Wait, you're listening.

Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See? Yeah. Come on. You guys came saying we want to talk to you about three. Okay. Okay. Let's do it. Let's do that. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. We're going to do something that's a little bit unorthodox today, at least for us. You know, if you've listened to the show in the last 10 years or so, however long we've been doing this. You understand that like, we like to edit, right?

We like a good edit. Or 70. But today I want to play you something that has almost no edits at all.

It's just a conversation, which is, of course, the foundation of what we do, these long, rambling, occasionally profane, error-strewn conversations that we then edit into something coherent.

But today, I want to show you the messiness. No edits!

This is a chunk of a conversation with science writer Carl Zimmer.

He came and sat down with us a while back, and we talked for four hours. Two of those hours became the basis for the CRISPR podcast. That was a few podcasts ago. This was about gene editing.

But then we kept on going for another two hours, and he told us this story, actually two stories,

but we're only going to play one, that I thought was really cool.

And it's about this new way of looking at life.

Is this a long story, a medium story, or a short story? No, we can get through this a lot faster than CRISPR.

Okay.

I really like CRISPR, by the way.

So do I.

I mean, Chrisper is, yeah, it's the bomb.

Yeah, that's a very perfect way to describe it.

Biological bomb.

Okay, so chapter two.

Maybe you could start the story, once upon a time.

Sure.

So once upon a time being, I'd say once upon a time being before 2003.

Okay.

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