Part One: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift
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Call zone media. Oh, wow. Sophie, I don't know. I don't know if we can put that on the air. I mean, that's actionable threats against a sitting...

Wow. I mean, just Sophie, that's, it's just dangerous to be saying stuff like that in this day and age. I know. Um, let's distract the audience, uh, and the federal agents listening in by bringing on our guest today, who definitely doesn't say stuff like that. Langston Kerman Langston. Yeah. Do you condemn Sophie's statements, assuming they ever get out in an edited form? I was, I was tempted to, to hang up the zoom right away. I,

I understand. It was so inflammatory that I said, I can't be a part of this. No. No, it's time to bring peace to the country. You know, that's what we all need to be focusing on is peace. 100%. We got to get back to what we were, which was normal and peaceful. Which was normal and good. Everyone knows things used to be good in this country for everybody, right? That's the thing we all know. We were chilling for a long time. We were so cool. Yeah. Things were so great.

And I think what'll get us back to that is talking about puppies, right? Everybody loves a good puppy, right? I like puppies. Puppies are wonderful. And there's been some really cool new puppy news. I ain't really nervous. What is he talking about? Oh, God, we're going to talk about puppy mills. No, don't worry. This is a fun one, everybody. We're going to have a good time this week. Like, it is a guy I think is a piece of shit, but it's going to be fun.

I will say, before you even go, one of the only taboos that exists in film and television is murdering dogs. Yes. And I'm getting so scared before we even start. I know nothing. No dogs are provably harmed yet in the making of this story, although I do have to specify yet.

But there is like a dog-like creature involved because if you spend any time online, if you've been on social media or just been watching the news, I think probably close to 100% of our audience caught this. There was a big story a couple weeks back about how this company brought back the dire wolf, right? That's right. Which is an extinct kind of wolf in the world.

And they did it using some, I think we can call it Jurassic Park style machinations, right? Like that's what everyone thought of. And this is all the work of an actual like science, like bioscience startup called Colossal Biosciences, which is just by name a company that could not sound more like it belonged in a Michael Crichton novel if they just called it InGen, right? Like it's amazing. It really feels like a fourth grader was like, I got it.

Yeah, trying to rewrite. Like when I was in fourth grade trying to rewrite Jurassic Park. Yes. Okay, okay. We'll get sued. That's fine. I'll change it. It's fine. Michael Crichton's not going to sue a four-year-old. Colossal. Biosciences. Original. Yeah, so it'll publish this. This is an iHeart Podcast.

How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice.

For an in-depth look at the facts, see What Happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of What Happened to Talena Zarr. It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her. I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason. I kept just kind of asking everybody, anyone else think this is strange?

You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl. You can now get access to episodes of What Happened to Talena Zarr 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. I'm a subscriber and you should be too. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Which he knew he left behind.

Listen to True Crime Tonight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So most news coverage of this whole dire wolf thing kind of casually accepted the PR claims being made by Colossal and its co-founder slash scientific spokesman, Dr. George Church.

Time published an article with the title, The Return of the Dire Wolf. And it's as hype an article as it could possibly be. And on the front of it, there's a photo of a very charismatic looking wolf as the header image. I mean, that's a beautiful wolf, right? That wolf has charm. That wolf has charm. That is a screen ready wolf.

You can tell that wolf knows how the business works. That's not a wolf that you gotta put a caretaker on. They said that they put some dire wolf genes into this wolf. I think they might have stuck one or two Tom Cruise genes in there, because that wolf knows where the camera is, right? That wolf does its own stunts, I hear you. That wolf does its own stunts, right?

Obviously, it's a good looking wolf. No one's throwing shade against these animals here. They're gorgeous. But they're not dire wolves, right? That's kind of where we're starting here. It gets much more fucked up than that. Dire wolves were a very real species of wolf, which roamed the Americas. They were found in parts of both North and South America from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene period, which is a span of somewhere over 100,000 years.

Its bite force, like when these animals lived, they had a stronger bite force than any known modern wolves. So they were pretty formidable. But the reputation for them being like the size of horses is something they largely accrued via Game of Thrones because dire wolves were around the same size as the largest modern wolves. A little bigger, but we're talking like 10 or 20 pounds heavier than like a Yukon wolf on average. And there was a...

Right. There's a pretty extensive collection of dire wolf bones in the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. Oh, right. Yeah. And boy, was I disappointed when I saw how little those bones were. Right.

You're expecting some Game of Thrones shit, yeah. Man, I walked in there and I said, I'm going to see the biggest wolf that ever was. And those wolves look like schnauzers. They're tiny little dogs as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, because you, I mean, like the average size of a dire wolf was like 150 pounds, which is like a good sized canid. That's a good wolf. But like, I've known dogs bigger than that. I've known some 200 something pound mastiffs, right? Like, and they're not that big on average. Yeah.

No. So, yeah, again, these are, in terms of bite force, very formidable animals, but they're not huge. Like, that's stuff that George R.R. Martin put in his book, because George R.R. Martin knows how to make a book cool, right? Yeah. You gotta zhuzh up reality a little bit, you know, especially if it's a fantasy novel. He knows how to make a book cool, and he knows how to make a hat cool. He's got cool hats, cool books, and scarves. Cool.

Cool hats, cool books. And he's achieved, I have a lot of respect for George, he's achieved every writer's dream, which is to never have to write again. Right? Like, that's what we're all shooting for. So just live in a lighthouse and never finish your series. He's done. I say as I'm two years overdue with my novel. Um, um,

But the name of the species is presumably the major thing that inspired George R.R. Martin. It's just a cool name. Dire wolf, like there's a, dire wolves have been in D&D before George put them in his books, right? Because it's just, it's a cool thing to call a wolf. It's like, yeah, that sounds like a scarier wolf to me. And Colossal Biosciences, knowing and being primarily, this is a company that describes themselves as being in gene sciences. They're in the PR business as much as anything else.

And they made the wise decision to rely heavily on the popularity of the Game of Thrones books and TV shows to act as advertising for their quote unquote dire wolf. Right. And in fact, this is even written into that fawning time coverage. And here's a quote from that article.

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient preserved DNA, colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, two-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter, a

Effectively, for the first time, de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool vanished long ago. Ty met the mates. Khaleesi was not present due to her young age at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24th, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes. Now...

Naming a dire wolf after a character in the books who had nothing to do with dire wolves was by far the cringiest possible choice here. What a missed opportunity. There were dire wolves with names. There were a lot of Starks. They could have just gone down the Stark lineage. They didn't have to go to Khaleesi. Quite literally. She had nothing to do with the wolves.

with the wolves did she even meet any of the wolves she was a dragon lady she met last season yes did she she met okay she met Jaws maybe okay right Ghost right okay so maybe one we don't talk about that last season we don't talk about that last season I got really sad for a second but it's a bummer folks you should do you should do that season as one of the bastards frankly we're working on a six-parter um

But having the animals, they also had the animals pose with George R.R. Martin as part of like the press tour. And that was a particular choice. First off, look at this, which again, no shade on George. I want to hold a wolf pup, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Like it looks cuddly as hell, but that's also kind of part of the problem.

because like that wolf is actively yawning, right? Like it seems pretty chill to be there. And that's interesting to me because if the information given to the team at time by Colossal Biosciences was accurate, there's no way this photo should exist. Here's what Time claimed right at the start of their article.

And again, just genetically, they're not dire wolves. But also, why is George cuddling that animal then?

If you can't, you're either forcing the animal into a situation that makes it distinctly uncomfortable, but the animal looks like it's yawning. So maybe they're just not as wolfy as you're pretending. Yeah, you're really trying to weave a story here. And that's a nice dog. That seems like a really polite, sweet dog. Seems chill. It looks like a husky. Yeah. I don't know, man. And frankly, George, why are you not finishing the books?

Well, he's got a lot of wolves to me. I'm not going to give him shit for that. Again, I also haven't. And if I had the chance to cuddle a wolf rather than spend another day working on my novel, I would be heading to that wolf so fucking fast. Yeah, I understand. The man owns a lighthouse. How are you expected to finish a book? He's finished other books.

I'll give him shit for his involvement in this company, though. That's cool to make that much money and be like, I'm gonna buy a lighthouse. I'm gonna get a lighthouse. Yeah, of course. I'm not sleeping where normal people sleep anymore. No. I've got a different thing going on. No, I'm gonna recreate that great Robert Pattinson movie. Where everybody was fine at the end. Where everyone was happy. Nothing bad happened. No, no. Really good movie with a good ending. So...

The fact that there's this photo of George R.R. Martin with one of these direwolves makes a lot more sense when you learn a few things about both the company behind these animals and the actual science behind the project itself. For one thing, George R.R. Martin is an investor in Colossal Bile Sciences and also an advisor to the company, which...

Advisor in what? George R.R. Martin's a number of things. He's not a scientist. He's not a geneticist. He's not an expert in real direwolves. He's got sunglasses on. He does have sunglasses. Like, he invented fake direwolves for his novels. I don't understand, like, under what circumstances would he be an advisor to this company doing genetics work? That's like if they hired...

the guy who played Dr. Alan Grant to advise a company cloning dinosaurs. It's like, well, but he doesn't really know anything about dinosaurs, right? That's actually not his forte. But yeah. Yeah.

He's actually, he doesn't even speak with that accent. He's pretending. Yeah. Like it's like bringing Jeff Goldblum onto the project. Well, you know, if you, if you're trying to like, I just don't think he has the expertise, nothing against Jeff. If you want to flirt with the dinosaurs. If you want to flirt with people. Yes. Bring Jeff in. You want them dinosaurs horny as hell. Get Jeff. But otherwise you gotta. Yeah. He could do that shit. You gotta talk to a scientist. You might want to bring in like Robert Backer or someone if he's still alive.

But anyway, an article by Michael Hilsett for the Los Angeles Times explains how Martin is being credited as an advisor here.

He's named as a co-author on a technical paper the company published as a non-peer-reviewed preprint describing its de-extinction effort. The text credits him with the review and editing of the paper's text among 36 other credited co-authors in that category. So he's one of 36 people who helped copy-edit an article? Yeah. This is... Okay. To your point, this is just PR. This is truly... This is just PR. First off, it never takes... This is nothing else. ...36 people to edit an article. Yeah.

And they didn't let those other 35 people hold that dog, and that's pretty fucked up. No, no, just George. They just brought George in there for that. Anyway, to kind of enforce the point I made earlier, these wolves, while very cute, are not direwolves. There's some genes that they found while sequencing direwolf genetics that have been put into a normal wolf.

but that doesn't it's kind of like how like some people have some neanderthal dna in there but they're not themselves neanderthals right they're people you know um that's gotta be a tough thing to to figure out for yourself though that you got a little bit of that in there because yeah you got some dna from a species we wiped out yeah you can kind of see it and then then that bums you out where you're

Sure. Like Jon Hamm, I assume, right? Like...

It's a big, big old head. Big old head. Yeah. So colossal biosciences is not actually in the de-extinction business. They are in the modifying animals genetically in ways that in some cases hadn't been done before business. And that is interesting, but it's not de-extinction. And so they are doing stuff. They are doing something new and something that is in some ways very interesting, but it's not what they're claiming they're doing.

So I can't call this a straight up con, right? Because they did make an animal that didn't exist before, but it's also not a dire wolf and they're not de-extincting anything. And I think the evidence shows they are massively inflating what they and their technology can do in order to win VC funding.

The whole explanation as to why will take a while, but I'm going to start by talking about the claims that first brought the company public attention. Back in September of 2021, a whole spate of almost identical articles dropped announcing the creation of colossal biosciences and their plan to clone a woolly mammoth by 2027. So we got two more years before there ought to be mammoths.

We're getting Wooly Mammoths back, y'all. This is exciting. Very soon. Like probably right around the same time we get Severance season three, you know, if we're lucky. Yeah.

You know what sucks about woolly mammoths too is they also are not bigger than elephants. No, no. I thought this whole time that woolly mammoths were like these giant beasts that we would never be able to see again. And they're like smaller than the average African elephant. No, and again, it's one of those things whenever people start to think about, oh, it's a bum. We've missed all the coolest animals that existed. The largest thing to ever exist on Earth is still around. Yeah.

swims in the sea and we're currently killing them okay something something you missed in this story that you've brought up the woolly mammoth is uh part of the investors for this company are like a tiktok tiktokers i'm getting to it i'm getting to that so okay don't you worry i was like i was like i know this why do i know this shit we're getting to the other investors in this fucking company don't worry um

But here's a representative example from like the press that explosion around this woolly mammoth claim. So this is a CNBC article. Lab-grown woolly mammoths could walk the earth in six years if geneticists' new startup succeeds. This was published in 2021.

And the geneticist that they're discussing, and the guy the article is based around interviewing, is co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, Dr. George Church, who claimed that he'd had the idea kicking around for years, and research supports this fact, he's been pushing this idea in one form or another for like a decade or more, but that he'd just been given $15 million in seed funding and a company had been established with serial entrepreneur Ben Lamb as CEO. And we will talk about Ben Lamb some more in part two.

Church, though, Dr. George Church, is a real doctor, and his credentials are impeccable on paper. And just to state, this guy's kind of a weird case where...

exaggerating a lot and I think you could even argue lying about some things but he's a real scientist with some very impressive achievements behind him and I I think it's important for us to say that scientists can be both legitimate and liars right yeah you yes we we often I think inflated somehow where scientists are like these moral beings that exist above us all and no they can be liars and also really smart and capable people right

It's like you could be a great science fiction author and racist as fuck, right? Yeah. Those two things have existed. Or like Isaac Asimov, where you're like, wow, what a genius. And also sex pest, right? Yeah. Like those things do not conflict whatsoever. It might have helped him. I don't know. Might have helped him. Who knows? Yeah.

So George Church's credentials, I'm not calling Church a sex pest, although he has some shady involvement with people that we'll talk about. None of it involves accusations of his specific behavior, just his choice of company. Anyway, his academic credentials. Anyway. He is the, oh, we're, this episode ends, you know, I'm not going to give you a hint, but you're going to be psyched. You're not going to be psyched. You're going to be bummed. I can't wait.

He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member at the Weiss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, also at Harvard. So, you know, that alone, pretty big achievement, right? And he still holds those positions today? Yes, yes. As far as I'm aware, yes.

Church has his name on more than 100 patents. And, you know, some of those are things where like maybe he got on there because he helped someone else. But a lot of them are because he contributed really significant work to those patents. Yeah.

He started the Personal Genome Project, and he has also helped found more than 20 companies. Now, that last claim was the first thing I read about him that made me wonder, like, okay, is there something, like, shady here? Because 20 companies is too many. No honest man has found more than 20 companies. You're doing some fucked up shit, right? You gotta focus, big man. That's a few too many companies. That's too many companies. Okay.

And then when I read about the actual claims Colossal through Church was making about why cloning mammoths was not just like a cool thing to do, but like necessary for conservation, I went fully over the edge. This is when I was like, okay, I got to dig more into this guy. There's got to be something fucked up.

And he has made claims like this, quote, and this is a quote from the article. Proponents of the project, and they're talking about Church, say rewilding the Arctic with woolly mammoths could slow global warming by slowing the melting of the permafrost where methane is currently trapped.

That's not true. How? It has something to do with them stomping down the ground to stop like trees from growing up. So the permafrost days, but like that's if theoretically there were a massive healthy mammoth population, it might do that.

we're not talking about number one, they're not talking about making mammoths. They're talking about modifying African elephants as a spoiler for what will be in part two. But also like, that's just not a feasible place for this project to end with like massive herds of mammoths clumping across the ground to say, to fix. Also, no amount of mammoth is going to fix global warming at its current, like,

the problem is not just there's too many trees in Siberia. There's other shit going on. If that's the approach you're taking, you're missing the mark quite a bit. Yeah, yeah. Mammoths can't be our first start at fixing the problem for sure. I don't think a lack of mammoths is the primary reason this is a problem. Yeah.

Yeah.

But then you read about who those investors are and you wonder, I don't know if I believe that. Because investors in Colossal outside of George R.R. Martin include self-help grifter Tony Robbins and Winklevoss Capital. Oh, we got Winklevii. The Winklevoss twins. Wow. Winklevii.

That's crazy. They'd only be involved in a real project. This is like when a bunch of celebrities open up an ice cream store and you're like, why do y'all know each other? Oh, one of you is moving coke and you guys needed a way to launder shit. What is this relationship that somehow fostered naturally between you? Uh-huh. Something's wrong here. I'm missing something.

And yes, there are some famous TikTokers involved as well and some other celebrities who should not be involved in a biosciences company that we'll talk about later.

So by the time I read about the Winklevoss twins being involved, I was fully on team fuck these people. Winklevi. The Winkles V. But that's not enough to actually justify accusing a person and their company of being bastards, right? Even I wouldn't do that. So I looked deeper, and boy howdy did I find some shit. Before we get into everything that's fucked up about this company...

A lot of what's fucked up here is actually Dr. George Church and talking about what this guy's done and where he's come from. Because this is a story of like a great scientist who makes some choices that I would argue puts him into a series of very unethical situations because there's money in it, right? That's what I think is going on here. But I'm just going to read you his bio.

George McDonald Church was born on August 28th, 1954 on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He grew up in Clearwater, the capital of Scientology, but I can't hold that against him. He's got no ties that I found to the organization. He just grew up there.

He just got lucky. He just got lucky. Thank God. Yeah. He's near Blue Base, I think. That's the big base in Clearwater. His family life was somewhat chaotic by most people's standards, as he laid out in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. I had three fathers as my mother remarried. The first one lasted about eight months post-birth, and he was an Air Force pilot. A

Whoa.

He was the first ABC wide world of sports color commentator. He was also just generally charismatic. He was a male model. He worked on film, television stuff as well. What? Right, right. And this guy, he's also primarily a communicator now, right? And he's very old now, but he's like a handsome kind of old. You would cast him to be like the old king in like a fucking new Robin Hood movie who comes back at the end, right? He is that kind of old guy. Yeah.

He was my birth dad, but I don't think he really influenced me that much intellectually. My second father was a lawyer and had the least influence. Third dad was a physician who had two pretty important roles. He sent me away to school, to an awesome high school. Both my stepbrother and I went away at roughly the same time. It might have just been to get the young teenage boys out of the house, but in my case, it was very good. It was a liberal East Coast school, Andover, which is where the Bushes went.

I don't know if I'd call that liberal, but and and Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides and a bunch of other interesting people. And the other thing he did was just being a physician. I could look at his medical technology and somehow be enthralled by it.

And Dr. Dad is where he gets the last name Church. So that definitely seems to be the guy he primarily considers to have been his father. And that summary of events does kind of smooth over a couple of things, including what seems to have been a difficult start for George at school. He's always very bright, but he has learning disabilities. He had to repeat the ninth grade as a result. George has claimed in recent years to have dyslexia, narcolepsy, OCD, and ADD. That's a lot of stuff. All of which he says, it's a lot of stuff.

He says they were all mild, but it made me feel different. Right. And so he became kind of desperate in grade school not to stand out or get attention. Right. Like he doesn't want to seem weird, which is a pretty normal way for kids to feel in school. So far, it's the thing I've related to him most on. Right. I get that. Yeah, I get it. That I connect to. Yeah. Saying reinvented wolves is a different conversation. The wolf thing I'm having trouble with. Yeah.

You very rarely claim that, Langston. It's almost never come up in our conversations, at least. Yeah, seldom. Prior to going to Andover, Church attended both public and Catholic schools, but had bad experiences in both systems. He just says the schools in Florida weren't very good. Again, I don't have trouble seeing that. Despite his difficulty with academics, he was a voracious reader and good at self-directed learning when he was interested in something.

He built an analog computer when he was 10. And when he started at Andover, they had a timeshare computing program with nearby Dartmouth College. So he was able to spend time on a computer before most people his age did, which is like you see similar stories with like a lot of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a lot of the guys who are like around age.

this age and also wound up being major tech players, right? Yeah. It was such rare technology to access at that age that I bet if you really were able to invest the time and energy, you advanced the chess piece so far for yourself. And you were generally kind of a rich kid, right? Which is, you know, the case with, even though he's got, you know, he goes through a couple of dads, this, this, this last one is very comfortable financially. And as a result, he gets this opportunity. And as a result, then he's,

His story sounds less like a lot of big science guys and more like a lot of tech startup dudes. Yeah. Like that's the kind of background this dude has. They always talk about how like Bill Gates started Microsoft in his garage, but it's like, oh, you had an entire garage that you could work in? You had a nice garage? Yeah. Yeah.

Most people have to store things and park cars in there. And you were just like, no, the garage is a workspace. Yeah, that's right. Speaking of garages, if you want to afford a garage, I don't know. I can't help you, but you can buy these products. Oh, nice. This is a beautiful segue. Yeah. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp.

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How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice.

For an in-depth look at the facts, see What Happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

We're back. Okay, so, so far, it's been a pretty similar story to a lot of tech guys. And George has a story about how he was like 10 or so. He goes to the New York World's Fair, and that has a huge impact on him. He gets to see very early touchscreens, which are obviously a precursor to a real technology. And also a lot of fake future technology, like personal jetpacks and stuff that like

I mean, there's technically some jetpacks, but it's not what we thought it would be, right? We're not flying around in those things, you and me. I thought it was going to be Rocket Man shit, and it's not that at all. No, no. Right up to the fact that I thought we'd all be shooting Nazis. And it turns out we chose other things to do with Nazis, which is unfortunate. Turns out some of us think they're a better hang than we anticipated. Certainly the better hang than the Rocketeer thought. Yeah.

So, but a lot of the tech he sees is also just stuff that like never happened. Right. And George would later say, quote, it didn't take too long for me to become disillusioned. Not only was it not like that in Florida, it probably wasn't even like that in New York once they shut down the World's Fair. And it might not ever be like that if I didn't do something about it. So I sort of felt like if I want that, I have to work for it.

And you can take two things out of this. Either he realizes the World's Fair is largely like a PR thing and most of this stuff isn't coming or at least not coming anytime soon. And like, well, then I'm going to get into – I'm going to become a cutting-edge scientist to try to make this future real. Or maybe what he learns is like –

It's really easy to lie to a lot of people about what you can do and like get money. And maybe that's, maybe that's a lot easier than inventing the future. I think spotting a grift is real profitable, real fast. It can be. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, maybe to be fair, maybe both of those things hit him because he does get into some real making the future shit at first. Church wound up attending summer courses in quantum physics at MIT. He gets into crystallography, which I don't really understand, but is important science. And he describes this as showing him, quote, the intersection of computers and biology, which is going to be like a constant source of fascination for him.

Now, he does still have issues in school. He has to repeat his first year of graduate school. And depending on where you find him interviewed, this is explained differently. I found one article that just said, well, he was just taking so many classes, too many classes, so that he couldn't graduate. And he was just like too interested in doing too many different things. And it just like graduating kind of slipped by him. And that's not really accurate. The way he explained it in this Harvard student paper is different from that, but it's also kind of weird.

He did not.

I didn't drop out. I just finished early. I also think I had this feeling that if I took four years to do it, I would probably flunk out, so it would be better to finish fast. That turned out to be true at about the three and a half year point. I did flunk out, but out of graduate school. And you see how that doesn't make sense, how he's like, well, I graduated early, so I wouldn't be a burden to my parents, but actually I flunked out after three and a half years. Yeah, you're...

I don't understand what you're saying. And I think if we're going back, that really speaks to both the passionate learner and the grifter. Right. Working in sort of synchronicity. Right. If you'll forgive me, Langston, he has two wolves inside him. The man contains two wolves. Yeah. One dire, one pretty much a regular wolf. One trying to sell you Amway. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't forgive you. Now, the way he describes this other times is that he didn't even realize he'd flunked out of graduate school because he was so excited about the crystallography work his advisor had him doing. And his advisor was like, hey, man, you're actually flunking. You know, you're going to – you've got to, like, you're getting kicked out. And hired him as a technician? Yeah.

but was like, you can't just keep doing this. You have to reapply to graduate school somewhere else. And Church eventually reapplies to Harvard and describes himself as being shocked at getting in because he'd flunked out of Duke and

But he had also gotten accepted to Harvard before he went to Duke. And anyway, whatever, he gets accepted. Did some stuff happen behind the scenes with his dad in Harvard? I don't know. It may just have been that he'd been accepted before. I was about to say, I bet having rich parents and a nice little parachute probably helped him figure that out. And he's got this professor who's probably going to bat for him, too, because he is good at some things. But anyway, how he dropped out and exactly why is like a little bit different every time I read it.

which always kind of like raises my grifter hackles just a skosh, but maybe I'm missing some things. At any rate, he gets into Harvard and he does better here. He gets into chemistry and genomic sequencing, which is what he does his thesis on. His 1985 PhD from Harvard per a write-up on edge.org, quote, included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcoding.

These led to the first genome sequence, pathogen, Helicobacter pylori, in 1994. His innovations have continued to nearly all next-generation DNA sequencing methods and companies. And as far as I can tell, and I even, like, reached out to a friend of a friend who's in this field, that is accurate. He is a legitimately, like, foundational mind in modern genome sequencing. His work has been massively influential in, like,

specifically personal genome. But people, he didn't invent genome sequencing, right? But when we first started sequencing, it cost billions of dollars to do that the first time. And he's a major reason why individuals can do it and why you can do it for, I think it's like 750 bucks to get your genome sequenced now.

Right. Like he is a big part of that process. Right. Not even not to just write it down to just him either. But his role is substantial. And this is meaningful, important science. Right. And I don't I'm not going to try to take that away from him or pretend like this does not seem to be exaggerated. Other aspects of his his achievements will be. This does not seem to be right.

A write-up on him in Popular Science by Janine Interlandi summarizes, scientists are now using it, personal genome sequencing, to identify intractable diseases such as cancer and schizophrenia, and doctors are beginning to use it to identify genetic mutations that cause rare and until now undiagnosable illnesses. So...

Church becomes a PhD. Seems like a year in that. Doing some good work. Doing some good work. He initiates the Personal Genome Project at Harvard in 2005 with the goal of sequencing and publicizing the complete genomes and medical records of 100,000 volunteers to further research into personalized medicine. And all this is great. But there's also – even in just this, you could be like –

Well, these people are volunteering, so maybe it's cool, but there is some potential troubling privacy stuff about publicizing everybody's genomes. I think we've all thought about that more in the last couple years. I prefer to keep my genomes pretty private. To me, yeah. I know a lot of people who use those 23andMe companies and are like, actually, I kind of wish I hadn't done that now knowing what they do with the data. Right?

Yeah, they can refuse a mortgage because you've published this and now they're like, oh, we think you're going to have diabetes and diabetes means you won't be able to pay 30 years worth of mortgage. So, nah. Insane.

And it's one of those things, you're not necessarily a bastard for like being in a science that is used by corporations and that isn't fundamentally evil, but gets used in some shady ways. But kind of what this does show is I don't really think he often thinks about the negative applications of what he's involved in. That is going to be kind of a through line with George Church.

as we'll talk about later. But that article in Popular Science continues. More so than any other scientist in his field, he is helping to forge a new kind of biology, one less geared towards studying DNA than harnessing it for our own aims. And this is where the fucked up shit starts to kind of come in. It's like he is a... DNA is no different from, you know, a computer chip, right? And we shouldn't think of it as different than that in terms of allowing us to build new technologies. And...

I can understand on some extent that attitude, but it is also different. It's not a computer chip. I really get nervous whenever the language starts dehumanizing human experiences. Right. There has to be some attachment to what it means to be a person for this to remain healthy.

healthy, normal, applicable in a way that isn't just you scamming us into something much more scary, evil.

Right. And that's the thing is like, there's a degree to which if you're just talking purely logically, right? There's a degree to which you can be like, well, I guess it makes sense to say like, you know, if I'm open to the idea of like genetically editing people to make them, you know, more resilient to diseases or something, maybe it makes a little sense to think of it as a technology in that way.

But the line from that to thinking about the people and other living beings you create is

as just smartphones, that, how do you, what stops you? What guardrails are you building in to stop that? If this is how you're looking at it, where are the guardrails? People turn into Minesweeper real fast. Exactly. You're not dealing with bodies anymore in that scale. Yeah, and that's not great. And that is kind of where we're headed here.

So Church's success led to Harvard funding the establishment of his lab. He has like a lab that is funded by Harvard that has been for quite some time. And he brings in, you know, minds that excite him and hires them and basically pays them to like fuck around and try to figure shit out. And he uses this like this is both a valid argument.

thing to do in terms of science, but it's also, he uses it as like an incubator for startup ideas. Like once people do stuff that shows promise, they'll, he'll often spin what they're doing off into a company per an

Per an article in Popular Science, the result is that his lab manages to be both one of Harvard's top producers and a well-known receiving center for science's misfit toys. There's an artist encoding Wikipedia entries into apple genomes to create a literal tree of knowledge, and an insurance industry refugee who fled his office job over a decade ago, worked several months for free while teaching himself biochemistry, and now serves as co-head of The Lab.

So again, that sounds kind of cool, potentially, you know? I guess. What's the true knowledge? What is that supposed to do? Yeah. That's cool, I guess. I don't know. It sounds awesome. Sounds like an art project. Yeah. Yeah. The article, we'll talk a little bit about like DNA coding. That's actually, there's some science there. But the article quotes a former student of Church's who founded a genetic engineering screening company that looks for inherited diseases. And he said, we always joke that the only thing you need to do to join George's lab is show up.

There is zero organization. His style is just to let things happen. Mostly, you have the constant sense that exciting things are happening or about to happen. And if you miss out on it, you have only yourself to blame. Yeah. And yeah, that's kind of the tech industry FOMO, you know, PR thing in a nutshell. That's also just not a good thing to sort of, I guess, have is like what people know about you that like, yeah, if you show up, he'll give you a job. He'll give you a job. He didn't give. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He's not checking. He's looking for bodies who are fucking around. Now, in the mid-aughts, Church participated in kind of his first noteworthy project after the genome sequencing stuff that we'll talk about, which is a project to actually encode digital data made of text into binary code and then transfer that into genetic code, thus using DNA to store digital data.

Right.

And it's a brilliant PR move. The book Regenesis was about to hit shelves and suddenly there's all these articles about how he stored 70 billion copies into like a dot of DNA, no longer than like a fucking period on a piece of paper that he was able to store so many copies. Like, isn't that amazing? Right. And it is, it is pretty interesting, right? Like that he synthesized a strand of DNA, replicated it and like put it onto a scrap of paper and it contained Regenesis.

real data, right? Um, this in fact was so interesting that it got him an appearance on the Colbert report, right? Uh,

Where he pulled out the paper scrap, which was like the size and shape of a fortune cookie slip, and showed it off to everybody. And this got representatives of different companies who like archive films and other stuff reaching out to him. Because they were like, oh shit, you know. Oh shit, he has a piece of paper. That's cool. He's got a piece of paper, right? Yes, yes, yes. His paper got a dot on it. We should work with him. Yeah. He's...

It is funny. Again, I don't know that this is exactly how a scientist should be putting out a discovery of this magnitude, apparently. But it's also – it's one of those things that's both like really cool and interesting and somewhat less impressive than it sounds when you drill into what's actually happening here, right? Because like the – like that article by Interlandi like makes it seem like – and this is obviously like a proof of concept for something that could be potentially a huge deal for like data storage. And that's not entirely untrue, but it's not –

Totally accurate either. The article goes on to summarize the book that he co-wrote with Ed Regis, who it's weird to me that his co-author's name is Ed Regis because Ed Regis is also a character in the book Jurassic Park.

um he was the public relations manager for engine in the novel oh no um he doesn't wind up in the film it's just really weird to me that his co-author on this book has that name yeah but i bet he gets eaten he sounds like he got eaten oh yeah man that motherfucker gets the hell eaten out of him yes yeah if i am remembering right he's one of the ones who gets eaten like a son of a bitch i think he gets replaced with the lawyer in the movie um

So the book Regenesis that Church writes with Ed Regis, quote, envisioned the future this new biology could bring, one in which bacteria fuels cars and commercial jets and humans are immune to cancer. It may sound like science fiction or at least like a litany of overhyped pipe dreams that science so often sells, but George Church's pipe dreams have an uncanny record of becoming reality. And I'd say this is the fundamental lie about George that keeps getting repeated and spread by a too credulous media. The

The man makes constant wild and almost impossible claims about what's going to happen in the future. And then people will be like, yeah, it sounds nuts, but his crazy dreams have become reality before, so we should take him seriously. And we shouldn't. Because while Church contributed massively to the science of gene sequencing, at no point were his ambitions in that field a pipe dream.

No one was ever like, no one can do what you're trying to do, George. You can't personally sequence the human genome. Scientists had been doing that, right? There were teams of people who had figured out aspects of this before he got into the field. And while what he discovered to do was really meaningful, nobody was like, this will never get done. It was more like, well, someone's got to figure it out. And he was the one who figured it out. I'm not saying that's not impressive, but it was never a pipe dream, right? At least not by the time he got into it.

And the stuff he's talking about in this book, like altering human biology to make us immune to cancer, that is a pipe dream. There's no evidence that will ever be possible, in part because cancer is a bunch of different diseases. There's never going to be a single thing that like renders you immune to cancer unless you start uploading people to the cloud, which is also probably not possible.

I also get really nervous when the science includes both car technology and cancer elimination. That feels like, wait a minute, you got to focus, big dog. Both of those things can't be true from your single discovery. Yeah. It's like if you like, you know, you're a Hollywood actor who's like starting to go bald and you go in for like Turkish hair transplants and the doctor's like, hey man, you want a new liver? Like,

I haven't. I got one. I'd be like, wait, what? Wait, I don't. I actually don't. No, I prefer to keep the one I have. I know it sucks, but I'll keep it. I just came in here to get the Joel McHale, man. I really was not interested in the new organ. Yeah.

Never have hair transplants worked out better for a man. My God. Oh, yeah. His are low and they're strong. I really respect it. The Mona Lisa of hair transplants. So even when it comes to the cool things, Dr. Church actually did, like store his book in DNA. And I do think that's a

Cool idea the practical reality behind it is a lot less exciting than the hype now before we bust that I want to show you a video of Church presenting the inside the exciting promise of DNA storage in a video that was part of the promotional campaign for his books and he's being interviewed here with one of his colleagues for this encoding project and

And yes, he does look exactly like I thought he would. Yeah, no, he does. The density is remarkably high, as little as one bit per base, one base per cubic nanometer. Yeah.

And so we can store on the order of almost a zettabyte in a gram of DNA, a milliliter volume. The theoretical density of DNA is that you could store the total world information, which is 1.8 zettabytes, at least in 2011, in about four grams of DNA. And it leverages rapidly improving next generation reading and writing of DNA.

He looks like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush. He does look like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush. I think he's a lot smarter than Stockton, though, although that is a very low bar because Stockton was really dumb. Old Stockton turned into Paste Rush. He does have the vibes of a guy that gets eaten by his own dinosaurs, but I don't think that's going to happen to him either, which is really tragic. That actually does bum me out. It definitely felt like late stage James Cameron. You know what I mean? Yeah.

It felt like you're telling me about the avatar technology, but this movie still sucks, so what's happening? So what he says here isn't technically wrong. Like, that's all technically accurate about what you could do with DNA, but it doesn't mean that DNA is currently or will be in any kind of timeframe a good way to store data. Now, obviously, this...

There's a need for a much better way to store data. Digital data storage is not forever and has a lot of problems. And like, is it just a really bad way to long-term protect human knowledge? And obviously like,

Paper is actually in some ways better if you're storing it in like the right conditions, like it will degrade less than digital data over a long enough time frame. But there's obvious problems with paper, right? Like are there things like if you've got like a climate sealed place to store books versus some hard drives, those hard drives will break on a faster time frame, assuming you manage to keep that place, you know, properly stored and whatnot. Yeah.

But so we do need ways that are much more space efficient because also the amount of data humanity is producing, you know, especially since we have projects like the Hadron Collider going, there's so much data being made and storing it is a problem, right? Like, because you need these massive facilities in order to even store a lot of this stuff. So these are issues that we have, right? And DNA and the fact that you could store data with such density in it

could be a solution to aspects of it, but it's kind of framed a lot as like, and this is in the future. Netflix will keep all its data in like DNA dry, yada, yada, like everything will be stored. And that probably is never going to happen. I can't say definitely, but there's, because there's a lot we don't know about this, how this technology would work, but there's shit, the shit we haven't figured out yet is really significant. For example, there's a high error rate when you write data to DNA current

And since it's really easy to fuck up writing the data, the current best practices is to store multiple redundant copies of each piece of information. So you have some that are right, which is like he put 70 billion copies of that book on like a dot, right? Like that's kind of what we're talking about here. You store a shitload of copies of something. Oh.

Because, you know, and scientists don't even know how many redundant backups we need yet, right? I found a study where they're just trying to figure that out. Like, okay, what is the actual best practice for the actual number of different redundant copies to store? Because we really hadn't locked that down yet.

So all of those, all of those books, there's like six of those books that are right. And then 70 billion others that are like just mid, like really shit books. I don't know if it's that bad, but we like the, I think the problem is like, we don't actually know how many you, we should be doing. Right. Um,

We're still figuring that part of it out. And then there's a separate issue of like, okay, well, you've got that on this dot, but you can't like, that dot's not connected to a computer. Like, sure, the data's there, but how would you access and store it and use it if you wanted to, right? Like, could you get that on a Kindle easily? And the answer's no, right?

I found an article on DNA data storage written by Nithil Krishnaraj that lays out some of the other practical issues inherent to doing this for any practical reason. Quote, DNA has horrendously slow read and write speeds, so it isn't ideal for real time storage and activities like streaming video and gaming definitely won't be viable at this time.

As a result, DNA data storage loses some of its versatility. And as of now, it would only work best for long-term storage. It's also not rewritable. Once you encode data into DNA, there's no way of making changes to your data without redoing the encoding process. There's also no random access functionality, which means you can't access a certain part of the data without decoding all of it. And this is still, like, interesting and potentially a way, again, you could have a bunch of different places where all of the data we've, you know...

made up to a certain point is stored on DNA somewhere. And that would potentially allow future people to access a lossless version of it and in a way that might be really helpful. But we're not talking about something that's going to alter daily life in its current form. And maybe not ever on any time frame any of us will see because it's just not practical, right? Yeah, Netflix isn't going to exist when this is actually a thing. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Like at some point in the future, maybe they'll figure out all this stuff, but that is not any kind of timeframe anybody should be like waiting for, right? Just again, not to say this isn't interesting or doesn't have a potential use. It's just, it's just prepped as like, this is the future of data storage. And it's like, well, maybe in like a couple hundred years, I don't know.

Now, there's also something in that video that I find creepy as an aside, which is that Dr. Church proposes one use of this technology would be to create permanent records of the brain activity of a human being. And I just don't like the way he says this. Or you could imagine other huge data sources like all the neuronal firings in the brain, which could be encoded into DNA. And again, you could do selective reading of that as needed. Yikes. I

I don't love that. No. He's saying like, well, you could do some really groundbreaking medical studies if you had access to this much data. And sure. But when you talk about making perfect records of a human brain's activity, you're also getting into the kind of territory where I'm like, I want to immediately hear what you think about the potential for surveillance and violation of privacy. Right? Like...

You kind of have to bring that up right away. You can't just be interested in the technology here. It seems like you want to download some information from people that maybe they didn't want to give you. Yeah.

That's some nasty work there, Dr. George. I'm a little, and I promise you, we're so far getting into all this, well, theoretically, there's stuff about this that could be wrong or he's exaggerating. The actual fucked up stuff starts right about now, right? Okay. Because when we're talking about, like, this is a technology that could be good or could have some major problematic ethical, you know,

you want to know the scientist working on the technology that could have fucked up ethical implications has a strong history of personal ethics, right? And this brings me to Dr. Church's history with our old friend of the pod, Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah.

Jeffrey Epstein. Yep, yep, yep, yep. That's the monster at the end of this book. Okay. Or at the end of this episode. Dr. Church has long ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, indeed. All right, buddy. Ha ha!

Well, well, well. Surprise Epstein. The Babadook emerges. Literally. He is the thin white duke of evil scientists. It's fucking Jeffrey Epstein. That's really cool. That's like a really exciting plot twist that you don't see coming. I love this. It's like the end of the second or third Kingsman movie when Hitler comes out of nowhere. Like, oh, there we go. There we go. I know him. Okay.

You guys really built that a long way. Great. Dropping him like Thanos.

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Some sources, I have said, say that Church and Epstein's relationship started in 2005. I've heard Church claim 2006, but people have said that he was receiving funding from Epstein as far back as 2005. It may just be that his lab started receiving unrestricted funding from Epstein before they met Epstein.

And I will remind you here, they were receiving funding from 2005 to 2007. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of sex trafficking, although that's not the end of their relationship. But let's talk about those first couple of years. Now, at that point in his career, 2005, right, he's just started the Personal Genome Project. His primary focus and the thing that he's most famous for is his work on, like, gene sequencing and gene editing. You know, he's into both of these things.

An article for The New York Times that discusses Church's and other scientists' associations with Epstein described Dr. Church in this period as, quote, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Oh, boy. Don't like that.

Superior humans, that's a trigger word for me. Yeah, yeah. Boy, has anyone ever said those two words and not been doing something horrifying? Yikes. So Dr. Church was an early pioneer for the use of CRISPR to edit human genes, and

And one of his ambitions was and is to create a method of gene therapy to, in his words, knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can't get AIDS anymore because the virus can't enter your cells. And hey.

That sounds fine. AIDS is bad. Stopping people from being able to get it. Lovely. The issue is that Church's ambitions don't stop here. And Epstein was not drawn to Church's life work for anything as humanitarian as stopping a virus. I have found a couple stories of how Church and Epstein actually met for the first time. Church has claimed that he was connected to Epstein first either. And he says, I don't know which.

either through the chairman of Harvard's psych department or through his literary agent, John Brockman. Sure, buddy. I feel like I'd remember how I first met Jeffrey Epstein, but maybe I'm wrong. But that speaks to his multitude. He's a busy man, right? He could either be a money man or he could be an academic man, but one of them introduced me. And both of them are implicated in some sketchy Epstein stuff, to be clear. We were all there with Jeffrey. Yeah.

But in another interview, Church seemed to suggest that Epstein probably reached out to him because Epstein was friendly and working with a biologist and mathematician named Martin Nowak. Church and Nowak had worked together on various applications of CRISPR to edit genes. Per an article in Stat by Karen Begley, at the get-togethers with Nowak, Church said, Epstein seemed interested in the science of life's origins and mathematically modeling the evolution of viruses, cancer cells, and life itself.

Epstein did not leave much of an impression on him, Church said. The meetings weren't really about Jeffrey. They were about the scientists who were talking with each other. Normally, expectations are low for people who sit in on meetings far outside their field of expertise. So he's kind of like, well, it was mostly just a scientist talking, and Jeffrey didn't really know much, and when he talked, it didn't really make an impression as a result, right? Oh, man. And if that's the truth...

which I have trouble believing because their relationship goes on after this. But, you know, if that's the truth, then all Church did was take this guy's money, who was not convicted of a crime yet, and show up at some dinners to talk about science. And

And that wouldn't be so bad, right? And in fact, there are some people who got some funding from Epstein and were not involved in the sketchy stuff because he funded a lot of guys and they didn't all go to his parties or have sex with teenagers, right? And I'm not saying Church did. He made enough money to buy an island. You can't do that with only sex pests. Some people had to be

on some version of an up and up. There's some people who were involved with him who have been tarnished unfairly, right? I'm also not saying that church is tarnished unfairly here because I don't think he is. However, I would be remiss if I did not read a different description of the dinner parties and events that Epstein held for scientists around this time. Maybe these are a different set of parties than the ones church attended, although they include people he's listed as his friends. So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.

The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he was invited by colleagues, including Martin Nowak, a Charverd professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, to salons and coffee clutches at which Mr. Epstein would hold court. On multiple occasions, starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists.

and an advisor to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it. It was not a secret. The advisor, for example, said he was told about the plans not only by Mr. Epstein at a gathering at his Manhattan townhouse, but also by at least one prominent member of the business community. One of the scientists said Mr. Epstein divulged his idea in 2001 at a dinner at the same townhouse. The other recalled Mr. Epstein discussing it with him at a 2006 conference that he hosted in St. Thomas and the Virgin Islands.

Once at a dinner at Mr. Epstein's mansion in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Mr. Janier, and he's talking about Jerron Lanier, said that he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein's goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000 square foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside of Santa Fe.

whoa cool it is pretty impressive to find out that jeffrey epstein is somehow more of a piece of shit than i thought i was like nah he's just a monster i don't think he's like a super monster and god damn no no i don't think he's got a baby ranch oh yeah he's got a baby ranch yeah or he tried to have a baby ranch now

Stat News, to their credit, did ask Dr. Church after Epstein's death about Epstein's eugenics baby ranch, being like, you're working in like gene editing people and Epstein wanted to do this. Did he talk to you about this? Because you guys knew each other when he was talking about this, right? Now I have no proof either way. For his part, Dr. Church said, I never heard anything about it. Although he went on to say, and I find this curious, I'd have thought that I would have been involved in that kind of conversation before.

but it didn't tend to go in that direction. But also, I think people tend to behave themselves around me. That's a weird thing to say after that. What a strange little guy. Honestly, bro, if someone asks you whether or not you're involved in Jeffrey Epstein's baby ranch, you end the statement with, I never heard anything about it. No, yeah, you don't have to be like, I would have liked to talk to him about it. Yeah, I would have.

kind of offended he didn't bring me in but also that actually sounds awesome i just no i didn't talk to him but also then when you say it didn't tend to go in that direction well tend doesn't mean never does that mean sometimes it kind of did like what are you saying you seem like a man who's precise with his language i don't know why you're phrasing it this way yeah jeffrey epstein's like uh you know i want to start a baby ranch he's like huh he's like oh nothing

I thought he was going to bring it up again, but he didn't. Never mind. I thought you'd be cool about it. Yeah, it's like Jeffrey being like, he wants some Coke. What? Nothing. I didn't say anything. I don't do Coke. Sober. Sober Jeffrey Epstein. That's what they call me. I'm going to go to the bathroom. Like 15 minutes. I'm going to come out really excited. I love peeing. We're going to talk business as soon as I get out. I'm going to look like Robin Williams in 1985 when I step out of that thing. It's nothing weird.

So perhaps that is the truth, that he had nothing to do with this. Friends and colleagues of Dr. Church expressed surprise when after Epstein's death, the years of close connections between Epstein and Church were made public. One associate pointed out that Church even brought a philosopher into his Harvard lab to flag potential bioethics issues and experiments, and that he teaches a research ethics class, which is uncommon for a scientist in his field working at his level.

And so they're like, well, it's weird to me that he would have any relationship with Epstein because I have always considered him one of the most concerned with ethics people in our field.

And again, to emphasize for legal and moral reasons, there is no evidence that Church was working on any kind of eugenics baby project for Epstein. Not that there would be because Jeffrey Epstein didn't publish all the details about everyone he was involved with with everything. We just know he talked about this plan during several coffee clatches and other events with his pet scientists and that Church was at similar events.

Dr. Church claims that working with Epstein et al. was an ethical lapse, but not entirely his fault. He points out that universities are supposed to vet donors before they meet with faculty. And he told Stat, my understanding is this vetting is the responsibility of the development office, which is yet another reason why scientists are a little more relaxed. They feel they have administrators who, in theory, do the difficult job of figuring out who's legit. So, sir, I'm just a little guy.

How could I be expected to think about this sort of thing? That's someone else's job. And now he's picking who introduced him. Previously, he didn't know who introduced him. Turns out it was Harvard the whole time. It was Harvard, yeah. Now, he added that scientists, quote, myself included, are not very good at screening or judging human beings, right? That just like, ah, we're all just kind of bad at people, you know? It's not really our strong suit. Yeah.

And to be fair, also, first off, I just don't believe that for Church because he's an incredibly skilled public relations expert. I think he's very good with people, right? He speaks well. I think he's probably very good at judging people because that's what he does. Anyway, to be fair to Church, he went on to make a good point in that stat interview that almost does sound like a mea culpa.

He states that a lot of scientists working on cutting edge projects with important applications field what he described as an exceptionalism, which is a sense that anything they do is OK if the work is important enough. This is almost like a precursor to like effective altruism.

type feelings, right? He predates that, but I don't think he's wrong here. I do think that's a thing that a lot of scientists working in important fields feel, which is that like, well, if I have to do something a little fucked up to further this research with incredibly important implications, it's worth it.

And he cited the case of a Nobel laureate, a biologist named Sidney Brenner, who took $15 million from Philip Morris to fund a biology institute. And Sidney's argument was that, like, look, if big tobacco keeps this money, they'll use it for something worse than I will using it for science. Which is like...

point, but also like, well, big tobacco is put to give you that money. Cause it's a write-off and like, they're gonna, they're expecting something. They're expecting something from it. Right. Aren't they Sydney? Are you giving them anything? Are you sure? Right. And also there you pick the worst guy. You know what I mean? Like, it's not like you picked a comparable, uh,

space to be putting this money into it's one thing like Walmart needed a tax write off so they funded this like medical thing I was doing and like you know Walmart's a sketchy corporation but also like the science is good it's like no this is the tobacco industry like their product is literally killing more people every year than World War II they win they win the murder game you did it it's just a little different you know um

But anyway, there is an argument about like, well, how? And obviously I'm in the advertising business. There's always an argument. How many moral compromises should you make to fund something valuable? Right. And the answer isn't none. You know, this is capitalism. I would say big tobaccos, maybe like 15 million dollars of Philip Morris money is maybe a step beyond that. But, you know, people feel differently. You know, like, is it fine to advertise vaping? I don't know. Whatever. Yeah.

What's less arguable is that after Epstein was charged, convicted, and sentenced in 2008, Dr. Church continued his association with the, by this point, known sex criminal, right? So 2005 to 2007, we don't know if he was involved in the weird eugenics stuff. We know he's taking Epstein's money, but Epstein's not a known criminal, right? He could have been...

you know, kind of innocent. He continues associating with Epstein repeatedly after he is convicted as a sex criminal in 2008. And that's crossing a line for me. Yeah. At one point, it's like, I fear this man just lacks common sense. Nope. Nope. You should have known. This is an act

Yeah. To associate with one of the world's biggest monsters. You're making a choice here, brother. He was like, nah, Jeffrey's awesome to me and I'm going to keep hanging. Yeah. So when Church's book Regenesis came out in 2012, it elevated his profile.

And Epstein seems to have gotten back in touch with him soon after. And this would have been, you know, after Epstein finished doing his quote unquote time, which doesn't really not by that was not time by normal people standards. Right. Like his slap on the wrist didn't even get a slap on the wrist. Right. Yeah. And it's not clear to me when they got back in touch or if they ever got out of touch after 2007. I don't even know that. Right.

Whatever the case, Dr. Church has posted a public online calendar every year since 1999, and it shows that he had six separate phone calls or meetings with Epstein in 2014. Stat News writes, sample entry, June 21st, 2014, lunch with Jeffrey Epstein, 12 to 1.30, Martin Nowak's Institute. And that's a lot of times to talk to Jeffrey Epstein, right? That's a long lunch. That's a lot of, that's a long lunch too. 12 to 1.30, you really, you guys were chatting. You were pushing it, huh?

When interviewed after Epstein's death, Dr. Church admitted to meeting Epstein several times each year since 2014. And Stat was like, didn't you hear that he'd been convicted of all those sex crimes? And like, you're a father and a grandfather. Did it not skeeve you out to be involved with this guy? And Church replied, I did read a couple of news articles like 10 years back, quote, but they weren't clear enough for me to know if there was a serious problem. Yeah.

Now, I should note here that reporting in 2008 alleged that Epstein had received massages from teenage girls. You didn't know? Yeah, I don't know. You didn't know, huh? You're a researcher. Yeah. Like...

That's a real R. Kelly, when we say teenage, how are we talking? Yeah, we'll be talking, right? Now, when he asked if he felt Epstein had paid his debt to society, Statt's like, so do you think he'd like paid his debt to society after 2008 and deserved a second chance? And I kind of, I really respect Statt for sitting down with this guy and kind of drilling him on this. Church responded with what I would call a non-answer. So they're like, hey, so is it that you thought, you know, he'd made good...

that everything was okay now. And he said, as far as I know, people just didn't have that conversation, but it should have.

So let's break that down. He's asked, do you think that after 2008, Epstein had paid his debt to society? And he said, as far as I know, people, not me, didn't have that conversation, but it should have. It, I guess the people. Your grammar should be better than that, man. But like, what do you, what do you mean? Yeah.

I think he's like, I'm not going to answer for myself. You, the single body of people that exist around me should have had the conversation with Jeffrey Epstein. Okay, man. Now, he went on to add in that interview, I would think

I would think to like that people's reputation is multidimensional and multi-year. It takes a long time to build up, but also to tear down. And stat notes, he was speaking generally and about himself as in like, this shouldn't destroy my reputation. Cause like I've done other things, but it's kind of hard not to read that as I'm talking about Epstein too, that like, well, he's a complicated guy. He's got other stuff that he's done besides the sex crimes. Yeah. Great. Well,

Love an answer like that from our ethics man working on brain reading. For what it's worth, George Church did ultimately apologize for taking Epstein's money in a 2019 interview. Although you want to guess what he blamed his lapse in judgment on?

Oh, boy. No, no, no. Yeah, no, just tell us. There's no way. Nerd tunnel vision. There we go. I'm just too much of a nerd to have a problem with sex crimes. He's like, whoa, I don't even notice pussy. You know how it goes.

You're watching Star Wars. Your friend's trafficking teenage girls around the world. It just happens. Yeah, no. There is this, again, it's just this want to, like, cutify themselves out of, like, the human experience. It's like, oh, I'm just a nerdy little cutie boy. I didn't even notice that bad things were happening. Like, oh, you're a grown man who's trying to manipulate genes. This isn't...

You're not a sweetheart at all. Yeah, yeah. It's just very, it's great stuff. Good work. Good work, Dr. Church. Now, that's pretty bad. Ending on Epstein in part one, not ideal. It gets so much worse in part two. There's so much eugenics coming. There's so much fucked up shit on the way. I'm so excited to tell you the rest of this story, Langston. But first, let's talk about you.

You know, what's your favorite color?

Favorite color is coral. Coral. I love coral. I honestly didn't call that. Okay. I didn't actually call anything. I had no idea what your favorite color would be. Yeah, I think for years I used to say blue to protect myself from my own insecurities. But then at some point I had to be honest and say, no. This is a safe place. My favorite color is nuanced and slightly effeminate, I guess. I have been looking for a pair of coral shorts for the summer. It does seem like a nice short color, you know? Yeah. Yeah. My brother wears...

Mother wears a lot of coral. It's a good color. We're all getting over our insecurities here, you know, just like George Church got over his insecurities about his friend Jeffrey Epstein. He's like, you know what? No, not like that. I can get past this. Yeah, we can get past this. And we can get past the part where we talk about George Church to talk about your pluggables. What are they?

Oh, you can listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. I do it with my friend David Borey, who is also an alumnus of this gorgeous podcast. And we talk about conspiracy theories, specifically Black conspiracy theories. And it's really fun and silly. And we do not nearly as effective research as you do, Robert.

My only hope is that George Church gets integrated into a series of conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein because everyone else who was tied to him has been. And look, you know, are all of those accurate? No. Are they all fun? Yes. And why should George miss out? You know?

I will say there was that era on what is now X, but formerly Twitter, where they were just making up lists of the people who were on the flight logs. And it was always a funny list. It never failed. No matter who wrote it, the right, the left, the sickos, the imagineers, they were always funny lists of people. Oh, yeah. One of my favorite things about that is just like, you know, maybe that's sketchy that

fucking Eddie Murphy wound up in there. But I could also, like, it's a perfect thing for an Eddie Murphy movie where he just finds out he's been on this sex criminal's plane a bunch of times. Like, I'll watch that 90-minute comedy. There were a few people on some of those flight logs where I was like, I don't think they knew what they got on the plane for. Yeah, you might have just been going to a thing with him, right? You go into some sort of conference. Somebody said, get on the PJ, and you're like, yeah. Yeah, I'll get on a private jet, sure.

It has, I will say, one thing that I have learned as a result of this, because previously, before I knew anything about Jeffrey Epstein, if some rich guy had been like, hey, we're going to pay you to go to a conference. You want to ride in my private jet? I probably would have been like, yeah, fuck, man. That sounds dope. Fucking 25-year-old me probably wouldn't have had the wherewithal to be like, I don't know. But now, absolutely not.

Someone asked me the other day if I would get on that Trump plane, the one that Qatar gave him. It's like, for the story alone, I kind of think I have to. Oh, yeah. No, that one. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's justifiable for journalism. Yeah. I just got to ride this wave and deal with the fallout later. Yeah, I'm good. I'm staying home. You would stay at home. You wouldn't touch it.

No, I'm good. I'm staying home. But no, folks, the lesson here is that if a rich guy wants to fly you and pay you to speak at some sort of weird conference, tell him first class from a real airline. Right. Yeah.

You know, it's nice enough. And no one can be like, well, what if that was that Delta flight like implicating you in crimes? The only thing a Delta flight implicates you in is crashing at Newark. Right. Sorry. That's that's bad. That was dark. They said they'll do better. They said they'll do better. I said they'll do better. Everyone's going to do better. All right. That's the episode. Yeah.

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