Dr. Zombie Explains...Zombies | StarTalk

I got a medical doctor who is known by his colleagues as Dr. Zombie. It's Dr. Steve Schan. Oh, there he goes.

"Hello, sir! Hello, doctor! Thanks very much for having me."

So you wrote a book called "The Zombie Autopsies," right? This intrigues me greatly because, as a work of fiction, you, being a medical doctor, can bring a lot of knowledge into making that an interesting story.

"Yes. So, when I wrote 'The Zombie Autopsies,' just to be clear, they're not real; zombies don't exist. But you can't look at a zombie and be a physician and not think to yourself, they're sick. So I wanted to try to explain, as best I could, the medical ideology of the zombie process, knowing that zombies aren't real."

So I started with the brain because I'm a brain doctor. Their frontal lobes are gone; they can't think in any kind of complicated way. They can't open doors; they can't open windows. You can eat a sandwich while you're running away from a zombie. They are ravenously hungry. That's the ventromedial hypothalamus—that's the region of the brain that's responsible for hunger.

Now, there are other issues that I actually find really fascinating. Like, how do they move if their muscles are decaying? So you'd have to have a virus that preserves muscle processes—the actin and the myosin, the two proteins that have to run past each other in order for muscles to move. And there are viruses that do that. An easy example would be the rabies virus, which still creates clonic movements where you jerk around a lot, and you have decreased cognition, but you remain mobile because a good virus wants you to stay mobile long enough to spread yourself to other people. So I tried to address each of these issues in the book as I told the story of essentially the impending end of the world.

So in your—now you work at Harvard Medical School, is that correct?

"Yeah, I do. I'm at Massachusetts General Hospital, and I teach at Harvard Medical School."

So in your professional opinion, what is the prognosis, the psychiatric prognosis for a zombie? How would—I’m just curious. I mean, this is the future, you know, right?

"So, it's not good. You don’t want to get the zombie bug. But like any disease, it has a natural history. So if you are noticed early in the progression of this disease—let's say you present to the emergency room with the early stages of what's already recognized as a zombie outbreak—then we have the opportunity to interrupt that outbreak both in the general population and also in the individual. The longer we let it progress, and more importantly, the more frightened we get, the worse the prognosis becomes for the individual as well as for society."

Okay, so the real bottom line here is whatever attempt we can all invest to preserve civilization. But really, civilization is gone. That’s the prognosis here, it seems to me, based on all that I have heard.

"So, Doc, Dr. Zombie, thanks for being on Star Talk with us. And I... yeah, you have a unique expertise here. We might come back to you in case we need it."