back to indexVincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines | Lex Fridman Podcast #216
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The following is a conversation with Vincent Reconyello,
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professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia.
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Vincent is one of the best educators in biology
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and in general that I've ever had the pleasure
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I highly recommend you check out his This Week
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in Virology podcast and watch his introductory lectures
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In particular, the playlist I recommend
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is called Virology Lectures 2021.
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To support this podcast, please check out the sponsors
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in the description.
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As a side note, please allow me to say a few words
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about the COVID vaccines.
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Some people are scared of a virus hurting or killing
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somebody they love.
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Some are scared of their government betraying them,
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their leaders blinded by power and greed.
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I have both of these fears.
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And two, I'm afraid, as FDR said, of fear itself.
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Fear manifests as anger and anger leads to division
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in the hands of charismatic leaders
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who then manufacture truth in quotes
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that maximize controversy and a sense of imminent crisis
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that only they can save us from.
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And though I'm sometimes mocked for this,
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I still believe that love, compassion, empathy
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is the way out from this vicious downward spiral
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I personally took the vaccine based
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on my understanding of the data,
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deciding that for me, the risk of negative effects
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from COVID, short term and long term,
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are far worse than the negative effects
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from the mRNA vaccine.
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I read, I thought, I decided, for me.
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But I never have and never will talk down
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to people who don't take the vaccine.
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I'm humble enough to know just how little I know,
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how wrong I have been and will be
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on many of my beliefs and ideas.
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I think dogmatic certainty and division
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is more destructive in the long term than any virus.
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The solution for me personally, like I said,
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is to choose empathy and compassion
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towards all fellow human beings
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no matter who they voted for.
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I hope you do the same.
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Read, think, and try to imagine
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that what you currently think is the truth
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may be totally wrong.
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This mindset is one that opens you
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to discovery, innovation, and wisdom.
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I hope my conversation with Vincent Racken Yellow
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is a useful resource for just this kind of exploration.
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He doesn't talk down to people
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and he's the most knowledgeable virologist
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I've ever spoken to.
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He has no political agenda,
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no desire to mock those who disagree with him.
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He just loves biology and explaining
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the fundamental mechanisms of how biological systems work.
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That's a great person to listen to
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and learn from with an open mind.
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I hope you join me in doing so
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and no matter what, try to put more love
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out there in the world.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast
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and here is my conversation with Vincent Racken Yellow.
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You mentioned in one of your lectures on virology
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that there are more viruses in a liter of coastal seawater
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than people on earth.
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In the Nature article titled,
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Microbiology by Numbers,
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it says there are 10 to the 31 viruses on earth.
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Also it says that the rate of viral infection
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in the ocean stands at 10 to the 23 infections per second.
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And these infections remove 20 to 40%
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of all bacterial cells each day.
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There's a war going on.
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Do you, what do you make of these numbers?
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Why are there so many viruses?
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So the numbers you're quoting,
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they're in my first virology lecture, right?
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Cause people don't know these numbers
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and they get wow, they get wowed by them.
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So I love to give them.
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Sorry to interrupt, but as I was saying offline,
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you have one of the best introductory lectures
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on virology that I've ever seen,
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introductory lectures periods.
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I highly recommend people find you on YouTube and watch it.
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If you're curious at all about viruses,
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it, yeah, there's a lot of times throughout watching it,
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I felt like, whoa.
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Yeah, that's my goal is to,
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and that's what my students tell me.
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One student once said, every day after every lecture,
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I could go home and tell my roommate something
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she didn't know and blew her away.
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So the number of viruses is really an amazing number.
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So that number 10 to the 31 is actually
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just the bacterial viruses in the ocean.
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So there are viruses that infect everything on the planet,
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including bacteria, there are a lot of bacteria in the ocean.
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And so 10 to the 31 is from basically particle counts
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of seawater all over the world.
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So there are more viruses than 10 to the 31,
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but just in the ocean.
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And that number is so big.
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First of all, the mass exceeds that of elephants
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on the planet by 1,000 fold.
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And if you lined up those viruses end to end,
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they would go 200 million light years into space.
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It's so big a number, it's amazing.
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And then yes, 10 to the 20 some infections per second
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of these viruses killing bacteria
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and releasing all this organic matter.
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And that's part of this,
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what we call the biogeochemical pump,
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cycling of material in the ocean,
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the bacteria die, they start to sink
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and then they get metabolized and converted
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to compounds that are needed.
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A lot of it gets released as carbon dioxide and so forth.
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So these are actually really important cycles
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that are catalyzed by the virus.
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Well, it's so wild that nature has developed
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a mechanism for mass murder of bacteria.
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That's one way to look at it,
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but it's just what happened, right?
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I mean, I wonder what the evolutionary advantage
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of such fast cycling of life is.
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Is it just an accident of evolution
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that viruses are so numerous?
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Or is it a feature, not a bug?
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So the fast is, it does not all fast,
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not all viruses are fast.
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Some are 20 minutes per cycle,
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some take weeks per cycle.
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But that's just per second.
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There's so many viruses in the ocean
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that that's what you get per second,
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no matter how fast the cycle is.
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But I look at it this way.
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Viruses were probably the first organic entities
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to evolve on the planet.
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Long ago, billions, billion years ago,
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just as the earth cooled and organic molecules began to form,
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I think these self, we call them self replicators.
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They're just short things that today
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would look like RNA,
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which is the basis of many viruses, right?
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They evolved and they were able to replicate.
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Of course, they were just naked molecules.
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They had no protection and it was just RNA based.
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And that's tough because RNA is pretty fragile
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in the world and it probably didn't get very big
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But then proteins evolved
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and I'm skipping like hundreds of millions of years
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of evolution, proteins evolved,
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maybe without a cell, maybe with a cell.
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But then to make a cell,
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there probably were some RNA based cells early on,
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but they were pretty simple.
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But the cells that we know of today,
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even bacteria and single cell eukaryotes,
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they have very long DNA genomes.
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And you need a lot of DNA to make a complicated cell.
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And so we think at some point, the RNA became DNA
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and probably one of the earliest enzymes that arose
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is the enzyme that could copy that RNA into DNA,
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which we now know today as reverse transcriptase,
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which my former boss, David Baltimore
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and Howard Timmons at CoDiscovered.
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And that enzyme arose and copied RNA to DNA
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and then you could build big cells with,
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because DNA can be millions and millions of bases in length.
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And RNA, the longest RNA we know of is 40,000 bases,
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not much bigger than the SARS CoV2.
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What would you say is the magic moment along that line?
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I saw it was one or two billion,
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maybe three billion years it took
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to go from bacteria to complex organism.
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Like it seems like Earth had a very long time,
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like not a very long time without life,
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and then a very long time with very primitive life.
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Maybe I'm discriminating,
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calling bacteria primitive life.
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People would object to you doing that for sure.
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But it seems like complex organism,
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when it starts becoming something like,
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I don't know what's a good, not animal like,
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but more complexity than just like a single cell.
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What do you think is the magic there?
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What's the hardest thing?
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If you were trying to engineer Earth and build life
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and build the simulations,
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obviously we're living in a video game, what this is.
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So if you were trying to build this video,
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what's the hardest part along this evolution path?
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So bacteria are mostly single cells.
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They do make colonies,
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they get together in biofilms,
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which are really important,
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but they're all single bacteria in that.
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And the key is making an organism
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where cells do different things.
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We have skin cells and eye cells and brain cells.
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Bacteria never do that.
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And the reason is probably energy.
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Bacteria can't make enough energy to do that.
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And so there was another cell existing at the time,
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And the idea is that a bacteria went into an archaea
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and became the modern day mitochondria,
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the energy factory of the cell.
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And that now led that cell
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to develop into more and more complicated organisms
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like we have today.
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It was all about energy.
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So the mitochondria, the energy,
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the mitochondria is the magic thing.
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It's actually not my idea, it's Nick Jones.
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Have you heard of Nick Jones?
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He's an evolutionary biologist in the UK.
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And he's done experimental work on this.
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And it's his idea that the defining point was
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the ability to make a lot of energy,
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which a mitochondria can do.
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It's basically a whole bacteria inside of a bigger cell.
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And that becomes what we now call eukaryotes
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and that they can get more and more complicated.
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So let me bring you back to the viruses.
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I wanna finish that story.
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Yeah, which points of virus has come along?
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So remember, we have these precellular,
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they're called precellular replicons, right?
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And so we have a precellular stage
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where we have these self replicating molecules
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and cells arise and then the self replicating molecules
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invade the cells, why?
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Because it's a hospitable environment.
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I mean, they didn't know that.
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They just went in and it turned out
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it was beneficial for them, so it's stuck.
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And they replicate inside the cell now
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where they have pools of everything they need.
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They get more and more complicated.
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And then they steal proteins from the cell
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to build a protective shell.
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And then they can be released as virus particles
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are now protected, they can move from host to host.
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And because they're at the earliest stages of cellular
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evolution, they can diversify to infect anything
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And that is why I think there's so many of them
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and everything on the planet is infected
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because the ancestor of everything
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was infected many years ago.
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So it's easier to steal than to build from scratch.
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So like it's easier to sort of break into
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somebody else's thing and steal their proteins.
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Yes, my colleague Dixon de Palmier calls viruses safecrackers.
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So it's just from an evolutionary perspective,
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it's easier to steal because you can select.
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But then you have to figure out mechanisms for stealing,
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for breaking into, for cracking the safe.
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Well, you don't have to figure out, it just happens, right?
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Because molecules are so diverse
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that a molecule gets into a cell.
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And if there's a protein that sticks to it,
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it's gonna stick and that gives an advantage.
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There's no, you know, there's no planning,
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there's no thinking about it, right?
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Oh, we'll return to that.
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What, but these numbers are crazy.
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So what, as these more complex organisms evolved,
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let's take us humans as an example,
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should we be afraid of these high numbers?
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Should we be worried that there's so many viruses
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Well, to a certain extent, I mean, they have,
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it's twofold, they're good and bad, right?
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Viruses are no, there's no question they can be bad.
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We know that because they've infected
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and cause disease throughout history.
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But we're also, you and I are full of viruses
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that don't hurt us at all and probably help us.
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And every organism is the same.
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So they are clearly beneficial as a consequence.
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So I think, so every living thing on the planet
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has multiple viruses infecting.
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Everything you can see.
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And most of them, I think we don't worry about
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because they can't infect us, they're unable.
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In fact, now you could actually,
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you can actually take your feces and send them to a company
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and they will sequence your viruses in your feces for you,
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your fecal viral, right?
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And the most common virus in human feces
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is a plant virus that infects peppers.
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It's called pepper model mosaic virus.
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And that's cause people eat a lot of peppers.
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And it just passes right through you.
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Cabbage is full of viruses from the insects
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that walk on the cabbage in the fields.
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We eat them, they just pass us.
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So I think most of the viruses we don't need to worry about
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except when we're talking about species
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that are closest to us, mammals, of course.
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I think the most numerous ones are the most concerning.
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They're viruses like bats, bats are 20% of mammals
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and rodents are 40% of mammals.
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And we humans live nearby, right?
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And we know throughout history,
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many viruses have come from bats
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and from rodents to people.
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No question about it.
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So there's a proximity in terms of just living together
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and a proximity genetically too.
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So it's more like that a virus will jump from a bat
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Birds can give us their viruses that's happened.
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Influenza viruses come from birds mainly.
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So I think those are the three species,
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not species, it's higher than species obviously,
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but those are the three I would worry about
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in terms of getting their viruses.
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And we don't really know what's out there, right?
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We have very little clue about what viruses.
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And I've for years wanted to capture wild mice
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in my backyard and see what viruses they have
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because no one knows.
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And it's an easy...
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We can't ask them.
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So you mean map, like is there a way to ask them?
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No, I would have to sacrifice them
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and take tissue and then bring it in the lab
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and do genome sequencing.
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So you can do a thorough sequencing
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to determine your viruses.
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Is there a sufficiently good categorization of viruses
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That's a very good question.
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So whenever you do sequence, right?
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You get some environmental sample
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and you extract nucleic acid and you sequence it.
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What you do is you run it past the database.
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The gold standard is the GenBank database,
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which is maintained here in the US.
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And you see if you get any hits.
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And then you can say,
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ah, look, this sequence is similar to this virus.
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And you can classify all the viruses you see.
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The problem is 90% of your sequence is dark matter.
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It doesn't hit with anything.
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It's probably a lot of it is unknown viruses.
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And that's gonna be hard to figure out
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because someone's gonna have to go after it
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and sort it through.
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So yes, you can find a lot of viruses.
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And the numbers you get are astounding.
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You can find thousands of new viruses
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just by looking in various life forms.
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But there are many more that we don't pick up
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because they're not in the database.
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Maybe this is a good time to take a quick tangent.
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What do you think about AlphaFold too?
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I don't know if you've been paying attention to that.
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But then my deep mind,
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solving the protein folding problem.
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And then also releasing,
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first of all, open sourcing the code,
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which is for me as a software person, I love.
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And then second of all, also making like $300,000
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in predictions or something like that
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for different protein structures and releasing that data.
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On the side of, because you're saying there's dark matter.
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Is there something, first,
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what are your general thoughts,
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level of excitement about their work?
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And second, how can that be applied to viruses?
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Do you think we'll be able to explore the dark matter
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of virology using machine learning?
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Because in all this dark sequence,
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you can translate it and make a protein.
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You can see what a protein looks like.
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It has what we call an open reading frame, right?
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A start and a stop.
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And right now it's just a bunch of amino acids.
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But if we could fold it,
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maybe the fold would be like something we already know.
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Some protein fold, which gives you a lot of clues, right?
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Because there are only so many protein folds in biology.
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And that dark matter is probably one of them.
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So I think that's very exciting because for years,
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I followed structural biologists for years.
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And in the beginning,
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we couldn't even solve structures of viruses.
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We could do small molecules like myoglobin.
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That was the first one done, took years to do that.
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Then as computational power increased,
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then they could start to do viruses.
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But it took a long time.
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X ray crystallography,
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depending on getting crystals of the virus, right?
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And now we can do cryoelectron microscopy,
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which is much faster.
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You could solve a spike of SARS CoV2
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was solved in two months by Jason McClelland here
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in Austin actually at the beginning of the pandemic.
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But you're limited.
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You can't do huge proteins.
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You can only do moderately sized ones.
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So, or actually you can do viruses,
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but you can't do small proteins.
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So that's speeded it up, but it's still too fast
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to solve, you get a new protein,
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you wanna solve its structure.
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So if we could predict it,
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and I know from talking to structural biologists,
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this has been their holy grail from day one.
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They wanna be able to take a sequence of a protein,
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put it in a computer and have the structure put out
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without having to do all the experiment.
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So that's why this is very exciting
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that you can predict it.
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That mean it's not finished, obviously,
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and there's more to do.
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But I think it will be a day
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where you could take any amino acid sequence
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and predict what it's gonna look like.
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See, but aren't structural biologists gonna get greedy?
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So once you have that,
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don't you wanna go more complicated then?
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Don't you wanna go,
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because that's just the first step, right?
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To go from amino acid to structure,
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and there's multiple protein interactions.
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Like, how do you get to the virus?
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Well, so that's what the ultimate goal
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of getting a structure is,
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that then you can do experiments
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and figure out what the structure means, right?
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So many, in the old days, structural biology
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was a career in itself.
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You worked with people who had a system
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and just solved proteins for them,
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and then you moved on to another one.
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You didn't really do any experiments.
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The other people got to do
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all the interesting experiments.
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Now, young structural biologists are multifaceted.
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They solve the structure,
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and then they say,
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what happens if we change this amino acid?
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Oh, look, it blocks binding to the receptor.
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This must be the receptor binding interface.
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So that's the exciting stuff,
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absolutely, is doing the experiments.
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I wonder if you can do some kinds of simulations
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of different proteins or multi protein systems
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going to war against each other.
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Like, to try to figure out,
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reinforcement learning is used in AlphaZero,
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for example, to learn chess and go,
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and that's using the self play mechanism
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where the thing plays against itself.
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And learns better and better.
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I wonder if you can simulate almost evolution in that way
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for primitive biological systems,
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have them in simulation, fight each other,
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and then see what comes out,
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like a super dangerous virus comes out,
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or super Chuck Norris type of thing
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that defends against the super dangerous virus,
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and it's all in simulation.
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So an example would be,
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we have all these variants of SARS CoV2 arising, right?
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Which look to be selected by immune responses.
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But we know what amino acids are changing in the spike,
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and how they block antibody bonding.
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You could simulate that.
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You could say, what is the antibody looking at?
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Where antibodies bind on proteins are called epitopes, right?
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You could map them all and change them in a simulation,
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one by one, and go back and forth
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between the antibody and the virus.
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So all these, evolution is what we call an arms race, right?
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The virus changes, and then it evades the host,
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and then the host can change.
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The host takes longer to change though, unfortunately.
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It takes geological time, but it can,
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and then the virus can change,
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and it can go back and forth.
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And we can see evidence of this
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in genome sequences of both viruses and their hosts.
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And so you can take a protein in a host
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that is a receptor for multiple viruses,
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and you can see all the impacts of virus pressure on it,
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and you could simulate that for sure.
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And that's just one thing that you could do.
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You could simulate changes in, say, an enzyme
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that makes it resistant to a drug,
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and predict all the drug resistance.
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But the problem is, people like me,
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the experimental virologists,
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don't know how to do any of that,
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so we need to collaborate with people, I guess.
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All with other humans.
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We do that, we do that.
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But with people from a field that we're not used to,
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I suppose people who, would it be AI, I suppose?
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Yeah, machine learning people.
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Machine learning people, and you would say,
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look, this is the biological problem.
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Is there a way we can use your tools to attack it?
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The problem is those people are antisocial introverts
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that have a place like this,
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and try to hide from other people in the world.
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Very difficult to find in the wild.
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Okay, so outside of doing amazing, brilliant lectures online,
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you host and produce five, I would say, related podcasts,
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including my favorite, This Week in virology,
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also This Week in parasitism,
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This Week in microbiology, and so on.
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So you're a good person to ask,
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what are the categories of small things,
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small biological things in this world that can kill you?
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Let's look, you said like most viruses are friendly,
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or at least not unfriendly,
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but let's look at the unfriendly ones,
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in viruses and bacteria and those kinds of things.
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When you look at the full spectrum of things
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that can kill you, can you kind of paint a brief picture?
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Yeah, I think the big picture is that
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the things that can kill you are a minority
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of everything that's out there.
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And we're talking about molecules.
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So we have in us proteins that can kill us,
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preons that are just, it's a protein in us.
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And if it misfolds,
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it makes all of its other copies misfold,
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and then you die of a neurological disease.
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That's pretty rare.
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So there are proteins that are viruses.
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And as I said, only certain ones can kill us.
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But even if we get those from animals,
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it's not straightforward.
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If you look at SARS CoV2,
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this is probably a once in a hundred year pandemic,
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I would say, equivalent to 1918 in its devastation.
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And in between there have been smaller pandemics
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of other viruses, but it doesn't happen all that often.
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So we have a lot of viruses.
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We have a lot of bacteria of various sorts
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that can cause infections in us.
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And it's a limited number, right?
link |
You're streptococci and staphylococci and clostridia.
link |
We could go on and on,
link |
but we know how to handle those as long
link |
as we have antimicrobials.
link |
It's just that we abuse them and we get resistance.
link |
So that can be a problem.
link |
Then we have fungi, not mushrooms,
link |
but much smaller fungi that multiply the submicroscopic
link |
or just at the microscopic level,
link |
they can, you know, in dry climates of the US,
link |
you can inhale their spores
link |
and they can grow in your lung
link |
if you're immunosuppressed and so forth.
link |
So those are the tiny guys.
link |
And then we have parasites,
link |
which we do this week in parasitism,
link |
where single cells, even worms of various sorts,
link |
can invade you and cause all sorts of problems.
link |
How, I was kind of terrified to listen to that podcast.
link |
Well, I mean, what you learn is that you can,
link |
you travel somewhere and you can get infected
link |
and bring it back home.
link |
In the US, we do have certain kinds of parasites,
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but because of our lifestyle,
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we more or less have avoided them.
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For example, there is a parasite called toxoplasma,
link |
which is infected most of the world actually,
link |
because a lot of people like to eat raw meat
link |
and you would get it from raw meat.
link |
And we're not as fond of that here in the US.
link |
We like to cook our meat,
link |
but that could be a consequence of eating raw meat.
link |
Is that what leads to what is it called, toxoplasmosis?
link |
So toxoplasmosis, it's mainly a big issue
link |
is if you're pregnant and you get toxa,
link |
then your fetus is gonna be very badly malformed.
link |
It's gonna have brain defects and so forth.
link |
And animals can get it as well.
link |
So there are a lot of parasites of that nature,
link |
which you often acquire by food,
link |
eating food of different sorts.
link |
And it usually happens elsewhere.
link |
We just, on this week in parasitism, we do a case.
link |
So Daniel Griffin is a resident physician.
link |
He's a doctor, a real doctor, right?
link |
And every month he comes up with a case.
link |
Okay, this is a person I saw.
link |
And last month, this young lady had traveled somewhere
link |
and she ate raw fish.
link |
It was somewhere Southeast Asia or something.
link |
And she ended up with red bumps all over her skin.
link |
And it turned out it was a parasite from the fish
link |
that moved around in her.
link |
And very easy to cure.
link |
We have the right doctors and the right drugs.
link |
You can cure all these.
link |
What about diagnosed, like connect the red spots
link |
to the fact that it's a parasite?
link |
Very easy to, if you have the right diagnostics.
link |
Now Daniel often goes to parts of the world
link |
where they don't have diagnostics
link |
and he has to use other mechanisms.
link |
He may have to take a bit and look under a microscope.
link |
And then he may not be able to get the drug
link |
depending on where he is.
link |
But often he sees patients who come back to the U.S.
link |
and they get diarrhea or they have a fever.
link |
And he said, where have you been?
link |
And he can put two and two together.
link |
And so we let our listeners do that
link |
and they all send in guesses.
link |
And it's wonderful to hear them go through this.
link |
So there are a lot of parasites
link |
You have to be careful about eating when you go overseas.
link |
And in parts of Africa, there are parasites in the lakes.
link |
And if you go swimming, they can invade you.
link |
And in fact, they can go into your hair follicles
link |
and burrow in and get into your bloodstream.
link |
So Daniel is interesting because he's very adventurous
link |
and he's not afraid of any of this.
link |
So there's a famous lake in Africa, Lake Malawi,
link |
which harbors a lot of these parasites.
link |
And he said, oh yeah, yeah, I just make sure
link |
I towel off vigorously when I get out and get rid of them.
link |
And that was the name of an episode.
link |
But food is, you know, sushi, you can get worms from sushi.
link |
And the solution is to freeze it.
link |
And many sushi restaurants now have liquid nitrogen.
link |
They snap freeze their sushi and that kills all the parasites.
link |
And a study was actually done in Japan
link |
showing that freezing does not alter the taste of sushi
link |
because it's up, you see a big industry there.
link |
Wow, that's brilliant.
link |
Yeah, I was thinking about, you know,
link |
I'm so boring and bland that especially when I'm now
link |
in Texas here and I've been eating quite a bit of barbecue,
link |
I realized I really haven't explored the culinary world.
link |
And I've been curious to travel and taste different foods.
link |
Is there something you can say by way of advice,
link |
you know, channeling Daniel, I guess,
link |
if you were to travel in the world,
link |
if eating is the thing that gets you the parasites,
link |
what's a good advice for eating
link |
in strange parts of the world?
link |
Mongolia, India, China,
link |
is there something you could say by way of advice?
link |
I think Daniel would say,
link |
make sure your food is cooked, right?
link |
Cooked, but that's so boring.
link |
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
link |
And he would agree with you
link |
because, you know, many vegetables are delicious.
link |
Salads even are delicious, not cooked,
link |
but they can have parasites in them.
link |
Meats, fish, people like to have uncooked fish.
link |
So if you want to be really safe and boring,
link |
just make sure everything is cooked.
link |
Now we have a case this week on TWIP of a young man who went,
link |
I forgot where he went, but he stayed in a hotel.
link |
I think he, oh, Oaxaca, Mexico, stayed in a hotel.
link |
And he came back with diarrhea and fever.
link |
And he said, I don't know, I stayed in the hotel,
link |
I just ate hotel food, lots of vegetables
link |
and fruits and probably they weren't washed
link |
with clean water, you know, he got something from that.
link |
The bottom line is most of these infections
link |
with parasites can be diagnosed
link |
and you can be treated and you'll be fine.
link |
So if you really want to experience the cuisine,
link |
I don't think you should worry about it.
link |
That's what Daniel would say.
link |
Let's return to the basics.
link |
We can then jump around all over the place.
link |
What are the basic principles of virology?
link |
Maybe a good place to start is what is a virus?
link |
I mean, I talk in my first lecture
link |
for 20 minutes before I get to that.
link |
But, and I wonder if I should put it up front,
link |
but it's kind of a boring definition.
link |
So if you do that, first people will turn off.
link |
So first you tell them about all the millions
link |
and billions of viruses around.
link |
So a virus, we have a very specific definition
link |
because it's different from everything else on the planet.
link |
Because first of all, it's a parasite.
link |
It takes, a parasite means you take something
link |
from someone else.
link |
You know, we have human parasites
link |
who take money from others, right?
link |
But in biological terms,
link |
a parasite takes something from the host
link |
that the host would otherwise use energy
link |
or some building block or something like that.
link |
There's never really a symbiotic relationship
link |
between a virus and a host.
link |
Well, there can be.
link |
So that's the dichotomy I think is that
link |
we define them as parasites yet.
link |
I just told you 20 minutes ago
link |
that many viruses are probably beneficial.
link |
So I think what it means is at some point
link |
we're gonna have to change our definition, right?
link |
Because after all definitions we make are just constructs
link |
that make it easier for us to study
link |
that not necessarily represent what's right.
link |
Yeah, like Pluto was a planet at first
link |
and now it's not a planet anymore
link |
and a lot of people are very upset.
link |
But it's only according to us.
link |
There may be another race living somewhere else
link |
who thinks it's a planet, right?
link |
Well, maybe that's why viruses are attacking humans.
link |
They're very angry.
link |
They weren't calling them parasites.
link |
So right now our definition includes parasite
link |
because a virus cannot do anything without a cell.
link |
If this mug were full of viruses
link |
it would not do anything for years.
link |
It would eventually probably lose its infectivity
link |
but it's not gonna reproduce here.
link |
And to the first people who discovered viruses
link |
that was astounding that they didn't just reproduce
link |
divide on their own like bacteria.
link |
So a virus needs to get inside of a cell,
link |
It can't just hang around on the surface.
link |
It needs to get in in order to make more of itself.
link |
And so we call it an obligate intracellular parasite
link |
because it needs to get in a cell
link |
and then it takes things from the cell
link |
in the form of all kinds of molecules and processes
link |
and energy and so forth to make new viruses.
link |
Obligate means it's obligated to be inside the cell.
link |
It will not reproduce outside of the cell.
link |
So this mug of viruses can in no way be living
link |
However, once it gets inside of a cell
link |
now the cell is a virus infected cell.
link |
So a virus in my view has two phases, right?
link |
It's this nonliving particulate phase
link |
that everyone is used to.
link |
I'll send you, you need a virus for your table.
link |
I'll send you a nice model.
link |
I think it would look good here.
link |
You don't have to go with all this other stuff.
link |
Well, these are all mechanical,
link |
there's no biology here.
link |
So you wouldn't want a virus here?
link |
No, I'd want a virus, of course.
link |
I'll send you one and then you can look at it.
link |
Because now that we have the three dimensional structures
link |
solved by structural biologists,
link |
we take the coordinates and we put it in a 3D printer
link |
and you can make amazing models, right, of any virus.
link |
And so there's a huge variety of viruses.
link |
Huge, that we know of,
link |
which is only a fraction of what's out there.
link |
What's the categories?
link |
So there's RNA, there's DNA viruses.
link |
What are those, what's DNA and RNA?
link |
Two broad categorizations, RNA and these are genetic material.
link |
It can be two different chemicals.
link |
So RNA, everything else on the planet besides viruses
link |
is all DNA based, you and I are DNA based.
link |
Everything on the planet today is DNA based
link |
except some viruses are RNA based.
link |
And that's because, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the first life that arose on the planet was RNA based.
link |
Yeah, so these are like old school viruses.
link |
These are old school, we call relics, yeah.
link |
Relics, and this has got a name,
link |
it's called the RNA world, which I think is great.
link |
Is it big still or are they out of the relics dying out?
link |
Oh no, the relics in my opinion
link |
are the most successful viruses, the RNA viruses.
link |
And SARS CoV2 is an RNA virus.
link |
We can talk about why they're so successful.
link |
But you have broadly speaking viruses with RNA,
link |
genetic information, which are relics.
link |
Of course, they're contemporary.
link |
They have adapted to the modern world
link |
and the modern organisms living in it.
link |
And then we have DNA based viruses,
link |
which are extremely conservative and slow.
link |
They're very successful.
link |
Everyone has a herpes virus infection,
link |
but they don't get the news like the RNA viruses do,
link |
the HIV's and the influenza viruses
link |
and the SARS coronaviruses,
link |
they get all the press in their RNA based.
link |
Because RNA lets you change more so than DNA.
link |
So they evolve much faster, the RNA viruses?
link |
And in fact, when I have an electron evolution,
link |
I don't know if you've listened to that when you should,
link |
it's really, I think it's really interesting.
link |
RNA viruses exist at their error threshold,
link |
which means they can't make any more mutations
link |
when they reproduce, otherwise they're dead.
link |
They would go extinct.
link |
They're evolving at their error threshold.
link |
DNA viruses are hundreds of times lower
link |
than their error thresholds.
link |
And we know this, we can do an experiment to find that out.
link |
And now why that is is a good question,
link |
but that's the reason why RNA viruses
link |
are far more successful.
link |
They, in fact, many more hosts
link |
and they're very, I would say slippery,
link |
they can change hosts really quickly
link |
because in any animal harboring an RNA virus,
link |
like let's say a bat in some cave somewhere,
link |
it's not just one genome,
link |
it's millions of different genomes of all kinds,
link |
all within the framework of say, coronavirus,
link |
but they're all different.
link |
And one genome in there might just be right
link |
for infecting a person if it ever encountered that person.
link |
I mean, that's the thing that...
link |
Or there could be a large number, this is a tiny fraction,
link |
but a large number of them,
link |
and they're all operating at the threshold of error.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
It's like little startups, little entrepreneurs,
link |
like a startup world.
link |
Yes, and many of them fail.
link |
Yeah, many of them.
link |
And then there's the DNA viruses that are like the IBM
link |
and the Google, the big corporations
link |
that become conservative with the bureaucracies
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
So they have a lot of baggage.
link |
Yeah, it's expensive for them to reproduce.
link |
Yeah, and they don't move quickly.
link |
Yes, the RNA viruses are the fast moving members.
link |
So that's what a virus is.
link |
We call them obviously intracellular parasites.
link |
And then I told you there's DNA and RNA,
link |
but then let's go further.
link |
The nucleic acid's not naked
link |
because naked nucleic acid in the world isn't good.
link |
I mean, it existed in the precellular world,
link |
but there probably weren't a lot of threats to it then.
link |
Naked nucleic acid doesn't last long in the environment.
link |
So they're covered.
link |
The nucleic acid is covered.
link |
It can be covered with a protein shell,
link |
a pure protein shell,
link |
or it can have a membrane around it,
link |
which would be lipids from the host cell.
link |
So lipids, so it's fatty membrane.
link |
So our cells are coated with fatty membranes, right?
link |
Our cells, the outer plasma membrane, right?
link |
The viruses can be too.
link |
So they're kind of like cells,
link |
but without the ability to do the mitochondria stuff.
link |
Some are, they don't have nuclei,
link |
they don't have mitochondria,
link |
but they do have a nucleic acid, they have a membrane,
link |
and then of course there are spikes in the membrane
link |
that allow them to attach to cells.
link |
And so that completes our two different kinds.
link |
So they all have like attachment mechanisms,
link |
like ways to like keys into the cells.
link |
They all have to get into cells.
link |
There are a couple of exceptions though.
link |
There are viruses of fungi and plants.
link |
So let's do the fungi.
link |
Fungi would be like yeast.
link |
The yeast cell wall is pretty hard to get through.
link |
So viruses typically don't attach to a yeast
link |
and get inside, rather they just live in the yeast forever.
link |
And they multiply as mostly nucleic acids,
link |
and as the yeast divide, they go into the daughter cells,
link |
and that's how they exist.
link |
Plant viruses, also the plant cell wall
link |
would be very hard to get across
link |
with by binding a protein.
link |
So plant viruses get into plants
link |
either by pests that inject them in.
link |
They're sucking sap out
link |
and they inject virus at the same time,
link |
or farmers, they have contaminated farm equipment
link |
and they roll over the plants and introduces viruses.
link |
So those fungi and plant viruses,
link |
they don't have this specific receptor binding
link |
to get them into the cell,
link |
but everything else, yeah,
link |
the virus binds to something on the surface,
link |
very specific, it's taken into the cell,
link |
because that's what cells do.
link |
When things bind their exterior, they take it in,
link |
because in most cases, it's good,
link |
it's something they need.
link |
And so the virus slips in,
link |
I guess you'd call that a Trojan horse, right?
link |
It's so hard to not anthropomorphize this whole thing.
link |
So obviously they don't know any of this.
link |
It's not an actual Trojan horse.
link |
So they're not getting actually tricked
link |
in the way humans trick each other.
link |
No, it's all passive.
link |
And it's just through so many years of evolution,
link |
it's you select something that works and it continues.
link |
And what survives then goes on
link |
with a perhaps a slightly different approach.
link |
I love this idea of passive.
link |
Of course, according to Sam Harris,
link |
so for my sufficiently intelligent alien civilization,
link |
observing humans, our behavior might seem passive too,
link |
because they understand fully exactly what we're doing.
link |
And then there's no free will
link |
and we're all just operating in the same way.
link |
A cell does put just a much higher level of complexity.
link |
So I love the distinction between active and passive.
link |
I mean, the point is,
link |
I think anthropomorphizing to a certain extent is fine,
link |
because it helps people understand.
link |
But when you start to say,
link |
I think the virus is doing that
link |
because then you're putting a human lens on it
link |
and you may be wrong,
link |
because you don't know why things happen for a virus.
link |
So right now we have variants emerging.
link |
And people say, well, I think it's because the antibodies
link |
are selecting for variants.
link |
That's a good idea,
link |
but it may not be the only thing that's going.
link |
You start imagining them coming to the table negotiating.
link |
Yeah, you get into trouble with that.
link |
That's why I tell my students,
link |
be careful about the anthropomorphizing,
link |
because you're gonna apply your values to a virus
link |
and you have different value, you're a human.
link |
And you have, what you think is the reason
link |
for this outcome may not be right.
link |
Just be open minded about it.
link |
In both directions.
link |
I actually, one of the things that pushed back
link |
on this in the space of robotics,
link |
people, most people in robotics
link |
try to not anthropomorphize.
link |
For example, they don't give a gender or a name to robots.
link |
They really try to see as a machine.
link |
And to me, that makes sense in one way,
link |
but it totally doesn't make sense in another.
link |
If that robot is to interact,
link |
operate in the human world and interact with humans,
link |
we have to anthropomorphize it
link |
in order to understand as an engineering problem,
link |
how should it operate in a human world?
link |
Now, the difference with viruses,
link |
the scale of operation,
link |
it doesn't make sense to treat them as human like,
link |
because the scale of operation is much smaller,
link |
but with robots, you're in the same time scale
link |
at the same spatial scale.
link |
Of course, in the movies,
link |
they always give them names and personalities.
link |
Yeah, well, yeah, that's my argument
link |
is we should do the same
link |
when you're trying to solve the engineering problem
link |
It's not just for the movies.
link |
Well, let me ask you this,
link |
because you've said, controversially, not really,
link |
that viruses are not living.
link |
Are viruses alive or not?
link |
So I've seen many people say,
link |
oh, they have to be, they have nucleic acids,
link |
they evolve, they mutate.
link |
That's all true, but they don't do it on their own.
link |
The particles in my mug are just not doing any of that
link |
unless they get into a cell.
link |
So a virus infected cell is alive.
link |
I totally agree with that,
link |
because in fact, when a virus gets in a cell,
link |
it converts it into a virus making factory, if you will.
link |
There's no longer a cell.
link |
Some people call it a virus cell.
link |
I don't really like that, but it's fine.
link |
So that's what I'm talking about.
link |
The particle is not alive.
link |
You can have your virus infected cell as alive,
link |
but the particle, it just would not do anything forever
link |
without getting inside of a cell.
link |
Well, once it's into cells, it is alive then,
link |
but it's no longer a particle.
link |
It's taken apart and nucleic acid is moving around the cell.
link |
It's making proteins.
link |
Eventually it makes new particles.
link |
And then those particles released from the cell,
link |
they're not living anymore.
link |
So I think it's kind of like a spore, a spore of a seed.
link |
Although the seed just doesn't work
link |
because the cells in the seed
link |
have the ability to make their own energy and so forth.
link |
But a bacterial spore, and it's the same thing,
link |
doesn't do anything unless you add water and nutrients
link |
and that starts to divide,
link |
but it doesn't need to get into a cell.
link |
It's very different from a virus.
link |
So that's why the particle.
link |
And when people think of virus,
link |
they're always thinking of the particle.
link |
And that's why I say it can't be alive
link |
because the particle can't do anything on its own.
link |
But if you think of a virus as an organism
link |
with a particle phase in a cell,
link |
then it makes sense to be alive.
link |
And by the way, when you say particle,
link |
you're referring to that structure
link |
that you've been mentioning some parts of membrane and not,
link |
that has been called, what is it, a virion particle?
link |
Virion, so what you should have here, I'll send you one.
link |
And then you can refer to it.
link |
What's the sexiest one to have?
link |
Like what, in terms of particles to have on a table?
link |
Well, fortunately, the ones that you can 3D print.
link |
Oh, they're not going to be, super.
link |
They're the ones that we know the structure's of, right?
link |
So someone sent me last year,
link |
a 3D model of SARS CoV2, and it's beautiful.
link |
It's actually cracked open, so you can see the RNA
link |
and the spikes are sticking out.
link |
And they even put some antibodies sticking onto the spikes.
link |
And I mean, when I show this on a live stream,
link |
people love this, they go, oh my God, this is beautiful.
link |
And it is, it's absolutely gorgeous.
link |
I have that, I have my virus
link |
that I worked on most of my career polio virus.
link |
I have a 3D model of that, which I actually just had made.
link |
And you can have it made in any color you want, right?
link |
What would you say is the most fascinating,
link |
terrifying, surprising, beautiful virus to you?
link |
So of all the viruses you looked at,
link |
sometimes when you just sit late at night
link |
with a glass of wine looking over the sunset,
link |
which virus do you think about?
link |
So fulfilling all of those adjectives is hard, right?
link |
Fascinating, exciting, terrifying.
link |
Well, the terrifying is an optional one, I think,
link |
because maybe that puts a lot of pressure.
link |
See, terrifying, to me, I'm not terrified
link |
because I think we can handle most viruses,
link |
as you see with this brand new one
link |
that emerged a year ago, we can handle it.
link |
From a virology perspective.
link |
Yeah, I mean, the human perspective
link |
is a different story, right?
link |
That's always an issue.
link |
But so I think there are a couple
link |
of different categories of virus.
link |
So we could do the terrifying.
link |
And I think rabies is a terrifying virus
link |
because unless you're vaccinated,
link |
100% certainty you're gonna die.
link |
So you get bitten by a rabid raccoon
link |
or bat or dog, whatever.
link |
And there's still 70,000 deaths a year of rabies
link |
throughout the world because there are a lot
link |
of feral dogs running around that are infected.
link |
Unless you're vaccinated, you're gonna die.
link |
There's nothing we can do.
link |
But we do have a vaccine which we can actually give you
link |
even after you've been bitten,
link |
which is the only vaccine that works that way.
link |
It's a therapeutic, right?
link |
It will treat your illness.
link |
Cause the disease takes so long to develop,
link |
eventually you get all kinds of neurological issues
link |
and paralysis and so forth.
link |
But it takes time and you can be vaccinated
link |
and it will prevent that in the meanwhile.
link |
So people always say, what's the most lethal virus
link |
I said, no, it's actually rabies.
link |
Unless you're vaccinated, it will kill you.
link |
Maybe it's good to linger.
link |
Cause we'll talk about vaccines a few times today.
link |
It's good to linger on cases where vaccines have clearly
link |
undoubtedly helped human civilization.
link |
And it seems like rabies is a good example.
link |
Oh, rabies is great because everyone knows what happens
link |
when somebody gets rabies, right?
link |
You have fear of water, hydrophobia.
link |
Your body becomes spastic and stiff and jerks around
link |
and you lose consciousness.
link |
You can't, you know, no more.
link |
It's not a fun ride to death.
link |
It's a horrible way to die.
link |
So I think most people know that.
link |
It's been popularized enough in media, right?
link |
So then nobody would probably object to getting,
link |
oh, I was just bit by this raccoon and it ran off.
link |
Okay, well, we should assume it's rabid.
link |
We should immunize you.
link |
And most people are okay with that.
link |
Cause they know the consequences.
link |
And it's also pretty rare, right?
link |
It's not like something that you're trying to get
link |
into the arms of, you know, 250, 300 million Americans.
link |
That's hard, but the few thousand every year, it's easy.
link |
So the transmissibility is difficult, right?
link |
It has to, oh, it's not, it's not airborne.
link |
It's not airborne.
link |
It just, you have to be bitten.
link |
Although some, some people claim you could walk into a cave
link |
and the bats, you know, breathing out rabies,
link |
virus could infect you, but I don't really think
link |
that's well, that's well substantiated.
link |
I think it's a bite.
link |
How would you do a study on that?
link |
Yeah, it's, it's very hard to do.
link |
You'd have to collect the vapors in the cave
link |
and show that they're infectious, which,
link |
and by the way, someone emailed me the other day,
link |
They say, why can't we just immunize all the bats
link |
in the world against these viruses?
link |
And I said, well, how would you do that?
link |
There are caves everywhere, right?
link |
And he said, well, maybe you could just go
link |
and aerosolize them.
link |
It's pretty dangerous.
link |
And then, and then all the bats should have vaccine
link |
passports to make sure that they're.
link |
And I said, you have to get their consent before you do it.
link |
But you, we do immunize wildlife against rabies.
link |
We have rabies vaccines for wild animals.
link |
So there are a whole bunch of them that get rabies.
link |
And we put it, we put it in bait
link |
and drop it from helicopters in the woods.
link |
And it drops down the incidence of rabies and people.
link |
You know, people hiking get bitten and so forth.
link |
It drops the incidence, so we can do that.
link |
I didn't know that.
link |
I was wondering how much medical care we're doing
link |
for animals in the wild because I've recently become
link |
more and more aware that animals are living
link |
in extreme poverty, right?
link |
Like, you don't know, you think like natural, it's great.
link |
You know, like when animals are living on a farm,
link |
it's terrible, but then you also have to compare to like
link |
what life is like in the, or like the zoo,
link |
you have to compare what life is like in the wild.
link |
Well, the life in the wild is very tough, I think.
link |
I mean, most animals have to, the carnivores anyway,
link |
they have to catch their food every day, right?
link |
And then there's the viruses there.
link |
They have viruses as well.
link |
So the rabies immunization is the only one I'm aware of
link |
We do immunize lots of other animals.
link |
We immunize chickens and pigs and cows, even fish,
link |
farmed fish, we pick each fish up and give it an injection,
link |
you know, when it's a small fish.
link |
But that's mostly so that the farmers get a good yield.
link |
We don't really care about the animals, right?
link |
We want a good yield for market.
link |
And then there's some examples where we immunize animals
link |
to prevent spillovers into people.
link |
So there's a disease called Hendra in Australia,
link |
which was discovered in the 90s.
link |
And it turns out there's, there are bats, fruit bats,
link |
that have this virus.
link |
The bats are fine, but sometimes they fly
link |
into horse stalls and the horses get infected.
link |
These are in Australia was initially race horses,
link |
which are very expensive, right?
link |
The horses got infected and they died.
link |
And the humans who would take care of them would die also.
link |
So now they immunize the horses to prevent,
link |
well, to save the horses,
link |
probably that's the motivation
link |
because these horses are hundreds of thousands of dollars,
link |
And then the people don't get sick
link |
because the horses don't get sick.
link |
You don't want to immunize all the people
link |
because it's too rare,
link |
but that approach is called one world health approach,
link |
which means everything's connected on the planet.
link |
And we have to think of everything
link |
in the grander scheme, not just us.
link |
Yeah, so you can immunize some things
link |
along the trajectory that a virus would take.
link |
Some living beings.
link |
In the Arabian Peninsula,
link |
they have a MERS coronavirus issue every month.
link |
There are a couple of cases where a camel
link |
will infect a human and the human can get very sick.
link |
It's a respiratory disease, very much like COVID.
link |
And so camels are very common there.
link |
They're raced, they're used as pets, they're eaten.
link |
So there's a lot of human camel contact,
link |
but the number of cases are rare to a month.
link |
So you don't want to immunize all the humans.
link |
So the idea would be to immunize the camels.
link |
So, okay, so you put rabies,
link |
but Ebola also is a famously deadly one.
link |
It kills like, I don't know, 50, 60% of it.
link |
50 to 90, but that's in Africa,
link |
where the healthcare isn't great.
link |
What you saw when cases of Ebola came to the US,
link |
we could take care of it.
link |
We knew how to take care of it.
link |
We had fancy hospitals and so forth,
link |
and now we have a vaccine.
link |
So we can, and the vaccine is really good,
link |
but there are many governments in Africa
link |
that are suspicious of us
link |
and they don't want to use our vaccine, so they.
link |
So there's a vaccine for Ebola.
link |
And the effectiveness and safety of it,
link |
to how much is understood.
link |
So this is difficult
link |
because there's not a lot of Ebola, right?
link |
It's not a continuous ongoing thing.
link |
There are sporadic outbreaks here and there.
link |
Of a few thousand people.
link |
At most, at most, usually a few hundred.
link |
And the biggest ever, in fact,
link |
this is why we didn't for years have an Ebola vaccine.
link |
The US military, together with Canada,
link |
developed an Ebola vaccine for service people, right?
link |
They wanted to say, well, we're sending people
link |
into these Ebola areas.
link |
We want a vaccine for them.
link |
So they had developed it through all the preclinical,
link |
which means before it goes into people.
link |
And that stopped because there was no money
link |
to do a phase one and a phase two and a phase three.
link |
In fact, for phase two and three,
link |
you need to have infections going on
link |
because you're looking at how well
link |
the vaccine prevents infections, right?
link |
So then there was a West African outbreak in 2015.
link |
The most cases ever, 25,000.
link |
So they got the test of vaccine.
link |
But they only put it in a few thousand people.
link |
It's not like it's been in hundreds of thousands of people
link |
like the COVID vaccines has been.
link |
So it looks like it has high efficacy,
link |
but we'd like to have more data.
link |
Side effects maybe are not so great.
link |
There are a couple of different available vaccines.
link |
Some have been tested more than others.
link |
I would say this would probably not be widely accepted
link |
But then neither would be something over 50%
link |
deadliness of a virus.
link |
No, I think if you are, in fact, many physicians
link |
work in countries that have Ebola,
link |
so they get vaccinated because they understand the choice.
link |
Yeah, right, it's always about the choice.
link |
So then one more thing to answer the interesting,
link |
what are some of the viruses you really
link |
are fascinated by?
link |
There are a number of viruses that have clearly been shown
link |
to alter host behavior, and that's how they spread.
link |
I think those are fascinating.
link |
For example, there's some viruses of plants
link |
that are spread by aphids.
link |
And the aphid bites the plant,
link |
the virus reproduces in the plant,
link |
and it somehow engineers the plant to give off
link |
volatile organics to attract more aphids,
link |
which will spread the virus.
link |
Isn't that amazing?
link |
So that's altering the behavior.
link |
Might be a Twitter.
link |
Altering because somehow the virus infecting the plant cells
link |
gives off these organics and it attracts aphids.
link |
And furthermore, somehow when the aphid bites,
link |
it tastes horrible.
link |
So they immediately leave with the virus
link |
they've just picked up and go to another plant
link |
So they're attracted and then repulsed at the same time.
link |
And obviously you don't want to anthropomorphize this
link |
like a strategy they're taking on.
link |
Somehow this worked out.
link |
It worked out this way.
link |
And evolution is sometimes hard to trace, right?
link |
Like Darwin famously said,
link |
he could never figure out how an eye evolved
link |
from a single cell, right?
link |
The more complicated, complex,
link |
the holistic organism is that the virus invades,
link |
the less able it is to control that organism, right?
link |
So I wonder if there's viruses that can control
link |
human behavior to induce more spread of the virus.
link |
Well, I don't see why not.
link |
There's not enough humans I supposed to like evolve through.
link |
Well, we can't do the experiment to test it, right?
link |
We have to observe.
link |
And that's always hard when you're observing
link |
because there's so many things that can confound.
link |
But you look at that.
link |
Yeah, change human behavior, yeah.
link |
I mean, there's so many things that impinge on our behavior,
link |
but yeah, I think it's possible.
link |
I think it's highly possible.
link |
If it does it in a plant,
link |
why not change some other organism's behavior?
link |
I think it's fine.
link |
Anyway, those fascinate me.
link |
There are lots of examples of those that are fascinating
link |
and how they work people are trying to figure out.
link |
But there's not a lot of money to work on, you know,
link |
insect and plant viruses
link |
unless you're going to the USDA.
link |
So they don't get a lot of work moving forward.
link |
if you understand some of those viruses,
link |
is that transferable to human viruses, that understanding?
link |
I think some of it could be, sure.
link |
I think the general principles, for example,
link |
how does the virus cause volatile organics to be made?
link |
It must be turning on some genes
link |
and you could learn principles from that,
link |
how the virus might do that.
link |
Sure, I think everything is broadly applicable.
link |
So to say it's not useful to study viruses of insects
link |
and plants is just wrong.
link |
Because in science, we probably know this,
link |
maybe in your field it's the same.
link |
If you're curious,
link |
you're going to run into interesting things
link |
that you never planned on, right?
link |
That's why people, like you can criticize,
link |
why do we want to go on Mars?
link |
Why do we want to colonize Mars?
link |
Well, it's like, why do you want to go to the moon?
link |
The reality is when you do really difficult things,
link |
engineering things,
link |
like all these inventions along the way are created.
link |
It's kind of fascinating.
link |
Basically just pick a thing
link |
that everyone can agree is kind of cool
link |
and it's really hard and do that.
link |
And then you'll have like thousands of inventions
link |
that have nothing to do with the thing.
link |
I think you should let curious scientists
link |
just follow what they're interested in
link |
to a certain extent.
link |
You can't, in science, we say
link |
we have translational research where we say,
link |
okay, here's some money,
link |
go cure cancer or diabetes or heart disease, whatever, right?
link |
But that often doesn't work out very well.
link |
What works better is to say you have a good lab,
link |
you have a good track record,
link |
here's some money or something.
link |
And that's where PCR, CRISPR, recombinant DNA,
link |
all that stuff which has made the field explode,
link |
that's all it came from.
link |
Not from people saying I want to cure genetic diseases
link |
but by saying what are these repeated things
link |
in this bacterium doing?
link |
Can I ask you a big philosophical question?
link |
So there's these deadly viruses,
link |
they're not very transmissible.
link |
and then there's these less deadly viruses
link |
that are very transmissible.
link |
Like COVID, I guess kind of borderline,
link |
but why isn't there super transmissible,
link |
super deadly viruses?
link |
I think if you compare SARS one and two,
link |
you get somewhat of an answer, right?
link |
SARS one was more deadly.
link |
In fact, over half of the time when people were infected,
link |
they ended up in the hospital,
link |
because they were that sick.
link |
And then the peak of virus shedding from them
link |
happened long after they went in the hospital.
link |
So it's easy to contain the infection
link |
when you're in a hospital, right?
link |
There was not much pre symptomatic or asymptomatic
link |
shedding with SARS one.
link |
And shedding means you become infectious.
link |
So in a respiratory virus,
link |
you inhale the droplets of the virus
link |
and they reproduce in your upper respiratory tract,
link |
what we call the nasopharynx, right?
link |
The nose and going back to that little cavity
link |
just above your mouth.
link |
So the virus reproduces really well.
link |
And then as you talk and sneeze and cough,
link |
you expel droplets and then those are inhaled
link |
by other people and then they reproduce.
link |
And for SARS two, we now know there's
link |
a lot of reproduction just before you feel anything,
link |
So there's a lot of shedding and transmission
link |
before you get symptomatic.
link |
And many people don't ever get symptomatic, right?
link |
So they spread really easily.
link |
So that explains why some viruses
link |
can transmit a lot better than others.
link |
And if one happens to knock you out,
link |
then you're never gonna transmit
link |
because you're in the hospital like SARS one.
link |
But why can't you have both?
link |
Why can't you just wait a while before knock you out
link |
but when you knock you out, it really kills you?
link |
That is a philosophical question, right?
link |
Because we could talk about why we haven't observed it.
link |
I mean, one issue is that if you're killed too quickly
link |
by a highly lethal virus,
link |
you're not gonna transmit it very well, right?
link |
So Ebola can kill you quite rapidly.
link |
And most of the transmission occurs
link |
when people are being cared for at home or in hospitals.
link |
Doctors and nurses get virus, but people walking around.
link |
You're not walking around when you have Ebola, you're too sick.
link |
You know, you have black, bloody diarrhea,
link |
you're vomiting, you're bleeding from your skin
link |
and mucus membranes.
link |
You're not walking around, you're not going to parties.
link |
So I think that's part of it,
link |
that if the infection is too lethal,
link |
you're simply not a good transmitter.
link |
And I think transmission is probably
link |
one of the most powerful selection forces for viruses
link |
because a virus always has to have find a new host.
link |
If it doesn't, it's a startup that fails, right?
link |
If it doesn't find a new host, it's gone.
link |
And so anything that makes the virus transmit better
link |
And if killing you, being less lethal is part of that,
link |
So there's a strong selection pressure against being lethal?
link |
I think there's a strong selection pressure
link |
against being lethal and being more transmissible.
link |
Those two seem to work in opposite ways.
link |
And now we don't have a lot of data to support this.
link |
This is kind of a thought experiment,
link |
but there is one experiment done in Australia many years ago.
link |
I don't know if you know this, but in the 1800s,
link |
the hunters in Australia imported a rabbit from Europe
link |
so they could hunt it.
link |
Because the native rabbit in Australia was too fast for them.
link |
They couldn't shoot them.
link |
So they brought in this European rabbit
link |
and they reproduced out of control.
link |
Within a couple of years, they were everywhere.
link |
Millions of rabbits and all the watering holes.
link |
And now they had a problem.
link |
So they decided to use a virus
link |
to get rid of these excess rabbits.
link |
And they used a virus, a pox virus called myxoma virus,
link |
which is a natural virus of a different kind of rabbit.
link |
But for these European rabbits, it was quite lethal.
link |
And it's spread by mosquitoes.
link |
So they said, okay, let's release this virus.
link |
And in the first year, 99.2% of the rabbits were killed,
link |
but that 0.8% that were left had some form of resistance.
link |
They were variants.
link |
Every organism, not just viruses makes mutants
link |
and there were some variants of the rabbits
link |
that could survive infection.
link |
And then in subsequent years, the virus became less lethal
link |
and then the mosquitoes had a better shot
link |
of transmitting it from one rabbit to another
link |
if the rabbit lived longer.
link |
That's the selection probably.
link |
And so in the end, the rabbits lived on,
link |
the virus was there, it evolved to be more transmissible
link |
So that's the only data.
link |
Life on Earth is amazing.
link |
If you take the time to look at it and see what's happened,
link |
It's also humbling that it just makes you realize humans
link |
are just a small part of the picture.
link |
And we're wrecking it, aren't we?
link |
Well, I mean, that's not really,
link |
I mean, viruses are wrecking it some ways.
link |
Part of this, we're not really wrecking anything.
link |
It's all part of it.
link |
But you know, when the ways that human exists
link |
encourages viruses to infect us, right?
link |
When we were hunter gatherers,
link |
living in bands of a hundred people,
link |
very few viruses because it was hard for the virus
link |
to go from one band to another.
link |
And perhaps a hunter would, one of these humans
link |
would get an animal and bring a virus at the camp
link |
and some people would die,
link |
but it would never spread to another.
link |
And then when we started to congregate in cities,
link |
we figured out agriculture and so forth
link |
and how to harvest animals.
link |
Then we could get bigger and bigger populations
link |
and the viruses went crazy.
link |
And they went from animals to us.
link |
So measles went from cows to humans,
link |
when humans learned to domesticate cows
link |
and started gathering in big cities.
link |
Yeah, but now that humans are able to communicate
link |
and travel globally,
link |
the virus has become more and more dangerous, transmissible.
link |
Thereby, if you look at earth as an organism,
link |
thereby pushing humans to be more innovative,
link |
create Alpha Fold 2 and 3 and 4 and 5,
link |
create better systems and eventually there's rockets
link |
that keep flying from earth.
link |
And eventually the virus is becoming super dangerous
link |
and threatening all of human civilization,
link |
will force it to become a multi planetary species
link |
and this organism starts expanding.
link |
So I think it's a feature, not a bug, I don't know.
link |
Well, I think that we have our early,
link |
probably the most of the,
link |
we're studying viruses since 1900, right?
link |
Most of that time was because of diseases they caused.
link |
The first virus is discovered, yellow fever,
link |
virus smallpox, polio virus, influenza virus.
link |
Those were all because people got sick and they said,
link |
oh, look, this is a virus that's associated with it.
link |
And so we got good at learning how to take care of these
link |
infections, making vaccines and so forth over the years.
link |
And it's only in the last 20 years
link |
that we recognize that there are more viruses out there
link |
that are far more interesting, perhaps,
link |
but we've learned how to deal with the bad ones for sure.
link |
So we talked about what is a virus.
link |
We talked about some of the most dangerous
link |
and deadly viruses.
link |
Can we zoom in and talk about COVID 19 virus?
link |
I don't know what your preferred name is, but...
link |
Well, the virus is SARS COVID 2,
link |
which is hard, it's long, right?
link |
And then COVID 19 is the disease.
link |
So you could say the virus of COVID 19, that's fine.
link |
The virus of COVID 19.
link |
But for the purpose of this conversation,
link |
we'll every once in a while just say COVID.
link |
It's fine, no problem.
link |
What is this virus from,
link |
I don't know how many ways we can talk about it.
link |
I think from a basic structural, like the variant structure,
link |
biological structure perspective,
link |
what is it, what are its variants?
link |
Can you describe the basics,
link |
the important characteristics of the virus?
link |
So viruses are classified by humans
link |
just to make it easier to keep track of them, right?
link |
So this is a coronavirus,
link |
which is because when they were first discovered,
link |
I think the first ones were animal coronaviruses.
link |
They looked at them in the electron microscope
link |
and it looked like the solar corona,
link |
and that's all there is to it.
link |
And I have to say that early in the outbreak,
link |
the place with the highest seropositivity in the US
link |
for a while, 68% was a working class neighborhood
link |
in New York City called Corona.
link |
Can you beat that, right?
link |
That's crazy, yeah.
link |
So coronaviruses, they have membranes, right?
link |
We talked about membranes,
link |
they have spike proteins in the membrane,
link |
so they can attach to cells,
link |
and inside they have RNA,
link |
and they are the viruses with the longest RNA
link |
that we know of, none other comes close.
link |
For some reason, they're able to maintain 30,000,
link |
so SARS CoV2 RNA is 30,000 bases of RNA,
link |
and some of the other coronas are even longer, 40,000.
link |
This is a, coronas are family viruses that included
link |
the one you mentioned before, version one.
link |
So SARS CoV1, yeah.
link |
CoV1 and I guess other ones as well.
link |
So the first, we first learned of them in animals,
link |
a lot of animals, pigs and cows and horses
link |
have coronaviruses, and then in the 60s,
link |
we discovered a couple of human coronaviruses
link |
that just cause colds, very mild colds
link |
that you wouldn't even think twice about, right?
link |
And then suddenly in 2003,
link |
there's this outbreak of severe respiratory disease
link |
in China, and it started in November,
link |
and they didn't tell the world until February,
link |
and that was really bad
link |
because it was already spreading by the time
link |
they told people about it,
link |
but this went to 29 different countries,
link |
only 8,000 people were infected, and then it stopped.
link |
And that was the first time we saw
link |
an epidemic coronavirus, and what they did afterwards
link |
is they said, okay, it looks like it came
link |
from the meat markets, they have live meat markets
link |
in Guangzhou, in the south of China,
link |
where you can go and pick out an animal,
link |
and the guy will slaughter it for you and give it to you,
link |
and then of course there's blood everywhere,
link |
and that's how they got infected,
link |
and they figured out that there's this animal
link |
called a palm civet, that was the source of virus.
link |
The palm civets are shipped in from the country,
link |
on the countryside, and the palm civets,
link |
somehow on the countryside, got it from a bat,
link |
so they went looking in caves in the countryside,
link |
and they found in one cave all the viruses
link |
that could make up SARS1, and that was 2000,
link |
I would say, took about five, eight years
link |
after that outbreak, so that was the first hint
link |
that bats have coronaviruses that can infect people
link |
and cause problems, right?
link |
And after that, we should have been ready.
link |
So, didn't they already start developing vaccines
link |
Yes, so some people started making vaccines,
link |
they tested them in mice, but they never got into people,
link |
and some people started working on antiviral drugs,
link |
nothing ever came of them, because, you know,
link |
industry, there's no disease, it's gone,
link |
why should we make vaccines in drugs,
link |
and NIH in the US, you submit a grant,
link |
and they say, ah, it's too risky,
link |
there's none of this virus around,
link |
so people were really short sighted,
link |
because I always say, we could have had antivirals
link |
for this, absolutely, for sure, no question.
link |
In fact, the one antiviral that's in phase three,
link |
it's called molnupiravir, it's the only one
link |
that you can take orally, it's a pill, it looks really good,
link |
that was developed five years ago,
link |
but never taken into humans, it could have been ready.
link |
So we dropped the ball, and then the next decade,
link |
2012, MERS coronavirus comes up in the Arabian Peninsula,
link |
this comes from camels and infects people,
link |
but probably the camels got it from bats originally
link |
some time ago, but that never transmits
link |
from person to person, very rarely.
link |
Every new little outbreak is a new infection from a camel,
link |
so that was 2012, and now here we are, 2019,
link |
the new outbreak of respiratory disease in China,
link |
and this one really goes all over the world,
link |
where SARS one could not, and it's a coronavirus,
link |
it's different enough from SARS one
link |
that it has very different properties, cause a lot.
link |
But it still has a membrane,
link |
it still has a very long RNA in the middle,
link |
and then it still has the spike proteins.
link |
What are the things that are,
link |
what are the little, the unique things
link |
that make it that much more effective?
link |
That make it cause a pandemic of millions of people
link |
as opposed to SARS one.
link |
Well, the genome is 20% different from SARS one, say,
link |
and in those bases, there's some,
link |
there are things that make it different from SARS one.
link |
It binds the same receptor, ACE two, on the cell surface,
link |
so that's remarkable, it has a lot of the same proteins,
link |
they look similar, like if you look at the structure
link |
of the spikes, they look similar,
link |
but there's enough amino acid differences
link |
to make the bile, and what it is, we don't know,
link |
because how do you figure that out?
link |
You need to study animals, cause you can't infect people,
link |
and the animal models aren't great, for example.
link |
So the way you figure that out
link |
is you figure out how those differences,
link |
what functional, like how the difference in the amino acids
link |
lead to functional difference in the virus.
link |
Like how it attaches, how it breaks the cell wall.
link |
And how the hell do you figure that out?
link |
Like, I guess there's models of interaction.
link |
First you need an animal of some kind to infect, right?
link |
You can use mice, people have used ferrets, guinea pigs,
link |
nonhuman primates, all of the above,
link |
and nonhuman primates are very expensive,
link |
so not many people do that.
link |
And then you can put the virus in the respiratory tract,
link |
but in fact, none of them get sick like people do.
link |
Many people with COVID get a mild disease,
link |
but 20% get a very severe, longer lasting disease,
link |
and they can die from it, right?
link |
No animal does that yet.
link |
So we have no insight into what's controlling that.
link |
But if you just want to look at the very first part
link |
of infection and the shedding and the transmission,
link |
you can do it in any one of several animal models.
link |
Ferrets are really good for transmission.
link |
They tend to have nasal structures like humans,
link |
and you can put them in cages next to each other,
link |
and they'll transmit the virus really nicely,
link |
so you can study that.
link |
But the other thing that's important that we should mention
link |
is how do you manipulate these viruses?
link |
So these are RNA viruses.
link |
You can't manipulate RNA.
link |
We don't know how to do it.
link |
But DNA, because of the recombinant DNA revolution
link |
that occurred in the 70s,
link |
we can change DNA any way we want.
link |
We can change the single base.
link |
We can cut out bases.
link |
We can put other things in really easily.
link |
And if I may give it a personal aspect,
link |
when I went to MIT as a postdoc in 1979,
link |
David Boothman said, here's what I want you to do.
link |
The moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments
link |
on viruses has just been lifted.
link |
I want you to make a DNA copy of polio
link |
and see if you put that in a cell,
link |
whether it will start an infection.
link |
So I made a DNA copy of polio virus.
link |
It's only 7,500 bases.
link |
It's much smaller than corona.
link |
And I took that DNA and I put it in a piece of DNA
link |
from a bacteria called a plasmid.
link |
And you can grow plasmids and many, many bacteria,
link |
make lots of them and purify the DNA really easily.
link |
And I took that DNA and I sequenced it
link |
because we didn't know the genome sequence
link |
of polio at the time.
link |
And that took me a year, by the way,
link |
because the techniques we had were really archaic
link |
and nowadays you could do it in 15 minutes, right?
link |
And I took the DNA and put it into cells
link |
and out came polio.
link |
So that's the start.
link |
Now, since then, everybody has taken that technique
link |
and used it for their virus.
link |
You can now do it with SARS CoV2.
link |
You make a DNA copy of any RNA virus.
link |
You can modify it and you put it back into cells
link |
and you'll get your modified virus out.
link |
So that's an important part of understanding
link |
the properties of the virus, it's saying an animal.
link |
By changing the virus, you're changing a DNA copy,
link |
you're making the virus then and putting it into the animal.
link |
So even in the RNA virus, you can take and turn it into DNA.
link |
And then that allows you to modify it.
link |
What's that mapping?
link |
Well, no, no, what's the process
link |
of going from RNA to DNA?
link |
Reverse transcription.
link |
That's reverse transcription.
link |
Also, you actually go into the process
link |
of reverse transcription to do this.
link |
Remember, David Baltimore and Howard,
link |
have discovered this enzyme in the 70s.
link |
They got the Nobel Prize for that.
link |
And when I went to David's lab at MIT,
link |
he had the enzyme in the freezer.
link |
He said, here, take this and make a DNA copy of polio.
link |
Yeah, I didn't make the connection
link |
that you can use that kind of thing for an RNA virus.
link |
And then modify it.
link |
See, any DNA virus already exists as DNA.
link |
So you can modify it.
link |
But for RNA viruses, it was difficult.
link |
And so then, from that point on, for influenza,
link |
every other RNA virus and coronaviruses,
link |
people made DNA copies,
link |
and that's what they use to modify and ask questions
link |
about what things are doing, right?
link |
What's this gene doing?
link |
What if we take it out?
link |
Can you do the same thing with COVID?
link |
Is it takes the RNA and then...
link |
And in fact, in January 2020,
link |
as soon as the genome sequence was released
link |
from China, the lab's all over,
link |
we're synthesizing this 30,000 base DNA
link |
What can you figure out without infecting anything?
link |
Just turning into, well, the reverse transcription,
link |
turning it to DNA, modifying stuff,
link |
and then putting it into a cell.
link |
What can you figure out from that?
link |
Oh, well, you could, let's say you can cut out a gene.
link |
You see some genes in the sequence.
link |
I don't know what these genes do.
link |
Let's cut them out.
link |
And then you could cut them out of the DNA.
link |
You put the DNA in cells
link |
and maybe you get virus out.
link |
And you go, oh, clearly that gene's not needed
link |
for the virus to reproduce, at least in cells, right?
link |
Or maybe you take the gene out
link |
and you never get any virus.
link |
Is there a nice systematic ways of doing this?
link |
Do people kind of automate it?
link |
I mean, the problem with SARS, the COVID virus,
link |
is it's 30,000 bases, there's a lot of stuff there.
link |
And what makes it more difficult is that you have to,
link |
it's been classified as a BSL3 agent, biosafety level three.
link |
And so not everyone has a lab that's capable of doing that.
link |
So it limits the number of people who can do experiments.
link |
You know, we're lucky to have a few in New York City,
link |
but not every place has them.
link |
So you cannot work with the virus just out on the bench
link |
like we do with many other viruses.
link |
You have to wear a suit and have to have special procedures
link |
and containment and so forth.
link |
So it makes it difficult to do basic experiments
link |
But when it's a pandemic, there's a lot of money,
link |
there's a lot of incentive to work on it harder.
link |
And also you don't need to work on the virus.
link |
You can take bits of it and work,
link |
you could say just the spike, right?
link |
And say, can we make a vaccine with just the spike?
link |
Cause that doesn't require BSL3.
link |
So like building a vaccine requires you to figure out
link |
how or antiviral drugs, how to attack various structural
link |
parts of the virus and the functional parts of the virus.
link |
You have to decide on a target.
link |
Like I'm going to make an antiviral.
link |
What am I going to target in the virus?
link |
And there are a few things that make more sense than others.
link |
Usually we like to target enzymes.
link |
I don't know if you remember any, your biochemistry,
link |
but you know, enzymes are catalytic.
link |
You don't need a lot of them to do a lot of things.
link |
So they're typically in low concentrations
link |
in a virus infected cell.
link |
So it's easier to inhibit them with a drug.
link |
And the coronas have a couple of enzymes that we can target.
link |
So you have to figure that out ahead of time
link |
and decide what to go after.
link |
And then you can look for drugs that inhibit
link |
what you're interested in.
link |
It's not that hard to do.
link |
Is there just something beautiful about biology,
link |
about the mechanisms of biology?
link |
And I kind of regret falling in love with computer science
link |
so much that I left that biology textbook on the show
link |
and left it behind,
link |
but hopefully we'll return to it now
link |
because I think one of the things you learn
link |
even in computer science that studying biology
link |
and certainly neurobiology, you get inspired.
link |
Here's a mechanism of incredible complexity
link |
that works really well.
link |
It's very robust, it's very effective, efficient.
link |
It inspires you to come up with techniques
link |
that you can engineer in the machine.
link |
That's what drives a field forward
link |
when people improvise and come up with new technologies
link |
that really make a difference.
link |
And we have a bunch of those now.
link |
What's the difference between the coronavirus family
link |
and the other popular family, influenza virus family?
link |
I mean, if I were, because you mentioned
link |
we should have done a lot more
link |
in terms of vaccine development,
link |
that kind of thing for coronaviruses.
link |
But if I were back then, from my understanding,
link |
the thing we should all be afraid of is influenza,
link |
like some strong variants coming out from that family,
link |
that seems like the one that will destroy human civilization
link |
or hurt us really badly.
link |
I don't know if you agree with this sense,
link |
but maybe you can also just clarify
link |
what to use is the difference between the families.
link |
So it's an interesting difference.
link |
They both have membranes, right?
link |
So then they have spike proteins embedded in them
link |
for, and they're different spikes.
link |
In fact, for influenza, there are two main ones.
link |
They're called the HA and the NA.
link |
But what's inside is RNA,
link |
but it's very different RNA.
link |
And here we have to explain that.
link |
So viruses with RNA can have three different kinds of RNA.
link |
They can have what we call plus RNA.
link |
They can have minus RNA,
link |
or they could have plus minus,
link |
actually two strands hybridized together.
link |
The plus RNA simply means
link |
that if you put that plus RNA in a cell,
link |
you know, your cell has ribosomes in it
link |
that make the proteins that you need.
link |
The ribosomes will immediately latch onto the plus RNA
link |
and begin to make proteins.
link |
A minus RNA is not the right strand to make proteins.
link |
So it has to be copied first.
link |
And then the plus minus is both together.
link |
So the SARS coronaviruses,
link |
all the coronaviruses have plus RNA.
link |
So as soon as that RNA gets in the cell,
link |
boom, it starts an infectious cycle.
link |
Same thing with poliovirus, by the way,
link |
which I worked on.
link |
Influenza viruses are negative stranded.
link |
So they cannot be translated when they get in the cell.
link |
So that's tough for the virus
link |
because the cell actually cannot make plus RNA
link |
It doesn't have the enzyme to do it.
link |
So the virus has to carry it in inside the virus particle.
link |
And then when the minus RNA is in the cell,
link |
the virus enzyme makes plus RNAs and those get translated.
link |
It's a big difference.
link |
And then in the influenza viruses,
link |
not only is it minus RNA, but it's in pieces.
link |
It's in eight pieces.
link |
We call that segmented,
link |
whereas the corona is in one long piece of RNA.
link |
Is that they're like floating separately?
link |
Yeah, so the genes are on separate pieces.
link |
They're all packaged inside that virus particle
link |
of influenza virus, but they're in pieces.
link |
And why that's important
link |
is because if two different influenza viruses
link |
infect the same cell,
link |
the pieces as they reproduce can mix
link |
and out can come a virus with a new assortment of pieces.
link |
And that allows influenza virus
link |
to undergo extremely high frequency evolution.
link |
That's why we get pandemics.
link |
When we have a new flu pandemics
link |
is because somewhere in some animal,
link |
two viruses have reassorted and made a new virus
link |
that we hadn't seen before.
link |
So you're talking about kind of biological characteristics,
link |
but what am I incorrect in my intuition
link |
that are from the things I've heard
link |
that the influenza family of viruses is more dangerous?
link |
Like what makes it more dangerous to humans?
link |
Well, it depends on the,
link |
there are many flavors or vintages of influenza virus.
link |
Some are dangerous and some are not, right?
link |
It depends on which one.
link |
Some, like the 1918 apparently was very lethal,
link |
killed a lot of people,
link |
but more contemporary viruses.
link |
We had a pandemic in 2009 of influenza.
link |
That wasn't such a lethal virus.
link |
We don't know exactly why,
link |
but it didn't kill that many people.
link |
It transmitted pretty well.
link |
Is that the bird flu one?
link |
They're all deriving.
link |
That one was called swine influenza.
link |
Swine, that's right, swine, yeah.
link |
it had RNAs from bird influenza viruses.
link |
These viruses are all reassortants
link |
of different viruses from pigs and birds and humans.
link |
But influenza can cause pneumonia
link |
and can kill you as does SARS COVID too.
link |
So it depends on the virus.
link |
So there is another influenza virus
link |
that's currently circulating.
link |
So right now we have the 2009 pandemic virus
link |
that's still around.
link |
And then the 1968 pandemic virus,
link |
which was the one before 2009,
link |
that one is still around too.
link |
And that's more lethal.
link |
And depending on the season,
link |
some seasons the 2009 virus predominates,
link |
some seasons the 1968,
link |
and when the 68 is around you get more lethality.
link |
So we're living with the influenza family.
link |
We haven't exterminated them.
link |
Right, we never will, never exterminate them.
link |
Because every shore bird in the world
link |
is infected with them,
link |
gulls and turns and ducks and all sorts of things.
link |
But why can't we develop strong vaccines
link |
that defend against?
link |
Oh, we could do that, sure.
link |
But that would not eliminate them from humans.
link |
Even if you had the best vaccine,
link |
you would never get rid of it in people
link |
because there would always be someone who's not vaccinated
link |
or in which the vaccine didn't work.
link |
No vaccine is 100%.
link |
Right, you just contradict yourself.
link |
You said the perfect vaccine.
link |
Imperfect, imperfect.
link |
But then you said,
link |
even if you had the perfect,
link |
yeah, some people wouldn't get vaccinated.
link |
But I understand what you mean.
link |
So, but I actually was asking,
link |
how difficult is it to make vaccines like that for,
link |
it seems like it's very difficult to do that
link |
for the influenza virus.
link |
So it's really easy to make an old school vaccine.
link |
So the way the first influenza vaccines were made
link |
was actually Jonas Salk worked on them in the 40s.
link |
You just grow lots of virus
link |
and you grow it in eggs, by the way, chicken eggs.
link |
Wait, wait. Yeah, chicken embryo needed
link |
so they get fertilized and there's a 10 or 12 day embryo
link |
in it and you put virus in it, it grows up
link |
and then you harvest it.
link |
You get about 10 mLs of fluid.
link |
And then you take that,
link |
you treat it with formaldehyde or formalin
link |
and it inactivates the virus.
link |
So it's no longer infectious.
link |
And you just inject that into people.
link |
And that was the first flu vaccine
link |
that was made for the U.S. Army, actually.
link |
And then it got moved over to people.
link |
We still use that old school tech today.
link |
So you're taking, can you help me out here?
link |
Okay, so this is a good time to talk about vaccines.
link |
Okay, so you're talking about,
link |
you're taking the actual virus,
link |
you put it in an egg, you let it grow up.
link |
It's very funny that you put it in an egg.
link |
And then how do you make it not effective or whatever?
link |
Not infectious, is that the right term here?
link |
So how do you make it not infectious?
link |
You can treat it with any number of chemicals
link |
that'll disrupt the particle, so it no longer infects.
link |
So that step of disrupting the particle,
link |
is that very specific to a particular virion particle?
link |
No, the same collection of chemicals
link |
you can use for all kinds of,
link |
and which have been used for SARS CoV2 vaccines also.
link |
Okay, so what are, there's several things to ask.
link |
So you call it old school in a way
link |
that's slightly dismissive,
link |
like people talk about Windows 98 or something.
link |
So is there risks involved with it,
link |
or is it just difficult to produce large amounts?
link |
No, it's only, it's very easy.
link |
I mean, you could do it in cells and culture,
link |
but eggs were convenient.
link |
And in the 1940s, we didn't have cells and culture.
link |
We didn't have to do that,
link |
so we had to use something else.
link |
It's easy to do, but the process of inactivating
link |
the virus with a chemical makes it
link |
not the best vaccine you can make.
link |
The flu vaccines that we have today,
link |
which are mostly based on this inactivation,
link |
is called inactivated virus vaccines.
link |
Also, like the kind of thing it presents
link |
to the immune system to train on is not close
link |
to the actual virus.
link |
Yes, that's what we think.
link |
So that's why probably the flu vaccines
link |
are just not very good, you know?
link |
60% efficiency at the best, right?
link |
Which is not really good.
link |
What does it mean?
link |
What is the measure of efficiency for a vaccine?
link |
Well, it's how it does in the general population
link |
at preventing influenza.
link |
At preventing illness, not infection.
link |
We usually don't measure infection
link |
when we're testing a vaccine.
link |
We just measure sickness.
link |
That's really easy to score, right?
link |
You do a trial and you say,
link |
if you feel sick, give us a call.
link |
We'll tell you what this is.
link |
So yeah, I mean, what's sickness?
link |
Sickness is the presence of symptoms.
link |
So this is good time to say what a symptom is, okay?
link |
A symptom is what you only can feel.
link |
Only you can feel an upset stomach
link |
or a sore throat or that sort of.
link |
It's the lived experience of a symptom.
link |
Whereas a sign is something that someone could measure
link |
and tell that you're infected.
link |
Like virus in your nasopharynx or something else, right?
link |
Signs and symptoms.
link |
And so in a vaccine trial, they tell you,
link |
if you have any of these symptoms,
link |
they give you a paper with the exact symptoms listed
link |
to make sure you're picking them up, right?
link |
So for flu, it would probably be fever, sore throat, cough.
link |
You call them and then they will do a PCR
link |
and make sure you've got flu
link |
and not some other virus that makes similar symptoms.
link |
And then they would say,
link |
are you a vaccine or non vaccine arm
link |
and to count up all the infections
link |
and see how the vaccine did, basically.
link |
That's so fascinating because the reporting,
link |
so symptom is what you feel.
link |
And certainly the mind has the ability
link |
to conjure up feelings.
link |
Oh yes, absolutely.
link |
And so like culturally, maybe there was a time
link |
in our culture where it was looked down upon
link |
to feel sick or something like that,
link |
like toughen up kind of thing.
link |
And so then you probably have very few symptoms
link |
being reported. Absolutely.
link |
And then now is like much more, I don't know,
link |
perhaps you're much more likely to report symptoms.
link |
Now it's fascinating because then it changes.
link |
Oh, it is definitely a perception
link |
because for your symptom,
link |
maybe nothing to me or vice versa, right?
link |
And so when you're doing this,
link |
it's a little bit of a imprecise science
link |
because and even it's a cultural thing
link |
and some countries, something that would make us feel horrible,
link |
they wouldn't even bother reporting.
link |
No, I didn't have any symptoms.
link |
So it's a little bit imprecise and it clouds the results.
link |
So if you can measure things, it's always better.
link |
But you start out with a symptom.
link |
And if you say, if someone tells you this virus,
link |
20% of the people are asymptomatic.
link |
They don't report symptoms.
link |
That number is probably not as a constant.
link |
It depends where you did the study.
link |
It could be different in China versus South America,
link |
Europe, et cetera, yeah.
link |
I mean, I was trying to fix,
link |
so I took two shots of the Pfizer vaccine.
link |
I had zero symptoms.
link |
So, and I was wondering, well, see,
link |
but that's my feelings, right?
link |
This is not, because I felt fine.
link |
Did you have pain at the injection site?
link |
No, it was kind of pleasant.
link |
You felt nothing the next day, no?
link |
Nothing, no, no tiredness, no exhaustion, no.
link |
But see, like I have an insane sleeping schedule.
link |
I already put myself through crazy stuff.
link |
That said, maybe I was expecting something really bad.
link |
Like I was waiting and therefore didn't feel it.
link |
But I also got allergy shots.
link |
And those, I was out all the next day,
link |
like exhausted for some reason.
link |
So that gave me like a sense like, okay,
link |
at least sometimes I can feel shitty.
link |
That's good to know.
link |
And then when the vaccine, it didn't,
link |
but the question is like,
link |
how much does my mind come into play there?
link |
The expectations of symptoms,
link |
the expectations of not feeling well,
link |
how does that affect the sort of the self reporting
link |
I think it's definitely a variable there,
link |
but there's certainly many people
link |
that don't feel anything after the vaccines.
link |
And there's some that have a whole range of things
link |
like soreness and fever, et cetera.
link |
So okay, you were talking about
link |
the old school development side, the egg.
link |
What's better than that?
link |
So then the next generation of vaccines,
link |
which arose in the 50s were what we call
link |
replication competent, where the virus you take
link |
and it's actually reproducing in you.
link |
Yeah, that sounds safe.
link |
And it can be somewhat problematic.
link |
Yes, as you might imagine,
link |
cause you're not, once you put that virus in you,
link |
you have no more control, right?
link |
It's not like you have a kill switch in it,
link |
which actually would be a great idea to put in.
link |
Like nanobots, what can possibly go wrong?
link |
You could just put something in there.
link |
If you added a drug, you would shut it off, right?
link |
And people are thinking about that
link |
because now we're engineering viruses to treat cancers
link |
and other diseases.
link |
And we may want to put kill switches in them
link |
just to make sure they don't run away.
link |
Oh, which thing so you can like deploy a drug
link |
that binds to this virus that would shut it off
link |
in the body, something like that.
link |
Something like that, yeah.
link |
That would be the idea.
link |
You'd have to engineer it in.
link |
Anyway, these were, the first one was yellow fever vaccine
link |
that was made because that was a big problem.
link |
And this virus, and the way you do this back in the old day
link |
So Max Tyler, who did the yellow fever vaccine,
link |
he took the virus, which is a human virus, right?
link |
And he infected, I think he used chick embryos.
link |
And he went from one embryo to another
link |
and just kept passing.
link |
He did that hundreds of times.
link |
And every 10 passages, he would take the virus
link |
and put it in a mouse or a monkey, whatever his model was.
link |
And then eventually he got a virus
link |
that didn't cause any disease after 200 in some passages.
link |
And then that was tested in people.
link |
And it became the yellow fever vaccine
link |
that we use today.
link |
He selected for mutations that made the virus
link |
not cause disease, but still make an immune response.
link |
So those are called replication competent.
link |
We now have the polio vaccine,
link |
which was developed in the 50s after the yellow fever.
link |
Then we had measles, mumps, rubella.
link |
Those are all replication competent vaccines.
link |
And you mentioned that's a good idea.
link |
They are all safe vaccines.
link |
The only one that has had an issue
link |
is the polio replication competent vaccine.
link |
It was called Saban vaccine or oral polio virus vaccine
link |
because you take it orally.
link |
It's wonderful because you don't have to inject it.
link |
This is the perfect delivery.
link |
Either intranasal for a respiratory virus
link |
or orally for polio.
link |
It goes into your intestines, it reproduces,
link |
and it gives you wonderful protection against polio.
link |
However, you do shed virus out.
link |
And that virus is no longer a vaccine.
link |
It's reverted genetically in your intestine.
link |
So you can infect others with polio.
link |
You could take that virus
link |
and it put it into an animal and give it polio.
link |
And in fact, the parents of some kids
link |
in the 60s and 70s who were immunized,
link |
we got polio from the vaccine.
link |
The rate was about one and one and a half million cases
link |
So it's called vaccine associated polio.
link |
And I always argue that we may not have
link |
picked the right vaccine.
link |
There was a big fight in the US and other countries
link |
between the inactivated polio
link |
and the infectious polio vaccines,
link |
which ones we should be using
link |
because we found out that the infectious vaccine
link |
actually caused polio.
link |
And eight to 10 kids a year in the US alone
link |
got polio from the vaccine,
link |
which looking back is really not acceptable in my view,
link |
although the public health community said it was
link |
to get rid of polio.
link |
So now we're close to eradicating polio globally,
link |
but this vaccine derived polio is a problem.
link |
So now we have to go back to the inactivated vaccine,
link |
which is tough because it's injected.
link |
So the basic high level, how vaccines work principle
link |
is you want to deploy something in the body
link |
that's as close to the actual virus as possible,
link |
but doesn't do nearly as much harm.
link |
And there's like a million, not a million,
link |
but there's a bunch of ways you could possibly do that.
link |
So those are two ways.
link |
And now of course we have modern ways
link |
we can make mRNA vaccines, right?
link |
What are the modern ways?
link |
Do you want to look mRNA vaccine?
link |
So that's the most modern,
link |
but even before mRNA vaccines,
link |
we learned that we could use viruses to deliver proteins
link |
from a virus that you want to prevent.
link |
And so the Ebola vaccine,
link |
we took the spike gene of Ebola virus
link |
and put it in a different virus
link |
and we deliver that to people.
link |
And that's called a vector vaccine.
link |
And some of the COVID vaccines are vectors
link |
of different kinds of most famous
link |
or adenovirus vectors carrying the spike gene into the cell.
link |
Can you explain how the vector vaccine works again?
link |
So we have, we take a virus that will infect humans,
link |
but will not make you sick.
link |
In the case of adenovirus,
link |
the years and years of people studying it
link |
has told us what genes you could cut out
link |
and allow the virus to infect the cell,
link |
but not cause any disease.
link |
So instead of doing selection on it,
link |
you actually genetically modify it.
link |
Yes, you modify the vector.
link |
So you'll be much more precise about it.
link |
You'll be very precise
link |
and then you splice in the gene for the spike
link |
and then you use that to deliver the gene
link |
and it becomes, produce this protein
link |
and then you make an immune response.
link |
And vectors the term for this modified.
link |
So we're now using viruses at our bidding.
link |
We're using them as vectors, not just for vaccines.
link |
We can cure monogenic diseases.
link |
That is, if you have,
link |
if you're born with a genetic disease,
link |
you have a deletion or a mutation in a gene,
link |
a single gene, we can give you the regular gene back
link |
using a virus vector, cancers too.
link |
We can cure cancers with vectors.
link |
I think in 10 to 15 years,
link |
most cancers will be treatable with viruses.
link |
And not only can we put things in the vector
link |
to kill the tumor,
link |
we can target the vector to the tumor specifically
link |
in a number of ways.
link |
And that makes it less toxic, right?
link |
It doesn't infect all your other cells.
link |
But it takes time to develop a vector for particular thing
link |
because it requires a deep understanding.
link |
In fact, we have about a dozen different virus vectors
link |
that have been studied for 20 years.
link |
And those are the set of vaccine vectors that we're using.
link |
So it includes adenovirus, vesicular stomatitis virus,
link |
which is a cousin of rabies,
link |
but doesn't make people sick.
link |
Influenza virus is being used as a vector
link |
and even measles virus.
link |
So we're familiar with how to modify those to be vectors
link |
and those are being used for COVID vaccines.
link |
And then of course we have the new,
link |
the new is just the nucleic acid vaccines.
link |
So years ago, people said,
link |
why can't we just inject DNA into people?
link |
Take the spike and put it in a DNA and inject it.
link |
So people tried many, many different vaccines.
link |
And in fact, there are no human licensed vaccines
link |
that are DNA vaccines.
link |
Although there is a West Nile vaccine for horses,
link |
that's a DNA based vaccine.
link |
So if you have a horse, you can give it this vaccine,
link |
Can you clarify, does a DNA vaccine only work
link |
No, it can work for DNA or RNA.
link |
Because remember, for an RNA virus,
link |
we can make a DNA copy of it.
link |
Well, still, when you put that DNA in a cell,
link |
it goes into the nucleus.
link |
So it's, you're just skipping a step.
link |
And eventually you get proteins.
link |
For RNA vaccines, you're giving, okay, I got it.
link |
So those didn't work for human vaccines.
link |
And there were many HIV, AIDS vaccine trials
link |
that used DNA vaccines, didn't work.
link |
And then a number of years ago,
link |
people started thinking, how about RNA?
link |
And I first heard this, I saw what?
link |
I've worked with RNA my whole career.
link |
If you look at it the wrong way, it breaks.
link |
I mean, that's being facetious, right?
link |
But you have to be very careful
link |
because your hands are full of enzymes
link |
that will degrade RNA.
link |
So I thought, how could this possibly work
link |
injecting it into someone's?
link |
It's an example of, I was skeptical and I was wrong.
link |
It turns out that if you modify the RNA properly
link |
and protect it in a lipid capsule,
link |
it actually works as a vaccine.
link |
And people were working on this years
link |
before COVID came around.
link |
They were doing experimental mRNA vaccines.
link |
And there were a couple of companies that were working on it.
link |
And so at the beginning of 2020, they said, let's try it.
link |
And I was skeptical, frankly,
link |
because I just thought RNA would be too labile,
link |
So this is, as we're saying offline, one of the great things
link |
about you is you're able to say when you were wrong
link |
about intuitions you've had in the past,
link |
which is a beautiful thing for a scientist.
link |
But I still think it's very surprising
link |
that something like that works, right?
link |
So you're just launching RNA in a protective membrane.
link |
And then now one thing is surprising
link |
that the RNA sort of lasts long enough in its structure.
link |
But then the other thing is why does it work
link |
that that's a good training ground for the immune system?
link |
Because is that obvious?
link |
Well, I don't think it's obvious to most people.
link |
And it's worth going into because it's really interesting.
link |
I mean, first of all, they wrap the RNA in fats,
link |
in lipid membranes, right?
link |
And the particular formulation, they
link |
test for years to make sure it's stable.
link |
It lasts a long time after it's injected.
link |
And the two companies that make the current COVID vaccines,
link |
Moderna and Pfizer, they have different lipid formulations
link |
to get to the same.
link |
So that's a real part of it.
link |
And it's not simple.
link |
There are quite a few different lipids
link |
that they put into this coating.
link |
And they test to see how long they protect the RNA
link |
after it's injected, say, into a mouse, how long does it last.
link |
And the way it works is apparently
link |
these lipid nanoparticles, they get injected into your muscle,
link |
they bump into cells, and they get taken up.
link |
So lipid fat is sticky.
link |
It's greasy, we like to say.
link |
And so your cells are covered with the greasy membrane also.
link |
So when these lipid nanoparticles bump into them,
link |
they stick, and they eventually get taken up.
link |
And they figured this out right at the beginning.
link |
If we put RNA in a lipid nanoparticle,
link |
will it get taken up into a cell?
link |
And the answer was yes.
link |
It was just let's try it, and it worked.
link |
So it's basically experiment.
link |
It's not like some deep understanding of biology.
link |
It's experimentally speaking.
link |
It just seems to work.
link |
Yeah, well, they had some idea that lipids
link |
would target this to a cell membrane.
link |
And remember, there's no receptor involved.
link |
Like the virus has a specific protein
link |
that attaches to a receptor.
link |
It's not efficient enough to just bump around and get
link |
That's what these things are doing.
link |
And they probably optimize the lipids
link |
to get more efficient uptake.
link |
But it's not as efficient as a virus would be to get into a cell.
link |
So you have no specific, which is why it's surprising
link |
that you can crack into the safe with a hammer or with some fat.
link |
I mean, that's kind of surprising.
link |
It's kind of amazing that it works.
link |
But so maybe let's try to talk about this.
link |
So one of the hesitancies around vaccines
link |
or basically around any new technology
link |
is the fact that mRNA is a new idea.
link |
And it's an idea that was shrouded in some skepticism,
link |
as you said, by the scientific community.
link |
Because it's a cool new technology,
link |
surprising that it works.
link |
What's your intuition?
link |
I think one nice way to approach this
link |
is try to play devil's advocate and say both sides.
link |
One side is why your intuition says
link |
that it's safe for humans.
link |
And what arguments can you see if you could steal man
link |
and argument why it's unsafe for humans?
link |
Or not unsafe for humans, but the hesitancy
link |
to take an mRNA vaccine is justified.
link |
So many people are afraid because it's new technology
link |
and they feel it hasn't been tested.
link |
I mean, in theory, what could go wrong?
link |
The nice thing about mRNA is that it doesn't last forever,
link |
as opposed to DNA, which doesn't last forever,
link |
but it can last a lot longer.
link |
And it could even go into your DNA, right?
link |
So mRNA has a shorter lifetime, maybe days
link |
after it's injected into your arm, then it's gone.
link |
So that's a good thing because it's not going to be around forever.
link |
So that would say, OK, so it's sticking around
link |
for your lifetime is not happening.
link |
But what else could happen?
link |
The protein that's made, could that be an issue?
link |
And again, proteins don't last forever.
link |
They have a finite longevity in the body.
link |
And this one also lasts perhaps at the best a few weeks.
link |
Now, this is a protein that's made after the RNA
link |
gets into the cell.
link |
Yeah, so the lipid nanoparticles taken up into a cell
link |
and the mRNA is translated and you get protein made.
link |
And there's also a question, and I'm sorry to interrupt.
link |
Where in the body, so because it's not well targeted,
link |
or I don't know if it's supposed to be targeted,
link |
but it can go throughout the body, that's one of the concerns.
link |
So it's injected deep into your deltoid muscle,
link |
right here, shoulder.
link |
And the idea is not to put it in a blood vessel,
link |
otherwise it would then for sure circulate everywhere.
link |
So they go deep in a blood vessel,
link |
and it's locally injected.
link |
And they did, before this even went into people,
link |
they did experiments in mice where they gave them
link |
1,000 times higher concentrations
link |
than they would ever give to people.
link |
And then when you do that, it can go everywhere, basically.
link |
You can find these nanoparticles in every tissue of the mouse.
link |
But that's at a 1,000 fold higher concentration, right?
link |
So I think at the levels that we're using in people,
link |
most of it's staying in the muscle,
link |
but sure, small amounts go elsewhere.
link |
Could there be a lot of harm caused if it goes elsewhere?
link |
Like let's say ridiculously high quantities.
link |
I'm trying to understand what is the damage
link |
that could be done from an RNA just floating about.
link |
So the RNA itself is not going to be a problem,
link |
it's the protein that is encoded in it, right?
link |
This is a viral RNA which has no sequence in us.
link |
So there's nothing that it could do.
link |
It's the protein that I would say you could ask,
link |
what is that going to do?
link |
And the one property we know about the spike
link |
is that it can cause fusion of cells, right?
link |
That's how the virus gets in in the beginning.
link |
The spike attaches to the cell by this H2 receptor
link |
and it causes the virus and the cell to fuse.
link |
And that's how the RNA gets out of the particle.
link |
But so wait, I'm a bit confused.
link |
So with this mRNA vaccine with the lipids and the RNA,
link |
there's no spike, right?
link |
The mRNA codes for the spike.
link |
Oh, the mRNA codes, so it creates the spike.
link |
So that spike could cause fusion of cells?
link |
Yes, except they modified the spike so it wouldn't.
link |
They made two amino acid changes in the spike
link |
so it would not fuse.
link |
So they understand enough
link |
which amino acids are responsible for the fusion.
link |
So they could modify it.
link |
So now it's not going to cause fusion,
link |
so that's not an issue.
link |
It's called the prefusion stabilized spike.
link |
So the spike, when it binds ACE2,
link |
that top fulls off and the part of the spike
link |
that causes fusion is now exposed.
link |
And that doesn't happen in this mRNA vaccine.
link |
So those are the things that could have happened,
link |
but I think they're ruled out by what we've just said.
link |
But there's no better test than putting it into people, right?
link |
And doing phase one, phase two, and phase three
link |
in increasing numbers of people and asking,
link |
Do we have any concerns?
link |
And so now it's been in many millions of people
link |
and we don't see most of the effects you see in a vaccine.
link |
You see in the first couple of months,
link |
things like the myocarditis with some of the vaccines,
link |
the clotting issues with the AstraZeneca vaccine,
link |
Guillain Barre, you see those relatively quickly.
link |
And we've seen small numbers of those occur,
link |
but other things we haven't seen
link |
and you never say never, right?
link |
Right, so I mean, this is fascinating, right?
link |
It's like I drink, I put Splenda in my coffee
link |
and has supposedly no calories, but it tastes really good.
link |
And despite what like rumors and blogs and so on,
link |
I have not seen good medical evidence
link |
that is harmful to you, but it's like, it tastes too good.
link |
So I'm thinking like there's gotta be longterm consequences,
link |
but it's very difficult to understand
link |
what the longterm consequences are.
link |
And there's this kind of like distant fear
link |
or anxiety about it.
link |
Like this thing tastes too good, it's too good to be true.
link |
There's gotta be, there's no free launch in this world.
link |
This is the kind of feeling that people have
link |
about the longterm effects of the vaccine.
link |
That you mentioned that there's some intuition
link |
about near term effects that you want to remove
link |
like the diffusion of cells and all those kinds of things,
link |
but they think, okay, this travels to other cells
link |
in the body, this travels to neurons
link |
or that kind of stuff.
link |
And then what kind of effect does that have longterm
link |
that's yet to be discovered?
link |
What do you make for this vaccine, but in general in science
link |
about making statements about longterm negative effects?
link |
Is that something that weighs heavy on you?
link |
Is that something that can kind of escape
link |
through just large scale experimentation
link |
with animals and humans?
link |
Well, if you're really, if you're concerned about longterm
link |
then you have to do a longterm experiment, right?
link |
And maybe you don't see something for 50, 60 years.
link |
So if someone says to you there are no longterm effects
link |
of the COVID vaccines, they can't say that
link |
because they haven't done the long experiment, right?
link |
It's always the possibility, but you have to weigh it.
link |
It's always, there's no free lunch, right?
link |
It's always a risk benefit calculation you have to make.
link |
You can have the study, it goes 50 years and then decide.
link |
But I guess what you're doing is just like we said,
link |
I forget with which one, with polio, with rabies, I forget,
link |
but you're weighing the side effects of the vaccine
link |
versus the effects of the virus.
link |
And like both of them, you don't know longterm effects,
link |
but you're building up intuition as you study,
link |
which what are the longterm effects?
link |
Like there's a huge number of people like that have,
link |
like I don't want to say experts
link |
because I don't like the word,
link |
but people have studied it long enough
link |
to where they build up intuition.
link |
They don't know for sure.
link |
There's basic science being done, there's basic studies.
link |
We start to build up an intuition of what might be a problem
link |
down the line and what is not, biologically speaking.
link |
And so given that map, considering the virus,
link |
there seems to be a lot of evidence for COVID
link |
having negative effects on all aspects of the body
link |
and not just even respiratory, which is kind of interesting.
link |
So the cognitive stuff, that's terrifying.
link |
All kinds of systems of, yes.
link |
And then you look at the same thing with the vaccine
link |
and there seems to be less of that.
link |
But of course you don't know
link |
if it's some kind of dormant thing that's just going to.
link |
You have to make a judgment
link |
and for a lot of people they can't, right?
link |
Because they don't have the tools to make the judgment.
link |
I totally understand that.
link |
And we have let people down a few times in medicine, right?
link |
And I know two very specific examples.
link |
The first polio vaccine ever made,
link |
the Salk vaccine was released in 1955.
link |
Immediately, within months, a few hundred cases of paralysis
link |
in kids who got it, because it was not properly inactivated.
link |
Now you have to understand, parents were dying
link |
for a polio vaccine, because kids were getting paralyzed
link |
every summer, 30,000 kids a year.
link |
And so they went and took it.
link |
They took the word of the medical establishment
link |
that it was safe and it wasn't.
link |
Big let down, never going to forget something.
link |
Although I think a lot of people
link |
today aren't aware of that.
link |
I think that was a big problem that's everlasting.
link |
Then the attenuated vaccine that we talked about,
link |
the infectious causing polio, yet parents continued
link |
to bring their kids to be vaccinated
link |
because they were said, this is the right thing to do.
link |
And I have to say, I was involved in several lawsuits
link |
where parents of a kid who got paralyzed
link |
from the polio vaccine decided to sue the manufacturer
link |
and get some money for their kid, and so they got mad.
link |
And I think you could not, the first issue
link |
could have been prevented, could have been prevented
link |
by inactivating it properly.
link |
I think the company just did the wrong thing.
link |
The second we had evidence for,
link |
and we should probably have not used that vaccine any longer,
link |
but I think that destroys public confidence.
link |
But those are, that's a minority of cases.
link |
This is a minority, this is a very rare event, yeah.
link |
But nevertheless, science as an institution
link |
didn't make corrections in that case.
link |
So what do you make of that?
link |
I mean, it's very unfortunate that those few things
link |
can destroy trust.
link |
But I don't think that lasts till today.
link |
I think today is a different era, right?
link |
And most people don't know about those stories.
link |
I already tell them to you because that's what could happen.
link |
I think it could happen today.
link |
If you look at the history of the polio vaccine,
link |
the US Public Health Service wanted kids to be vaccinated.
link |
So they did things that probably weren't correct
link |
to get the vaccine back online, right?
link |
But they did it and they pushed it through.
link |
So the question is, what do we do today?
link |
So I can look at, as we just said,
link |
I can look at what might happen
link |
and I can make reasonable decisions
link |
about the likelihood of them happening.
link |
And I can also say, I don't want to get COVID of any kind
link |
because I've seen how nasty it can be.
link |
And I decide I'm taking the risk,
link |
whatever small of a long term effect,
link |
I'm going to take the risk.
link |
My family took the risk and many other people did.
link |
Of getting vaccinated because I think it's very small.
link |
But I understand where people can't make that decision.
link |
And that begs the question, what would they need
link |
to make a decision?
link |
So if you're concerned about an effect in 40 years,
link |
we're not going to know for 40 years.
link |
Yeah, so I think if I were to speak,
link |
because I talked to, like I mentioned offline
link |
to Joe Rogan and his podcast yesterday,
link |
I talked to him all the time about this.
link |
I think the concern is less about the long term effects, like on paper.
link |
It's more about the, like people like Anthony Fauci
link |
and people at the top are simply misrepresenting the data
link |
or like are not accurately being transparent,
link |
not collecting the data properly,
link |
not reporting on the data properly,
link |
not being transparent, not representing the uncertainties,
link |
not openly saying they were wrong two months ago.
link |
Like in a way that's not like dramatic,
link |
but revealing the basic process of science
link |
when you have to do your best under uncertainty,
link |
just also just being inauthentic.
link |
There's a sense, especially with like a younger generation now,
link |
there's a certain way on the internet,
link |
like the internet can smell bullshit,
link |
much better than previous generations could.
link |
And so they see there's a kind of inauthenticity
link |
that comes with being like representing authority.
link |
Like I am a scientist, I'm an expert, I have a PhD,
link |
I have four decades of work,
link |
therefore everyone should listen to me.
link |
And somehow that maps to this feeling of, well, what are they hiding?
link |
If they're speaking from authority like this,
link |
if everyone is in agreement like this,
link |
that means they all have emails between each other.
link |
They said, we're going to tell this,
link |
this is the message we're going to tell the public.
link |
Then what is the truth, the actual truth?
link |
Maybe there's a much bigger uncertainty.
link |
Maybe there's dead people in the basement
link |
that they're hiding from bad mRNA vaccine experiments.
link |
Maybe they're, and then the conspiracy theories
link |
start to grow naturally
link |
when there's this kind of mistrust of that.
link |
So it's less about kind of like a deep concern
link |
about long term effects.
link |
It's a concern about long term effects
link |
if we find out that there's some secret stuff
link |
that we're not being told.
link |
It all runs on that.
link |
So I put the blame not on the data,
link |
but basically on the leaders and the communicators
link |
of the science at the top.
link |
Well, to that I would say,
link |
all the data, as far as I know, are made public.
link |
So you can dive into it.
link |
And I know a lot of people ask me questions,
link |
and I just say it's right here in the data.
link |
And I know a lot of people can't do that.
link |
They can't dive into it.
link |
But that's one solution for people who are able.
link |
Now you could argue, well, maybe they've left data out.
link |
Well, then not even I can help,
link |
because then they're hiding it from me too.
link |
And I think that's highly unlikely.
link |
I think for the most part,
link |
the FDA requires the release of all the clinical trial data.
link |
So this clinical trial data, that's one thing.
link |
So that's the data that we should be focusing on, right?
link |
So there's a lot of different data sets here.
link |
So there's preclinical data,
link |
which is everything that was done in the lab
link |
before this vaccine ever went into a human arm.
link |
It's all the cell culture work
link |
that we talked about a little, experiments in animals.
link |
All of that is publicly accessible.
link |
Most of it gets published.
link |
And then there's the initial drug filing,
link |
which is huge, the books have died.
link |
You can get that and look at it, right?
link |
This is me sort of asking sort of difficult questions here.
link |
So there's a lot of money to be made by makers of the vaccine.
link |
So for these companies,
link |
and obviously there's a distress of those folks too.
link |
They've done a lot of really good things in this world,
link |
but the incentives are such
link |
that you wanna sweep stuff under the rug
link |
if you're not 100% pure in your ethics.
link |
And how hard is it for that data to be fabricated,
link |
manipulated, like what's your intuition
link |
for the pre trial stuff?
link |
I think when you start fabricating,
link |
then you get inconsistencies,
link |
which are pretty easy to pick up.
link |
When you're talking about some large scale things of this nature.
link |
Because then you can look through the data very,
link |
you're gonna, I mean, we require looking very carefully,
link |
but you'll see inconsistencies from one trial to another.
link |
And that may ring a bell that something's been done.
link |
It's like the moon landing thing.
link |
I think sometimes like going to the moon
link |
is easier than faking it, right?
link |
In the sense it might be easier to do a large scale trial
link |
and get an effective vaccine versus faking it.
link |
But you know, when you brought up the for profit issue,
link |
I think that is always been an issue.
link |
I've always felt that having your health depend
link |
on for profit industry may not be the best solution.
link |
And I don't know how else to do it.
link |
People tell me I'm a dreamer that thinking that,
link |
you know, all medicines could be nonprofit,
link |
but I also think that the world should have one health system
link |
that takes care of everyone, right?
link |
Because there are some countries that can't
link |
and other countries haven't access like us.
link |
So I wish we could do that.
link |
Well, the argument is the speed of which the vaccines
link |
for COVID were produced would never happen
link |
in a nonprofit system,
link |
would never happen in a non capitalist system.
link |
Oh, I could set up a vaccine production institute
link |
in the US that would get the vaccines done
link |
because you just need to put money into it.
link |
That's what made these vaccines get done.
link |
Money, they poured billions of dollars
link |
and they got it done quickly.
link |
But if I set up a nonprofit institutes of vaccines
link |
throughout the US, staffed with really talented people,
link |
pay them well, keep them motivated,
link |
you'll get your vaccines.
link |
No, but that's the thing with capitalism
link |
is that the selection of who to hire a good,
link |
when you say good people,
link |
the capitalist has a machine that fires people
link |
who are not good and selects people that are good.
link |
Coming from the Soviet Union,
link |
the dream of communism is similar to what you're saying,
link |
It certainly doesn't work in the broads,
link |
the question of whether it works in the healthcare space.
link |
You know, there is some aspect to the machine of capitalism
link |
being the most effective way to select for good people
link |
to effectively produce the thing.
link |
But then of course, a lot of people would argue
link |
that even the current healthcare is not with regulations.
link |
There's some weird mix
link |
where there's a lot of opportunities for inefficiencies.
link |
There's a lot of opportunities for bureaucracy.
link |
So you have like the worst of all the world.
link |
Can't there be some intermediate that works?
link |
Because I mean, the other issue that we have mentioned
link |
is that politics gets thrown into this
link |
and that really messes up
link |
and it should never be mixed with healthcare,
link |
but it is because a lot of funding comes from the government.
link |
So that's another confounding factor.
link |
But I really think I could make a vaccine institute
link |
that if someone didn't do well, I'd fire them.
link |
No, you're not gonna stay if you can't do your job
link |
and do it well, you don't give them incentives,
link |
but it doesn't have to be the two extremes, I think.
link |
It has to be a solution
link |
that people don't have this mistrust
link |
for a company making huge profits off of a drug.
link |
But you know what?
link |
It's funny, it seems that vaccines and antivirals
link |
bear the brunt of this criticism,
link |
yet there are many other pharmaceuticals
link |
that people rely on of all sorts.
link |
They don't seem to question and have issues with those
link |
and they have far more side effects than vaccines.
link |
It's very strange how we're picking that way.
link |
But I should also say that if you have one big vaccine
link |
institute, one of the other sets of vaccine conspiracies,
link |
I mean, I would say they're a little farther out
link |
into the wild set of ideas.
link |
But there's one way to control the populace
link |
is by injecting substances into them, right?
link |
People, I mean, part of that, funny enough,
link |
this probably has to do with needles versus
link |
something you put in your mouth.
link |
But there's something about the government,
link |
especially when it's government mandated,
link |
injection of a substance into you.
link |
I don't care what the science says,
link |
if it's 100% effective, 100% safe,
link |
there's a natural distrust of what,
link |
even if this is effective and safe,
link |
giving the government power to do this,
link |
aren't they gonna start getting ideas down the line
link |
for, I think that they can barely govern.
link |
I don't think they're gonna do that,
link |
but you don't have to take, unless you're a federal employee,
link |
you don't have to take a COVID vaccine.
link |
Yeah, but that largely has to do, not largely,
link |
but there is an individualistic spirit to the American people.
link |
There's this, like, you're not gonna take my gun away from me.
link |
You're not going, and I think that,
link |
that's something that makes America what it is.
link |
Just coming from the Soviet Union,
link |
there's a power to sort of resisting
link |
the overreach of government.
link |
That's quite interesting,
link |
because I'm a believer, I hope that it's possible
link |
to have, to strive towards a government
link |
that works extremely well.
link |
I think at its best, a government represents the people
link |
and functions in a similar way that you're mentioning,
link |
but that, like, pushback,
link |
even if it turns into conspiracy theories sometimes,
link |
I think is actually healthy in the long arc of history.
link |
It can be frustrating sometimes,
link |
but that mechanism of pushing back against power,
link |
against authority, it can be healthy.
link |
I think it's fine to question the vaccines.
link |
What I have issue with is that many people
link |
put out incorrect information,
link |
and I'm not sure what their motivations are,
link |
and it's very hard to fight that,
link |
because then it's my word versus theirs,
link |
and I'm happy to talk with people
link |
about any of their concerns,
link |
but if you start getting into the stuff
link |
that just isn't true, then we have a problem.
link |
The thing I struggle with is conspiracy theories,
link |
whatever language you wanna use,
link |
but sort of ideas that challenge the mainstream,
link |
quote, unquote, narrative,
link |
given our current social media and internet,
link |
like the way it operates,
link |
they can become viral much easier.
link |
There's something much more compelling about them.
link |
Like, I have a secret about the way things really work.
link |
That becomes viral, and that's very frustrating,
link |
because then you're not having a conversation
link |
on level ground, when you're trying
link |
to present scientific ideas,
link |
and then there's conspiracy theories,
link |
the conspiracy theories become viral much faster,
link |
and then you're not just having a discussion
link |
on level ground, that's the frustrating part,
link |
that it's not an even discussion.
link |
Can I just say one more thing?
link |
So, I mean, the internet is here to stay,
link |
so we're gonna have to figure out how to deal with it, right?
link |
But from my perspective, I was skeptical
link |
that these mRNA vaccines, that any COVID vaccine
link |
would be ready within a year.
link |
Plus, the way I look at the mRNA vaccine as a scientist,
link |
it's gee whiz to me.
link |
That's amazing that it worked,
link |
and I think the data are great, so I want it.
link |
As a scientist, I want it.
link |
One of the really sad things again with me too,
link |
as a scientist or as an admirer of science,
link |
is I don't know if it's politics,
link |
but one of the sad things to me about the previous year
link |
is that I wasn't free to celebrate
link |
the incredible accomplishment of science with the vaccines.
link |
I was very skeptical as possible
link |
to develop a vaccine so quickly.
link |
So, it's unfortunate that we can't celebrate
link |
how amazing humans are to come up with this vaccine.
link |
Now, this vaccine might have long term effects.
link |
That doesn't mean this is not incredible.
link |
Why couldn't you celebrate?
link |
Because I would love to inspire the world
link |
with the amazing things science can do.
link |
And when you say something about the vaccines,
link |
they're not listening to the science.
link |
A lot of people are not listening to the science.
link |
What they hear is, oh, you're a Republican
link |
or you're a Democrat and you're social signaling us
link |
and doing some kind of signaling.
link |
No, I think that the vaccine,
link |
you're talking about injecting something into you
link |
and maybe you're right that the rhetoric is like,
link |
you better take this or you're dumb,
link |
is not the right approach.
link |
I've seen, actually, it's kind of interesting.
link |
I've seen both sides kind of imply that.
link |
So, the people who are against the vaccine
link |
are dumb for not trusting science
link |
and the people who are for the vaccine
link |
are called dumb for trusting science,
link |
the scientific institutions.
link |
And nobody wins, yeah.
link |
And they both kind of have a point.
link |
Like, because you can always,
link |
it's like a glass half full or half empty
link |
because you can always look at like science
link |
from a perspective of certain individuals
link |
that don't represent perhaps are not greatest leaders,
link |
almost like political leaders.
link |
There's a lot of, you know,
link |
yesterday went on a whole rant against,
link |
I said a lot of positive things about Anthony Fauci
link |
before I went on a rant against him.
link |
Because ultimately, you know,
link |
I think he failed as a leader
link |
and I know it's very difficult to be a leader
link |
but I still wanted to hold him accountable for that.
link |
As a great communicator of science and as a great leader.
link |
But what do you think he didn't do right?
link |
So, the core of the problem is the several characteristics
link |
of the way he was communicating to the public.
link |
So, one is the general inauthenticity.
link |
Two is a thing that it's very hard to put into words
link |
but there are certain ways of speaking to people
link |
that sounds like you're hiding something from them.
link |
That sounds like you're full of shit.
link |
That's the authenticity piece.
link |
Like it sounds like you're not really speaking
link |
to the full truth of what you know
link |
and that you did some shady shit in your past
link |
that you're trying to hide.
link |
So, that's a way of communicating
link |
that I think the internet and people in general
link |
are becoming much better at detecting.
link |
Yeah, as you said, they're good BS detectors.
link |
Yeah, good BS detectors.
link |
But contributing to that is speaking from authority.
link |
Speaking with authority and confidence
link |
where neither is deserved.
link |
So, first of all, nobody's an authority on this new virus.
link |
Right, we're facing a deadly pandemic
link |
and especially in the early stages
link |
it was unclear how deadly it would be.
link |
It was unclear, probably still unclear,
link |
fully how it's transmitted.
link |
The full dynamics of the virus,
link |
the full understanding of which solutions work and not,
link |
how well masks of different kinds work,
link |
how easy or difficult it is to create tests,
link |
how many months or years it's gonna take
link |
to create a vaccine,
link |
how well in history or currently do quarantine methods
link |
or lockdown methods work.
link |
What are the different data mechanisms
link |
that are data collection mechanisms
link |
that are being implemented?
link |
What are the clear plans they need to happen?
link |
What the epidemiology that's happening,
link |
what is the uncertainty around that?
link |
Then there's the geopolitical stuff with China.
link |
Like what, I personally believe
link |
there should have been much more openness
link |
about the origins of the virus,
link |
whether a leak from a lab or not.
link |
I think communicating that you're open to these ideas
link |
is actually the way to get people to trust you,
link |
that you're legitimately open to ideas
link |
that are very unpleasant that go against the mainstream.
link |
Showing that openness is going to get people
link |
to trust you when you finally decrease
link |
the variance in your uncertainty,
link |
like decrease uncertainty and have,
link |
we still have a lot of uncertainty,
link |
but this is the best course of action.
link |
Vaccines still have a lot of uncertainty around them.
link |
mRNA is a new technology,
link |
but we have increasing amounts of data
link |
and here's the data sources
link |
and like laying them out in a very clear way
link |
of this is the best course of action that we have now.
link |
We don't know if it's the perfect course of action,
link |
but it's by far the best course of action.
link |
And that would come from a leader
link |
that has earned the capital of trust from people.
link |
I mean, I think in recent history,
link |
the worst pandemic is 1918 flu, right?
link |
But that's mainly because we didn't know what to do.
link |
We didn't have many tools at our disposal.
link |
And that was tied up with World War I.
link |
That's right, that's right.
link |
So the leadership there, I mean.
link |
But I don't know what is a lot of deaths, right?
link |
And any one person is someone's family.
link |
So to them, it's a lot, right?
link |
But that logic, we don't apply that logic generally
link |
because there's a lot of people suffering
link |
and dying throughout the world.
link |
And we turn the other way all the time.
link |
And that's the story of history.
link |
So saying you all of a sudden.
link |
Well, bothers me though.
link |
I mean, personally, I don't like anyone dying anywhere,
link |
but especially considering what technology
link |
we're able to muster yet we still kill each other.
link |
It's just dichotomy to me.
link |
Yeah, but I mean, this is the, what is it?
link |
Paul Farmer, there's these great stories.
link |
I mean, that's the burden of being in healthcare,
link |
being a doctor is you have to help.
link |
You can't help but help a person in front of you
link |
But you also are burdened by the knowledge
link |
that you helping them, you spending money
link |
and effort and time on them means you're not going
link |
to help others and you cannot possibly allocate
link |
that amount of time to everybody.
link |
So you're choosing which person lives
link |
and which person dies.
link |
And you're doing so, the reason you're helping
link |
the person in front of you is because they're
link |
And so the reason right now, we care a lot about COVID
link |
is because the eye of the world has turned to COVID,
link |
but we're not seeing all the other atrocities
link |
going on in the world.
link |
They're not necessarily related to deaths,
link |
they're related to suffering, human suffering,
link |
which you could argue is worse than death,
link |
prolonged suffering.
link |
So there's all of these questions.
link |
And the fundamental question here is,
link |
are we overreacting to COVID in our policies?
link |
So this is the, when we turn our eye and care
link |
about this particular thing and not other things,
link |
are we dismissing the pain that business owners
link |
who've lost their businesses are going to feel?
link |
And then the long, talking about long COVID,
link |
the long term economic effects on the millions
link |
of people that will suffer, that suffer financially,
link |
but also suffer from their dreams
link |
being completely collapsed.
link |
So a lot of people seek gain meaning from work.
link |
And if you take away that work,
link |
there's anger that can be born, there's pain.
link |
And so what does that lead to?
link |
That can lead to the rising up of charismatic leaders
link |
that channel that anger towards destructive things
link |
that's been done throughout history.
link |
So you have to balance that with the policies
link |
that you have in COVID.
link |
And then, I mean, very much my main opposition
link |
to Fauci is not on the details, but the final result,
link |
which is I just observe that there's a significant decrease
link |
in trust in science as not the institution,
link |
but the various sort of mechanisms of science.
link |
I think science is both beautiful and powerful.
link |
And the reason why we have so many amazing things
link |
and such a high quality of life and distrust in that,
link |
that the thing we need now to get out of all the troubles
link |
we're in, continue getting out of the troubles we're in
link |
is science, the scientific process broadly defined
link |
like innovation, technological innovation,
link |
scientific innovation, all of that.
link |
Distrust in that is totally the wrong thing we need.
link |
And so anybody who causes a distrust in science to me,
link |
carries the responsibility of that
link |
and should be, because the response should be fired,
link |
should be or at least openly have to carry
link |
the burden of that, of having caused
link |
of that kind of level of mistrust.
link |
Now, it's maybe unfair to place it on any one individual,
link |
but you have to, I think in your pocket said,
link |
the buck stops at the top, like the leaders have to care.
link |
There's a clear leader here, yes, absolutely.
link |
So even if it's not directly his fault,
link |
he has to carry the price of that.
link |
Do you think we should at this point say,
link |
okay, we have vaccines, you can decide
link |
whether you take them or not, let's move forward?
link |
Maybe you can help me understand this
link |
because it seems like, why is that not the right solution?
link |
Completely open society.
link |
The vaccines, at least in the United States,
link |
as I understand, are widely available.
link |
So this is the American way.
link |
You have the decision to make.
link |
If you have conditions that make you worried
link |
to get COVID and go to the hospital,
link |
then you should get vaccinated.
link |
Because here's the data that shows
link |
that it's much less likely for you to die.
link |
If you get vaccinated, if you don't want to get vaccinated
link |
because you're worried about a longterm effects of vaccine
link |
that you don't have to, but then you'll suffer
link |
the consequences of that, and that's it.
link |
So here's what I think is driving.
link |
I think it's all about kids,
link |
because they're gonna go back to school in the fall
link |
and many of them can't be vaccinated.
link |
So if they get infected, they do have less frequency
link |
of disease, but it's not zero.
link |
They do get sick and they can have longterm consequences.
link |
And at that age, it would be a shame, right?
link |
And not even their choice.
link |
They can't decide to get vaccinated or not
link |
because they can't have access to it.
link |
So I think that's what would drive my efforts
link |
to try and get more people, at least in schools vaccinated,
link |
but I might be wrong.
link |
It may not be that.
link |
Can you kind of dig into that a little bit?
link |
So you're saying that there should be an effort
link |
for increased vaccinations of kids going to school,
link |
just not for societal benefit,
link |
but for the benefit of each individual kid, right?
link |
So right now, kids under 12, right,
link |
are not yet vaccinated, is that correct?
link |
And it's not gonna be in time for school opening
link |
that they get vaccinated.
link |
And then, I suppose the teachers are all gonna be vaccinated.
link |
Makes sense for them to do that,
link |
but I'm just worried the kids
link |
are gonna be transmitting it amongst them.
link |
And many states don't allow mask mandate in school.
link |
So I think that's what's driving the larger narrative
link |
in the US to protect kids.
link |
It's kind of what I hear from Daniel Griffin,
link |
because increasing numbers of kids
link |
are being admitted to hospitals now,
link |
because they're becoming the major unvaccinated population.
link |
They're hanging out over the summer,
link |
and that's just gonna get worse in the fall.
link |
And so you could have a lot of kids with long COVID
link |
and disabled their entire lives, right?
link |
So... And of course,
link |
hearing from people who are vaccine hesitant,
link |
I hear exactly the kids statement,
link |
but they're saying they don't want the long vaccine,
link |
the long term effects of the vaccine to affect the kids.
link |
That's the, of this new vaccine.
link |
Which I would say is, as I said before,
link |
you can't say never,
link |
but we do know that long COVID exists.
link |
We don't know for how long,
link |
because we've only looked out six or eight months.
link |
We know that exists, and the frequency is increasing.
link |
It certainly exists in young kids,
link |
and we have no idea about long vaccine effects.
link |
So I think they have to make their decision based on that.
link |
But your question is, why don't we just open up society?
link |
So here we have these vaccines,
link |
if you want to protect yourself.
link |
I think it's mainly the school
link |
that's driving the whole narrative.
link |
That's my opinion.
link |
In which direction not to open up, or?
link |
No, to open up, but to try and get,
link |
there are efforts at the federal level
link |
to get people vaccinated, right?
link |
But see, how high are the risk for kids?
link |
I mean, as my understanding was,
link |
I mean, yes, it's non zero, but it's very low.
link |
But what is the numbers?
link |
Now, 70,000 hospitalizations so far in kids
link |
So yes, it's low, but polio was low.
link |
Polio was 20, 30,000 kids a year paralyzed.
link |
And well, many people have actually argued
link |
that that vaccine wasn't necessary, you know?
link |
That wasn't a substantial enough health problem.
link |
But paralyze is different than hospital.
link |
So what does hospitalized mean?
link |
But this is the long COVID question.
link |
I mean, this is the open question.
link |
What is long COVID in kids?
link |
Well, a lot of the same issues, cognitive issues,
link |
motor issues, respiratory, GI dysfunction.
link |
I mean, it could end in a year.
link |
As you know, there are other post acute infectious sequelae
link |
that we know about, you know, chronic fatigue, ME, CFS.
link |
It's thought to be a post infectious sequelae,
link |
which has gone for many decades now
link |
in many millions of people.
link |
This could be another one of those.
link |
So I'm just saying it might be worth airing on the side
link |
of not letting the kids getting infected.
link |
Yeah, but well, I'm trying to keep an open mind here
link |
and I appreciate you doing the same.
link |
Of course, I lean on definitely not requiring
link |
people to get vaccinated,
link |
but I do think getting vaccinated is just the wiser choice
link |
of looking at all the different trajectories before us.
link |
Getting vaccinated is seems like from the data,
link |
it seems like the obvious choice, frankly.
link |
But I'm also trying to keep an open mind
link |
because some things in the past that seemed obvious
link |
would turn out to be completely wrong.
link |
So I'm trying to keep an open mind here.
link |
So for example, one of the things I'd love
link |
to get your thoughts on this is antiviral ideas.
link |
So ideas outside of the vaccine.
link |
So Ivermectin, something that Brett Weinstein
link |
and a few others have been talking about.
link |
There's been a few studies,
link |
some of them have been shown not to be very good studies,
link |
but nevertheless, there seems to be some promise.
link |
And I wanted to talk to Brett about this particular topic
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One, I was really bothered by censorship of this.
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That's a whole nother topic.
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I just, I'm bothered by censorship.
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There's a gray area, of course,
link |
but it just feels like
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that should not have been censored from YouTube,
link |
like discussions of Ivermectin.
link |
We can set that aside.
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The other thing, I was bothered by the lack of open mindedness
link |
on exploring things like Ivermectin in the early days,
link |
especially when at least I thought the vaccine
link |
would take a long time.
link |
I mean, it's not just Ivermectin,
link |
it's really seriously at a large scale,
link |
rigorously exploring the effectiveness of masks
link |
and the big one for me is testing.
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Like the fact that that wasn't explored aggressively
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to lead to mass manufacture in like May, 2020 is as absurd.
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Anyway, so I was bothered by these solutions
link |
not being explored and not by now
link |
having really good Ivermectin studies.
link |
So can I talk about Ivermectin?
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Yeah, I would love that, yeah.
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So full disclosure, my wife worked on Ivermectin at Merck
link |
for 20 years, okay?
link |
So they just want people to know,
link |
but I don't talk to her all the time about it anyway.
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She hasn't been at Merck for a long time.
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As you know, Ivermectin is a very safe drug
link |
used to treat certain parasitic infections, right?
link |
And it is approved, it's amazing.
link |
You can take one dose a year
link |
and be protected against river blindness in Africa
link |
and certain parts of Africa.
link |
It's remarkably effective.
link |
And so it's quite a safe drug at the doses that are approved.
link |
Now, early last year, a study was done,
link |
I believe in Australia, which showed in cells in the lab,
link |
if you infect with SARS CoV2 and put Ivermectin in,
link |
it would inhibit the virus production substantially.
link |
It was quite clear, right?
link |
But the concentrations they were using were rather high
link |
and could not be achieved by the approved dosing.
link |
So you would need to do a dosing study
link |
to make sure it's safe.
link |
And the reason is that Ivermectin binds
link |
to receptors in your brain and it can have high doses.
link |
A lot of, some people take high doses inappropriately
link |
and they have neurological consequences.
link |
So if you needed 10 times more Ivermectin,
link |
you'd have to make sure it would be safe.
link |
So this is a question of safety too.
link |
So I think it has always been the case
link |
that it should have been properly studied, but it wasn't.
link |
There were lots of trials here and there,
link |
lots of improperly controlled trials
link |
where someone would just treat some patients and say,
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hey, they all did fine, but have no control arm.
link |
And there were some controlled trials,
link |
but they were very small.
link |
So right now, a 4,000 person trial is enrolling
link |
to test in a randomly controlled trial setting,
link |
whether it works or not.
link |
There's still plenty of cases that you can do that.
link |
So you can ask whether there are any side effects.
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I think that's completely fine.
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And if it says it works, then we should use it.
link |
In the meantime, I always tell people,
link |
if you want to use Ivermectin, you can do it off label.
link |
It's FDA approved.
link |
And if your physician says,
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I'm going to give you this off label,
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I don't have any objection.
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But I don't know if it's going to work.
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Now a friend of ours last week in New Jersey got COVID,
link |
he went to his local hospital
link |
and their regimen was Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, Ivermectin.
link |
It's written, that's what they do for every COVID patient.
link |
They just give it to them automatically.
link |
And so he's, he recovered.
link |
So who's to say it was or was not Ivermectin, right?
link |
So I don't have any strong ideological opposition.
link |
I just think it should be tested
link |
for what you want to use it for.
link |
And that's being done.
link |
And I think that's fine.
link |
Is it strange to you that Ivermectin
link |
or other things like it weren't tested aggressively
link |
in the beginning, from a broad scientific community aspect?
link |
I can be a little bit conspiratorial.
link |
And this is what people talk about with Ivermectin
link |
is with the vaccines,
link |
there's quite a lot of money to be made.
link |
With Ivermectin, there's not as much money to be made.
link |
Is that too conspiratorial?
link |
Like why didn't we try more solutions in the beginning?
link |
Well, all the money was put into vaccines, right?
link |
Very little was put into antivirus
link |
because the decision was made at a very high level,
link |
probably involving Dr. Fauci.
link |
We're going to put 24 billion into vaccines, right?
link |
And I think part of the reasoning is
link |
they give you years worth of protection,
link |
whereas an antiviral works
link |
and you have to keep dosing and so forth.
link |
But Ivermectin is not trivial in this.
link |
I agree it should have been tested early on,
link |
but we had a really bad experience with hydroxychloroquine,
link |
which we can talk about too.
link |
Ivermectin is very hard to synthesize.
link |
Most drugs you synthesize chemically.
link |
You devise a formulation and a synthesis
link |
and they do it, they scale it up and it's fine.
link |
Ivermectin is really hard.
link |
And so what they do instead
link |
is they take the culture of the bacterium that makes it
link |
and they grow it up and they ferment it
link |
and then they purify it.
link |
And Merck owns the bacteria.
link |
A number of years ago, two employees of Merck stole it
link |
and left the company and tried to mark it
link |
and they were arrested and they got put in jail.
link |
So they protected very carefully.
link |
So you can't just make it.
link |
If you do, it's incredibly expensive.
link |
And now India, it's very cheap apparently.
link |
They use it quite liberally there.
link |
And I don't know how they're making it.
link |
Maybe they've licensed it from Merck and so forth,
link |
but that's why it hasn't been tested more widely, I think.
link |
There's complexities in terms of getting a lot of it
link |
and manufacturing a lot of it.
link |
So what was the other, the hydroxychloroquine?
link |
So hydroxychloroquine was also shown early on
link |
to inhibit virus in cell culture.
link |
And that's not surprising.
link |
Hydroxychloroquine of course is used for malaria
link |
and what it does, when your cell takes up things
link |
from the plasma membrane, including viruses,
link |
it goes through a pathway called the endocytic pathway
link |
which involves a vesicle moving through the cell.
link |
And as it moves through the cell, it's pH drops.
link |
And that lets a lot of viruses out actually
link |
and hydroxychloroquine blocks that.
link |
So it blocks infection with a lot of viruses.
link |
So the problem with those early studies that were published
link |
is that they were done in kidney cells and culture
link |
where the only way the virus can get in
link |
is through the endosome.
link |
And hydroxychloroquine inhibits that
link |
and that's why it inhibits in kidney cells and culture.
link |
But lung cells and respiratory cells of humans
link |
where the virus reproduces can get in two different ways.
link |
It can get in from this endocytic pathway
link |
which is inhibited by hydroxychloroquine
link |
or it can get in at the cell surface
link |
which is not inhibited by hydroxychloroquine.
link |
So when you treat patients, it has no effect in the lung
link |
because the virus can just bypass it.
link |
And all the usage initially were based
link |
on the studies done in kidney cells and culture.
link |
So that was just wrong scientifically incorrect
link |
yet it drove a lot of and today many people still think
link |
they should be taking it but.
link |
So like the that not panning out kind of resulted
link |
in a loss of optimism about other similar things.
link |
Well that and many other drugs repurposed drugs
link |
were tried, right?
link |
A lot of HIV antivirals were tried.
link |
I think the problem with hydroxychloroquine
link |
influenced the ivermectin narrative, right?
link |
People thought that the data was being hidden
link |
about hydroxychloroquine.
link |
So they said, well they must be doing the same thing
link |
with ivermectin but with hydroxychloroquine
link |
it just scientifically could not work as an antiviral.
link |
The other problem that is more broad
link |
that is important to point out is that
link |
when you have COVID and you need an antiviral
link |
it's usually because you can't breathe
link |
and you go in a hospital.
link |
Because if you're mildly ill you're never gonna go
link |
to your doctor and ask for an antiviral.
link |
And the problem is when you can't breathe
link |
it's no longer a viral issue.
link |
It is now an inflammatory issue
link |
and no antiviral in the world is gonna help you.
link |
So if that's why remdesivir doesn't work very well
link |
because it's mainly given intravenously
link |
to people who go in a hospital.
link |
If you get ivermectin in the hospital
link |
it's not gonna do anything for reducing virus
link |
because by that time you have very little virus
link |
You have an inflammatory problem
link |
that you need to treat in other ways.
link |
So this is why a lot of the antivirals failed
link |
because they're used too late.
link |
What you need is a pill you take
link |
on that first positive test when you have a scratchy throat.
link |
You get a PCR in 15 minutes on positive take a pill, boom.
link |
That's gonna inhibit it.
link |
If you wait till you can't breathe
link |
and that's why the monoclonals even don't work
link |
if you're in a hospital that well.
link |
Cause it's too late and the approach now is
link |
if you're in a high risk group
link |
if you're over 65, if you are obese
link |
or have diabetes or any other comorbidities
link |
your first sign of a scratchy throat positive
link |
you get monoclonals.
link |
Then they might help you
link |
but if you wait till you go in a hospital
link |
it's too late cause the viral curve drops
link |
after that first symptom within three days
link |
you're no longer shedding enough virus to transmit.
link |
Drops really quickly.
link |
So that's the reason a lot of these antivirals failed
link |
cause they were tested in hospitalized patients
link |
and we have nothing but remdesivir now unfortunately.
link |
So it was the wrong approach.
link |
We should have been giving it to people
link |
who just tested positive from the start.
link |
Or even for preventative and see.
link |
You could do that too.
link |
But I have to say the other issue is
link |
this molnupiravir is a drug in phase three now
link |
it's an oral antiviral that looks good.
link |
If we go ahead with just one
link |
we're gonna get resistance within a few months
link |
and it will be useless.
link |
We need to have at least two or three drugs
link |
that we can give in combinations.
link |
And we know that cause that's what took care of HIV
link |
that's what took care of HCV, hepatitis C virus.
link |
It really reduces the emergence of resistance.
link |
Joe Rogan got quite a bit of heat recently
link |
about mentioning a paper and a broader idea
link |
which I didn't, I don't think is that controversial
link |
but maybe we can expand on it.
link |
And the idea is that vaccines create selective pressure
link |
for a virus to mutate and for variants to form.
link |
First of all, from a biological perspective
link |
can you explain this process?
link |
And from a societal perspective
link |
what are we supposed to do about that?
link |
So let's get the terminology right.
link |
So as we talked about earlier
link |
viruses are always mutating.
link |
So no vaccine or no drug makes a virus mutate.
link |
That's the wrong perspective
link |
which you look at it.
link |
What the immune response is putting pressure
link |
selection pressure on the virus.
link |
And if there's a one particle with the right mutation
link |
that can escape the antibody that will emerge, right?
link |
So that's what happens with influenza virus, right?
link |
We vaccinate every year
link |
and there are not a lot of people that get infected
link |
so they get natural immunity.
link |
And then the virus is incredibly varied.
link |
It mutates like crazy.
link |
And there's in some person somewhere
link |
there's one variant that escapes the antibody
link |
which has been induced either by infection or vaccination.
link |
And that drives the emergence of the new variants
link |
so the next year we need to change the vaccine.
link |
So I would say both natural infection and vaccination
link |
sure select for variants.
link |
Absolutely, there's no question
link |
because they're inducing immunity.
link |
Now what happened last year was at the beginning of 2020
link |
very few people in the world were immune
link |
as the virus first started spreading.
link |
But you can see in the sequences of those isolates
link |
from the beginning of 2020,
link |
you can see all of the changes that are now present
link |
in the variants of concern at very, very low frequencies.
link |
They were already there
link |
but there was no selection for them to emerge.
link |
Until November when we now had many millions of people
link |
who had mostly been infected but also some vaccinated
link |
then we saw the alpha variant emerge in England
link |
probably because of immune selection.
link |
Now the virus that had the change that evaded the antibody
link |
and that virus drove through the population.
link |
So that's what we're seeing.
link |
All these variants are simply antigenic selection.
link |
So the variants, the mutations that are at the core
link |
of these quote unquote variants,
link |
they were always there all along the vaccine
link |
or the infections did not create them.
link |
No, the infections don't create them, they're selected.
link |
It's like the vaccine wipe out a lot of the variants
link |
and then by making your body immune to them
link |
but some of them survive.
link |
And then there's another tree that's built
link |
and it's unclear what that tree leads to.
link |
I mean, it could make things much worse or much better
link |
and we don't know.
link |
Well with flu, we see year after year, the virus changes,
link |
we change the vaccine, we deal with it,
link |
we change it again, there's an unending series.
link |
But see, that's a very different story.
link |
If do you think COVID will be with some likelihood
link |
like the flu, whereas basically variants
link |
will never be able to eradicate it.
link |
It will never eradicate it in any case, ever.
link |
Well, come up with a vaccine that makes you immune
link |
to enough variants where there's not enough
link |
evolutionary like room.
link |
Well, if you cut down the number of infections,
link |
then you reduce the diversity, sure, right?
link |
The problem is if, let's say you're a cynic
link |
and you say, well, vaccination is just selecting
link |
for variants, so let's stop it.
link |
But then you're gonna have infection
link |
and that's gonna select for variants
link |
and there, you're more likely to get very sick
link |
because we know the vaccines are really good
link |
at preventing you from dying.
link |
So that's why it still makes sense to use vaccines
link |
because they prevent you from dying.
link |
That's the bottom line.
link |
But can we ever make a vaccine that deals with all variants?
link |
And the reason I say that is because people
link |
who get naturally infected with SARS COVID,
link |
they develop COVID, they recover.
link |
If you give them one vaccine dose,
link |
they make an immune response that handles
link |
all the variants that are around right now.
link |
All of them, much better than people
link |
who've gotten two doses of vaccine.
link |
For some reason, their immune response
link |
is suddenly broadened after the infection vaccination
link |
and they can handle all the variants
link |
that we know of so far.
link |
So that tells me we can devise a strategy
link |
to do the same thing with a vaccine
link |
that makes a really broad vaccine
link |
that'll handle all the variants.
link |
Well, you actually, on the virology blog,
link |
I don't know if you're the author of that,
link |
but the blog, yes, but there's a particular post
link |
that's talking about reporting on a paper
link |
that makes a match strategy.
link |
Oh yes, that's one of my co writers, Trudy Ray.
link |
Yeah, that's an interesting idea
link |
that there are some early evidence now
link |
that mixing and matching vaccines,
link |
like one shot of Pfizer and one of Moderna or something,
link |
that creates a much better immunity
link |
than does two shots of Pfizer.
link |
I think that's worth exploring, absolutely.
link |
And this is relevant, what we're doing with influenza,
link |
you know, instead of having to vaccinate people every year,
link |
why can't we devise a vaccine
link |
which you'd get once in your lifetime
link |
or maybe once every 10 years, okay?
link |
So the spike of influenza, it's a long protein,
link |
kind of like the spike of SARS CoV2,
link |
it's stuck in the virus membrane.
link |
And the very tip, that's the part that changes every year.
link |
This is where the antibodies bind.
link |
But the stem doesn't change.
link |
And if you make antibodies to the stem,
link |
they can also prevent infection.
link |
It's just that when people are infected
link |
or with the current vaccines,
link |
they don't make many antibodies to that stem part.
link |
But we're trying to figure out how to make those
link |
and we think they would be broadly protective
link |
and you'd never be able to or more rarely be able to
link |
have a variant emerge that escaped it.
link |
And I think we can do the same thing with coronavirus too,
link |
Can I ask you about testing?
link |
So you mentioned PCR, what kind of tests are there?
link |
The antigen test, what are your thoughts on each?
link |
Maybe this is a good place to also mention like viral load.
link |
And the history of the virus as it passes through your body
link |
in terms of what's being tested for
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
So the first tests that were developed were PCR,
link |
polymerase chain reaction.
link |
They're basically nucleic acid amplification tests.
link |
And they were very first ones.
link |
They stuck the swab all the way up into your brain almost.
link |
I had that done a couple of weeks ago.
link |
Oh my gosh, it's really nasty.
link |
But now they do an interior nary swab.
link |
They get a bunch of cells and some mucus
link |
which has virus and parts of virus sticking in a test tube
link |
and then they run a reaction,
link |
which by the way involves reverse transcriptase
link |
because it converts the viral RNA to DNA
link |
and then you amplify it.
link |
And you can specify what part of the viral RNA
link |
you wanna amplify.
link |
And then a machine will detect it
link |
and it can be done in 15 minutes.
link |
But you're detecting pieces of RNA, not infectious virus.
link |
So we're measuring viral RNA loads, right?
link |
And a common mistake that many people who should know better
link |
physicians and scientists of all kinds,
link |
they think that indicates how much virus you have.
link |
It's a diagnostic of whether you have bits of RNA in you.
link |
And it probably means you're infected,
link |
but you can't use it to shed light on what's going on.
link |
And I'll tell you why in a bit,
link |
but first we have to explain some other things.
link |
So until you get to about a million copies of RNA,
link |
so you can measure the copy number in this test,
link |
It's a number called CT or cycle threshold.
link |
The test, the way the machine works, it goes through cycles
link |
and every cycle it amplifies what you put in.
link |
And the more cycles you need to see something,
link |
that means there's not a lot of RNA there.
link |
So if you do a test and you have a cycle threshold of 35,
link |
you have very little RNA in you.
link |
Contrary, if you have a cycle threshold of 10,
link |
you have a ton of RNA and you only took 10 cycles
link |
And you can extrapolate from that number,
link |
the number of copies you have per sample, say per swab.
link |
And if you don't have a million, you're not infectious.
link |
You're not gonna infect anyone.
link |
So in the early days, no matter what PCR result you had,
link |
they would quarantine you.
link |
And that was wrong because you're not shedding,
link |
you don't need to be quarantined,
link |
but wasn't thought through properly, right?
link |
That's where you had like 14 days or something like that.
link |
14 days, which is now we know is too long
link |
because you don't shed for that long in a normal infection.
link |
Now it's 10 days should be fine.
link |
So what happens is you get infected,
link |
you don't know it, of course,
link |
the virus starts to grow very quickly.
link |
And within four or five days,
link |
you reach a peak of shedding,
link |
you're making a lot of RNA
link |
and you may be asymptomatic,
link |
you're shedding, you can infect others,
link |
and then you may or may not have your symptom onset.
link |
So you shed for a couple of days before symptom onset
link |
and then within three days, four days,
link |
the viral RNA crashes and you're no longer shedding,
link |
you're no longer transmitting.
link |
So that's the one kind of test we have.
link |
It can tell you if you're infected at the moment,
link |
but it won't tell you
link |
if you're gonna be infected tomorrow, right?
link |
Because if you're negative today,
link |
you could be positive tomorrow.
link |
You just might be in a different part
link |
of the incubation period, right?
link |
So that's one test been used the most.
link |
You can now get 15 minute versions of them
link |
in a walk in or whatever, fine.
link |
Then there are antigen tests,
link |
which look for the proteins that the virus is making.
link |
So as it's reproducing in your nose,
link |
it's not only making genomes, it's making proteins.
link |
And so these you can buy in the drugstore.
link |
And these would have been great if they had,
link |
Michael Minna last year had the idea
link |
that if we could make a little stick,
link |
a little piece of paper that you would suck on
link |
and it would tell you if you're infected or not,
link |
if this could cost less than a buck,
link |
everybody could test themselves.
link |
Which they can cost less than a buck, by the way.
link |
Yeah, but they were never made, right?
link |
Yeah, they're never mass manufactured.
link |
So his idea is to do like daily tests.
link |
So there are some.
link |
Yeah, daily and then the kid's going to school,
link |
he's positive or she's positive.
link |
Well, if it's cheap enough, you just take another test
link |
because they have a certain error frequency.
link |
If it's positive twice, you stay home
link |
and the next day you try again.
link |
And I think this would have revolutionized
link |
because the PCR tests are more expensive at the time
link |
and they take longer to do and so forth.
link |
But that never happened.
link |
But now we do have $20 binax now and others
link |
that you can buy and people buy them and...
link |
See, but that can still happen, right?
link |
And this is the very frustrating thing to me
link |
because I'm worried about variants,
link |
but I'm also worried about future
link |
and much more deadly pandemics.
link |
I know we kind of said, yes, COVID and lots of deaths,
link |
but like it could be a lot worse too.
link |
So I'm thinking what is going to be
link |
the right response for the future pandemic of its kind?
link |
And what's the right response for continued number of variants
link |
and some of the variants might be deadlier
link |
or more transmissible?
link |
Well, the antigen tests will pick up the variants.
link |
That's not a question.
link |
The PCR may be influenced by changes,
link |
but you can quickly adapt the primers that you use.
link |
But that's what I mean, like to me,
link |
all these discussions about vaccines and so on.
link |
Vaccines, we got very lucky that they took so little time.
link |
And you have to be aware, no matter what,
link |
that there's hesitancy with the vaccines in this country.
link |
Before, I mean, yeah, that's a reality.
link |
You can't just be like magically saying
link |
that you're going to overcome that.
link |
And I don't think there's any hesitancy
link |
and cheap tests at home.
link |
I agree, I think if someone...
link |
So the question is, if someone tested positive,
link |
would they stay home?
link |
That's the question.
link |
What if their job depends on them going in?
link |
Well, you have to look at sort of aggregate,
link |
how many people would decide.
link |
And I think, again, a lot of that is in leadership,
link |
but I think a lot of them,
link |
I would say most people would stay home.
link |
I think that Mina had the idea
link |
and it would have changed the whole situation for sure.
link |
If it could have been made when we talked to him last spring,
link |
I think, or summer, we would have gotten around
link |
a lot of the issues that we're in today
link |
because I think people would have stayed home
link |
and not transmitted.
link |
And I think it's still valuable to this day.
link |
In the fall, if we don't have vaccine uptake,
link |
we could just test kids every day and keep them home
link |
when they're infected.
link |
And we don't have it.
link |
But I think, and I'm not privy to what was going on,
link |
but I don't think a lot of emphasis
link |
was put on testing early on.
link |
The CDC developed the first one, it was flawed.
link |
They had to recall the kids.
link |
I mean, there's a fiasco.
link |
They should have had 100 companies
link |
making the tests initially, right?
link |
So for the future, I think what we have learned
link |
is we need to have a rapid antigen test
link |
right off the bat that's doable.
link |
You can't do it in a day like you can for PCR
link |
because you need to make antibodies
link |
to the protein that you're looking for
link |
and you need to do those in animals,
link |
but you can do it in weeks
link |
and we should be ready for that.
link |
Yeah, because I mean, to me, that's obvious.
link |
That's obviously the best solution.
link |
Second to that, if we understood how well masks work.
link |
Like maybe let me ask you this question.
link |
Let's put masks aside.
link |
How will do we understand how COVID is transmitted?
link |
There's droplets of different sizes, aerosols,
link |
tiny, tiny droplets.
link |
It seems like that's a very difficult thing
link |
to understand thoroughly.
link |
So it seems like it's transmitted both ways.
link |
It's unclear how exactly.
link |
So how much do we understand
link |
and why is it so difficult to understand fully?
link |
I think it's clear that it's transmitted
link |
through the air mostly.
link |
It's not touching.
link |
We thought initially it would be a lot of touch,
link |
but very little of that.
link |
It's through the air and when you talk,
link |
mainly when you talk, you expel a lot of droplets, right?
link |
Even the plosives that your foam thing here
link |
are meant to pee, right?
link |
That you send out little sprays
link |
and those have viruses in them.
link |
And the big drops fall to the ground
link |
and the little ones can go 100 feet or more, right?
link |
But the little ones also have less virus in them.
link |
So I'm not sure, well, we certainly do not know
link |
how much virus you need to be infected,
link |
but it's probably at least several thousand particles,
link |
And it could be that for most people,
link |
the tiny droplets don't have enough virus
link |
to infect someone else.
link |
But there's one observation about this virus
link |
that's really interesting.
link |
And that is that 80% of transmissions
link |
are done by 20% of the people, of the infected people.
link |
Not every infected person transmits.
link |
That's been borne out in multiple studies.
link |
And in fact, there's a study at University of Colorado
link |
where they quantified the viral RNA loads
link |
and all the swabs that had been done of students
link |
for like a six month period.
link |
And most of the infectious virus,
link |
most of the RNA copies were found in
link |
15 to 20% of the people.
link |
The rest had really low and that's probably
link |
why they don't transmit.
link |
So those are the ones that might get enough virus
link |
in the tiny droplets to be able to infect someone
link |
And I think that's entirely possible.
link |
Why is it hard to study?
link |
You can't do it in real life
link |
because you don't know who's infected.
link |
And if you do, there's not a controlled environment
link |
to measure droplets and so forth.
link |
You'd have to do it in a laboratory situation.
link |
If you use an animal, you just don't know
link |
what the relevance of that is to people.
link |
You'd have to use human and do challenge experiments
link |
and we don't do that at this point,
link |
at least not for this virus.
link |
So that's why it's hard to know what's going on.
link |
So we have to make inferences
link |
from epidemiological associations
link |
where you're studying say transmission in a household
link |
where people are stuck in the same rooms together
link |
and you can get an idea of what kind of droplets
link |
we're involved in.
link |
So that makes it much harder to if you're leaning
link |
on epidemiological stuff as opposed to like biophysics
link |
or something like the mechanic.
link |
So that makes it really hard to then develop solutions
link |
like masks to ask the question, how will the masks work?
link |
Because then to answer that question,
link |
you can lean on epidemiological stuff again,
link |
like looking at populations that wear masks
link |
or just don't wear masks.
link |
As opposed to actually saying,
link |
like from an engineering perspective,
link |
like what kind of material and what kind of tightness
link |
by which amount decreases the viral load
link |
that's received on the other end.
link |
But some experiments have been done with masks
link |
and just droplets with no virus in them, right?
link |
And you can measure the efficiency
link |
of different mask materials at keeping those in.
link |
So if I say that this mask stops 70% of this
link |
or larger size droplet,
link |
that leads to this percent decreased transmission.
link |
And also on both the generation
link |
and the receiving end and the giving end.
link |
So how will the mask protect you from others?
link |
How well do you do mask protect others from you?
link |
Like all of those things seem like
link |
they could be more rigorously studied.
link |
There's no doubt about it.
link |
And now is the time because once this is over,
link |
nobody's gonna do it.
link |
Nobody's gonna care, right?
link |
But it seems like to me, so tests is one thing,
link |
but masks, like the good mask,
link |
whatever the good means, whatever that means,
link |
like some level of quality of material on your face,
link |
if it's shown to actually like thoroughly shown
link |
to work well, that seems like an obvious solution
link |
to reopen society with,
link |
if you have a good understanding of how well they work.
link |
Because if you don't have a good understanding,
link |
if there's a lot of uncertainty, that's when you get,
link |
and you have people speaking from authority,
link |
that's when you start getting the politicization
link |
Of course, of course.
link |
No, the data, there are some data.
link |
Most, they're mostly epidemiological
link |
and they show some effect in some countries, right?
link |
But they could be way better.
link |
And, but the fact that they're not perfect,
link |
then people take advantage of and say,
link |
well, look, they don't work that well,
link |
so I'm not gonna wear it.
link |
I think, as you said, people can use it as an excuse.
link |
But even if it works, so Daniel always says it,
link |
a mask will cut down transmission by 50 to 60%.
link |
And then distance will do another 30%.
link |
Yeah, those numbers are made up though.
link |
I mean, they're not made up, but they're estimates.
link |
And many of them are made based on models, right?
link |
We will make this model and let's say the mask
link |
cuts down this much, what will be the effect on,
link |
I mean, yeah, they're models.
link |
And it's for the same reason,
link |
I don't believe the transmission of the variants
link |
because it's all based on statistical models as well,
link |
not biological experiments done in the lab.
link |
So that in that sense, vaccine date
link |
is much better than mask date.
link |
For sure, for sure.
link |
So my problem with the mask date,
link |
which I always thought was fascinating,
link |
I stopped talking about it.
link |
I was in the paper about masks.
link |
I stopped talking about it because what started happening
link |
is mask created assholes on both sides.
link |
The people that were like in Silicon Valley,
link |
the friends of mine that were wearing masks,
link |
the way they look at others who don't is like.
link |
Well, that's a whole nother issue, right?
link |
Yeah, I understand.
link |
That happens when you don't have solid science.
link |
They now start judging you like you're a lesser human being.
link |
You're not only dumb, but you're almost like evil.
link |
You're doing bad for society by not wearing a mask.
link |
And then the people looking in the other way
link |
are seeing you for the asshole that you're being
link |
for judging them unrightly.
link |
So they almost wanna say F you by not wearing the mask.
link |
And there's this division that's created
link |
that was heartbreaking to me
link |
because masks like testing is a solution
link |
that was available early on.
link |
And if understood well, it could be deployed in a mass scale.
link |
And it seems like there's some historical evidence
link |
for other viruses where it does very well.
link |
And so like the fact that this was politicized,
link |
yeah, was a little bit heartbreaking.
link |
You can find in the literature studies,
link |
mostly of healthcare workers and influenza,
link |
where you can actually, because you see the people every day
link |
that can sample them,
link |
you can actually see what masking does.
link |
And some of them show an effect and others do not.
link |
Then that's the problem.
link |
Like any trial, sometimes if it's not big enough
link |
and then people latch onto that, see,
link |
it doesn't really work.
link |
But I think the main issue is that in January,
link |
both CDC and WHO said masks don't work, don't use them.
link |
That was the kiss of death for masks
link |
because when they then changed their mind,
link |
they didn't say we screwed up.
link |
They just said wear masks.
link |
If they had said we made a mistake, we were wrong,
link |
I think more people would have worn masks, but they didn't.
link |
And like you said, admitting you're wrong
link |
is like a real big part of it.
link |
And I also think almost the better way
link |
is not just saying you're kind of saying you're wrong,
link |
but in January saying,
link |
like revealing the uncertainty under which we operate.
link |
Like actually reveal what was done with the Spanish flu
link |
at the beginning of the previous century
link |
because there's a lot of mass controversy then too.
link |
It went back and forth
link |
and that was actually the source of a lot of distrust there too.
link |
So, and then look at influenza,
link |
like how is it effective with that?
link |
And just reveal this, we don't know,
link |
but with some probability,
link |
this is the best option we got currently.
link |
And then in a month or two, adjust it saying that,
link |
you know what, our like the uncertainty decreased a little bit.
link |
We have a better idea.
link |
Like that was an incorrect estimate,
link |
but reveal that you're struggling.
link |
It's not like this weird binary clock
link |
that goes one direction or the other.
link |
You're struggling with uncertainty.
link |
And like trusting,
link |
people maybe criticize me sometimes with this,
link |
but I think most people are actually intelligent.
link |
Like trusting the public to be intelligent
link |
with, if you give them, if you have transparent
link |
and give them information in a real authentic way,
link |
like don't look like you're hiding something.
link |
I think they're intelligent enough
link |
to use that data to make decisions.
link |
It's the same thing as with the testing,
link |
is if you put that power in the people's hands
link |
to know if they're sick or not,
link |
they're gonna make unmasked the right decision, I think.
link |
It's that the masks and the testing
link |
has been a bit heartbreaking.
link |
I think that's a good point, though,
link |
that most people don't seem to have an objection to testing.
link |
It's a good point.
link |
And then obviously Makamina makes that point brilliantly.
link |
And still there's very little excitement around that.
link |
But he said he was going to do it.
link |
I don't understand.
link |
I mean, I haven't spoken to him since then.
link |
So I don't know why.
link |
Well, I mean, but he can't do it alone.
link |
He has to get, so one of the resistances,
link |
FDA doesn't like cheap things.
link |
They don't want to approve it.
link |
So it makes the mass manufacture,
link |
like with emergency exceptions,
link |
all those kinds of things, very difficult.
link |
And then there's not much money to be made on it
link |
I think there's just economic pressures against it.
link |
And because so much investment was placed on the vaccines,
link |
and obviously there's an incentive mechanism there
link |
where the company's lobbyists and all those,
link |
there's this machine that says,
link |
arguing for tests is difficult
link |
because the thing that's worked for most severe viruses
link |
in the past is vaccines.
link |
Now we have vaccines, why the hell would you need tests?
link |
At that time, like why the hell do you need tests
link |
when we can be working on vaccines?
link |
It seems like the obvious thing to be working
link |
is the vaccines from their perspective.
link |
But it's not obvious at all to me.
link |
I think you should have both.
link |
I think you have vaccines and good testing
link |
and that covers you really well
link |
because you're always going to have people
link |
who don't get vaccinated.
link |
I don't know if you've been paying attention to this.
link |
There's a guy named Brett Weinstein
link |
and there's a guy named Sam Harris.
link |
They have good representation,
link |
I would say of two sides of a perspective on the vaccine.
link |
So from Sam Harris's perspective,
link |
it's obvious that everybody should get vaccinated
link |
and it's irresponsible to not get vaccinated.
link |
I think he represents a lot of people's belief in that.
link |
And then Brett talks a lot about hivermectin
link |
but also talks about hesitancy towards the vaccine
link |
for people who are healthy,
link |
who are people who are younger, that kind of thing.
link |
And saying we should consider longterm effects of the vaccine
link |
in making this calculation.
link |
What do you make about this conversation?
link |
Some of it happens on Twitter,
link |
some of it happens in the space of podcasts.
link |
Do you pay attention to this kind of thing?
link |
What's your role in this?
link |
What do you hope is the way to resolve this conversation?
link |
Do you think it's healthy?
link |
Well, a conversation is always healthy
link |
but to make definitive statements is not
link |
because it suggests you have information that you don't have.
link |
So we talked about longterm effects.
link |
I think you need to balance those
link |
versus longterm effects of the disease
link |
and you can make your decision.
link |
I don't think you need to tell everybody to get vaccinated.
link |
I think you need to present the case.
link |
You say here we made good vaccines,
link |
here the safety profile,
link |
here's the risk benefit balance and you should decide.
link |
You're a smart person, you should decide.
link |
Now, companies are gonna do differently, right?
link |
Companies may say you have to be vaccinated to work here.
link |
My employer, Columbia, said we have to be vaccinated
link |
to work in the fall and if you wanna be a student,
link |
you have to be vaccinated.
link |
So you decide whether you wanna go or not.
link |
But the idea that you should make a decision
link |
based on longterm effects, there is no evidence, right?
link |
So how can you make a decision
link |
where you don't have evidence?
link |
Whereas we do have evidence
link |
that there are longterm effects of getting COVID.
link |
So I don't think that's a fair argument
link |
and it just makes people scared to say that.
link |
But on the other hand, for some of us to say it's a no brainer
link |
and to denigrate people for not being vaccinated,
link |
that's not the approach either
link |
because they're gonna dig in and say I'm not doing this
link |
because you tell me to, right?
link |
I think the middle ground is to say,
link |
take a bit of both and say here are the potential issues
link |
and here are the benefits and this is what I would do
link |
and you have to just decide on your own.
link |
I'd leave it to them.
link |
I say you decide and if you don't want to,
link |
it's up to you, you don't have to get vaccinated
link |
and you'll probably get infected at some point
link |
and maybe you'll be okay.
link |
But here's the best available data
link |
and it looks like the vaccines are pretty damn smart solution.
link |
They seem to work.
link |
I think you tell people what you did
link |
and present both sides calmly
link |
and I think digging in as like in a debate,
link |
I don't think that's terribly useful.
link |
So that's my view.
link |
I mean, people come to me all the time and ask me,
link |
I'm worried, what should I do?
link |
And I said, what are you worried about?
link |
Let's talk about it and go through it calmly.
link |
And if they want to still take ivermectin,
link |
I said, it's fine, it's your choice.
link |
And I have a problem with that.
link |
I love that's the way you think.
link |
People should definitely listen to this week in virology
link |
and follow your work is brilliant.
link |
I've been really enjoying it lately.
link |
It's like, it's my favorite way to stay in touch
link |
with the happenings of COVID.
link |
Obviously you put in a lot of other stuff in there, but.
link |
We used to do other viruses before COVID,
link |
it was quite interesting.
link |
And I'm trying to slip other viruses in
link |
because I think they're informative in many ways
link |
and we're going to do more and more of that.
link |
But I have to say, I canceled,
link |
usually I record on Tuesday and Friday
link |
and I canceled today so I could be with you.
link |
It's a huge honor, I appreciate that.
link |
No, no, it's fine.
link |
I think a couple of other people
link |
were going to be away anyway, so.
link |
So I do a lot of different pods.
link |
They're all on YouTube and I also do a live stream
link |
on Wednesday nights on YouTube, which you can find.
link |
And that's where people can come and ask questions.
link |
We don't have an agenda, we just start
link |
and by 30 minutes in, there's 700 people
link |
with questions that I can't even get through
link |
because there's so many of them.
link |
And I'm actually astounded that so many people
link |
are, have really good questions.
link |
Most of them are reasonable and they come back every week.
link |
So it's a great, it's turning into a great forum
link |
to have a nice discussion.
link |
And the YouTube channel is called what?
link |
So you could search for my name,
link |
which is Vincent Radkin Yellow, it'll turn up
link |
or my handle on YouTube is ProfVRR, PROFVRR.
link |
Have you read The Plague by Camus by any chance?
link |
Years ago, years ago, I have to read it again.
link |
That's really relevant.
link |
Let me ask you a question about it.
link |
It describes a town that's overtaken by a plague
link |
and it's blocked off from the rest of the world
link |
and it kind of reveals the best, the worst of human nature.
link |
That's like how people respond to that,
link |
sort of the encroaching that their own mortality,
link |
their own death and the horizon.
link |
I think one of the messages in the book that
link |
ultimately like love for others.
link |
So it's like a lot of people want to become isolated
link |
and they hide from each other,
link |
but ultimately the thing that saves you is love,
link |
which is one of the things of just watching this pandemic,
link |
you know, with the distance, with the masks,
link |
that's all fine, but there's a distancing from people
link |
of that attention, the breaking
link |
of the common humanity between people.
link |
That's one of the reasons I, when I came to Austin
link |
earlier this year just to visit,
link |
I fell in love with the city
link |
because even with the masks and the distance,
link |
there was still a camaraderie, like, I don't know,
link |
just a love for each other,
link |
just a kindness towards each other.
link |
And that's why I took away from the plague.
link |
Mostly it's told the story of the doctor,
link |
who basically gives in and just gives himself
link |
as a service to others.
link |
And that love is the thing that liberates him
link |
from his own conception of mortality.
link |
The fact that he's here, he's going to die.
link |
What do you think about this, the effect of the virus?
link |
We talked a lot about biology,
link |
but the effect of the virus and the fabric
link |
of the common humanity that connects us.
link |
Well, that's what a pandemic does.
link |
It really cuts that, right?
link |
Because small outbreaks are local,
link |
they don't have global effects.
link |
But when you have something this big
link |
where pretty much nobody escapes
link |
and not just making people sick, it changes your life, right?
link |
People lose jobs, they change jobs,
link |
they move somewhere else.
link |
They have all kinds of disruptions.
link |
Kids can't go to school, really shows you.
link |
I mean, I always like to say,
link |
a tiny virus can bring earth to its knees.
link |
A tiny virus that you can't even see
link |
and that most people don't even think about
link |
And the real effect is not just sickness,
link |
it's what it does to people
link |
because in the end we are animals
link |
and most animals like each other
link |
and they interact, they have great social structures
link |
and that makes them do well.
link |
I guess the exception is people in AI, right?
link |
They could be on their own.
link |
Well, that's why you build robots that you fall in love with.
link |
And so I think when a,
link |
the real story is what it does to society for sure,
link |
which has ramifications way beyond
link |
the number of people dying and the vaccines
link |
and the tests and all of that.
link |
And this one has really made a big rupture.
link |
And you could tell not now so much,
link |
I think being out and about now,
link |
things look pretty normal except,
link |
for some people wearing masks,
link |
you would never know.
link |
I mean, the airport this morning was completely jammed.
link |
People going, and they're all on vacation,
link |
they're all wearing shorts, right?
link |
So they're back to normal, it's August.
link |
But last year is really different in New York
link |
where you're used to lots of people on the street.
link |
It was eerie, it was just quiet.
link |
But under it all, people are still,
link |
most people help each other when they have to, right?
link |
Most people are willing to,
link |
if something happens to someone to reach out and help them,
link |
there are always exceptions where people are mean,
link |
and that's just the way animals are.
link |
We're not the only ones that can be mean to our own species.
link |
But I think most of the motivation
link |
for everything that was done is to help other people.
link |
I mean, I do think that the vaccine manufacturers,
link |
maybe not the leaders, but the people working in the labs
link |
really wanted to get this out quickly and help people, right?
link |
I think at every level, people who are contributing
link |
really wanted to help other people
link |
and feel proud that they're able to do that.
link |
So I view it as, we're never gonna be 100% good
link |
because animals are not, evolution made us.
link |
I mean, we're lucky, we somehow rose above
link |
by having incredible brain and so forth.
link |
But a lot of our base instincts are animals,
link |
and they chase each other and have alpha males
link |
and all that stuff.
link |
And we always have a little bit of that in us.
link |
But we do have some humanity that this really ripped up,
link |
And I think for me, someone who studied,
link |
viruses for over 40 years, it's just amazing
link |
that an invisible thing can do that, right?
link |
It goes back to the thing you found fascinating,
link |
which is a virus affecting human behavior
link |
or behavior of the organism.
link |
Yes, so humans can make weapons and do harm
link |
and you can see that, but this you can't even see.
link |
You can't, and look what it has done.
link |
And it'll do it again, there'll be more.
link |
I just, I wish we would be more prepared
link |
because we know what to do.
link |
We know we should be making antivirals vaccines masks,
link |
testing masks, making test modalities
link |
that we can really quickly redesign.
link |
But after SARS one, all that went out the door.
link |
People didn't do anything.
link |
And that's why we're in this situation.
link |
So, people ask me this all the time,
link |
are we gonna be ready for the next one?
link |
And I always say, we should be.
link |
We have all the information we need to know what to do.
link |
But somehow, I think people forget.
link |
That said, sometimes we really step up
link |
when the tragedy is right in front of us.
link |
When the catastrophic.
link |
So, I don't know, somehow humans have still survived.
link |
The fact that we had nuclear weapons for so many decades
link |
and we're still not blowing each other up,
link |
whether by terrorists or by nation,
link |
It's quite surprising.
link |
That's always, after reading the Pentagon Papers,
link |
it's even more amazing, right?
link |
So, I don't know how we do it.
link |
I tend to believe there's that at the surface,
link |
you notice the greed, the corruption, the evil,
link |
but the core of human nature, the human spirit,
link |
is one in the scientific realm is curiosity.
link |
And more deeply is kindness, compassion,
link |
and wanting to do good for the world.
link |
I believe that desire to do good outpowers
link |
all the other stuff by a large amount.
link |
And that's why we don't, we have not yet destroyed ourselves.
link |
We kind of, there's a lot of bickering.
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There's a lot of wars on the surface, but underneath it all,
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there's this ocean of love for each other.
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I mean, I think there's an evolutionary advantage to that.
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And it would be a good explanation
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why we still haven't destroyed ourselves.
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Wow, we had so many opportunities.
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If you look at all the wars in history, so many.
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I was just, my son was telling me
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about the Ottoman Empire, right?
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I mean, it's just, war after war,
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and then other countries splitting up countries
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with no regard to who's living where, right?
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It's just, how can these people do this?
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Yeah, it's fascinating.
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Human history is fascinating.
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And we're still young as a species.
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We have a lot more time to go
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and a lot more wasted to destroy ourselves.
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Do you have advice, like you said,
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you have many decades of research
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and incredible career and life.
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Do you have advice for young people about career,
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about life, people in high school, people in college,
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of how to live a life that can be proud of?
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So what I like to do is tell people, don't plan it
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because I didn't plan anything.
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Everything I did was one step at a time.
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You don't have to plan.
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I just found things that were interesting to me.
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And so my father was a doctor
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and he wanted me to be a doctor,
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but I was not interested in taking care of people.
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I learned that, but I couldn't say no to him.
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So I was a biology major in college and I graduated
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and I didn't have anything to do.
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So I liked science.
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So I got a job in a lab and it was very exciting.
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And that led to everything else
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that I've done one step at a time.
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And I think the most important thing you can do,
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whether two important things,
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you can be really curious all the time.
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You mentioned curiosity.
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I think curiosity is essential.
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You have to be curious about everything.
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And if you are, you're never gonna be bored.
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And so people who say they're bored,
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I say, you are not curious.
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You should just think about things
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and say, look at something and say, how does that work?
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Or what is it doing?
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And how do they get there?
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And you'll never be bored.
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And the other thing is when you find something,
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which may take time, it's fine.
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You have to be passionate about it.
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You have to put everything into it.
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And that's what I did with viruses.
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So I think they're amazing.
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And I tell my classes, I love viruses.
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And people think I'm morbid
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because obviously they kill people
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and I shouldn't love something that,
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but that's not the point.
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That's not what I mean.
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I love them in the way they have emerged
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and how they work and so forth
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and all that we don't know about them.
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So you need to be curious and passionate
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and don't plan too much.
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And just find something that you don't call a job.
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Because someone said on the live stream last week,
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I wish I had a job I liked as much as you.
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I said, it's not a job.
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I never looked at it as a job.
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If it's a job, then you're not gonna like it.
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Yeah, something that doesn't feel like a job.
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So you said viruses are kind of passive,
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nonliving, you could say.
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Or even cells are passive.
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And humans are kind of active.
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We seem to be making our own decisions.
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So let me ask you the why question.
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What do you think is the meaning of this life of ours?
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Oh, there's no meaning.
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I think there's no life elsewhere
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because this is just a rare accident that happened
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and the right conditions.
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I mean, people all think I'm wrong
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because there are billions and billions of stars out there.
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So there's a lot of opportunity.
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There's no meaning.
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It's just a, what do they call it?
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A perfect storm of events
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that led to molecules being formed and eventually,
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I mean, it took a long time for life to evolve, right?
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But it's just driven by conditions.
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If something emerged that worked,
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it would then go on to the next step.
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There's no meaning other than that.
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The only difference is that we,
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I don't think many other animals can probably,
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we have the ability, we're sentient, right?
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We can influence what happens to us.
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We can take medicines, right?
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We can alter what would normally happen to us
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so we can remove some of the selection pressure.
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But I think everything else on the planet just goes,
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looks for food and give a lot of offspring
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so you can perpetuate.
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It's just a natural biological function.
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Yeah, they're much more directly concerned with survival.
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I think humans are able to contemplate their mortality.
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We can see that even if we're okay today,
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we're eventually going to die
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and we really don't like that.
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So we try to come up with ways
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to push that deadline farther and farther away.
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Well, we have really,
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I mean, we used to die in our 30s, right?
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Now it's 70s, 80s.
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Well, most of us used to die in the first few weeks.
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Yeah, infant death.
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I always tell people the only thing that's 100% is death.
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It's the only thing in the world that's 100%.
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Do you think about your own mortality?
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Yeah, I never think about it.
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I'm just enjoying day to day.
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And I don't think about it.
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Really, you work on viruses.
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You don't contemplate your own mortality
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given the deadliness of the virus around us.
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I never thought COVID would kill me.
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No, I never was afraid of that, not at all.
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I've mostly feared for other people getting sick,
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especially people who could die of it
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and want that to happen to them.
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But I always thought that,
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it's obviously not a realistic viewpoint not to be worried
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because many people are,
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but I've been relatively healthy.
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They should sequence my genome
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because it works really well and have a good immune system.
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Maybe you'd be the first immortal person.
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There's gotta be a first.
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I think that biologically, you just can't,
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you know, the ends of our chromosomes
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keep getting shorter and shorter
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and that's eventually what kills us.
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So you just can't keep going on.
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But that's fine, I don't need to.
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I understand from the vampires
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that it's not good to live forever.
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I guess make the most of the time you got.
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That's the, bacteria live a much shorter time.
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So we got that on bacteria.
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Bacteria are just, you know, little bags of chemicals
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So they have no, they have no stake in the matter at all.
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It doesn't bother.
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And I think you have to go a long ways
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before you get into some kind of consciousness, but.
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Yes, weird that this bag of chemicals
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has a stake in the matter.
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Like our human body is a consciousness is a weird thing.
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Not just in us, but they make half of the oxygen
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20% of the oxygen comes from bacteria.
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And they made, in the beginning of Earth,
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they made enough oxygen to start oxygenation going,
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I mean, it's, they have an incredible role.
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It's all an accident.
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Well, Vincent, like I told you, I'm a huge fan.
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It's a big honor that you were talking with me today.
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Thank you so much for coming down.
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Thank you for spending so much time with me.
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And thank you for everything you do in terms of educating
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about viruses, about biology, microbiology
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and everything else.
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Everybody should check out Vincent's YouTube,
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watch his lectures, listen to the podcast.
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It's truly incredible.
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Thank you so much for talking, Davidson.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with Vincent Racaniello.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words
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from Isaac Asimov.
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The saddest aspect of life right now
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is that science gathers knowledge
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faster than society gathers wisdom.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.