WEBVTT - Biotechnology 0:00:03.080 --> 0:00:06.720 Probably more than any other field that poses an existential risk. 0:00:07.160 --> 0:00:10.440 The dangers of the biotech field are the easiest to understand. 0:00:11.160 --> 0:00:16.160 The field deals with bugs, viruses, bacteria, pathogens that can 0:00:16.280 --> 0:00:19.400 kill us if we're infected by them. And every one 0:00:19.440 --> 0:00:24.000 of us has experienced infectious disease firsthand, like the preschooler 0:00:24.079 --> 0:00:26.320 catching the flu and bringing it home and making the 0:00:26.360 --> 0:00:29.960 whole family sick, or having to cancel your vacation because 0:00:29.960 --> 0:00:32.120 the place you were going has become a zeke a 0:00:32.200 --> 0:00:37.159 hot spot. It's pretty basic stuff, and it's relatable to us. 0:00:38.200 --> 0:00:41.519 But when you dig deeper into the biotech field, it 0:00:41.600 --> 0:00:45.080 becomes clear that the risks it poses are maybe the 0:00:45.120 --> 0:00:49.800 most immediate of all the existential risks. The pathogens the 0:00:49.840 --> 0:00:52.800 field studies in the hopes of creating vaccines that can 0:00:52.840 --> 0:00:56.240 save lives pose a pretty severe threat as they are 0:00:57.360 --> 0:01:00.440 not too long ago. Wild viruses like small pox and 0:01:00.520 --> 0:01:04.440 influenza killed a lot of people, as we'll see in 0:01:04.480 --> 0:01:07.920 this episode, and bugs like that can still kill a 0:01:07.959 --> 0:01:12.800 lot of people, and that's threat enough. But the existential 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:16.360 threat from biotech comes from the type of research that 0:01:16.440 --> 0:01:20.480 began to proliferate in the early twenty one century. When 0:01:20.600 --> 0:01:24.240 high containment labs begin to mushroom around the world, and 0:01:24.280 --> 0:01:27.360 a type of research called gain of function really took off. 0:01:28.680 --> 0:01:32.520 No longer were researchers dealing with wild viruses and bacteria. 0:01:32.640 --> 0:01:36.600 They were forcing evolution in them by speeding up mutations 0:01:37.000 --> 0:01:42.360 and altering them genetically to be deadlier and more contagious. 0:01:42.360 --> 0:01:46.480 This kind of research is extremely dangerous. If a genetically 0:01:46.480 --> 0:01:49.440 altered bug escapes from a lab, it could kill a 0:01:49.600 --> 0:01:54.240 potentially staggering amount of people before it is contained. If 0:01:54.360 --> 0:01:58.000 it is contained, but if done right, the risks from 0:01:58.040 --> 0:02:02.960 these experiments can be minimized. The trouble is they're frequently 0:02:03.000 --> 0:02:06.200 not done right. As you'll see, the biotech field has 0:02:06.200 --> 0:02:09.480 a shocking track record of accidents and a willingness to 0:02:09.520 --> 0:02:14.880 take huge, possibly unnecessary risks. And what's most unsettling is 0:02:14.919 --> 0:02:18.360 that there is precious little oversight on the risky experiments 0:02:18.400 --> 0:02:23.119 being carried out around the world. Even seemingly innocuous experiments 0:02:23.400 --> 0:02:27.079 have the potential to produce catastrophic results. And I can 0:02:27.080 --> 0:02:29.840 show you now if you'll follow me to Canberra, the 0:02:29.919 --> 0:02:33.560 capital of Australia. We're back in two thousand. A pair 0:02:33.600 --> 0:02:37.720 of researchers named Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw are unpleasantly 0:02:37.760 --> 0:02:41.080 surprised with the results of an experiment they've just conducted. 0:02:43.200 --> 0:02:48.120 Australia has a significant mouse problem. Mice were probably introduced 0:02:48.160 --> 0:02:51.320 to the country as stowaways among the ships of the 0:02:51.320 --> 0:02:55.040 British settlers in the eighteenth century, and when they arrived, 0:02:55.160 --> 0:02:59.560 they began to spread and grow to unusually large numbers. 0:02:59.680 --> 0:03:03.000 Especial slee in the southeast, where Australia grows its grain. 0:03:04.240 --> 0:03:08.280 During what the country calls its mouse plagues, farms are 0:03:08.320 --> 0:03:12.720 overrun with mice that streamed from seemingly everywhere. The ground 0:03:12.800 --> 0:03:16.639 ripples with them. The mice are so abundant and aggressive 0:03:17.040 --> 0:03:19.720 that they can chew through the tires of farm equipment, 0:03:20.080 --> 0:03:25.480 and they attack pigs and poultry. On mouse plague caused 0:03:25.520 --> 0:03:28.880 nearly one hundred million dollars worth of damage to crops 0:03:28.880 --> 0:03:33.240 and farms. What Ramshaw and Jackson were looking for was 0:03:33.280 --> 0:03:36.480 a way to sterilize female mice by training their immune 0:03:36.480 --> 0:03:40.320 systems to attack their own eggs. To do that, the 0:03:40.400 --> 0:03:44.440 two biologists created a vaccine that contained a gene which 0:03:44.480 --> 0:03:47.440 codes for the production of something called inter luken four, 0:03:47.760 --> 0:03:52.200 which is a naturally occurring protein i L four stimulates 0:03:52.200 --> 0:03:56.360 mammals to produce antibodies to deliver the genes to the 0:03:56.440 --> 0:04:01.680 mice's DNA. The researchers used a virus because of a 0:04:01.760 --> 0:04:06.320 virus's unique ability to insert its own genetic information into 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:10.600 a cell's DNA and hijack a cells normal processes. They 0:04:10.640 --> 0:04:14.320 make ideal vehicles to deliver the main ingredient in a vaccine. 0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:18.320 The virus adds it into the cells genetic code along 0:04:18.360 --> 0:04:22.400 with its own genetic material. The cell produces whatever it 0:04:22.480 --> 0:04:24.960 finds in its genetic code, whether it was added there 0:04:24.960 --> 0:04:28.560 by a virus or by a human. It's pretty impressive 0:04:29.040 --> 0:04:34.120 researchers hijack a virus's ability to hijack a cell. Jackson 0:04:34.120 --> 0:04:38.480 and Ramshaw chose the virus that causes mousepox ectromelia as 0:04:38.520 --> 0:04:42.800 the vehicle for their vaccine. Normally, mousepox would kill a 0:04:42.839 --> 0:04:44.760 lot of the mice that were exposed to it in 0:04:44.800 --> 0:04:47.880 the study, but the researchers were using mice that had 0:04:47.920 --> 0:04:52.560 been previously vaccinated against mousepox, along with other mice that 0:04:52.640 --> 0:04:57.320 had been genetically altered to be totally immune to the disease. Few, 0:04:57.400 --> 0:04:59.800 if any, of the mice used in the study works 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:04.679 to die from exposure to the mousepox, but within nine 0:05:04.760 --> 0:05:08.880 days of receiving the vaccine, every single mouse in the 0:05:08.920 --> 0:05:13.360 study was dead. The mousepox had a one hundred percent 0:05:13.520 --> 0:05:17.599 mortality rate. It killed every mouse that had been exposed 0:05:17.600 --> 0:05:21.240 to it. The researchers found that the i L for 0:05:21.440 --> 0:05:25.480 gene had indeed increased anybody production in the mice as intended, 0:05:26.120 --> 0:05:30.919 but the increased inner lucan had another unanticipated effect. It 0:05:31.040 --> 0:05:35.200 also suppressed the mice's cell mediated response, a function of 0:05:35.200 --> 0:05:40.160 the immune system which wards off infections by viruses. By 0:05:40.200 --> 0:05:43.520 adding the i L four gene to the mouse pox virus, 0:05:43.560 --> 0:05:46.320 the surge of inter luken told the mice's immune system 0:05:46.360 --> 0:05:49.039 to lay down its arms, which paved the way for 0:05:49.240 --> 0:05:54.000 total annihilation by the mousepox virus, even among mice that 0:05:54.080 --> 0:05:56.880 had been genetically designed to be immune to the disease. 0:05:58.320 --> 0:06:02.279 Jackson and Ramshaw had x dently created a perfect killer 0:06:02.440 --> 0:06:08.359 of mice. Mousepox bears a resemblance to smallpox and humans. 0:06:08.839 --> 0:06:11.880 The two viruses are distantly related, and it was not 0:06:12.040 --> 0:06:14.920 lost on Ramshaw and Jackson what would happen if their 0:06:14.960 --> 0:06:19.560 technique was used with smallpox instead of mousepox. Jackson told 0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:22.480 new scientists, it would be safe to assume that if 0:06:22.520 --> 0:06:26.320 some idiot did put human ill four into human smallpox, 0:06:26.640 --> 0:06:31.760 they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically. Something like that would 0:06:31.800 --> 0:06:37.680 be monumentally bad. Smallpox is caused by the very ola virus. 0:06:37.800 --> 0:06:40.600 It's an ancient virus that has plagued humans for possibly 0:06:40.600 --> 0:06:43.800 as long as ten thousand years, and it's believed to 0:06:43.839 --> 0:06:47.280 have made the jump from either camels or gerbils, or 0:06:47.400 --> 0:06:50.520 possibly some extinct animal we don't know about, over to 0:06:50.680 --> 0:06:54.119 humans and spread along trade routes that crossed the Middle 0:06:54.120 --> 0:06:57.960 East to Asia and then eventually west over to Europe. 0:06:59.040 --> 0:07:02.120 Our earliest defend native evidence of smallpox dates back at 0:07:02.200 --> 0:07:05.599 least three thousand years, found on mummies of people who 0:07:05.640 --> 0:07:09.920 lived millennia ago, including the Egyptian pharaoh Ramsey's the fifth 0:07:10.960 --> 0:07:13.760 Ramsey's appears to bear the sign of the virus, the 0:07:13.840 --> 0:07:16.760 pox marks that are left behind when the pustules that 0:07:16.840 --> 0:07:21.920 cover the body scab and fall off. Those pustules come 0:07:22.120 --> 0:07:26.160 at the final stage of a very difficult disease. Within 0:07:26.200 --> 0:07:28.880 a couple of days of being exposed to smallpox for 0:07:28.920 --> 0:07:31.840 the first time, you will be leveled by a fever 0:07:32.120 --> 0:07:37.080 and flu like symptoms that incapacitate you for days. Sores 0:07:37.160 --> 0:07:40.720 develop in your mouth and they fill with fluid, and 0:07:40.840 --> 0:07:43.680 just as you overcome the fever and begin to feel better, 0:07:44.200 --> 0:07:48.200 the mouth sores erupt, which releases the virus filled fluid 0:07:48.400 --> 0:07:51.800 into the rest of your body, where it reappears as 0:07:51.840 --> 0:07:55.720 those pustules masses of tiny bumps that cover the skin 0:07:56.160 --> 0:08:01.800 and concentrate around your extremities. The uestull scab over and 0:08:01.880 --> 0:08:04.880 eventually they fall off, and when the last one falls, 0:08:05.280 --> 0:08:09.640 you are no longer contagious. If you survived the disease 0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:14.040 that is, smallpox kills by overwhelming your immune system with 0:08:14.080 --> 0:08:18.360 the protein that counteracts anybodies that would normally prevent infected 0:08:18.400 --> 0:08:23.280 cells from replicating the virus. To catch smallpox, it takes 0:08:23.360 --> 0:08:26.600 close contact with a person who is actively suffering from it, 0:08:27.080 --> 0:08:29.520 which meant that people who cared for the ill were 0:08:29.600 --> 0:08:33.040 usually the ones who came down with it. Once a 0:08:33.080 --> 0:08:36.520 person comes down with smallpox and survives, they are conferred 0:08:36.559 --> 0:08:39.800 a lifelong immunity to the disease, and even though they 0:08:39.840 --> 0:08:42.640 may still carry the virus, they aren't contagious to others. 0:08:43.000 --> 0:08:47.920 Even people who have never had smallpox before. By the 0:08:47.960 --> 0:08:52.520 Middle Ages, smallpox had settled into Europe, becoming endemic, which 0:08:52.520 --> 0:08:55.600 means it settled into the human population kind of made 0:08:55.640 --> 0:08:59.600 itself comfortable. It went into hiding and made the rounds 0:08:59.600 --> 0:09:01.679 when new comers who had never been exposed to the 0:09:01.760 --> 0:09:05.000 virus entered the towns of people who are already immune 0:09:05.040 --> 0:09:08.800 to it. So in Europe smallpox became mostly a disease 0:09:08.840 --> 0:09:13.520 of children and immigrants. The local adults had all either 0:09:13.640 --> 0:09:17.960 died from it or survived it and become immune. Once 0:09:17.960 --> 0:09:21.600 it became endemic, the mortality rate for smallpox hovered around 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:25.199 It killed about three out of every ten people who 0:09:25.240 --> 0:09:28.840 came in contact with it. But in the fifteenth century, 0:09:29.280 --> 0:09:32.520 Europe began to spill over its banks, and it brought 0:09:32.600 --> 0:09:35.520 the disease to places that had never encountered it before. 0:09:37.040 --> 0:09:41.240 West Africa was first visited by slave traders from Portugal 0:09:41.280 --> 0:09:45.120 and Spain, who brought pandemics with them. Many of the 0:09:45.200 --> 0:09:48.439 villages that were rated had never been exposed to the disease, 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:52.320 and so it spread quickly. The people suffering those outbreaks 0:09:52.320 --> 0:09:54.839 were stolen from their homes and they were taken to 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:58.480 holding camps along the coast, where the disease spread even 0:09:58.520 --> 0:10:02.400 more quickly. Those people were forced onto ships while they 0:10:02.400 --> 0:10:06.360 were actively ill, making the horrific experience of being enslaved 0:10:06.600 --> 0:10:10.679 even more brutal. Each time a ship set sail from 0:10:10.720 --> 0:10:14.880 Africa to the America's over stuffed with people ill from smallpox, 0:10:15.440 --> 0:10:18.800 it was like tossing a lit match onto a powder cake. 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:22.040 At first, the ships were too slow to make it 0:10:22.080 --> 0:10:24.760 to the New World before the smallpox burned itself out. 0:10:25.280 --> 0:10:28.800 The human cargo aboard were either no longer contagious what 0:10:28.920 --> 0:10:31.319 We're dead from it by the time they made land. 0:10:32.280 --> 0:10:36.480 But as ocean going technology improved, those ships got faster, 0:10:37.200 --> 0:10:40.360 and eventually one of those matches stayed lit and it 0:10:40.520 --> 0:10:46.120 set off the powder keg of the America's It is 0:10:46.160 --> 0:10:49.959 difficult to overstate the effect that European disease had on 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:54.240 North and South America. Not just smallpox, but a number 0:10:54.240 --> 0:10:58.760 of contagious disease began to rage at once, forming overlapping 0:10:58.840 --> 0:11:04.320 epidemics called sindemics. The Native Americans had never been exposed 0:11:04.360 --> 0:11:07.120 to these kinds of pathogens, and so they had no 0:11:07.320 --> 0:11:11.199 natural defenses against them, which allowed the diseases to spread 0:11:11.280 --> 0:11:22.280 at unimaginable rates. And kill untold numbers of people. It 0:11:22.360 --> 0:11:25.880 appears to have all started in what is now Mexico City. 0:11:26.559 --> 0:11:29.560 The Aztecs suffered losses of up to half of their 0:11:29.640 --> 0:11:34.200 population when the Spanish brought smallpox. A short An African 0:11:34.240 --> 0:11:37.360 slave whose name is lost to history, was suffering from 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:40.400 smallpox when he landed with an expedition led by the 0:11:40.440 --> 0:11:46.680 conquistador Panfello de Navarrees. In writing five years after the 0:11:46.720 --> 0:11:50.800 outbreak began, a Spanish fire who traveled to Mexico wrote 0:11:50.800 --> 0:11:55.880 of the devastation the diet inhapes like bed box. Many 0:11:55.960 --> 0:11:58.800 all theirs died of a starvation, because I said, we're 0:11:58.840 --> 0:12:01.480 all taken secret of more. And they could not care 0:12:01.559 --> 0:12:04.439 for each other, nor was there anyone to give them 0:12:04.440 --> 0:12:08.400 bread or anything else. In many places it happened that 0:12:08.480 --> 0:12:11.800 everyone in the house died, and as it was impossible 0:12:11.840 --> 0:12:14.719 to vary the great number of dead, they pulled down 0:12:14.720 --> 0:12:17.440 their houses over them in order to check the stinch 0:12:17.600 --> 0:12:20.440 that rushed from the dead bodies, so that their homes 0:12:20.800 --> 0:12:27.600 became their tombs. The disease spread like wildfire into the 0:12:27.679 --> 0:12:32.480 interior of the American continent. In the America's smallpox found 0:12:32.520 --> 0:12:36.640 what's called Virgin Territory a population that had no immunity, 0:12:37.040 --> 0:12:39.640 so everyone who came in contact with it fell ill. 0:12:40.600 --> 0:12:43.079 This left no one to care for people suffering from 0:12:43.080 --> 0:12:47.560 the disease, which increased the mortality right even further. As 0:12:47.640 --> 0:12:50.360 the sick fled their dead villages to look for helping 0:12:50.360 --> 0:12:54.320 others nearby, they brought the infection with them, and the 0:12:54.360 --> 0:12:58.680 cycle of disease began again and again. This happened over 0:12:58.760 --> 0:13:02.439 and over for centuries, leaving the Great Native American cultures 0:13:02.480 --> 0:13:07.160 in rubble. Explorers who came in later waves found destroyed, 0:13:07.440 --> 0:13:22.000 abandoned settlements filled with the dead. In places the virus appeared, 0:13:22.040 --> 0:13:27.160 the population fell by half two thirds. In some places, 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:31.200 nine out of every ten members of the Native American 0:13:31.240 --> 0:13:35.560 groups in contact with the Massachusetts Bay settlers died from 0:13:35.600 --> 0:13:40.160 sixteen seventeen to sixteen nineteen. The English Puritans, who arrived 0:13:40.160 --> 0:13:42.959 the following year took it that God had cleared the 0:13:43.040 --> 0:13:47.360 land for them. During the sixteen thirties, half of the 0:13:47.440 --> 0:13:51.200 Iroquois Confederation and the Huron around the Great Lakes died 0:13:51.880 --> 0:13:56.360 half in a decade. A single seventeen thirty eight outbreak 0:13:56.600 --> 0:13:59.640 killed half of the Cherokee tribe in the Carolinas and 0:13:59.720 --> 0:14:04.000 george Ja. In real numbers, these epidemics killed hundreds of 0:14:04.040 --> 0:14:08.120 thousands to millions of people at a time. Imagine a 0:14:08.200 --> 0:14:11.839 disease that can kill off of the people in your town. 0:14:14.200 --> 0:14:17.200 It's no wonder, then, that smallpox is considered one of 0:14:17.240 --> 0:14:21.800 the deadliest viruses in the history of humanity. It is 0:14:21.800 --> 0:14:24.920 credited with killing half a billion people in the twentieth 0:14:25.000 --> 0:14:28.880 century alone, the first eight tenths of the twentieth century, 0:14:28.960 --> 0:14:32.960 I should say. Back in nineteen sixty six, the World 0:14:33.040 --> 0:14:36.560 Health Organization of the u N led a global vaccination 0:14:36.600 --> 0:14:42.440 campaign and by it declared smallpox eradicated from planet Earth. 0:14:43.520 --> 0:14:46.560 This is a pretty big deal. Along with a cattle 0:14:46.640 --> 0:14:49.680 disease called render pest that's related to the virus that 0:14:49.760 --> 0:14:54.320 causes measles and humans, smallpox is the only contagious disease 0:14:54.640 --> 0:14:58.840 humanity has ever managed to eradicate. Right now, there is 0:14:58.920 --> 0:15:02.000 no living person earth who has a case of smallpox. 0:15:03.040 --> 0:15:05.120 But that's not to say that the very ola virus 0:15:05.480 --> 0:15:11.160 isn't still alive and well after the eradication campaign, the 0:15:11.240 --> 0:15:14.560 u N persuaded the global scientific community to give up 0:15:14.560 --> 0:15:18.920 its stocks of smallpox, and they were almost entirely successful, 0:15:19.040 --> 0:15:22.000 save for two nations which just happened to be the 0:15:22.000 --> 0:15:25.560 two most powerful on the planet, the nuclear superpowers the 0:15:25.560 --> 0:15:30.240 Soviet Union in the United States. Those two nations decided 0:15:30.280 --> 0:15:32.560 that it would be better for them to keep their 0:15:32.600 --> 0:15:37.880 stocks rather than destroy them. Ostensibly this was for scientific research, 0:15:38.600 --> 0:15:41.840 but both nations have been known to run illegal biological 0:15:41.840 --> 0:15:45.720 warfare programs, and the idea of them maintaining stocks of 0:15:45.760 --> 0:15:49.640 smallpox made the rest of the world uneasy. But this 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:52.560 being the height of the Cold War, no other nation 0:15:52.720 --> 0:15:55.760 was in much of a position to argue, so all 0:15:55.800 --> 0:15:59.320 smallpox samples on Earth would be stored under secure conditions 0:15:59.400 --> 0:16:03.360 in two occasions. In Russia, they are stored at the 0:16:03.400 --> 0:16:08.280 State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia. 0:16:08.520 --> 0:16:10.760 In the US, they are held at the Centers for 0:16:10.840 --> 0:16:16.080 Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Those two stockpiles still 0:16:16.120 --> 0:16:21.080 exist today. On a number of occasions, the U n 0:16:21.120 --> 0:16:25.400 again called for those stockpiles to be destroyed in two 0:16:25.400 --> 0:16:29.240 thousand seven and most recently in two thousand eleven, and 0:16:29.240 --> 0:16:32.440 it also tried to create a global agreement that once 0:16:32.520 --> 0:16:36.760 those final stocks were destroyed, any nation caught with smallpox 0:16:36.840 --> 0:16:41.160 could be charged with the crime against humanity. Unfortunately, in 0:16:41.200 --> 0:16:45.760 all cases, the un failed and the smallpox stocks remained intact. 0:16:47.360 --> 0:16:51.280 Contagious disease researchers are divided on the wisdom of keeping 0:16:51.320 --> 0:16:55.120 these stocks. The US and Russia continue to argue that 0:16:55.160 --> 0:16:58.360 we need to study Bariola so we can understand how 0:16:58.400 --> 0:17:03.160 the virus coevolved with our immune system. Hopefully we can 0:17:03.240 --> 0:17:07.119 use that knowledge to cure and prevent other diseases. The 0:17:07.200 --> 0:17:11.360 logic goes that if nature made smallpox from say, camel pox, 0:17:11.840 --> 0:17:16.280 it could create another pox on humanity. Studying smallpox could 0:17:16.320 --> 0:17:20.480 help us prepare for that. To plenty of other researchers, though, 0:17:20.680 --> 0:17:23.639 eradicating the very ola virus from the wild only to 0:17:23.720 --> 0:17:27.800 keep hundreds of samples of it in laboratories is madness. 0:17:28.840 --> 0:17:32.600 But regardless of where contagious disease researchers fall on the matter, 0:17:33.280 --> 0:17:36.880 most dismissed the idea of a small pox epidemic as 0:17:36.920 --> 0:17:40.640 being a genuine threat to humanity. It could be utterly 0:17:40.720 --> 0:17:44.359 catastrophic for any community where the virus showed up, true, 0:17:44.760 --> 0:17:48.720 and that is bad enough. But because smallpox requires close 0:17:48.760 --> 0:17:52.800 contact for transmission, it would be relatively easy to contain 0:17:52.840 --> 0:17:55.760 an outbreak and cut off the possibility of a pandemic. 0:17:56.520 --> 0:18:00.120 It almost certainly does not pose an existential threat to humanity. 0:18:00.960 --> 0:18:04.480 One that does, the one that keeps researchers awake at night, 0:18:05.320 --> 0:18:20.000 is the flu. Influenza is a common virus among humans. 0:18:20.560 --> 0:18:27.160 It also infects a lot of other animals too, like pigs, birds, seals, bats, horses, rodents, 0:18:27.480 --> 0:18:31.520 among others. The different types of flu are described and 0:18:31.560 --> 0:18:35.000 classified based on the two types of proteins found on 0:18:35.080 --> 0:18:40.440 the viruses outer envelope he magluten in and neuraminides. It's 0:18:40.480 --> 0:18:44.879 called the h X n Y naming convention, so you 0:18:45.000 --> 0:18:48.000 end up with flu names like H five and two. 0:18:49.240 --> 0:18:52.119 The flu typically has one of two traits when it 0:18:52.200 --> 0:18:56.920 comes to infecting us. It's either extremely deadly or it's 0:18:57.000 --> 0:19:01.680 extremely contagious. But once in a while, those two traits 0:19:01.760 --> 0:19:05.640 co evolved within a single virus, and the results can 0:19:05.680 --> 0:19:13.720 be catastrophic. November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, was a chilly, drizzly 0:19:13.800 --> 0:19:17.200 day in Compiegne, a town in the north of France, 0:19:17.600 --> 0:19:21.119 where representatives of the Allied Nations met with the leaders 0:19:21.119 --> 0:19:24.119 of Germany to sign the armistice that ended the First 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:28.600 World War from nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen, what was 0:19:28.640 --> 0:19:31.160 then called the Great War, claimed the lives of more 0:19:31.200 --> 0:19:37.080 than eighteen million people, soldiers and civilians. But as the 0:19:37.200 --> 0:19:41.879 armistice was being signed, another even deadlier killer than warfare 0:19:42.359 --> 0:19:45.160 was making short work of human lives around the globe. 0:19:45.840 --> 0:19:50.600 Type A H one and one influenza, the Spanish flu. 0:19:52.440 --> 0:19:56.960 In the span of just four months from September through 0:19:57.000 --> 0:20:03.919 December eighteen, fifty million people perhaps more died around the 0:20:03.960 --> 0:20:08.439 world from this new and deadly strain of flu. It 0:20:08.600 --> 0:20:12.160 killed like a bird flu and spread like a seasonal flu, 0:20:12.359 --> 0:20:17.080 and those two qualities combined made it an extraordinarily dangerous virus. 0:20:17.840 --> 0:20:21.280 As much as one third of the entire population of 0:20:21.280 --> 0:20:25.359 the world was infected by it that season. It took 0:20:25.440 --> 0:20:29.160 its heaviest toll on the young people under twenty five, 0:20:29.320 --> 0:20:32.159 whose immune systems had never been exposed to an H 0:20:32.240 --> 0:20:35.920 one and one strain before. Many young people who had 0:20:35.960 --> 0:20:40.080 been the picture of health just days before died suffocating 0:20:40.080 --> 0:20:42.600 on a bloody froth that they were too weak to 0:20:42.720 --> 0:20:47.000 cough from their airways. In some cases, people died within 0:20:47.119 --> 0:20:52.200 hours of their symptoms first appearing, then just as fast 0:20:52.200 --> 0:20:55.720 as it began. The epidemic ended by the summer of 0:20:55.800 --> 0:20:59.640 nineteen the flu had burned itself through the global population, 0:21:00.000 --> 0:21:03.800 and it disappeared. It almost certainly evolved into a new 0:21:03.880 --> 0:21:06.679 strain of flu that was far less deadly, and for 0:21:06.720 --> 0:21:10.119 all intents and purposes, the Spanish flu that had been 0:21:10.160 --> 0:21:14.960 such a killer of people went extinct. Where the Spanish 0:21:14.960 --> 0:21:19.000 flu came from remains a mystery. Initially, it was thought 0:21:19.000 --> 0:21:23.360 to have originated in Spain, hence the name. Other research 0:21:23.440 --> 0:21:27.960 that came later implicated China. China and Southeast Asia are 0:21:28.000 --> 0:21:31.280 commonly the source of bird flues the type that includes 0:21:31.320 --> 0:21:35.680 the Spanish flu. But one theory traces the eighteen flu 0:21:35.960 --> 0:21:38.879 back to Haskell County, Missouri, to one of the area's 0:21:38.920 --> 0:21:44.360 plentiful chicken farms, where it disappeared to is equally mysterious. 0:21:45.240 --> 0:21:49.199 For decades, researchers pined for a sample of the eighteen 0:21:49.280 --> 0:21:52.639 strain to study in search of answers to questions about it. 0:21:53.400 --> 0:21:56.119 The Spanish flu was the one that got away, a 0:21:56.200 --> 0:22:00.840 vicious killer that the epidemiological and medical communities were helpless 0:22:00.880 --> 0:22:04.840 to defend against, leaving no trace of itself aside from 0:22:04.880 --> 0:22:10.600 the dead in its wake. And then in nine microbiologist 0:22:10.760 --> 0:22:14.560 Johann Holton recovered a sample of the nineteen eighteen Spanish 0:22:14.600 --> 0:22:18.320 flu from where it was entombed in the Alaskan tundra. 0:22:20.560 --> 0:22:24.000 The tiny town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, had just eighty 0:22:24.040 --> 0:22:27.240 residents when the Spanish flu came to town in nineteen eighteen, 0:22:27.640 --> 0:22:31.399 mostly Native and up at Eskimos. In just a couple 0:22:31.440 --> 0:22:35.879 of months, seventy two of the eighty died. A group 0:22:35.920 --> 0:22:38.800 of gold miners were hired by the survivors to come 0:22:38.840 --> 0:22:41.720 dig a mass grave for the bodies and enter them 0:22:41.720 --> 0:22:46.680 in the perma frost. They lay undisturbed until nineteen fifty one. 0:22:47.600 --> 0:22:51.520 That year, Johan Holton arrived and asked the tribe's permission 0:22:51.800 --> 0:22:55.600 to break the grave open. In their frozen tomb, the 0:22:55.680 --> 0:22:59.920 victims were preserved mummified in a way, and Holton reasoned 0:23:00.040 --> 0:23:02.400 that the flu virus that killed them maybe as well. 0:23:03.520 --> 0:23:06.600 Through a slow process. In nineteen fifty one and then 0:23:06.640 --> 0:23:11.919 again in Holton opened the grave twice. He built a 0:23:11.960 --> 0:23:15.560 fire to thaw the permafrost below, Then he excavated the 0:23:15.600 --> 0:23:19.320 thawed soil. When he reached frozen ground again, he built 0:23:19.359 --> 0:23:24.920 another fire. Finally, on his second attempt, in he managed 0:23:24.960 --> 0:23:28.320 to call a living sample of the H one and 0:23:28.400 --> 0:23:31.440 one virus from the lung tissue of one of its 0:23:31.440 --> 0:23:36.679 preserved victims. In a few years, researchers cobbled together the 0:23:36.720 --> 0:23:40.879 genome of the virus. They synthesized it, and inserted the 0:23:40.920 --> 0:23:46.600 genetic material into a living cell. The Spanish flu lived 0:23:46.680 --> 0:23:50.840 once more. That researcher thought that was a useful line 0:23:50.840 --> 0:23:56.199 of inquiry, and there were other researchers who vehemently disagreed 0:23:56.440 --> 0:24:02.280 and thought it was a um an extraordinarily reckless thing 0:24:02.359 --> 0:24:06.600 to do. That is Beth Willis. She founded an organization 0:24:06.760 --> 0:24:11.960 that agitated for increased transparency from the government's biological labs 0:24:11.960 --> 0:24:17.040 in Frederick, Maryland, her community. The biotech field is not 0:24:17.240 --> 0:24:21.920 like other fields that pose existential risks. Like other fields, 0:24:21.960 --> 0:24:24.760 the research is dual use. It can be used to 0:24:24.800 --> 0:24:29.080 help or harm humanity. But unlike research in other fields 0:24:29.119 --> 0:24:32.080 like AI, which has yet to become clear to most 0:24:32.080 --> 0:24:36.080 people that it poses an existential risk, working with deadly 0:24:36.119 --> 0:24:40.600 pathogens is understood as dangerous work by people inside the 0:24:40.600 --> 0:24:46.439 biotech field and out. There's no ambiguity. But despite the 0:24:46.480 --> 0:24:50.560 inherent danger of working with deadly pathogens. The field has 0:24:50.560 --> 0:24:54.600 shown that it's willing to take potentially catastrophic risks in 0:24:54.640 --> 0:24:58.520 the name of research, and it's frequently divided over what 0:24:58.720 --> 0:25:03.359 risks are acceptable and which are not. One area that 0:25:03.440 --> 0:25:08.240 divides the field is gain of function research. Wherever the 0:25:08.280 --> 0:25:11.920 Spanish flu came from, it almost certainly evolved from an 0:25:11.920 --> 0:25:15.119 avian variety of flu that mixed with one more common 0:25:15.119 --> 0:25:20.040 to humans through a process called reassortment. That's the ability 0:25:20.040 --> 0:25:23.639 of viruses to swap genetic material with other viruses that 0:25:23.680 --> 0:25:27.000 are also living in the same host. What comes out 0:25:27.040 --> 0:25:29.760 can be a virus that is a genetic failure, which 0:25:29.800 --> 0:25:33.240 may be unable to survive or copy itself, or it 0:25:33.240 --> 0:25:36.600 could produce a deadly inefficient killer of humans. It's a 0:25:36.640 --> 0:25:40.840 genetic crap shoot. When a virus mutates or adapts in 0:25:40.880 --> 0:25:44.200 some way that makes it more efficient at infecting hosts, 0:25:44.560 --> 0:25:48.760 it is said to have gained function. Studying these mutations, 0:25:49.040 --> 0:25:53.200 how they take place, what mutations lead to which characteristics. 0:25:53.240 --> 0:25:57.880 That's gain of function research. By studying how influenza evolves, 0:25:58.320 --> 0:26:02.879 epidemiologists can get better at predicting what flu viruses have 0:26:03.040 --> 0:26:08.040 pandemic potential before they reach that level of deadliness, and 0:26:08.040 --> 0:26:10.960 there are two ways to do this. The most common 0:26:11.000 --> 0:26:14.560 method is to capture wild flu viruses in store them 0:26:14.600 --> 0:26:19.439 in a state of suspended animation, which usually involves freezing them. 0:26:19.560 --> 0:26:22.360 Later on, when new viruses are caught that have evolved 0:26:22.359 --> 0:26:26.280 from that same genetic line, researchers can compare the genomes 0:26:26.280 --> 0:26:29.160 of the older strain to the current strain and see 0:26:29.160 --> 0:26:33.400 how the virus has mutated. This is slow and laborious 0:26:33.440 --> 0:26:37.200 work and frustrating lee it relies on the rate of 0:26:37.320 --> 0:26:42.320 nature for evolutionary changes to take place, so some researchers 0:26:42.359 --> 0:26:46.960 are increasingly using another method where they hasten evolution and 0:26:47.040 --> 0:26:50.040 they forced the mutation of new and novel flu strains 0:26:50.080 --> 0:26:55.040 to study gain a function. Research itself is uh effort 0:26:55.080 --> 0:27:02.320 by researchers to increase the virulence or the infectiousness of 0:27:02.359 --> 0:27:09.399 a panthogen and potentially to decrease its ability to respond 0:27:09.640 --> 0:27:15.800 to countermeasures to treatment. That second, riskier method has become 0:27:15.800 --> 0:27:20.439 a hot button issue in microbiology lately. In two thousand eleven, 0:27:20.720 --> 0:27:25.480 two separate research groups working independently, one Dutch and one American, 0:27:26.000 --> 0:27:29.480 stunned the world when they announced that each had forced 0:27:29.520 --> 0:27:33.359 the mutation of an extremely deadly strain of flu, the 0:27:33.680 --> 0:27:38.080 H five and one avian flu, and created an entirely 0:27:38.160 --> 0:27:42.199 new version that is easily transmitted from mammal to mammal. 0:27:43.160 --> 0:27:47.600 In nature, the H five N one virus mainly infects birds. 0:27:47.720 --> 0:27:50.320 It has rarely made the jump to humans, and even 0:27:50.359 --> 0:27:53.439 then only to those who have spent prolonged periods in 0:27:53.440 --> 0:27:58.000