Maren McKenna

Everybody knows the Alba Maria.

Everybody knows the length of an Alba Maria.

So maybe it's take this medicine and wait 20 minutes, and I know how to standardize 20 minutes, which is... Three Ave Marias, four Ave Marias may actually be time travel.

It may appear one way, and it in fact could be a totally different way.

It suggests that in order to time travel, you have to somehow... God, it's like we don't even have the language to be able to understand what they were doing and how effective it was.

There's a phrase, the past is a foreign country.

We need to kind of be a little bit less dismissive and learn a little bit more, you know, stuff from them.

I learned a bit of humility this way.

But here's the reason why this is so confusing to me.

So 1,100 years is a crazy long time for humans.

And for bacteria, that's like an exponentially crazy long time.

So how is it that something that this man, Bald, was doing to these bacteria then, like it's not even the same bacteria.

How could that even work?

That's an awesome question.

So one thing we've got to think about is why did these medicines drop out of use?

And maybe it's because when they were used, the bacteria evolved resistance.

But now, a thousand years later...

When these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

This is something that Maren McKenna mentioned to Soren and I, that sometimes when you take a drug out of circulation... Sometimes resistance will decline.

That doesn't always work, but sometimes resistance does decline.