Okay, we're live. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I'm a very special guest. His name is Bill Shutt. His last name is spelled S-C-H-U-T-T, and he's just published a book September 21st, 2021. Title of the book is Pump, A Natural History of the Heart. Fascinating book. Very accessible. I learned so much reading this book about the functioning of the circulatory system, the heart as well.

If you're watching on YouTube, you can see a cover of the book.

But this is not Mr. Shutt's first book. He has also written Dark Banquet, Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures in 2008,

and also Cannibalism,

a perfectly natural history published 2017.

And that book, Cannibalism was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon and was a Goodreads

Choice Awards finalist.

And Mr. Shutt is a vertebrate zoologist and author and emeritus professor of biology at Long Island University.

And he is now a full-time author who maintains strong ties with the American Museum of Natural History, where he is a research associate in the Department of Maimology.

But he can tell more of the stories that he's included in this book.

So Mr. Shutt, are you there?

Yeah, nice to be here.

Great.

Thanks for agreeing to the interview.

For people who may not have heard your background or some of your other books,

can you talk about your research and what led you to write this book,

Pump, A Natural History of the Heart?

Yeah.

When I went from my PhD at Cornell University, I started there in 1990, and my mentor had a strong interest in bats.

And I'd always been into strange animals and had pets and collected creatures from under rocks and from my entire life. So I think I was a

zoologist from when I was five or six years old. And so his grant money was looking at

horse muscle biochemistry, but his, I think his research love had to do with bats. So it probably

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