Welcome to another edition of Cool Stuff Ride Home.

My name's Marcus Paff.

Coming up on today's episode, what if I told you there were people out there who were immune to all viruses?

I had to read it to believe it as well.

We've got that story and what it might mean for you, me, and the rest of humanity.

Plus, toothpaste made

from human hair. Yeah, it sounds gross, but we'll give you the potential benefits coming up. Plus

enhanced earthquake warnings coming to Alaska in the near future. Details coming up on this

edition of cool stuff. Turning back to our friends at Z M.E. Science and author TB Pooey. 15 years ago,

immunologist Ducen Bogginovich stumbled across a handful of patients whose bodies played by

different rules. They carried a rare genetic mutation that disabled an immune regulator called

ISG-15. The immediate downside is that they

were more vulnerable to some bacterial infections. But the upside was astonishing. They seemed to be

immune to every virus doctors threw at them. These people never got a cold, the flu, COVID, measles, chicken pox, you name it.

And upon closer inspection, even though these viruses didn't make these people carrying the

mutation ill, they left fingerprints in their blood. Boggidovich, now a professor at Columbia

University, soon realized that if nature had, by accident, given

these patients an all-purpose viral shield, perhaps science could learn to copy it.

In a new study, Bogdanovich and colleagues have set out to turn this rare genetic accident

into a universal antiviral, a treatment that could, in theory anyway, protect against almost any virus,

even those we've never seen before.

Now, when people with ISG-15 deficiency, the immune system runs a kind of constant low-grade alarm,

...