Speaker 1: School of Humans. What would your life be like right
Speaker 1: now if coronavirus hadn't emerged in twenty nineteen, What would
Speaker 1: the world be like? I'm Sean Revieve. I'm a full
Speaker 1: time freelance journalist. I travel around the country and world
Speaker 1: to tell stories. I've reported on HIV, neuro signs, AI,
Speaker 1: facial recognition, and a host of weirder topics. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: I did none of that. Instead, I spent months afraid
Speaker 1: of going to the grocery store, afraid of touching door
Speaker 1: knobs and hugging my best friends. I worried about keeping
Speaker 1: my wife and two year old sons safe. I worked
Speaker 1: half time or no time. I got the news that
Speaker 1: my aunt died alone in a hospital. I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time on a couch depressed. That's just me.
Speaker 1: You've got your own list. Now. Multiply that by seven
Speaker 1: point eight billion. Lives ground to a halt after a
Speaker 1: novel coronavirus showed up in Wuhan. Nearly two hundred million
Speaker 1: people have been infected with coronavirus since December twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: More than four million have died. So many lives disrupted
Speaker 1: or damn near ruined we want our old lives back,
Speaker 1: if that's even possible. While a truly universal pandemic, one
Speaker 1: that affects everyone everywhere, may be unprecedented. In our lifetimes,
Speaker 1: humans and viruses have evolved side by side. Our history
Speaker 1: has been shaped by plagues, pandemics, viruses and diseases and
Speaker 1: the fight against them. Today, they are in combat more
Speaker 1: than ever, and vaccines have moved from the background to
Speaker 1: the foreground of our daily lives. So as a journalist
Speaker 1: and generally curious person, I want to know what went
Speaker 1: into them. In this podcast series, we're going to take
Speaker 1: you deep into the science and the people behind the
Speaker 1: coronavirus vaccines. We'll travel back in time to me the
Speaker 1: first innoculators, follow a path from legendary healers in China
Speaker 1: to obscure country doctors in the UK, from an enslaved
Speaker 1: African in Boston to the man who invented dozens of vaccines,
Speaker 1: and we'll draw a direct line between them and the
Speaker 1: shots we're getting today. In this episode about Beginnings, we'll
Speaker 1: talk to a virologists who played a key role in
Speaker 1: releasing the genetic sequence of coronavirus. We'll also hear from
Speaker 1: an evolutionary biologist who explores the origins of all coronaviruses
Speaker 1: from My Heart Radio and School of Humans. I'm Sean
Speaker 1: Revived and this is long shot the two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty year journey to the COVID nineteen vaccines. Ever since
Speaker 1: coronavirus became the biggest story in the world, vaccines have
Speaker 1: been our greatest hope to stop it. The coronavirus vaccines
Speaker 1: were produced in record time, but they're not slap dash
Speaker 1: overnight inventions. There are a culmination of centuries of research
Speaker 1: and advances and some unbelievable experimentation that began way back
Speaker 1: when with smallpox inoculation, which marks the beginning of one
Speaker 1: of humankind's greatest achievements, the ability to protect from disease.
Speaker 1: It's a practice so old that nobody knows who first
Speaker 1: attempted it or exactly where it originated. To even begin
Speaker 1: to figure that out, you have to probe nameless. Healers,
Speaker 1: myths and legends. Here's writer and actor Leoe I v
Speaker 1: Chen to tell us one of them. To get to
Speaker 1: the top of the highest of the four sacred the
Speaker 1: Buddhist the mountains in China, you must climb sixty thousand
Speaker 1: steps over piles of snow in winter, past the water
Speaker 1: falls and the large greenery in summer. It will take
Speaker 1: you two days to get to the top. Mont er May,
Speaker 1: or er May Shan, was created two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: million years ago by a volcanic event so explosive that
Speaker 1: it caused the massive extinctions across the planet. The mountain
Speaker 1: is ten thousand feet top. It juts into the heavens
Speaker 1: above the clouds, like a defined place it is. The
Speaker 1: mountain is one of the holiest sites in Buddhism. There
Speaker 1: are more than thirty buddha is the temples on mont
Speaker 1: er May, including the first one built in China. Like
Speaker 1: all holy places, there is a legend about mont er May.
Speaker 1: A thousand and years ago, the son of a local
Speaker 1: governor got very sick from small pox, which by land
Speaker 1: had plagued China for at least a thousand years. The
Speaker 1: governor offered the piles of gold to anyone who could
Speaker 1: help his son. Three Daoists traveled from mont er May
Speaker 1: and offered their services. By washing the small pox, the
Speaker 1: Dooists said, you could grant protection from the disease. The
Speaker 1: governor asked the Daoists to teach him this practice. The
Speaker 1: Daoists agreed, and before they returned to the mountain, they
Speaker 1: placed a book containing the secret of inoculation underneath a
Speaker 1: medal incense thorible. Upon opening the book, the governor learned
Speaker 1: at least tech chniko inoculation had long ago been invented
Speaker 1: by a female Daoist. As a reward for her pioneering discovery,
Speaker 1: she was turned into a goddess. So this myth, this
Speaker 1: one on Mount a Mae. It was written in the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century by a man named Fusheng Lin, and fusheng
Speaker 1: Lin has his own interesting connection to innoculation. Louise, going
Speaker 1: to tell us that story, said about seven hundred years later,
Speaker 1: during the reign of teen Emperors sunt there were at
Speaker 1: least nine outbreaks of small parks in Beijing, the city
Speaker 1: where he lived. Each time there was an outbreak, the
Speaker 1: emperor left his home to go to a bid Saw,
Speaker 1: a place to quarantine from small parks, including one Bidsa
Speaker 1: that was on a literal island. This way, the parks
Speaker 1: could not reach across and infect him. Despite these precautions,
Speaker 1: the emperor caught a small pox as he lay dying,
Speaker 1: the emperor had to decide on a successor among his
Speaker 1: six young sons. He chose the second son at a
Speaker 1: young age. He'd already survived the small pox. With protection
Speaker 1: from the disease, the boy was more likely to have
Speaker 1: a long rule be a stabilizing force for the empire,
Speaker 1: and he was This Song became the County Emperor, the
Speaker 1: longest the ruling emperor in China's history. Low the County
Speaker 1: Emperor survived the small parks, he did not escape to
Speaker 1: trauma every time there was an outbreak of small parks.
Speaker 1: He was haunted both by his foulest death and by
Speaker 1: the isolation, and so when he grew into an adult,
Speaker 1: the Councy Emperor searched far and wide for the umpire's
Speaker 1: best inoculators. Around the sixteen eighty two inoculators were chosen
Speaker 1: to protect the emperor's children. One of them was a
Speaker 1: full Hunling, the author of the story about Monteur May.
Speaker 1: Those early Chinese inoculators used several different methods to protect
Speaker 1: people from small pox. One involved blowing the scab of
Speaker 1: a small pox sufferer into the nose of a patient
Speaker 1: using a bamboo shoot. Another method had the patient wearing
Speaker 1: the clothing of an affected person for two or three days.
Speaker 1: Yet another had a child lay underneath the quilt with
Speaker 1: a sick patient, so that the patients chi would transfer
Speaker 1: to the child. Some methods worked better than others. Even
Speaker 1: in these early times, the inoculators had standards for who
Speaker 1: could or should be inoculated. They avoided the procedure for
Speaker 1: medically fragile patients, who were more likely to develop full
Speaker 1: blown smallpox. It was not recommended for the week or
Speaker 1: otherwise diseased, or for pregnant women. They thought it was
Speaker 1: better to inoculate before puberty. It's unclear which innoculation method
Speaker 1: was favored by fushang Lin, but the story he wrote
Speaker 1: about Mountain Amey and the three Taoists may be evidence
Speaker 1: of the earliest known inoculators, so long ago that the
Speaker 1: first Crusaders hadn't yet invaded Jerusalem, but it might just
Speaker 1: be a story. Real documentation of inoculation doesn't come for
Speaker 1: about five hundred more years. In volume six of the
Speaker 1: late British historian Joseph Needham's enorm a series Science and
Speaker 1: Civilization in China, there is a reference to a fifteen
Speaker 1: forty nine medical text by a Ming dynasty physician. That
Speaker 1: quote casually mentions smallpox inoculation as if it is already
Speaker 1: by then a common practice in China. That's one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years before the first known inoculation in say, England.
Speaker 1: But the point is nobody really knows exactly when or
Speaker 1: where innoculation began. All we have our stories. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties and nineties, a relatively new disease ravaged the
Speaker 1: city of Edinburgh, Scotland. It was called acquired immuno deficiency
Speaker 1: syndrome or AIDS, the disease caused by HIV. In Edinburgh,
Speaker 1: HIV spread fast, often through the sharing of needles by
Speaker 1: intravenous drug users. They would in a drugs and shared
Speaker 1: a needle, They passed the needle down, you know, amongst
Speaker 1: these people in these kind of tenement buildings that fuel
Speaker 1: this massive HIV ant break in Edinburgh. That's Eddie Holmes,
Speaker 1: a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney.
Speaker 1: Back in the early nineties, he was in Edinburgh studying
Speaker 1: the spread of HIV. So what we were trying to
Speaker 1: do was trying to work out how the virus was
Speaker 1: spreading through that population, how it had diffused, and how
Speaker 1: it got into sydy and how it spreading. I do
Speaker 1: remember that actually getting in Around that time, he got
Speaker 1: a car from Beatrice Hahn. Beatrice harm, who was then
Speaker 1: working in virologist then working at the University of Alabama
Speaker 1: at Birmingham. Hann asked Eddie if he was interested in
Speaker 1: joining her and an HIV related research project. She's been
Speaker 1: the person who's done more than anyone else to reveal
Speaker 1: the origins of HIV. And she asked me in nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: was I interested in working on that? And I said, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do my own, my own work on
Speaker 1: something else. He turned her down to concentrate on his
Speaker 1: own work. By then, AIDS had already killed more than
Speaker 1: sixteen million people. It was known that there were two
Speaker 1: main types of HIV, HIV one and two. Han and
Speaker 1: her colleagues and not Eddie would go on to discover
Speaker 1: that neither type of HIV came initially from humans. Both
Speaker 1: originated in primates HIV one in chimpanzees and HIV two
Speaker 1: in suity manga bays, each of which carry Simian immuno
Speaker 1: deficiency virus or SIV. The virus jumped to humans at
Speaker 1: least seven times, mostly in areas around Congo. It was
Speaker 1: a stunning discovery. Hans said that it was especially sobering
Speaker 1: that two very different primate species could serve as a
Speaker 1: host for human pathogens. She was even more worried because
Speaker 1: she knew that there were dozens more species of primates
Speaker 1: that carried their own forms of SIV. Hans blockbuster paper
Speaker 1: was exciting to Eddie home, but he had some regrets
Speaker 1: knowing that he could have been a part of it.
Speaker 1: That was like saying those the Beatles in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: you know I missed, I missed my opportunity. It's a
Speaker 1: do some great work on that. Instead of discovering the
Speaker 1: origin of HIV, Eddie began working in metagenomics, the study
Speaker 1: of genetic material taken directly from the environment. So our
Speaker 1: focus has always been on these kind of key species,
Speaker 1: but with metagenomics you could at anything. So we're looking
Speaker 1: at this an these wild Invertibrus and known and looked at,
Speaker 1: and we found this amazing diversity of viruses in nature
Speaker 1: and everywhere. So these animals we never looked at suddenly
Speaker 1: saw this this huge diversity of viruses. The virus sphere
Speaker 1: was enormous. Opening that door was facilitated by this this technology,
Speaker 1: the methogenomics. By the time coronavirus hits, Eddie has become
Speaker 1: a pretty big time evolutionary biologist. He studied the flu,
Speaker 1: deng HIV, Hepotatis C and other viruses. He's got grants
Speaker 1: and awards and fellowships, but he still hasn't had his
Speaker 1: Beatles moment, not since turning down the chance to discover
Speaker 1: the origin of HIV back in the nineties. In twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: Eddie moves to Australia to work at the University of Sydney.
Speaker 1: He begins a partnership with Professor Jong jen Jang, then
Speaker 1: working at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Speaker 1: in Beijing. He's a character, as they say, I said
Speaker 1: this thing where whenever I sent an email to him,
Speaker 1: he would reply within fifteen minutes, right because he was
Speaker 1: always checking. So I used to send him an email
Speaker 1: like at six am in the morning, thinking right now,
Speaker 1: I'll get he must be asleep. That's three am in
Speaker 1: and then ten minutes later, Hi, Eddie, it's amazing. So
Speaker 1: he'd wake up in the night just to check his
Speaker 1: email you know he's extraordinarily hard working. I mean off
Speaker 1: the scale. Using metagenomic elysis, Eddie and Jang sampled animals
Speaker 1: of all kinds looking for RNA viruses, that is, viruses
Speaker 1: that have rabuclaic acid as their based genetic material, like coronavirus.
Speaker 1: Some of the animals they look at include bats, mice, pigs,
Speaker 1: and birds, but also snakes, crabs, spiders, ticks, shrimp, crayfish,
Speaker 1: woodlight tapeworm, mosquitoes, centipedes, millipedes, leeches, earthworms, octopus, snails, oysters, muscles, clams, barnacles,
Speaker 1: even goddamn sea cucumbers. No species is too obscure In
Speaker 1: these animals and their parasites, they discover thousands of new viruses.
Speaker 1: A lot of their work is done in and around Wuhan,
Speaker 1: an enormous city in central China. It's not very well
Speaker 1: known in the West at the time, but with eleven
Speaker 1: million people, Wuhan is bigger than New York or Paris.
Speaker 1: It's a very big city. It's extremely well connected in China.
Speaker 1: It's very famous for being a travel hub because because
Speaker 1: the Yancy River goes through it's the big river kind
Speaker 1: of delta or big river system brother and the train system.
Speaker 1: You can get from basically anywhere in China to Ruhan
Speaker 1: about six and a half house as an international airport,
Speaker 1: so it's a big hub. It's a really big hub.
Speaker 1: Also around Ruhan, it's just this you know, pristine natural environments.
Speaker 1: Actually's a very interesting place to sample. In twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: Eddie and Jang even visit the place most associated with
Speaker 1: the first cases of coronavirus, the Huanan seafood wholesale market.
Speaker 1: The local CDC took me there because they said, look
Speaker 1: at this place, it's a really good place for a
Speaker 1: disease to emerge. It's probably like two big supermarkets glued together,
Speaker 1: the set of indoor alleys with a kind of road
Speaker 1: to the middle of it. There's lots of it. It's
Speaker 1: like an indoor, big indoor market, and there's lots of stores,
Speaker 1: and there's there's kind of gutters, there's lots of things
Speaker 1: on sales. There's lots of eye products, lots of fish,
Speaker 1: lots of frozen products. And there's one section where there
Speaker 1: were wildlife. I mean I saw mammalian wildlife there. There's ice,
Speaker 1: saw rodents there, and variety of other things. There's also
Speaker 1: these famous kind of like menu boards outside showing some
Speaker 1: of the kind of wildlife that they're they're selling. It's
Speaker 1: very closed. It feels kind of like, you know, it
Speaker 1: feels kind of sweaty and cramped, and it feels like
Speaker 1: kind of incubator in a way. You know. I took
Speaker 1: the photographs, really crappy photographer took of these raccoon dogs, okay,
Speaker 1: in these cages that raccoon dogs are weird. Theircadians in
Speaker 1: the dog founding and their fur farm, and I think
Speaker 1: they're used for food as well. And what I realized
Speaker 1: is that raccoon dogs they were implicated in the first
Speaker 1: Stars outbreak of two thousand and two two thousand and
Speaker 1: three because there were positive raccoon dogs in these markets
Speaker 1: in Grand Dumb and there they were in this market
Speaker 1: in Wuhan. During the two years before the outbreak of
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen, Eddie and Jang are working on a study
Speaker 1: of Central Hospital of Wuhan. They're studying patients with acute
Speaker 1: respiratory disease symptoms and trying to find out the cars. Again,
Speaker 1: this is before COVID nineteen, But what that meant was
Speaker 1: we were kind of like on site almost looking at
Speaker 1: the same Z syndrome in the right tissue samples with
Speaker 1: the right technology, and so we happen to be in
Speaker 1: the wrong place the wrong time. I feel like when
Speaker 1: it all kind of started, and that gave us the
Speaker 1: kind of an open door to really try and look
Speaker 1: at this some of the early first cases to see
Speaker 1: what was going on. In mid December of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the forty one year old worker at the Huanan seafood
Speaker 1: wholesale market begins getting pneumonia like symptoms, fever, calf pain, easiness,
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. A few days later, the patient
Speaker 1: is admitted to Central Hospital of Wuhan, among the very
Speaker 1: earliest identified novel coronavirus patients in the world, the same
Speaker 1: hospital where Eddie and Jang have already been studying patients
Speaker 1: with similar symptoms. By this time, Eddie is back in
Speaker 1: Australia and Jang is in Shanghai, but because of their
Speaker 1: prior work at Central Hospital, they particularly Jang, are in
Speaker 1: prime position to see what's going on with these strangely
Speaker 1: afflicted patients. Early in the afternoon on January third, Jang
Speaker 1: receives a package, a metal box holding a test tube
Speaker 1: packed in dry ice. Inside the test tube is a
Speaker 1: swabbed sample from the sick market worker. By this time,
Speaker 1: word of a new contagious virus is spreading among the
Speaker 1: public health community. The first news reports about this mysterious
Speaker 1: illness have been published. In China. There are forty four
Speaker 1: or so confirmed pneumonia of unknown origin cases. Seafood market
Speaker 1: has been closed. Many countries and the World Health Organization
Speaker 1: are trying to figure out what the heck is going
Speaker 1: on and if this disease is going to cross borders.
Speaker 1: Jiang does not know that the test tube in front
Speaker 1: of him contains a sample of a virus that would
Speaker 1: take over the world within months, but he knows it's important.
Speaker 1: Rumors are already spreading that it is SARS like which
Speaker 1: in China and especially in Chinese virologist circles, is a
Speaker 1: big deal. The first severe acute respiratory syndrome where SARS
Speaker 1: epidemic was discovered in the city of Foshan in China
Speaker 1: in November two thousand and two. Eventually it's spread to
Speaker 1: more than eight thousand people in twenty nine countries. SARS
Speaker 1: one was internationally embarrassing for Chinese leadership. They could not
Speaker 1: contain the outbreak and could not treat the disease. Western
Speaker 1: media reported aggressively on China's failures. The last thing Jiang
Speaker 1: or his country wanted was another There are stars, and
Speaker 1: Jang strongly suspected he had it. Sitting in that test tube.
Speaker 1: For the next two days, working around the clock, Jang
Speaker 1: and his team worked to sequence the virus. Around two
Speaker 1: am on the fifth, it was done. Eddie gets an
Speaker 1: email from Jang. Jang emailed me and says, please call
Speaker 1: me immediately. I was driving to the beach and my
Speaker 1: in laws for breakfast, right because it's January. It's summer
Speaker 1: in Sydney, right, And that was that was like eight
Speaker 1: am in Sydney time, so it must have been like
Speaker 1: five o'clock in the morning in Shanghai. And so I
Speaker 1: ranging on. I was in the phone my inlaws and
Speaker 1: he said they managed to get the complete genome on
Speaker 1: the fifth in January. And they they they literally worked,
Speaker 1: you know, non so it took forty hours. They worked NonStop.
Speaker 1: So just put it in context, it's actually very interesting.
Speaker 1: So it took forty hours for some to gain the
Speaker 1: full genome. Okay, two years, two years for HIV to
Speaker 1: be described as the cause of AIDS and took forty
Speaker 1: hours to find this virus. Okay, Now Jang knows he's
Speaker 1: a virus very closely related to SARS one. He reports
Speaker 1: his findings to China's Ministry of Health and to public
Speaker 1: health officials in Wuhan. He also submits the genetic sequence
Speaker 1: for review to a database run by the US NIH
Speaker 1: and as part of a paper co authored by Eddie
Speaker 1: for the journal Nature. But the genetic sequence has not
Speaker 1: been released publicly, which means researchers can't study it's thousands
Speaker 1: of bits of data and use it to start figuring
Speaker 1: out how to stop it, how to build a vaccine
Speaker 1: to protect people from the virus. To put it in perspective,
Speaker 1: there is at most one reported death at this point.
Speaker 1: No other countries have known cases. Nobody could have guessed
Speaker 1: this virus would change the world. Still, the idea that
Speaker 1: there could be another SAR or MIRS is terrifying. MRS
Speaker 1: or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome was another coronavirus that had
Speaker 1: spread in twenty twelve and killed nine hundred people in
Speaker 1: eighteen countries. Nobody wants to see a third coronavirus outbreak.
Speaker 1: Six days after Jang finishes sequencing the virus. The genetic
Speaker 1: information is still not out there, but rumors of the
Speaker 1: novel coronavirus have spread, as has word of the embargoed
Speaker 1: paper in Nature. But Jang doesn't know how Chinese officials
Speaker 1: will react to him releasing the sequence, and a few
Speaker 1: days earlier the government told local authorities not to publish
Speaker 1: information about the virus because the Ministry of Health were
Speaker 1: controlling everything and they wanted they wanted to control the message,
Speaker 1: they wanted to damp down on rumors, they wanted to
Speaker 1: be in control of the situation. And as the days
Speaker 1: went on, more information was slowly being kind of released,
Speaker 1: and so there was I think the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: in January eighth published that it was a corona virus.
Speaker 1: I think the Chinese authorities on the ninth announced it
Speaker 1: was a coronavirus. As as the days wore on, it
Speaker 1: got more and more kind of ridiculous that they weren't
Speaker 1: saying exactly what it is, and this is this is
Speaker 1: the sequence, right. We sent our paper off to Nature,
Speaker 1: off to the journal Nature, and they were very keen
Speaker 1: for the sequence to be released as well. On January eleventh,
Speaker 1: jan gets on a plane in Shanghai and it's about
Speaker 1: to take off when a phone buzzards. It's Eddie and
Speaker 1: I said, we need to release these data. Nokay, I've
Speaker 1: been emailing about this and we have to get this release.
Speaker 1: And he said, okay, okay, do it, do it, do it?
Speaker 1: And I said, can you send me the seat I
Speaker 1: haven't got the seats myself. Can you please send it
Speaker 1: to me right? And so he got I think he
Speaker 1: got one of his one of his post docs to
Speaker 1: email me that the sequence. So it arrived on my
Speaker 1: on my email and I thought, oh, you know, Franky,
Speaker 1: I'm knowing. I better get it's done right. So and
Speaker 1: that whole process for me getting the sequence in the
Speaker 1: email to releasing it, I think it's like fifty two
Speaker 1: minutes or something like that. If I didn't even chet
Speaker 1: what it was. And after I said I've posted it,
Speaker 1: it could have been any odd chunk, but luckily it
Speaker 1: was actually the virus. So and then that was that moment.
Speaker 1: Then that was a huge kind of burden off my shoulders.
Speaker 1: At that point, he posts the sequence on a website
Speaker 1: called Virological, a somewhat obscure open access epidemiology discussion board
Speaker 1: founded by one of Eddie's friends. Jang is not the
Speaker 1: first to sequence the virus by this time. It's already
Speaker 1: been done at private labs in Wolhuan as early as
Speaker 1: late December, but Jang and Eddie's sequence is the first
Speaker 1: to catch international notice. Eddie tweets out a link to
Speaker 1: the sequence in January eleventh, Sydney time. This is the
Speaker 1: moment kicking off development for the COVID nineteen vaccines. One
Speaker 1: of the first replies to the tweet is from a
Speaker 1: professor of microbiology and Mount Sinai in New York City.
Speaker 1: He sends a gift of hundreds of planes taking off
Speaker 1: in unison, along with the words and so it begins.
Speaker 1: What if it never began? That is, what if we
Speaker 1: were never struck by the coronavirus known as SARS cove two.
Speaker 1: What if twenty twenty was just a normal year. We
Speaker 1: never quarantined, never wore masks, never sanitized groceries, We just lived.
Speaker 1: I spoke with another evolutionary biologist. His name is Joel Wortheim.
Speaker 1: He's an associate professor of medicine at you See, San Diego.
Speaker 1: He ran these computer based simulations of the virus going
Speaker 1: back and forward in time. The goal was to describe
Speaker 1: the likeliest version of the way the virus spread after
Speaker 1: it first infected a human being. But while doing so,
Speaker 1: he discovered that the very likeliest outcome was that we
Speaker 1: never had a pandemic to begin with, That coronavirus infected
Speaker 1: one person and never a second. That coronavirus dematerialized as
Speaker 1: quickly as it materialized, and before we even knew it existed,
Speaker 1: it was gone seven out of ten of our simulations
Speaker 1: when extinct on their own, So without any mitigation efforts,
Speaker 1: without any sort of attempt to slow down transmission of
Speaker 1: the virus, the natural progression of seventy percent of stars
Speaker 1: CoV two introductions into the human population result in natural extinction.
Speaker 1: So we were sort of unlucky in that we were
Speaker 1: part of at thirty percent where it did not go extinct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really just bad luck in that regard. Joel
Speaker 1: specializes in taking viruses back in time using something called
Speaker 1: the molecular clock. I'll let him explain. The molecular clock
Speaker 1: is a really important tool and one of my favorite
Speaker 1: to use in research. It basically helps us estimate the
Speaker 1: number of changes that are happening in a viral genome
Speaker 1: over time, over weeks, months, and years, and by sampling
Speaker 1: a lot of different viruses at different time points, we
Speaker 1: can estimate that rate of change, and then we can
Speaker 1: basically count to the number of mutations going back in
Speaker 1: time that it would have taken to get back to
Speaker 1: the ancestor of all of the viruses we saw. So
Speaker 1: we can put a date on a virus that was
Speaker 1: never observed based on looking at the rate of change
Speaker 1: in viruses that we did observe. In KSE, you didn't
Speaker 1: get that. Joel and his colleagues take RNA of viruses
Speaker 1: at different times, count the differences in the number of
Speaker 1: mutations at each point, and use the differences to estimate
Speaker 1: when viruses start to diverge from each other. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: Joel and some colleagues use the molecular clock to estimate
Speaker 1: when the first cases of COVID appeared in Hubei. Hube
Speaker 1: is a landlocked central province in China. Uhan is the capital.
Speaker 1: Using all the information available on all known cases in
Speaker 1: hube they determined that the first case, the index case,
Speaker 1: appeared in hube sometime between mid October to bid November.
Speaker 1: That's weeks before anyone knew of a mysterious virus making
Speaker 1: people sick. Even local experts like Jang had no idea
Speaker 1: at this point, so the first outbreak of the virus
Speaker 1: almost certainly occurred much earlier than even the first reports
Speaker 1: in China. In the US, we're all out trick or
Speaker 1: treating for Halloween twenty nineteen, and the virus that would
Speaker 1: eventually halt all our lives may have already been spreading
Speaker 1: across the world. Crazy, maybe even crazier is another study
Speaker 1: by Joel. This one was done way back in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: This is a bit of a hipster coronavirus paper. We
Speaker 1: were studying it before it was cool. I'm still proud
Speaker 1: of this paper where actually we're proud of it than ever.
Speaker 1: More people, and by that I mean more scientists have
Speaker 1: read this paper in the last year than read it
Speaker 1: in the previous eight years. More people are downloading it,
Speaker 1: more people are citing it. We are shocked that this
Speaker 1: paper was rediscovered. I'm not shocked that the paper was
Speaker 1: rediscovered in our case by Gabby Watts, the producer on
Speaker 1: this series. And the reason I'm not shocked is that
Speaker 1: the paper has the tantalizing title a case for the
Speaker 1: ancient origin of coronaviruses. That's exactly the case Joel and
Speaker 1: his colleagues make in the paper that coronaviruses are super
Speaker 1: damn old. They looked at a lot of coronaviruses. So
Speaker 1: you have turkey coronaviruses, you have magpie robin coronaviruses, you
Speaker 1: have bovine coronaviruses, various different back coronaviruses. I don't even
Speaker 1: have the names of them. I just have the They
Speaker 1: just have boring names. Yeah, I'm sorry, I kind of disagree, Joel.
Speaker 1: What about duck coronavirus, thrush coronavirus, widgeon not pigeon coronavirus,
Speaker 1: and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus. Before Joel's paper, molecular clock
Speaker 1: analysis suggested that the common descendant of coronaviruses, the sort
Speaker 1: of coronavirus zero or coronavirus eve, existed about ten thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, but this seemed far too recent for Joel,
Speaker 1: especially since bats and birds, the most common carriers of coronaviruses,
Speaker 1: have been around for millions of years. The molecular clock
Speaker 1: works really well for viruses in the short term. You
Speaker 1: can watch a virus like SARSCOBE two or influence a
Speaker 1: spread around the world, and you can count those mutations
Speaker 1: and see how quickly they occur, and you can then
Speaker 1: estimate going back in time, well, this virus probably existed
Speaker 1: six months ago, this ancestor a year ago, this answer
Speaker 1: ten or fifty or one hundred years ago. But once
Speaker 1: you start getting past that point in time, things start
Speaker 1: to get a little weird for viruses. And the reason
Speaker 1: we think that is because those mutations that used to
Speaker 1: click off regularly, well, the same mutation seemed to be
Speaker 1: happening over and over and over again. So instead of
Speaker 1: mutation indicating a week or a month or a year,
Speaker 1: you're gonna count one mutation and that's actually going to
Speaker 1: be ten or one hundred years because that same change
Speaker 1: has happened ten or one hundred times. So you start
Speaker 1: to undercount. So instead of looking at a virus and say, well,
Speaker 1: if we just put the evolutionary rate on this virus
Speaker 1: and it's you know, ten thousand years old, your virus
Speaker 1: is there could actually be ten million years old and
Speaker 1: they would look the same. In other words, Joel believed
Speaker 1: the molecular clock for RNA viruses was broken. When you
Speaker 1: think about evolution and change in animals or other living things,
Speaker 1: you tend to think of evolution favoring change, adaptation to
Speaker 1: different environments, promotion of new positive traits. But with viruses
Speaker 1: it's different. In fact, it's not even agreed upon by
Speaker 1: scientists whether viruses are living things. They have an impact
Speaker 1: on living things, but as one virologists put it, viruses
Speaker 1: exist at the border between chemistry and life. If viruses
Speaker 1: may not even be alive, it stands to reason they
Speaker 1: would evolve differently than living things, and they do. Viruses,
Speaker 1: when they evolve, tend to remove negative mutations rather than
Speaker 1: accentuate the positive ones. That's called purifying selection. Mostly when
Speaker 1: we think about viruses or evolution in general, we like
Speaker 1: to think about a natural selection evolution favoring changes. We
Speaker 1: adapt to this, and we adapt to that, And we
Speaker 1: think about this doubly so for viruses, where they're constantly
Speaker 1: adapting to the host environment, to the immune system, to
Speaker 1: drugs that we try and throw at them. But really
Speaker 1: the main driver of evolution in viruses is actually to
Speaker 1: stay where you are, to keep your genetic sequence where
Speaker 1: it is, and that's purifying selection, and that it removes changes.
Speaker 1: And what we notice is that if a virus is
Speaker 1: able to change from one, say genetic position to another,
Speaker 1: what it's going to do is it's probably just going
Speaker 1: to keep making those same changes again and again. And
Speaker 1: that's strong purifying selection. And when you're forced to make
Speaker 1: the same change again and again and again rather than
Speaker 1: making any change you want, that's strong purifying selection. And
Speaker 1: that's going to hide the ticking of the molecular clock.
Speaker 1: It's going to make it look like only one hundred
Speaker 1: or a thousand years have passed, when really it's taken
Speaker 1: a million years, but we've only made the same changes
Speaker 1: again and again and again. So after factoring in all
Speaker 1: the potential mutations that the molecular clock may have missed
Speaker 1: and that strong purifying selection may have hidden, Joel came
Speaker 1: up with an estimate for the age of coronaviruses. Now
Speaker 1: that's not Sars covi two, our current adversary, or STARS one,
Speaker 1: or even poor signed epidemic diarrhea virus. That's all bat
Speaker 1: and bird coronaviruses, which likely originate from a common ancestor.
Speaker 1: The age they came up with not ten thousand years
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety three million years Some things were
Speaker 1: different then. For one, the Earth had just one giant
Speaker 1: land mass, a super consonant. Dragonflies and amphibians have just evolved,
Speaker 1: while primitive ancestors of mammals and cockroaches are on the way.
Speaker 1: No people, no dinosaurs, no netflix. Two hundred ninety three
Speaker 1: million years ago is also not long after the time
Speaker 1: that mammals and birds first diverged from each other. This
Speaker 1: implies that ancestors of coronaviruses, which we find mostly in
Speaker 1: bats and birds, could be as old as bats and
Speaker 1: birds themselves. Maybe they developed in sinc Maybe coronaviruses are
Speaker 1: wondering where do these humans come from? These humans that
Speaker 1: infected our world. But Joel isn't super confident in his number.
Speaker 1: He says, it's an extremely rough to it. As much
Speaker 1: as I'd like to think, in all of that noise
Speaker 1: and all of that uncertainty, we managed to hit the
Speaker 1: nail on the head, going back hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: years and identifying the split between bats and birds. I
Speaker 1: just think that that's a lucky happenstance. So we said, look,
Speaker 1: it's possible that these viruses have been around in bats
Speaker 1: since bats became bats, And these viruses have been around
Speaker 1: in birds since birds became birds. And you can't use
Speaker 1: the molecular clock to argue that they're younger, because the
Speaker 1: molecael clock says they can be well, they can be
Speaker 1: as old as time. Sometimes we tell stories because it
Speaker 1: makes us feel better. I'm a writer. Sometimes I tell
Speaker 1: stories to make me feel better, sometimes to make others
Speaker 1: feel better or worse. If I'm being honest. Joel Wortheiman
Speaker 1: says that the story his paper tells that these viruses
Speaker 1: were around two hundred ninety three million years ago. It
Speaker 1: may not be true at all. Coronaviruses might be far younger.
Speaker 1: It's just a PhD educated, calculated and simulated guests. But
Speaker 1: another virologists we've already heard about, has also studied ancient viruses.
Speaker 1: Jeong Jenjang, Eddie Holmes's close collaborator, one of the heroes
Speaker 1: of COVID. I wasn't able to speak directly with Jang,
Speaker 1: but here he is in a World Signed Summit video
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty. Just to make sure you understand, I'll
Speaker 1: speak along with Jang. Are these carraviros low Wart Brice sambled.
Speaker 1: The discovery of viruses in low vertebrates sampled from the
Speaker 1: ocean indicate that the RNA viruses that still infect us
Speaker 1: today are ancient and have evolutionary histories that date back
Speaker 1: to the first vertebrates and perhaps the first animals. So
Speaker 1: for the first time we can definitely show that RNA
Speaker 1: viruses are many millions of years old and have been
Speaker 1: in existence since the first vertebrates existed. Viruses are everywhere,
Speaker 1: and our work makes it clear that there are still
Speaker 1: many millions more viruses still to be discovered. He's coward,
Speaker 1: so your rivrsphea has to be redefined, and ours I
Speaker 1: would change the pupil's honest thanguable. Like Joel's ancient coronavirus story,
Speaker 1: the story of Mountain a May, where the divine doctor
Speaker 1: comes down from the mountain and heals the governor's son
Speaker 1: is probably made up, at least according to the source
Speaker 1: where I read it. I found the story in a
Speaker 1: University of London thesis by the medical historian Chia Feng Chang.
Speaker 1: In the paper, she makes clear that there is no
Speaker 1: contemporaneous written record of innoculation at the turn of the
Speaker 1: second millennium, ad. In her thesis, Chang surmises that this
Speaker 1: legend was used to justify smallpox inoculation in a sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: when it was certainly practiced under the cloak of a
Speaker 1: heavenly goddess. She says it would be easier to convince
Speaker 1: people to get inoculated. She says these stories may have
Speaker 1: been told to persuade patients or even doctors of the
Speaker 1: practice's worthiness. It's good pr for inoculators. Her theory is
Speaker 1: not quite as cool as a mystical doctor, a secret book,
Speaker 1: and a healer transformed into a goddess of innoculator's working
Speaker 1: a whole millennium ago on a sacred mountain. But it's
Speaker 1: still a pretty good story. And how about Eddie Holmes's story.
Speaker 1: He may have passed on the chance to discover the
Speaker 1: origins of HIV, but he hit it big by posting
Speaker 1: the genetic sequence for coronavirus so that the word world
Speaker 1: could start fighting the virus create vaccines. It's finally Eddie's
Speaker 1: Beatles moment. Right, You mentioned at the beginning of a
Speaker 1: conversation that you sort of missed out or you may
Speaker 1: have missed out in the Beatles moment of you know,
Speaker 1: tracking HIV back to Congo or Cameroon. Um. But now
Speaker 1: do you feel like this, this was your sort of
Speaker 1: similar moment that you're able to sort of be there
Speaker 1: at the very very beginning of this of this virus.
Speaker 1: I wish it never happened. I honestly, I would change
Speaker 1: anything to not be in this position I have to
Speaker 1: say anything, So you know, maybe it's I don't regard
Speaker 1: any of this is good at all. I regard this
Speaker 1: as an absolute miserable thing to be involved in. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it might be the defining point of my
Speaker 1: of my career. I think I'll always be remembered for this.
Speaker 1: But I mean I'd rather I wish I wasn't. I
Speaker 1: honestly wish I wasn't. I wish it never happened. On
Speaker 1: the next episode of long Shot, We're going to meet
Speaker 1: a family of an oculation entrepreneurs and we'll speak to
Speaker 1: one of the first people to ever get a COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen Veccine. Long Shot is a production of School of
Speaker 1: Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode was produced, written, and narrated
Speaker 1: by me Sean Revive. My co producer is Gabby Watts.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and ELC. Crowley.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio and actor and
Speaker 1: writer Leuis ivy Chen. Thank you to Falling Walls for
Speaker 1: the clip of Young Jen j long shot was scored
Speaker 1: by Jason Shannon with sound design and mixed by Harper
Speaker 1: Harris at Tuonewelder's School of Humans.