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Do you know the name of the director
of the FBI? Probably not. James Comey has been America's top cop for just one year and
he hasn't done a major television interview until tonight. We had a lot to cover. We wanted
to know whether a terrorist attack is imminent. And how hackers are breaking into our computers.
Along the way, we learned surprising things about Comey himself; like the time he was
held hostage at gunpoint. We sat down with 53-year-old James Comey in his command center
at FBI headquarters in Washington where one of his urgent concerns is the whereabouts
of Americans who've joined terrorist groups overseas.
Scott Pelley: How many Americans are fighting in Syria on the side of the terrorists?
James Comey: In the area of a dozen or so.
Scott Pelley: Do you know who they are?
James Comey: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Each and every one of them?
James Comey: I think of that, dozen or so, I do. I hesitate only because I don't know
what I don't know.
Scott Pelley: With American passports, how do you keep them from coming home and attacking
the homeland?
James Comey: Ultimately, an American citizen, unless their passport's revoked, is entitled
to come back. So someone who's fought with ISIL, with American passport wants to come
back, we will track them very carefully.
"ISIL" is the acronym he uses for the Islamic extremist group occupying much of Syria and
Iraq. The U.S. is bombing ISIL and an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria called Khorasan.
Scott Pelley: Was Khorasan about to attack the United States?
James Comey: Khorasan was working and may still be working on an effort to attack the
United States or our allies, and looking to do it very, very soon. I can't sit here and
tell you whether it's their plan is tomorrow or three weeks or three months from now. Given
our visibility we know they're serious people, bent on destruction. And so we have to act
as if it's coming tomorrow.
Scott Pelley: How would you describe the terrorist networks in Syria as they exist right now?
James Comey: They're a product of what I describe as the metastasis of al Qaeda. And so you
have two in particular in that area, a group called al-Nusra and then ISIL. They are both
vicious, sort of the inheritors of a lot of the mantle of al Qaeda and present different
threats in a lot of ways.
Scott Pelley: Competent?
James Comey: Highly.
Scott Pelley: What do you mean?
James Comey: Let's stay with the Nusra group first. They are experienced terrorists, experienced
bomb-makers, experienced killers, experienced planners with an international eye. These
are people who have thought about bringing terrorism on a global scale. ISIL is as sophisticated,
maybe more than any of the others in its media presence and its recruiting and training efforts
online.
Those terrorist training efforts online appeared to play out, the day before our interview,
in Oklahoma. Police say a man who'd tried to convert fellow employees to Islam, beheaded
a woman in his workplace. He was allegedly upset about being suspended. But the FBI is
investigating whether the murder was an imitation of ISIL's beheadings.
Scott Pelley: Some people call individuals who are radicalized "lone wolves." Is that
the biggest threat we face?
James Comey: Yeah, people who use that term, it's not one I like because it conveys a sense
of dignity I don't think they deserve. These homegrown violent extremists are troubled
souls, who are seeking meaning in some misguided way. And so they come across the propaganda
and they become radicalized on their own, sort of independent study, and they're also
able to equip themselves with training again through the Internet, and then engage in jihad
after emerging from their basement.
Scott Pelley: The name "lone wolf" offends you.
James Comey: It does. I'd prefer lone rat to capture the kind of person we're talking
about.
Scott Pelley: Lone rat?
James Comey: Yeah.
Scott Pelley: Is this as dangerous a time as al Qaeda at its peak?
James Comey: No, I don't think so.
Scott Pelley: What's different?
James Comey: We are better organized as an intelligence community. We're better organized
and equipped at the border. We have relationships with our foreign partners. All of which make
us better able to see dots and connect dots. The transformation since before 9/11 is striking.
One striking transformations is in the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team. Which has more
than doubled in size since 9/11.
[Special agent: One minute! One minute!]
You almost never see the HRT, but we were given rare access to their training center.
These are FBI special agents practicing an assault on a building where a hostage might
be beheld. Even training, the team uses live ammunition and live explosives.
The Hostage Rescue Team has joined U.S. special operations forces for hundreds of missions
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last June, the team swooped into Libya and grabbed a suspect indicted
for a role in 2012's Benghazi attack, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three others.
The new emphasis, these days, is to bring terrorists to court.
James Comey: We're there to make sure that we have a criminal option in our country's
toolbox when we take the fight to the terrorists. Scott Pelley: So they would be involved in
such things as evidence collection and making sure that arrests were done in such a way
that they'd be seen as admissible in court.
James Comey: Yeah, or if we grab somebody and they say something that we may want to
use later we can use special agents of the FBI to testify about it.
The Hostage Rescue Team is symbolic of the FBI's growth since 9/11. The budget has jumped
from under four billion a year to more than eight billion. Comey now leads 34,000 employees.
James Comey: This is called "watch."
In his operations center we got a sense of one of the imposing things about Comey, he
is six foot eight. He grew up near New York City, in the suburbs, where his grandfather
was a police chief and where he came face-to-face with crime at an early age.
James Comey: I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother.
And a guy - gunman kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two
of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So a pretty horrific experience.
Scott Pelley: Horrific how?
James Comey: Well, frightening to anybody but especially to a younger person to be threatened
with a gun and to believe you're going to be killed by this guy.
Scott Pelley: You believed you were going to be killed?
James Comey: I did.
Scott Pelley: What happened to that guy?
James Comey: He got away. My recollection was he was part of a pattern of rapes and
robberies, home invasion rapes and robberies in that area of northern New Jersey.
Scott Pelley: Does that inform your work today in any way.
James Comey: It does, but probably in a way that would surprise people. I think it most
affects me in giving me a sense of what victims feel. And that even the notion no one was
physically harmed, doesn't mean no one was harmed. Because I thought about that guy every
night for five years. So I think it's made me a better prosecutor and investigator for
being able to feel better what victims of crime experience.
He's been a federal prosecutor most of his career. In 2003, President Bush appointed
him deputy attorney general, number two at the Justice Department. But after two years
he left for private industry, telling his wife that it was her turn to do what she wanted.
Then the phone rang last year.
James Comey: The attorney general called and asked me if I was willing to be interviewed
for FBI director. And the truth is I told him I didn't think so, that I thought it was
too much for my family. But that I would sleep on it and call him back in the morning. And
so I went to bed that night convinced I was going to call him back and say no.
Scott Pelley: What happened?
James Comey: I woke up. And my amazing wife was gone. And I found her down in the kitchen
on the computer, looking at homes in the D.C. area. Which was a clue. And she said, "I've
known you since you were 19. This is who you are. This is what you love. You've got to
say yes." And then she paused and said, "But they're not going to pick you anyway, so just
go down there and do your best. And then we'll have no regrets."
Scott Pelley: At least you would have tried.
James Comey: Right.
Scott Pelley: So you met with the president.
James Comey: I did.
Scott Pelley: What happened?
James Comey: Had to give my wife some bad news: that her confidence in them not picking
me was misplaced.
That pick gives Comey a ten-year term. He intends it to be a decade that transforms
the FBI again. To fight crime and espionage online.
James Comey: Cybercrime is becoming everything in crime. Again, because people have connected
their entire lives to the Internet, that's where those who want to steal money or hurt
kids or defraud go. So it's an epidemic for reasons that make sense.
Scott Pelley: How many attacks are there on American computer systems and on people's
credit card numbers and the whole mass of it? What does a day look like if you're concerned
with crime in cyberspace?
COMEY: It would be too many to count. I mean, I think of it as kind of an evil layer cake.
At the top you have nation state actors, who are trying to break into our systems. Terrorists,
organized cyber syndicates, very sophisticated, harvesting people's personal computers, down
to hacktivists, down to criminals and pedophiles.
Scott Pelley: What countries are attacking the United States as we sit here in cyberspace?
James Comey: Well, I don't want to give you a complete list. But I can tell you the top
of the list is the Chinese. As we have demonstrated with the charges we brought earlier this year
against five members of the People's Liberation Army. They are extremely aggressive and widespread
in their efforts to break into American systems to steal information that would benefit their
industry.
Scott Pelley: What are they trying to get?
James Comey: Information that's useful to them so they don't have to invent. They can
copy or steal so learn about how a company might approach negotiation with a Chinese
company, all manner of things.
Scott Pelley: How many hits from China do we take in a day?
James Comey: Many, many, many. I mean, there are two kinds of big companies in the United
States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've
been hacked by the Chinese.
Scott Pelley: The Chinese are that good?
James Comey: Actually, not that good. I liken them a bit to a drunk burglar. They're kicking
in the front door, knocking over the vase, while they're walking out with your television
set. They're just prolific. Their strategy seems to be: We'll just be everywhere all
the time. And there's no way they can stop us.
Scott Pelley: How much does that cost the U.S. economy every year?
James Comey: Impossible to count. Billions.
Scott Pelley: Sounds like cybercrime is a long way from Bonnie and Clyde for the FBI.
James Comey: Bonnie and Clyde could not do a thousand robberies in the same day, in all
50 states, from their pajamas, halfway around the world.
Scott Pelley: The FBI's had legendary problems upgrading its computer systems. Are you now
to a place where you're satisfied that you're meeting the cybersecurity threat?
James Comey: We've made great progress coordinating better as a government. When I last left government,
my sense of us was kind of like four-year-old soccer. So like a clump of four year olds
chasing the ball, we were chasing it in a pack. We're about high school soccer now.
We're spread out. We pass well. But the bad guys are moving at World Cup speed. So we
have to get better.
Scott Pelley: Do people understand, in your estimation, the dangers posed by cybercrime
and cyber espionage? James Comey: I don't think so. I think there's
something about sitting in front of your own computer working on your own banking, your
own health care, your own social life that makes it hard to understand the danger. I
mean, the Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable. But if you were crossing a
mall parking lot late at night, your entire sense of danger would be heightened. You would
stand straight. You'd walk quickly. You'd know where you were going. You would look
for light. Folks are wandering around that proverbial parking lot of the Internet all
day long, without giving it a thought to whose attachments they're opening, what sites they're
visiting. And that makes it easy for the bad guys.
Scott Pelley: So tell folks at home what they need to know.
James Comey: When someone sends you an email, they are knocking on your door. And when you
open the attachment, without looking through the peephole to see who it is, you just opened
the door and let a stranger into your life, where everything you care about is.
Scott Pelley: And what might that attachment do?
James Comey: Well, take over the computer, lock the computer, and then demand a ransom
payment before it would unlock. Steal images from your system of your children or your,
you know, or steal your banking information, take your entire life.
Scott Pelley: We have talked about a lot of menacing things in this interview. Do you
think Americans should sleep well?
James Comey: I think they should. I mean, the money they have invested in this government
since 9/11 has been well spent. And we are better organized, better systems, better equipment,
smarter deployment. We are better in every way that you'd want us to be since 9/11. We're
not perfect. My philosophy as a leader is we are never good enough. But we are in a
much better place than we were 13 years ago.
Our conversation with FBI Director James Comey continues here next week when we ask whether
the FBI is snooping on average Americans and why he thinks Apple's new iPhone software
could be a threat to national security.
Cancer is so pervasive that it touches virtually every family in this country. More than one
out of three Americans will be diagnosed with some form of it in their lifetime. And as
anyone who's been through it knows, the shock and anxiety of the diagnosis is followed by
a second jolt: the high price of cancer drugs.
They are so astronomical that a growing number of patients can't afford their co-pay, the
percentage of their drug bill they have to pay out-of-pocket. This has led to a revolt
against the drug companies led by some of the most prominent cancer doctors in the country.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: We're in a situation where a cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes
of personal bankruptcy.
Dr. Leonard Saltz is chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one
of the nation's premier cancer centers, and he's a leading expert on colon cancer.
Lesley Stahl: So, are you saying in effect, that we have to start treating the cost of
these drugs almost like a side effect from cancer?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I think that's a fair way of looking at it. We're starting to see the
term "financial toxicity" being used in the literature. Individual patients are going
into bankruptcy trying to deal with these prices.
Lesley Stahl: The general price for a new drug is what?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: They're priced at well over $100,000 a year.
Lesley Stahl: Wow.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: And remember that many of these drugs, most of them, don't replace
everything else. They get added to it. And if you figure one drug costs $120,000 and
the next drug's not going to cost less, you're at a quarter-million dollars in drug costs
just to get started.
Lesley Stahl: I mean, you're dealing with people who are desperate.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I do worry that people's fear and anxiety are being taken advantage
of. And yes, it costs money to develop these drugs, but I do think the price is too high.
The drug companies say it costs over a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, so
the prices reflect the cost of innovation.
The companies do provide financial assistance to some patients, but most people aren't eligible.
So many in the middle class struggle to meet the cost of their co-payments. Sometimes they
take half-doses of the drug to save money. Or delay getting their prescriptions refilled.
Dr. Saltz's battle against the cost of cancer drugs started in 2012 when the FDA approved
Zaltrap for treating advanced colon cancer. Saltz compared the clinical trial results
of Zaltrap to those of another drug already on the market, Avastin. He says both target
the same patient population, work essentially in the same way. And, when given as part of
chemotherapy, deliver the identical result: extending median survival by 1.4 months, or
42 days.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: They looked to be about the same. To me, it looked like a Coke and
Pepsi sort of thing.
Then Saltz, as head of the hospital's pharmacy committee, discovered how much it would cost:
roughly $11,000 per month, more than twice that of Avastin.
Lesley Stahl: So $5,000 versus $11,000. That's quite a jump. Did it have fewer side effects?
Was it less toxic? Did it have...
Dr. Leonard Saltz: No...
Lesley Stahl: ...Something that would have explained this double price?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: If anything, it looked like there might be a little more toxicity
in the Zaltrap study.
He contacted Dr. Peter Bach, Sloan Kettering's in-house expert on cancer drug prices.
Lesley Stahl: So Zaltrap. One day your phone rings and it's Dr. Saltz. Do you remember
what he said?
Dr. Peter Bach: He said, "Peter, I think we're not going to include a new cancer drug because
it costs too much."
Lesley Stahl: Had you ever heard a line like that before?
Dr. Peter Bach: No. My response was, "I'll be right down."
Lesley Stahl: You ran down.
Dr. Peter Bach: I think I took the elevator. But yes, exactly.
Bach determined that since patients would have to take Zaltrap for several months, the
price tag for 42 days of extra life would run to nearly $60,000. What they then decided
to do was unprecedented: reject a drug just because of its price.
Dr. Peter Bach: We did it for one reason. Because we need to take into account the financial
consequences of the decisions that we make for our patients. Patients in Medicare would
pay more than $2,000 a month themselves, out-of-pocket, for Zaltrap. And that that was the same as
the typical income every month for a patient in Medicare.
Lesley Stahl: The co-pay.
Dr. Peter Bach: Right. 20 percent. Taking money from their children's inheritance, from
the money they've saved. We couldn't in good conscience say, "We're going to prescribe
this more expensive drug."
And then they trumpeted their decision in the New York Times. Blasting what they called
"runaway cancer drug prices," it was a shot across the bow of the pharmaceutical industry
and Congress for passing laws that Bach says allow the drug companies to charge whatever
they want for cancer medications.
Dr. Peter Bach: Medicare has to pay exactly what the drug company charges. Whatever that
number is.
Lesley Stahl: Wait a minute, this is a law?
Dr. Peter Bach: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: And there's no negotiating whatsoever with Medicare?
Dr. Peter Bach: No.
Another reason drug prices are so expensive is that according to an independent study,
the single biggest source of income for private practice oncologists is the commission they
make from cancer drugs. They're the ones who buy them wholesale from the pharmaceutical
companies, and sell them retail to their patients. The mark-up for Medicare patients is guaranteed
by law: the average in the case of Zaltrap was six percent.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: What that does is create a very substantial incentive to use a more
expensive drug, because if you're getting six percent of $10, that's nothing. If you're
getting six percent of $10,000 that starts to add up. So now you have a real conflict
of interest.
But it all starts with the drug companies setting the price.
Dr. Peter Bach: We have a pricing system for drugs which is completely dictated by the
people who are making the drugs.
Lesley Stahl: How do you think they're deciding the price?
Dr. Peter Bach: It's corporate chutzpah.
Lesley Stahl: We'll just raise the price, period.
Dr. Peter Bach: Just a question of how brave they are and how little they want to end up
in the New York Times or on 60 Minutes.
That's because media exposure, he says, works. Right after their editorial was published,
the drug's manufacturer, Sanofi, cut the price of Zaltrap by more than half.
Dr. Peter Bach: It was a shocking event. Because it was irrefutable evidence that the price
was a fiction. All of those arguments that we've heard for decades, "We have to charge
the price we charge. We have to recoup our money. We're good for society. Trust us. We'll
set the right price." One op-ed in the New York Times from one hospital and they said,
"Oh, okay, we'll charge a different price." It was like we were in a Turkish bazaar.
Lesley Stahl: What do you mean?
Dr. Peter Bach: They said, "This carpet is $500" and you say, "I'll give you $100." And
the guy says, "Okay." They set it up to make it highly profitable for doctors to go for
Zaltrap instead of Avastin. It was crazy!
But he says it got even crazier when Sanofi explained the way they were changing the price.
Dr. Peter Bach: They lowered it in a way that doctors could get the drug for less. But patients
were still paying as if it was high-priced.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, come on.
Dr. Peter Bach: They said to the doctor, "Buy Zaltrap from us for $11,000 and we'll send
you a check for $6,000." Then you give it to your patient and you get to bill the patient's
insurance company as if it cost $11,000. So it made it extremely profitable for the doctors.
They could basically double their money if they use Zaltrap.
All this is accepted industry practice. After about six months, once Medicare and private
insurers became aware of the doctor's discount, the price was cut in half for everyone.
John Castellani: The drug companies have to put a price on a medicine that reflects the
cost of developing them, which is very expensive and takes a long period of time, and the value
that it can provide.
John Castellani is president and CEO of PhRMA, the drug industry's trade and lobbying group
in Washington.
Lesley Stahl: If you are taking a drug that's no better than another drug already on the
market and charging twice as much, and everybody thought the original drug was too much...
John Castellani: We don't set the prices on what the patient pays. What a patient pays
is determined by his or her insurance.
Lesley Stahl: Are you saying that the pharmaceutical company's not to blame for how much the patient
is paying? You're saying it's the insurance company?
John Castellani: I'm saying the insurance model makes the medicine seem artificially
expensive for the patient.
He's talking about the high co-pay for cancer drugs. If you're on Medicare, you pay 20 percent.
Lesley Stahl: Twenty percent of $11,000 a month is a heck of a lot more than 20 percent
of $5,000 a month.
John Castellani: But why should it be 20 percent instead of five percent?
Lesley Stahl: Why should it be $11,000 a month?
John Castellani: Because the cost of developing these therapies is so expensive.
Lesley Stahl: Then why did Sanofi cut it in half when they got some bad publicity?
John Castellani: I can't respond to a specific company.
Sanofi declined our request for an interview, but said in this email that they lowered the
price of Zaltrap after listening "to early feedback from the oncology community and ... To
ensure affordable choices for patients..."
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: High cancer drug prices are harming patients because either you come
up with the money, or you die.
Hagop Kantarjian chairs the department of leukemia at MD Anderson in Houston. Inspired
by the doctors at Sloan Kettering, he enlisted 119 of the world's leading leukemia specialists
to co-sign this article about the high price of drugs that don't just add a few weeks of
life, but actually add years, like Gleevec.
It treats CML, one of the most common types of blood cancer that used to be a death sentence,
but with Gleevec most patients survive for 10 years or more.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is probably the best drug we ever developed in cancer.
Lesley Stahl: In all cancers?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: So far. And that shows the dilemma, because here you have a drug
that makes people live their normal life. But in order to live normally, they are enslaved
by the cost of the drug. They have to pay every year.
Lesley Stahl: You have to stay on it. You have to keep taking it.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: You have to stay on it indefinitely.
Gleevec is the top selling drug for industry giant Novartis, bringing in more than $4 billion
a year in sales. $35 billion since the drug came to market. There are now several other
drugs like it. So, you'd think with the competition, the price of Gleevec would have come down.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: And yet, the price of the drug tripled from $28,000 a year in 2001
to $92,000 a year in 2012.
Lesley Stahl: Are you saying that the drug companies are raising the prices on their
older drugs.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: That's correct.
Lesley Stahl: Not just the new ones. So you have a new drug that might come out at a $100,000,
but they are also saying the old drugs have to come up to that price, too?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: Exactly. They are making prices unreasonable, unsustainable and, in
my opinion, immoral.
When we asked Novartis why they tripled the price of Gleevec, they told us, "Gleevec has
been a life-changing medicine ... When setting the prices of our medicines we consider ... the
benefits they bring to patients ... The price of existing treatments and the investments
needed to continue to innovate..."
[Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is quite an expensive medication.]
Dr. Kantarjian says one thing that has to change is the law that prevents Medicare from
negotiating for lower prices.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is unique to the United States. If you look anywhere in the
world, there are negotiations. Either by the government or by different regulatory bodies
to regulate the price of the drug. And this is why the prices are 50 percent to 80 percent
lower anywhere in the world compared to the United States.
Lesley Stahl: Fifty percent to 80 percent?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: Fifty percent to 80 percent.
Lesley Stahl: The same drug?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: Same drug. American patients end up paying two to three times
more for the same drug compared to Canadians or Europeans or Australians and others.
Lesley Stahl: Now, Novartis, which makes Gleevec, says that the price is fair because this is
a miracle drug. It really works.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: The only drug that works is a drug that a patient can afford.
The challenge, Dr. Saltz at Sloan Kettering says, is knowing where to draw the line between
how long a drug extends life and how much it costs.
Lesley Stahl: Where is that line?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I don't know where that line is, but we as a society have been unwilling
to discuss this topic and, as a result, the only people that are setting the line are
the people that are selling the drugs.
Human beings have lived with dogs for thousands of years. You'd think that after all that
time we'd have discovered all there is to know about them. But it turns out that until
recently scientists didn't pay much attention to dogs. Dolphins have been studied for decades,
apes and chimps as well, but dogs, with whom we share our lives, were never thought to
be worthy of serious study. As a result, we know very little about what actually goes
on inside dogs' brains. Do they really love us, or are dogs just licking us so they can
get fed? How much of our language can they understand? Before you answer, we want you
to meet Chaser, who's been called "the smartest dog in the world."
Eighty-six-year-old retired psychology professor John Pilley and his border collie Chaser are
inseparable.
John Pilley: We are almost there. We are almost there. Can you speak? Speak? Speak!
Chaser: Woof!
John Pilley: Good girl. Good girl.
Anderson Cooper: Do you view Chaser as a family pet? As a friend? How do you see Chaser?
John Pilley: She's our child.
Anderson Cooper: She's your child?
John Pilley: She's our child, a member of the family. Oh yes. She comes first.
Many people think of their dogs as children, but John Pilley has been teaching her like
a child as well. By assigning names to toys, Pilley has been helping Chaser learn words
and simple sentences.
[John Pilley: Take KG.]
He's been teaching her up to five hours a day, five days a week for the past nine years.
John Pilley: My best metaphor is this is a two-year-old toddler.
Anderson Cooper: That's how you think about your dog, a two-year-old toddler?
John Pilley: Yeah, she has the capabilities of a two-year-old.
[John Pilley: Chicken, chicken, chicken. Where's chicken? Yes. Good girl.]
He's not kidding. Most two-year-old toddlers know about 300 words.
[John Pilley: Figure 8. Figure 8. Good girl. That's figure 8.]
Chaser's vocabulary is three times that.
[John Pilley: To tub.]
She's learned the names of more than a thousand toys. And all those toys add up.
[John Pilley: Wheel. Yes, bring it on.]
To show us Chaser's collection, Pilley's brought us to his back porch.
Anderson Cooper: So, these are all the toys in here?
John Pilley: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: Got a chicken in here. Is it all right if I dump them out?
John Pilley: Please do. Please do.
There are 800 cloth animals, 116 different balls and more than a hundred plastic toys.
One thousand twenty-two toys in all. Each with a unique name.
Anderson Cooper: So Chaser could recognize the names of every one of these toys?
John Pilley: That's true, that's true.
To prove it, Pilley cataloged the toys and then, over the course of three years, gave
Chaser hundreds of tests like this.
[John Pilley: Chaser, find circle, find circle.]
In every test, Chaser correctly identified 95 percent or more of the toys.
[John Pilley: Find circle Chase. Yeah.]
The results were published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, and a star was born.
[Fan: How are you? I'm so glad to see you.]
Chaser even landed a book deal. But John Pilley didn't stop with the names of toys.
[John Pilley: Nose, KG. Nose KG. Nose it. Nose it. Good girl.]
He's taught Chaser that nouns and verbs have different meanings.
[John Pilley: Paw it. Paw it.]
And can be combined in a variety of ways.
[John Pilley: Take wheel. Do it girl, do it. OK. Out. Out. Chase, take KG. Do it. Good
girl. Good girl.]
Anderson Cooper: So she's actually understanding the difference between take, paw, putting
her paw on something and putting her nose on something?
John Pilley: Right. And that's what we are demonstrating.
All this learning has been possible, Pilley says, because of a breakthrough Chaser had
when she was just a puppy.
Anderson Cooper: At a certain point she realized that objects have names?
John Pilley: Right. It was an insight that came to her.
Anderson Cooper: How could you tell that she'd suddenly had that insight?
John Pilley: Well, it was in the fifth month and she'd learned about 40 names. And the
time necessary to work with her kept getting shorter and shorter.
Anderson Cooper: She was starting to learn words faster and faster?
John Pilley: Yes.
Brian Hare: It's the closest thing in animals we've seen to being like what young children
do as they are learning words.
Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, believes Chaser is the
most important dog in the history of modern scientific research.
Brian Hare: This is very serious science. We're not talking about stupid pet tricks
where people have spent, you know, hours trying to just train a dog to do the same thing over
and over. What's neat about what Chaser's doing is Chaser is learning tons, literally
thousands of new things by using the same ability that kids use when they learn lots
of words.
He's talking about what researchers call social inference - a capability humans, like Hare's
son, Luke, acquire around age one. To demonstrate the concept, Hare hides a ball under one of
these two cups.
Brian Hare: Hey Lukey guy. Where is it? Can you get it? Can you get the ball?
Luke doesn't know which cup the ball is under, but when his father points, he makes an inference.
Anderson Cooper: Hey, nice job.
Brian Hare: You got it.
Anderson Cooper: So what does that show you?
Brian Hare: So when kids his age start understanding pointing, it's right when the foundations
of what lead to language and culture start to develop.
It might look simple, but when Hare tried the same test with bonobos, great apes he
studied for more than a decade, look what happened.
Brian Hare: Oh, you chose the wrong one.
Bonobos, our closest genetic relatives, can't do it. But Hare discovered dogs can.
Brian Hare: You ready? So I'm going to hide it in one of these two places.
This two-year-old Labrador named Seesu has no trouble understanding the meaning of pointing.
Anderson Cooper: Now she doesn't know for sure which place you've put it in?
Brian Hare: That's right. There is no way she could know. And I'm just going to tell
her where it is. Okay Seesu. So that's really hard for a lot of animals and that's what
is really special about dogs is they're really similar to even human toddlers.
Anderson Cooper: That's a level of thinking that people didn't really think dogs could
do?
Brian Hare: Right. I mean, there was no evidence until the last decade that dogs were capable
of inferential reasoning, absolutely not. So that's what's new, that's what shocking
is that of all the species, it's dogs that are showing a couple of abilities that are
really important that allow humans to develop culture and language.
It's not surprising that dogs share characteristics with humans; after all we've evolved alongside
each other for more than 15,000 years. There are now some 80 million dogs in this country,
more dogs than children. But for all the playing and petting, the companionship, we still know
very little about their brains.
Dr. Greg Berns, a physician and neuroscientist at Emory University, has studied the human
brain for more than two decades, but three years ago questions he had about his own dog
inspired him to start looking at the canine brain.
Dr. Greg Berns: It started out with the desire to know, really, what does my dog think of
me? I love my dog, but do they reciprocate in any way? When they hear you come home,
you know they start jumping around. Is it just because they expect you to feed them?
Is this all just a scam by the dogs?
Anderson Cooper: Are dogs just big scammers?
Dr. Greg Berns: Yeah.
To try and answer that question, Dr. Berns is doing something scientists have had a difficult
time with. He's conducting brain scans on dogs while they're awake and un-sedated. Inside
the fMRI machine they're trained to stay completely still.
Anderson Cooper: How hard is it to get a dog to do this?
Dr. Greg Berns: This represents probably about three to four months of training. So most
of the dogs take that long.
Anderson Cooper: What's around Tigger's head here?
Dr. Greg Berns: The scanner makes a lot of noise. It's quite loud. And because dogs'
hearing is more sensitive than ours, we have to protect their hearing, just like ours.
So we, we put earplugs and earmuffs and just wrap it all to just keep it in place.
[Trainer: OK. Now we can go up.]
Tigger certainly knows the drill. Once in the machine he lies down and doesn't move.
These scans are giving Dr. Berns the first glimpse at how a dog's brain actually works.
Anderson Cooper: So these are slices of Tigger's brain that you're seeing?
Dr. Greg Berns: Yeah, exactly. So we're slicing from top to bottom. We analyze them later
to see which parts increase in response to the different signals.
While in the scanner the dogs smell cotton swabs with different scents. First, the underarm
sweat of a complete stranger. Next, the sweat of their owner.
As Dr. Berns expected, when the dogs sniffed the swabs the part of their brain associated
with smell, an area right behind the nose, activated. It didn't matter what the scent
was.
But it was when the dogs got a whiff of their owner's sweat that another area of the brain
was stimulated - the caudate nucleus, or "reward center." Dr. Berns believes that means the
dog is experiencing more than the good feeling that comes with a meal. It shows the dog is
recognizing somebody extremely important to them. It's the same area in a human brain
that activates when we listen to a favorite song or anticipate being with someone we love.
Anderson Cooper: So just by smelling the sweat of their owner, it triggers something in a
much stronger way than it does with a stranger? Dr. Greg Berns: Right. Which means that it's
a positive feeling, a positive association.
Anderson Cooper: And that's something you can prove through MRIs? It's not just, I mean,
previously people would say, "Well, yeah, obviously my dog loves me. I see its tail
wagging and it seems really happy when it sees me."
Dr. Greg Berns: Right. Now we're using the brain as kind of the test to say, "Okay, when
we see activity in these reward centers that means the dog is experiencing something that
it likes or it wants and it's a good feeling."
Anderson Cooper: My takeaway from this is that I'm not being scammed by my dog.
Dr. Greg Berns: Did you have that feeling before?
Anderson Cooper: Yeah, totally. I worry about that all the time.
Watch YouTube videos of dogs welcoming home returning service members and it's easy to
see the bond between dogs and their owners.
Brian Hare says there's even more proof of that bond. It's found in our bloodstreams.
Brian Hare: We know that when dogs and humans make eye contact, that actually releases what's
known as the love hormone, oxytocin, in both the dog and the human.
It turns out oxytocin, the same hormone that helps new mothers bond with their babies,
is released in both dogs and humans when they play, touch or look into one another's eyes.
[Dog owner: Thank you very much.]
Brian Hare: What we know now is that when dogs are actually looking at you, they're
essentially hugging you with their eyes. Anderson Cooper: Really?
Brian Hare: Yes. And so it's not just that when a dog is making a lot of eye contact
with you that they're just trying to get something from you. It actually probably is just really
enjoyable for them because they get an oxytocin or they get an uptick in the love hormone
too.
All these new discoveries about dogs have led Brian Hare to create a science-based website
called Dognition, where owners can learn to play games to test their dog's brain power.
Anderson Cooper: So you're allowing people to do an intelligence test for their dogs?
Brian Hare: That's exactly right. And the idea though is that there's not one type of
intelligence. We help you measure things like how your dog communicates, how empathic your
dog is. Is your dog cunning? Is your dog actually capable of abstract thought like reasoning?
Anderson Cooper: So there are different kinds of intelligence for dogs just like with humans?
Brian Hare: Absolutely. And so just like some humans are good at English, and others are
good at math, it's the same for dogs.
When Hare tested his own dog, a mixed breed named Tassie, he was surprised by what he
learned.
Brian Hare: What I found out was that I had someone sleeping in my bed that I didn't even
know.
Anderson Cooper: Really?
Brian Hare: And I didn't know my dog doesn't really rely on its working memory. So if I'm
saying sit and stay, I no longer have to wonder why my dog wanders off. He like literally
forgot.
Anderson Cooper: So you're dogs not the sharpest of dogs?
Brian Hare: He did great on communication. He's very communicative.
Anderson Cooper: So he can basically be a TV anchor?
Brian Hare: Yes.
[John Pilley: Fetch shirt. Fetch shirt. There we go.]
If you're wondering how Chaser did on Brian Hare's intelligence tests? She was off the
charts on reasoning and memory. Not surprising perhaps considering Chaser is a border collie
- dogs bred specifically for their ability to understand how farmers want their sheep
herded.
Anderson Cooper: Is Chaser just like an Einstein of dogs?
Brian Hare: So that's really fun. Is Chaser somehow special? And I think the idea actually
is that no. I mean, when Dr. Pilley chose Chaser, he just randomly took her out of a
litter.
[John Pilley: Drop. Drop.]
Brian Hare: What's special is that he spent so much time playing these games to help her
learn words, but are there lots of Chasers out there? Absolutely.
[John Pilley: On your mark, get set, go!]
Anderson Cooper: There's going to be a lot of people who see this and are jealous of
your relationship with Chaser. I mean, I now think about my own dog and kind of think,
wow, I've missed the boat, I haven't sort of help my dog live up to her potential.
John Pilley: Well, start working with your dog more.
[John Pilley: Yeah, you're so sweet.]