Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Life's Edge: Exploring the Boundary between Living & Nonliving | Carl Zimmer | Into the Impossible (#320)

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

On this episode of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast, Carl Zimmer discusses the importance of ethics in scientific communication and how scientific discoveries can be inaccurately reported by journalists, leading to misunderstandings by the public. The difficulty of defining what it means to be alive is explored and the stakes of this debate, particularly in regards to the autonomy of one's own body, are discussed. The episode also touches on the controversy surrounding gain of function research on pathogens and the importance of verifying scientific findings. The guest shares anecdotes from her career, including her experience covering the controversial discovery of arsenic life, and reflects on why biology continues to surprise and fascinate her. The episode ends with a discussion on the human brain’s difficulty in dealing with ambiguous states and the challenge of capturing people’s interest in retractions or flawed findings. Carl Zimmer is an expert science writer who is highly curious about the mysteries of life and often ponders the question of how to define it. Although scientists all study life, their definitions vary, leading to a unique fascination for Zimmer. He was particularly inspired by the astronomers who study the same thing, making their work seem more straightforward. Zimmer was also driven by the belief that advanced technology can sometimes feel magical. These interests have shaped his career as a science writer, and he has covered everything from genetics to pythons. https://carlzimmer.com/ Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ask biologists themselves and be like, so what's your definition of life? I'd just be like, well, they might have some definition, and then the next person would have a different one, or more often they would just want to, like, answer the question, be like, oh, I, you know, I just study pythons. Like, that's what really fascinated me. And maybe that's what made me sort of quip about, you know, astronomers having it more easy.

Like, all these people study the same thing. They all study life, and they either don't know how to define it, or they come up with definitions that are pretty different from each other. And I found that that has really stuck with me. And eventually I just sort of felt like I need to dive deep into this. Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Into the Impossible, with acclaimed science writer and author Carl Zimmer, discussing his latest of 14 books, Life's Edge,

the search for what it means to be alive. Zimmer's writing has appeared in prestigious publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic and Scientific American. He has a focus on evolutionary biology and genetics, and in this book, he delves deep into the origin and nature of life and the implications of manipulating it. Your fearless host, Brian Keating, probes Carl on the big questions. What is life? What is alive? How did life begin? And one of our favorite topics is their life beyond Earth. And what does astrophysics have to do with any of this anyway? please keep evolving and keep into the impossible at the top of your feeds by subscribing and following.

For some extra credit, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, where you can see the video version of this and other episodes about astrobiology and related topics. Please subscribe there too. Do you want to hear more from the best science communicators and beyond? Let us know what you think. in the form of review like this one on Audible. From Brooklyn Bookworm. I love this podcast.

I'm not a scientist or much of a science person. Brian's podcast YouTube channel are great fun for the layman to be introduced to fascinating insights, exhilarating theories, and mind-expanding ideas. And now, Brian Keady and Carl Zimmer, discussing Life's Edge, the search for what it means to be alive. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please, help. Welcome everybody to a very promising and lively episode of The Into the Impossible podcast.

I started this podcast in earnest in 2020 during the pandemic when I said I was your fearful host, but I've become a lot less fearful and a lot more fearless since the advent of things like the maybe perhaps the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We'll talk with today's guest, who's renowned communicator, writer, thinker, journalist. It's Carl Zimmer joining us all the way from the nutmeg state on the East Coast. I think I got that right. How are you today, Carl? I'm good.

I'm good. It's great to meet you. And today we're talking about your latest book, your most recent book, A Life's Edge, which kept me on the edge of my seat for a variety of reasons. And it's somewhat remarkable to me that perhaps of all the authors who have graced, you know, me with their presence on this podcast, this book has perhaps the highest number of intersectional networking nodes with people both located here in San Diego or former guests of the podcast or folks that we did not get on the podcast because they passed away and other sort of assorted connections that really makes this kind of. conversation unique, but I always like to have my author guests go through an exercise, which you're not supposed to do, but we don't have anything else to go on if we have not encountered your work. And that's to judge your book by its cover. Carl, I want to ask you,

what is the Genesis, the origin story of the title of the book, the illustration, and I always find the subtitle fascinating. And as I said, you can't say my publisher forced me to do. Oh, this is all mine, I'm happy to say. I mean, sometimes my editors, Stephen Morrow Dutton is very good with titles and so on. So if I'm just, if it's not working out for me, I know he'll have my back. But this time around, yeah, Life's Edge, you know, I think what I wanted to convey with that was that we have this idea of life being a thing. And there's sort of a, a border between life and whatever isn't life, whether it's life and death or living things and inanimate things. And I wanted to, in a way, I'm sort of playing with that, that, you know, there's this edge like it's sharp. And, you know, I wanted to sort of make the point that it's actually not, and it's very hard to find, and you can get kind of lost looking for it. And that sort of leads to the subtitle, which is this search, this search for what it means to be alive, because, you know,

that really has been a struggle for centuries. And it's one that, you know, I think biologists themselves sometimes don't even really acknowledge just how much of a struggle it has been and how much longer there is to go. And, you know, we were trying to figure out, like, what would be a good thing to put on the cover. And I, there are lots of, that I talk about in the book, lots of cool things, and weird things. And we settled on a picture.

I'm just going to hold it up here to show you. This is this strange rainbow-colored blob. This is a brain organoid. It was started from a volunteer who provided skin cells. and then biologists, actually, the University of California, San Diego, coaxed that skin cell with some chemicals through a series of steps and developments to become a neuron, a brain cell,

and not just any brain cell, but the kind of early brain cell that would form in an embryo, which then multiplied and grew into something like a brain, And so one of the names that people give this thing is a brain organoid. And it sits there in a bath of chemicals. The neurons release electrical signals. And, you know, there are these deep questions that something like that creates. I mean, these things have only been around for a few years.

But, you know, they can grow to the size of a, you know, a sugar cube, a sand grain, maybe even a little bigger, getting towards. rice grain size, are they alive? Are they living things? You know, we, you know, when we think about ourselves as being alive, we really think about it in terms of our brain, you know, like, well, of course I'm alive because I'm conscious. And, you know, we actually, like, have come to define death by brain death. So here you have this thing that's made of human brain cells that behaves very much like a human brain. It's not connected to a human body. But the cells metabolize and they can divide. So what is it? Is it alive? I think that would be a very hard thing,

a question to answer. And I look at other these hard cases in the book. Yeah, the book is really sort of the exploration of the edge of the boundary between living and non-living. And I was fine those things get us into trouble, you know, and things are kind of ambiguous. The human mind, as you point out in the book, you know, is not so simple to really model or predict even. And now with the advent of, you know, large language models and chat GBT type things and past guest on the show Max Tegmark has made the argument that Life 3.0 is really basically here and will be abundant and perhaps supersede life 2.0. I think we're, I think we're like 2.1 in his, in his cognition scheme. But, but yes, the brain organoid was a fascinating episode with,

with my colleague Alison Motry. We did a conversation. I've solicited a question for you from him, which we will talk about. He raves about his experience getting to know you. And there are many, many connections here at San Diego that we'll get into, including the Miller, experiment, Harold Deary and Miller, we're eventually here at UC San Diego, Romeo Maro, who's a renowned professor, chemistry, theoretical chemist, who's here, who did a lot of contributions to some of your piece in the New York Times from a year or two ago when the pandemic was sort of fresh and it was vital to get that information out. But I want to start with maybe a surprising connection, which maybe you didn't know about, or maybe you wouldn't have

agree. Actually, you agreed to come on the podcast after a very cheeky and perhaps annoying tweet of mine where you said, imagine if astronomers couldn't agree on what a planet was, you know, and here we are. We can't agree on what life is. I said, Carl, I have news for you. I have good news and bad news. So we don't agree. And it's not so simplified or simple to really ascertain what is a planet, what is a star even, what is the universe, what is the multiverse. These are all sort of ambiguous things, which relates really to the first topic that I encountered in the book that had a nexus with this podcast. And surprisingly, Carl, that's with Ben Shapiro, who is a friend of mine and has been on the podcast three times. And you talk

about life, his quote is one of the opening chapters of the book. You talk about life begins at conception. The conservative pundit, Ben Shapiro declared in 2017. That's not a religious belief. That's science. And I want to ask about that because I think these essence of some of the polarization that we suffer in science and society is because of the difficulty the human mind has with ambiguous states. So Schrodinger-type states, and Schrodinger will play a big role in this podcast, as you undoubtedly are aware. So when you have a superposition of possibilities, live and un-live fetus, a baby, you know, machine gun and anti-tank weapon, you know, you straddle the spectrum of reasonableness, ranging from life begins a conception, as one person might believe, to life can be terminated

up until the point of, you know, full term birth. So what do you think is that sort of border? I mean, is it something that we're fundamentally doomed to never really be able to resolve because of the ambiguity in these matters? In other words, because the human brain is so bad at dealing between things that aren't, you know, exactly black and white. Is that part of the difficulty, or is it deeper than that in the definition of what life is? Just a quick pause to ask you for a small favor while my thumb is occupied with old Albert on it. Yours is presumably freed up to leave a thumbs up on this video. It really helps me a lot with a good old-fashioned YouTube algorithm.

Thanks a lot. Now back to the video. Well, I think in the case that you provided, I think the problem, I think one of the fundamental problems with these sorts of slogans like life begins at conception is like I've looked like it's very difficult to to actually like figure out what people mean when they say that um there are as I explain in the book hundreds of definitions of life but I never actually hear somebody actually like really it's hard to find anyone lay it out what they really mean when they say the life begins at conception um because and and you know if you know there are plenty of ways in which you can think about life that would not mean the beginning of conception

because the cells that gave rise to that zygote were themselves alive. Now, one may want to say, well, there's something special about that life, but now all of a sudden we're in a different ballgame. I mean, that's different than saying life begins. It's saying, well, this special life begins or when I say life, I mean this, you know. So I don't think, you know, so saying life begins, conception is a, it's a catchy slogan, but if you really try to analyze it, it falls apart. And, you know, as a society, you know, as a democracy,

we need to come to agreements about these things in agreements with people we may disagree with. There is, you know, I think it's telling that, you know, we have ended up with, you know, I'd say a fair agreement about, you know, talking about life and when it ends. You know, the idea of brain death is a, it's, you know, in the history of understanding life, it's pretty recent. It really only started to emerge in the 1960s.

And it, and, you know, and it emerged because of technology. It wasn't because of some philosophical issue or so on. It was basically that they were ventilators. They could keep people their heart still beating when otherwise they would have been dead. And transplant surgeons were figuring out how to save people's lives by giving them transplants. And they sort of felt like, you know, we need to like, you know, for the good, for the good of everybody here, we need to figure out what we mean to say that someone is still alive or someone is dead. And that definition, you know, that was hashed out very clearly, explicitly with philosophers and bioreethic and so on. and, you know, that definition is brain death.

Now, that is, can be controversial sometimes. And there have, I write in the book about, you know, there have been cases where people like, no, I don't, I don't want to accept this. And I don't want to accept what the state of California says is dead. Right. But it's, but it's nothing compared to the conflict over, over the beginning of, you know, when we talk about embryos and fetuses. Yeah, and that kind of, you know, is a hybrid of a hybrid or a superposition because you're dealing of life and then on abortion, you're dealing with the, you know, the

potential termination of a life or potential life, the potential termination of a potential life. But in, you know, in terms of... You know, but, I mean, just to point out how complicated this is all is, what do we mean by a potential life. You just use that phrase as if we all, A, know what it means and we all agree on what that means. And I would just say, like, we all need to stop and really think more carefully about these things because it's, it is a lot slipper, more slippery than we may appreciate. And it's getting more slippery. And so this actually brings us back to those brain

organoids. You know, because, you know, just as technology has, you know, created a new challenge in terms of understanding when life ends, you know, in terms of, you know, brain death, ventilators, transplantation, and so on, technology has made it possible to start creating organoids. And so, you know, every, you know, these are just like. from skin cells, as I said. So every one of your skin cells has this potential life. Maybe not a life of a, you know, someone walking around and, you know, being on a podcast, sure. But, you know, if we define life in other ways by saying, well, you know, brain activity, brain, brain would appear to be

brainwave oscillations, you know, development of different layers of the cortex, It's all there. So if every skin cell in our body has potential life, what is our obligation to our skin? Because we are sloughing off countless skin cells every single day. Sure, sure. Are we getting into the potential, you know, all those potential lives every day? And I'm not trying to be facile here.

I'm just sort of saying, you know, let's really think about, let's think and rethink about all these terms that we're using, because they're not as simple as we tend to think they are. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton for the stay. Yeah, I mean, I've had on several eminent scholars, philosophers of consciousness and the brain and activity, you know, related to that domain, which you just mentioned is sort of the sine qua non of, of life, maybe human life or termination of the right to terminate. Although you point out in the book, case of a young girl who basically goes through puberty and menstruates and so forth, she's brain. So, but again, getting back to what I think is the, not the explanation, the real. resolution of the difficulty. But I think the origin of the problem, when we talk about, well, pornography is something that you know when you see it. Okay, that affects people, but it's very different from, you know, autonomy over one's own body or a living a baby. I mean, nobody ever, you know, comes up to a woman who's carrying determinances has the fetus, you know, or how's your

embryo do? And they usually say, how's your baby? When's the baby do? So again, it's something you know when you see it. But with pornography, it doesn't impact, again, your autonomy. your freedom, possibly being made criminal in certain locations. So I guess the stakes are so much higher. And even with gun rights, I mean, you don't need, you're, you know, you don't have to own a gun, right? There's no, there's no mandate. And I think even reasonable people, members of the NRA, would say, look, you can't operate a portable thermonuclear device and call that, you know, part of a well-regulated militia. On the other hand, you know, having some mode of self-defense might be applicable to even David Hogg or some activist on the opposite side. So I guess I'm saying

is the stakes are so high combined, you know, with this particular topic. And I think that combined with the human beings' inability to deal with these questions because we are classical creatures. We live in a quantum world. And I think it's appropriate, you know, we should turn to Schrodinger, who did approach this topic way back when in the in the 50s, when he was an eminent, you know, Nobel laureate coming up with the canonical equations of quantum mechanics that govern the behavior of essentially all of chemistry and part of physics. And obviously chemistry is very deeply related to life and its existence and its definition.

Now, Schrodinger, like these people that I talk to, like David Chalmers, like Nick Ballstrom and other people. When I ask them, what is consciousness? I get a 20-minute definition, Carl. And that's okay. Because, look, if we can't define what it means to be a bat, that doesn't affect some woman's right to do something with her body or with a fetus or with a baby, right? But in this case, it does. So I think Schrodinger's question is basically, you know, has not been definitively answered,

but I think your book is an approach to surveying the landscape, both from the macroscopic down to the quantum. And I wonder, you know, you've done a lot of work. She has her mother's laugh, is genetic in nature, the history of heredability, planet of viruses. You've done a lot in this field. What is it about this question that seems to fascinate you so much so that you've dedicated a considerable amount of your professional career to issues of the biological sciences, life, chromosomes, and viruses, etc? So I started out as a journalist at a magazine called Discover, and, you know, I was just, you know, an assistant editor there doing some copy editing and some fact checking and then they let me start to write little articles and you know I would you know

write about all sorts of different things because you know we couldn't be you know too precious about what we would or wouldn't write about so I was writing about physics and you know technology and astronomy and all sorts of stuff and it was enjoying all of it but um it just felt like the when I would write about biology I would just, there would just be like, I would just be reading a study and say, like, wait, what? Like, really? Like, this exists? This is how this works. Like, I would, I would just continually be surprised. Like, you know, every week, there would be at least one thing that just, just blew my mind. And so, and so once I was at the point where I could kind of gravitate towards when I wanted to write about

features at Discover and then working with other magazines like National Geographic or the Atlantic. You know, biology was really what I wanted to write about. And it just, you could also just write about so much, and yet it was all interconnected in interesting ways, most importantly, through evolution, that, you know, this principle just helps you to understand how everything, there are these themes to how living things work. And not only that, but it all comes from the same common ancestors. So, and, and. And, you know, and I've had the luxury of, you know, well, I'm, you know, I'd start in the 90s. And so I didn't realize it, but I was going to be riding this wave of, you know, the modern

science of genomics, of molecular biology, which just, you know, just like took us down to this incredible level of detail that I really couldn't imagine before. You know, I'm writing stories now that are regularly about, you know, like people who are analyzing, you know, the genomes of hundreds of different species in one study. And that's just standard. Like, there's so much information and the insights are really profound. But, you know, along the way, you know, I have to say that every now and then I'd be like, okay, like, clearly like what really, you know, I'm interested in his life. Okay. What exactly am I writing about, you know? You know, I mean, I had read Schrodinger and, you know, and other things. But, but, you know, then I would start to think like, well, you know, have people really sorted this out very well, you know? And, you know, I would ask biologists themselves and be like, so what's your definition of life? And, you know, I'd be talking to someone who studies pythons or somebody who studies crabs or somebody who studies Venus flytraps. And they'd just be like, ah, well, they might have some. some definition and then the next person would have a different one, or more often they would just really not want to like answer the question, be like, oh, I, you know, I just study pythons. Like, I, you know, like, and so that's what really fascinated me. And maybe that's what made me sort of quip about, you know, astronomers having it more easy. Like all these people study the same

thing. They all study life and they either don't know how to define it or they come up with definitions that are pretty different from each other. And I found that, um, that is really stuck with me. And eventually I just sort of felt like, I need to dive deep into this. And it's so interesting to see how, just how long of a history, uh, there's been to this and how the struggles that people have today in the 21st century are very, they echo things in the 1800s, the 1700s, the 16th. This is a long struggle. And we're not done with it. Yeah. And I wonder how much of that, is driven by, you know, something I call the academic media hype complex, which is that, you know, that we researchers need to depend on funding sources, which depend on our ability to get results and drive research publications, or obtain funding, obtain students to work with us and collaborate with other researchers. And I wonder if your journalistic, you know, kind of neck hairs ever really stand up on edge when you're, when you're dealing with people.

I'll just say my friend Lee Cronin features very prominently in the book, and especially at the very end. I don't think it's a spoiler of a, you know, the book's been out for a little while. And, you know, it's not like I'm revealing, you know, who done it. But, you know, his assembly theory. And he was asked famously, and my audience would be quite annoyed at me if I didn't at least, you know, press you on your opinions about it. But they've pressed me on, you know, why is it that he said in 2010 at his TED talk that, you know, life would be created in the lab. in the next 22 months or whatever he said. And here we are, you know, 13 years later and we can't seem to come up with it.

I wonder, what do you believe is, you know, the job of a journalist communicating to the public or a popular science author, both of which careers you've enjoyed? What role do you have to sort of, you know, call out? Like, this doesn't really, I mean, you guys have been saying similar things, as you said, for decades now. And this is true in the alien, you know, extraterrestrial intelligence hunting field that I'm tangentially involved with at times. So at what point do you ever inject yourself into the story? You do a lot of, you know, this is like a memoir of this book and a part. You know, you're doing experiments. You're creating, you know, compounds.

You're meeting with faculty here in California and elsewhere. What is your responsibility as a journalist or on a mission and a popular science book to maybe expose and call out BS when you see it? Do you ever have that as a conflict? I don't see as a conflict. I see it as, you know, one of the jobs that science writers and journalists more generally should do. And, you know, I think that, you know, when writing about science, you know, the challenge is that there's a lot of work to be done to explain the ideas and the experiments. the research, the concepts in these areas. Like that takes a lot of work and a lot of space. And so, but, you know, at the same time, you know, I think it's also, I think it is important,

you know, if people are trying to, you know, hype up the stuff that they're doing to, you know, to take a skeptical look, especially, you know, if people are sort of setting their own goals. I mean, I've done that a lot. I would say, I'd say I've done that. I'm trying to think areas where I've done that. You know, the, well, with the genome, you know, the human genome, you know, when Francis Collins and others were, were, James Watson, were lobbying. for the money to do the first draft of the human genome,

it was a big ask. They were wanting billions of dollars, and they were trying to justify it. And so they were promising that there would be a lot of medical benefits that would come out of it. And, you know, like, I would say, like, five years after, the draft genome was published in, I guess, what was that, 2001, 2002? You know, it's not like, you know, people were getting curative cancer or something like that.

And, you know, like there were years were going by where, you know, critics were saying, like, you know, what, you know, did you, what about those promises that you made? And, you know, I think it's important to quote those promises and look at what's happened. But I also think that, you know, it's even when you, you know, remember the history of these things, it's also important to to recognize the complexity because like if I had, if I would go say to like a cancer biologist and say, you know what, you know, like they made a bunch of promises and, you know, in five years, you know, there weren't any great cancer drugs that came. out of it. So I tell you what, you can't use the human genome anymore. They say, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no. I'm sorry, I'm not giving this back. This map of the human genome is a tool that I cannot live without. And the fact is that there are a lot of of really promising treatments today, you know, we're talking like two decades later, that where, you know,

the human, you know, having that map of the human genome was just essential. It just was. So, you know, if you were expecting things in five years and you started getting them in 20, you know, what is that? I mean, I don't think that. I think it's, it would be wrong to say like, ah, it was a complete waste. It wasn't. It just, you know, there is a contrast between people's expectations when the project started and how things really played out. Right. On the hype side, you know, you feature a lot of very interesting anecdotes that I've drawn upon many times in my career, both to illustrate the kind of nexus between, you know, promotion and publication and scientific research and funding. And one of those is very famous because it appears in the movie Contact featuring past guest avatar, Jill Tarter, played by Jody Foster. And it was written, called, co-written by Carl Sagan and his wife, Angerian, who's been a guest on this podcast, as long, along with her daughter. I think I'm the first podcaster to have both of them on the podcast. And when we discuss that particular movie, there's a scene in there where Bill Clinton is on the White House lawn. He's talking about how revolutionary this discovery of the signal from alien extraterrestrial intelligence is. Now, of course, that wasn't real, but the actual footage is real. And he's really talking about the discovery. of these microbes found on a meteorite that landed in Antarctica where I've been twice. And that discovery, and you go through it. So here's a meteorite. And by the way, if you have a .edu email address,

you sign up for my mailing list, and I will send you a meteorite. That's briankeating.com slash list because I love distributing materials. But it was kind of bespeaks of not the origin of life itself, but the origin of life perhaps on Earth or some form of life coming from Mars. And I like point out that it took a very long time and was really if you if you survey even scientists and you say what's the status of the proof or dispositiveness of the Allen Hills meteorite in terms of life on on you know for Martian microbes and even scientists will tell me that oh it could be still you know hasn't been definitively ruled out it was published in science as you point out it was leaked and then Clinton talked about it Dan Golden used it as as a motivation

to get more funding for NASA's nascent astrobiology. The point is a lot of people in the public never know the inside baseball unless they read this book or have seen in another format. So what obligation do you think a scientist has to maintain a budget for publicization of retractions and sort of to come clean about this? I'm thinking also of the discovery of arsenic life, also published in science, also shown not to be replicable. these are huge things and it impacts the public's understanding. So do you think scientists, I've called for scientists to maintain some PR budget for

retractions as sort of a lockbox? What do you think? How do you think we can handle this so that the public is not left with a sense of mistrust of what scientists actually do? Well, you know, the arsenic life example is a really interesting one. I mean, that was a case where people. had found bacteria in a lake in California that seemed to be using arsenic to build their DNA, which would really just be just something that we have never seen before.

And I remember that that hype was really kind of mind-blowing from the journal and from NASA, you know, and they were just ready to launch with it. And but I, you know, there were, you know, I, at the time I was writing a fair amount for Slate. And my editor and I, Dan Engber, who's a great science writer in his own right, he's at the Atlantic now, we were saying like, just emailing back and forth, like, hey, I don't know. This seems kind of funny to us. And I had, you know, this was back in the age of blogging. And it was a very small blog that I, a couple small blogs that I like to read that, I mean small just in terms of they had small audiences.

Big ideas, small audiences, but, you know, I was one of them. And then they were like, microbiologists and such. And they were like, it doesn't seem right. So I just said, look, let me just go like check with a bunch of experts. And so I think I just, you know, just email like a dozen, you know, top people. and pretty much they are all like, this is terrible. I'm like, okay, that's the story. So that's what I wrote.

Like, you know, I think the headline was like, this paper should have never been published. I think that was in quotes. Like, that was what one of these people said, you know. And it really, you know, and I think that accurately reflected this sort of feeling of a lot of scientists. And, you know, they actually then published, you know,

their own studies saying like, look, no, this was all an artifact, you know, you didn't control for things carefully and so and so and so forth. That is a part of science. Like the sort of getting ahead of your skis and, you know, it's not a judgment, it's just an observation. And I start the book with someone who got way ahead of his skis about 100 years ago, James Butler Burke, this physicist, who thought that he had created life in the lab. And people believed him. He was being celebrated around the world, like newspapers are calling him, you know, he published a book shortly afterwards about this incredible experimented with radium and protein broth.

And people are saying this is like on par with the origin of species, you know. This is artificial life. They would use these terms. And it was all wrong. It was completely botched. And, you know, a few scientists, you know, doggedly proved that that was the case. But, you know, I agree that, you know, it's important to put some focus on, you know, the law, you know, what happens after the big flashy paper. Do the findings hold up? Do they not? Where does science go? Because science is not just one flashy paper at a time. But, you know, the fact is that it's a lot harder to capture people's interests about, you know, a retraction of a paper they may barely have remembered reading about if they read

about it at all five or ten years ago. So, um, it's not easy. And it's not just doing it doesn't necessarily, uh, fix that problem you're identifying. I wonder if it's a journalism problem as, uh, you know, as a, uh, as a scientific problem in that, as you say, you know, we've had my own encounter with, you know, front page above the fold in the New York Times discovery, which, you know, then later had to be rescinded the claims that we made, not that we didn't make a blunder, we didn't leave the lens cap on the telescope, but we misinterpreted the signal

as coming from the inflationary origin of the entire beginning of time. And in fact, we had seen just specks of dust in the cosmic interstellar wind. And when that was finally retracted to the extent that it was, thanks to a reanalysis of our data, that was on page 8,

16 of the Saturday edition, It's the least read edition. So I wonder, yeah, if we can, if we can sort of have both in terms of ethics and in terms of publicization, there are many kind of ethical edges as well as life edges. We have, for example, I did an interview with James Tour, who's actually a, how should I say, he's a messianic Jew, which means that he was actually born Jewish, became Christian. and he's extremely devout but highly cited named distinguished chair at Rice University. And, you know, he presented a survey that was done independently. I think it was done by the National Science Foundation. And it said, like, what is the, ask the public, what is the most advanced form of life that scientists have been able to create?

And the majority of respondents said something like a frog. There was, admittedly, only a few different choices. There was, you know, a cell, DNA. And, of course, you know, there's nothing even remotely close to that. But I wonder, and it reminded me of a talk of another study by the National Science Foundation, asked Americans how, which, which happen? Does the sun orbit the Earth or not? And 25% of Americans said the sun does orbit the Earth.

And so, you know, now people aren't publishing papers anymore that say, you know, the sun orbits the Earth, the way they might have done in, you know, Ptolemy's Day in the Ptolemy Times or the Alexander. times. But people like La Jolla Denizzen, Craig Ventner, who's, I don't believe he makes an appearance in this book, maybe didn't. But he'll come out and say, well, he created artificial life, you know, the first artificial life. And even closer to home is the case of the Miller Uri experiment. Because if you ask people, even scientifically well-inclined people, people I've had on the podcast, they'll say that the Miller-Uri experiment, you know, definitively show that we could create, if not DNA, you know, precursors to DNA. And as you point, it's really not true, right? So

how do we, what do we, you know, how do we combat that? Because I think the light of truth, you know, it should be most prominent and we should be come clean about what we are able to do, such that when we do make life in the lab or do discover extraterra, that people will be appropriately appreciative of it. So I don't know if there's really a question there, but I'd love to hear your your take on it? Like, what do we make of the very, very large incentivization to make these bold claims and the lingering aftertaste in the public that may redound to the detriment of the public? Well, you know, I do think that a, you know, a big challenge with all this is just our, you know, that it's, there's just a lot of science that gets done.

And it's hard to, you know, we, we come up with these sort of short hands to remember what's going on. And, you know, I mean, you know, if you talk to, you know, certainly my experience, like talking to scientists, like if we, if we move out of their field of expertise, you know, they're kind of, you know, castarney little fuzzy on things as well. don't begrudge them. I mean, it's just, it's, it's challenging. And I think that we just, you know, I think the way that the, the, the human mind works is to go from like, okay, here are the, you know, here's this interesting but complicated set of results to being like, okay, here's this quick,

quick, simple story. Then I'll remember that instead, you know. I don't, I don't think we're going to, you know, solve the problem of the human brain, um, uh, anytime soon. But, you know, I think that, you know, if you want to, if you're bringing up like fundamental things about, you know, the sun and so on, like, you know, I don't, I don't see a place for like journalists to be like, you know, the way that news works just makes it difficult to address those sort of fundamental issues. I mean, there's another, there's another number. I think it's maybe the same survey that you looked at, my one that really caught my eyes that actually the majority of people think that electrons are bigger than atoms. I mean, that's like a majority. And, you know, and I'm like, that's interesting because I have no idea why people would think that. But most people do, most Americans who are surveyed at least. And, you know, we're not going to, I mean, like, the format of news is not such that we

will, like, have a headline saying, like, news flash electrons are smaller than atoms. Like, that's just not, that's not going to work. You know, the best that I can think of is, you know, just a redoubling an emphasis on, you know, better science education from kindergarten through high school. Like, I just, I keep coming back to that. I just, I mean, you know, most people are not, most people are not science PhDs. Most people don't even take, you know, take a college science class. This is where our focus needs to be. Yeah, just a quick closing anecdote about that survey about the sun orbiting the Earth. So I cited that statistic on the occasion of Galileo's 450th birthday, I believe it was, and at his actual final resting place slash prison in our Chetri, Italy, outside of Florence.

And there was a crowd of astronomers gathered there. And at first I showed the statistic because it was, you know, it was kind of pertinent. It said 25% of Americans believe that the sun orbits the earth and all the Italians, oh, stupid American. And I said, but guess what? And then I showed them the European Research Council did the same survey and 33% of Europeans, believe that. So they're really not in a position to judge us Americans.

One of the best, the most enjoyable parts as a physicist was the kind of delineation and the history of how physics has really informed biology. And I wonder if you could comment on that. What were some of the surprising things you learned about? I didn't really realize, you know, Della Brooke. I obviously knew Schrodinger, but Dellabrook. Obviously, Lisa Maitner was an x-ray crystallographer. I believe Watson was also trained as a physicist.

Cric was trained as a physicist, perhaps. There are many, many crossovers between physics, which is reputed to be the science of the 20th century, and biology, which is really, reputed to be the science of the 21st century. So what were some of the surprising findings and learnings that you encountered along the way of writing this book? I think it was very interesting to kind of get into the perspective of people like Delbrook and Schrodinger and these other physicists who were, you know, and Crick. I mean, they're looking at you, and just thinking

from their perspective as people looking at life. And, you know, from their experience, you know, studying radioactivity, studying quantum physics and so on, and saying like, huh, okay, like quantum physics, I think I get quantum physics, but life, okay, that's weird. And I want to, like, think about life. As, you know, so, and they were, you know, it's very different than the sort of the main sort of trunk of the main channel of the history of biology where you, you have. had naturalists. You know, you had, you know, starting with Aristotle, you know, just splashing around lagoons and, you know, dissecting aquatic creatures and so on, you know, all the way on through, you know, Linnaeus, you know, marching around in Lapland and capturing every living thing he could find. So, so that, you know, obviously biology has taken in all. all of the tools of physics and a lot of the concepts of physics at a kind of a lower level in the sense of like, you know, obviously like, you know, thank you physics for the electron

microscope. Thank you for, you know, cryo-eem. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cryolography. Oh, my goodness. And now we have, you know, fancier things like cryo-em and so on. And that's all great. But, you know, like it's, you know, for a day-to-day, you know, biologists, I might be like, okay, great. So now I can really look at the ribosome and how it makes proteins. And that's all I care about. That's all I want to do. I love looking at ribosomes and that's all I care about. But, you know, the fact is that a lot of these physicists were actually like saying, no, no, no, no, no, wait. I don't care about the many, many details of life and there are many details of life. I'm just, I want to know what this big question the question the shorter address what is life like i want to ask as a physicist and um and you know

it's really neat to hang out with the physicist today who are still asking that question and still working on these theories and and doing some experiments to try to get at that and um you know i i maybe you know maybe these physicists will actually like you know build a theory of life um and then we will you know, maybe someday we will look at life as just a property of matter. In the same way, we think of superconductivity as a property of matter. You know, like not everything has superconductivity. But there's not just one thing that has superconductivity. Like there's just like these, you can have a theory to understand how under some circumstances,

some materials will have superconductivity. Maybe we can say the same things about life someday. We can't do it now. We don't have a theory of life. Right. And maybe like superconductivity, it'll emerge as a consequence of a more deeper complexity that's hard to understand by merely breaking it into the sum of its parts. I wonder as we're coming up on the hour, and I have several questions from the audience and also my existential questions that I love to ask my guests if you're willing to answer one or two of those. when we think about the discovery of extraterrestrial life, moving from the generation of life on Earth, perhaps, but extraterrestrial life, what do you think it would mean to discover there's some other form of life? Perhaps there's life here as past guest Paul Davies might hypothesize that there might be a shadow biosphere hiding in plain sight or lurking on some minor body in our solar system. What would you,

think would be the impact of a discovery. Let's just not, let's not say, you know, Ellie Arrowway discovering, you know, 5D Tesserax and whatnot. But let's restrict it to the slime mold planet, you know, orbiting around Proxima Centauri B. And that's all there is. And what do you think that would mean for our understanding, not only of life, but of ourselves? Well, I mean, scientifically, I think it would be a huge deal because, you know, you either it will be a lot like life as we know it or it will completely expand our concept of what it means to be alive. You know, all of life on earth is kind of boring in the sense that it's all, you know, DNA as far as to speak for yourself. You've never babysat my kids, Carlos. Well, there might be interesting abstentions.

Yeah. No, no, I mean boring. Just, you know, not in the phenotype, but when you get down to the genotype, you know, when you get down to those molecules that are carrying on life through the generations, it's all DNA. And it's like, I mean, the code is pretty much the same. It's just, it's, so it would be amazing, as Paul Davies has suggested. Like, maybe there's RNA life that's lurking, you know, in the tiny pores of rocks where

DNA life can't go and eat it, you know, maybe. Or a fifth base or something, a fifth base, Z. Yeah, right. But, you know, but, you know, I think what's interesting is that is, it's been interesting to look at the word, at how astronomers have been looking at, at, and discovering exoplanets. And, you know, I think we kind of looked at our own solar system and said, like, oh, yeah, I guess we get planets. So it'll be just like this.

Well, no, it's like it turns out like planets around other stars are kind of mind-blowing. They just, they don't play by, quite play by the rules we thought the planets played by, you know. So you just have, you know, these huge planets right next to their sun or you'd have just, you know, planets going around dead stars or just all sorts of stuff. And so it would be exciting if life, you know, elsewhere. and the universe challenged us that way. Even if it doesn't, just finding it would be amazing. But, you know, I think that, you know,

to a culture that has, you know, that has, where, you know, we just, we watch science fiction movies and the aliens are all, you know, bearing a very striking resemblance to Hollywood extras. It's like, I think, you know, I think, you know, yeah, I just think people might, you know, feel, I hope people will be able to feel some of the excitement that scientists will feel, even if it's just slime molds or bacteria.

I still think that that will be things like that, single-celled life will be amazing if it's out there. Maybe it's not. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Right. Yeah.

I mean, my basic prediction is that we won't find intelligent life because simply the argument always goes, as made by Carl Sagan and Andrewan in that Apocco book contact, where they say, you know, if there's not life out there, it's an awful waste of space. But, you know, Carl, I've been to Antarctica twice, to the South Pole even. And, you know, Antarctica's one seventh of the Earth's space in terms of continental shelf. And there's not much life there. There are a couple penguins near the ocean, some seals. There aren't even very many microbes and certainly not a lot of flora.

And so just saying that there is, you know, surface area, other planets, perhaps, which is undoubtedly true, has no bearing on whether or not it's probable. And in fact, I'll run this argument by you. Tell me what you make of it. It's not something I'm really an expert in. But the fact that we haven't really discovered, well, we certainly haven't discovered life in our solar system outside of Earth. We've said in the thin kind of veneer that covers the Earth's surface or tardigrades that float around, I guess.

But that's about it. And yet, the Earth has been exchanging material, just like the Allen Hills meteorite, came from Mars. And this meteorite came from the asteroid. belt. So, too, are pieces of the earth, potentially carrying base pairs and DNA enzymes and maybe even microbes and tardigrades and tardigrades, landing on, presumably on landing on Mars and celadus in other places. So the fact that we don't see, you know, any evidence for it. Of course, you can't say lack of evidence is evidence of absence, as Carl Sagan also said. But I wonder, it has to tell you

something about the prior probability distribution, the fact that, you know, if you did see some form of life, you'd say, okay, it is. Once life gets started anywhere in the solar system, it immediately spreads. That can't be true because we don't see it anywhere else but Earth. So anyway, you can react to that if you choose, but I have a series of audience questions that I love to also ask you. Well, you know, we haven't looked all that hard for life, put it that way. I mean, you know, we may have, we could have potentially contaminated Mars already with our spacecraft, but we don't know. yet because it's not as if there's a microbiologist up there who is doing the kind of research to

find those things. There could be subterranean life in Mars and we have, you know, our probes have not yet really like done the, done the work to find it. They found some odd plumes of methane that might or might not be life. We don't know. But, you know, like there's, you know, as you say, like, I mean, on Earth, you know, we have Antarctica, we have the oceans, which, you know, we barely explored. And, you know, you're not going to, you know, if you've never seen a blue whale and you go, you know, go take a swim and you don't see a blue whale, that doesn't mean the blue whales aren't out there. Right. Or a giant kelp ball like you encounter here in Loya Shores at the very outset of the book. Okay. Some questions if you would give me your forbearance to ask of you.

So I asked our friend Alison Motry, who, a reminder, we did a podcast. with him in studio here at UCSD a couple of months ago. And that title of that episode is to help his autistic son. He grows brains in space. A little bit of hype on my part, but it is true. He has a very personal mission, as you know, to conquer autism and to explore the deeper regions of the human brain. Allison says, oh, yes, I would love to hear from him if his concept of life has changed after he wrote the book. and what he would call life now, even outside of Earth.

Enjoy the conversation. He is very nice to talk to. Yeah. I was kind of, you know, life concept agnostic before. I think I'm more so now. I think that I think the philosopher Carol Cleland, I think really makes a very compelling case. I feel it more compelling now. that it's just the wrong way, it's just the wrong way of going about understanding life

that scientists should be trying to find a theory that explains what we call life. It's fine if we sort of have sort of placeholders for what life is, but I, you know, life transcends all that. I feel that more so than ever having worked on this book. Mm-hmm. All right. And next turning to a question tangentially related to future guest on the podcast, hopefully, Professor Romi Amari here at UCSD, and that's your work on COVID. This is sort of a kind of update from the audience members, and then I have a follow-up.

Sort of what is your, what is the best current thinking about the origin of COVID? is you've written definitively about it in the New York Times and elsewhere. What do you think is the origin of God? We started off with like religion, so now we got to pivot to something very contrary. We won't get into anti-vaccination, though, don't worry. But tell me, what is the best thinking or perhaps your best understanding of how COVID, in fact, originated? Well, you know, I mean, the, the, there has been, you know, there's been a group of, of virus. who have studied, you know, the emergence of viruses for a while, and they have published a couple

papers in science where they make the case that there was a spillover, multiple spillovers at a market in Wuhan. And, you know, they, you know, they are, they marshal evidence just in terms of like distribution of samples in this marketplace and an analysis of the, you know, the, you know, they are, you mutations in the virus. But, you know, but, you know, if people want, you know, to have like a, you know, video footage of a raccoon dog that's like coughing and then that person next to that raccoon dog inhaled it and that person tested positive and then you can trace from there, they don't have it.

We will, we would never be able to get that. the animals that were there were all killed. So, you know, like we're in a tough situation. Now, there have been, you know, certainly in, you know, congressional hearings talking about, you know, raising questions about what was happening miles away at the Wuhan Institute virology. Other people have pointed out this Chinese Center for Disease Control had a facility that was closer to the market.

Um, you know, like, uh, if somebody were to say like, you know, okay, we have, here we have this, you know, this, this lab data that shows that, you know, here's this virus that was collected from, I don't know, you know, let's say, uh, southern China. And it's the sequence of almost SARS-CoV-2 and then we did this to it and that was the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Then, you know, then you could say, aha. But you'd still, have to explain why it is that a lot of the early cases appear to have been, not just people associated with the market, but just people who lived near the market. Those things have been challenged by people who say, oh, well, you can't trust those early cases. Well, you know, that's what we've got so far. So, you know, I'm sure this is not a satisfying answer for anybody. It shouldn't be. And, you know, I, you know, I, it would, we could certainly stand with looking at more information. And, you know, I do think that, you know, it's also important to, to recognize that

spillovers are a regular part of, of the world of pathogens. And, you know, we've seen it with HIV and SARS and influenza and so on. on. And so, you know, regardless of the specifics of what happened here, we know there are lots of coronaviruses and bats. We know they get into other hosts. We know there's influenza. We know they're need to be... There are a lot of viruses that are knocking at the door. And so, you know, we need to... And also the gain of function type of behavior. You know, I've had COVID only once, thankfully. Somehow my wife's managed to avoid it, despite the numerous children running around and all of us having gotten it.

But, you know, I got it, Carl, and I, you know, I dropped five pounds. And I always joke, I dropped five pounds from my chin to my stomach. But no, I lost weight. You know, I lost my sense of taste and smell. And it was clear to me there were some, you know, benefits. I mean, I hate to sound callous at all. But I could envision after that, and especially, maybe you'll be sorry I'm saying this, but after reading your book, I almost thought, well, what if, like, some alien civilization is

using us for gain of function for them. I mean, it's pretty far-fetched, especially for someone that doesn't believe there's, you know, advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that's regularly visiting us here in Southern California. But I wonder, you know, is it not true that gain of function has potential utility? And to say that, you know, we weren't pursuing that in some level, I mean, wouldn't that be kind of negligent on behalf of people that support scientific research and so forth that maybe there are bent not not a COVID especially killed a million people plus worldwide but this concept of gain of function do you see it as having value um well you know the term gain well i mean gain of function is it's not quite as as uh slippery a

term as life but it is pretty slippery like when people talk about gain of function in a sort of casual way i think like okay well what are you talking about are you talking about um I think people are, like there's tons of science that goes on that might be described as gain of function where, you know, cells are being manipulated so they start doing something they couldn't do before. You know, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like let's, you know, our insulin, where does our insulin come from? Our insulin largely comes from bacteria that were engineered with human insulin genes. That's where we get our insulin from. That's gain of function if what you're saying is like manipulating the genes of an organism so they can do something they couldn't do before.

Bacteria, we're not making human insulin before. Now they make it in huge quantities. Now people wouldn't say like, oh, human insulin is a bad thing. They just think it's too expensive. That's the real controversy about it. The reason that we're not concerned about that is because we don't think that these bacteria are going to kill us all. However, in the 1970s, I write about this in my book, Markercosm, some people did think that those insulin bacteria were going to kill us all when they were first invented. They would get out of the fermentation tanks and they would put us all in the diabetic comas.

This was real arguments people were having. It didn't happen. So, you know, so again, we have to really be careful about what we are talking about when we talk about gain of function. And so what a lot of the debate has focused on among scientists and in government circles is specifically about doing experiments on pathogens or potential pathogens. or I should say pathogens that have the potential to become pandemic, which sounds more precise, but what do we mean by potential? Like,

how do you know in advance of something is going to become a pandemic or not? And so, you know, I think that, you know, when people are outraged that anyone is doing any gain of function, I think they, you know, I think they're not,

I think they need to look more closely at the, at all of the complexity of all this. And I, you know, there are tradeoffs here and there are, there are fundamental tradeoffs here that I think are, we're just going to have to, you know, make a call on in a, you know, in a democratic process and a real like deliberation. Because on the one hand, you know, we are very concerned about, you know, the, I'm certainly concerned. And I think a lot of people are concerned about these strains of bird flu right now that are getting into a lot of people. a lot of mammals. And, you know, a few more mutations and one of these things could really take off and, and, you know, could be worse than COVID.

And yet, you know, we really, like our best understanding of, about the mutations that we should be concerned about, actually, we know about them because somebody did real gain of function research on bird flu viruses back in like 2012, 2013. The whole, their research freaked everyone out so much that we sort of had the whole, that's when the whole gain of function debate actually started because people, because there were people, you know, scientists who were saying, what are you doing? You are trying, you know, they were basically trying to make these bird flu so they could be transmissible between ferrets.

And other people, scientists were saying like, whoa, we should not be making these things. It's like, you know, it's like evolution is already like, you know, doing this. Why are we risking this, you know, this ferret adapted flu? You could get out and make people sick. But, you know, the fact remains that that research went forward and it told us a lot. We know a lot of what we know about in terms of the risks we are now facing with bird flu. We got from gain of function research. But it was terribly controversial.

lot of scientists in the field thought which shouldn't have never been done. That's, that's the, that is the, the real tradeoff that we face. It's not a simple choice to, to, to be made. If we don't do anti-function research, we're not, there are going to be things we don't know about. Right. In principle, we could head off or develop vaccines in advance. And there's a lot of curative properties that could be invoked. And, but like everything, it should, a lot of people have said, well, look, it should never be done. It should be done. But it shouldn't be done and things can lead to human pathogenic pathogenic response.

Carl, what are you working on now? You've done a lot in the genetic space. Can we entice you to write about what is a planet next? What can we do to get you to move into the astronomical realm? You know, I had a little taste of that as I was sort of coming out of my sort of 120% COVID coverage all the time.

It was really nice to sort of, in the past year or so, to kind of start to branch out again into areas that I hadn't written about before. And now that the James Webb Space Telescope is up and eye is open, it's fascinating. And I'm understandably drawn to their work on planets and on possibly finding habitable planets. And I've written one piece on that, and I'm keeping an eye on that research because I just think that's just, it's incredible to be alive when we have tools that can let us see those things for the first time. So Carl, I always end my conversations with a quote from Arthur C. Clark, one of his many quotes. He's very quotable. One quote I love to quote to my department chair frequently is for every expert.

There's an equal and opposite expert that usually shuts them up pretty quickly. But I'm going to ask you a different one to comment on the following. statement made famous by Sir Arthur C. Clark that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Now, I ask you, if you look at the whole of human history, what is the most magical technology that human beings have ever been able to create? Interesting. I have to say that the first thing that comes to mind is the technology that is making a possible for me to look at you in California right now and have a conversation with you. I just, this, you know, this, this is kind of bizarre.

Like, I think a lot of people got accustomed to what the internet could provide in terms of connection during the pandemic with Zoom and that was a drag. And, I mean, anybody who's tried to teach by Zoom as we have knows what a nightmare can be. But still, this is kind of amazing to me. And, yeah, I mean, I think things that, you know, make things that, you know, make. communication possible. Maybe because I'm a writer, maybe that's what I'm prone to. But I'd have to vote for that communication technology. Very good.

So Carl Zimmer, author of many, many renowned author of many, many wonderful books from Life's Edge, we spoke about today to she has her mother's laugh. We'll talk about that. I think that came out the same month that my first book came out in April of 2018. So it's the fifth anniversary. So happy anniversary, Carl. That wonderful book, which is lauded around the world. And this book, of course, received rave reviews.

The New York Times called it, you know, shimmering and zipping with his phenomenal prose. And I just want to thank you for sharing your time with us today. And I hope to see you back in the future. And I hope you have a magical rest of your day from here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. Brian Keating, your formerly fearful host, signing off. you, Carl. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch and inspired by signing up from Professor Keating's

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