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Language: en
the following is a conversation with rob
reed entrepreneur
author and host of the after on podcast
sam harris recommended that i absolutely
must talk to rob
about his recent work on the future of
engineer pandemics
i then listened to the four hours
special episode
of sam's making sense podcast with rob
titled
engineering the apocalypse and i was
floored
and knew i had to talk to him quick
mention of our sponsors
athletic greens volcano fund rise
and netsuite check them out in the
description to support this podcast
as a side note let me say a few words
about the lab leak hypothesis
which proposes that covet 19 is a
product
of gain of function research on
coronaviruses conducted at the wuhan
institute of virology
that was then accidentally leaked due to
human error
for context this lab is biosafety level
4 bsl4
and it investigates coronaviruses bsl4
is the highest level of safety
but if you look at all the human in the
loop pieces required to achieve this
level of safety
it becomes clear that even bsl4 labs are
highly susceptible to human error
to me whether the virus leaked from the
lab or not getting to the bottom of what
happened
is about much more than this particular
catastrophic case
it is a test for our scientific
political
journalistic and social institutions of
how well
we can prepare and respond to threats
that can cripple
or destroy human civilization if we
continue to gain a function research on
viruses
eventually these viruses will leak and
they will be more deadly
and more contagious we can pretend that
won't happen
or we can openly and honestly talk about
the risks involved
this research can both save and destroy
human life on earth as we know it
it's a powerful double-edged sword if
youtube and other platforms
censor conversations about this if
scientists
self-censored conversations about this
would become merely victims
of our brief homo sapiens story not its
heroes
as i said before too carelessly labeling
ideas
as misinformation and dismissing them
because of that
will eventually destroy our ability to
discover the truth
and without truth we don't have a
fighting chance
against the great filter before us
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation
with rob reed i have seen evidence on
the internet that you have a sense of
humor
allegedly but you also talk and think
about the destruction of human
civilization
what do you think of the elon musk
hypothesis that
the most entertaining outcome is the
most likely
and he i think followed on to say a
scene from
an external observer like if somebody
was watching us
it seems we come up with creative ways
of progressing our civilization that's
fun to watch
yeah so he exactly he said from the
standpoint of the observer not the
participant
right and so what's interesting about
that this were
i think just a couple of freestanding
tweets and and delivered
without a whole lot of rapper of context
so it's left to the mind of the
the reader of the tweets yes to infer
what he was talking about but
so that's kind of like it provokes some
interesting thoughts like first of all
it presupposes the existence
of an observer and it also presupposes
that the observer wishes to be
entertained and has some mechanism
of enforcing their desire to be
entertained so there's like a lot
underpinning that
and to me that suggests particularly
coming from elon
that it's a reference to simulation
theory that you know
somebody is out there and has far
greater insights and a far greater
ability
to let's say peer into a single
individual life
and find that entertaining and full of
plot twists and surprises and
either a happier tragic ending or they
have a
incredible meta view and they can watch
the arc of civilization
unfolding in a way that is entertaining
and full of plot twists and surprises
and a happy or unhappy ending
so okay so we're presupposing an
observer
then on top of that when you think about
it you're also presupposing a producer
because the act of observation is
mostly fun if there are plot twists and
surprises and other developments that
you weren't foreseeing
i have re-read my own novels and that's
fun
because it's something i worked hard on
and i slaved over and i love
but there aren't a lot of surprises in
there so now i'm thinking
we need a producer and an observer for
that to be true and on top of that
it's got to be a very competent producer
because elon said the most
entertaining outcome is the most likely
one so there's lots of layers for
thinking about that
and when you've got a producer who's
trying to make it entertaining it makes
me think of there was a south park
episode
in which earth turned out to be a
reality show yeah
and somehow we had failed to entertain
the audience as much as we used to so
the earth show was going to get
cancelled et cetera
so taking all that together and i'm
obviously being a little bit playful and
laying this out
what is the evidence that we have that
there we are in a reality that is
intended to be most entertaining
now you could look at that reality on
the level of individual
lives or the whole arc of civilization
other lives you know levels as well i'm
sure
but just looking from my own life i
think i'd make a pretty lousy show
i spend an inordinate amount of time
just looking at a computer
i don't think that's very entertaining
and there's just a completely
inadequate level of shootouts and car
chases
in my life i mean i'll go weeks even
months without a single shootout or car
chase
that just means that you're one of the
non-player characters in this game
you're just waiting
you're an extra that waiting for you one
opportunity for a brief moment to
actually interact with one of the main
um one of the main characters in the
play just saying okay that's
that's good so okay so we'll rule out me
being the star of the show which i
probably could have guessed at
anyway but then even the arc of
civilization yeah i mean there have been
a lot of really intriguing things that
have happened and a lot of astounding
things that have happened
but you know i would have some
werewolves i'd have some zombies
you know i would have some really
improbable developments like
maybe canada absorbing the united states
you know so i don't know i'm not sure if
we're necessarily designed for maximum
entertainment but if we are
uh that will mean that 2020 is just a
prequel
for even more bizarre years ahead so
i i kind of hope that we're not designed
for maximum entertainment
well the night is still young in terms
of canada but do you think it's possible
for the observer and the producer to be
kind of
emergent so meaning
it does seem when you kind of watch
memes on the internet
the funny ones the entertaining ones
spread more efficiently they do i mean i
don't know what it is about the human
mind
that soaks up on mass funny
things much more sort of aggressively
it's more viral like
in in the full sense of that word is is
there some sense that
whatever this the evolutionary process
that created our cognitive capabilities
is the same process that's going to in
an emergent way
create the most entertaining outcome the
most memorable outcome
the most viral outcome if we were to
share it on twitter yeah that's
interesting
um yeah we do have an incredible ability
like i mean how many memes are created
in a given day and the ones that go
viral are almost uniformly funny at
least to somebody with a particular
sense of humor
right um yeah i have to think about that
we are definitely great at creating
atomized units of funny like in the
example that you used
there are going to be x million brains
parsing and judging
whether this meme is retweetable or not
yes and so that sort of atomic
universe atomic element a funniness
of entertainingness etc we definitely
have an environment that's
good at selecting for that and selective
pressure and everything else that's
going on
but in terms of the entire
ecosystem of conscious systems here on
the earth
driving through for a level of
entertainment
that is on such a much higher level that
i don't know if that would necessarily
follow directly from the fact that you
know atomic units of entertainment are
very very aptly selected for us
i don't know do you find it compelling
or
useful to think about human civilization
from the perspective of the ideas versus
the perspective
of the individual human brains so almost
thinking about the ideas or the memes
this is the dawkins thing as the
organisms
and then the humans as just like uh
vehicles for briefly carrying those
organisms as they jump around and spread
yeah for propagating them mutating them
putting selective pressure on them etc
yeah um i mean i found um dawkins
interpret or his his launching of the
idea of memes is just
kind of an afterthought to his
unbelievably brilliant book about the
selfish gene like
what a ps to put at the end of a long
chunk of writing profoundly interesting
i view the relationship though between
human and
humans and memes is probably an
oversimplification but maybe a little
bit like the relationship between
flowers and bees right do flowers have
bees or do
bees in a sense have flowers and the
answer is
it is a very very symbiotic relationship
in which both
have semi-independent roles that they
play and
both are highly dependent upon the other
and so
in the case of bees obviously you know
you could see the flower as being this
monolithic structure
physically in relation to any given bee
and it's the source of
food and sustenance so you could kind of
say well flowers have bees
but on the other hand the flowers would
obviously be doomed
they weren't being pollinated by the
bees so you could kind of say well you
know bees
you know flowers are really expression
of what the bees need
and the truth is a symbiosis so with
with memes and human minds
our brains are are clearly the petri
dishes
in which memes are either propagated or
not propagated get mutated or don't get
mutated if
they are the venue in which competition
selective competition plays out between
different memes
so all of that is very true and you
could look at that and say
really the human mind is a production of
memes
and ideas have us rather than us having
ideas but at the same time let's take
a catchy tune as an example of a meme um
that catchy tune did originate in a
human mind
somebody had to structure that thing and
as much as i like elizabeth gilbert's
ted talk about how the universe i'm
simplifying but you know kind of
the ideas find their way in this
beautiful ted talk it's very lyrical she
talked about
you know ideas and prose kind of
beaming into our minds and you know she
talked about needing to pull over the
side of the road when she got
inspiration for
a particular paragraph or a particular
idea and a burning need to write that
down
i love that i find that beautiful as a
as a writer as a novelist
uh myself i've never had that experience
and
i think that really most things that do
become memes
are the product of a great deal of
deliberate
and willful exertion of a conscious mind
and so like the bees
and the flowers i think there's a great
symbiosis and they both kind of have one
another ideas have us but we have ideas
for real
if we could take a little bit of a
tangent stephen king on writing
you as a great writer you you're
dropping a hint here
that the ideas don't come to you that
it's a grind
of sort of it's almost like you're
mining for gold
it's more of a very uh deliberate
rigorous daily process so maybe can you
talk about
the writing process how do you
write well and maybe if you want to step
outside of yourself almost like give
advice to
an aspiring writer what does it take to
write
the best work of your life well it would
be very different if it's fiction versus
nonfiction
and i've done both i've written two
works of not two
non-fiction books and two works of
fiction two works of fiction being more
recent i'm gonna focus on that right now
because that's more
toweringly on my mind there are amongst
novelists
again this is an oversimplification but
there's kind of two schools of thought
um some people really like to fly by the
seat of their pants
and some people really really like to to
outline
to plot you know so there's plotters and
pantsers i guess is
one way that people look at it and you
know as with most things
there is a great continuum in between
and i'm somewhere on that continuum but
i lean i guess a little bit
a little bit more toward the plotter and
so
when i do start a novel i have a pretty
strong point
of view about how it's going to end and
i have a very strong point of view about
how it's going to begin
and i do try to make an effort of making
an outline that i know i'm going to be
extremely unfaithful to in the actual
execution
of the story but trying to make an
outline that gets us from here to there
and
notion of subplots and beats and rhythm
and different characters and
and so forth but then when i get into
the process
that outline particularly the center of
it ultimately
inevitably morphs a great deal and i
think if i were personally
a rigorous outliner i would not allow
that to happen
i also would make a much more
vigorous skeleton before i start so i
think people who are really in that
plotting outlining mode are people who
write page turners people who write you
know spy novels
or you know supernatural adventures
where you really want a relentless pace
of events action plot twists
conspiracy etc and that is
really the bone that's that's really the
you know the skeletal structure
so i think folks who write that kind of
book are really very much on
the outlining side and i think people
who write um
what's often referred to as literary
fiction for lack of a better term
where it's more about you know sort of
aura and ambiance and character
development and experience and
inner experience and inner journey and
so forth
i think that group is more likely to fly
by the seat of their pants and i know
people who start with a blank page and
just see where it's going to go
i'm a little bit more on the plotting
side
now you asked what makes something
at least in the mind of the writer as
great as it can be
for me it's an astonishingly high
percentage of it is editing as opposed
to the initial writing
for every hour that i spend writing
new pros you know like new pages new
paragraphs stuff that you know
new bits of the book i probably spend
i mean i wish i i wish i kept a count
like i wish i had like one of those
pieces of software that lawyers use to
decide how much time i've been doing
this that but
i would say it's at least four or five
hours and maybe as many as 10 that i
spend editing
and so it's relentless for me for each
one hour of writing
i'd say that for wow i mean i i write
because i edit and i spend
just relentlessly polishing and pruning
and sometimes on the micro level of just
like did the does the
rhythm of the sentence feel right do i
need to carve a syllable or something so
it can land
like as micro as that to his macro as
like okay i'm done but the book is 750
pages
long and it's way too bloated i need to
lop a third out of it
problems on you know those two orders of
magnitude and everything in between
that is an enormous amount of my time
and i also
um i also write music write record and
produce music
and there the the ratio is even higher
of
every minute that i spend or my band
spends
laying down that original audio it's a
very high proportion of hours that go
into just
making it all hang together and sound
just right so i think that's true of a
lot of creative processes i
i know it's true of sculpture um i
believe it's true of woodwork my dad was
an amateur woodworker and
he spent a huge amount of time on
sanding and polishing at the end
so i think a great deal of the sparkle
comes from that part of the process any
creative process
can i ask about the psychological the
demon side of that picture
in the editing process you're ultimately
judging the initial piece of work
and you're judging and judging and
judging how much of your time
do you spend hating your work
how much time do you spend in gratitude
impressed thankful for how good the work
that you will put
together is um i spend almost
all the time in a place that's
intermediate between those but leaning
toward gratitude
i spend almost all the time in a state
of optimism
that this thing that i have i like i
like quite a bit
and i can make it better and better
and better with every time i go through
it so
i spend most of my time in a state of
optimism
i think i i personally oscillate much
more aggressively between those two
where i wouldn't be able to find the
average i i go pretty deep
um marvin minsky from mit
had this advice i guess
to uh what it takes to be successful
in science and research is to hate
everything you do
you've ever done in the past i mean
at least he was speaking about himself
that the key to his success was to uh
hate everything he's ever done i have a
little marvin minsky
there in me too to sort of uh always be
exceptionally self-critical
but almost like self-critical about the
work but grateful
for the chance to be able to do the work
yeah that makes sense
it makes perfect sense but that you know
each one of us have
have to strike a certain kind of a
certain kind of balance
but back to the uh destruction of human
civilization
if humans destroy ourselves in the next
hundred years
what will be the most likely source
the the most like the reason that we
destroy ourselves well let's see
100 years it's hard for me
to comfortably predict out that far and
it's something to give
a lot more thought to i think than you
know
normal folks simply because i am a
science fiction writer and
you know i feel with the acceleration of
technological progress
it's really hard to foresee out more
than just a few decades i mean comparing
today's world to that of
1921 where we are right now a century
later it's been so unforeseeable
and i just don't know what's going to
happen particularly with exponential
technologies
i mean our intuitions reliably defeat
ourselves with exponential technologies
like computing and synthetic biology and
you know how we might destroy ourselves
in the 100 year time frame
might have everything to do with
breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years
from now and then how rapidly those
breakthroughs accelerate
but in the nearer term that i'm
comfortable predicting let's say 30
years
i would say the most likely route to
self-destruction would be synthetic
biology
and i always say that with the gigantic
caveat
and very important one that i find and
i'll abbreviate synthetic biology to sin
bio just to save us some syllables
i believe synbio offers us simply
stunning
promise that we would be fools
to deny ourselves so i'm not an anti-sin
bio person
by any stretch i mean sin bio has
unbelievable odds of helping us beat
cancer
helping us rescue the environment
helping us do things that we would
currently find imponderable so it's
electrifying the field
but in the wrong hands those hands
either being
incompetent or being malevolent
in the wrong hand synthetic biology to
me
has a much much greater odds has much
greater odds
of leading to our self-destruction
than something running amok with super
ai which i believe is a real possibility
and one we need to be concerned about
but in the 30-year time frame i think
it's a lesser one
or nuclear weapons or anything else that
i can think of
can you explain that a little bit
further so your concern
is on the man-made versus the natural
side of the pandemic front here so we
humans
engineering pathogens engineering
viruses
is the concern here yeah and
maybe how do you see the possible
trajectories happening here
in terms of mo is it malevolent or is it
um
accidents oops little mistakes
or unintended consequences of particular
actions that are ultimately lead to
unexpected mistakes
well both of them are in danger and i
think the question of which is more
likely has to do with two things one
do we take a lot of methodical
affordable
four-sided steps that we are absolutely
capable of taking
right now to first all the risk of a bad
actor
infecting us with something that could
have annihilating impacts
and in the the episode you referenced
with sam we talked a great deal about
that
so do we take those steps and if we take
those steps i think the danger
of malevolent rogue actors doing us in
with sin bio
couldn't plummet but you know it's
always a question of if and we have a
bad bad
and very long track record of hitting
the snooze bar after
different natural pandemics have
attacked have attacked us so that's
variable number one
variable number two is how much
experimentation and pathogen development
do we as a society decide is acceptable
in the realms of academia
government or private industry and
if we decide as a society that it's
perfectly okay
for people with varying research agendas
to create
pathogens that if released could wipe
out humanity if we think that's fine
and if that kind of work starts
happening in you know one lab
five labs 50 labs 500 labs
in one country than 10 countries then 70
countries
or whatever that risk of a boo-boo
starts rising astronomically and this
won't be a spoiler alert
based on the way that i presented those
two things but i think it's
unbelievably important to manage both of
those risks
the easier one to manage although it
wouldn't be
simple by any stretch because it would
have to be something that all nations
agree on
but the easiest way the easier risk to
manage
is that of hey guys let's not develop
pathogens
that if they escape from a lab could
annihilate us
there's no line of research that
justifies that and in my view
i mean that's the point of perspective
we need to have we'd have to
collectively agree that there's no line
of research that justifies that
the reason why i believe that would be a
highly rational conclusion
is even the highest level of biosafety
lab in the world biosafety lab
level four and they're not a lot of bsl4
labs in the world
there have there are things can can and
have leaked out of bsl4 labs
and some of the work that's been done
with potentially annihilating pathogens
which we can talk about
is actually done at bsl3 and so
fundamentally
any lab can leak we have proven
ourselves to be incapable
of creating a lab that is utterly
impervious to leaks
so why in the world would we create
something where if god forbid it leaked
could annihilate us all and by the way
almost all of the measures that are
taken in biosafety level
anything labs are designed to prevent
accidental leaks
what happens if you have a malevolent
insider and we could talk about the
psychology and the motivations
of what would make a malevolent insider
who wants to release something and not
annihilating
in a bit i'm sure that we will but what
if you have a malevolent insider
virtually none of the standards that go
into biosafety level
one two three and four are about
preventing somebody hijacking the
process i mean some of them are
but they're mainly designed against
accidents they're imperfect against
accidents and if this kind of work
starts happening in lots and lots
of labs with every lab you add the odds
of there being a malevolent insider
naturally increase arithmetically as the
number of labs goes up
now on the front of somebody
outside of a government academic or
scientific
traditional government science academic
scientific
environment creating something
malevolent
again there's protections that we can
take both at the level
of sin bio architecture the sin
hardening the entire
sin bio ecosystem against
terrible things being made that we don't
want to have out there by rogue actors
to early detection to lots and lots of
other things that we can do to
dramatically mitigate that risk
and i think we do both of those things
decide that no we're not going to
experimentally make annihilating
pathogens in leaky labs
and b yes we are going to take counter
measures that
are costs going to cost a fraction of
our annual defense budget
to to preclude their creation then i
think both that
both both risks get managed down but if
you take one set of precautions and not
the other
then the the thing that you have not
taken precautions against
immediately becomes the more likely
outcome so can we talk about
this kind of research and what's
actually done and
what are the positives and negatives of
it so
if we look at gain of function research
and the kind of stuff that's happening
level three and level four
bsl labs what's the whole idea here is
it trying to engineer
viruses to understand how they behave
you want to understand the dangerous
ones
yeah so that that would be the logic
behind doing it and so gain a function
can mean a lot of different things
um viewed through a certain lens
gain-to-function
research could be what you do when you
create you know gmos
when you create you know hearty strains
of corn that are resistant to pesticides
i mean you could view that as gain of
function
so i'm going to refer to gain of
function in a relatively narrow sense
which is actually the sense
that the term is usually used which is
in some way
magnifying capabilities of
microorganisms
to make them more dangerous whether it's
more transmissible or more deadly
and in that line of research i'll use an
example from 2011
because it's very illustrative and it's
also very chilling
back in 2011 two separate
labs independently of one another i
assumed there was some kind of
communication between them but they were
basically independent projects one in
holland and one in wisconsin
did gain a function research on
something called h5n1 flu
h5n1 is you know something that
at least on a lethality basis makes
kovad look like a kitten
you know coveted according to the world
health organization has a case fatality
rate somewhere between
half a percent and one percent h5n1 is
closer to sixty percent
six zero and so that's actually even
slightly more lethal than ebola
it's a very very very scary pathogen the
good news about h5n1 it is
that it is barely barely contagious
and i believe it is in no way contagious
human to human it requires
um you know very very very deep contact
uh with birds in most cases chickens
and so if you're a chicken farmer and
you spend an enormous amount of time
around them and perhaps you get into
situations in which you get a break in
your skin and you're interacting
intensely with with fowl who
as it turns out have h5n1 that's when
the jump comes
um but it's not there's no airborne
transmission that we're aware of human
human i mean they're
not that way it just doesn't exist um i
think the
world health organization did a
relentless survey of the number of h5n1
cases i think they do it every year i
saw one 10-year series
where i think it was like 500 fatalities
over the course of a decade
and that's a drop in the bucket kind of
fun fun fact
i believe the typical lethality from
lightning
over 10 years is 70 000 deaths so we
think getting struck by lightning pretty
low risk h5n1
much much lower than that what happened
in these experiments
is the experimenters in both cases um
set out to make h5n1 that would be
contagious
that could create airborne transmission
and so they basically passed it i think
in both cases they passed it through
a large number of ferrets and so this
wasn't like
crispr there wasn't even a crisper back
in those days this was relatively
straightforward you know selecting for a
particular outcome
and after guiding the path and passing
them through
again i believe it was a series of
ferrets they did in fact come up with
a version of h5n1 that is capable of
airborne transmission
now they didn't unleash it into the
world they didn't
inject it into humans to see what would
happen and so for those two reasons we
don't
really know how contagious it might have
been
but you know if it was as contagious as
covid
that could be a civilization threatening
pathogen
and why would you do it well the people
who did it were good guys
they were virologists i believe their
agendas they explained it was
much as you said let's figure out what a
worst case scenario
might look like so we can understand it
better but
my understanding is in both cases it was
done in by bsl3 labs
and so potential of leak uh
significantly non-zero hopefully way
below one percent but significantly
non-zero
and when you look at the consequences of
an escape in terms of human lives
destruction of a large portion of the
economy etc and you do an expected value
calculation
on whatever fraction of one percent that
was you would come up with
a staggering cost staggering expected
cost for this work so it should never
it should never have been carried out
now you might make an argument
if you said if you believed that h5n1
in nature is on an inevitable path
to airborne transmission and it's only
going to be a small number of years
a and b if it makes that transition
there is you know one set of changes to
its metabolic pathways
and you know it's genomic code and so
forth one
that we have discovered so it is going
to go from point a which is where it is
right now to point b
we have reliably engineered point b that
is the destination
and we need to start fighting that right
now because this is five years or less
away
now that'd be very different world
that'd be like spotting an asteroid
that's coming toward the earth and is
five years off and yes you marshal
everything you can to resist that but
there's two problems with that
perspective
the first is in however many thousands
of generations that humans have been
inhabiting this planet there has never
been a transmissible form of h5n1 and
influenza has been around for a very
long time
so there is no case for inevitability
of this kind of a jump to airborne
transmission so
we're not on a freight train to that
outcome and if there was inevitability
around that
it's not like there's just one set of
genetic code that would get there
they're just there's there's all kinds
of different mutations
that could conceivably result in that
kind of an outcome
unbelievable diversity of mutations and
so we're not actually creating something
we're inevitably going to face
uh but we are creating something we are
creating
a very powerful and unbelievably
negative card and injecting in the deck
that nature never put into the deck so
in that case
um i just don't see any moral or
scientific
justification for that kind of work and
interestingly
there was quite a bit of excitement and
concern about this when the work came
out one of the teams was going to
publish their results in science the
other in nature
and there were a lot of editorials and a
lot of
scientists are saying this is crazy and
publication of those
papers did get suspended and not long
after that there was a pause put on
u.s government funding nih funding on
gain of function research
but both of those speed bumps were
ultimately removed
those papers did ultimately get
published and that pause on funding
you know ceased long ago and in fact
those two very projects my understanding
has
resumed their funding got their
government funding back i don't know why
a dutch project's getting nih funding
but whatever
about a year and a half ago so as far as
the us government and regulators are
concerned
it's also systems go for gain of
function at this point which i i find
very troubling
now i'm a little bit of an outsider from
this field but it has echoes of the same
kind of problem i see
in the ai world with autonomous weapon
systems
nobody in my colleagues
my colleagues friends as far as i can
tell
people in the ai community are not
really talking about autonomous weapons
systems
as now us and china are full steam ahead
on the development of both
right and that seems to be a similar
kind of thing on getting a function
i've uh you know have friends in the
biology space
and they don't want to talk about gain
of function
publicly it and i don't that makes me
very uncomfortable
from an outsider perspective in terms of
gain of function it makes me
very uncomfortable from the insider
perspective on autonomous weapon systems
i'm not sure how to communicate exactly
about autonomous weapon systems and i
certainly don't know how to communicate
effectively about
getting a function what is the right
path forward here
should we seize all gain of function
research is that
is that really the solution here well
again i'm going to use gain of function
in the relatively narrow
context of overview because you could
say almost you know anything
that you do to make biology more
effective is gain a function so within
the narrow confines of what we're
discussing
i think it would be easy enough
for level-headed people in all of the
countries level had any governmental
people in all the countries that
realistically could support such a
program to agree
we don't want this to happen because all
labs leak i mean and you know an example
that i
i use i actually didn't use it in the
piece i did with sam harris as well
um is the anthrax attacks in the united
states in 2001 i mean talk about an
example of the least likely lab
leaking into the least likely place
shortly after 9 11 for folks who don't
remember it and
it was a very very lethal strand of
anthrax that
as it turned out based on the for
forensic genomic work that was done and
so forth
absolutely leaked from a high-security
u.s army lab
probably the one at fort detrick in
maryland it might have been another one
but who cares
it absolutely leaked from a high
security u.s army lab
and where did it leak to this highly
dangerous substance that was kept under
lock and key by a very security-minded
organization
well it leaked to places including the
senate majority leader's office tom
daschle's office
i think it was senator leahy's office
certain publications including
bizarrely the national enquirer but
let's go to the senate majority leader's
office
it is hard to imagine a more
security-minded country than the united
states two weeks after the 911
attack i mean you it doesn't get more
security-minded than that
and it's also hard to imagine a more
security
capable organization than the united
states military
we can joke all we want about
inefficiencies in the military and you
know
24 000 wrenches and so forth but pretty
capable when it comes to that
despite that level of focus and concern
and competence just a
days after the 9 11 attacks something
comes from the
inside of our military industrial
compacts and ends up
you know in the office of someone i
believe the senate majority leader
somewhere in the line of presidential
succession
it tells us everything can leak so again
think of a level-headed conversation
between powerful leaders in a diversity
of countries
thinking through like i can imagine a
very simple powerpoint revealing
you know just discussing briefly things
like the anthrax leak
um things like uh this this foot and
mouth disease
outbreak that or leaking that came out
of a bsl four-level lab
in the uk several other things talking
about
the utter virulence that could result
from gain of function and say
folks can we agree that this just
shouldn't happen
i mean if we were able to agree on the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty which
we were
by a weapons convention which we did
agree on we the world
for the most part i believe agreement
could be found
there but it's going to take people in
leadership
of a couple of very powerful countries
to get to consensus amongst them
and then to decide we're going to get
everybody together and browbeat them
into banning this stuff now that doesn't
make it entirely impossible that
somebody might do this
but in well-regulated you know
carefully watched over fiduciary
environments
like federally funded academic research
anything going on in the government
itself
you know things going on in you know
companies that have
investors who don't want to go to jail
for the rest of their lives
i think that would have a major major
dampening impact on it
but there is a particular possible
catalyst
in this time we live in which is
uh for really kind of raising the
question of gain of function research
for the application of virus making
viruses more dangerous
is the question of whether covid
leaked from a lab sort of
not even answering that question but
even asking that question is a very
it seems like a very important question
to ask
to uh catalyze the conversation about
the whether we should be doing
gain of function research i mean from a
high level
uh why do you think people
even colleagues of mine are not
comfortable asking that question
and two do you think that the answer
could be that it did
leak from a lab i i think the mere
possibility
that it did leak from a lab is
evidence enough again for the
hypothetical rational national leaders
watching this simple powerpoint
if you could put the possibility at one
percent
and you look at the unbelievable
destructive power that covet had
that should be an overwhelmingly
powerful argument for excluding it
now as to whether or not that was a leak
some very very level i don't i don't
know enough about
all of the factors in the bayesian
analysis and so forth that has gone into
people making the pro argument of that
so i don't pretend to be an expert on
that and i i don't have
a point of view i i just don't know but
what i
what we can say is it is entirely
possible for a couple of reasons
one is that there is a bsl4 lab in wuhan
the wahan institute of virology i
believe it's the the only bsl4 in china
i could be wrong about that
but it definitely had a history
that alarmed very sophisticated uh u.s
diplomats and others
who were in contact with the lab and
were aware of what it was doing
uh long before covid uh coveted
um hit the world and so there are
diplomatic cables that have been
declassified
i believe one sophisticated scientist or
other observer said
that wiv is a ticking time bomb and
i believe it's also been pretty
reasonably established that
coronaviruses
were a topic of great interest at wiv
sars obviously came out of china and
that's a that's a coronavirus that would
make an enormous amount of sense for it
to be studied there
um and there is so much opacity
about what happened in the early days
and weeks
after the outbreak that's basically been
imposed by the chinese government that
we just don't know so it feels like a
substantially or greater than one
percent possibility to me
looking at it from the outside and
that's something that one could imagine
now we're going to the realm of thought
experiment not
me decreeing this is what happened but
you know if they're studying coronavirus
at the wuhan institute of virology
um and there is this precedent of gain
of function research that's been done
on something that is remarkably
uncontagious to humans whereas we know
coronavirus is contagious to humans
i could definitely and there is this
global consensus
you know certainly was the case you know
two or three years ago when this work
might have started this
seems to be this global consensus that
gain a function is fine
the u.s paused funding for a little
while but paused funding they never said
private actors couldn't do it
it was just the pause of nih funding and
then that pause was lifted so
again none of this is irrational you
could certainly see the folks at wiv
saying gain a function interesting
vector coronovice
virus unlike h5n1 very contagious
uh we are in a a nation that has had
terrible run-ins with coronavirus why
don't we do a little getting function on
this
and then like all labs at all levels
one can imagine this lab leaking so it's
not an impossibility and very very
level-headed
people have said that you know who've
looked at it much more deeply
do believe in that outcome uh why is it
such a threat
to power the idea that leaked from a lab
why is it so threatening i don't maybe
understand this point exactly
like is it just that
as governments and especially the
chinese government is really afraid of
admitting
mistakes that everybody makes so this is
a horrible mystery like
uh chernobyl is a good example i come
from the soviet union
i mean well major mistakes were made in
chernobyl
i would argue for a lab league to happen
the the the scale of the mistake is much
smaller
um right there the the depth and the
breadth of rot
that in bureaucracy that led to
chernobyl
is much bigger than anything that could
lead to
a lab leak because it could literally
just be
i mean i'm sure there's security very
careful security procedures even in
level three labs but
it uh i i imagine maybe you can correct
me it's
all it takes is the incompetence of a
small number of individuals or even
one yeah one individual on a particular
a couple weeks three weeks
period as opposed to a multi-year
bureaucratic
failure of the entire government right
well certainly the
magnitude of mistakes and compounding
mistakes that went into chernobyl was
far far
far greater but the consequence of
kovitt
outweighs that the consequence of
chernobyl to a tremendous degree
and you know i think that that
particularly um authoritarian
governments
are unbelievably uh reluctant to
admit to any fallibility whatsoever
there's a
long long history of that across dozens
and dozens
of authoritarian governments and to be
transparent
again this is in the hypothetical world
in which this was a leak which
again i don't have i don't personally
have enough sophistication to have an
opinion on the
on the likelihood but in the
hypothetical world in which it was a
league
the global reaction
and the amount of global animus
and the amount of you know
the decline in global respect that would
happen toward china because every
country suffered
massively from this unbelievable damages
in terms of human lives and economic
activity disrupted
the world would in some way present
china with that bill
and when you take on top of that
the natural disinclination for any
authoritarian government to admit any
fallibility and tolerate the possibility
of any fallibility whatsoever
and you look at the relative opacity
even though they let a world
health organization group in you know a
couple months ago to run around
they didn't give that who group anywhere
near the level of access it would be
necessary to definitively say
x happened versus y the level of opacity
that surrounds those opening weeks and
months
of covet in china we just don't know
if you were to kind of look back at 2020
and maybe broadening it out to future
pandemics
that could be much more dangerous what
kind of response
how do we fail in the response and how
could we do better
so the gain of function research is
discussing
which you know the the question of we
should not be
creating viruses that are both
exceptionally contagious and
exceptionally deadly to humans
but if it does happen perhaps the
natural
evolution natural mutation is there
interesting technological responses
on the testing side on the vaccine
development side
on the collection of data or on the
basic sort of policy response side
or the sociological the psychological
side
yeah there's all kinds of things and
most of what i've thought about and
written about and again discussed in
that long
bit with with sam is dual use
so most of the countermeasures that i've
been thinking about and advocating for
would be every bit as effective against
zoonotic
disease a natural pandemic of some sort
as an artificial one
the the risk of an artificial one even
the near-term risk of an artificial one
ups the urgency around these measures
immensely but
but most of them would be broadly
applicable and so i think
the first thing that we really want to
do on a global scale
is have a far far far more robust
and globally transparent system of
detection
and that can happen on a number of
levels the most obvious one
is you know just in the blood of people
who come into clinics
exhibiting signs of illness and there
we are certainly at a point now with
we're at with
relatively minimal investment we could
develop
in clinic diagnostics that would be
unbelievably effective at pinpointing
what's going on
in almost any disease when somebody
walks into a doctor's office or a clinic
and better than that um this is a little
bit further off
further off but it wouldn't cost tens of
billions in research dollars it would be
you know a relatively modest and
affordable budget in relation to the
threat
at home diagnostics that can really
really pinpoint
you know okay particularly with
respiratory infections
because that is generally almost
universally
the mechanism of transmission for any
serious pandemic
so somebody has a respiratory infection
is it one of the
you know significantly large handful of
rhinoviruses coronaviruses and other
things that cause common cold
uh or is it influenza if it's influenza
is it influenza a versus b
um or is it you know a small handful of
other more exotic but nonetheless
sort of common respiratory infections
that are out there
developing a diagnostic panel to
pinpoint all of that stuff that's
something that's well within our
capabilities that's much less
a lift than creating mrna vaccines which
obviously we proved capable of when we
put our minds to it
so do that on a global basis
and i don't think that's irrational
because the best prototype
for this than i'm aware of isn't
currently rolling out
in atherton california or fairfield
county connecticut or some other wealthy
place
the best prototype that i'm aware of
this is rolling out right now in nigeria
and it's a project that came out of the
broad institute
which as as i'm sure you know but uh
some listeners may not is
kind of like an academic joint venture
between harvard and mit
the program is called sentinel and their
objective
is and their plan and is a very well
conceived plan a methodical plan
is to do just that in areas of nigeria
that are particularly vulnerable to
zoonotic
diseases making the jump from animals to
humans
but also there's just an unbelievable
public health benefit from that
and it's sort of a three-tier system
where clinicians in the field
could very rapidly determine do you have
one of the infections of acute interest
here either because it's very common in
this region
so we want to diagnose as many as things
as we can at the front line
or because it's uncommon but
unbelievably threatening like ebola
so frontline worker can make that
determination very very rapidly
if it comes up as a we don't know they
bump it up to a level that's more like
at a fully
configured doctor's office or local
hospital and if it's still it
we don't know it gets bumped up to a
national level and
that and it gets bumped very very
rapidly so
if this can be done in nigeria and it
seems that it can be
there shouldn't be any inhibition for it
to happen in most other places
and it should be affordable from a
budgetary standpoint and based on
sentinel's budget and adjusting things
for things like you know very different
cost of living larger population etc
i did a back of the envelope calculation
that doing something like sentinel in
the u.s would be in the low billions of
dollars
and you know wealthy countries
middle-income countries can't afford
such a thing lower income companies in
income countries should certainly be
helped with that
but start with that level of detection
and then layer on top of that other
interesting things
like you know monitoring search engine
traffic search engine queries
for evidence that strange clusters of
symptoms
are starting to rise in different places
there's been a lot of work done with
that
most of it kind of like academic and
experimental but some of it has been
powerful enough to suggest that this
could be a very powerful early warning
system there's a guy named bill lampos
at university college london
who basically did a very rigorous
analysis that showed that symptom
searches reliably predicted coveted
outbreaks in the early days of the
pandemic in given countries
by as much as 16 days before the
evidence started to crew at a public
health level
16 days of forewarning can be
monumentally important
in the early days of an outbreak and
this is
you know a very very talented but
nonetheless very resource constrained
academic project imagine if that was
something that was done
with a norad like budget yeah yeah so i
mean
starting with detection that's something
we could do radically radically better
so aggregating multiple data sources in
order to create something
i mean this is really exciting to me the
possibility that i've heard
inklings of of creating almost like a
weather map
of pathogens like basically
aggregating all of these data sources
scaling
many orders of magnitude up at home
testing and all kinds of
testing that doesn't just try to test
for the particular pathogen
of worry now but everything like a full
spectrum of things that could be
dangerous to the human body
and thereby be able to create these maps
like that are dynamically updated on an
hourly basis
of the of how viruses travel throughout
the world
and so you can respond like you can then
integrate just like you do when you
check your weather map
and it's raining or not of course not
perfect but it's
very good predictor whether it's going
to rain or not
uh and use that to then make decisions
about your own life
ultimately give the power information to
individuals to respond
and if it's a super dangerous like if
it's acid rain versus regular rain
you might want to really stay inside as
opposed to risking it
i mean that um just like you said if
i think it's not very expensive relative
to all the things
that we do in this world but it does
require
bold leadership and there's another
dark thing which really is bothering me
about 2020 which it requires
is it requires trust in institutions to
carry out these kinds of programs
and it requires trust and science and
engineers
and uh sort of centralized organizations
that would operate at scale here
and much of that trust has been um
at least in the united states diminished
it feels like
not exactly sure where