Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 174. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and do me. Imagine you really want to help children. You want to help children so much that for 20

years you work all day, every day in a windowless concrete room collecting blood and stool and feces from mice. Now imagine you do this every single day, seven days a week and ten years in you wake

up you get out of bed you make some coffee you get ready for work and you think to yourself on the commute. I may never see this

through before I die but today I will get one step closer to defeating this virus.

And then you arrive and you park and you put on your lab coat

and you do it all over again.

You do it the next day and the next day and the next. Dr. Paul Offett did that for 20 years. He spent his days in what they call the Mouse House.

It's this windowless concrete room at the animal facility at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.

It was there he spent his days, 7,300 of them, listening to classical music,

inoculating mice and collecting their bodily fluids,

year after year, day after day, even on the weekends.

I never ever thought of the scientific endeavor as in any sense of sacrifice.

I loved it.

I mean, although it doesn't sound fun probably to most people to go into a

windowless concrete block room and inoculate mice and collect their breast milk

feces and blood. I loved it because you were always had these these questions you were trying to answer here's this

thousand piece puzzle and you're putting in one piece at a time and so I loved it I mean it's and

that's why it was seven days a week I I couldn't wait to get to the lab.

Offit hoped by collecting all this evidence,

he and his team would one day be able to defeat the rotavirus.

Why work so hard to do that?

Because when they started, while he was doing that work, each year, that particular virus infected 4 million children in the United States. And the Rhodovirus is pretty nasty. 70,000 of those kids each

...