Speaker 1: Pushkin. I got my first real job in journalism at
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. It was the nineteen eighties. I was
Speaker 1: twenty three. I had never written a newspaper story before.
Speaker 1: I had no idea what I was doing. All round
Speaker 1: me people were shouting into telephones, banging out stories on deadline.
Speaker 1: I sat there, mute, terrified, convinced that I would be
Speaker 1: found out and fired. And then I was rescued by
Speaker 1: this crazy, opinionated, insanely productive, brilliant genius of a reporter who,
Speaker 1: if memory serves, used to cruise the newsroom every passover
Speaker 1: handing out matza. His name was Michael Spector. I was
Speaker 1: rescued by Michael Specter. He fed me stories, he wrote
Speaker 1: my leaves, he shared his byline. He taught me how
Speaker 1: to handle critics, which I had never forgotten. Somebody would
Speaker 1: call him up to register one complaint or another, and
Speaker 1: Michael would interrupt them and say, you seem to have
Speaker 1: forgotten one thing. I don't work for you, sage advice
Speaker 1: that has guided my career ever since I was the
Speaker 1: tadpole trying to stay afloat. Michael was my big, friendly
Speaker 1: guardian frog. Now why am I going on and on
Speaker 1: about Michael, because when I look out from my office
Speaker 1: here at Pushkin, whose office do I see Michael Spector,
Speaker 1: Tadpole and Frog still together? Michael, thank you for joining
Speaker 1: me today.
Speaker 2: Thank you now. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Michael Spector, friend of the show, New Yorker, science writer,
Speaker 1: mit professor, seer of the Future, total Ham.
Speaker 2: Now, normally when I do these things, normally I have
Speaker 2: like champagne in the green room and where is that?
Speaker 1: Well, you'll have to talk to Malcolm about that. Okay,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Revision is History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Glaubwe. Today in the show, an
Speaker 1: old friend gives me the inside scoop on the future
Speaker 1: of life on Earth. For Michael, the real significance of
Speaker 1: the last few years was not COVID nineteen. It's the
Speaker 1: mRNA vaccines because the synthetic biology technology behind those vaccines
Speaker 1: is going to change everything about our world. It's a
Speaker 1: revolution on the scale of the first computers. And Michael
Speaker 1: has written an audiobook about that revolution, Higher Animals, Vaccines,
Speaker 1: Synthetic biology, and the Future of life, and it is amazing.
Speaker 1: So I asked Michael to sit down for a chat
Speaker 1: about some of the big ideas in the audiobook and
Speaker 1: to play some of it.
Speaker 3: For me.
Speaker 1: One of the things that struck me is I was
Speaker 1: reading your book, was you make this very compelling and
Speaker 1: convincing argument. This is a revolution on the order of
Speaker 1: electricity being invented. It's that kind of level revolution. People
Speaker 1: refer to Twitter as being a revolution. Twitter is like,
Speaker 1: if that's a revolution, you know, they problem we have
Speaker 1: rob there should be like a revolution pyramid and we
Speaker 1: give there's like a level B, level, C, level, D
Speaker 1: level G level. Twitter is like F. Electricity is a
Speaker 1: this is a this.
Speaker 2: Is a R A plus because we're taking a physical science,
Speaker 2: biology and we're turning it into an information science. What
Speaker 2: that means is that if I think of something clever
Speaker 2: to do, like, for instance, create a vaccine against COVID,
Speaker 2: I can put it up on the Internet and people
Speaker 2: all over the world can download it within minutes, which
Speaker 2: is why we had a vaccine, which is what happened
Speaker 2: so rapidly for COVID. It was the first vaccine that
Speaker 2: was ever made in a lab. Loaded, the sequences were
Speaker 2: uploaded to the internet. Scientists all over the world downloaded it,
Speaker 2: put the parts together made the virus and infect itself. Moderna,
Speaker 2: the company that was the first of one of two
Speaker 2: to have an mRNA vaccine. They essentially had that vaccine
Speaker 2: in seven days. Yeah. The fastest vaccine that has ever
Speaker 2: been developed in humanity before was months, and that took
Speaker 2: four years.
Speaker 1: Polly, it took fifty.
Speaker 2: HIV we're pushing fifty now and it's killed tens of
Speaker 2: millions of people, and many very brilliant people have dedicated
Speaker 2: their lives to figuring it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, here's the puzzle I have. If this is
Speaker 1: a level A A plus revolution, and yet it seems
Speaker 1: to be that nobody knows about it. Like, for example,
Speaker 1: not a day passes when you can't hear some lament
Speaker 1: from some Silicon Valley person, which is all about how
Speaker 1: you know the Remember the famous they promised is flying planes,
Speaker 1: and all we got was fourteen characters. Actually we did
Speaker 1: get something way better than flying planes. But for some
Speaker 1: reason you're not paying any attention to it. Why have
Speaker 1: we ignored this revolution?
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of it is expectations, and I have
Speaker 2: to say I'm in disrespect not a lover of Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley's approach because their approach to synthetic biology is often
Speaker 2: there are no billionaires, there's no billion dollar companies. You
Speaker 2: can't quadruple your investment in an hour and a half.
Speaker 2: We don't want that, and the fact is to take
Speaker 2: a little while. But there have been remarkable advances constantly,
Speaker 2: and I go into them in this book and some
Speaker 2: to tell. But I think when I tell people who
Speaker 2: are not scientists that biology has become like information, it's
Speaker 2: just like computers, except instead of bits and bytes, we
Speaker 2: use DNA, letters, ACTNG. They're like, what how do you
Speaker 2: make it? Well, we have DNA printers, we can write DNA,
Speaker 2: we can put them together, we can create DNA, and
Speaker 2: we can rearrange DNA in any way that we want.
Speaker 2: If that's not a revolution, If being able to sort
Speaker 2: of rewrite the basic elements of life isn't a revolution
Speaker 2: on this planet, I just don't know what that word means.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, when you were doing this book, what was
Speaker 1: the coolest, weirdest, most fun moment?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, for me, in chapter four, I interviewed
Speaker 2: a blackfooted ferret. Well that's a defensive ferret, chatter way,
Speaker 2: And I do mean, well, when you interviewed the ferret, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's very rare that I get to interview an endangered
Speaker 2: animal of any kind. It happens to me the most
Speaker 2: endangered species in America. And it's endangered because for a
Speaker 2: lot of reasons, but one of them, the significant one,
Speaker 2: is it gets the plague, the black plague, get the
Speaker 2: black well, they get a thing called silvadic plague.
Speaker 1: But it's thought life for a ferret without being susceptible too.
Speaker 2: It's hard, It's really hard. And the thing is, there's
Speaker 2: a vaccine for the plague and it works on ferrits.
Speaker 2: You can't run around Wyoming, Utah, all the Western States
Speaker 2: vaccinating every ferret. It's just crazy.
Speaker 1: Why because they're vaccine skeptics.
Speaker 2: Or because you just can't catch them all.
Speaker 1: They're in the wrong part of the country.
Speaker 2: Live free or die of maybe, I'm sure. What you
Speaker 2: can do is you can take that vaccine and you
Speaker 2: can splice it into the DNA of a ferret so
Speaker 2: that it passes on the antibodies to its progeny. So
Speaker 2: basically it is a heritable vaccine and you're born vaccinated
Speaker 2: against the plague. And that's so.
Speaker 1: Are we going to do that with us with non ferrets?
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, we will eventually do that, but I'm
Speaker 2: not sure we'll do it with vaccines. I think when
Speaker 2: it comes to changing our DNA, I think the first
Speaker 2: thing we have to say is is there a really
Speaker 2: compelling reason to do that? And if you have a vaccine,
Speaker 2: if you have something you can like shoot in your
Speaker 2: arm or swallow, that'll take care of a disease. I'm
Speaker 2: not so sure that rewriting the basic fundamental code of
Speaker 2: humanity is the way to go. Yeah, but there will
Speaker 2: be diseases that people want to eliminate, and we will
Speaker 2: be able to eliminate them in that way, and it
Speaker 2: will start a kind of interesting slippery slope of how
Speaker 2: do we decide what to do?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Wait, so interview in the ferret that was high
Speaker 1: on the list. Yeah, the vaccine skeptic ferret. What's the
Speaker 1: number two?
Speaker 2: Well, this is a personal highlight for me because I've
Speaker 2: spent so many years writing about things like genetically modified
Speaker 2: products and having people scream about how dangerous they are
Speaker 2: and which they are not. And a company called Ginkgo
Speaker 2: Bioworks went public in late twenty twenty one, and I
Speaker 2: went to the day on the New York Stock Exchange
Speaker 2: when they were announcing their offering, and the whole floor
Speaker 2: of the New York Stock Exchange was chanting DNA, d A,
Speaker 2: and there were huge pictures all around. I love GMOs,
Speaker 2: And it was like I died and went to some weird,
Speaker 2: perverted heavens.
Speaker 1: Because only found your people on Wall Street. Wait, if
Speaker 1: you're a company that's doing work on genetic modification and
Speaker 1: you want to avoid the kind of bad publicity and
Speaker 1: nut jobs that have plagued your field, don't call yourself Dinko, bioworks, whatever, Ginko, Ginko,
Speaker 1: it's worse. Call yourself acme. You know, better products inc
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 2: Ginko is a three thousand year old Chinese tree. It's
Speaker 2: the both. But you're I mean, you're right. Look, Synthetic
Speaker 2: biology is not an ideal name for a discipline in
Speaker 2: which we make things with biology because it scares the
Speaker 2: crap out of a lot of people. But it's hard
Speaker 2: to undo a name that exists and replace it. And
Speaker 2: so that's where we are, and so I think the
Speaker 2: thing we need to do, Like if you go to Ginko,
Speaker 2: their motto is we want to grow biology. We don't
Speaker 2: want to make it. We don't want factories we don't
Speaker 2: want chemicals. We're just going to grow stuff in a vat.
Speaker 2: We're going to grow nitrogen in a vat. We're going
Speaker 2: to grow dyes so that you that are completely benign,
Speaker 2: so that you don't have to use these horrible chemicals
Speaker 2: to make blue jeens. And they're doing that, and it's
Speaker 2: really kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: Wait, Michael, in a book that began with smallpox moved
Speaker 1: on to some of the most serious existential questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we get the blue jens.
Speaker 1: You end up getting to someone who solved the blue
Speaker 1: jen dye problem.
Speaker 2: It's all of a piece. It's an environmental problem that
Speaker 2: is a result of us having to rely on chemicals.
Speaker 2: And what they're saying is we don't need to build
Speaker 2: with chemistry. We can build with biology, and we can
Speaker 2: do all sorts of stuff. We can do medicines, we
Speaker 2: can do environmental remediation. If there's something like I mean,
Speaker 2: it would bottle your mind to know how much blue
Speaker 2: dye is made and how ruinous it is for the environment.
Speaker 2: So if you could get rid of those millions of
Speaker 2: tons of year and just grow it into that in
Speaker 2: a way that isn't chemically derived, you know, I taught
Speaker 2: bioengineering for a while at Stanford, and those students were
Speaker 2: more engineers than they were biologists, and they were trying
Speaker 2: to figure out how to apply engineering to cells. And
Speaker 2: in a lab now you'll have people who know a
Speaker 2: lot about biology, but they might know more about systems
Speaker 2: biology and computers and engineering. And you can't really do
Speaker 2: biology anymore unless you have those people ready to call.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of the son of a friend of
Speaker 1: mine is one of those brainy Stanford engineering types, and
Speaker 1: he does computer science and he works at some startup,
Speaker 1: you know, but if you talk to him, it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: So he's whatever he is twenty two. It's clear he
Speaker 1: talks about things going on in the world of science
Speaker 1: in exactly the way he talks about computer code. It's
Speaker 1: all the same, it is. It's really interesting. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I grew up like you, writing about these
Speaker 1: disciplines as if they were each in a kind of
Speaker 1: fortified castle on a different hill in southern Italy, right,
Speaker 1: and you had to throw on the hill and you know,
Speaker 1: jump get over the drawbridge in order to understand what
Speaker 1: was going on the discipline. Now it's like those walls
Speaker 1: are down, those walls are and sort of what your
Speaker 1: book is about that if the walls come down, it's
Speaker 1: it's exciting, but it's also kind of terrifying.
Speaker 2: We hope I make that point clearly in the book.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think this is a really exciting time,
Speaker 2: and I don't think it's hyped to say we're going
Speaker 2: to create a lot of solutions to terrible problems. I
Speaker 2: also don't think it's hyped to say that you know
Speaker 2: it used to be. It is like moving from a
Speaker 2: giant main frame computer where it used to take up
Speaker 2: four rooms to a computer on our phone that's more
Speaker 2: powerful than what's sent astronauts to the moon. Well, that's
Speaker 2: going to happen. It's beginning to happen with biology. And
Speaker 2: while that is great, it also means there's going to
Speaker 2: be lots of people who are going to be able
Speaker 2: to design things on their phone. And some of those things,
Speaker 2: either on purpose or by accident, are not going to
Speaker 2: be things we want whipping around the universe or made.
Speaker 2: And so we have to really start paying attention to
Speaker 2: how easy it's going to be to make viruses, to
Speaker 2: alter viruses, and that's one of the things with smallpox.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is now possible, very very hard to do,
Speaker 2: and not a lot of people could do it. To
Speaker 2: make smallpox. Uh, scientists in Canada famously made horsebox, which
Speaker 2: was a cousin of smallpox. Once you start being able
Speaker 2: to make those things, you can make them in such
Speaker 2: a way that they evade the current vaccines. We can
Speaker 2: then develop new vaccines, and you're in a really ugly
Speaker 2: arms race. So we need to be careful about that.
Speaker 2: And for once we need to ask a question that
Speaker 2: we never ask, which is are there technologies we shouldn't use?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, so you've written Higher Animals is essentially a
Speaker 1: book about this revolution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I started with smallpox, which there's a
Speaker 2: bit in the first chapter about the last great smallpox
Speaker 2: scare in the United States, which is in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: seven in New York. Yeah. I mean a person got
Speaker 2: on a bus and came to the city and he
Speaker 2: could have wiped out the entire population. So, yeah, someone
Speaker 2: came to New York City carrying.
Speaker 1: Small parks in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty seven. Yeah, and you don't know that
Speaker 2: it's not written on your shoulder. There's no way of
Speaker 2: knowing you're infected. And you can create an incredible epanemen.
Speaker 1: So there was legit. There was a legitimate fear in
Speaker 1: the lifetime of my mom and your mom that New
Speaker 1: York City could have been wiped out by one of
Speaker 1: the most one of the scariest epidemics in human history.
Speaker 2: Incredibly legitimate fear.
Speaker 1: And the chapter we're going to play for you is
Speaker 1: about what happened next.
Speaker 2: And I won't give anything away to accept to say
Speaker 2: that New York City stories.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, we can, we can. We can confirm that
Speaker 1: the city is vexxillare I just thought of a better
Speaker 1: title for your book.
Speaker 2: Where were you three months ago? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What pandor pox?
Speaker 2: That is good.
Speaker 1: That's good, Michael. This has been wonderful. The book Hire
Speaker 1: Animals is amazing, and I encourage all of you listening
Speaker 1: to stick around and listen to chapter one.
Speaker 2: Thanks Mausman. Great wonderful.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's your cliffhanger, the near destruction of New York City.
Speaker 1: How did they stop it? You'll find out in this
Speaker 1: amazing chapter excerpt right after the break. The year is
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. A man named Eugene Lebar has come
Speaker 1: to New York City and died of smallpox, and the
Speaker 1: health commissioner, the amazingly named Israel Weinstein, has to figure
Speaker 1: out how to stop the disease before it wipes out
Speaker 1: the whole city. Oh and a lot of people are
Speaker 1: about to gather in one place for a big parade.
Speaker 1: Let me just say, this is an amazing, gripping story.
Speaker 1: Like you think the Last of Us is good, you
Speaker 1: haven't seen anything yet. Roll tape.
Speaker 2: Many city officials were dismayed to find Israel Weinstein in
Speaker 2: charge of this crisis. He was new on the job
Speaker 2: and had come from the Bureau of Health Education, where
Speaker 2: he'd mainly worked with the press. Also, Weinstein seemed kind
Speaker 2: of strange. He installed a chin up bar at the
Speaker 2: door of his office, and he rarely walked in or
Speaker 2: out without doing a few pull ups. Few members of
Speaker 2: the medical establishment had even met this new commissioner, and
Speaker 2: he was about to face the biggest challenge any American
Speaker 2: health official had seen in decades. James Imperato, who would
Speaker 2: later serve as commissioner himself, knows the kind of challenge
Speaker 2: Weinstein faced.
Speaker 4: He was appointed, and many of the leadership kind of
Speaker 4: treated that somewhat scornfully. I didn't think he had what
Speaker 4: it took.
Speaker 2: Weinstein got the lab results on Good Friday, April fourth.
Speaker 2: That weekend, New Yorkers would pack churches throughout the city
Speaker 2: and gather for the annual Easter Parade.
Speaker 5: Each year, the Easter Parade brings out much finery and
Speaker 5: startling millinery, and some unusual participants.
Speaker 2: If just one person at the parade had been infected,
Speaker 2: even among a vaccinated population, the resulting outbreak could paralyze
Speaker 2: the city. Weinstein had to plan for the worst possible outcome,
Speaker 2: and that meant New York would need to launch the
Speaker 2: most aggressive public health campaign in American history. It simply
Speaker 2: wasn't going to be enough to vaccinate the hospital staff somehow,
Speaker 2: they would have to vaccinate everyone.
Speaker 3: For your own sea and for that of your family's
Speaker 3: and friends. Please don't take a jack be vaccinating too night.
Speaker 2: Doctor Weinstein, the New York City Health Commissioner, knew how
Speaker 2: quick cleovirus can spread in one of the world's most
Speaker 2: densely populated cities, and he needed to stop it before
Speaker 2: it really started. The Easter Parade came only two days
Speaker 2: after the city received the test results, and a million
Speaker 2: people turned out. At that point, fewer than a thousand
Speaker 2: had been vaccinated. There was one ray of hope. If
Speaker 2: a smallpox vaccine is administered soon enough, it can protect
Speaker 2: people even after they've been exposed. So there was a
Speaker 2: clear reason to get one. And just days after the parade,
Speaker 2: news broke that smallpox had infected several other people. The
Speaker 2: epidemiologist James Imprato has studied this period and says New
Speaker 2: Yorker's were practically storming local clinics demanding to be inoculated.
Speaker 4: The department has held him very very high esteem. It
Speaker 4: really was, and it had a large infrastructure of district
Speaker 4: health centers and milk stations which were really well baby.
Speaker 2: Clinics, and they were called milk stations.
Speaker 4: Now they were called milk stations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't even know that. Yeah.
Speaker 4: They would give free milk out to mothers for their infants,
Speaker 4: and usually in a resource disadvantage areas of sitting.
Speaker 2: Was that one of the key places where people were
Speaker 2: vaccinated in lintin four.
Speaker 4: They vaccinated people everywhere. They even vaccinated them in police stations.
Speaker 4: They used every possible venue that was available, and certainly
Speaker 4: they mustered private practitioners, of which there were many in
Speaker 4: those years.
Speaker 2: They were not.
Speaker 4: Really group practices at that point.
Speaker 2: The mayor received his vaccination in front of the press Corps.
Speaker 2: World War two air marshals went door to door making
Speaker 2: sure people knew where they could get their shots. Members
Speaker 2: of the New York Philharmonic received their shots after a
Speaker 2: concert at the Lyric Theater. Anybody who had been exposed
Speaker 2: was offered a choice get vaccinated or endure twenty one
Speaker 2: days of surveillance by the Health Department. Everybody, it seemed,
Speaker 2: was getting vaccinated. At the time, the Health Department possessed
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand doses of smallpox vaccine. That
Speaker 2: was not remotely enough to meet the demand. The mayor
Speaker 2: convened an emergency meeting with the heads of the seven
Speaker 2: American pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines. He asked for a
Speaker 2: commitment to provide six million doses. The Army and Navy
Speaker 2: also chipped in. The campaign was dramatic, but somehow the
Speaker 2: city met the demand. Thousands of people stood in line,
Speaker 2: often through the night, to get their shocks. James in
Speaker 2: Prato was a child in New York at the time.
Speaker 2: He remembers those events as if they happened last week.
Speaker 4: Two of my uncles were Cornwell graduates, and they had
Speaker 4: private practices. In one of them vaccine me. I recall
Speaker 4: that very well. He came at me with a huge,
Speaker 4: long needle, which I thought he was going to inject
Speaker 4: in its entirety into my arm, But it was to
Speaker 4: scrape and scrape in the vaccine. So they had they
Speaker 4: had widespread cooperation, and they were and they did not
Speaker 4: have any difficulty getting people to come out to be vaccinated.
Speaker 4: They really didn't.
Speaker 2: Some of that theatrical atmosphere was captured years later in
Speaker 2: a dark melodramatic film called The Killer That Stalked New
Speaker 2: York about a woman who started what else a smallpox outbreak.
Speaker 5: Oh no, she didn't field death out of the end
Speaker 5: of a gun or off the point of a night.
Speaker 5: She delivered at holesing, just by walking through a crowd.
Speaker 5: The tragedy was she didn't know she was dead. Even
Speaker 5: all Sheila knew she had a headache.
Speaker 2: It's pretty standard more stuff, not exactly high art. But
Speaker 2: the best part, the strangest part, is the vaccination montage.
Speaker 3: We have to stop it, get to the people first,
Speaker 3: beat the disease, vaccinate the whole city.
Speaker 2: That's really how it happened. Six million people vaccinated in
Speaker 2: a month, most of them in the course of about
Speaker 2: two weeks. Almost unimaginably, the city was declared free of
Speaker 2: smallpox by the middle of April, just weeks after the
Speaker 2: Easter parade. In all, two people died Lebar and the
Speaker 2: pregnant wife of the many infected. Twelve other New Yorkers
Speaker 2: became ill. Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein had to deal with
Speaker 2: the type of misinformation that has now become so familiar.
Speaker 2: But vaccination was an easy sell to New Yorkers in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty seven. The truth had little competition.
Speaker 3: At no time has any such number been vaccinated and
Speaker 3: such work period and thought noble.
Speaker 2: It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the city's achievement.
Speaker 2: It prevented a potentially disastrous outbreak, and yet almost nobody
Speaker 2: has heard of Israel Weinstein today. Where's his statue, his plaque?
Speaker 2: When James Improtu was appointed to Weinstein's old job, New
Speaker 2: York City Health Commissioner in nineteen seventy six, Weinstein was
Speaker 2: still alive, although he had already been forgotten and Proto
Speaker 2: decided to give him.
Speaker 4: A call, and he was then living in Brooklyn Heights
Speaker 4: in Brooklyn, and I did. I did tell him something.
Speaker 4: And I used to keep a schinning bar at the
Speaker 4: doorway of the Commissioner's office, and I asked him he
Speaker 4: was still doing it. He said, oh, of course I am,
Speaker 4: he said. I took the bar with me and I left.
Speaker 2: Did you like him? Did you think he was a
Speaker 2: good guy?
Speaker 4: Oh? He was very agreeable on the phone, Yes he was.
Speaker 4: I think in person he generally was considered that way.
Speaker 4: I mean when I was in the health department in
Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies, there were many people who remembered him.
Speaker 4: They remembered him, most of course for the smallpox vaccination
Speaker 4: campaign and also for his chinning boar.
Speaker 2: Doctor Weinstein left his job as city health commissioner soon
Speaker 2: after the outbreak, but his massive smallpox eradication campaign influenced
Speaker 2: more than a few of today's public health officials.
Speaker 6: New York City in March and April of nineteen forty
Speaker 6: seven vaccinated six million, three hundred and fifty thousand people,
Speaker 6: five million of which they did in two weeks. I
Speaker 6: was a six year old boy who was one of
Speaker 6: those who got vaccinated.
Speaker 2: Anthony S. Fauci the United States leading infectious disease expert
Speaker 2: has tried to do with COVID for all of America
Speaker 2: what Weinstein did for New York, and the response could
Speaker 2: hardly be more different. Throughout the COVID pandemic, Fauci has
Speaker 2: been threatened with death on a near daily basis. Members
Speaker 2: of Congress have tried to have him indicted and attempted
Speaker 2: to pass laws to prevent him from being paid. Fauci
Speaker 2: has frequently been accused of what he has spent his
Speaker 2: entire adult life being a government scientist. At one point,
Speaker 2: during the nineteen forty seven smallpox scare, Weinstein stated that
Speaker 2: universal vaccination was the only safeguard against an epidemic. I
Speaker 2: began writing this book in the Story of the nineteen
Speaker 2: forty seven vaccination Drive at the height of the fourth
Speaker 2: wave of the COVID pandemic in the United States, and
Speaker 2: it was far from the last. That wave came in
Speaker 2: spite of the widespread availability of vaccines that are far
Speaker 2: safer than the small pop vaccine they used in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty seven. Sure America was a different country then. It
Speaker 2: was a society that sought to protect people from home.
Speaker 2: Authority was trusted and respected. The words science and progress
Speaker 2: were cheered, not denounced. Those six million New Yorkers required
Speaker 2: little coercion, few incentives, and no meaningful debate. Over the years,
Speaker 2: I have often asked myself what changed? Why did we
Speaker 2: become a country so suspicious of authority and of science
Speaker 2: that millions of people would rather risk death than take
Speaker 2: a vaccine that has perhaps the best safety profile of
Speaker 2: any in history. I needed some wider context for what's
Speaker 2: happened to us. For that, There's no better person to
Speaker 2: visit than one Enriquez. Few people have thought more deeply
Speaker 2: about the impact that vaccines have had on human civilization.
Speaker 2: And Rikaz, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project
Speaker 2: at the Harvard Business School, is a futurist, a genomic entrepreneur,
Speaker 2: and a historian of science. Together with J. Craig Venter,
Speaker 2: who led the team that assembled the first draft of
Speaker 2: the Human Genome Project, and Rica has also founded Synthetic Genomics.
Speaker 2: Enricas lives in a pleasant suburb of Boston. When I
Speaker 2: told him I was looking into the history of the
Speaker 2: smallpox vaccine, he abruptly stood up and left the room.
Speaker 2: He returned a few minutes later with a long, narrow
Speaker 2: and ornately illustrated book, clearly something old and valued, and
Speaker 2: he began to page through it.
Speaker 7: What it is is, it's an inquiry into the causes
Speaker 7: and effects of variolation vaccine in Gloucestershire on the cowpox.
Speaker 7: And this is done by Edar Jenner. And the fact
Speaker 7: that some of our listeners don't immediately know who Edward
Speaker 7: Gender is, even though he saved more lives than almost
Speaker 7: anybody else before a sense is really important.
Speaker 2: He and I were both staring at this antique folio
Speaker 2: with genuine reverence.
Speaker 7: And so what you're looking at is you know, when
Speaker 7: he addressed the kinge and talked about the public causes
Speaker 7: of vaccines and such and the inquiry into.
Speaker 2: Varulation, Jenner understood that the science of his discovery would
Speaker 2: only take him so far. Vaccination works on a population,
Speaker 2: not just a person, and it's a political problem as
Speaker 2: much as it is a scientific one. So Jenner couldn't
Speaker 2: just be a scientist. He was an advocate and the
Speaker 2: report Enriquez held in his hands was part of Jenner's advocacy.
Speaker 2: It looked more like the magnet carta than what it was,
Speaker 2: a statistical analysis like those that appear in modern medical
Speaker 2: journals every day.
Speaker 7: This is one of the most important medical records in
Speaker 7: the world, and so it's a report on how you
Speaker 7: saved hundreds of millions of human beings, and very few
Speaker 7: people value it. And one of the scenarios that you
Speaker 7: wouldn't come up with is that a political party where
Speaker 7: most of the people in the senior levels of that
Speaker 7: party have been vaccinated, would advocate for their followers not
Speaker 7: to be vaccinated. And that's just such a perverse scenario
Speaker 7: that even in a Michael Crichton Andromeda Strained type book,
Speaker 7: it would be unbelievable. What's extraordinary about these days is
Speaker 7: that the unbelievable has become reality. We never expected American
Speaker 7: democracy to be questioned. We never expected science, which is
Speaker 7: what's made this country the country it is. And having
Speaker 7: that question is, i think, not just questioning this science,
Speaker 7: but questioning the very idea of what America is.
Speaker 2: I'm wonder if people really are questioning the idea of America.
Speaker 2: I think maybe it's more that we just take our
Speaker 2: remarkable achievements for granted, achievements like the development of vaccines.
Speaker 7: What's fascinating is how many times we've forgotten this. So
Speaker 7: we go through these cycles where we forget just how
Speaker 7: important vaccines are. We go through cycles where we forget
Speaker 7: to develop vaccines, We go through cycles where we make
Speaker 7: it too expensive to develop vaccines. And one of the
Speaker 7: things that's terribly frustrating about the medical system until COVID,
Speaker 7: which is a horrendous strategy, but one of the things
Speaker 7: that happened during COVID is we remembered again just how
Speaker 7: important vaccines are.
Speaker 2: The COVID vaccine will almost certainly prove to be one
Speaker 2: of the major scientific advances of our time. We produced
Speaker 2: them by the one hundred million safely and with remarkable speed,
Speaker 2: so clearly one is right. We've been reminded of the
Speaker 2: critical role vaccines play in all our lives, and yet
Speaker 2: with so many people refusing the vaccine, hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 2: maybe even millions, have died needlessly. Reluctance is a perfectly
Speaker 2: understandable reaction to anything new. People often reject truly disruptive technologies,
Speaker 2: at least for a while. The telegraph was shunned when
Speaker 2: it was introduced. People once recoiled at the thought of
Speaker 2: entering an elevator without a human operator. The debate over
Speaker 2: driverless cars seems as if it will rage for decades.
Speaker 2: But these vaccines are not just another challenging new technology.
Speaker 2: They are our main defense against a novel pathogen passing
Speaker 2: like a wrecking ball through the human population. Are the
Speaker 2: clearest sign yet of a revolution in biology, one that
Speaker 2: can save and enhance the lives of people everywhere, if
Speaker 2: we can figure out how to trust science again, and
Speaker 2: if scientists can figure out how to earn that trust.
Speaker 1: That was an abridge version of chapter one of Higher Animals, Vaccines,
Speaker 1: Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life by Michael Spector.
Speaker 1: Get your copy at Pushkin dot Fm, Slash Audiobooks, or
Speaker 1: wherever you buy your audiobooks. Revision's history is produced by
Speaker 1: Ben Nadaph Haffrey, Leeman, Gesteu, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Our share runner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luisqira,
Speaker 1: mastering by Sarah Bruguer, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Julia Barton, who also edited Higher Animals, and
Speaker 1: to the rest of the audiobooks team. I'm Malcolm glam