April 7, 2023 • 38 mins
Cautionary Conversation: In 1990, a small extremist group launched a nerve gas attack on passengers riding the Tokyo subway. Thousands of people were hurt, more than a dozen died. At the time, such use of a chemical weapon seemed new and uniquely terrifying.
But advances in biology mean that today it's possible such a group could create a virus like Covid... with the potential to kill millions. What are the dangers and what can we do to combat them? Tim Harford talks to writer Michael Specter about his new book Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology and the Future of Life.
(Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology and the Future of Life is is available now at Pushkin.fm, Audible, or wherever audiobooks are sold.)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Japan is one of the safest countries in the world,
which only made it more shocking. During morning rush hour
on the twentieth of March nineteen five men stepped onto
five different trains on the Tokyo Metro. Each of them
(00:37):
had the same mission to drop a couple of plastic
bags wrapped in newspaper on the floor, to puncture those
bags with a specially sharpened umbrella, and then to get
off the train and make a getaway. Each bag contained
almost a pint of liquid surin, a chemical developed by
Nazi scientists in the nineteen forties. Suren vapor can be
(01:00):
breathed in or absorbed to the skin. Even in small doses.
It blocks the body's ability to control its muscles. A
simple of suren exposure and nausea and drooling, followed by vomiting,
twitching and self soiling as the bladder and bowels opened,
followed by death from asphyxiation. Those who survive can suffer
(01:23):
permanent nerve damage. It's not a chemical you want to
have drifting through a busy subway carriage, but since saren
evaporates very quickly, that's what happened. The result was carnage.
Twelve people died almost immediately and thousands were injured, with
two later dying of those injuries. The attack was the
(01:47):
work of a cult named Home Shinrikyo, which had just
a few thousand members. A small number of unhinged extremists
had caused dreadful harm. Still, it could have been worse.
The Tokyo Metro attack killed fourteen people, COVID killed many millions, imagine,
(02:09):
and the Ohm Shinrikyo cult had released not nerve gas,
but a killer coronavirus that might infect the entire world.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This
(02:47):
is another of our occasional cautionary conversations in which we
explore a mistake at anything with a mishap to a
catastrophe and try to learn the lessons with the help
of an expert guest. This time I'm joined by Michael Spector.
Michael is an award winning staff writer at The New Yorker,
where his subjects have ranged widely, everything for p Diddy
(03:09):
to Doctor Oz, but often focusing on science and public health.
And his new audiobook is Higher Animals, Vaccines, Synthetic Biology,
and The Future of Life. It's published by Pushkin Industries,
which full disclosure also produces cautionary tales. Michael, welcome, thank you.
I'm happy to be here. I'm very happy that you
(03:32):
are here. And let's circle back to the Saren attack later,
because I first wanted to discuss something which first sight
it seems a world away. It's a city council meeting
in Cambridge, Massachusetts in nineteen seventy six, which really caught
my attention. In your book, tell us about that. It
was an unusual city council meeting, probably the most unusual
(03:52):
of its kind to that point in the history of
the United States. It was a meeting about whether Harvard
University would have the right to build a biological laboratory
to work with recombinant DNA, which had just recently been
discovered and become in. DNA means you can basically mix
the genes of two species, and that is something that
(04:16):
every lab in the world does right now. But at
the time it sort of invoked every type of fear
of creating monsters in destroying the world that you could
possibly imagine. The or that has been written about over
the last three hundred years and the mayor of Cambridge
was a very cantankerous and somewhat intelligent man who understood politics.
(04:40):
His constituency was working class Cambridge, and he was going
to go after the elites at Harvard for ignoring what
he thought were the risks. And this city council meeting
was an epical event in the history of molecular biology
because it sort of pitted the future against citizens who
(05:00):
had not really asked questions in the past, and it
really set the tone for almost every kind of meeting
that came afterwards. Yes, I may have a Lucci. He
was very politically savvy, and you had some wonderful tape
in your audio booklet. I mean, let's listen to a
small extract of his remarks at this meeting. When I
was a little boy, I used to fish in the
Child River, and I woke up one more and I've
(05:22):
found millions of fair dead in the Child River. And
you tonight tell me the shot dump chemicals into the
sewer system of game, and the sewer system all that
flows into the Child Was he right to be so
worried the image of millions of dead fish? Were those
(05:43):
concerns overblown at the time? Yes, They were overblown at
the time, but they weren't completely ridiculous. And what's really
interesting if you go back and listen to that conversation
in those debates, it's not overblown now. Those questions were
crazy at the time. He was asking whether entirely new
species could be created in that lab, and that was
(06:06):
something that could never have happened. It's not crazy question now.
So those inflammatory debates were kind of necessary. And I
think it's worth pointing out that Cambridge, Massachusetts is now
the absolute center of biotechnological innovation in the world. There
(06:26):
are dozens, if not hundreds of labs there that use
that kind of recombinant DNA technology with the blessing of
the city council and with the participation of members of
the city council, so we've come a long way. As
we said, was nineteen seventy six. What was the kind
of background, Why did the stakes seem so high and
why was people so worried? Because a guy named Paul Berg,
(06:49):
who was a professor at Stanford, had recently figured out
a way to take a virus called SV eleven, which
caused cancer and hamsters, and inserted into a very common
Bacterium e coli, and that was the first time that
humans had ever been able to mix species of any kind.
(07:13):
And while it showed a great deal of promise, it
was a very scary step because it also meant maybe
some things would be created that we couldn't control. So
that was the background. I mean, immediately, when you say that,
I think if I undercook my sausage, I could catch
cancer for me. No, that's what it sounds like. Well
(07:34):
I know it sounds like that, but first of all,
this is something that happened in a lab in the
cancer virus is not one that's common or that infects humans.
It's just that we didn't know at the time whether
or not it was going to be possible for that
to mutate into something that somebody could sneeze and catch.
(07:54):
I mean, we had no idea. It had never been
done before. And even Paul Berg was quite upfront about saying,
there are tremendous dangers to this. He could see the promise,
all biologists and many other people could, but the dangers
were evident too, and they were evident and also unknown.
(08:15):
We didn't know what might happen. Yeah, we've got a
little bit more tape from the council meeting. If you
listen to some of the questions that have come in,
you can really get a sense that the fears are palpable.
For the benefit of all of members of the City Council,
I would like to inject his statement of questions not
to be answered at this time, but for the benefit
(08:36):
of members of this City Council who may want to
ask these questions. We're recombinant, DNA experienced, be safer if
they were done in a maximum security lab. Question is
a truth that in the history of science, mistakes have
been made, nor to happen. Question to scientists ever exercise
(08:57):
or judgment? Question do they ever have accidents? Question? Classic politician,
isn't he? He's a classic politician? And they were inflammatory questions,
but you can't deny that they even now have some
application in real life. And I mean there were other
things going on at the time, So I think Ford
(09:19):
Motor Company had had put out this car the pinto,
which they knew was unsafe, and they had just decided
it was cheaper to deal with the legal claims from
these exploding fuel tanks than it was to redesign or
withdraw the car. And this had come out, and so
there was this real palpable sense of mistrust of corporations
(09:41):
and overshadowing all of this for the previous thirty years
had been the atomic bomb and the sense that scientists
could potentially create something uncontrollable. There's a moment in that
book where David Baltimore, who's a Nobel Prize winning biologists,
said the reason people were so afraid was it wasn't
so far from World War Two and they were worried
(10:04):
whether there was an atomic bomb in biology. And at
the time that seemed a crazy fear. Again it's not now,
but these things seemed palpable at a time when we
were learning so much about how corporations allied to us.
That was the year. It was two years after Richard
(10:24):
Nixon had resigned, the first president ever to resign in
the United States in disgrace. There's been a lot going
on previously. A few years previously, one of the Great
Lakes caught fire because of all the pollution that had
been admitted into it. So there was a sense that
you couldn't really trust the institutions you used to believe
(10:45):
in anymore. And when scientists started to come along and
say hey, we've created a new form of life that
could do all sorts of cool things. It didn't go
down so well, yeah, Well, as Mavolucci's questions, do scientists
have exercised poor judgments? Do they ever have accidents? I
mean yeah, yeah, and Tween Mile Island came along shortly afterwards,
so yeah, there are accidents. So puts us in a
(11:08):
strange position then, because we're saying, well, from the point
of view of nineteen seventy six, people were highly strong.
You understand why they were mistrustful. But actually the pears
were overblown. There was nothing really to worry about. But now,
I mean, as I alluded to in the introduction, if
you manufactured a virus, you could kill tens of millions
(11:30):
of people. You could kill more people than you could
kill at least with a single hydrogen bomb, even the
largest hydrogen bomb. So it turns out there walls an
atomic bomb in biology. Oh, absolutely more than an atomic bomb.
Because there's one thing about biology that there isn't even
with nuclear weapons. It's exponential. It's digital. Biology has become
a sort of part of information technology. We developed a
(11:53):
COVID vaccine really rapidly, because scientists were able to download
it from the internet make DNA in certain into cells.
That's great, that's wonderful, but it also means, you know,
there used to be very few people who do this
sort of thing. There are thousands now. And if they
wanted to do it badly, if they wanted to harm people,
(12:15):
if they wanted to make a virus, it is in
no way inconceivable that they could. At this meeting, the
Council imposes a two year moratorium on experiments with recombinant DNA.
And looking at this, it felt like quite an old story.
There was a previous episode of Cautionary Tales called How
to End a Pandemic where we were discussing early smallpox inoculations.
(12:38):
Funny enough, also in Massachusetts, in the Boston area, and
in seventeen twenty one, as Sabdel Boylstone the doctor, he
was going around innoculating Bostonians against smallpox. He'd got this
idea from Africa and enslaveman called Onnissimus, and he faced
huge resistance, partly that seemed to be racism, like this
idea has come from Africa, it's come from enslave people.
(13:01):
It's it's not a white idea, it's not a domestic idea.
But also, I mean, you can die from being auld inoculated.
People do have a dose of smallpox, they can infect
other people. And in the end the resistance went as
far as people throwing hand grenades to Boilster's window where
his wife and his children were sitting. And in the
(13:22):
end he started visiting people at midnight and in disguise
because there was just yeah, he was physically under threat
for what he was doing. Yeah, I address some of
that in the first chapter of this book, but I think,
especially at that time, you have to remember that a
small pox inoculation was to some degree dangerous in a
(13:45):
way that it isn't or wouldn't be today if we
got them again. People don't look at the risks and
rewards of these things. They just get excited about the rewards,
are upset about the risks, And the fact is the
risks of getting small parks and dying of small parks
were much greater than the risks of being harmed by
the vaccine. But you know, every number has a numerator
(14:08):
and a nominator, and we only usually look at one
or the other, and so yeah, it's true that those
things can cause harm. You can't ever say something's going
to be one hundred percent in biology, Yeah, but you
have to figure out is it better than the alternative,
and often it's pretty clear the answer. Cautionary tales will
(14:33):
be back after the break, Michael. Let's try and look
at the rewards as well as the risks. I mean,
I've framed our whole discussion in terms of risks, partly
(14:56):
because you talk about them very eloquently in higher animals,
partly because this is cautionary tales. Wouldn't be cautionary tales
if we weren't talking about something going wrong. But let's
talk about the upside. So where are we now with
synthetic biology. What can we do and what should we
be thankful for? Well, I mean, first of all, the
first thing we should remember is we just made a
(15:17):
vaccine that has been administered billions of times, and that's
a synthetic biological product that saved millions of lives. But
beyond that, there are people growing things that they used
to make in plants with chemicals. They're growing all sorts
of medicines. There's going to be an opportunity to try
(15:39):
and make vaccines. For other illnesses, not COVID but HIV influenza.
We have terrible influenza vaccines that we administer every year.
Now people are seriously attempting to develop a single shot
that would be universal, and that would I mean, influenza
is a really serious disease and people always say, oh
(16:01):
I got the flu, Usually they didn't, they had a cold.
That would be something. But beyond that, people are using
synthetic biology to replace plastics, to engineer dyes, to make
types of energy that would not be you know, carbon
based and not cause terrible pollution. It has unlimited potential
(16:25):
because it's the potential of biology. And if we can
rewrite the rules of biology, Yeah, there are risks, but
we can also do some tremendous things, and we're starting
to see that. It's early days, yeah, and that's very
clear in the later chapters of Higher Animals. So it
is enormously exciting. However, as Caution Retales, let's talk about
(16:48):
this risk, which you cover in some detail in the book. Fundamentally,
smallpox was eradicated by better and better vaccinations, and that's
that subject we've discussed in Caution Tales as well. Just
a few samples of smallpox in a couple of very
high security laboratories in case we need to study it.
(17:11):
And as you explain, in higher animals, sure there were
just a few samples of smallpox remaining in highly secure labs.
But you can make smallpox, and people people have made
small pox. In fact, I think they haven't. They made
horse horse parks, they made a very similar parks. Yeah,
(17:31):
they demonstrated that they could have made small pox if
they wanted to, and that potential exists because it's the
formula for the formula. Maybe that's the wrong word, the
recipe for smallpox. It's it's no right, it's it's not
a secret. Yeah, I mean one of the problems that
we have to address is not only is the genetic sequence,
the sort of code, the letters of small pox all known,
(17:55):
they're all printed, and so, by the way, are the
recipes to make every virus you could possibly name, influenza,
every type of deadly influenza, COVID, SARS, you name it.
It's on the end that seems bad. Well, I mean
it used to be. It has always been in academics
and particularly that the incentive is to keep your information
(18:18):
close and then publish it. So that everyone knows you
have it, and the idea was publishing a sequence would
let other scientists do research with it and check your work.
The problem is we don't have the kind of regulations
we need to have. You know, at least with nuclear weapons,
there are regulations, there are treaties, they could be violated,
(18:40):
they certainly are violated. But biology is different because we
actually encourage the thing that we should be preventing, and
it's something that you can do for I don't know,
ten twenty thousand dollars in a couple smart graduate students.
You don't need a nation state to develop a virus.
(19:01):
So let's talk about scientists who have pushed back against
publication and those who who've gone a long way. So fas,
let's talk about the horsepox guy. So what was the
what was the reaction of the scientific community to someone
just saying, hey, I can make this virus, I have
made this virus, I've kind of proof of concept that
I could have made smallpox. Who did that and how
(19:22):
do people respond to that scientist? It was a guy
named David Evans and his team in Canada. There's serious virologists,
and their position was, we want you to understand that
this can be done, and there was also some sense
that it would help make a better smallpox vaccine, though
most scientists I've talked to think that's absolutely not the case.
(19:46):
It was pretty universally condemned because what it basically showed
is that you can go make I mean, there's no
reason to have horsepox out there. I mean, we don't
need a virus. We don't need a vaccine. It was
extinct in the world. People weren't getting up in the
morning and saying, I hope I don't get horsepox, And
there was no need to bring a deadly virus that's
(20:07):
closely related to small back to life. It is just
highly irresponsible. Yeah, but so people criticized him, But I mean,
he didn't he didn't lose his job, he didn't go
to prison. He didn't he didn't violate any any laws.
There's no law I could if I and I'm not
(20:27):
the smart but if I was, I could buy the
DNA online. It's not that expensive. I could get sequencing machines.
I could get all the stuff I need. I could
make whatever virus you tell me to make. It's not
against the law, it's not against the rules, and that
has to change. Yeah, So, how many people do you
(20:48):
think exist in the world who could make a dangerous virus?
I mean, are we talking millions? Are we talking hundreds,
five or six? I mean, I don't really have a
sense of the number of people who who do have
access to the technology and the skill. It's a growing number.
Kevin as Felt, who teaches at MIT and who I
(21:09):
teach a course with, I should say he does a
lot of this kind of research. He believes there's five
or ten thousand people who could do this now, but
in a few years. You know, we're sort of in
the era of biology. It used to be like if
you look at early days and computers, there was a
mainframe computer that would take up a whole building, and
(21:31):
now the computers in our watches are more powerful than
that mainframe. That's what's happening with biology. So as that happens,
people are getting access to more powerful programs to make
things like viruses, it's going to be great. You know,
it's going to be graduate students, then it's going to
be undergraduates, and then your eighth grade is going to
(21:51):
come home and say, Mommy, look what I made. And
they can make a lot of cool things, and I
think it's great, but there has to be some guardrails.
You also in the book discuss kind of the polo
opposite of Evans making horsebox. There were scientists who discus
was something very dangerous and said, we're going to give
(22:12):
you the broad outlines, but we're not actually going to
tell you what we did or how we did it.
And so tell us about that, and tell us about
what we actually they received. There's a guy named Robert
Arnon in California. He was a bacheline expert. He actually
died last year. But there were seven known baculism toxins
and they're deadly, but we also have antidotes for all
(22:32):
of them. He found an eighth, so this is an
incredibly poisonous substance for which there was no antidote. Deadly
and there was no antidote at the time. And he said,
I found this stuff. I'll tell you about it, but
I'm not going to do what we would always do,
which has published the information so that my competitors and
(22:53):
colleagues can go out and repeat it and make sure
it really is deadly. He said, it's just it's too
dangerous to do that, and he was roundly denounced for
doing that. People said they didn't trust him, they didn't
believe him. He was a very senior scientist and well respected,
but he wasn't playing by the rules that were established,
and so he tried to do the right thing. And
(23:14):
in fact, he stuck to his guns and did the
right thing, and he was condemned for it. It's interesting,
I'm trying to get my head around this. So the
horsebox guy was condemned for going too far right, the
eighth botulism toxin guy was condemned for not publishing what
he found. So the scientists seem they need to make
up their mind. What am I misunderstanding about this situation.
(23:36):
You're not misunderstanding anything. I think in the case of
the horsebox guy, what he did was within the legitimate
rules of biology. That was how things worked. It's just
that people understood it shouldn't work that way. Arnon did
something different. He said, I'm not going to do this
normal published stuff because it's wrong and it would be
(23:57):
dangerous at least until we have a universal antidote the
way we do to other toxins. And he was denounced
and condemned for not adhering to the normal rules of
biolog So what this says to me is we need
to change the normal rules of biology. Yeah, so let's
talk about that. I'm thinking again about the souring gas attack,
(24:20):
which is a reminder that there are groups out there
who would be very happy to unleash apocalyptic harm if
they could. We can all think of various extremist groups,
terrorist groups, whatever you want to call them, who would
be willing to do that, and perhaps also some state
actors who would be happy to support that kind of thing.
(24:42):
So there's clearly a risk of biological terrorism. So what
rules do you have in mind that might help us
defend against that. Well, there are things we could do.
One of them is, let's say we tested the waste
water with DNA sequencers at every airport or porta ventry
in Europe in the United States. That's about three hundred places.
(25:05):
You could instantly see viruses and you would be looking
for are things that were exponentially growing really fast. You'd
find very rapidly if someone was releasing something, Would it
save everyone? Maybe not. That's one thing you can do.
Another thing is personal protective equipment can be immensely better
(25:26):
than it is. I mean, we saw in the COVID
pandemic bad equipment, a lack of knowledge about what work
and what didn't. We can make really good ppe that
people would use that would protect them. Other things we
can do is if I want to order some DNA
from one of the sort of Amazon like places that
(25:50):
sell it on the internet, we should have some sort
of body that says, why do you want that sequence?
Because it's coding an awful lot like one of these viruses. Now, yeah,
it's sort of like gun control. You can always get
around it. You will be able to get around it,
but we ought to make an effort in There are
ways to make an effort. Another thing to do is
(26:11):
when you print DNA. You can now print DNA at
home or in your lab, but you could put bar
codes into those printers so that there would be some
form of regulation. It would make it seem like the
US currency that has water marks. You couldn't counterfeit it,
you could account for it. Those things can be done,
(26:34):
and none of them really are. This is blowing my mind.
I mean, this is actually more than anything else you said, Michael,
gives me a sense of just how advanced the technology
now is that Oh yeah, you can print DNA at
home and you can water market so you know, you
know whose printer was being used. There's more that I
can't even yet go into because it's too speculative. But
(26:54):
there are things you can do to regulate DNA and
kill viruses that would be really effective. But I also
have to say, we just went through a pandemic that
name your figure across the world, seventeen trillion, you know,
crazy amount of money. And in the United States we
can't even get a billion dollars in the next budget
(27:18):
to do some of these preparations, these pandemic preparations, these
anti viral preparations. It's just remarkable. That is astonishing. So
let's talk about what scientists should do differently. You talked
about your concerns that the norms, the rules of science
were maybe not fit for these new risks. He also
(27:40):
in the book you say, look, I'm a journalist. As
a journalist, if I find something out, I'm going to
publish it. And scientists are the same. So used to
sympathize with the urge to be transparent and to get
everything out there to be discussed and debated. But that's
not right. Do you think I do sympathize, and I
think it's a fine line. I mean, I don't want
biologists to be hemmed in and not be able to
(28:00):
do their work, but there has to be some sort
of justification, like we now fund and courage scientists to
go out and find new deadly viruses, take them to
labs and work on them and see how deadly they
are and what can be done. You know, there's an
(28:21):
endless debate about was the Wuhan virus a lab leak
or not. Most people in the field that I talked
to the most think it was not a lab leak,
but their lab leaks happen. I mean, it wouldn't be
impossible for it to have been one, and there are
many examples. So the idea that we're actually encouraging scientists
(28:41):
to go into bat caves and bring back deadly viruses
to labs so that the rationale for that used to be, well,
if you want to make a vaccine, you need to
know what you're making a vaccine against. So the idea
that we need to have deadly viruses everywhere so that
we can build something that will contain those viruses is
(29:03):
very old think and it needs to be done away with.
You talk about gain of function research and dual use research,
and you say that actually you don't find either of
those terms to be particularly helpful. So could you explain
those terms and then explain why you think that they're
a little bit short for the purposes of this discussion. Well,
gain of function and dual use are two ways of
(29:26):
describing enhancing biological microbes to do something other than what
they do in nature. But the reason I have a
problem with that is almost everything we do with biology,
whether it's make an artificial sweetener or make penicillin, or
make some sort of cancer drug, or anything else. A
synthetic dye for clothing enhances the original microbes, so you
(29:51):
know there are more than one use we are going
to gain function. The question is is it a gain
of function that could cause harm? So if we are
going to rethink the norms of science formulate new rules
about when to be transparent and when not to be
who does that? Is they have a model for doing
(30:13):
that successfully in the past. That's a really painful question.
You could say there's a model if you look at
nuclear treaties and the attempt to regulate nuclear weapons. But
I don't think that's really a model. And if you're talking,
this is sort of more akin to something like climate change,
(30:34):
a biological function that would affect the whole world. And
we're not that great at whole world governance as far
as I can tell. So you could say the who
could take a crack at at the UN Maybe we
need a new body, but we need to do something.
We've alluded several times in our conversation to the possible
(30:55):
analogy between uclear weapons and bioweapons. Where does that analogy
help us and where does it lead us astray? Well?
I think it helps us in the sense that there
have been international efforts to agree on what's dangerous and
what isn't dangerous and who should control it. And there
are people who inspect places where they exist. I think
(31:17):
that is helpful. It would be nice to have people
who are unaligned who could go into various labs and
inspect what's there. Where it doesn't help us is you know,
I think there are maybe eight or nine countries that
could theoretically have a nuclear weapon at this point. There
(31:38):
are many thousands of groups that could have biological weapons
because biology is information now, so ultimately it has to
be a more powerful antidote, and it has to be
a more present discussion than it is right now, and
even I think, much more powerful a weapon than nuclear weapons. Are.
(32:01):
You mentioned in the book that moderna had had basically
made their vaccine before the Chinese even admitted that the
virus could spread from human to human. It was that quick,
It was that early. And yet so this is all
in January twenty twenty. Their vaccine wasn't actually being used
in the general population until December of twenty twenty. So
(32:25):
why did it take so long? First of all, I
should point out the obvious developing a vaccine in any
years infinitely faster than it's ever been done before. The
fastest vaccine previously had been months, and that was four years.
But it took a while because people needed to test it,
and they had to do big trials, and they had
to make sure it was safe. This is a new technology,
(32:48):
and so the idea of putting it into fourteen billion
arms without any testing is crazy. There are intermediary steps,
and you know, we can be much much faster than
we are, and we're going to have to be, Yeah,
because isn't this an example of what you were saying
we're thinking about the benefit, thinking about the costs, but
(33:10):
not really being able to synthesize both of them, because
I mean, the costs of not injecting fourteen billion people
with this vaccine really fast were huge. Obviously, there's a
risk to using a vaccine before it's been properly tested.
Do you think we got the balance right? And how
could we do better next time? We probably got the
(33:31):
balance close to right, I think. Unfortunately, the answer to
better that I know of are things caught challenge trials.
Challenge trials are you take a virus, like the COVID virus,
and you take forty people or four hundred people, and
you give half of them the virus and half of
them not the virus. They don't know. It's double blind,
(33:53):
and then you vaccinate everybody and you see what happens.
Presumably you vaccinate them before you give them the virus.
But right, right, why is it easeful to actually deliberately
infect them? Why is that an important step? Well, it's
a very rapid way of finding out if the vaccine
works or not, because if two hundred people have the virus,
(34:13):
and you know they have the virus, and you give
them a vaccine and seven of them get sick instead
of one hundred and ninety six, you know that the
vaccine is effective. If some of them get sick and
then have terrible side effects, you know that too. The
problem is it's hard to get medical officials to agree
(34:37):
to do something like that because the harm could be
serious and that's just not how it's worked in the past.
And it's very hard to get people to understand that
this is a new era and we have to do
things differently. Yeah, paint us a picture of what we
might be able to achieve with these new synthetic biology
(35:01):
technologies in twenty years. If things go well, if we
get the balance right and we avoid the risks, what's
sort of benefits might we be enjoying by say twenty
or twenty fifty. Cancer vaccines are absolutely possible autoimmune diseases,
diseases that have been very difficult to treat. If you
(35:23):
can figure out what cells are attacking your body and
in what way you can make an mRNA or a
synthetic attack to it, that would probably be very very specific.
You know, until recently, what we've done with broad spectrum
antibiotics and with vaccines is you know, take a big,
(35:45):
wide swing at the body and try and protect you
as broadly as you can. The side effects of those things,
particularly in cancer treatments, are evident. What would be great
is very highly targeted treatments to diseases, and I think
we'll be looking at that, and I think we'll see
a lot of treatments for things that in twenty thirty
(36:07):
forty years that you think are terrible and permanently deadly.
Right now, just thinking back to that council meeting in
nineteen seventy six, they voted for a moratorium. They basically said,
let's just wait for a bit, which is understandable, but
let's just wait for a bit does seem to be
a very crude response to a technology which has rewards
(36:32):
and risks. I think there's a middle ground, and it's
something we've never done, and I'm not sure we can do.
I don't know of an example where humans have decided
not to use a technology that's available to them, but
we need to start thinking about that. I'm not saying
we shouldn't use synthetic biology, but there are some things
we don't want to make. There are some tools we
(36:54):
should agree ought not to be pursued. And that's a
conversation that's starting to happen all around the world in
biological circles. And it hasn't happened before. It hasn't needed
to happen in the past. You develop up to your technology,
you did what you did, and then if there was
a problem, you tried to fix it later. And that
(37:17):
can't operate like that anymore. Is that then what we need?
We need those conversations about what we should and shouldn't
be being pursued, and we're having I mean we're having
them in the sense that scientists are having them in
bioethesis are having them. And I know that's not the public,
but it's it's a start. And I think the COVID
(37:38):
pandemic at least got people to think about some of
these issues. Like I now talk about m RNA and
people know what I'm talking about. You know, four years
ago I was talking about m RNA and they were like,
what planet is that from? So there's a level, you know,
a level of sophistication that exists. Now. People know about
spike proteins, they know a bit about vaccines, things they
(38:00):
never knew before. And that's great because this isn't something anymore,
if it ever was, that scientists can just deliver to
poll This has to be something that we all decide
we want and figure out a way to get it.
Michael's bag to thank you very much. Thank you, it's
been a great pleasure. Michael's audiobook Higher Animals is available
(38:25):
now at pushkin dot Fm, Audible, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
Pushkin. Japan is one of the safest countries in the world,
which only made it more shocking. During morning rush hour
on the twentieth of March nineteen five men stepped onto
five different trains on the Tokyo Metro. Each of them
(00:37):
had the same mission to drop a couple of plastic
bags wrapped in newspaper on the floor, to puncture those
bags with a specially sharpened umbrella, and then to get
off the train and make a getaway. Each bag contained
almost a pint of liquid surin, a chemical developed by
Nazi scientists in the nineteen forties. Suren vapor can be
(01:00):
breathed in or absorbed to the skin. Even in small doses.
It blocks the body's ability to control its muscles. A
simple of suren exposure and nausea and drooling, followed by vomiting,
twitching and self soiling as the bladder and bowels opened,
followed by death from asphyxiation. Those who survive can suffer
(01:23):
permanent nerve damage. It's not a chemical you want to
have drifting through a busy subway carriage, but since saren
evaporates very quickly, that's what happened. The result was carnage.
Twelve people died almost immediately and thousands were injured, with
two later dying of those injuries. The attack was the
(01:47):
work of a cult named Home Shinrikyo, which had just
a few thousand members. A small number of unhinged extremists
had caused dreadful harm. Still, it could have been worse.
The Tokyo Metro attack killed fourteen people, COVID killed many millions, imagine,
(02:09):
and the Ohm Shinrikyo cult had released not nerve gas,
but a killer coronavirus that might infect the entire world.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This
(02:47):
is another of our occasional cautionary conversations in which we
explore a mistake at anything with a mishap to a
catastrophe and try to learn the lessons with the help
of an expert guest. This time I'm joined by Michael Spector.
Michael is an award winning staff writer at The New Yorker,
where his subjects have ranged widely, everything for p Diddy
(03:09):
to Doctor Oz, but often focusing on science and public health.
And his new audiobook is Higher Animals, Vaccines, Synthetic Biology,
and The Future of Life. It's published by Pushkin Industries,
which full disclosure also produces cautionary tales. Michael, welcome, thank you.
I'm happy to be here. I'm very happy that you
(03:32):
are here. And let's circle back to the Saren attack later,
because I first wanted to discuss something which first sight
it seems a world away. It's a city council meeting
in Cambridge, Massachusetts in nineteen seventy six, which really caught
my attention. In your book, tell us about that. It
was an unusual city council meeting, probably the most unusual
(03:52):
of its kind to that point in the history of
the United States. It was a meeting about whether Harvard
University would have the right to build a biological laboratory
to work with recombinant DNA, which had just recently been
discovered and become in. DNA means you can basically mix
the genes of two species, and that is something that
(04:16):
every lab in the world does right now. But at
the time it sort of invoked every type of fear
of creating monsters in destroying the world that you could
possibly imagine. The or that has been written about over
the last three hundred years and the mayor of Cambridge
was a very cantankerous and somewhat intelligent man who understood politics.
(04:40):
His constituency was working class Cambridge, and he was going
to go after the elites at Harvard for ignoring what
he thought were the risks. And this city council meeting
was an epical event in the history of molecular biology
because it sort of pitted the future against citizens who
(05:00):
had not really asked questions in the past, and it
really set the tone for almost every kind of meeting
that came afterwards. Yes, I may have a Lucci. He
was very politically savvy, and you had some wonderful tape
in your audio booklet. I mean, let's listen to a
small extract of his remarks at this meeting. When I
was a little boy, I used to fish in the
Child River, and I woke up one more and I've
(05:22):
found millions of fair dead in the Child River. And
you tonight tell me the shot dump chemicals into the
sewer system of game, and the sewer system all that
flows into the Child Was he right to be so
worried the image of millions of dead fish? Were those
(05:43):
concerns overblown at the time? Yes, They were overblown at
the time, but they weren't completely ridiculous. And what's really
interesting if you go back and listen to that conversation
in those debates, it's not overblown now. Those questions were
crazy at the time. He was asking whether entirely new
species could be created in that lab, and that was
(06:06):
something that could never have happened. It's not crazy question now.
So those inflammatory debates were kind of necessary. And I
think it's worth pointing out that Cambridge, Massachusetts is now
the absolute center of biotechnological innovation in the world. There
(06:26):
are dozens, if not hundreds of labs there that use
that kind of recombinant DNA technology with the blessing of
the city council and with the participation of members of
the city council, so we've come a long way. As
we said, was nineteen seventy six. What was the kind
of background, Why did the stakes seem so high and
why was people so worried? Because a guy named Paul Berg,
(06:49):
who was a professor at Stanford, had recently figured out
a way to take a virus called SV eleven, which
caused cancer and hamsters, and inserted into a very common
Bacterium e coli, and that was the first time that
humans had ever been able to mix species of any kind.
(07:13):
And while it showed a great deal of promise, it
was a very scary step because it also meant maybe
some things would be created that we couldn't control. So
that was the background. I mean, immediately, when you say that,
I think if I undercook my sausage, I could catch
cancer for me. No, that's what it sounds like. Well
(07:34):
I know it sounds like that, but first of all,
this is something that happened in a lab in the
cancer virus is not one that's common or that infects humans.
It's just that we didn't know at the time whether
or not it was going to be possible for that
to mutate into something that somebody could sneeze and catch.
(07:54):
I mean, we had no idea. It had never been
done before. And even Paul Berg was quite upfront about saying,
there are tremendous dangers to this. He could see the promise,
all biologists and many other people could, but the dangers
were evident too, and they were evident and also unknown.
(08:15):
We didn't know what might happen. Yeah, we've got a
little bit more tape from the council meeting. If you
listen to some of the questions that have come in,
you can really get a sense that the fears are palpable.
For the benefit of all of members of the City Council,
I would like to inject his statement of questions not
to be answered at this time, but for the benefit
(08:36):
of members of this City Council who may want to
ask these questions. We're recombinant, DNA experienced, be safer if
they were done in a maximum security lab. Question is
a truth that in the history of science, mistakes have
been made, nor to happen. Question to scientists ever exercise
(08:57):
or judgment? Question do they ever have accidents? Question? Classic politician,
isn't he? He's a classic politician? And they were inflammatory questions,
but you can't deny that they even now have some
application in real life. And I mean there were other
things going on at the time, So I think Ford
(09:19):
Motor Company had had put out this car the pinto,
which they knew was unsafe, and they had just decided
it was cheaper to deal with the legal claims from
these exploding fuel tanks than it was to redesign or
withdraw the car. And this had come out, and so
there was this real palpable sense of mistrust of corporations
(09:41):
and overshadowing all of this for the previous thirty years
had been the atomic bomb and the sense that scientists
could potentially create something uncontrollable. There's a moment in that
book where David Baltimore, who's a Nobel Prize winning biologists,
said the reason people were so afraid was it wasn't
so far from World War Two and they were worried
(10:04):
whether there was an atomic bomb in biology. And at
the time that seemed a crazy fear. Again it's not now,
but these things seemed palpable at a time when we
were learning so much about how corporations allied to us.
That was the year. It was two years after Richard
(10:24):
Nixon had resigned, the first president ever to resign in
the United States in disgrace. There's been a lot going
on previously. A few years previously, one of the Great
Lakes caught fire because of all the pollution that had
been admitted into it. So there was a sense that
you couldn't really trust the institutions you used to believe
(10:45):
in anymore. And when scientists started to come along and
say hey, we've created a new form of life that
could do all sorts of cool things. It didn't go
down so well, yeah, Well, as Mavolucci's questions, do scientists
have exercised poor judgments? Do they ever have accidents? I
mean yeah, yeah, and Tween Mile Island came along shortly afterwards,
so yeah, there are accidents. So puts us in a
(11:08):
strange position then, because we're saying, well, from the point
of view of nineteen seventy six, people were highly strong.
You understand why they were mistrustful. But actually the pears
were overblown. There was nothing really to worry about. But now,
I mean, as I alluded to in the introduction, if
you manufactured a virus, you could kill tens of millions
(11:30):
of people. You could kill more people than you could
kill at least with a single hydrogen bomb, even the
largest hydrogen bomb. So it turns out there walls an
atomic bomb in biology. Oh, absolutely more than an atomic bomb.
Because there's one thing about biology that there isn't even
with nuclear weapons. It's exponential. It's digital. Biology has become
a sort of part of information technology. We developed a
(11:53):
COVID vaccine really rapidly, because scientists were able to download
it from the internet make DNA in certain into cells.
That's great, that's wonderful, but it also means, you know,
there used to be very few people who do this
sort of thing. There are thousands now. And if they
wanted to do it badly, if they wanted to harm people,
(12:15):
if they wanted to make a virus, it is in
no way inconceivable that they could. At this meeting, the
Council imposes a two year moratorium on experiments with recombinant DNA.
And looking at this, it felt like quite an old story.
There was a previous episode of Cautionary Tales called How
to End a Pandemic where we were discussing early smallpox inoculations.
(12:38):
Funny enough, also in Massachusetts, in the Boston area, and
in seventeen twenty one, as Sabdel Boylstone the doctor, he
was going around innoculating Bostonians against smallpox. He'd got this
idea from Africa and enslaveman called Onnissimus, and he faced
huge resistance, partly that seemed to be racism, like this
idea has come from Africa, it's come from enslave people.
(13:01):
It's it's not a white idea, it's not a domestic idea.
But also, I mean, you can die from being auld inoculated.
People do have a dose of smallpox, they can infect
other people. And in the end the resistance went as
far as people throwing hand grenades to Boilster's window where
his wife and his children were sitting. And in the
(13:22):
end he started visiting people at midnight and in disguise
because there was just yeah, he was physically under threat
for what he was doing. Yeah, I address some of
that in the first chapter of this book, but I think,
especially at that time, you have to remember that a
small pox inoculation was to some degree dangerous in a
(13:45):
way that it isn't or wouldn't be today if we
got them again. People don't look at the risks and
rewards of these things. They just get excited about the rewards,
are upset about the risks, And the fact is the
risks of getting small parks and dying of small parks
were much greater than the risks of being harmed by
the vaccine. But you know, every number has a numerator
(14:08):
and a nominator, and we only usually look at one
or the other, and so yeah, it's true that those
things can cause harm. You can't ever say something's going
to be one hundred percent in biology, Yeah, but you
have to figure out is it better than the alternative,
and often it's pretty clear the answer. Cautionary tales will
(14:33):
be back after the break, Michael. Let's try and look
at the rewards as well as the risks. I mean,
I've framed our whole discussion in terms of risks, partly
(14:56):
because you talk about them very eloquently in higher animals,
partly because this is cautionary tales. Wouldn't be cautionary tales
if we weren't talking about something going wrong. But let's
talk about the upside. So where are we now with
synthetic biology. What can we do and what should we
be thankful for? Well, I mean, first of all, the
first thing we should remember is we just made a
(15:17):
vaccine that has been administered billions of times, and that's
a synthetic biological product that saved millions of lives. But
beyond that, there are people growing things that they used
to make in plants with chemicals. They're growing all sorts
of medicines. There's going to be an opportunity to try
(15:39):
and make vaccines. For other illnesses, not COVID but HIV influenza.
We have terrible influenza vaccines that we administer every year.
Now people are seriously attempting to develop a single shot
that would be universal, and that would I mean, influenza
is a really serious disease and people always say, oh
(16:01):
I got the flu, Usually they didn't, they had a cold.
That would be something. But beyond that, people are using
synthetic biology to replace plastics, to engineer dyes, to make
types of energy that would not be you know, carbon
based and not cause terrible pollution. It has unlimited potential
(16:25):
because it's the potential of biology. And if we can
rewrite the rules of biology, Yeah, there are risks, but
we can also do some tremendous things, and we're starting
to see that. It's early days, yeah, and that's very
clear in the later chapters of Higher Animals. So it
is enormously exciting. However, as Caution Retales, let's talk about
(16:48):
this risk, which you cover in some detail in the book. Fundamentally,
smallpox was eradicated by better and better vaccinations, and that's
that subject we've discussed in Caution Tales as well. Just
a few samples of smallpox in a couple of very
high security laboratories in case we need to study it.
(17:11):
And as you explain, in higher animals, sure there were
just a few samples of smallpox remaining in highly secure labs.
But you can make smallpox, and people people have made
small pox. In fact, I think they haven't. They made
horse horse parks, they made a very similar parks. Yeah,
(17:31):
they demonstrated that they could have made small pox if
they wanted to, and that potential exists because it's the
formula for the formula. Maybe that's the wrong word, the
recipe for smallpox. It's it's no right, it's it's not
a secret. Yeah, I mean one of the problems that
we have to address is not only is the genetic sequence,
the sort of code, the letters of small pox all known,
(17:55):
they're all printed, and so, by the way, are the
recipes to make every virus you could possibly name, influenza,
every type of deadly influenza, COVID, SARS, you name it.
It's on the end that seems bad. Well, I mean
it used to be. It has always been in academics
and particularly that the incentive is to keep your information
(18:18):
close and then publish it. So that everyone knows you
have it, and the idea was publishing a sequence would
let other scientists do research with it and check your work.
The problem is we don't have the kind of regulations
we need to have. You know, at least with nuclear weapons,
there are regulations, there are treaties, they could be violated,
(18:40):
they certainly are violated. But biology is different because we
actually encourage the thing that we should be preventing, and
it's something that you can do for I don't know,
ten twenty thousand dollars in a couple smart graduate students.
You don't need a nation state to develop a virus.
(19:01):
So let's talk about scientists who have pushed back against
publication and those who who've gone a long way. So fas,
let's talk about the horsepox guy. So what was the
what was the reaction of the scientific community to someone
just saying, hey, I can make this virus, I have
made this virus, I've kind of proof of concept that
I could have made smallpox. Who did that and how
(19:22):
do people respond to that scientist? It was a guy
named David Evans and his team in Canada. There's serious virologists,
and their position was, we want you to understand that
this can be done, and there was also some sense
that it would help make a better smallpox vaccine, though
most scientists I've talked to think that's absolutely not the case.
(19:46):
It was pretty universally condemned because what it basically showed
is that you can go make I mean, there's no
reason to have horsepox out there. I mean, we don't
need a virus. We don't need a vaccine. It was
extinct in the world. People weren't getting up in the
morning and saying, I hope I don't get horsepox, And
there was no need to bring a deadly virus that's
(20:07):
closely related to small back to life. It is just
highly irresponsible. Yeah, but so people criticized him, But I mean,
he didn't he didn't lose his job, he didn't go
to prison. He didn't he didn't violate any any laws.
There's no law I could if I and I'm not
(20:27):
the smart but if I was, I could buy the
DNA online. It's not that expensive. I could get sequencing machines.
I could get all the stuff I need. I could
make whatever virus you tell me to make. It's not
against the law, it's not against the rules, and that
has to change. Yeah, So, how many people do you
(20:48):
think exist in the world who could make a dangerous virus?
I mean, are we talking millions? Are we talking hundreds,
five or six? I mean, I don't really have a
sense of the number of people who who do have
access to the technology and the skill. It's a growing number.
Kevin as Felt, who teaches at MIT and who I
(21:09):
teach a course with, I should say he does a
lot of this kind of research. He believes there's five
or ten thousand people who could do this now, but
in a few years. You know, we're sort of in
the era of biology. It used to be like if
you look at early days and computers, there was a
mainframe computer that would take up a whole building, and
(21:31):
now the computers in our watches are more powerful than
that mainframe. That's what's happening with biology. So as that happens,
people are getting access to more powerful programs to make
things like viruses, it's going to be great. You know,
it's going to be graduate students, then it's going to
be undergraduates, and then your eighth grade is going to
(21:51):
come home and say, Mommy, look what I made. And
they can make a lot of cool things, and I
think it's great, but there has to be some guardrails.
You also in the book discuss kind of the polo
opposite of Evans making horsebox. There were scientists who discus
was something very dangerous and said, we're going to give
(22:12):
you the broad outlines, but we're not actually going to
tell you what we did or how we did it.
And so tell us about that, and tell us about
what we actually they received. There's a guy named Robert
Arnon in California. He was a bacheline expert. He actually
died last year. But there were seven known baculism toxins
and they're deadly, but we also have antidotes for all
(22:32):
of them. He found an eighth, so this is an
incredibly poisonous substance for which there was no antidote. Deadly
and there was no antidote at the time. And he said,
I found this stuff. I'll tell you about it, but
I'm not going to do what we would always do,
which has published the information so that my competitors and
(22:53):
colleagues can go out and repeat it and make sure
it really is deadly. He said, it's just it's too
dangerous to do that, and he was roundly denounced for
doing that. People said they didn't trust him, they didn't
believe him. He was a very senior scientist and well respected,
but he wasn't playing by the rules that were established,
and so he tried to do the right thing. And
(23:14):
in fact, he stuck to his guns and did the
right thing, and he was condemned for it. It's interesting,
I'm trying to get my head around this. So the
horsebox guy was condemned for going too far right, the
eighth botulism toxin guy was condemned for not publishing what
he found. So the scientists seem they need to make
up their mind. What am I misunderstanding about this situation.
(23:36):
You're not misunderstanding anything. I think in the case of
the horsebox guy, what he did was within the legitimate
rules of biology. That was how things worked. It's just
that people understood it shouldn't work that way. Arnon did
something different. He said, I'm not going to do this
normal published stuff because it's wrong and it would be
(23:57):
dangerous at least until we have a universal antidote the
way we do to other toxins. And he was denounced
and condemned for not adhering to the normal rules of
biolog So what this says to me is we need
to change the normal rules of biology. Yeah, so let's
talk about that. I'm thinking again about the souring gas attack,
(24:20):
which is a reminder that there are groups out there
who would be very happy to unleash apocalyptic harm if
they could. We can all think of various extremist groups,
terrorist groups, whatever you want to call them, who would
be willing to do that, and perhaps also some state
actors who would be happy to support that kind of thing.
(24:42):
So there's clearly a risk of biological terrorism. So what
rules do you have in mind that might help us
defend against that. Well, there are things we could do.
One of them is, let's say we tested the waste
water with DNA sequencers at every airport or porta ventry
in Europe in the United States. That's about three hundred places.
(25:05):
You could instantly see viruses and you would be looking
for are things that were exponentially growing really fast. You'd
find very rapidly if someone was releasing something, Would it
save everyone? Maybe not. That's one thing you can do.
Another thing is personal protective equipment can be immensely better
(25:26):
than it is. I mean, we saw in the COVID
pandemic bad equipment, a lack of knowledge about what work
and what didn't. We can make really good ppe that
people would use that would protect them. Other things we
can do is if I want to order some DNA
from one of the sort of Amazon like places that
(25:50):
sell it on the internet, we should have some sort
of body that says, why do you want that sequence?
Because it's coding an awful lot like one of these viruses. Now, yeah,
it's sort of like gun control. You can always get
around it. You will be able to get around it,
but we ought to make an effort in There are
ways to make an effort. Another thing to do is
(26:11):
when you print DNA. You can now print DNA at
home or in your lab, but you could put bar
codes into those printers so that there would be some
form of regulation. It would make it seem like the
US currency that has water marks. You couldn't counterfeit it,
you could account for it. Those things can be done,
(26:34):
and none of them really are. This is blowing my mind.
I mean, this is actually more than anything else you said, Michael,
gives me a sense of just how advanced the technology
now is that Oh yeah, you can print DNA at
home and you can water market so you know, you
know whose printer was being used. There's more that I
can't even yet go into because it's too speculative. But
(26:54):
there are things you can do to regulate DNA and
kill viruses that would be really effective. But I also
have to say, we just went through a pandemic that
name your figure across the world, seventeen trillion, you know,
crazy amount of money. And in the United States we
can't even get a billion dollars in the next budget
(27:18):
to do some of these preparations, these pandemic preparations, these
anti viral preparations. It's just remarkable. That is astonishing. So
let's talk about what scientists should do differently. You talked
about your concerns that the norms, the rules of science
were maybe not fit for these new risks. He also
(27:40):
in the book you say, look, I'm a journalist. As
a journalist, if I find something out, I'm going to
publish it. And scientists are the same. So used to
sympathize with the urge to be transparent and to get
everything out there to be discussed and debated. But that's
not right. Do you think I do sympathize, and I
think it's a fine line. I mean, I don't want
biologists to be hemmed in and not be able to
(28:00):
do their work, but there has to be some sort
of justification, like we now fund and courage scientists to
go out and find new deadly viruses, take them to
labs and work on them and see how deadly they
are and what can be done. You know, there's an
(28:21):
endless debate about was the Wuhan virus a lab leak
or not. Most people in the field that I talked
to the most think it was not a lab leak,
but their lab leaks happen. I mean, it wouldn't be
impossible for it to have been one, and there are
many examples. So the idea that we're actually encouraging scientists
(28:41):
to go into bat caves and bring back deadly viruses
to labs so that the rationale for that used to be, well,
if you want to make a vaccine, you need to
know what you're making a vaccine against. So the idea
that we need to have deadly viruses everywhere so that
we can build something that will contain those viruses is
(29:03):
very old think and it needs to be done away with.
You talk about gain of function research and dual use research,
and you say that actually you don't find either of
those terms to be particularly helpful. So could you explain
those terms and then explain why you think that they're
a little bit short for the purposes of this discussion. Well,
gain of function and dual use are two ways of
(29:26):
describing enhancing biological microbes to do something other than what
they do in nature. But the reason I have a
problem with that is almost everything we do with biology,
whether it's make an artificial sweetener or make penicillin, or
make some sort of cancer drug, or anything else. A
synthetic dye for clothing enhances the original microbes, so you
(29:51):
know there are more than one use we are going
to gain function. The question is is it a gain
of function that could cause harm? So if we are
going to rethink the norms of science formulate new rules
about when to be transparent and when not to be
who does that? Is they have a model for doing
(30:13):
that successfully in the past. That's a really painful question.
You could say there's a model if you look at
nuclear treaties and the attempt to regulate nuclear weapons. But
I don't think that's really a model. And if you're talking,
this is sort of more akin to something like climate change,
(30:34):
a biological function that would affect the whole world. And
we're not that great at whole world governance as far
as I can tell. So you could say the who
could take a crack at at the UN Maybe we
need a new body, but we need to do something.
We've alluded several times in our conversation to the possible
(30:55):
analogy between uclear weapons and bioweapons. Where does that analogy
help us and where does it lead us astray? Well?
I think it helps us in the sense that there
have been international efforts to agree on what's dangerous and
what isn't dangerous and who should control it. And there
are people who inspect places where they exist. I think
(31:17):
that is helpful. It would be nice to have people
who are unaligned who could go into various labs and
inspect what's there. Where it doesn't help us is you know,
I think there are maybe eight or nine countries that
could theoretically have a nuclear weapon at this point. There
(31:38):
are many thousands of groups that could have biological weapons
because biology is information now, so ultimately it has to
be a more powerful antidote, and it has to be
a more present discussion than it is right now, and
even I think, much more powerful a weapon than nuclear weapons. Are.
(32:01):
You mentioned in the book that moderna had had basically
made their vaccine before the Chinese even admitted that the
virus could spread from human to human. It was that quick,
It was that early. And yet so this is all
in January twenty twenty. Their vaccine wasn't actually being used
in the general population until December of twenty twenty. So
(32:25):
why did it take so long? First of all, I
should point out the obvious developing a vaccine in any
years infinitely faster than it's ever been done before. The
fastest vaccine previously had been months, and that was four years.
But it took a while because people needed to test it,
and they had to do big trials, and they had
to make sure it was safe. This is a new technology,
(32:48):
and so the idea of putting it into fourteen billion
arms without any testing is crazy. There are intermediary steps,
and you know, we can be much much faster than
we are, and we're going to have to be, Yeah,
because isn't this an example of what you were saying
we're thinking about the benefit, thinking about the costs, but
(33:10):
not really being able to synthesize both of them, because
I mean, the costs of not injecting fourteen billion people
with this vaccine really fast were huge. Obviously, there's a
risk to using a vaccine before it's been properly tested.
Do you think we got the balance right? And how
could we do better next time? We probably got the
(33:31):
balance close to right, I think. Unfortunately, the answer to
better that I know of are things caught challenge trials.
Challenge trials are you take a virus, like the COVID virus,
and you take forty people or four hundred people, and
you give half of them the virus and half of
them not the virus. They don't know. It's double blind,
(33:53):
and then you vaccinate everybody and you see what happens.
Presumably you vaccinate them before you give them the virus.
But right, right, why is it easeful to actually deliberately
infect them? Why is that an important step? Well, it's
a very rapid way of finding out if the vaccine
works or not, because if two hundred people have the virus,
(34:13):
and you know they have the virus, and you give
them a vaccine and seven of them get sick instead
of one hundred and ninety six, you know that the
vaccine is effective. If some of them get sick and
then have terrible side effects, you know that too. The
problem is it's hard to get medical officials to agree
(34:37):
to do something like that because the harm could be
serious and that's just not how it's worked in the past.
And it's very hard to get people to understand that
this is a new era and we have to do
things differently. Yeah, paint us a picture of what we
might be able to achieve with these new synthetic biology
(35:01):
technologies in twenty years. If things go well, if we
get the balance right and we avoid the risks, what's
sort of benefits might we be enjoying by say twenty
or twenty fifty. Cancer vaccines are absolutely possible autoimmune diseases,
diseases that have been very difficult to treat. If you
(35:23):
can figure out what cells are attacking your body and
in what way you can make an mRNA or a
synthetic attack to it, that would probably be very very specific.
You know, until recently, what we've done with broad spectrum
antibiotics and with vaccines is you know, take a big,
(35:45):
wide swing at the body and try and protect you
as broadly as you can. The side effects of those things,
particularly in cancer treatments, are evident. What would be great
is very highly targeted treatments to diseases, and I think
we'll be looking at that, and I think we'll see
a lot of treatments for things that in twenty thirty
(36:07):
forty years that you think are terrible and permanently deadly.
Right now, just thinking back to that council meeting in
nineteen seventy six, they voted for a moratorium. They basically said,
let's just wait for a bit, which is understandable, but
let's just wait for a bit does seem to be
a very crude response to a technology which has rewards
(36:32):
and risks. I think there's a middle ground, and it's
something we've never done, and I'm not sure we can do.
I don't know of an example where humans have decided
not to use a technology that's available to them, but
we need to start thinking about that. I'm not saying
we shouldn't use synthetic biology, but there are some things
we don't want to make. There are some tools we
(36:54):
should agree ought not to be pursued. And that's a
conversation that's starting to happen all around the world in
biological circles. And it hasn't happened before. It hasn't needed
to happen in the past. You develop up to your technology,
you did what you did, and then if there was
a problem, you tried to fix it later. And that
(37:17):
can't operate like that anymore. Is that then what we need?
We need those conversations about what we should and shouldn't
be being pursued, and we're having I mean we're having
them in the sense that scientists are having them in
bioethesis are having them. And I know that's not the public,
but it's it's a start. And I think the COVID
(37:38):
pandemic at least got people to think about some of
these issues. Like I now talk about m RNA and
people know what I'm talking about. You know, four years
ago I was talking about m RNA and they were like,
what planet is that from? So there's a level, you know,
a level of sophistication that exists. Now. People know about
spike proteins, they know a bit about vaccines, things they
(38:00):
never knew before. And that's great because this isn't something anymore,
if it ever was, that scientists can just deliver to
poll This has to be something that we all decide
we want and figure out a way to get it.
Michael's bag to thank you very much. Thank you, it's
been a great pleasure. Michael's audiobook Higher Animals is available
(38:25):
now at pushkin dot Fm, Audible, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
Host
Tim Harford
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