What if Terrorists Could Weaponize Covid?
38:41 Share

So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Same great taste, plant-based. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.

It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft. And not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you.

LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business. Red Bull harnessed the strength of the T-Mobile 5G network to launch point-of-view drones and give fans unmatched views of their extreme sports, while broadcasting in real time from some of the most remote locations in America. This is heart-pounding fan experiences. This is Red Bull with T-Mobile for Business.

Take your business further at T-Mobile.com/now Pushkin Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, which only made it more shocking. During morning rush hour on the 20th of March 1995, five men stepped onto five different trains on the Tokyo Metro. Each of them had the same mission: to drop a couple of plastic bags wrapped in newspaper on the floor

to puncture those bags with a specially sharpened umbrella, and then to get off the train and make a getaway. Each bag contained almost a pint of liquid sarin, a chemical developed by Nazi scientists in the 1940s. Sarin vapour can be breathed in or absorbed to the skin. Even in small doses, it blocks the body's ability to control its muscles. The symptoms of sarin exposure are nausea and drooling.

followed by vomiting, twitching and self-soiling as the bladder and bowels open, followed by death from asphyxiation. Those who survive can suffer permanent nerve damage. It's not a chemical you want to have drifting through a busy subway carriage, but since sarin evaporates very quickly, that's what happened. The result was carnage.

12 people died almost immediately, and thousands were injured, with two later dying of those injuries. The attack was the work of a cult named Aum Shinrikyo, which had just a few thousand members. A small number of unhinged extremists had caused dreadful harm. Still, it could have been worse. The Tokyo Metro attack killed 14 people.

Covid killed many millions. Imagine the Aum Shinrikyo cult had released not nerve gas, but a killer coronavirus that might infect the entire world. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

This is another of our occasional cautionary conversations, in which we explore a mistake, anything from a mishap to a catastrophe, and try to learn the lessons with the help of an expert guest. This time, I'm joined by Michael Spector. Michael is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker, where his subjects have ranged widely, everything from P. Diddy to Dr. Oz, but often focusing on science and public health.

And his new audiobook is Higher Animals, Vaccines, Synthetic Biology and the Future of Life. It's published by Pushkin Industries, which, full disclosure, also produces Cautionary Tales.

Michael, welcome. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I'm very happy that you are here. And let's circle back to the Sarin attack later, because I first wanted to discuss something which at first sight, it seems a world away. It's a city council meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1976, which really caught my attention in your book. Tell us about that. It was an unusual city council meeting, probably the most unusual of its kind to that point in the

A meeting about whether Harvard University would have the right to build a biological laboratory to work with recombinant DNA, which had just recently been discovered. And recombinant DNA means you can basically—

mix the genes of two species. And that is something that every lab in the world does right now. But at the time, it sort of invoked every type of fear of creating monsters and destroying the world that you could possibly imagine or that has been written about over the last 300 years. And the mayor of Cambridge was a very cantankerous and somewhat intelligent man who understood politics.

His constituency was working class Cambridge, and he was going to go after the elites at Harvard for ignoring what he thought were the risks. And this city council meeting was an epical event in the history of molecular biology because it sort of pitted the future against citizens who had not really asked questions in the past. And it really set the tone for almost every kind of meeting that came afterwards. Yeah.

Yeah, Mayor Vellucci, he was very politically savvy and you had some wonderful tape in your audio book. I mean, let's listen to a small extract of his remarks at this meeting. When I was a little boy, I used to fish in the Charles River. And I woke up one morning and found millions of fish dead in the Charles River. And you tonight tell me that you dumped chemicals into the sewer system of Cambridge. And the sewer system overflows into the Charles.

Was he right to be so worried? The image of millions of dead fish, were those concerns overblown at the time? Yes, they were overblown at the time, but they weren't completely ridiculous. And what's really interesting, if you go back and listen to that conversation and those debates, it's not overblown now. Those questions were crazy at the time. He was asking whether

entirely new species could be created in that lab. And that was something that could never have happened. It's not a crazy question now. So those inflammatory debates were kind of necessary. And I think it's worth pointing out that Cambridge, Massachusetts is now the absolute center of biotechnological innovation in the world. And

There are dozens, if not hundreds of labs there that use that kind of recombinant DNA technology with the blessing of the city council and with the participation of members of the city council. So we've come a long way. As we said, it was 1976. What was the kind of background? Why did the stakes seem so high and why were people so worried? Because a guy named Paul Berg, who was a professor at Stanford, had recently said,

figured out a way to take a virus called SV11, which caused cancer in hamsters, and insert it into a very common bacterium, E. coli. And that was the first time that humans had ever been able to mix species of any kind. And while it showed a great deal of promise, it was a very scary step because it also meant maybe some things would be created that we couldn't control.

So that was the background. I mean, immediately when you say that, I think if I undercook my sausage, I could catch cancer from it. No. I mean, that's what it sounds like. Well, I know it sounds like that. But first of all, this is something that happened in a lab. And the cancer virus is not one that's common or that infects humans. It's just that...

We didn't know at the time whether or not it was going to be possible for that to mutate into something that somebody could sneeze and catch. I mean, we had no idea. It had never been done before. And even Paul Berg was quite upfront about saying there are tremendous dangers to this. He could see the promise. All biologists and many other people could, but the dangers were evident too. And

They were evident and also unknown. We didn't know what might happen. Yeah. We've got a little bit more tape from the council meeting. If you listen to some of the questions that have come in, you can really get a sense that the fears are palpable. For the benefit of all the members of the city council, I would like to inject this statement of questions, not to be answered at this time, but for the benefit of members of this city council who may want to ask these questions.

Would recombinant DNA experience be safer if they were done in a maximum security lab? Question. Is it true that in the history of science, mistakes have been made to not to happen? Question. Do scientists ever exercise poor judgment? Question. Do they ever have accidents? Question.

Classic politician, isn't he? He's a classic politician and they were inflammatory questions, but you can't deny that they even now have some application in real life. And I mean, there were other things going on at the time. So I think Ford Motor Company had put out this car, the Pinto, which they knew was unsafe and they just decided it was cheaper to

to deal with the legal claims from these exploding fuel tanks than it was to redesign or withdraw the car. And this had come out. And so there was this real palpable sense of mistrust of corporations. And overshadowing all of this for the previous 30 years had been the atomic bomb and the sense that scientists could potentially create something

uncontrollable. There's a moment in that book where David Baltimore, who's a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, said the reason people were so afraid was it wasn't so far from World War II, and they were worried whether there was an atomic bomb in biology. And at the time, that seemed like a crazy fear. Again, it's not now. These things seemed palpable at a time when we were learning so much about how corporations lied to us,

That was two years after Richard Nixon had resigned, the first president ever to resign in the United States in disgrace. There'd been a lot going on. Previously, a few years previously, one of the Great Lakes caught fire because of all the pollution that had been admitted into it. So there was a sense that you couldn't really trust the institutions you used to believe in anymore.

And when scientists started to come along and say, hey, we've created a new form of life that could do all sorts of cool things, it didn't go down so well. Yeah, well, as Mayor Vellucci's question, do scientists ever exercise poor judgment? Do they ever have accidents? I mean, yeah, yeah. And Three Mile Island came along shortly afterwards. So yeah, there are accidents. So puts us in a strange position then because...

We're saying, well, from the point of view of 1976, people were highly strong. You understand why they were mistrustful, but actually the fears were overblown. There was nothing really to worry about.

But now, as I alluded to in the introduction, if you manufactured a virus, you could kill tens of millions of people. You could kill more people than you could kill at least with a single hydrogen bomb, even the largest hydrogen bomb. So it turns out there was an atomic bomb in biology. Oh, absolutely. More than an atomic bomb. Because there's one thing about biology that there isn't even with nuclear weapons.

It's exponential. It's digital. Biology has become a sort of part of information technology. We developed a COVID vaccine really rapidly because scientists were able to download it from the internet and

make DNA insert it into cells. That's great. That's wonderful. But it also means, you know, there used to be very few people who could do this sort of thing. There are thousands now. And if they wanted to do it badly, if they wanted to harm people, if they wanted to make a virus, it is in no way inconceivable that they could. At this meeting, the council imposes a two-year moratorium on experiments with recombinant DNA.

And looking at this, it felt like quite an old story. There was a previous episode of Cautionary Tales called How to End a Pandemic, where we were discussing early smallpox inoculations. Funnily enough, also in Massachusetts, in the Boston area. And in 1721, as Sabdiel Boylston, the doctor, he was going around inoculating Bostonians against smallpox. He'd got this idea from Africa via an enslaved man called Onesimus.

And he faced huge resistance. Partly that seemed to be racism. Like this idea has come from Africa. It's come from enslaved people. It's not a white idea. It's not a domestic idea. But also, I mean, you can die from being inoculated. Inoculated people die.

do have a dose of smallpox, they can infect other people. And in the end, the resistance went as far as people throwing hand grenades through Boylster's window where his wife and his children were sitting. And in the end, he started visiting people at midnight and in disguise because there was just, you know, he was physically under threat for what he was doing. Yeah, I addressed some of that in the first chapter of this book. But I think...

Especially at that time, you have to remember that a smallpox inoculation was to some degree dangerous in a way that it isn't or wouldn't be today if we got them. Again, people don't look at the risks and rewards of these things. They just get excited about the rewards or upset about the risks. And the fact is, the risks of getting smallpox and dying of smallpox were much greater than the risks of being harmed by the vaccines.

But, you know, every number has a numerator and a denominator, and we only usually look at one or the other. And so, yeah, it's true that those things can cause harm. You can't ever say something's going to be 100% in biology. But you have to figure out, is it better than the alternative? And often it's pretty clear, the answer. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI.

OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If

If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. oracle.com slash strategic. I love cycling, and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe.

which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it

And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis, and even their extensive archives. So where

Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.

Michael, let's try and look at the rewards as well as the risks. I mean, I've framed our whole discussion in terms of risks, partly because you talk about them very eloquently in Higher Animals, partly because this is Cautionary Tales. It wouldn't be Cautionary Tales if we weren't talking about something going wrong. But let's talk about the upside. So where are we now with synthetic biology? What can we do and what should we be thankful for?

Well, I mean, first of all, the first thing we should remember is we just made a vaccine that has been administered billions of times. And that's a synthetic biological product that saved millions of lives.

But beyond that, there are people growing things that they used to make in plants with chemicals. They're growing all sorts of medicines. There's going to be an opportunity to try and make vaccines for other illnesses, not COVID, but vaccines.

HIV, influenza, we have terrible influenza vaccines that we administer every year. Now people are seriously attempting to develop a single shot that would be universal. And that would, I mean, influenza is a really serious disease. And people always say, oh, I got the flu. Usually they didn't. They had a cold. That would be something. But beyond that, people are using synthetic biology to

replace plastics, to engineer dyes, to make types of energy that would not be carbon-based and not cause terrible pollution. It has...

unlimited potential because it's the potential of biology. And if we can rewrite the rules of biology, yeah, there are risks, but we can also do some tremendous things. And we're starting to see that. It's early days. Yeah. And that's very clear in the later chapters of Higher Animals. So it is enormously exciting. However, it's a cautionary tale. Let's talk about this

risk which you cover in some detail in the book. Fundamentally, smallpox was eradicated by better and better vaccinations, and that's a subject we've discussed in Cautionary Tales as well. Just a few samples of smallpox in a couple of very high security laboratories, just in case we need to study it. And as you explain in Higher Animals, sure, there are just a few samples of smallpox remaining in highly secure labs, but

you can make smallpox and people people have made smallpox in fact i think they they haven't they made horse horse pox they made a very similar pox yeah they demonstrated that they could have made smallpox if they wanted to and and that potential exists because it's the formula for i'm the formula maybe that's the wrong word

the recipe for smallpox. It's known, right? It's not a secret. Yeah, I mean, one of the problems that we have to address is not only is the genetic sequence, the sort of code, the letters of smallpox all known, they're all printed. And so, by the way, are the recipes to make every virus you could possibly name. Influenza, every type of deadly influenza, COVID, SARS, you name it, it's on the internet.

That seems bad. Well, I mean, it used to be, it has always been in academics and particularly that the incentive is to keep your information close and then publish it so that everyone knows you have it. And the idea was publishing a sequence would let other scientists do research with it and check your work. The problem is we don't have the kind of regulations we need to have. You know, at least with nuclear weapons,

There are regulations. There are treaties. They could be violated. They certainly are violated. Biology is different because we actually encourage the thing that we should be preventing. And it's something that you can do for...

I don't know, $10,000, $20,000 and a couple smart graduate students. You don't need a nation state to develop a virus. So let's talk about scientists who have pushed back against publication and those who've gone a long way. So first let's talk about the horsepox guy. So what was the reaction of the scientific community to someone just saying, hey,

I can make this virus, I have made this virus, I've kind of proof of concept that I could have made smallpox. Who did that and how did people respond to that scientist? It was a guy named David Evans and his team in Canada. They're serious virologists and their position was, we want you to understand that this can be done. And there was also some sense that

it would help make a better smallpox vaccine. Though most scientists I've talked to think that's absolutely not the case.

It was pretty universally condemned because what it basically showed is that you can go make... I mean, there's no reason to have horsepox out there. I mean, we don't need a virus. We don't need a vaccine. It was extinct in the world. People weren't getting up in the morning and saying, I hope I don't get horsepox. And there was no need to bring a deadly virus that's closely related to smallpox back to life. It was just highly irresponsible. Yeah. But so...

People criticized him, but I mean he didn't he didn't lose his job. He didn't go to prison He didn't he didn't violate any any laws. There's no law I could if I and I'm not this smart, but if I was I could buy the DNA online It's not that expensive. I could get sequencing machines. I could get all the stuff I need I could make whatever virus you tell me to make it's not against the law It's not against the rules

And that has to change. Yeah. So how many people do you think exist in the world who could change?

make a dangerous virus? I mean, are we talking millions? Are we talking hundreds? Five or six? I mean, I don't really have a sense of the number of people who do have access to the technology and the skill. It's a growing number. Kevin Esvelt, who teaches at MIT and who I teach a course with, I should say, he does a lot of this kind of research. He believes there's

5 or 10,000 people who could do this now. But in a few years, you know, we're sort of in the era of biology. It used to be like, if you look at early days in computers, there was a mainframe computer that would take up a whole building. And now the computers in our watches are more powerful than that mainframe. That's what's happening with biology. So as that happens, people are getting access to more powerful programs to make things like viruses.

It's going to be, you know, it's going to be graduate students, then it's going to be undergraduates, and then your eighth grader is going to come home and say, mommy, look what I made. And they can make a lot of cool things. And I think it's great, but there has to be some guardrails. You also in the book discuss kind of the polar opposite of Evans making horsepox. There were scientists who discovered something very dangerous and said,

We're going to give you the broad outlines, but we're not actually going to tell you what we did or how we did it. And so tell us about that and tell us about what reaction they received. There's a guy named Robert Arnon in California. He was a botulinum expert. He actually died last year. But there were seven known botulism toxins, and they're deadly, but we also have antidotes for all of them.

He found an eighth. So this is an incredibly poisonous substance for which there is no antidote. Deadly, and there was no antidote at the time. And he said, "I found this stuff. I'll tell you about it, but I'm not going to do what we would always do, which is publish the information so that my competitors and colleagues can go out and repeat it and make sure it really is deadly."

He said, it's just, it's too dangerous to do that. And he was roundly denounced for doing that. People said they didn't trust him. They didn't believe him. He was a very senior scientist and well-respected, but he wasn't playing by the rules that were established. And so he tried to do the right thing. And in fact, he stuck to his guns and did the right thing. And he was condemned for it. It's interesting. I'm trying to get my head around this. So the horsepox guy was condemned for going too far. Right.

The eighth botulism toxin guy was condemned for not publishing what he'd found. So the scientists seem to need to make up their mind. What are my misunderstanding about this situation? You're not misunderstanding anything. I think in the case of the horsepox guy, what he did was within the legitimate rules of biology. That was how things worked. It's just that people understood it shouldn't work that way.

Arnon did something different. He said, "I'm not going to do this normal published stuff because it's wrong and it would be dangerous, at least until we have a universal antidote the way we do to other toxins."

And he was denounced and condemned for not adhering to the normal rules of biology. So what this says to me is we need to change the normal rules of biology. Yeah. So let's talk about that. I'm thinking again about the sarin gas attack, which is a reminder that there are groups out there who would be very happy to unleash apocalyptic harm if they could.

We can all think of various extremist groups, terrorist groups, whatever you want to call them, who would be willing to do that. And perhaps also some state actors who would be happy to support that kind of thing. So there's clearly a risk of biological terrorism. So what rules do you have in mind that might help us defend against that? Well, there are things we could do. One of them is

Let's say we tested the wastewater with DNA sequencers at every airport or port of entry in Europe and the United States. That's about 300 places. You could instantly see viruses, and what you'd be looking for are things that were exponentially growing really fast. You'd find very rapidly if someone was releasing something, would it save everyone? Maybe not.

That's one thing you can do. Another thing is personal protective equipment can be immensely better than it is. I mean, we saw in the COVID pandemic, bad equipment, a lack of knowledge about what worked and what didn't. We can make really good PPE that people would use that would protect them. Other things we can do is...

If I want to order some DNA from one of the sort of Amazon-like places that sell it on the internet, we should have some sort of body that says, why do you want that sequence? Because it's coding an awful lot like one of these viruses. Now, yeah, it's sort of like gun control. You can always get around it. You will be able to get around it. But we ought to make an effort, and there are ways to make an effort. Another thing to do is...

When you print DNA, you can now print DNA at home or in your lab. But you could put barcodes into those printers so that there would be some form of regulation. It would make it seem like U.S. currency that has watermarks. You couldn't counterfeit it. You could account for it. Those things can be done.

And none of them really are. This is blowing my mind. I mean, this actually more than anything else you've said, Michael, gives me a sense of just how advanced the technology now is that, oh yeah, you can print DNA at home and you can watermark it. So you know whose printer was being used. There's more that I can't even yet go into because it's too speculative, but there are things you can do to regulate DNA and kill viruses that would be really effective. But I also have to say,

We just went through a pandemic that, name your figure, cost the world $17 trillion, you know, some crazy amount of money. And in the United States, we can't even get a billion dollars in the next budget to do some of these preparations, these pandemic preparations, these antiviral preparation. It's just remarkable. That is astonishing. So let's talk about

What scientists should do differently. You talked about your concerns that the norms, the rules of science were maybe not fit for these new risks. You also, in the book, you say, look, I'm a journalist. As a journalist, if I find something out, I'm going to publish it. And scientists are the same. So you sort of sympathize with the urge to be transparent and to get everything out there to be discussed and debated. But that's not right, you think? I do sympathize.

And I think it's a fine line. I mean, I don't want biologists to be hemmed in and not be able to do their work. But there has to be some sort of justification. Like we now fund and encourage scientists to go out and find new deadly viruses, take them to labs.

and work on them and see how deadly they are and what can be done. You know, there's an endless debate about was the Wuhan virus a lab leak or not.

Most people in the field that I talk to the most think it was not a lab leak. But lab leaks happen. I mean, it wouldn't be impossible for it to have been one. And there are many examples. So the idea that we're actually encouraging scientists to go into bat caves and bring back deadly viruses to labs so that we can... The rationale for that used to be, well, if you want to make a vaccine...

You need to know what you're making a vaccine against. So the idea that we need to have deadly viruses everywhere so that we can build something that will contain those viruses is very old think and it needs to be done away with.

You talk about gain-of-function research and dual-use research, and you say that actually you don't find either of those terms to be particularly helpful. So could you explain those terms and then explain why you think that they're a little bit food for the purposes of this discussion? Well, gain-of-function and dual-use are two ways of describing enhancing...

biological microbes to do something other than what they do in nature. But the reason I have a problem with that is almost everything we do with biology, whether it's make an artificial sweetener or make penicillin or make some sort of cancer drug or anything else, a synthetic dye for clothing, enhances the original microbes. So, you know, there are more than one use. We are going to gain function. The question is,

is it a gain-of-function that could cause harm? So if we are going to rethink the norms of science, formulate new rules about when to be transparent and when not to be, who does that? Is there a model for doing that successfully in the past? That's a really painful question. You could say there's a model if you look at nuclear treaties and the attempt to regulate nuclear weapons.

But I don't think that's really a model. This is more akin to something like climate change, a biological function that would affect the whole world. We're not that great at whole world governance, as far as I can tell. You could say the WHO could take a crack at it, the UN. Maybe we need a new body, but we need to do something. We've alluded several times

in our conversation to the possible analogy between nuclear weapons and bioweapons. Where does that analogy help us and where does it lead us astray? Well, I think it helps us in the sense that there have been international efforts to agree on what's dangerous and what isn't dangerous and who should control it. And there are people who inspect places where they exist. I think that is helpful. It would be nice to have people who are

unaligned who could go into various labs and inspect what's there. Where it doesn't help us is, you know, I think there are maybe eight or nine countries that could theoretically have a nuclear weapon at this point. There are many thousands of groups that could have biological weapons because biology is information now. So ultimately,

It has to be a more powerful antidote and it has to be a more present discussion than it is right now. And even, I think, much more powerful a weapon than nuclear weapons are. You mention in the book that Moderna had basically made their vaccine before the Chinese even admitted that the virus could spread from human to human. It was that quick. It was that early.

And yet, so this is all in January 2020, their vaccine wasn't actually being used in the general population until December of 2020. So why did it take so long? First of all, I should point out the obvious: developing a vaccine in a year is infinitely faster than it's ever been done before. The fastest vaccine previously had been months and that was four years.

But it took a while because people needed to test it and they had to do big trials and they had to make sure it was safe. This is a new technology. And so the idea of putting it into 14 billion arms without any testing is crazy. There are intermediary steps and, you know, we can be much, much faster than we are and we're going to have to be.

Yeah, because isn't this an example of what you were saying? We were thinking about the benefits, thinking about the costs, but not really being able to synthesize both of them because the costs of not injecting 14 billion people with this vaccine really fast were huge. Obviously, there's a risk to using a vaccine before it's been properly tested. Do you think we got the balance right? And how could we do better next time? We probably got the balance close to right. I think

Unfortunately, the answer to better that I know of are things called challenge trials. Challenge trials are you take a virus like the COVID virus and you take 40 people or 400 people.

And you give half of them the virus and half of them not the virus. They don't know. It's double blind. And then you vaccinate everybody and you see what happens. I mean, presumably you vaccinate them before you give them the virus. But right. Right. Why is it useful to actually deliberately infect them? Why is that an important step? Well, it's a very rapid way of finding out if the vaccine works or not, because if 200 people get

have the virus and you know they have the virus and you give them a vaccine and seven of them get sick instead of 196, you know that the vaccine is effective. If some of them get sick and then have terrible side effects, you know that too. The problem is it's hard to get medical officials to agree to do something like that because the harm could be serious. And

That's just not how it's worked in the past and it's very hard to get people to understand that this is a new era and we have to do things differently. Yeah. Paint us a picture of what we might be able to achieve with these new synthetic biology technologies in 20 years, if things go well, if we get the balance right,

and we avoid the risks, what sort of benefits might we be enjoying by say 2040 or 2050? Cancer vaccines are absolutely possible. Autoimmune diseases, diseases that have been very difficult to treat. If you can figure out what cells are attacking your body and in what way,

you can make an mRNA or a synthetic attack to it that would probably be very, very specific, you know, until recently what we've done with broad spectrum antibiotics and with vaccines is, you know, take a big wide swing at the body and try and protect you as broadly as you can.

The side effects of those things, particularly in cancer treatments, are evident. What would be great is very highly targeted treatments to diseases. And I think we'll be looking at that. And I think we'll see a lot of treatments for things that in 20, 30, 40 years that we think are terrible and permanently deadly right now. Just thinking back to...

that council meeting in 1976, they voted for a moratorium. They basically said, "Let's just wait for a bit." Which is understandable, but "let's just wait for a bit" does seem to be a very crude response to a technology which has rewards and risks. I think there's a middle ground, and it's something we've never done and I'm not sure we can do. I don't know of an example where humans have decided not to use a technology that's available to them.

But we need to start thinking about that. I'm not saying we shouldn't use synthetic biology, but there are some things we don't want to make. There are some tools we should agree ought not to be pursued. And that's a conversation that's starting to happen all around the world in biological circles. And it hasn't happened before. It hasn't needed to happen in the past.

You developed your technology, you did what you did, and then if there was a problem you tried to fix it later. And that can't operate like that anymore. Is that then what we need? We need those conversations about what we should and shouldn't be being pursued? And we're having them in the sense that scientists are having them and bioethicists are having them, and I know that's not the public, but it's a start.

And I think the COVID pandemic at least got people to think about some of these issues. Like I now talk about mRNA and people know what I'm talking about. You know, four years ago I was talking about mRNA and they were like, what planet is that from? So there's a level, you know, a level of sophistication that exists now. People know about spike proteins. They know a bit about vaccines, things they never knew before. And that's great.

Because this isn't something anymore, if it ever was, that scientists can just deliver to people. This has to be something that we all decide we want and figure out a way to get it. Michael Spector, thank you very much. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Michael's audiobook, Higher Animals, is available now at pushkin.fm, Audible, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.

The news isn't always good news, but when you're getting quality journalism and in-depth expert analysis that's held up for more than 180 years, that is definitely good news. So if you haven't already, save 20% with The Economist's summer sale today and stay on top of the stories that matter to you. You'll instantly gain unlimited digital access to daily articles, special reports, award-winning podcasts, subscriber-only events, and so much more. Now that's

Good news. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.