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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk posted on

November 18th, 2012. I'm Steve Merski. On this episode,

the single spillover that led to the pandemic, led to the pandemic strain of HIV, was from

one chimp into one human in the southeastern corner of Cameroon back as far as 1908.

That's David Quamman. The New York Times correctly called Quaman, quote, not just among our best science writers,

but among our best writers, period, end quote.

I and many other Quaman fans first met him through his natural acts columns in outside

magazine, which are available in a couple of anthologies.

He went on to write the epic Song of the Dodo Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction.

He also wrote Monster of God about the few animals left that are predators of us.

His latest book is titled Spillover, Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

He was in New York City recently, and we met early in the morning at his

hotel near the World Trade Center site, so you might hear some construction sounds in the background.

Please forgive my hoarse voice as I was getting over a respiratory infection of my own. Also,

the last few minutes of our conversation features some profanity because the book does.

Your last book was about big animals that kill people and eat them.

And this to me is almost like a sequel, although there's the extra factor of the diseases moving from the animals into people.

...