- If you were Jasmine in the movie Aladdin,
would you trust this guy?
- Is it safe?
- Sure, do you trust me?
- What?
- Do you trust me?
- Trust can be a delicate matter,
including when it relates to science, medicine
and riding magic carpets.
It has to be built, gained and kept.
But that's not an impossible task.
Let's meet two women who have worked really hard
to build trust with other people
and have made major changes
in their own communities in the process.
The first is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
She managed to convince people
living in England in the 1700s,
to inject themselves with a scab.
Yap, to inoculate against smallpox.
The second woman is a scientist and TV producer,
and among her million accomplishments
is that she's best friends with elephants.
Meet elephant whisperer, Paula Kahumbu.
Okay, let's dive right into Lady Mary's story.
Time machine, take us to 1716, Constantinople,
otherwise known as modern day Istanbul in Turkey.
(upbeat music)
- In 1716, Lady Mary, her husband,
England's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,
and her son, moved to Constantinople,
probably to enjoy amazing baklava and borek
and the company of brilliant Turkish ladies
who had surprisingly flawless skin, not ravaged by smallpox.
Unlike its name, smallpox is no small matter.
It's a bunch of rashes and sores and blisters
all over your skin.
It's accompanied with fever and it could be pretty deadly.
Like it killed about three
out of every 10 people who got it.
And for those who didn't die,
they were left with horrible scars,
and some were even blinded.
Luckily, it's not a thing we have to deal with anymore
because vaccination. Yay!
But hey, no spoilers.
At some point, Mary found herself
in the middle of smallpox parties.
Basically, parties where someone from the community
takes a wound scab, that is dried smallpox blisters scabs
from someone sick, with a mild case of smallpox,
makes a cut on healthy people, including kids,
and then add some of the scab into it.
Then, they just wait to recover
from a mild case of smallpox.
The idea is that hopefully,
the kids are less likely to get it again.
And this whole process is called inoculation.
Note, please don't try this at home, especially with COVID.
Infecting yourself, or others with COVID intentionally
is extremely dangerous.
Now, Mary was not only fascinated by this technique,
but she also noticed that smallpox was far less extreme
in the Ottoman Empire than it was back in England.
This was especially important to Mary,
because some years before,
she had lost her brother to smallpox,
and not long after that,
Mary herself had become ill with smallpox,
which left her with visible scars on her face.
Eradicating smallpox for Mary was personal.
Before leaving for England,
Mary ran to the British embassy surgeon,
and asked him to inoculate her babe
under the observation of a wise Turkish lady
who knew how this whole inoculation thing works.
And thus, the babe was inoculated.
That's how the Brits said child, babe.
When Mary went back to England, she said,
"Hey everyone, I found a way to protect our children.
Thanks to brilliant Turkish ladies,
just take the scab and inject it into your babes."
And people and some other doctors were like,
"Um, ew. No thank you."
Which kinda made sense,
'cause why would they trust the rando saying,
please inject grossness to your children.
So Mary had to go
to her super popular high society friend, Caroline,
Princess of Wales, the future queen of Great Britain,
the Vogue magazine cover of her time, if you will.
And Mary said, "Listen, Carrie,
can you maybe infect your babes with this scab
in the name of science
and let everyone know about it, please?"
And Princess Caroline said, "Girl, Mary, my muffin, sis,
honey, anything for you.
But I'm kind of a science nerd,
so I think we need to arrange for some science trials
to make sure this thing you say actually works."
So Caroline got the royal surgeon to run some trials.
He inoculated a few prisoners,
for the promise of earning their freedom.
And then he ran some more trials on orphan children
and had doctors watch them
to make sure the inoculation was safe.
Okay, pause, honest chat.
I was supposed to talk here about medical ethics.
Did the prisoners know what to expect after the inoculation?
How about the orphan children?
What if they inoculation would have gone wrong?
I started looking into medical experimentations,
especially those done on children, orphan children,
Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other people of color,
medical experimentations done by the Nazis on Jewish
and other people during the Holocaust
and horrible things
happening to ethnic and religious communities
all just for seeming different.
It's a horrible place to go to.
But hey, that's also the history of science.
Yes, today US hospitals and researchers
have rules in place to make sure
that medical procedures are as safe as possible.
And yes, when there are experiments that involve any risks,
people are supposed to be fully informed about those risks.
But we also have to remember the harmful things
that the science community has done.
Those things don't just vanish
and we still see them different versions
of them happening today.
We have to remember the past
and understand why different communities
might find certain practices dishonest and uncaring,
and then work really hard to try to rebuild that trust
by demonstrating real integrity and transparency.
Okay, back to the smallpox story.
After Princess Caroline felt safe inoculating her babes,
more royalty followed in her footsteps,
and more people were like,
"If cool kid Caroline inoculates her own babes,
we will do it too."
You see, now that the royalty was inoculating their babes,
the public felt more comfortable
trusting the practice of scab injection.
Of those who got inoculated against smallpox,
only about 2% died, compared to about 30%
who died after contracting smallpox naturally.
What Mary did was immensely important, she brought back
the knowledge of Turkish practices back to England,
but education and access to information on their own
are not necessarily enough to change behavior.
Without a trusted source like Caroline,
much of England would have suffered the same fate as Mary
or worse yet, her brother.
Well, if there's one thing we have learned from Aladdin
is that you could still lie and get the girl.
Okay, no obviously trust is very important,
if you lie to people,
then you have to work really hard to rebuild that trust,
and sometimes you have to do
some really extraordinary things.
So we have to get people to trust us.
We have to be honest
and tell them what our real intentions are.
And that brings me to science communication superstar,
elephant expert, Paula Kahumbu.
- I am from Kenya.
I run a conservation organization
called Wildlife Direct,
and we produce a television series called Wildlife Warriors
to help educate, inspire,
and just bring the wonder of nature into the homes of people
all across Kenya and in fact, Africa.
- We will get back to the trust story in a second,
but first, let's learn about an
unlikely friendship, that inspired Paula
to protect the forest and its inhabitants.
- After finishing my PhD at Princeton,
I continued teaching undergraduate courses
and I would take the students all over the country,
Amboseli, being one of my favorite places.
You have the backdrop of this majestic mountain,
Mount Kilimanjaro, and these elephants
that are kind of tame, they're really calm and relaxed
and they're everywhere, and you can get quite close to them.
And one day, while I was with my students,
we were watching the mountain just enjoying this afternoon,
and this monumental elephant came into the scene.
He was an elephant I'd never seen before,
just magnificent, huge tusks right down to the ground.
And I took photographs of him,
and went to the elephant research center
and they told me, "Oh, that's Tim."
- Later, Paula and her team
managed to put a radio collar on Tim
so that they could know where he was going.
You see Tim was really into going to neighboring villages
and steal food from the farms, so by having the radio collar
the researchers would know
if it was going near any of those villages,
it could help dissuade him.
- I could always find Tim,
and he'd often be standing underneath acacia trees.
And if I called his name, he would often,
walk up to my car, just stand there,
towering over me and just looking at me.
He had this sense of full awareness of who I was.
He was unbelievable.
- Tim would just fall asleep around Paula, you know chill,
just fetch the ball and do back flips.
Wait, uh. Yep, no. No fetching involved? follows doc, okay.
Nope. That was Paula's dog? Okay.
- Tim and his entire family of elephants fell asleep
in front of me and my crew.
Eight elephants lying down,
snoring for an hour in front of us.
- Could it be that the elephants
recognized Paula's good intentions and trusted her? Maybe.
Tim died of natural causes in 2020.
But his memory lives on
in the hearts and minds of those who loved him.
- But I wanted Kenyans and people around the world
to know this magnificent elephant called Tim
and perhaps his story about being this naughty elephant,
who wanders across the landscape,
interacts with people. You know, he's relatable.
- In 2013, Wildlife Direct
launched Hands Off Our Elephants,
a conservation campaign
aimed at ending the poaching crisis in Kenya.
Since then, elephant and rhino poaching in Kenya,
has dropped by 80 and 90% respectively.
That's awesome.
But there's something deeper going on.
- We have separated ourselves from nature.
We see ourselves differently,
but when we reconnect and develop that trust,
we can experience something that is truly unimaginable,
magical, inexplicable,
something that is worth more than any amount of money
you could possibly pay.
- Paula gained Tim's trust by truly caring for him.
And there's a lot of ways
we can show people that we care for them.
We do that all the time with our friends,
by being there when they need us,
by being honest with them
and show them what's really in our hearts,
and by listening to their long, long, long stories.
As a communicator, building trust
is at the heart of every interaction every day.
So when Paula approached the Maasai people
for an episode of her program, Wildlife Warriors,
she knew she needed to their trust.
The Maasai are Kenyan tribe who've been protecting nature,
and as a result, the elephants.
But you know, no one really likes
to let a rando in their house
and then spill their guts in front of them.
You need to really trust them.
But Paula is anything but a rando,
she's like the opposite of a rando.
She's more like a randon't.
- Down near the Maasai Mara, just to the east,
there's a mountain range, called the Loiter Hills.
These hills are cloaked in this beautiful rain forest
and the people who live in that area,
call themselves the Loita Maasai.
And they have a very, very strong
and ancient tradition and culture of defending forests.
They have spiritual elders called the Laibon.
They're not very old, but they just have this sense calm.
You can't actually tell how old they are.
They smile a lot, they're very relaxed
and they wear traditional clothes.
They seem to like look right through you.
It's a very, very strange and amazing experience.
It never occurred to me how important it was
that people really felt my intentions.
I always thought, it's on my CV, here are my credentials.
So when I went to see them, I was trying to explain to them,
"I've come to make this film."
And they just looked at me and they said, "We know.
We've already accepted you.
We already know that you've come here with good intentions."
They could see it in my eyes, in my body language,
they could hear it in my voice,
they could see it in the way I interact with other people.
It was very important.
Trust is really important, that it's backed up by integrity
and that what we say is what we're thinking,
what we're doing, they're all aligned.
And that people know that if I say something,
it's what I'm going to do.
What I'm doing is what I promised I would do.
- Paula has credibility. She's the expert.
She shows care by listening to other people,
and she shares her worthy intentions with them.
She also shows integrity
by telling people what is important to her
and she behaves accordingly.
She builds trust.
And with the Maasai's trust,
Paula got to learn a lot about how they protect the forest
and encourage their community to do so too.
How they are only allowed
to collect what they need from the forest,
because if the forest goes, we all go.
Science is valuable, it offers solutions,
treatments, improvements,
but none of those scientific advancements mean anything
if the public, the communities don't trust them.
Building trust like Mary, Caroline, and Paula,
isn't just pizazz,
and it isn't just showing everyone you're smart.
It's doing the hard work to show people
that you're trustworthy.
And for science to mean anything,
for it to have true impact, the people who do science
and the people who communicate science
need to be worthy of people's trust.