Speaker 1: Probably more than any other field that poses an existential risk.
Speaker 1: The dangers of the biotech field are the easiest to understand.
Speaker 1: The field deals with bugs, viruses, bacteria, pathogens that can
Speaker 1: kill us if we're infected by them. And every one
Speaker 1: of us has experienced infectious disease firsthand, like the preschooler
Speaker 1: catching the flu and bringing it home and making the
Speaker 1: whole family sick, or having to cancel your vacation because
Speaker 1: the place you were going has become a zeke a
Speaker 1: hot spot. It's pretty basic stuff, and it's relatable to us.
Speaker 1: But when you dig deeper into the biotech field, it
Speaker 1: becomes clear that the risks it poses are maybe the
Speaker 1: most immediate of all the existential risks. The pathogens the
Speaker 1: field studies in the hopes of creating vaccines that can
Speaker 1: save lives pose a pretty severe threat as they are
Speaker 1: not too long ago. Wild viruses like small pox and
Speaker 1: influenza killed a lot of people, as we'll see in
Speaker 1: this episode, and bugs like that can still kill a
Speaker 1: lot of people, and that's threat enough. But the existential
Speaker 1: threat from biotech comes from the type of research that
Speaker 1: began to proliferate in the early twenty one century. When
Speaker 1: high containment labs begin to mushroom around the world, and
Speaker 1: a type of research called gain of function really took off.
Speaker 1: No longer were researchers dealing with wild viruses and bacteria.
Speaker 1: They were forcing evolution in them by speeding up mutations
Speaker 1: and altering them genetically to be deadlier and more contagious.
Speaker 1: This kind of research is extremely dangerous. If a genetically
Speaker 1: altered bug escapes from a lab, it could kill a
Speaker 1: potentially staggering amount of people before it is contained. If
Speaker 1: it is contained, but if done right, the risks from
Speaker 1: these experiments can be minimized. The trouble is they're frequently
Speaker 1: not done right. As you'll see, the biotech field has
Speaker 1: a shocking track record of accidents and a willingness to
Speaker 1: take huge, possibly unnecessary risks. And what's most unsettling is
Speaker 1: that there is precious little oversight on the risky experiments
Speaker 1: being carried out around the world. Even seemingly innocuous experiments
Speaker 1: have the potential to produce catastrophic results. And I can
Speaker 1: show you now if you'll follow me to Canberra, the
Speaker 1: capital of Australia. We're back in two thousand. A pair
Speaker 1: of researchers named Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw are unpleasantly
Speaker 1: surprised with the results of an experiment they've just conducted.
Speaker 1: Australia has a significant mouse problem. Mice were probably introduced
Speaker 1: to the country as stowaways among the ships of the
Speaker 1: British settlers in the eighteenth century, and when they arrived,
Speaker 1: they began to spread and grow to unusually large numbers.
Speaker 1: Especial slee in the southeast, where Australia grows its grain.
Speaker 1: During what the country calls its mouse plagues, farms are
Speaker 1: overrun with mice that streamed from seemingly everywhere. The ground
Speaker 1: ripples with them. The mice are so abundant and aggressive
Speaker 1: that they can chew through the tires of farm equipment,
Speaker 1: and they attack pigs and poultry. On mouse plague caused
Speaker 1: nearly one hundred million dollars worth of damage to crops
Speaker 1: and farms. What Ramshaw and Jackson were looking for was
Speaker 1: a way to sterilize female mice by training their immune
Speaker 1: systems to attack their own eggs. To do that, the
Speaker 1: two biologists created a vaccine that contained a gene which
Speaker 1: codes for the production of something called inter luken four,
Speaker 1: which is a naturally occurring protein i L four stimulates
Speaker 1: mammals to produce antibodies to deliver the genes to the
Speaker 1: mice's DNA. The researchers used a virus because of a
Speaker 1: virus's unique ability to insert its own genetic information into
Speaker 1: a cell's DNA and hijack a cells normal processes. They
Speaker 1: make ideal vehicles to deliver the main ingredient in a vaccine.
Speaker 1: The virus adds it into the cells genetic code along
Speaker 1: with its own genetic material. The cell produces whatever it
Speaker 1: finds in its genetic code, whether it was added there
Speaker 1: by a virus or by a human. It's pretty impressive
Speaker 1: researchers hijack a virus's ability to hijack a cell. Jackson
Speaker 1: and Ramshaw chose the virus that causes mousepox ectromelia as
Speaker 1: the vehicle for their vaccine. Normally, mousepox would kill a
Speaker 1: lot of the mice that were exposed to it in
Speaker 1: the study, but the researchers were using mice that had
Speaker 1: been previously vaccinated against mousepox, along with other mice that
Speaker 1: had been genetically altered to be totally immune to the disease. Few,
Speaker 1: if any, of the mice used in the study works
Speaker 1: to die from exposure to the mousepox, but within nine
Speaker 1: days of receiving the vaccine, every single mouse in the
Speaker 1: study was dead. The mousepox had a one hundred percent
Speaker 1: mortality rate. It killed every mouse that had been exposed
Speaker 1: to it. The researchers found that the i L for
Speaker 1: gene had indeed increased anybody production in the mice as intended,
Speaker 1: but the increased inner lucan had another unanticipated effect. It
Speaker 1: also suppressed the mice's cell mediated response, a function of
Speaker 1: the immune system which wards off infections by viruses. By
Speaker 1: adding the i L four gene to the mouse pox virus,
Speaker 1: the surge of inter luken told the mice's immune system
Speaker 1: to lay down its arms, which paved the way for
Speaker 1: total annihilation by the mousepox virus, even among mice that
Speaker 1: had been genetically designed to be immune to the disease.
Speaker 1: Jackson and Ramshaw had x dently created a perfect killer
Speaker 1: of mice. Mousepox bears a resemblance to smallpox and humans.
Speaker 1: The two viruses are distantly related, and it was not
Speaker 1: lost on Ramshaw and Jackson what would happen if their
Speaker 1: technique was used with smallpox instead of mousepox. Jackson told
Speaker 1: new scientists, it would be safe to assume that if
Speaker 1: some idiot did put human ill four into human smallpox,
Speaker 1: they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically. Something like that would
Speaker 1: be monumentally bad. Smallpox is caused by the very ola virus.
Speaker 1: It's an ancient virus that has plagued humans for possibly
Speaker 1: as long as ten thousand years, and it's believed to
Speaker 1: have made the jump from either camels or gerbils, or
Speaker 1: possibly some extinct animal we don't know about, over to
Speaker 1: humans and spread along trade routes that crossed the Middle
Speaker 1: East to Asia and then eventually west over to Europe.
Speaker 1: Our earliest defend native evidence of smallpox dates back at
Speaker 1: least three thousand years, found on mummies of people who
Speaker 1: lived millennia ago, including the Egyptian pharaoh Ramsey's the fifth
Speaker 1: Ramsey's appears to bear the sign of the virus, the
Speaker 1: pox marks that are left behind when the pustules that
Speaker 1: cover the body scab and fall off. Those pustules come
Speaker 1: at the final stage of a very difficult disease. Within
Speaker 1: a couple of days of being exposed to smallpox for
Speaker 1: the first time, you will be leveled by a fever
Speaker 1: and flu like symptoms that incapacitate you for days. Sores
Speaker 1: develop in your mouth and they fill with fluid, and
Speaker 1: just as you overcome the fever and begin to feel better,
Speaker 1: the mouth sores erupt, which releases the virus filled fluid
Speaker 1: into the rest of your body, where it reappears as
Speaker 1: those pustules masses of tiny bumps that cover the skin
Speaker 1: and concentrate around your extremities. The uestull scab over and
Speaker 1: eventually they fall off, and when the last one falls,
Speaker 1: you are no longer contagious. If you survived the disease
Speaker 1: that is, smallpox kills by overwhelming your immune system with
Speaker 1: the protein that counteracts anybodies that would normally prevent infected
Speaker 1: cells from replicating the virus. To catch smallpox, it takes
Speaker 1: close contact with a person who is actively suffering from it,
Speaker 1: which meant that people who cared for the ill were
Speaker 1: usually the ones who came down with it. Once a
Speaker 1: person comes down with smallpox and survives, they are conferred
Speaker 1: a lifelong immunity to the disease, and even though they
Speaker 1: may still carry the virus, they aren't contagious to others.
Speaker 1: Even people who have never had smallpox before. By the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, smallpox had settled into Europe, becoming endemic, which
Speaker 1: means it settled into the human population kind of made
Speaker 1: itself comfortable. It went into hiding and made the rounds
Speaker 1: when new comers who had never been exposed to the
Speaker 1: virus entered the towns of people who are already immune
Speaker 1: to it. So in Europe smallpox became mostly a disease
Speaker 1: of children and immigrants. The local adults had all either
Speaker 1: died from it or survived it and become immune. Once
Speaker 1: it became endemic, the mortality rate for smallpox hovered around
Speaker 1: It killed about three out of every ten people who
Speaker 1: came in contact with it. But in the fifteenth century,
Speaker 1: Europe began to spill over its banks, and it brought
Speaker 1: the disease to places that had never encountered it before.
Speaker 1: West Africa was first visited by slave traders from Portugal
Speaker 1: and Spain, who brought pandemics with them. Many of the
Speaker 1: villages that were rated had never been exposed to the disease,
Speaker 1: and so it spread quickly. The people suffering those outbreaks
Speaker 1: were stolen from their homes and they were taken to
Speaker 1: holding camps along the coast, where the disease spread even
Speaker 1: more quickly. Those people were forced onto ships while they
Speaker 1: were actively ill, making the horrific experience of being enslaved
Speaker 1: even more brutal. Each time a ship set sail from
Speaker 1: Africa to the America's over stuffed with people ill from smallpox,
Speaker 1: it was like tossing a lit match onto a powder cake.
Speaker 1: At first, the ships were too slow to make it
Speaker 1: to the New World before the smallpox burned itself out.
Speaker 1: The human cargo aboard were either no longer contagious what
Speaker 1: We're dead from it by the time they made land.
Speaker 1: But as ocean going technology improved, those ships got faster,
Speaker 1: and eventually one of those matches stayed lit and it
Speaker 1: set off the powder keg of the America's It is
Speaker 1: difficult to overstate the effect that European disease had on
Speaker 1: North and South America. Not just smallpox, but a number
Speaker 1: of contagious disease began to rage at once, forming overlapping
Speaker 1: epidemics called sindemics. The Native Americans had never been exposed
Speaker 1: to these kinds of pathogens, and so they had no
Speaker 1: natural defenses against them, which allowed the diseases to spread
Speaker 1: at unimaginable rates. And kill untold numbers of people. It
Speaker 1: appears to have all started in what is now Mexico City.
Speaker 1: The Aztecs suffered losses of up to half of their
Speaker 1: population when the Spanish brought smallpox. A short An African
Speaker 1: slave whose name is lost to history, was suffering from
Speaker 1: smallpox when he landed with an expedition led by the
Speaker 1: conquistador Panfello de Navarrees. In writing five years after the
Speaker 1: outbreak began, a Spanish fire who traveled to Mexico wrote
Speaker 1: of the devastation the diet inhapes like bed box. Many
Speaker 1: all theirs died of a starvation, because I said, we're
Speaker 1: all taken secret of more. And they could not care
Speaker 1: for each other, nor was there anyone to give them
Speaker 1: bread or anything else. In many places it happened that
Speaker 1: everyone in the house died, and as it was impossible
Speaker 1: to vary the great number of dead, they pulled down
Speaker 1: their houses over them in order to check the stinch
Speaker 1: that rushed from the dead bodies, so that their homes
Speaker 1: became their tombs. The disease spread like wildfire into the
Speaker 1: interior of the American continent. In the America's smallpox found
Speaker 1: what's called Virgin Territory a population that had no immunity,
Speaker 1: so everyone who came in contact with it fell ill.
Speaker 1: This left no one to care for people suffering from
Speaker 1: the disease, which increased the mortality right even further. As
Speaker 1: the sick fled their dead villages to look for helping
Speaker 1: others nearby, they brought the infection with them, and the
Speaker 1: cycle of disease began again and again. This happened over
Speaker 1: and over for centuries, leaving the Great Native American cultures
Speaker 1: in rubble. Explorers who came in later waves found destroyed,
Speaker 1: abandoned settlements filled with the dead. In places the virus appeared,
Speaker 1: the population fell by half two thirds. In some places,
Speaker 1: nine out of every ten members of the Native American
Speaker 1: groups in contact with the Massachusetts Bay settlers died from
Speaker 1: sixteen seventeen to sixteen nineteen. The English Puritans, who arrived
Speaker 1: the following year took it that God had cleared the
Speaker 1: land for them. During the sixteen thirties, half of the
Speaker 1: Iroquois Confederation and the Huron around the Great Lakes died
Speaker 1: half in a decade. A single seventeen thirty eight outbreak
Speaker 1: killed half of the Cherokee tribe in the Carolinas and
Speaker 1: george Ja. In real numbers, these epidemics killed hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands to millions of people at a time. Imagine a
Speaker 1: disease that can kill off of the people in your town.
Speaker 1: It's no wonder, then, that smallpox is considered one of
Speaker 1: the deadliest viruses in the history of humanity. It is
Speaker 1: credited with killing half a billion people in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century alone, the first eight tenths of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: I should say. Back in nineteen sixty six, the World
Speaker 1: Health Organization of the u N led a global vaccination
Speaker 1: campaign and by it declared smallpox eradicated from planet Earth.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty big deal. Along with a cattle
Speaker 1: disease called render pest that's related to the virus that
Speaker 1: causes measles and humans, smallpox is the only contagious disease
Speaker 1: humanity has ever managed to eradicate. Right now, there is
Speaker 1: no living person earth who has a case of smallpox.
Speaker 1: But that's not to say that the very ola virus
Speaker 1: isn't still alive and well after the eradication campaign, the
Speaker 1: u N persuaded the global scientific community to give up
Speaker 1: its stocks of smallpox, and they were almost entirely successful,
Speaker 1: save for two nations which just happened to be the
Speaker 1: two most powerful on the planet, the nuclear superpowers the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union in the United States. Those two nations decided
Speaker 1: that it would be better for them to keep their
Speaker 1: stocks rather than destroy them. Ostensibly this was for scientific research,
Speaker 1: but both nations have been known to run illegal biological
Speaker 1: warfare programs, and the idea of them maintaining stocks of
Speaker 1: smallpox made the rest of the world uneasy. But this
Speaker 1: being the height of the Cold War, no other nation
Speaker 1: was in much of a position to argue, so all
Speaker 1: smallpox samples on Earth would be stored under secure conditions
Speaker 1: in two occasions. In Russia, they are stored at the
Speaker 1: State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia.
Speaker 1: In the US, they are held at the Centers for
Speaker 1: Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Those two stockpiles still
Speaker 1: exist today. On a number of occasions, the U n
Speaker 1: again called for those stockpiles to be destroyed in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven and most recently in two thousand eleven, and
Speaker 1: it also tried to create a global agreement that once
Speaker 1: those final stocks were destroyed, any nation caught with smallpox
Speaker 1: could be charged with the crime against humanity. Unfortunately, in
Speaker 1: all cases, the un failed and the smallpox stocks remained intact.
Speaker 1: Contagious disease researchers are divided on the wisdom of keeping
Speaker 1: these stocks. The US and Russia continue to argue that
Speaker 1: we need to study Bariola so we can understand how
Speaker 1: the virus coevolved with our immune system. Hopefully we can
Speaker 1: use that knowledge to cure and prevent other diseases. The
Speaker 1: logic goes that if nature made smallpox from say, camel pox,
Speaker 1: it could create another pox on humanity. Studying smallpox could
Speaker 1: help us prepare for that. To plenty of other researchers, though,
Speaker 1: eradicating the very ola virus from the wild only to
Speaker 1: keep hundreds of samples of it in laboratories is madness.
Speaker 1: But regardless of where contagious disease researchers fall on the matter,
Speaker 1: most dismissed the idea of a small pox epidemic as
Speaker 1: being a genuine threat to humanity. It could be utterly
Speaker 1: catastrophic for any community where the virus showed up, true,
Speaker 1: and that is bad enough. But because smallpox requires close
Speaker 1: contact for transmission, it would be relatively easy to contain
Speaker 1: an outbreak and cut off the possibility of a pandemic.
Speaker 1: It almost certainly does not pose an existential threat to humanity.
Speaker 1: One that does, the one that keeps researchers awake at night,
Speaker 1: is the flu. Influenza is a common virus among humans.
Speaker 1: It also infects a lot of other animals too, like pigs, birds, seals, bats, horses, rodents,
Speaker 1: among others. The different types of flu are described and
Speaker 1: classified based on the two types of proteins found on
Speaker 1: the viruses outer envelope he magluten in and neuraminides. It's
Speaker 1: called the h X n Y naming convention, so you
Speaker 1: end up with flu names like H five and two.
Speaker 1: The flu typically has one of two traits when it
Speaker 1: comes to infecting us. It's either extremely deadly or it's
Speaker 1: extremely contagious. But once in a while, those two traits
Speaker 1: co evolved within a single virus, and the results can
Speaker 1: be catastrophic. November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, was a chilly, drizzly
Speaker 1: day in Compiegne, a town in the north of France,
Speaker 1: where representatives of the Allied Nations met with the leaders
Speaker 1: of Germany to sign the armistice that ended the First
Speaker 1: World War from nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen, what was
Speaker 1: then called the Great War, claimed the lives of more
Speaker 1: than eighteen million people, soldiers and civilians. But as the
Speaker 1: armistice was being signed, another even deadlier killer than warfare
Speaker 1: was making short work of human lives around the globe.
Speaker 1: Type A H one and one influenza, the Spanish flu.
Speaker 1: In the span of just four months from September through
Speaker 1: December eighteen, fifty million people perhaps more died around the
Speaker 1: world from this new and deadly strain of flu. It
Speaker 1: killed like a bird flu and spread like a seasonal flu,
Speaker 1: and those two qualities combined made it an extraordinarily dangerous virus.
Speaker 1: As much as one third of the entire population of
Speaker 1: the world was infected by it that season. It took
Speaker 1: its heaviest toll on the young people under twenty five,
Speaker 1: whose immune systems had never been exposed to an H
Speaker 1: one and one strain before. Many young people who had
Speaker 1: been the picture of health just days before died suffocating
Speaker 1: on a bloody froth that they were too weak to
Speaker 1: cough from their airways. In some cases, people died within
Speaker 1: hours of their symptoms first appearing, then just as fast
Speaker 1: as it began. The epidemic ended by the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen the flu had burned itself through the global population,
Speaker 1: and it disappeared. It almost certainly evolved into a new
Speaker 1: strain of flu that was far less deadly, and for
Speaker 1: all intents and purposes, the Spanish flu that had been
Speaker 1: such a killer of people went extinct. Where the Spanish
Speaker 1: flu came from remains a mystery. Initially, it was thought
Speaker 1: to have originated in Spain, hence the name. Other research
Speaker 1: that came later implicated China. China and Southeast Asia are
Speaker 1: commonly the source of bird flues the type that includes
Speaker 1: the Spanish flu. But one theory traces the eighteen flu
Speaker 1: back to Haskell County, Missouri, to one of the area's
Speaker 1: plentiful chicken farms, where it disappeared to is equally mysterious.
Speaker 1: For decades, researchers pined for a sample of the eighteen
Speaker 1: strain to study in search of answers to questions about it.
Speaker 1: The Spanish flu was the one that got away, a
Speaker 1: vicious killer that the epidemiological and medical communities were helpless
Speaker 1: to defend against, leaving no trace of itself aside from
Speaker 1: the dead in its wake. And then in nine microbiologist
Speaker 1: Johann Holton recovered a sample of the nineteen eighteen Spanish
Speaker 1: flu from where it was entombed in the Alaskan tundra.
Speaker 1: The tiny town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, had just eighty
Speaker 1: residents when the Spanish flu came to town in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: mostly Native and up at Eskimos. In just a couple
Speaker 1: of months, seventy two of the eighty died. A group
Speaker 1: of gold miners were hired by the survivors to come
Speaker 1: dig a mass grave for the bodies and enter them
Speaker 1: in the perma frost. They lay undisturbed until nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: That year, Johan Holton arrived and asked the tribe's permission
Speaker 1: to break the grave open. In their frozen tomb, the
Speaker 1: victims were preserved mummified in a way, and Holton reasoned
Speaker 1: that the flu virus that killed them maybe as well.
Speaker 1: Through a slow process. In nineteen fifty one and then
Speaker 1: again in Holton opened the grave twice. He built a
Speaker 1: fire to thaw the permafrost below, Then he excavated the
Speaker 1: thawed soil. When he reached frozen ground again, he built
Speaker 1: another fire. Finally, on his second attempt, in he managed
Speaker 1: to call a living sample of the H one and
Speaker 1: one virus from the lung tissue of one of its
Speaker 1: preserved victims. In a few years, researchers cobbled together the
Speaker 1: genome of the virus. They synthesized it, and inserted the
Speaker 1: genetic material into a living cell. The Spanish flu lived
Speaker 1: once more. That researcher thought that was a useful line
Speaker 1: of inquiry, and there were other researchers who vehemently disagreed
Speaker 1: and thought it was a um an extraordinarily reckless thing
Speaker 1: to do. That is Beth Willis. She founded an organization
Speaker 1: that agitated for increased transparency from the government's biological labs
Speaker 1: in Frederick, Maryland, her community. The biotech field is not
Speaker 1: like other fields that pose existential risks. Like other fields,
Speaker 1: the research is dual use. It can be used to
Speaker 1: help or harm humanity. But unlike research in other fields
Speaker 1: like AI, which has yet to become clear to most
Speaker 1: people that it poses an existential risk, working with deadly
Speaker 1: pathogens is understood as dangerous work by people inside the
Speaker 1: biotech field and out. There's no ambiguity. But despite the
Speaker 1: inherent danger of working with deadly pathogens. The field has
Speaker 1: shown that it's willing to take potentially catastrophic risks in
Speaker 1: the name of research, and it's frequently divided over what
Speaker 1: risks are acceptable and which are not. One area that
Speaker 1: divides the field is gain of function research. Wherever the
Speaker 1: Spanish flu came from, it almost certainly evolved from an
Speaker 1: avian variety of flu that mixed with one more common
Speaker 1: to humans through a process called reassortment. That's the ability
Speaker 1: of viruses to swap genetic material with other viruses that
Speaker 1: are also living in the same host. What comes out
Speaker 1: can be a virus that is a genetic failure, which
Speaker 1: may be unable to survive or copy itself, or it
Speaker 1: could produce a deadly inefficient killer of humans. It's a
Speaker 1: genetic crap shoot. When a virus mutates or adapts in
Speaker 1: some way that makes it more efficient at infecting hosts,
Speaker 1: it is said to have gained function. Studying these mutations,
Speaker 1: how they take place, what mutations lead to which characteristics.
Speaker 1: That's gain of function research. By studying how influenza evolves,
Speaker 1: epidemiologists can get better at predicting what flu viruses have
Speaker 1: pandemic potential before they reach that level of deadliness, and
Speaker 1: there are two ways to do this. The most common
Speaker 1: method is to capture wild flu viruses in store them
Speaker 1: in a state of suspended animation, which usually involves freezing them.
Speaker 1: Later on, when new viruses are caught that have evolved
Speaker 1: from that same genetic line, researchers can compare the genomes
Speaker 1: of the older strain to the current strain and see
Speaker 1: how the virus has mutated. This is slow and laborious
Speaker 1: work and frustrating lee it relies on the rate of
Speaker 1: nature for evolutionary changes to take place, so some researchers
Speaker 1: are increasingly using another method where they hasten evolution and
Speaker 1: they forced the mutation of new and novel flu strains
Speaker 1: to study gain a function. Research itself is uh effort
Speaker 1: by researchers to increase the virulence or the infectiousness of
Speaker 1: a panthogen and potentially to decrease its ability to respond
Speaker 1: to countermeasures to treatment. That second, riskier method has become
Speaker 1: a hot button issue in microbiology lately. In two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: two separate research groups working independently, one Dutch and one American,
Speaker 1: stunned the world when they announced that each had forced
Speaker 1: the mutation of an extremely deadly strain of flu, the
Speaker 1: H five and one avian flu, and created an entirely
Speaker 1: new version that is easily transmitted from mammal to mammal.
Speaker 1: In nature, the H five N one virus mainly infects birds.
Speaker 1: It has rarely made the jump to humans, and even
Speaker 1: then only to those who have spent prolonged periods in
Speaker 1: close contact with sick birds, like poultry workers when it
Speaker 1: has made the jump. Though the virus has been astoundingly lethal,
Speaker 1: H five and one has a mortality rate among humans
Speaker 1: of between sixty eight. The only upside to H five
Speaker 1: and one is that it doesn't easily spread among people.
Speaker 1: In the late nine nineties, the world held its breath
Speaker 1: when several hundred cases of H five and one avian
Speaker 1: flu broke out among poultry workers in Asia, but the
Speaker 1: global avian flu pandemic never came, and aside from the
Speaker 1: obvious that the virus just simply lack the ability to
Speaker 1: transmit from person to person, researchers couldn't exactly say why
Speaker 1: the pandemic never happened, So microbiologists began to look for
Speaker 1: answers by forcing a gain of function in H five
Speaker 1: and one. One of the two groups that did this
Speaker 1: was from the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They
Speaker 1: forced multiple mutations within the virus, speeding up its evolution,
Speaker 1: and then inserted the mutated virus into the noses of ferrets.
Speaker 1: Ferrets are commonly seen as one of the best animals
Speaker 1: to model humans. Then they transferred nasal fluid from those
Speaker 1: infected ferrets to the noses of other ferrets. That second
Speaker 1: group of ferrets became sick as expected, but alarmingly, the
Speaker 1: second group passed the virus along to others without the
Speaker 1: aid of researchers through sneezes and costs, just like humans would.
Speaker 1: That really alarmed the virology community. I would say that
Speaker 1: at least four to one people are against doing that
Speaker 1: kind of research. This is Dr Lynn Clots. He's a
Speaker 1: senior Science Fellow for Biosecurity at the Center for Arms
Speaker 1: Control and Non Proliferation. Those two labs had brought to
Speaker 1: life a novel lab created strain of one of the
Speaker 1: deadliest flus known on Earth and given it the entirely
Speaker 1: new ability to pass easily from person to person, and
Speaker 1: now it's sat in their freezers. When the labs announced
Speaker 1: their experiments, outrage erupted. In reaction, the field of microbiology
Speaker 1: issued a two year long ban on high risk experiments
Speaker 1: with flu viruses, and the fault line developed between scientists
Speaker 1: who believed that force mutation gain of function research was
Speaker 1: needed and necessary to stave off potential pandemics and those
Speaker 1: who considered the research unjustifiably risky. The people who carried
Speaker 1: out these experiments were cowboys, in the words of one microbiologist.
Speaker 1: There was also the issue of censorship. Both of the
Speaker 1: experiments were expected to be published, which would provide, in
Speaker 1: the opinion of some researchers, essentially a how to guide
Speaker 1: to creating the experimental extraordinarily deadly virus. So there were
Speaker 1: calls for the two major English language scientific journals, Science
Speaker 1: and Nature not to publish the studies, and those calls
Speaker 1: were heated for a time. But scientists tend to bristle
Speaker 1: at the idea of science being censored, and understandably so,
Speaker 1: findings are meant to be shared among everyone in order
Speaker 1: to advance human understanding. That's how science works. The trouble is,
Speaker 1: once it's out there, the information can be accessed by anyone,
Speaker 1: including people who would use it to inflict harm, and
Speaker 1: in the case of the detailed description of exactly how
Speaker 1: to transform H five and one virus into one that
Speaker 1: is easily transmitted among mammals, that harm could be profound.
Speaker 1: The experiments were the very definition of dual use research.
Speaker 1: But repressed knowledge has a way of getting out, regardless
Speaker 1: of our greatest efforts, a point that was proven shortly
Speaker 1: after the moratorium ended when a team of microbiologists in
Speaker 1: China announced they had successfully crossed the hive and one
Speaker 1: virus with the less deadly but easily transmitted H one
Speaker 1: and one virus, creating a genetically altered superbug of their own.
Speaker 1: If any of the virus is created by the Chinese,
Speaker 1: American or Dutch groups were introduced into the general population,
Speaker 1: the effects would be monumentally bad, potentially on the order
Speaker 1: of an extinction level event for humanity, and so with
Speaker 1: the aim of preventing just such a catastrophe, the field
Speaker 1: of biosecurity has emerged to consider how something like that
Speaker 1: could happen. There is the obvious, the ever looming specter
Speaker 1: of terrorism. A radicalized lab employee or one who is
Speaker 1: desperate for money, a disgruntled researcher or someone looking to
Speaker 1: prove their abilities. Any of these people could make an
Speaker 1: excellent candidate for the release of what are called potential
Speaker 1: pandemic pathogens, which are exactly what they sound like. Some
Speaker 1: biosecurity experts are also concerned that some of the smallpox
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union stockpiles was lost after the country dissolved. Really, though,
Speaker 1: a bio terrorists doesn't need to have access to a
Speaker 1: lab that stockpiles pathogens. The main concern over publishing that
Speaker 1: H five and one how to Guide the journal Science
Speaker 1: eventually published it in full, was that the information would
Speaker 1: fall into the hands of someone well versed in microbiology
Speaker 1: with enough resources and few enough scruples to create the
Speaker 1: virus outside of any formal lab or oversight and then
Speaker 1: release it. That idea is rather unsettling, but many microbiologists
Speaker 1: considered it barely more than an urban legend, something the
Speaker 1: media ran with to scare the public into watching the news.
Speaker 1: That is until two thousand and sixteen, when scientists from
Speaker 1: the University of Alberta announced that they had created the
Speaker 1: virus that as his horse pox from scratch, using only
Speaker 1: snippets of genetic material called oglio nucleotides that they ordered
Speaker 1: retail over the internet. It costs the team a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and took six months to create a living,
Speaker 1: infectious virus. The University of Alberta experiment showed that it
Speaker 1: was now possible for a d I Y biologist to
Speaker 1: create viruses in bacteria through the emerging field of synthetic biology.
Speaker 1: Rather than attempting expensive and time consuming experiments to force
Speaker 1: mutations in a virus over and over and hope that
Speaker 1: it evolves in a way that you wanted to, synthetic
Speaker 1: biology allows researchers to create exactly the kind of organism
Speaker 1: they're looking for by designing and building it denovo, which
Speaker 1: essentially means in Latin from scratch. Synthetic biology emerged from
Speaker 1: genetic engineering, which revolutionized the world by creating the ability
Speaker 1: to cut and splice genes between organisms. Synthetic biology combines
Speaker 1: genetic engineering with the goal of streamlining life into a
Speaker 1: more predictable, reliable, efficient version of what's found in nature.
Speaker 1: What synthetic biology does actually is make literal use of
Speaker 1: the building blocks of life. Eventually, synthetic biology aims to
Speaker 1: create a database of genomic codes that, when inserted into
Speaker 1: an organism will produce a predictable trait. So this snippet
Speaker 1: is a gene that codes for proteins that creates bioluminescence,
Speaker 1: and when you insert it into E. Col I, it
Speaker 1: will make the bacterium glow like a firefly, which is
Speaker 1: pretty neat. The common analogy is lego bricks. The synthetic
Speaker 1: biology community calls their genetic snippets bio bricks, but instead
Speaker 1: of plastic blocks, synthetic biologists use genes snapped together, as
Speaker 1: it were, to radically alter existing species, or to even
Speaker 1: create entirely new ones that have never existed before. Synthetic
Speaker 1: biology will eventually democratize biotechnology, making it easier for people
Speaker 1: to enter the field, and this effort is already underway.
Speaker 1: M I T maintains a database of bio bricks that
Speaker 1: anyone can access. Find the gene that produces the trade
Speaker 1: you're looking for, copy the genomic code of that gene,
Speaker 1: and paste it into the order form of an online
Speaker 1: genetic synthesis lab. They will produce those snippets of DNA
Speaker 1: or glio nucleotides from simple sugars, which you can then
Speaker 1: insert into a host organism, transforming it into a creation
Speaker 1: utterly outside of nature. This ability to create organisms from
Speaker 1: scratch at home basically could be very beneficial for humanity,
Speaker 1: but it also poses huge new risks that have yet
Speaker 1: to be explored. Still, the idea of something like a
Speaker 1: rogue biologist creating a lethal virus DiNovo and releasing it
Speaker 1: under the human population occupies a very small place among
Speaker 1: the worries of people in the bio security field. An
Speaker 1: accidental release, they say, is much more likely. Imagine that
Speaker 1: you're working in a bio safety level for research lab
Speaker 1: that's the highest level containment facilitians, and you don't notice
Speaker 1: that the space suit you're wearing in the lab has
Speaker 1: a small terr in it. While you're working with a
Speaker 1: genetically altered virus. You don't notice that it comes in
Speaker 1: contact with the bare skin of your hand. After leaving
Speaker 1: the lab, you take off your suit and you scratch
Speaker 1: an itch around your nostril with your infected hand, and
Speaker 1: the virus makes its toy into your body. You are
Speaker 1: now infected. This particular virus has been altered to have
Speaker 1: a short incubation period, the time between when you're infected
Speaker 1: and when you can infect other people. Inside your lung tissue,
Speaker 1: the virus has entered a respiratory cell and injected its
Speaker 1: own genetic material. The cell begins to replicate the virus.
Speaker 1: In the matter of a second, a million or more
Speaker 1: copies of the virus are produced. They rupture the hijack
Speaker 1: cell and spread out, infecting other nearby respiratory cells, where
Speaker 1: the process begins again. Now you're contagious. With each breath
Speaker 1: you expel respiratory aerosols water vapor laced with the virus
Speaker 1: from your body into the air where others breathe. Your
Speaker 1: saliva and your nasal fluid are both infectious, but with
Speaker 1: this particular virus. The time between when you become infectious
Speaker 1: and the padrome, the time when you first begin to
Speaker 1: feel symptoms, is more than twenty four hours, And during
Speaker 1: that time you live your life. You take the subway
Speaker 1: to work and back. You hold onto poles in the
Speaker 1: train cars. You chat and laugh with your coworkers. You
Speaker 1: spend time with friends in a crowded bar. All the
Speaker 1: while you shake hands, give hugs, touch door handles, breathe, laugh,
Speaker 1: You spread the virus to other people. By the time
Speaker 1: the first signs of illness appear, you have infected five
Speaker 1: of the people you've come in contact with. Each of
Speaker 1: those people spread out and infect an average of three
Speaker 1: more people, and so on and so on. Some of
Speaker 1: those infected people have business overseas in Europe, South America, Asia,
Speaker 1: they leave the country, they cough in airplanes, they shake
Speaker 1: hands too, they drink from cups that get cleared away.
Speaker 1: They spread the virus to other people around the world.
Speaker 1: Each of the infected people creates a new branch in
Speaker 1: an ever expanding chain of infection that epidemiologists have a
Speaker 1: very short time to contain. If that genetically altered virus
Speaker 1: is easily spread, the epidemiologists may fail a pandemic magnite,
Speaker 1: and if that virus is also highly virulent with a
Speaker 1: high mortality rate, the pandemic could be an existential threat.
Speaker 1: What makes this worst case scenario so unnerving is the
Speaker 1: biotech field's real life track record of accidental releases. In
Speaker 1: addition to a willingness to take huge risks in its research,
Speaker 1: the field is also dangerously accident prone. That very situation
Speaker 1: I've just described happened in two thousand four when a
Speaker 1: worker handling the coronavirus at a c DC lab in
Speaker 1: Beijing became infective with Stars, a deadly and contagious respiratory illness.
Speaker 1: Although the virus killed only one person, it managed to
Speaker 1: make it all the way to Hong Kong and Canada
Speaker 1: before it was contained. The two thousand four Stars outbreak
Speaker 1: resulted from an incorrectly inactivated virus in a biosafety level
Speaker 1: three or four lab. The suits that workers have to
Speaker 1: wear and the safety equipment they have to use is
Speaker 1: cumbersome to say the least, but those protocols are necessary
Speaker 1: for handling the deadliest pathogens, both to prevent the people
Speaker 1: working with those pathogens from getting infected and to prevent
Speaker 1: the pathogens from escaping the lab. So to get around
Speaker 1: those highest level safety protocols, labs sometimes kill the path
Speaker 1: legions they're working with, say by exposing them to dry
Speaker 1: heat or changing their pH but the virus or bacterium
Speaker 1: itself remains intact, so since it's now dead, it can
Speaker 1: be rendered non infectious and studied in a lower level
Speaker 1: containment lab, where safety requirements are much less stringent, making
Speaker 1: the pathogen easier to work with. The problem is inactivation
Speaker 1: isn't always effective. Some viruses simply don't die, and the
Speaker 1: process is prone to human error. Accidental releases of incorrectly
Speaker 1: inactivated viruses is disturbingly common. In fact, labs that work
Speaker 1: with potential pandemic pathogens have a breathtakingly bad record of
Speaker 1: accidental releases of all kinds. Just to pick a few,
Speaker 1: in the flu season featured a strain of H one
Speaker 1: and one that was almost genetically identical to a strain
Speaker 1: that had last made the rounds about three decades earlier.
Speaker 1: In evolutionary terms for a virus, three decades is an
Speaker 1: epoch to us, any strain related to one from NIF
Speaker 1: should have mutated so many times that it was no
Speaker 1: longer even remotely possible it could be genetically identical to
Speaker 1: the previous one. For years, scientists puzzled over this surprise reappearance,
Speaker 1: considering and discarding theories, until they finally came to an
Speaker 1: unsettling conclusion. The only reasonable way such a thing could
Speaker 1: have happened as if the virus had entered some form
Speaker 1: of suspended animation and then made its way back into nature,
Speaker 1: and the most reasonable explanation for that was that it
Speaker 1: had been frozen and kept in a lab and then released.
Speaker 1: Researchers eventually settled on the theory that the strain had
Speaker 1: probably been released in a vaccine that wasn't inactivated properly.
Speaker 1: The result created a pandemic. Fortunately it was not a
Speaker 1: particularly deadly one. Exactly what lab the virus came from
Speaker 1: has never been fully proven. The next year, a photographer
Speaker 1: working at the University of Birmingham Medical School in the
Speaker 1: UK caught smallpox and her mother, who cared for her, died.
Speaker 1: She had contracted it from a lab one floor below.
Speaker 1: The smallpox had traveled through the air duct into her office.
Speaker 1: And in nine in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, sixty
Speaker 1: four people died of anthrax infections after an air filter
Speaker 1: was removed and not immediately replaced in a lab that
Speaker 1: was working on illegal weaponized anthrax bacteria, which was carried
Speaker 1: into a village down wind. It was ex it's like
Speaker 1: these that led to the creation of those high biosafety
Speaker 1: level labs and the use of space suits when conducting
Speaker 1: research with the deadliest pathogens, which makes sense in the
Speaker 1: U s Department of Agriculture created a list of the
Speaker 1: deadliest pathogens, which the U S d A calls biological
Speaker 1: and select agents, and the Centers for Disease Control took
Speaker 1: responsibility for monitoring the labs that work with them. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't until two thousand one that bs L three
Speaker 1: and bs L four labs really began to spread. There
Speaker 1: weren't very many of them until two thousand and one
Speaker 1: and after the anthrax letters, which came from Frederick, where
Speaker 1: I live, which is how I got engaged in this issue.
Speaker 1: After that time we went from just a few labs
Speaker 1: to a large number, a very large number of labs.
Speaker 1: It mushroomed tremendously UM with the assumption that um, we
Speaker 1: had to do a lot of research because of the
Speaker 1: threat of bioterrorism. But of course the only incidents we've
Speaker 1: ever experience came from one of our own labs. In
Speaker 1: two thousand one, just a week after the September eleventh attacks,
Speaker 1: members of Congress and the media began receiving strange letters
Speaker 1: with a white powder. Inside the powder was spores of
Speaker 1: Bacillus and thracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. It had
Speaker 1: been weaponized to make it more easily inhaled and therefore infectious.
Speaker 1: Twenty two people were infected by the spores, and five
Speaker 1: of them died. In in America already gripped by panic.
Speaker 1: The anthrax letters had a profound impact on the country's psyche,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that the source of the anthrax
Speaker 1: was actually a a lab at for Dietrich a scientists
Speaker 1: there who really was somewhat mentally unstable, and I think
Speaker 1: people should have known it. Uh, he was responsible for
Speaker 1: spreading that anthrax. I think that just scared the hell
Speaker 1: out of everybody. The problem is that even with the
Speaker 1: creation of BSL three and four labs, with their astounding
Speaker 1: array of precautionary equipment and procedures, the twenty one century
Speaker 1: has still seen a lot of high profile accidents from
Speaker 1: these labs. Between two thousand four and two, there were
Speaker 1: six hundred and thirty nine reported accidental releases of pathogens
Speaker 1: found on the U s d A's list of Biological
Speaker 1: select agents and toxins. Bacteria and viruses like the Ebola
Speaker 1: virus and the bacteria that causes the plague the virus
Speaker 1: that causes stars are all on the list. Those six
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty nine accidents represent just the ones that
Speaker 1: were reported, and only then among those publicly funded labs
Speaker 1: that are required to report such accidents. Labs that don't
Speaker 1: receive public funding like those run by corporations or private groups,
Speaker 1: don't have to report accidents like that at all. Back
Speaker 1: in two thousand fourteen, a National Institutes of Health lab
Speaker 1: in Bethesda, Maryland, discovered six fials of live Bariola, the
Speaker 1: smallpox virus, in an unsecured freezer. The vials were labeled
Speaker 1: Bariola and have been stored in the nineteen fifties in
Speaker 1: a lab that had gone unused since the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: The f d A, which had taken custody of the
Speaker 1: lab from the NAH way back in, had lost track
Speaker 1: of the stocks with smallpox and failed to destroy the
Speaker 1: Bariola or submitted to the CDC as part of that
Speaker 1: eradication campaign. It had just sat forgotten in the freezer.
Speaker 1: Also in two thousand fourteen, a c DC workers ship
Speaker 1: live strains of the bacteria that causes typhoid fever to
Speaker 1: another lab in a reused box that wasn't marked for
Speaker 1: hazardous material. Not to mention, the box was broken open
Speaker 1: in the corner and it was sent using regular ups delivery.
Speaker 1: Some specimens broke during shipping, although the Typhus vile remained
Speaker 1: intact and sealed again. These are just a few randomly
Speaker 1: selected examples, like those ships that carried smallpox between Africa
Speaker 1: and the America's. Each accident involving potential pandemic pathogens is
Speaker 1: like tossing a lit match on a powder keg. Each
Speaker 1: one has a chance for an outbreak to take hold.
Speaker 1: The problem is as more BSL three and four labs
Speaker 1: come online, more of this risky research is being conducted.
Speaker 1: More labs conducting more of this risky research compounds the
Speaker 1: probability of an accidental release of a pathogen that can
Speaker 1: cause a catastrophic pandemic. Even worse, BSL three and four
Speaker 1: labs have mushroomed to a point where no one, not
Speaker 1: the U. S. Government, not the Centers for Disease Control,
Speaker 1: not the National Institutes of Health, not the World Health Organization,
Speaker 1: no one can definitively say how many high containment labs
Speaker 1: are operating around the world. In the US, even there's
Speaker 1: no certainty about how many there are, it has become
Speaker 1: something of a status symbol among nations, universities, and corporations
Speaker 1: to operate high level containment labs. So some people in
Speaker 1: the biotech and bio security fields have called for an
Speaker 1: end to gain a function research of any kind. The
Speaker 1: trouble is there's no regulatory framework overseeing high containment labs.
Speaker 1: In the US. The National the Institutes for Health is
Speaker 1: the agency that provides funding for this type of work,
Speaker 1: and they have adopted guidelines for best practices and safety,
Speaker 1: but there's no penalty for labs that don't follow those guidelines.
Speaker 1: The most potent weapon the NIH has to curtail reckless
Speaker 1: experiments is to deny funding for further research, and this
Speaker 1: only applies to labs that receive public funding. Privately funded labs,
Speaker 1: like again those found inside corporations, as well as labs overseas,
Speaker 1: operate utterly outside of any jurisdiction. But even if American
Speaker 1: labs had a flawless safety record, which they definitely do not,
Speaker 1: other countries across the rest of the world operate with
Speaker 1: a patchwork of regulations, if any at all. There is
Speaker 1: no global oversight of research with deadly pathogens, and there's
Speaker 1: really no one to say what constitutes a reckless experiment anyway,
Speaker 1: Aside from the institution the researcher is affiliated with. There's
Speaker 1: no one empowered to decide which experiments are simply too
Speaker 1: risky to carry out, and in most cases, the institutions
Speaker 1: that can make that decision air on the side of
Speaker 1: their researchers, since highly visible work that gets lots of
Speaker 1: press brings their institutions prestige. What's probably most disturbing is
Speaker 1: the tendency to downplay or even totally fail to report
Speaker 1: lab accidents. A culture of silence and opaqueness pervades the
Speaker 1: bio labs in the US. For all of the existential
Speaker 1: risk involved, there is almost no public scrutiny of the
Speaker 1: field of biotechnology. If science is never to be censored,
Speaker 1: doesn't that also require it to be fully transparent. There
Speaker 1: are ways to make the system in place safer. Some
Speaker 1: microbiology to argue that the same results can be found
Speaker 1: by using non infectious proteins to study the functions of viruses,
Speaker 1: that those live altered viruses that some labs are creating
Speaker 1: are not only reckless but also totally unnecessary. Others say
Speaker 1: that researchers could be required to add genetic traits to
Speaker 1: their altered specimens that make them reliant on conditions in
Speaker 1: the lab to survive, so that they cannot spread in nature,
Speaker 1: kind of like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Perhaps they
Speaker 1: could engineer a kill switch like a self destruct mechanism
Speaker 1: that is triggered once the cell divides a prescribed number
Speaker 1: of times. In other areas, labs that synthesize DNA and
Speaker 1: RNA could be required to compare the sequences of orders
Speaker 1: that come in against the database of known pathogens and
Speaker 1: report any of those orders that set off alarms to authorities,
Speaker 1: and propose souls. For research that has dual use imposes
Speaker 1: a low probability, high consequence threat to the public could
Speaker 1: undergo review and approval based on its relative benefit to
Speaker 1: science as part of funding requests, and labs both public
Speaker 1: and private in the US and abroad could be put
Speaker 1: under an international regulatory body that both respects and understand science,
Speaker 1: but also equally value safety for humankind. There are holes
Speaker 1: in these safeguards, yes, but even this handful of ideas
Speaker 1: are still vastly better than what's currently in place. When
Speaker 1: you combine the increasing number of labs around the world
Speaker 1: carrying out research on potential pandemic pathogens with the history
Speaker 1: of accidental releases in human error in the biotech field,
Speaker 1: it is extraordinarily difficult not to conclude that the potential
Speaker 1: for an existential threat posed by the release of a
Speaker 1: deadly pathogen is real. This is not a far off
Speaker 1: field of existential risk. It surrounds us right now. Dr
Speaker 1: Lynn Clots, who you met earlier, calculated the probability of
Speaker 1: a lab acquired infection that followed that worst case scenario
Speaker 1: I described based on the current track record of accidental
Speaker 1: releases over the course of a ten year period. Considering
Speaker 1: ten labs with an average safety record, Dr Clots calculated
Speaker 1: that there is a twenty seven percent chance of an
Speaker 1: undetected lab acquired infection creating a global pandemic in the
Speaker 1: next decade. That's better than a one in four chance
Speaker 1: of an existential catastrophe. And that's just considering ten labs.
Speaker 1: No one knows how many labs there actually are. Risk
Speaker 1: is product of two things, the likelihood of something happening
Speaker 1: times consequence. The likelihood of something happening is small, very
Speaker 1: small per lab per year, but you do things in
Speaker 1: enough labs for enough years, it gets bigger. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the consequences, potential consequences are huge in the worst case scenario,
Speaker 1: perhaps killing a large percentage of the world's population. And
Speaker 1: we just don't know. So I just don't think it's
Speaker 1: worth taking the chance on the next episode of the
Speaker 1: End of the World with Josh Clark. Particle physics works
Speaker 1: at the leading edge of human knowledge, at the leading
Speaker 1: edge of theory. That's the whole point of it. Particle
Speaker 1: physics is where science touches the fabric of the universe,
Speaker 1: and it puts us in a dilemma to know if
Speaker 1: the experiments that we're running inside of particle colliders are safe.
Speaker 1: We have to run the experiments in the first place,
Speaker 1: but hoping for the best is not a good strategy
Speaker 1: for an existential risk that could theoretically end the universe
Speaker 1: as we know it. M