of finds its way being front and center in some kind of way. And so even though it kind of makes me nervous and afraid, I imagine it does for everybody, it's something I find myself thinking about quite frequently. So what about yourself?

Lane Fortenberry (00:49):
I love that kind of storytelling in particular. I like the dread part of it. I like the stories that also have some hope and optimism at the end. So I kind of like a mixture of both.

Jeremy Thomas (01:02):
And it's one of those things too where it is, like I mentioned earlier, even though I don't actually seek it out, I've realized that even in just in video games that I pay, even "Call of Duty," there's this zombie apocalypse mode, the survival mode, and so I think I enjoy those even more because it gives me this sense of almost control. And I find myself wondering why I enjoy games like that so much, or even fiction or nonfiction books. I always find myself thinking about worst case scenarios as far as humanity goes. And so it's very interesting to me why I, and a lot of people that I talk to are so fascinated with thinking about apocalyptic themes and why humanity can survive certain things like that. And so it is very interesting question to think about I think all the time. And so were you able to talk to anyone here at Texas State to just kind of figure out what it is about apocalyptic themes and culture and movies and TVs that makes it so interesting and why we're so captivated with it?

Lane Fortenberry (01:56):
I actually found a faculty member who wrote a book on this very topic and I'd say he's an expert in analyzing apocalyptic type of media, Dr. Robert Tally.

Dr. Robert Tally (02:09):
My name is Robert Tally. I'm a professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts here at Texas State University.

Lane Fortenberry (02:14):
And when did you come to Texas State and what's your area of study and research here?

Dr. Robert Tally (02:18):
I arrived in the fall of 2005, so 20 years this year. My background is in 19th century American literature especially. I wrote my dissertation on "Moby Dick" in fact, but I also teach a number of courses in world literature and literary criticism, literary theory.

Lane Fortenberry (02:36):
So whenever I was thinking about potentially doing an episode about the apocalypse, I just started my search and just typed in apocalypse on our website. And you were the first person that popped up and fortunately you also have the book that you wrote last year, "The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse." So I thought you'd be the perfect person to talk to about this. So why are you personally interested in writing and teaching about the consumption of apocalyptic and dystopian type of content?

Dr. Robert Tally (03:03):
Yeah, it's a great question. I had actually started out doing work on Utopia and have a short book that I wrote more than 10 years ago on Utopia. But as I was working on that, the more and more I saw, started noticing dystopia as being the more prominent genre, even if sometimes dystopias do have a little bit of a hopeful element as well. And obviously pop culture, especially in the 20th and here in 21st century, just seems dominated by dystopian imagery. You think "Hunger Games," things like that, apocalyptic imagery into the world scenarios and monsters. And so that's why "The Fiction of Dread," which was originally going to be a book about dystopia also then became a book about monsters and about apocalypse and relevant for our discussion. Some of those into the world scenarios involved monsters, most notoriously the zombie apocalypse where you have an end of the world causing or caused by monsters taking over.

(04:04):
And so that kind of fascinated me as I saw more and more, I'm not a pop culture theory guy mostly, but I consume films and TV like anyone else and it's just you see so many variations on the zombie thing the "28 Days Later," which is now "28 Years Later," I guess coming out soon, "Train to Busan," Korean film. These all strike me as just examples of a timeliness of our sense of monstrosity and apocalypse that it's also of course a very popular entertainment. You start wondering, yeah, why is it that we love to watch our world destroyed?

Lane Fortenberry (04:43):
It's interesting that you say that because I think for me, this is some of my favorite type of media to consume. "The Last of Us," the second game for instance, is probably my favorite piece of media I think ever that I've ever had the chance of playing or watching or whatever the case may be. Very similar to "Station Eleven", which is sort of different —spoiler, if you've never seen this show or read the book — a flu wipes out most of civilization and they have to rebuild. It centers around our culture and there's more of a sense of hope in that rather than "The Last of Us" or "A Quiet Place" and things like that, "Contagion." For me, I feel like it's almost, I enjoy watching and getting a sense of dread. I like seeing those scenarios and how we rebuild or how it all ends, which I don't know what that says about me, but there's also a part of it where I like getting the sort of hope aspect of it. Why do you think this sort of media is so popular or has I guess gotten more popular as the years have gone on? What do you think audiences are wanting?

Dr. Robert Tally (05:47):
I think you're actually getting at it a bit the idea that a sense of dread, a sense of foreboding, a sense of fearful anticipation can also be enjoyable and somewhat stimulating. I suspect that that may be as natural as any discussion in human nature, ghost stories, things like this that all cultures have. I think the predominance in sort of popular media in recent years, so I argue at least is connected with a growing sense of lack of control. The global system in itself hence the end of the world scenarios, but also the various systems in which we find ourselves where we don't necessarily feel we are in control, whether that be political, economic, certainly there have been arguments about zombies as signifying capitalism and the sort of universal extraction of labor power from our bodies, that sort of Marxist twist on things, but there's also of course the fear of climate change.

(06:52):
This is part of "The Last of Us" as I understand it. I haven't played the games, but I've seen the last season, the first season of the show where the idea is that perhaps global warming may have something to do with why this particular kind of fungus is able to survive and take over human bodies. The idea of other forms, earlier versions of sort of nuclear, like the "Night of the Living Dead," there's suggestions that maybe nuclear energy, the somewhat humorous, "The Dead Don't Die" movie, I don't know if you saw that, but that involved fracking on the moon that had displaced the moon and caused the dead to rise. And so you get these, there can be sort of economic arguments or environmental arguments. It seems that wherever you have zombies or things zombie-like outbreak, contagion like this, which is not quite the same as zombies, of course it is not dead bodies rising from the graves, but wherever you have that you have some sort of significance. There's a scholar I admire very much, British scholar named Mark Bould who wrote a book called "The Anthropocene Unconscious," which has a chapter on zombies and it's on zombie movies. And he says, not all zombies can be killed with a shot to the head, but all zombies mean something. They are allegorical creatures and wherever you have zombies in books or movies, there's going to be more meaning there than just a shambling, or these days pretty fast, a monster coming after you.

Lane Fortenberry (08:27):
I wonder too, with this sort of thing, you find people potentially building bunkers for themselves. There's all these underground houses and things like that. From my understanding, they were built long time ago whenever there was a lot of threat of atomic war and things like that. There's also people who they have doomsday preparation kits at home or whatever the case may be. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that as far as do you think people are consuming this because maybe today they find it's difficult to get by or they want to envision other things and get ready for something like that if something ever does happen?

Dr. Robert Tally (09:07):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's hard to say with the so-called preppers exactly what's going on there. I think some perhaps are very earnestly believers in a kind of apocalyptic scenario and they're honing up on their survival skills. My wife and I live over by the cemetery, and so she always jokes we'll be the first to go when the zombie apocalypse happens right there, and we're not well prepared for it. But I think there's some elements where it's almost to me a kind of, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but kind of end-of-the-world cosplay, where it's like you're really sort of imagining the adventure movie starring yourself where you're going to get to fight off these whatever the hoards are. And it may not be zombies, of course, it may just be your neighbors who are now vicious tribes out to get you, something like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," the movie and the book where really the most dangerous problem in the world is other people that may try to enslave you or kill you or whatever.

(10:13):
So I mean, I think that there's something along those lines. And I also feel like kind of what I was saying before about these systems where we don't feel like we have complete control, if you strip it down to just basic survival, and especially if you are well provisioned, you have a bomb shelter, as you said, these, many started out as kind of bomb shelters. If you have guns and other things, you may feel like, OK, I have some control. If things go really badly, at least I'll be ready, I'll be prepared. And I think that's part of it. And I also think that this kind of goes to the desire for the end of the world, if I could phrase it in that very ironic way, is that it makes the world a simpler place right down to in the case of literally survival, live or die, fight or flight, it breaks things down in a way that our own world is far too complicated to just think in those terms.

(11:08):
But in so many of these movies for example, you get the protagonist or a very small group of people, and that's already helpful, right? Because it limits the number of characters you have to deal with. Whereas even in a small town like San Marcos, we have a 100,000 people to think about, but in the movie you think about a dozen people, maybe it makes it a lot easier once you simplify things down to that, simplify things like, oh, we've got to get here to this safe zone or we've got to defeat this thing. You've got a clear mission. The simplification of our lives in making those sort of wonderful adventure stories I think is a way of, again, taking back control of a world where really we as individuals could do in such a scenario, unless again, everybody else was dead and we had a very small group.

(11:57):
There's a movie I talk about that doesn't involve zombies, but it is a kind of end of the world and it's not a great movie, but it's kind of fun movie, Roland Emmerich's "2012," which was about the, I guess the Mayan prophecy that the world would end. But in that we learned that almost everybody in the world has died and then it ends up having a kind of happy ending because he reunites with his family and they see promised land on the horizon as the waters recede or whatever. It's a strange thing to say, it has a happy ending given that nine-tenths of the world at least have been killed, but by reducing it to "Will John Cusack save his family?" it then becomes a story of like, OK, nevermind that seven and a half billion people are dead. At least John Cusack got together with estranged wife and he's back with his kids. And so I think that there then becomes this kind of idea of the end of the world is a way to make things a slightly better place. Again, I don't mean to make it sound so cynical because I don't think anybody's actually wishing that nine-tenths of the population suddenly died. Nobody wants that.

Lane Fortenberry (13:05):
Just sort of for fun, not for fun, obviously if something like this happens, but what is this a scenario that you could actually see potentially happening? I think with this sort of stuff, it's always fun to speculate a little bit, even though obviously if it happened, it would be awful.

Dr. Robert Tally (13:21):
I am probably more on the sort of horror and fantasy side of the sci-fi divide, but I do think some of the sci-fi scenarios that you see could be fairly, I don't want to say likely, but we are already seeing elements, for example, of artificial intelligence taking over systems that had previously had humans at the controls often for just efficiency sake sometimes because it actually works better that way. Obviously we have a whole genre, it's not the zombie genre, but kind of the robot genre, right? Where the machines rise up against you, whether it be Terminator style or "Blade Runner." Interesting thing about "Blade Runner," and I find it interesting actually in some other movies as well. You not only sympathize for the monsters in that where you really, by the end of the movie, I mean the original "Blade Runner," you're like, gosh, why are we killing these guys?

(14:19):
They just want to live their lives, right? Sorry, the sequel 2049 explicitly has us cheering for the Replicants, and I noticed that possible end of the world movies have done that. "The Planet of the Apes" remake, we're cheering for the apes. I mean, there may be some humans that we also want to see live, but we're actually cheering for humanity to lose to the apes. And so I think that this is not quite answering your question, but in a world where we're getting all these, I don't want to call 'em evil corporations, but come on, we've got the Googles, we've got the Amazons, we've got five or six companies that are bigger than anything else in the world, bigger than countries. In fact, in their economic impacts, I could easily see various end-of-the-world scenarios involving a mixture of technology, corporate greed, hunger, game style governments in connection to those industries and things like that. In fact, I think that seems all too realistic lately.

Lane Fortenberry (15:20):
Relating it back to Texas. I wonder if you have any advice for Texans if something like this were to happen, some sort of end of the world situation would happen, or do you think we're equipped to handle something like that?

Dr. Robert Tally (15:36):
No, I mean it's hard to say because of course until you're faced with it, you never quite know what you're capable of either individually or collectively. When I say no though, I think part of it is it seems that you'd want to have some infrastructure in place for cooperation. I know in so many of these movies it is, and we already mentioned sort of the survivalist, it's a single individual or a very small group trying to save the world or just trying to save themselves. But I feel like in these situations you would really need a much larger collective effort and coordinated effort, communication and organization, shared leadership and whatnot are the things you'd really want to have if you needed a coordinated effort to go against the zombie hoards or something like that. And I'm not sure how well positioned we are in terms of just organizing at a communitywide or statewide level.

(16:36):
That said, I also don't know that anybody can be entirely prepared for such a thing. One of the other things that I've been doing, in fact, my new book coming out is on Tolkien's orcs, the Tolkien world, which is also, I suppose in "Lord of the Rings," a kind of medieval-esque end-of-the-world scenario. If supposedly if Sauron wins, our world will be destroyed. It does wind up being, of course, hobbits who not because they were necessarily well-trained or anything, but they happened to make this stuff work in a way that mostly accidental, in Tolkien's case, there's a sense of a kind of divine providence behind all of this. But at any rate, it is just the efforts of people who are doing their best with what they can. And there's even a moment in "Lord of the Rings" where I think Frodo says to Gandalf, "I wish this had not happened during my lifetime." There's a thousand year old story and I'm only 50. And Gandalf says, so do all who live to see such times, but all we can do is do what we can do in the time that we have. I feel like there is some wisdom there. I realize it's also a kind of cliche and obvious, but it's like if the zombie apocalypse happened, I don't like our chances, but I do think we would make a good effort.

Jeremy Thomas (17:59):
Well, that was really fascinating to hear Dr. Tally talk about some of just the history and some of the reasons why our society is kind of obsessed with some of those apocalyptic themes and whatnot. I think it definitely touched on a lot of things that I've thought about in the back of my head as far as consuming some of this content goes. And so did you talk to anyone else to just learn more from a scientific perspective about how some of these things operate in our society today?

Lane Fortenberry (18:22):
I talked to Dr. Rodney Rohde about it, and we kind of discussed the history of disease outbreaks across the globe. What could potentially happen in the future that might mimic that? We touched on COVID and then we kind of talked about Texas a little bit too.

Dr. Rodney Rohde (18:41):
My name is Rodney Rohde. I am Regent's Professor and chair of the medical laboratory science program in the College of Health Professions here at Texas State.

Lane Fortenberry (18:48):
And when did you get to Texas State and what's your sort of area of study and research?

Dr. Rodney Rohde (18:53):
So I've had kind of an interesting tie in with Texas State. I came here in 1985 to get my microbiology degree and I stayed for a couple more years to get a virology degree, which is going to be pertinent to this conversation. And then I left for a decade and went to public health, worked at the Texas Department of Health and CDC for about a decade. And then I had the fantastic opportunity to rejoin Texas State as an assistant professor in the medical laboratory science program in 2002. And over the past 23 years, which is hard to believe, I've kind of worked my way through the ranks and now I'm sitting as the chair.

Lane Fortenberry (19:26):
I mean, one of the main reasons I want to have you on because you are the media guy here, I think some would say you do a lot of podcasts and a lot of hits on disease and things like that. So I figured you'd be great for this conversation. You think about "Contagion," that was something that came from a bat in the movie, went to a pig that was sold at a market and it spread. "28 Days Later," it's like a bloodborne virus called, I think it's called the rage virus, if I remember right. And then "Station Eleven," it was a flu that knocked out, I think 95% of the population. So I'm just kind of curious. Those are all fictional. Throughout history, what sort of disease outbreaks cause a lot of panic or potentially could have ended civilization?

Dr. Rodney Rohde (20:04):
So let's do just a quick history lesson then. I might have a comment for some of that popular press stuff. I am a lover of some of that as well, just from a scientific standpoint. But if you go back in time to the mid 500s and the mid 1300s, back to back over that span, in about a 50 year span, over the 500s and the 1300s, we had something called Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague. So the first time through it basically wiped out 50 to 70 million people, probably brought down the Byzantine Empire. So many pathogens can do this, especially before all the treatments and vaccines. We have mid 1300s, it was called the Black Death. And if you don't know anything about the plague, it's transmitted by flea bites and rat bites. And so again, when you think about your history lessons, when we kind of came into the New World and people were doing a lot of migration prior to understanding all of this, they were bringing along with them hitchhikers that wiped out Indigenous people.

(21:01):
Many times after that, when you get into the 1600s, we had something called smallpox that showed up. Many people know about that because perhaps your grandparents or parents had the vaccine. We eliminated that actually because humans are the only host and we got most of the world vaccinated. And then in more common times in the 1900s, most people know about the 1918 Influenza pandemic, kind of terrifying. This was during, if you remember, World War I, was from about ’18 to ’22 or so, and really it ended up killing more people than World War I put together. It just spread rapidly through all that troop movement and things like that. And again, we talk about flu a lot in today's world because it's still around. And then beyond that, even more close to maybe the people listening to these podcasts and talks are things like HIV.

(21:52):
That was when I was in high school. I still remembered in the 1980s, really didn't know what it was for a while, very dormant kind of secret, smart bomb type of virus that stayed in our cells and then showed up later, really devastated Sub-Saharan Africa, just wiped out many, many, many people in full families. And most recently of course is COVID-19, which is caused by SARS-CoV-2. That one to date we think has wiped out about 7 million plus. It's probably more as we still kind of understand it, probably the biggest impact when you think about it, the global impact it had on supply chains and distribution and trade routes in our digital world kind of fell apart in some ways, but in some ways it also really helped us. We could go to Zoom, we could go to platforms where we could do education, but still challenging in many ways.

Lane Fortenberry (22:40):
Well, I was going to mention COVID-19 because I mean largely for many generations now, that's the first sort of experience that we've had with a pandemic and shutdown and things. And on the back of COVID-19, I guess, what would you consider to be the most realistic scenario to potentially worry about in the future?

Dr. Rodney Rohde (22:59):
I think the most likely scenario, so I know we've been talking about this with other researchers and faculty about Cordyceps, which is a really popular series right now regarding fungi. That's probably unlikely in reality from a microbiological standpoint because fungi actually grow best at five to about 32 degrees Celsius. Our normal body temperature as humans is 37. So there's already a natural barrier and there's also issues around humidity and some other growth factors. So it's probably unlikely. I'm not saying it had never happened, but probably unlikely. The more likely scenario is what we just experienced, is probably a viral pathogen. Viruses are some of the most, again, remember I'm a credentialed virologist, so I always tell people, because I've worked with rabies and others for many, many years, I think they're the most interesting to study because of what they do biologically and yet the most diabolical to humankind because of their impact on our health and what they can do to massive mortality and things like that.

(23:59):
The most likely scenario. Try to wrap your head around this a little bit. I always tell people I think about something that has really high mortality or lethality, however you want to think about it. So it's something like Ebola that we all kind of heard about in 2014, remember that long time ago, 11 years ago when it showed up in the US. So Ebola kills greater than 70% of its infected host, and it's mainly transmitted bloodborne, so it's actually hard to transmit in reality, when everybody was freaking out in 2014, I was actually in the back of my mind thinking this is actually not really a major issue, even though it is, but it's really difficult to transmit Ebola if you know what you're doing. It's not aerosolized, it's not airborne. So think of Ebola that someone, a rogue actor, a rogue player has changed in a way that now has the transmission rate of a flu or a measles virus, which is airborne.

(24:53):
If one person walks in the room that's infected and hangs around for a little bit and walks out, for about two hours, anywhere from 12 to 18 people can be infected. Super — it's probably the most transmissible virus we know. So now take that lethality of Ebola, you've engineered it to be like measles, and then throw in lastly, the last point would be what's its latency or how long would it be asymptomatic? So even more diabolical is if this virus now became like HIV or chickenpox like a herpes virus, and it kind of laid low in your nervous system for years or months. So you actually wouldn't know as a researcher or a surveillance expert looking at wildlife or people or even ER surge data, there's nothing going on. We're not preparing, we're not thinking because we don't know. And then wham, right? It all kind of smart bombs out. It unfolds over days to weeks and you're just wiping out thousands and thousands of people at a time. That's the scenario. Most physicians, public health specialists like myself and microbiologists worry about because it could happen with viruses. They mutate so often, especially RNA viruses like SARS and flu, Ebola, that potentially it could happen naturally, probably less likely. But if someone is a rogue player and we're using some new biological tools that we have these days that everybody's heard about mRNA technology and CRISPR gene editing, that's the worry. That's the real worry.

Lane Fortenberry (26:18):
So I was wondering what sort of thoughts you had on some of that popular media that deals with this.

Dr. Rodney Rohde (26:23):
I think it makes for great reading. I love to read, and I've been reading for many years, I mean all the way back to Stephen King, he had something called "The Stand," "Contagion" that you mentioned, "12 Monkeys." "I am Legend" and I love Will Smith, but that's a pretty scientifically accurate type of movie. So is "Outbreak," many others including the one we were discussing with Cordyceps. So I think what's interesting is it introduces the world and the population to these apocalyptic scenarios. It also does kind of a nice thing I think for science is that it does help people to maybe understand a little bit around what viral mutations mean, maybe testing. What's difficult for me, and I think people like me and you probably know the answer, is in something like "Outbreak" for example, where they have a monkey that kind of contracts a disease and it jumps to man and it's really fast.

(27:16):
They basically create a vaccine in a week that will, I don't think will ever happen. I mean COVID at its fastest was 10 months and that was amazing because usually it's, gosh, it can be five to seven years to really get it through all the trial testing. So it's an interesting scenario because it does lay out and eerily, you mentioned "Contagion" bat to pig then to human. That's kind of like COVID, right? We think it was probably a zoonotic transfer from animal to man through a mixing vessel like a pig, flu does the same thing. So very, very realistic scenarios.

Lane Fortenberry (27:51):
Well, and that kind of segues to what I wanted to ask you about next is the sort of different ways to handle these things. You talked about sort of vaccine timelines. COVID was 10 months at its quickest, but it normally takes many years to do something like this. And I've watched a lot of documentaries about COVID and how the response to it, how you have to shut things down, mask and everything like that. So what's sort of proper protocol with something that's like airborne or even bloodborne? How did the scientific community look at this and how to stop it quickly?

Dr. Rodney Rohde (28:23):
Yeah, I think so. So much to unpack there. So let's just try to talk a little bit about it and then we can break it down if we want to. Kind of the big picture, the global view, if you're thinking about public health and medicine and healthcare, and this really bleeds into animal health and environmental health. So there's this platform now, this theoretical framework that we call it one health strategies. I'm part of that. I discuss it and talk about it all the time. And the idea is that animal health plus environmental health, like water and air, plus human health equals one health. You really can't attack it from one angle. So my first point about this, and this is a societal and governmental type of thought process, is we have to be prepared and thinking about surveillance and testing in all areas. Animals, humans and water.

(29:11):
That takes a commitment both monetarily and willpower to be honest with you. That's number one, because you don't know what you don't know if you don't have testing on the ground, and we saw this during COVID, we can talk about it a little bit. Some lessons learned. You need massive upscaling of reference labs and way you can do, if not thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of tests to understand where the virus or bacteria is spreading. If you don't have that, you're flying blind. So surveillance is critical. Next up is what do you do when you figure it out? What's the index case? Who has it? Where's it at? Is it a city? Is it a state? Is it a country that requires perhaps some drastic measures that we dealt with? Quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, maybe mask, physical distancing, being smart about how we do education or going into conference meeting rooms with thousands of people we haven't really known well.

(30:02):
All of that played out during COVID. Some of it was successful, some of it was miserable failures. So we got to get better at that in how we prepare the public for those sorts of things. And then the end part is the diagnostics and the preparation of vaccines and treatments. So we can kind of talk a little bit about that. In a regular scenario, you have discovery, then you have phase one, which is early animal trials and things like that. Phase two is small human trials. Phase three is large population trials to see if it is safe to use across all ethnicities, all ages, all genders, what have you. And then ultimately, and maybe the toughest part is regulatory approval. And so during COVID, and I'll say this again and again, I think one of the great things that came out of COVID was how we cut through red tape.

(30:51):
We cut through some of the bureaucracy. Some people might have a disagreement here on safety. I would say that we still met those because of the decades we had with mRNA technology. We've been using it for 20 years. A lot of people think it's been a year or two. It's a long time. And so that was to me, amazing. And in reality probably helped us break the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Again, one fact that I would like to state, no vaccine is 100% going to prevent you from getting an infection. I think the public, this is messaging and transparency issues. We had another lesson we should be saying to people, I say this all the time, no vaccine is a hundred percent going to prevent you. What it is, some might be 90, like measles, mumps and rubella, great vaccine, 97% effective, but most of them are going to, one, prevent you from severe illness.

(31:42):
Two, keep you out of the hospital and ultimately hopefully keep you from dying. You still may get COVID. I've had it twice, but it's been pretty mild. And I know early on, if you've forgotten, lots of people were dying from SARS-CoV-2. I mean here in Texas we had refrigerated trucks in San Antonio, Houston and Austin backing up to hospitals. I mean very scary. I don't forget those things. I was dealing with it as a tester. So it's easy to kind of be critical, and I'm just going to state this from a scientific standpoint, but you really have to understand what a vaccine does, and that's prevention and lowering morbidity and mortality. So I think that's one of the big hallmarks was the mRNA technology and the ability to push that through in less than a year was probably saved. And there are studies out there now with predicting modeling that show we probably saved 600,000 people by using these vaccines really quickly and early on, if not more.

Lane Fortenberry (32:34):
Are there ways that Texas is more vulnerable or better prepared to handle some sort of disease outbreak if it were to happen?

Dr. Rodney Rohde (32:41):
Love this question. This is such a great case study that's happening right here in our backyard. So this started we think in January of 2025. A couple of cases popped up in Gaines County. The stats show that three out of a thousand people die when you have measles outbreaks, hundreds of hospitalizations, massive side effects from an actual measles infection can happen like deafness and encephalitis and some other dangerous things. So it's a dangerous bug, very transmissible as we mentioned earlier. But Texas in some ways does have the opportunity to show how a state or a country can be prepared. Some of the strengths of Texas, remember I worked at the Department of Health for a decade. I still interact with them and the CDC on many, many things. We have great infrastructure, so that's a big advantage. Our ability to have gone through some of these things, even natural disasters like hurricanes over and over again in Texas has helped prepare our National Guard, our military, our public health infrastructure.

(33:37):
We've been through this before. There's nothing better than scenarios that kind of train people to kind of how to act. We also have, in a weird way, in some areas of Texas, we have low populations. So think about a pathogen, how a pathogen thinks. They want people lined up next to each other so they can jump through aerosol or whatever. When you get to West Texas or deep South Texas, there's areas that have no one out there. So that could be an advantage when you're thinking about attacking an outbreak from an actual, what can we do if it slows down as it's going through West Texas, maybe we can get over on the arm or Central Texas and get people vaccinated or start talking about prevention protocols. That time is of essence, if you have just a week or two can be just critical. And then I think the other piece is we have — and Texas State's a big part of this as our incubator up in Round Rock at the campus, our interaction with San Antonio and Austin and Dallas and others in biotech, AI and other tools that are revolutionizing how we prepare for vaccine prep treatment, perhaps like antivirals and just understanding the viruses and the bacteria and the fungi, anything that's out there.

(34:46):
So pretty proud to be a Bobcat and having that kind of effort here along with translational health, which is more of a societal community benefit. So in many ways, Texas is good. Now, those same strengths in a weird way could be vulnerabilities. So because of places like Houston and Dallas and Austin now in San Antonio, huge population centers with massive amounts of people, viruses' playground, right? They can really jump from one person to the other. Our border with Mexico and Latin America could be considered vulnerable. I know we're dealing with that all the time, but migratory patterns and things that we worry about when perhaps you're missing people that have not had vaccines for whatever reason, or they're harboring an agent that's not showing up. This is what we worry about with air travel too. Someone could be incubating, this happened with COVID, you look fine. You're not coughing, you have no fever. Guess what? You're incubating a virus and here you come into San Marcos, Texas after you get off the airplane. So that could be an issue. Those are just some of my thoughts about Texas. And I am a proud Texan. I'm a native Texan, and I do think we have a lot of advantages because of our amazing economic growth and our diversity in our population and expertise. But there is some balance there with some weaknesses as well.

Jeremy Thomas (36:04):
Always interesting to hear Dr. Rodney Rohde just talk about his expertise in biology and virology and just learning about the history of those things and how they've impacted society, especially coming off of the hills of the pandemic for sure. And so it's one of those things that I think people still might have a little PTSD about with the COVID pandemic and whatnot. And so I think it makes a lot of sense how that ties into our culture's slight obsession with these apocalyptic things for sure in our culture, I think. So were you able to talk to anyone about viruses or fungi and stuff and kind of how that has impacted our perception of apocalyptic themes and culture in media?

Lane Fortenberry (36:41):
Yeah, I talked to Dr. David Rodriguez about it. He's a biologist here and he kind of dove into what cord ISPs is, how it affects animals and insects and things like that, not humans, fortunately. And he kind of just talked about some of his research that he's done with amphibians and different fungi and things like that.

Dr. David Rodriguez (37:02):
Yeah, so my name's David Rodriguez. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Biology, and that's in the College of Science and Engineering.

Lane Fortenberry (37:09):
And when did you come to Texas State and what's your sort of research background area of study?

Dr. David Rodriguez (37:13):
Yeah, so I have a long history with Texas State University or Southwest Texas State University. I was a student here. I was an undergraduate and I was also a master's student. But then I went off and did my postdoc work and I came back and I started my professorship in 2015.

Lane Fortenberry (37:26):
So when we think about "The Last of Us," obviously it started because of a sort of deadly fungi called Cordyceps. So one, is it real and two, can this ever affect humans?

Dr. David Rodriguez (37:40):
Well, to answer your first question, yes, it's very real. I've seen it in my research when I go down to Ecuador looking for a fungus that actually infects frogs, I see lots of Cordyceps in the forest infecting moths, spiders and ants, but it's unlikely to actually infect humans. So it has evolved to specifically infect insects and they have a simpler immune system and a simpler nervous system than humans do.

Lane Fortenberry (38:13):
In the show, the globe got warmer, so this caused the Cordyceps to sort of morph and effect more than just insects. So is that sort of a potential to ever happen or is that really unlikely?

Dr. David Rodriguez (38:28):
It's really unlikely. I mean, there are fungi that can infect the human body and they're mostly opportunistic. So 37 degrees C, which is a human body temperature, is perfectly fine for some fungi, but it's unlikely to result in the manifestation of morphological changes that you see in the show or changes in behavior on humans that you see in the show. Again, simply because humans are a bit more complex in terms of their immune system and their nervous system than insects.

Lane Fortenberry (39:01):
And I remember there was a couple of years after the show came out, there was a kind of horrifying video that circulated of, you could see this sort of timelapse video of it sort of infecting an insect. So could you kind of explain what happens, I guess whenever an ant or something like that comes into contact with it?

Dr. David Rodriguez (39:19):
First of all, you got to start with the spore, and the spore comes from this structure called a sporocarp. The sporocarp is where the spores develop, and then those are basically meant to disperse the spores. Well, when a susceptible organism, like another ant comes in contact with a spore, that spore will attach to its exoskeleton and one way or another it's going to create an infection peg that then goes into the inside of the exoskeleton. And once it's inside the exoskeleton, it starts growing this structure called hypha and hypha are these, or hyphae, are little tubes that then start growing and you can think of them as roots, but they're not roots. They're different structures, but they start growing inside of the ant. And the purpose of those structures are basically to get the nutrients from the inside of the ants. So once the fungus starts getting nutrients, then it can support more and more growth. Eventually what ends up happening is that it changes the behavior of the ant through metabolites, through things that it exudes from its cells, and then the ant will go and clasp on to the bottom of a leaf and then it will die. And once it dies, then the fungus runs out of food and then it generates a brand new sporocarp to then develop and release more spores.

Lane Fortenberry (40:46):
So once the sort of host, I guess body dies, then it just continues to spread to other ones.

Dr. David Rodriguez (40:53):
It continues to spread again and again and again. And the purpose of this particular fungus is to basically use the ants or the insects as a propagation mechanism effectively.

Lane Fortenberry (41:06):
So if we can tie back Cordyceps, fungi, things like that, back to Texas, are these located anywhere in Texas? Do you have to find 'em in certain environments? And if not, what other sort of fungi could we expect to run into if we're just out and about?

Dr. David Rodriguez (41:21):
There are Cordyceps species here in North America. They're basically all over the world, but lots of them are maybe in tropical subtropical regions, really, where there's a lot of insect diversity. You're going to find pathogens for insects too. But in Texas, I mean there are lots of types of fungi here, and some of this I discussed in my mycology class, but the fungal kingdom is a huge group with lots of diversity. For instance, I study of fungus that kills frogs, and that's an aquatic fungus that actually swims through the water, which is it's motile, and most people think of fungi as cecil, which means they don't move. But there's all kinds of crazy mushrooms that you can find on campus. In fact, we take students out in ecology in one of the first labs to come look for whatever kind of fungi we can find here at the JCK ponds simply because there's a lot of water and rotting wood and whatnot. You'll find earth stars, you'll find puff balls, you'll find different colored mushrooms all over the place.

Lane Fortenberry (42:28):
It is interesting what you were saying about the version that can swim and it's affecting frogs. Could you talk more about that?

Dr. David Rodriguez (42:34):
The amphibian killing chytrid, its species is Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is a globally dispersed fungus that is, I would call it early diverged. So it's a very basic fungus that has two stages. One is again, a cecil stage within which spores grow and well zoospores because they actually move around and they kind of look like sperm cells is what they look like. And then those will come out of the zoosporangium, and then swim through the water and chemotax or go towards a source of food, and in this case it's the frog skin and they'll insist inside of the frog skin and then develop another zoosporangium within which more zoospores grow. The problem here is that amphibians use their skin to respire. Once you start affecting the capacity of osmoregulation through the skin, then you start affecting the physiology of the frog, and it could lead to susceptibility to predators. They start sloughing their skin a whole bunch. They might get lesions. So some frogs are more susceptible than others, but there are populations that have been completely extricated from the regions that they're found because of this fungus. But it's all over the world. And actually our lab was the first lab to isolate it from the environment from Texas, and it was in Kyle, Texas where we actually isolated it from.

Lane Fortenberry (44:00):
Is there any more expansion that you could do on that particular discovery?

Dr. David Rodriguez (44:04):
Yeah, so we actually published a paper, and it is related to, so the origin of the fungus, there was some debate as to where it came from. I hypothesized that it had come from Brazil because there was more diversity there, but I was wrong. There was another group did a wonderful study that was published in Science that showed that it came out of Asia, so it came out of Asia through probably anthropogenic means. So plant trade, amphibian trade, because people ship amphibians all over the world. So there's probably all kinds of ways that the fungus made it to the Americas, but it basically dispersed from Asia all over the world. And then it encountered susceptible populations like the beautiful atelopus toads from the highlands of the Andes, and lots of those populations were affected and extricated. But then there are other species like bullfrogs, which are native to North America, that have been shipped all over the world and actually are invasive in Brazil, and they carry lots of the fungus and they don't care.

Lane Fortenberry (45:11):
Is that just a freshwater issue or does this problem persist in oceans?

Dr. David Rodriguez (45:16):
Yeah, that's a really good question. So this is a freshwater fungus, so it can't survive in high salinity environments or really in really hot temperatures, even though we actually isolated from Texas. So yeah, it cannot survive in the ocean or in salt water. But there are fungi that infect things like dolphins. Lobomycosis is a fungus that infects dolphins.

Lane Fortenberry (45:42):
So whenever you think of other fungi or maybe there's microorganisms, all these other terms and things like that, is there anything that could potentially pose a threat to humans and sort of cause the end of the world or some sort of apocalypse or is that all sort of just make believe?

Dr. David Rodriguez (45:59):
At this point, It's make believe. There are all kinds of fungi. They've been on the planet for billions of years and we haven't been on the planet that long in terms of evolutionary time. So the fungi that actually infect us are mostly opportunistic. So fungi don't tend to specialize on infecting humans. There are some dermatophyte things that live in the soil that specialize in infecting humans, but that's a very recent evolutionary process. So for now it seems to be very much fiction. But again, on the other hand, there are lots of other fungi like the black fungus that looked at in India when people had COVID, so they became severely immunocompromised and then were susceptible to this fungus, which they're called mucor or mucormycosis of the disease. And this is a very severe disease that infects central nervous system infects basically it's almost like a flesh eating fungus. It's pretty gnarly. The images that come out of that is pretty gnarly. But again, fungi tend to be mostly opportunistic and opportunistic on immunocompromised patients. So unless the world becomes completely immunocompromised, then it's unlikely that fungi will take over and it's very unlikely that they will affect our central nervous systems in a way that they're going to control our behavior. So we're safe for now.

Lane Fortenberry (47:22):
Is it more of a case that we just haven't found it yet?

Dr. David Rodriguez (47:25):
Again, we have to think about evolutionary time and usually when there's a pathogen and a host, there has to be some coevolution there because we haven't been around that long. It's unlikely that there's going to be something that is going to affect us that way. Now there may be some ancient fungal spores trapped in ice that might still be viable. That's the other thing is genetic contact inside of a spore might degrade over time simply because of spontaneous mutations. Again, it's unlikely to cause the massive morphological changes that we see in "The Last of Us." It might cause disease. I mean there might be viruses and other bacteria that will cause major diseases in us, but unlikely in terms of a global pandemic.

Lane Fortenberry (48:13):
For the hopeful part of this segment, it seems like fungi and other things like this are far more beneficial than harmful. So I wonder if you could talk about some of the beneficial factors that they have.

Dr. David Rodriguez (48:24):
Oh, fungi do amazing things for us. Most of us wouldn't be here without fungi. So penicillium species where penicillin came from is responsible for saving millions if not billions of humans from infection. Nowadays you can get a pretty severe cut or any infection and you take antibiotics and you clear the infection. Before penicillin, before these antibiotics, that wasn't the case. If you get a major cut, you might die of infection. That doesn't happen as much as it used to in the past. However, not just medicine, but also when you think about foods, fermented foods are actually really good for humans. You got things like beer, you have things like kimchi, you have cheeses, bread is fermented food and yeast have done amazing things for humans society by changing the water quality or changing water into something that is actually drinkable. So in ancient times, people used to make beer and believe it or not, it would be water that would kill people from organisms that lived in the water would make humans sick.

(49:38):
But if you make beer out of it and you increase the alcohol content, then you kill those organisms. So that's very helpful. That was very helpful to humans in our societal development. Now, in modern times, we use fungi to produce things like insulin. Instead of killing a bunch of animals to extract insulin from their organs, we now can use fungi to produce insulin for people who are diabetic. We can also use them as tiny factories to make tons and tons of important metabolites that people use in industry like citric acid or plant hormones or things like that.

Lane Fortenberry (50:15):
I wonder at Texas State if we're doing any sort of research around surrounding fungi and other things like that, I wonder if you could talk about that for a minute.

Dr. David Rodriguez (50:24):
Not lots of people study fungi. Here at Texas State University there's a few labs and mine is one of them. And so my lab intersects microbiology, genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and also field biology, but specifically herpetology. So we grow the fungus, we study the genetics of the fungus, we study infection patterns between amphibians and chytrid fungus. There's another fungus that causes snake fungal disease that I study also, and that's ophidiomyces. That one particularly causes nasty lesions on snake skin. So we study, again, I focus on fungi that infect reptiles and amphibians, but there's other people on campus that maybe study fungi that infect humans and their metabolism and how we can prevent infections. But one of the issues with studying fungi these days is the lack of scientists that specialize in mycology. So we actually need more students to pursue this field. And whether you're going to go into basic research or whether you're going to go into applied research or industry, having knowledge about how fungi affects us, plants, animals, our crops is really important these days.

Jeremy Thomas (51:45):
Well, that was certainly fascinating to hear. I know this can be a little bit of a scary topic to talk about and it linked, but to be such a kind of nerve-racking and scary topic. I found it to be very interesting to hear everyone kind of explaine why our society is kind of obsessed with these types of themes and culture and media, but also explaining why things get to that point and how we can take the best action to take care of ourselves in a situation like that.

Lane Fortenberry (52:14):
Honestly, no matter how scary it is, it continues to pop up everywhere. I mean, it seems like every couple of weeks there's a new apocalyptic type of movie or a book that comes out, so you kind of can't escape it. And I think everyone consumes it in some variety no matter if they realize it or not. It was great to be able to talk to these three guests about different areas around, surrounding apocalypse, no matter if it's the actual media, what can happen or the medical side of it. So it was a good conversations all around.

Jeremy Thomas (52:42):
Yeah, definitely a great conversation and I'll definitely be keeping this information with me as I go, a little bit of a prepper on the inside. And so I think this information was very helpful for me and hopefully it will be very helpful for everyone that's listening. And so thank you again to everyone that's listening. This again is Enlighten Me, and we will see you all in the next episode.

Rodney Crouther (53:00):
Follow us on the social media platform of your choice at TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State Podcast Network represent the views of the host and guests not of Texas State University.