Return of the Flesh-Eaters

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- You're listening to radio lab. - And radio. - From NWNYS. - WNYS. - WNYS.

- See you. - Hey, I'm Lattef, this is Radio Lab. And today, I have with me a Sara. - Okay, no echo or anything. - Nope.

- Okay, great. - As in Radio Lab reporter producer Sara Kari, you hear me without a echo? - Oh, yeah, no. You sound great.

- And Sarah's here in the studio. - I have a Sarah. - Hello. - Hi. - Nice to talk to you.

- Sarah's in, who writes for the Atlantic, and is a wildly prolific science journalist. - Oh, thank you. - Like, I feel like you cover COVID. I know you cover autoimmune diseases.

I know you cover a Zempeck. - I'm sort of lucky enough to cover just like whatever I'm interested in. - But we called her up because a while back, she noticed something weird happening to the deer

in the Florida Keys.

“- I don't know if you've know about the key deer.”

They're like really cute. They kind of like, wait at bus stops. And people like to feed them. - Okay. - And so back in 2016.

A very grave situation for this endangered key. - People saw me sort of noticing, with all these like ugly, like, grizzly wounds on these deer. - They being holes or wounds in their neck

or in their head. - Literally, you could see down to the bone. - There was some painful. - It's a very sad side. - So it was kind of like a weird thing happening in Florida.

Sorry. - Yeah. - But volunteers are teaming up to treat affected animal. - When it turned out, was it, there was an infestation of insect called the new world scrollworm.

- New world scrollworm. - The new world scrollworm. - Also known as flesh-eating worm.

- And like I had never heard about scrollworms before.

- Yep. - Yeah, no. - I would imagine most Americans have never heard about scrollworms before. And the reason we don't know about it is because it's been eradicated from our country.

- It's like, why it's like, that's crazy. I've never heard of like an insect being completely eradicated from our country. - And as Sarah started to dig into this, it got even crazier and crazier.

What she found was the kind of amazing story of one of the biggest environmental interventions that humanity has ever undertaken. And the story of this worm,

“this honestly, blank marriage, flesh-eating parasite,”

that despite those efforts is right now today back in the news. We are on screwworm watch, and we are ready. - Forcing public health officials and ranchers and ethicists. - Here we are in the sixth major extinction

that we humans are causing. - To ask, maybe one of the biggest questions that we as beings on this planet can ask. - Would it ever be okay to bring about the extinction of a species?

- Oh boy, yeah. But, I mean, these are about the worst parasite on Earth. I cannot imagine anything worse than these guys. - So one of the first people we called when we got into this whole screwworm thing

was the author Sam Keene. - My name is Sam Keene. I am a science writer. - 'Cause it turns out he, like Sarah, at some point had fallen into the screwworm hole.

- Yeah, I had never heard of them,

and I started Googling, and then I went to Google Images, and I immediately regretted doing that. - And according to Sam, the reason that none of us had ever heard about what he called the worst imaginable parasite on Earth

is because of something that in 1970, the New York Times called the single,

- And it turns out that thought was born in the brain of a man named Edward Nippling. - Edward Nippling.

- So as you know, a lot this, when we first learned about this,

I got obsessed and started doing some digging. - Yeah. - And learned that Nippling has unfortunately passed away, but-- - Dr. Edward F. Nippling, we're happy to be here

in your own today, and thank you for participating in this oral history. - I found this whole trove of interviews that he did back in the day. - If you could start please by telling us

of when and where you were born. - I was born in a part of my contactis, March 20th, 1999. - Nippling grew up on his family farm in Texas, and-- - No, today's farming was a very difficult occupation.

- Honestly, mostly because of the-- - What was I supposed to say after that? - The screw arm. - Oh, mostly because of screw arms. - Yeah, so it was a problem for ranchers.

“Actually, I think this is a quote I remember.”

It was screw arms used to strike fear in the hearts of ranchers, all throughout the southern United States. - Could you just tell me what a screw arm even is? - It is a fly. It has kind of like--

- Why do they call it a worm if it's a fly? - Well, flies are also maggots, right? Like, or flies come from maggots. So the maggot phase is a worm. - Okay, okay.

- So basically what they do is that if you have a little like

making your skin a little wound. - Even something as small as it ticked by it? - These flies would lay their eggs in those wounds. - Roughly 400 eggs at a time. - Oh, my God.

- And then these maggots, essentially, would come out. They kind of look like a small white thread. - They have this kind of horrifying mouth with two sharp teeth and a little ridge on their body that sticks out exactly the way the threads on a screw do.

They would twist themselves down. - Kind of burrow themselves into the flesh, like a screw, and they would eat the flesh. Oh, yeah, it's-- - And they are extremely hard to get out

once they have locked in. - These screw worm would get into the neighborhood calves when they were born or-- - And so back to young Edward Nippling.

- He got probably the worst job on the farm,

which was to pick the screw worms out of the family's house. And that was a very unpleasant task. - I have to try to yank them out of these animals that obviously aren't happy about this. - Is there a tool you use?

“Like, what are you guessing at tweezers or just fingers?”

- Screw driver. You got to use a screwdriver. - That was his job. And it introduced a lifelong hatred of screw worms in his heart, you know, understandably so.

- But at the same time, you know, he has sort of a scientific bent of mind, he's curious. - He was actually kind of fascinated by insects. - Over time, he became a bugner. - Definitely a bugner.

- Even named his cats after insects. - One after a mosquito, and one after a whole week. And Thomas and Q-Lex. - And when he grew up. - He grew up to be an entomologist.

But also, kind of in the back of his mind, he was always thinking, "I have to figure out a way to control screw worm. I want to put a stop to them somehow." - And as it happens.

- The first job I had. - In the late 30s, he got a job at the USDA. As an entomologist, works known as "Fru worm." That was the Bureau of Entomology and Plan quarantine at that time. - And then we'll board two breaks out.

And the military enlist him in developing. - And insect size and repellence for use, buddy, for their own perfect. - He actually ends up helping develop DDT? - Oh, yeah, heard as that one.

- And this is actually sort of part of his journey, which is that he saw insecticides can be really effective, but they can also be really devastating for any of them, right? - So after the war, when he gets back to his screw worm job, he's just thinking about this problem.

Like, how can we figure a way to control insects that this not require spraying lots of poisons? And his way of trying to figure that out is watching screw worms mate. - So washing a lot of insect sex?

- As one does, like, why, why?

“- I think he was just trying to understand these pests, right?”

To think, like, what could we do about it? - And so one day, a colleague of Nipplings is, you know, watching the screw worms have their sexy times, and he makes this observation that sounds like, maybe not that important or not that interesting.

- But that kind of hinted at something, he wasn't quite sure what exactly. - Which is that female's only mate once. - Whether or not they get pregnant, they get one shot to have in our course

and try to have it. - I really feel for these females, like, this is such a high stakes. You have to have the best sex of your life in that one time.

- Yeah, that's it. - But Nippling, he's looking at this and he's like,

Like, if you could just make the male sterile, and then if you could trick the female screw worms into mating with these sterile males, the females aren't gonna lay in the eggs or viable. - That would essentially take those females

out of circulation for reproduction purposes.

- There are one shot would just be doomed to fail, basically.

- Yes, exactly. - So just like somehow flood the zone with sterile males. - Is the idea? - These poor females already had it so hard and now he's just like ruining the dating pool for them.

- It's a little diabolical from the flies perspective, but lucky for these screw worm ladies. - It wasn't like that was a very practical idea. - Because how would you even pull that off?

“- You know, how do you mass sterilize a bunch of insects?”

- But then he finds a paper. - An article, scientific magazine. - Basically since World War II, there's sort of like love interestingly, what can we do with radiation? - Oh, of course, right, yeah.

- And this paper was by a geneticist who was saying that it was possible to sterilize fruit flies and by exposure to x-rays. - And I think he sort of jumped off of this couch and said, oh my God.

(bell ringing)

- Maybe we could sterilize true worm.

- Like this could be the solution to the problem. (bell ringing) - Okay, so what, yeah, what does he do? - Well, so the thing he needs is a bunch of x-ray machines. - But he decides he's not going to go public

and try to get any funding for this. - We knew that if the media got a hold of that, they could make quite a deal out of that. - I mean, remember, he's working for the government, like taxpayer money is at stake here.

What happens if the press gets hold of this and then we're just totally ridiculed for like-- - Wishing money. - Watch it, insects all the time. Not in a weird way.

- Yes, yes. - We were rather cautious about that.

“- So he decides he wants to do this kind of on the download.”

- And basically he gets one of his colleagues to take a bunch of screw worms and sneak them into a nearby military hospital and use the x-ray machines there. - Flush eating worms in a hospital, great.

- Yeah, exactly. - But how does he get the screw worms in? - Unfortunately, we don't have many details about what he did to actually get inside there. I picture no him hanging out at the loading dock at night

and grabbing the door right before it shots or like water gate like taping the lock or something like that and sneak into the hall. I believe that did this at night, too. He had to be kind of clandestine about it, sneak around

a little bit. - And they are literally like, you know, putting these flies through the last few machines and feel like, hey, what happens?

But the problem is shooting a bunch of radiation

out of a bunch of flies is that you create all these mutations of a bunch of random mutations. So you might just kill the fly that's kind of a problem. So they found that they figured out the right dose, but they also figured out exactly when to put them

through radiation.

“It's when the flies testys are developing, right?”

'Cause that's like what you really want to knock out. So that happens to be between 5.5 and 5.7 days. - So it's like they've got it to within hours. - Yes, yes. And when they do that, bingo, it seems to work.

- But, of course, the next thing was would they perform in a natural population? - It's not enough to just do it in a lab. - So then he decides it's time for a real world test and he found an island off Florida.

- On the island of Santa Bale. - Santa Bale Island. - He shows up there with some of the radiated screw worms from his lab, releases them on the island. - And it did not work.

Like the population of screw worms stayed pretty much the same. - The experiment failed. - And Nippling was glad he hadn't said anything or gone after public money. - So, yeah, does he just resigned to his failure?

- So he had to the story, yeah. - No, not the end of the story. - We were kind of stabbing what to do for a year or so. And then I got a letter from a veterinarian on the island of Curacao.

- A Dutch island called Curacao. - Where is Curacao? - Off the coast of Venezuela. - He wrote a letter. - And said, the goats are being ravaged.

I know you study this. Can you help us in any possible way? - And I thought, well, this is just the place that we're looking for. - And this time, Nippling wants to go all out.

- They were not going to take a chance that there would be two few flies. - Like no more handful of flies from his rinky-ding lab. - They're gonna set up an industrial facility

for making these flies. - And like carpet Curacao. - And really overwhelm them with the sterile males to make sure that they were doing everything they could to give this experiment a chance of success.

- So in this factory that they set up. - They came up with a formula for the food that they were going to feed them. - Okay. - And it was ground horse meat.

- That they soaked in blood and they would let they get putrid and then they would douse it with for Meldehyde. - Oh. - Okay.

- So, yeah.

so they knew they could produce a lot of this stuff pretty quickly. - Okay. - Right before Meldehydehyde. I don't know.

- Yeah. - But apparently they just like to from Meldehyde. I don't know if it's just a little extra kick. It's like hot sauce for them. So then from about March 1954,

they are producing 170,000 of these sterile adults per week. - They are feeding them this slurry, though at this point without the formaldehyde. - It took 40 tons of the slurry to get that job done and it was a smashing success.

The population plummeted after they started releasing these flies. His big idea had worked. - Back in the United States. - One of the last stock people is special. - Ranchers catch hold of this.

- Yeah, they came to us. - And they're like, wait, we really want this. - Eventually the clamor from ranchers got so big.

“Nippling decided, well, I think the time is right.”

- To try rolling out his grooms strategy in the US. And so armed with some funding from the USDA. - This new technique for insect control is eliminating screwworms.

- The first big push started in about 1957.

- In Florida. - And after about two years of dedicated work, they had eliminated them. - Not just in Florida, but everywhere. - East of the Mississippi.

- That is huge. - And then it kinda keeps going west. The Texas cattlemen's association hears about it. I mean, it was a Texas-sized problem that they had. - They wanted to, so Nippling and his team,

ended up building a really big factory in Texas. - Scouram eradication headquarters at Mission Texas. Here millions of scouram flies are being really each day. - All these like metal machines. Sarah told us about a similar factory

she went to in her report and many different rooms. Sort of like all at different temperatures, different humidities for each piece of a lifecycle. - I could not have imagined it smelled good.

“- I'm sorry to say this, but what it reminded me of”

was a smell of a used tampon. - Okay, it makes sense. - Blood that's kinda a little bit bad maybe. From these factories, they start releasing flies multiple times a week. - So how do they do that?

- By airplane. - These planes are being loaded with several male screwworm flies in Mission Texas.

- Basically, they were flying through soil like prop planes

and release these flies in the air. - They took them up in refrigerated boxes. They had to buy essentially cases of perfume and cologne and dump them on the boxes before the appliance would allow them in the airpoints.

And then they would essentially open the hatch and just dump them out and let them fall down. - Oh wow. - And at this point. - The nippling strategy is working so well.

Screwworms are disappearing from all of the southwest. - They started marching their way down to the border, pushing it down, pushing it down, pushing it down. - Eventually, people were like, "Well, scurams obviously don't respect national borders."

- If we're really going to deal with this true worm problem, then we would have to enlarge a program. - What if we just cut going? - This operation can now expand into Mexico. - You know, get them out of Mexico.

Then we go down country by country through Central America. That is so much ground to cover. - Yep. - And so all through the 70s, 80s, 90s, all these kind of international agreements.

- Frankly, this was a tough sell in some places because the US has a history of meddling in Central America. - Right. - Especially in this time. But despite that, and despite political turmoil, - Revolution's and coos and things like that.

- The discussed over screwworms was enough. - That all seven countries in Central America came to the table. - And they started marching down, you know, dozen miles at a time or so,

just working down year by year, all the way down to the border between Panama and Colombia. - In 2006, all of North America is declared screwworm free. - Wow.

- And that so-called single most original thought in the 20th century changes the face of the entire continent. - Amazing. - And to this day, at the time I was reporting it like, there's still a factory in Panama.

It's still producing millions of scoorms, growing millions of scoorms every day.

“Flying a plane, I think it was three times a week.”

And maintaining this, like, basically this, would they call it like a sterile insect barrier? - The idea is that that area where Panama meets Colombia, the Durian Gap, which I think it's been the news a lot for other reasons.

- That's like the most dangerous area for migrants, right? - Exactly. - But it's also one of the nearest parts of the Americas. The only about 60 miles wide. - Okay, so it's like a natural choke point.

- Right. And because of that, maintaining that sterile screwworm barrier

only costs $15 million per year,

which is a pretty reasonable price compared to the huge cost if screwworms were just kind of running wild. - Yeah, so when I was praying on this back in 2020, the money saved was estimated to be over $1 billion a year, so a billion other saved compared to $15 million cost.

- Wow, so that's pretty good return. - And obviously it was more expensive

but the maintenance cost knew.

“It's really not that much money for a government program.”

And it's just a little kind of an example of how

when with basic science, you don't always know exactly

where it will go, but in this case, it ended up creating this continent-wide multinational collaboration that has been going on for decades and decades. And the fact that this all kind of started with someone like watching screwworms meet in the lab

and having a Tiffany is kind of remarkable. - Now, there have been a couple of small outbreaks here and there over the years, including the Florida one, - The deer, right? - The 2016 one. - Yeah.

- But they've all gotten tamed down pretty easily. Like it didn't take all that much to beat those back. But when we come back from break, all kinds of things are gonna break loose. News, biological barriers,

and maybe also, let this heart. - Hey, Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by Better Help. It is March in like a lion, out like a lamb

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This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, the author of the anxious generation. If we all say that social media is addictive, then why are children allowed to use it? You ever notice on an iPhone,

you want to check your email, you pull down,

“and then it kind of bounces up and you get new ones?”

- Yeah. - That was literally copied from slot machines. Johnathan Height joins me next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcast.

- This is Radio Lab. I'm Latte Fnasser here with Producer Sara Kari. - Hello. - And we've been talking to journalist Sarah Zeng and writer Sam Keene about

screw-ups. - Right. The skin-crawly flesh-heating parasite that we all forgot about because nippling and hysteral flies drove it down south.

- All the way to a biological demilitarized zone at the very bottom of North America, aka the southern border of Panama. - Yeah. - But in 2023,

- I went up the NAMOS, oh nah, well, but we're not there. - Panama suddenly started seeing - A massive spike in screw-room cases from like 25 cases a year to like thousands. - And since then,

- It's only gotten worse. - The parasitic fly is moving north of it. - They have been steadily marching north. - They've been found in Costa Rica. - Nicaraguan.

- Honduras. - El Salvador, Guatemala. - They're even in Mexico. - Only 700 miles from the U.S. border.

And it turns out, it's basically getting closer every day.

- Less than 400 miles, 300 miles from Texas and the southern border. - It's gotten as close as 70 miles or so from the U.S. border. - Whoa.

- This is an ongoing breaking news story. - So what happened? Like, how did they get past the biological wall? - There are a couple of theories. - One theory is that maybe the strain of scrim

that they were growing at the factory was not as effective anymore. I don't know, maybe the ladies out there caught onto what was going on and weren't meeting with them or something. - Yeah, just general disruptions due to COVID,

might have weakened the production a little bit. Or maybe Sam says, given that we live in a more and more interconnected world 'cause it does still exist in South America, where people and products and animals

are moving from place to place. It was just a matter of time before these worms found their way through. The best guess is that people were smuggling cattle that were infected and then it just got out.

But regardless, as of today, right now, the screw worm,

- It's not a matter of if the deadly pest gets to the US

but when.

“- And surprisingly enough, in this time of cuts to science”

funding and all that and the idea of building political will around something that everyone has pretty much forgotten seems dubious, the issue has also alarmed Washington. It actually does seem like the US government is paying attention.

The US Department of Agriculture has snapped into action. - And really, just like Mimpling's time, pretty much because of the cattle industry. - Millions of dollars of losses a year. - Of course.

- It could truly crush the cattle industry as well as other livestock industry in Texas. - So the USDA has started to set up screw worm traps along the US Mexico border. - Cut down the southern border.

- They have agents on horseback. - These are so-called tick riders. Patrolling the border for stray cows. They are pouring money into screw worm research. And of course, they are rebuilding Nippling's fly factories.

- They are now building a new facility down in Texas. - Another one in Mexico. - All told probably in the next couple of years, we will be producing and releasing something

like 500 million flies per week.

- Wow. - And we probably will have spent like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. - Do you see this as like the modern cow factory farm system is like unsustainable?

And like this is just like one other band aid to keep that system financially profitable. Like I could see an argument that's like, oh, this is just to help like big rancher businesses.

“- Yeah, well, I think in a literal sense,”

this program was created to help ranchers. That is in fact the express purpose of the USDA. So I think I wouldn't even argue with that premise. But this does affect wild animals too. - Right.

- In Central America, like used to see like howl or monkeys fall out of trees because they had become so this bigger than sick from getting infected by schoolworms. - And beyond that, I mean, actually this time around

with this effort, it's not just the USDA that's involved in this program. So I'll try and make the case on the human side of things. Number one. So I talked to this public health official named Megan Nichols,

who is at the CDC and my current role is incident manager for our new World Screwworm response. Because the CDC is worried about this outbreak too. And the thing that Megan pointed out is that these flies like to infest a wound.

I mean, you know, wildlife or cows aside, screwworms will happily lay their eggs in pretty much any warm-blooded animal, including humans. And it can be a pretty small wound,

“like as small as a little cut or a bite on the skin.”

- I read that they can also get in through just like bodily openings. Is that true? - It is true. They are often attracted to mucus membranes.

So eyes, nose, ears, your genital. - Oh. - Yeah, so yes. And during this outbreak, there have been over 1,000 human cases

and the number continues to grow daily. And to be fair, you know, like not to fear longer here. This is not a pandemic level human health crisis. Most people that take precautions will be totally fine, but I also think very much about this on an individual level.

And the kinds of individuals that would be the most susceptible to a serious screwworm infestation, like folks who can't get medical help right away or people who are unhoused or have weakened immune systems or even like kids with a lot of scrapes.

They're the last ones that need to deal with something like this. And on the off chance that it does happen, it is kind of a horror show. - One of the most impactful images

that I have seen related to 2025 was patients that were lining the hallway of a medical treatment facility in a country that is currently part of this outbreak.

And the patient was holding a bowl in which they were basically

sneezing out and pushing out larvae from their nasal passage. - And other people who were lining this hallway basically waiting to be seen because they were also needing to get the maggots out of their body. - Oh my gosh.

- Okay, all right, I now I see the point that this is more than just the cattle industry. - Yeah. - But I do now wonder if it's just gonna keep coming back. Like is this just an inevitable cycle

that we're now stuck in? Like we're just gonna have to keep doing this? - Yeah, you kind of are on a treadmill. You're on a treadmill. - Yeah.

- You're using Nippling's technique, yeah. - Yeah. - But I did, as I was reporting on this, come across a different way that people are starting

- So another option that is controversial,

“but scientists have been talking about it.”

- This is something that Sam mentioned too. - It's something called a gene drive. - Okay, so what is that? It kind of goes around the normal, Mendelian laws of genetics.

- Okay, so first of all, let's assume that you are a scientist

that has modern-day genetic technologies available to you and you introduce a killing gene into the screw-worm population. - You could make it lethal to be a female, though it could trigger something where females just don't get out of the egg stage.

- It's like a little time bomb in the cell. - Yeah, exactly. And typically if you were to try to do that, genetics would work its normal way and that killing gene would only get inherited

50% of the time and in every successive generation, it would become less and less common and you'd have to keep receding that gene into the population. - Okay. - But this is where gene drives have a little extra trick.

- In a gene drive, there's closer to 100% chance that the gene will get passed down. You can basically ensure that it'll get passed down every time. And so it's kind of like a set it

and forget a kind of thing.

Like you introduce the killing gene and then you just let it have its way with the screw-worm population. - The screw-worms are gonna be out there reproducing and spreading that gene by themselves very quickly.

- And what that really means is eventually-- - It's gonna wipe them out. - Not just beating screw-worms back down to Panama, but like truly and wholly eradicating screw-worms. - Extincting.

- Off of extincting them off the face of the planet forever. - I just, well, like, I don't want us to have to live with these, but I don't want us to kill them forever. That feels wrong. That feels like we're doing something

untake-backable that is not that we should not be doing. - Yeah. - Yeah, so let me bring in one more person here. - So I'm Greg Cape Nick. I am a research scholar and the Hastings Center.

“- Because I think he feels a lot of the same way.”

- I mean, here we are in the early stages of the sixth major extinction. One that we humans are causing. And I mean, in a way, this seems like gosh, joining forces with the other side in some way.

- Yes, yes, exactly. - Well, but at the same time, Gregory has seen this potential use of gene drives coming on the horizon and really wanted to think about it more. So what he decided to do is get together a panel.

- I thought, and I'll turn to some environmental ethicists. - Ecologists. - Conservation biologists. - Geneticists, entomologists. - Some people with public health background.

- No one from the Texas cattle ranchers association. - We already know what they think. - I thought it would be particularly interesting to bring together people who would be a by-and-large kind of predisposed to want not

to take out species. - So we gathered at Arizona State. - In May, 2024. - For a day and a half of presentations and discussion. - They considered a couple of the top nasty species.

- Like the mosquito species that is the main vector of malaria. - And one of them was screw worms. - Yes. - So the idea was to hash out some of the pros and cons

for either side, you know, keep eliminate and sort of report out our findings. - And given the group of people that were sitting at the table, they started out with some of the arguments that you might expect.

- We need to think about the value of species. - Yeah, what do you mean when you say that? - Yeah, I mean there'd be a different ways in which a species could be valuable.

- Like first off, there's some very practical

ecological considerations. - I mean, the main question is, what's it doing in the wild? - Is it a pollinator? Turns out, screw worm is something of a pollinator, but-- - He said?

- Yeah, it is. - Oh my gosh. - Yeah. But it's probably not a very important pollinator. - Okay.

- There'll be a lot. - Please do a better. - Yeah, the bees probably win.

“- Then you have to consider whether some other animal”

needs to eat it. - Probably sometimes. - But turns out it's not really a key food source for any other animal. - Is it, does it play an important role

as a predator and keeping other species in check? - I mean, obviously in this case, yes, it is a predator, but according to Gregory, the animals it eats-- - Are already under pressure from human forces. So if anything, you want to eat the burden

as much as you can on those species. - Okay, but they did also consider some more abstract values that a species might have. - You know, aesthetic. - aesthetic.

- Educational, historical, scientific. I think that's the list. - Or maybe we put in terms of screwworms. - Yeah, in my mind, I was thinking about it like,

and you opened it up to all your colleagues,

and then sitting there was a giant screwworm who was going to make the case to save itself. Yeah, like what's the best case that that screwworm would win? (laughing) - That's thard case.

(laughing) - aesthetic, clearly. - Yeah, of course. - Educational, like, don't mess with nature kids. - You know, jokes aside, though.

- I mean, Gregory says, you know, people like him do actually put a lot of stock in the sort of intrinsic value of a species. - It's this ingenious development in and of its own right. - You know, anything that's around today

has been honed by millennia of evolution,

and in that way, every species is--

- A marker of the creative natural forces that sustain life that brought us into being.

“I mean, I feel like you have to try to put it”

in a practically poetic way in order to really convey what people are thinking. - So Gregory's group, after about a day and a half, of discussing all of this-- - We're all kind of exhausted, and we're trying to like,

put it all together. - And Gregory says, okay, we're gonna go around the room one by one. Sort of put everyone on the spot and see what they thought. And we did so.

And by the time we'd gone around, everyone, most people had, I think, maybe everyone had actually said, yeah, screw or look like a pretty good candidate. - Really? Like, that it would be okay to wipe this species

off the planet forever. - Yeah. - How did that feel, is that awkward? - Well, I mean, it was just like,

“it was kind of like this serious moment.”

It was, everyone was sort of signed. I was like, oh, I really don't wanna, I really don't wanna vote for this, but it looks like maybe the case can sometimes be strong enough.

But isn't there sort of like, I mean, this just feels like,

you know, an idea that always comes out with ecosystems.

Like, we think we know, and then we don't. Like, there's always the knock-on effects that we never see coming and we thought we knew everything, but then it surprises us, but there it is. Like, does it not feel like hubris

to assume that we know everything that could potentially go wrong? - Yeah, but we did, in fact, at least up until very recently, get rid of screwworm in Southern North America and throughout Central America.

And, you know, the sky didn't fall. Other species didn't wing out because they weren't able to eat new world screwworm anymore. So we have a little bit of a kind of preliminary-- - Like, experimental data.

- Yeah, kind of, like, that suggests that it's probably not really that important ecologically. - So losing it, you know, doesn't seem to do any harm and then, on the other side-- - Part of what was so persuasive about it was that

the death that it causes is exquisitely awful. - I mean, with screwworms, did you guys consider alternatives to eradication? - Like, if there were some other kind of treatment for some sort of medicine that you could take?

- Gregor says, if it was possible to separate screwworms from the thing that they do or like the disease that they cause of, you know, flesh being eaten. And if you could attack that disease, then great, you know? Like, that's sort of the case with malaria and mosquitoes

where you can, you can attack the disease or in that case, the parasite rather than the mosquito. But with screwworms, there's just no way to do that. Like, the eating flesh is in their nature. It's what they do.

There's just no way to make them like vegetarians or make them uninterested and flesh.

“- The only way you get rid of the disease”

is by getting rid of the fly. At least at the time that we were meeting and writing, there was nothing else to do except pick it out if you can. Aluminate the flies. (gentle music)

I don't know. I don't know. I want to agree with him, but I just, I don't know if that wins the day for me. Like, I don't disagree, but I just can't bring myself to agree.

- No, this is, you know, this is the part of the story where I feel like I agree with you. I, I don't know. I don't know what to do with the fact that I don't want screwworms to exist.

we just stopped at Panama.

“I don't know, I don't want them to have to deal with screwworms”

and suffer. And, but at the same time, this, this stuff gets scary. I guess one thing I will say though, that Gregory did mention is that if we go down this path, theoretically there is sort of an undo button here.

- You can definitely keep it somewhere else in a facility or, you know, frozen eggs or something. And if it were to turn out that, like the cure for cancer was in the screwworm eggs or really vital to the life cycle of this frog species in South America

or something like that. - Some ecological group Goldberg machine got set off because we got rid of all the screwworms. - Yeah.

- It would be possible to achieve something like the extinction

with screwworm. We bring it back to see it, fling it out of the plains the way we're flinging out of the sterile one. - Yeah, and what we know from the outbreak in Central America now is that they can take off pretty well.

- Imagine the public campaign where it would be like,

“"Hey everybody, remember how we remember how we--”

- Remember how they used to exist. - There's this one frog in Panama that this was really helpful for. So we're just going to drop these flesh-heating worms. We're just going to rain them down over you and your home."

- Yeah. - So one last thing before we go, back in 2016,

Edward Nippling and his screwworm research

won a Golden Goose Award. If you haven't heard of it before, the Golden Goose Award goes to US government-funded science that sounds ridiculous but ends up changing the world and Nippling's research was exactly that.

Even years after it proved useful, members of Congress still ridiculed and scapegoated it. - For a list of poor projects such as the screwworm research, 35 million dollars. - As an example of government waste.

“- Even though the screwworm has been eradicated”

in the United States. - This is now the fourth Golden Goose inspired story that we have done. - Nice. - We did want about Cohen Snails called Golden Goose, a bacterium called the Age of Aquaticis,

and one recently about honeybees called Time Is Honey. And now this one, it's almost become like a sneaky little recurring series that if you ever meet someone who doesn't believe that the government should fund basic science, just play them one of these.

We'll link them all in the episode description. - This episode was reported and produced by me, Sarah Curry with Reporting Help from Lothafnasser. Our fact-checker was Emily Krieger. Check out Sam Keene's podcast, "The Disappearing Spoon,"

his episode about screwworms is linked in our episode description. Sam goes for Sarah Zang's latest story in the Atlantic. And if you were interested in hearing more about jean drives, check out our episode about it. The last 10 minutes of our CRISPR update.

- Thank you to James Peacol and Max Scott, Amy Mariao, Daniel Griffin, Phil Kaufman, Katie Barnhill, Arthur Kaplan, Ron Sandler, Yasha Rower, and our gaggle of friends at Triple A S who administer the Golden Goose Award, Aaron C. Swindle and Bogart Valreus Abotte,

Meredith Asbrey, and Joanne Petron, Karny. - And the last last thing, if you want more information on screwworm invested in areas, or how you can take precautions to be safe, there is a website you can check out, it is screwworm.gov. - That's screwworm.gov.

Um, sorry, I guess it's time for us to just screw off in this. - And we'll catch you next week. - All right. (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Gabby, I'm from San Francisco,

and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lula Miller and Lettif Nasser. Soron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters.

Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu, Nina Sumbandon, Matt Kielty, Mona McGawker, Annie MacQun, Alex Nason, Sarah Carrie, Rebecca Rand,

Anise Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semi. Leadership support for Radio Lab's Science Programming

is provided by the Simon's Foundation

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