Making Sense with Sam Harris - Special Episode: Recipes for Future Plagues

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

In this episode of the podcast, Rob Reid and Kevin Esvelt discuss USAID’s new “Deep VZN” program, which aims to discover new pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes to the world. Esvelt estimates that there are currently around 30,000 people who could then easily build them. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, Russia has invaded Ukraine, so we have the first major land war in Europe in decades. So, that seems like a very big deal. It certainly deserves its own podcast at some point. I think I'll wait to see how things evolve for a little while here. It remains to be seen how bad this war will be, and what else might happen as a result. So I will reserve comment at this point, apart from echoing the nearly universal sentiment that Putin's actions are despicable, as is the support for him that came dribbling out of the mouth of our former president.

Anyway, as chance would have it, the topic of today's podcast is also scary. This is another PSA, and in some sense the continuation of the podcast that my friend Rob Reed did for me in April of last year. That episode was titled Engineering the Apocalypse, and it was a four-hour examination of the threat that is posed to all of us by developments in synthetic biology. In recent weeks, Rob discovered a specific threat along these lines that seems fairly imminent, and he's tapped Kevin Esvelt to walk him through the problem. Kevin is a Harvard-trained biologist, and he's credited as the first person to describe how CRISPR gene drives could be used to alter the traits of wild populations

in a way that was evolutionarily stable. And he is currently a professor at MIT. As you'll hear, there's a call to action at the end of this episode, and the call is to get the attention of USAID, which is currently running the program of virus hunting that poses such a concern. Anyway, I won't say any more about this. Rob does an impeccable job at exploring the issue,

and I hope you will join me in making noise about it once you come to understand the nature of the problem. Thanks for listening. Today's conversation will be an episode of two different shows, the After On podcast, which I host, and Making Sense, which my podcasting colleague Sam Harris hosts. We're doing this because we both find the subject extraordinarily important, and also timely enough that we want to get it out there fast. And since I've done a bunch of research that's connected to the subject and also know the guest, Sam and I thought the quickest thing would be for me to conduct the interview, and then for both of us to distribute

it. For Making Sense listeners who don't know me, my name is Rob Reed, and I'm a venture capitalist turned tech entrepreneur turned science fiction author turned science podcaster turned venture capitalist once again, one who still podcasts and scribbles a bit on the side. My voice may be familiar because I was on Sam's show several months ago when we spent almost four hours examining how very awful the next pandemic could be, and how we can prevent that awful pandemic if we get our act together. I spent about a thousand hours, literally, including over 20 scientific interviews, researching those subjects, and our episode had a fairly unusual format as a result. I'm not a scientist myself, but over the past

five years I've gotten pretty deep into pandemic-related issues. It started with research for one of my novels, which later led to writing a few articles on the subject, which led to several episodes of my own podcast, then appearances on other shows, and then to a TED Talk that I gave right before COVID, and then to that big episode with Sam, and then quite a bit more. Which brings us to today and my conversation with MIT's Kevin Esvelt, a highly regarded evolutionary engineer who I met in the wake of some congressional testimony that he made on a subject that interests us both. Kevin's going to present something that will probably shock you, which you may find hard or even impossible to believe. But before that, he's going to lay down a fairly

deep foundation of concepts, definitions, and a bit of history, which should give you a sophisticated basis for deciding whether you buy the fairly shocking points he's going to make in the second half of our conversation. Now, I think it'll be useful for you to know the full context while he's laying that foundation. So here comes a spoiler, which is that Kevin is going to argue that a small, new, and very well-intentioned U.S. government program could completely inadvertently cause the deaths of millions or even hundreds of millions of people or even more, despite what Kevin is certain are the entirely good intentions of the people behind it. The program is called Deep VZN, which I believe is pronounced Deep Vision, and it's part of USAID, the agency which distributes

most American foreign aid. Kevin believes Deep Vision is on a path to posting assembly instructions for what we can only call weapons of mass destruction to the open internet for anyone to download. Specifically, the genomes of previously unknown pandemic-grade viruses that we have no defenses against. Viruses that tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries could easily build from scratch, as soon as they're given the genetic code. Now, if this all sounds a bit bonkers to you, given the genetic code. Now, if this all sounds a bit bonkers to you, I get it. I struggle to believe my own ears at first. But if you listen to Kevin, you'll quickly realize that this isn't some COVID-era conspiracy theory, even if he doesn't ultimately persuade you that things are as dangerous as he thinks. I'll add that I wouldn't have interviewed him for this if I thought he had

even the faintest partisan agenda. I actually have no idea what party, if any, Kevin affiliates with, and I couldn't care less. Because every point I've heard him make on the subject has been rooted in science, not politics. Now one thing that made this story especially hard for me to credit at first is that it's coming out of USAID, which is dedicated to economic development and human flourishing in poorer countries, and which puts its resources into so many great projects. Now, like any program that's put out hundreds of billions of dollars across many decades, USAID has had its share of blunders and scandals and lousy uses of funds. But I admire the agency

on the whole. And that's partly due to personal experience, because right after college, I spent a year in Cairo on a Fulbright grant and met lots of USAID people. And they were funding things like irrigation projects, schools, and technical assistance in places that really needed them. And they were all smart, committed, and working for a fraction of what they could have made in the private sector. On top of that, USAID is run by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. I can't say that I know Samantha, but we have a fair number of people in common and had a couple great conversations at the TED conference, and I know how smart and ethical she is. Plus, she literally wrote the book on

not killing millions of people. It was a searing denunciation of genocide, which you may be thinking isn't the most controversial or risky position for an author to stake out, but it won the Pulitzer Prize, so it was no puff piece. And there's zero chance that Samantha would deliberately imperil millions of lives. All of this is to say that there are two sides of this story, each of them held by very smart, ethical people. And as you'll hear, the other side sincerely sees Deep Vision as an invaluable weapon against pandemics. And I'm sure this is the side Samantha hears from the most, because the program's creators work for her. And since Deep Vision is literally less than a tenth of 1% of

USAID's budget, and she basically inherited the program, this just isn't something she manages directly. I should also point out that some of Deep Vision's plans could help us fight pandemics. But after many hours of researching this, and talking to various people in academia, philanthropy, security, and entrepreneurship, I believe that most of its agenda is appallingly misguided. And I'm not going to hide that, because I'm not an actor, and it would be dishonest. Now despite that, in the second half of the interview, I'm going to present all of the best arguments I've heard or have thought of myself in favor of deep vision, because this subject is way too important for you

not to hear the other side. I also want to convey why some very smart and ethical people sincerely think this is a great idea, and show that thinking this doesn't mean that they're not smart and ethical, because I'm sure that they are. Now, someone close to deep vision could surely do a much better job of presenting this side. And in an ideal world, we might have structured this as a debate between Kevin and a deep vision proponent. But I am an interviewer who has never once moderated a debate. And though I could probably become a decent moderator with some experience and guidance, this is happening right now. And we want to get the story out right now. Because the program is so new, it's barely underway. In fact, it may not even have quite

switched on yet. Which means it should still be possible to alter its focus or even redirect its entire budget to the countless world-positive programs that USAID supports. And you may be able to help with this yourself, as Kevin and I will discuss toward the end of our conversation, which will start right now. So, Kevin, thanks so much for joining us today. And why don't we start out with a quick overview of your professional background and what you spend most of your time doing in the lab these days? Well, thanks so much for the invitation.

I'm an evolutionary engineer and professor at MIT, where my lab specializes in building synthetic ecosystems to what we call direct the evolution of new molecular tools. And we also work a lot with communities to safely and controllably engineer populations of wild organisms and associated ecosystems. So we evolve cool tools in the lab, and then we talk a lot about whether, when, and how to use those tools to change the environment. Evolution, of course, doesn't know anything. It's just a natural process. And that means you can harness it to create things when you don't know how they work. And that's true of a lot of biology, honestly.

We still don't know the details of how it works, of how to make things fold just the right way to cause something to happen within a cell. One way to deal with this is to take something that does something reasonably close to what you want, make a billion variants, throw them all at the wall and see which ones stick best. Then take those, make a billion variants of those, throw those at the wall and see what sticks. And do this over and over again until you get something that does exactly what you selected for. And you do some related work with phages in your lab. Yeah. So since we're interested in applying evolution to create molecular tools, it's useful to work with the fastest evolving things in nature, which tend to be bacteriophages, viruses

that infect bacteria. And these viruses can replicate once every 10 minutes. So that's a really short generation time. So what we do is we engineer the bacteria so that the phage only gets to reproduce if it does the molecular trick that we want to see. So we put a gene we want to evolve, or multiple genes, onto the genome of the virus, and we take away the pieces that it needs to reproduce. We move those into the host cell. So the host cell will produce this critical factor for virus replication in proportion to how well the virus manages to perform the molecular trick. So that way, all of these populations of a billion viruses compete with one another, creating mutations in those genes that we put on there. And the ones that perform the molecular trick best

produce the most offspring. And of course, this is a continuous process, generation after generation, for hundreds of generations in the lab until it spits out the thing that we want to see. All to create a better platform for making useful and hopefully safe biotech tools. Now, just a couple clarifying questions. First of all, phages, they are viruses, but they're minuscule and they can only infect bacteria. There's no way a phage is going to infect a human and inflict disease. Is that right? That's right. Their machinery just would not function within our cells. They're optimized for bacteria, very different context. Got it. And to edge toward

what I understand to be the practical application of this is you can train this ecosystem that you've put together to create a very good version of a complex thing that you want with all these billions and billions of shots on goal. And then having done that, you can make some useful product. In your case, it's generally for pretty sophisticated biological applications, right? Like big pharma, biotechs, other labs. For the most part, yeah. A platform for creating useful molecular tools can really accelerate biotech research because there's no way to have a big impact like accelerating everybody else's work and empowering

others. So you've been doing this for quite a while. Lots of experiments. These things replicate every 10 minutes. You've got robotic tools accelerating it. How many genetically distinct phages do you estimate you've produced in your lab since you started doing this work? Genetically distinct is a hard question because we do crank up the mutation rate very high, so they evolve much more quickly. Probably somewhere between 10 to the 13th, maybe even 10 to the 15th at most. So that's a quadrillion.

I believe that would be, to contextualize it, the number of stars in roughly 5,000 to 10,000 galaxies the size of the Milky Way. So that is a lot. Now, you are often described as the inventor of the gene drive. What is a gene drive? So gene drive is a naturally occurring phenomenon that originated maybe a billion years ago. And it happened when some genes realized that they could replicate more often if they changed the odds that they'd get inherited by the offspring. So one way they do this in organisms that have sex, so they inherit one copy from the mother and one copy from the father, a gene can cut the chromosome that doesn't have it, which causes a cell to copy itself over. And that means

that instead of half the offspring inheriting the particular gene drive system, all of them will. That's a huge fitness advantage. You're going from half of offspring inheriting you to all of them, at least for the case of heterozygotes that have one copy of each. And so gene drive systems can just sweep through populations of sexually reproducing organisms very, very quickly. Just to clarify, that means that the trait that this particular gene confers can go from rare or even one-off because it was a mutation to saturating the population in a certain number of generations. The trait changes. We don't end up getting clones of the individual. That's right. And Austin Burt, who is one of the

earliest gene drive researchers in the modern era at Imperial College London first proposed that we use these things by engineering genes to cut sequences that we want in order to change the population. The problem is we really didn't have the tools to make this happen. Well, I played a minor role in developing CRISPR, which is a genome editing tool that is basically a set of molecular scissors that can be programmed to cut whatever sequence we want. A few months after we had been one of the first groups to show that CRISPR worked in mammalian cells, I was looking around outdoors at a bunch of ducks and I saw a turtle that day in the water. I was thinking, hey, are we ever going to edit wild organisms with CRISPR? I I thought, probably not, at least not effectively,

because when we edit an organism, we're changing it to do what we want, which means we're diverting its resources away from survival and replication in nature. And that means natural selection is going to act to remove whatever changes we make. But then I thought, well, wait a minute, what if instead of just using CRISPR to edit the genome, what if we use it to insert our engineered trait and we also encode the CRISPR system that can make that change? Then you get recursive genome editing. That means in principle, we could build a system that would spread the engineered trait throughout the whole population, even if the trait was harmful. And because I'd read the literature,

as soon as I thought of this, I thought, wait a minute, that's a gene drive. Didn't I see a paper where someone had said we should use the genes like the one in yeast to engineer populations? And maybe we could take out, say, malaria. What if we crashed populations of malarial mosquitoes? We might be able to help eradicate malaria that way. With CRISPR, it's so versatile. You could cut whatever gene you needed to at whatever site you needed to, and you can even do it in multiple places, which could make it evolutionarily stable, or fairly so. So it was tremendously exciting, thinking we might be able to help get rid of malaria and schistosomiasis and so forth.

Okay, so you had this idea that was obviously very, very novel and exciting on many levels, but it also kind of terrified you, didn't it? Well, the first day, I admit, was pure euphoria thinking up all the applications because, I mean, malaria is an exceptionally horrible disease. It kills nearly half a million people every year, most of them kids under five. And there's things like schistosomiasis, which cognitively stunt tens of millions. So I spent the first day kind of euphoric and, of course, doing research to see whether it would actually work. But the next day I woke up in a cold sweat because I was thinking, wait a minute,

if just about anyone who can edit the genome of a sexually reproducing species with CRISPR can make a gene drive system to spread their change through the population. Well, what about misuse? Sure, you can engineer a mosquito so it can't carry a disease. Could you engineer a mosquito so it would always carry a disease? How much of a problem would misuse be? And it seemed rather frightening because you could imagine people weaponizing the natural world. So I spent quite a long time before I even told my academic advisor at the time about this idea because I wanted to learn whether or not that was a likely outcome. And fortunately, I concluded that it's not.

Gene drive spreads only vertically, parents to offspring. So that means it's fairly slow. It can't do more than double every generation at absolute most in terms of frequency in a population. It's fairly obvious in that it works in sexually reproducing organisms which don't have CRISPR in nature, so this is a signature that can't be hidden. It will be present in all gene drive systems, and that means you can always find it if it's there. And most importantly, if you see a gene drive that you don't like, it's trivial to reliably build the counter. You can add some extra instructions for CRISPR telling it to cut the original rogue version. Then your version, what we call an

immunizing reversal drive, could still spread through the wild population, just like the rogue. But whenever it encounters the rogue, the immunizing reversal drive will cut the rogue and replace it with itself. So there is a reliable off switch. If somebody does something bad that imperils human society or the ecosystem, this immunizing reversal drive is a reliable off switch. And did you think through and basically kind of map out the immunizing reversal drive before you told the world about the gene drive? Long before, yes. And in fact, before I even told George. Oh, before you even told your advisor? Yeah. So you did not let this new idea leak into the world until you knew you had an off switch? Well, I mean, an off switch is perhaps a little

much. Just because you can reliably overwrite the unwanted change doesn't mean that it wouldn't have made changes in the ecosystem before you managed to do that. But anything that is slow, obvious if you look, and easily blocked is not a terribly great threat. And so with that understanding, I then approached George and said, I think there's a lot of good that we could do this, especially if we do it openly and transparently. And I don't think there's much potential for misuse for this reasoning. What do you think? And when you first told me this story, you said the words that we're very lucky that gene drives quote, favor defense. What exactly does that mean?

GeneDrive's, quote, favor defense. What exactly does that mean? Well, anytime you have a technology that is accessible to many people, and GeneDrive isn't that accessible. There aren't that many labs that use CRISPR to edit the genomes of organisms other than currently fruit flies, worms, and mice are sort of the big ones. If there's a lot of people who can use the technology, then there's a lot of people who could misuse the technology. And so favoring defense just means that if someone does misuse it, everyone else can prevent it from causing much harm. Anything that's slow, obvious, and easily blocked isn't much of a weapon. But things that are fast, or are subtle, or are unblockable are another story. And most obvious example of something that can't easily be countered is a nuke, right?

A nuclear warhead on an ICBM is something that we haven't figured out how to counter, despite many decades of wishing that we could. The way we have to deal with that threat is by minimizing access and deterring those who can actually wield that weapon. Because if they actually use it, there's nothing we can do. On the subject of nukes, this could be a good time to define the terms information hazard and attention hazard, because we'll probably use them later in the conversation. Yeah. So history of nuclear weapons, it's remarkable how they were originally developed

because researchers were afraid of the consequences if malicious people got ahold of them. Specifically, Nazi Germany was the concern of Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein when they wrote the letter that launched the Manhattan Project. But what's not so well known is that once Germany surrendered in World War II, Szilard launched a petition within the top-secret Manhattan Project in which he argued that the United States should not use the bomb on Japan, not because it wouldn't save many American lives by preventing an invasion, but because doing so would call attention to the power of nuclear weaponry. He pointed out that at the time, the notion that any adversary could militarily threaten the mainland American city, Los Angeles or New York, was just laughable. There is no way that any adversary could threaten the continental

United States. But if you show the world that there is a single bomb that can destroy the bulk of a city, that would change. You would be advertising the existence of this kind of weapon and thereby incentivizing other countries to gain access to it, which would then imperil your own cities. So he said, if you use the bomb on Japan, the Soviet Union will get it that much more quickly, and probably other nations as well, and you will make the United States less secure. And so he spent the rest of his career advocating for a nuclear non-proliferation, pointing out that the fewer actors who had the ability to wield this kind of power, the safer humanity would be. And so in that sense, Hiroshima was an attention hazard.

It informed the world that this is possible, this thing you might not otherwise have bothered with because it's going to cost billions of dollars to develop and distract a lot of your top scientists. Without that attention to the fact that this is possible. That's right. So there's different kinds of information hazards. One is like the blueprints. So in a way, using the bomb on Japan, the isotopic signature told everyone what the Americans had managed to do.

So without the blueprints of the bomb, they could look at the radioactive signature of Hiroshima and get a lot of hints. Yeah, that's a conceptual information hazard. But the big one is, as you said, an attention hazard. It says, this is a weapon powerful enough to destroy cities that could determine the future course of warfare. That's a giant neon blinking sign in the sky to anyone who wants to acquire power, that they need to acquire this kind of weapon in order to matter in the future. Now, with all the background of the last several minutes, I'd like to now jump topics pretty significantly to the Spanish flu, which was quite literally extinct for 80 years. But then that changed. How did that change? Well, some influenza researchers at the CDC

were concerned that something like 1918 influenza might come again. So they wanted to know, well, what about it was so bad? Because no other flu strain has killed anywhere near as many people. So they went to museum specimens that had samples from victims of the 1918 pandemic. And they also got samples from someone who had died of the flu and been buried in the permafrost in Alaska. And remarkably, they were able to extract the RNA genome of the virus from these samples and sequence it and thereby learn how to make the virus using recently discovered techniques for virus assembly.

So they resurrected this extinct, deadly virus. So that was a well-oiled machine that came back into existence after having vanished into obscurity. I'm sure it was a very seductive idea scientifically, but was that a reasonable thing to do from a global security standpoint? Well, there's arguments back and forth as to whether or not it was wise, and there's good arguments on both sides. But what bothers me from a security standpoint is that they posted the genome sequence online. And it's there for anybody to download, as I know, because I was able to find it very quickly via Google myself, which means literally anybody in the world can get this

thing. Now, I'm pretty sure I know how you're going to answer this, but what is bad about this genome being online? Well, posting the genome sequence of a virus online, in this case, gave exact blueprints for a pathogen that once killed maybe as much as one in 30 living humans to anyone, including lone terrorists and bioweapons programs, who have the skills to assemble it, which doesn't seem like a great idea. Important qualifier. We should be grateful that it's pretty unlikely that releasing that virus again today would cause such a deadly pandemic. And the reason is that virus has been called the mother of all pandemics. That is to say, most modern flu strains are much less deadly pandemic. And the reason is that virus has been called the mother of all pandemics.

That is to say, most modern flu strains are much less deadly descendants. But because most of us have been exposed to at least one of those, we tend to have immunity to that kind of flu virus, especially those of us who caught the flu during the 2009 pandemic, which was the same kinds of molecular coding. Second is we do have antiviral drugs that work against it, even though we probably can't produce enough of those quickly enough to really matter in a fast-moving pandemic. But what we do have are antibiotics. And there's some pretty good evidence from autopsies and going through the records of autopsies from 1918, that it killed people at least as much by causing secondary bacterial infections of the lungs as it did directly causing damage, that is the virus itself.

And we definitely have enough antibiotics to dose the entire world population already available. Now, this is obviously completely impossible to know precisely, but taking those mitigating factors into account, what would you estimate back of the envelope the plausible ranges are of a death toll if this thing gets out? I'm not so sure of the lower window just because of, you know, unlikely to take off at all. But if you presume that it does take off, then I would probably say somewhere between 200,000 and 10 million people. And that's just because it would probably be worse

than most modern day strains, but it's not going to be nearly as bad as it was back then. So I think that's a probably reasonable 10 to 90% confidence interval. But honestly, I haven't sat down and thought about it for 20 minutes. Of course, on the other hand, just because it's highly unlikely doesn't mean it's no chance. And when there's a non-trivial chance of millions or even tens of millions of people dying, well, some discretion would seem prudent. Now, I've actually known for years that the genome was freely available online, but I actually only learned that the CDC put it up there pretty recently. And at the time, the only explanation I could imagine for that was that it was so impossible for anyone to assemble

a virus from scratch back then in 2005 that they just failed to realize how soon the publication of this genome would enable labs in dozens of countries to basically restart the engine of one of history's worst pandemics. And that was a scary enough idea to live with. But then a couple of weeks ago, you came along and told me that they actually did realize it would soon become possible to synthesize it, and they were fine with it. And since this makes my head spin, I'd love it if you could give us a quick sense of where the science of virus synthesis was in 2005 when they posted this. Well, the first instructions, the first detailed protocol for

assembling influenza viruses was published in 1999. And the first virus was synthesized from synthetic DNA in 2002. And that was poliovirus, which is probably comparable to maybe slightly easier to assemble than influenza. How long after the publication of the genome would you say it became scientifically feasible to synthesize it? Immediately. That is to say, probably a good 100 or so people had the skills at the time to follow that protocol, maybe a few hundred people, to use the protocol to assemble 1918 influenza after publication of the genome sequence. What they may not have anticipated was just how cheap of the genome sequence. What they may not have anticipated was just how cheap synthetic DNA would become. Because in the last 20 years, the cost of assembled DNA, that is assembled into large gene-length fragments like you would need in order to boot up the virus, the cost has fallen

by a factor of a thousand. And while presumably they knew that a good couple hundred people could assemble it immediately. They may not have understood how that number would grow because most of the folks involved were virologists. They weren't involved in biotech, and they weren't familiar with exponential technologies. Okay, so we've gone from a hundred-ish labs that could create this more or less immediately after it was published. What would you say that number has grown to today? I'd estimate somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people.

Could do that right now. Which is pretty alarming, even given that it's unlikely that it would actually cause a pandemic. So is it fair to say that we're kind of relying on the goodwill of half a stadium to a full stadium's worth of people not to put this back out in the world? I mean, frankly, most people aren't that evil. And anyone who is that malicious, if there's only a small chance that it might actually take off, then why would they bother?

But you can do the math and say it still looks like a pretty bad bet given the expected death toll, even if you assign a very small chance that someone would, and a small chance that it would actually cause a pandemic. The numbers don't look good when you calculate it from that perspective, especially because it's going to remain accessible to future generations. That is, in five years, there's going to be even more people who could do it,

and in 10 years, quite a bit more. The number is only going to grow. Okay, even though 1918 flu would probably be less destructive than many of us would fear if it was released today, the decision to put it online will probably boggle most people's intuitions. It certainly boggled my own. But the people at the CDC are really smart, and by definition, they're hugely concerned about public health. So what benefits might they have thought would accrue from publishing this? And what perspective might they have that I lack that would cause them to prioritize those benefits over the fairly obvious downsides?

There is a mindset difference, which says something along the lines of, if we understand how the world works, then we can come up with better cures and treatments and interventions that we couldn't necessarily predict in the absence of that knowledge. That is another way to say it is, you got to do the basic blue sky research without being able to point to a particular benefit, or you will of necessity lose access to all the benefits that you couldn't see before you did the research. That really is what drives folks in these fields, the belief that we can come up with innovations that will make life sufficiently better to be worth the risk. It's important to point out that the scientific benefits that did accrue It's important to point out that the scientific benefits that did accrue from resurrecting the 1918 influenza virus were largely accomplished by a relative handful of specialized laboratories doing research with it or with pieces of it.

We didn't actually need to publish the genome sequence in order to gain virtually any of those benefits. Given that the number of people with access to 1918 flu has grown by a factor of 300, and it's quite plausible that the CDC didn't realize it would be quite that large quite that soon, do you imagine the people who made the decision to post it regret that decision now, particularly in the post-COVID era? Well, some of the folks who are in charge or highly influential at NIH today have been around for most of the last 20 years, and they've been among some of the strongest supporters of taking highly lethal viruses that aren't very transmissible and engineering and evolving them to become much more transmissible. Since that's simply identifying things from the past,

to which most people have immunity today, it's fair to say that they don't regret it. What other scary genomes are there online? Is the horse out of the barn when it comes to terrifying things being posted online, or are we currently in okay-ish shape? You know, a lot of people seem to think that it's too late, but it's really not. Because again, 1918 isn't that likely to take off itself. There is something that would take off, which is variola virus, smallpox, which is much more lethal and about as transmissible. And also online. And also online, put there by the CDC. But with variola virus, the United States has 350 million doses of vaccine ready to go. And variola is much harder to

make as a virus. I would estimate that maybe 100 people could make variola. And it doesn't do the asymptomatic transmission thing the way COVID does. So I think we'd have a much better chance of getting it under control, especially since we have so many vaccines. It would require the U.S. to actually donate some to the rest of the world to stamp it out. But the world in living memory has experience of vaccinating people against smallpox and eradicating it. And other than that, people speculate about a few things, but there's nothing else out there that is really all that nasty in terms of potential pandemic pathogen. Right. So of course the Ebola genome is online, 50% case fatality rate, but relatively not very contagious compared to COVID. SARS, 10%, demonstrably far less contagious than COVID

because we know how many people died in the SARS outbreak and it was less than a thousand. One that always frightens me is MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, another coronavirus like SARS, but also not very transmissible. So unless I'm missing something, we're in pretty good shape for now. That's right. I'm not super worried about all the viruses that are out there in terms of causing sufficient devastation to really, certainly not to threaten civilization or anything like that, probably not even the casualty levels that we've just seen with COVID. Folks can reasonably disagree on this, but from my perspective, we're actually doing pretty okay when it comes to blueprints for nasty plagues online. Now, has anybody heard the last episode I did on Sam's podcast?

Now, has anybody heard the last episode I did on Sam's podcast? One thing that really worries me a great deal is the deliberately artificially modified H5N1 flu that was created in Madison, Wisconsin, and Holland, two labs, in 2012. It scares me because it has a 60% fatality rate, even worse than Ebola. And in nature, it's barely contagious at all. But that experiment led it to being transmissible, at least in ferrets. And the idea of something with that kind of case fatality rate ravaging the population freaks me out. But you're not as worried about that as I am, correct? That's right. Both of them, yeah, they're respiratory transmissible in ferrets. That doesn't mean they're transmissible enough to cause a pandemic in ferrets, let alone transmissible

enough to cause a pandemic in humans. And subsequent studies of them suggest that there are reasons to think that even if they were continually passaged to be even more transmissible and it translated to humans, the virus would be much, much less lethal. The same mutations affecting transmissibility would also reduce the lethality. So those are bad, but we're still in the bucket of probably not. So unless we're quite unlucky with H5N1, at this point, we don't really have much to fear from the genomes that are currently on the internet unless we keep posting new and worse ones to the internet. And because it's more future risk than current risk, it's really alarming that you previously said that quite a few people seem to be operating under the presumption that the

horse is already out of the barn and therefore why not post everything? Like, who's saying that? Well, a lot of people. In fact, to the extent that I've been trying to raise this concern, saying, you know, we perhaps shouldn't share blueprints for what amounts to an arsenal of plagues online by doing new research for trying to find things that would actually be that bad and would be likely to take off. A lot of people say, eh, we're already past that. And I think that's because some people are referring to COVID, which is not really what we're talking about. There's no reason not to post COVID genome online when it's already causing a pandemic.

That's different from the scenario where it hasn't actually infected humans, because that means that it might never do so, at least unless humans cause it to do so. But a lot of scientists seem to take the view of, there's lethal viruses online, therefore there's no reason not to put more of them online. And that attitude is quite worrisome. To give you just one example of this, so Dennis Carroll is a huge figure in the field of finding and identifying unknown viruses. In a December article in The Intercept that we were both interviewed for for said that Dennis basically acknowledged that yes, a scientist could use the genetic sequence of a dangerous virus maliciously. But he said that risk already

exists. And they quote him directly saying, we don't need to find some new virus in order to elevate that risk. And I just can't imagine why he would say something like that. Now, to be fair, unlike many folks in this field, Dennis does seem to invite us to hold him accountable in the case that he's wrong. He says, and again quoting, if you go out and cavalierly begin collecting and characterizing these viruses, there is inherent risk attached to that, and you have to be accountable for that risk. So I applaud him for saying that, but I just couldn't disagree more when it comes to the risks of putting new viruses online. Speaking of Dennis, this is actually a really good moment to transition to talk about Deep Vision,

the new USAID program that concerns you so much, because Dennis ran the immediate predecessor to it, a program called Predict, which was basically the template for Deep Vision. And that's just strange to me, that Predict was able to spawn a follow-on program in light of some of the terrible scandals, frankly, it has been implicated in. At the center of which is the fact that Predict directed a fair amount of money by way of an intermediary called EcoHealth Alliance to fund research on coronaviruses in Wuhan. And not just that, but in labs that were known to have very shoddy safety practices to the US government. We know that beyond a shadow of a doubt from some declassified diplomatic cables. So that seems like an incredibly radioactive error in judgment.

So that seems like an incredibly radioactive error in judgment. This was all out in the open by the time Deep Vision was funded. And on top of that, we have to add the significant possibility, not uncertainty, but possibility, that that work may have resulted in a leak that led us to COVID. While there was a time when a lot of well-regarded scientists were putting the odds of a lab leak at zero. That's a long, long time ago. At this point, substantially nobody who has significant scientific depth in this would put the odds of a lab leak at zero. Some put it as high as 90%. I'm sure some put it in single digits. But it is undeniable that Predict may have had a hand in that. So for all those reasons, this is politics,

it's irrelevant to your discussions, Kevin, so we can just leave it there. But I just find it a little bit unfathomable that Predict spawned an encore. Now, one of Predict's main activities was something called virus hunting, and that's also going to be a major activity of deep vision. What is virus hunting? Well, you probably have this vision of someone who puts on some kind of suit and cavalierly goes spelunking in a bat cave to collect samples and take them back to the lab, see what kinds of viruses you can pull up. Yeah, Indiana Jones, National Geographic kind of vibe. Now, you got to keep in mind that's the media distortion. That's

a glamorous presentation of the virus hunter. Most virus hunting is probably more like going to those wet markets with various wild-caught creatures and taking samples, or going to bushmeat markets in other parts of the world, or contracting with local hunters to bring samples of various wild critters back, or even just taking general environmental samples out there from a wide variety of environments and isolating whatever viruses you can find from those samples. In the modern day, now sequencing them all, sharing the genomes online, and then potentially doing more than that with the viruses that you've isolated. The idea is we want to know what viruses are out there. Having done a bit of digging into this, some basic stats on Predict, they found roughly 1,200 previously unidentified viruses. They identified them, they sequenced them, and they were active, I think, in 20-something

countries, 60 foreign laboratories. And what was interesting to me in the 1,200 viruses, all of them had the potential to erupt into pandemics. That was the presupposition for selecting them. I got this from the LA Times, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. So that was predict's haul. What's interesting to me about Deep Vision, they're actually talking about 10,000 to 12,000 viruses over five years. So something like 10x the number of viruses in half the time. This is with $125 million instead of $200.

It's a big explosion in efficiency. And to the extent that this work poses risks, it's a big explosion in the risk. What's driving this acceleration? And if we continue to do programs like this after Deep Vision's legislated five-year life, will that explosion continue to the point that at some point we might be doing this for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of viruses? So one big chunk of the cost is taking all of these isolated virus samples and sequencing them. That's creating the detailed blueprints, because you have the genome then we can use DNA synthesis to reconstruct that virus

using these virus assembly protocols that folks have worked out and made tremendous improvements in over the last few years. But the main cost reduction for programs like Deep Vision is that sequencing is just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And that means it's easier and easier to collect more and more viruses. What isn't appreciably easier is taking them back to the lab, culturing them in the lab, and performing the set of studies that tell you, is this one likely to actually cause a pandemic? So what you're talking about now is essentially step two. We have found the viruses, we have virus hunted, now they're back in the lab. And what you're talking about now is called characterization, right? Yeah. The whole point of the program is to identify which viruses might spill over and cause future pandemics in the hope that we could do

something to prevent it. There's four key classes of experiments that you perform on an animal virus to determine whether it's a good candidate for causing a pandemic in humans. You want to know how tightly does this virus bind to human target cells? How readily does it actually infect those cells? How readily does the backbone of the virus replicate and churn out new copies of the virus in relevant human tissue types? And because you can't test it in humans, of course, how readily is it transmitted in animal models that are chosen for their similarity to humans, whether naturally or because in the case of mice, they've been engineered to express human receptors and have human-like immune systems?

So to play this back to you to make sure I understood, there's four sets of experiments. Experiment one is, does this virus bind to a receptor on a human cell? Like, can it find the door? Step two, having found the door, can it get in? Does it infect the cell? So does it find the door? Does it have the key? Step three, having gotten inside, can it hijack the mechanisms of the cell to replicate? And then step four is, if it does those first three things, does it seem to be transmissible in animal models that replicate as closely as possible transmissibility in humans? Did I get that right? That's exactly right. Great analogy. And if you answer those four questions, you'll basically determine which of these 10,000

yet undiscovered viruses actually have major pandemic potential. There's going to be a tiny minority of them. And this is something you'd have zero knowledge about without taking these steps. So having done this characterization or pandemic identification process, you will know something that humanity would otherwise never have known, which is that these viruses could be incredibly dangerous and these are not. Now, while I know this is, of course, an unknowable number, and the best we'll probably do is a confident range,ly how many pandemic-grade viruses would you estimate Deep Vision is likely to find over its five years, if it does in fact net 10,000 to 12,000 mystery viruses? It's a good question. That's about 10 times as many as Predict found. And Predict didn't find

any that looked particularly likely in and of themselves. Found a bunch that looked worrisome in one or another property on some of those tests, but it didn't find any that looked particularly likely in and of themselves. Found a bunch that looked worrisome in one or another property on some of those tests, but it didn't find any that checked all the boxes, so to speak. We can also just look back and say, well, how many viruses are plausibly out there? How many pandemics do we normally see? And then here's the real big one. What fraction of viruses out there are actually going to spill over and get into humans in the first place? Because we're still discovering new species out there. There's plausibly a lot of viruses out there that have never seen a human and never will. So some researchers say there's probably way more pandemic

capable viruses out there than will ever cause pandemics because most of them are just never going to come in contact with humans. Let's try to drill this down and say the low-end estimate for how many viruses might be out there in mammals is around 40,000, of which they estimate that maybe 10,000 are capable of human-to-human transmission. That's one rigorous estimate that's out in the literature. That's the low-end estimate. Others in the field have estimated as many as half a million in mammals. They didn't give an exact number for how many in humans, but if you dig into the other papers, they suggest that maybe 20% of those. So somewhere between 10 and 100,000 viruses that could plausibly human to human transmission. But human to human transmission

is not the same as causing a pandemic. There's lots of viruses that can spread human to human, but on average, each person infects fewer than one other person. So they die out, like SARS-1 and MERS. So how many of them could actually cause pandemics? That's really hard to know, but if Deep Vision finds 10,000 and you assume the lower end estimate, then that would be as much as a quarter of all the viruses out there. So let's say 20% of those are going to be capable of spreading human to human. It's 2,000 that we expect human to human. What fraction of those 2,000 spreading human to human could actually cause a pandemic? It's not really known because the ones that

are endemic in humans are a biased sample from all of history. So it's really hard to say. But if we're guessing like one in a hundred, then that would mean 20 pandemic-capable viruses. But that doesn't make sense statistically because PREDICT found 1,100, 1,200 viruses and didn't find anything that clearly looked like a pandemic-capable virus. Which makes logical sense. And I do generally believe that probably that means ADISH is a high-end plausible outcome. But a quick question. end plausible outcome. But a quick question, is it possible that the targeting of the hunted viruses or the accuracy of some of the laboratory steps have gotten substantially more efficient,

that perhaps more will be caught, maybe predict missed things that deep vision will not miss because it's being done in 2022 instead of 2009? The main difference is that now there are much better computational tools for matching virus to host species by receptor similarity and the like. So when DeepVision decides a virus is worth testing from the sequence data, they're going to have a much better shot at identifying at that virus being high risk than Predict was. Okay, so to play this back, the upper ceiling could be eight. It could be higher because of improved technology. Bottoms up estimate gets us into the possibility of it maybe even being low dozens.

We don't know exactly. But it's important to note that it is possible they will find zero pandemic-capable viruses, in which case the program cannot by definition trigger any of the terrifying things that we're about to talk about that it could trigger. estimate because the organizers of this program presumably know a lot about the state of the science and what can be done now and what can be expected. And they wouldn't be spinning up this program if they thought it was a real possibility that there would be zero, because then by definition, the program will fail. So zero is possible. And then the high end from a bottoms up and an intuition and a top down, we're getting into quite plausibly mid-to-high single-digit number, possibly but not likely, into the dozens. Is that a reasonable ballpark? Yeah, I think that's, frankly, a much better way of estimating it than I was giving.

Okay, thank you. Now, the characterizing work is really interesting to me for a bunch of reasons. How hard and expensive is it to do this characterizing work at scale? And how likely is that kind of work to happen with many thousands of viruses in the absence of this program? From what I understand, the characterization aspect is the most expensive component of a program that is not limited to virus hunting and characterization. That is, Deep Vision is also about monitoring the human populations that are closely exposed to a bunch of the animals that are most likely to pass on viruses to them, so as to identify outbreaks early and give us a better shot at containing them. So this program does a bunch of really good stuff too.

Yeah, that's an unadulterated good thing, what you just mentioned. But my understanding is that the bulk of the cost is actually taking the viruses back to the lab and running the experiments, because that requires a bunch of trained virologists with skills that are much more specialized than following a protocol to assemble a virus from the sequence. That is, there's a whole lot more people that can make a virus from a genomic blueprint than can search through this haystack of wild viruses looking for ones that could plausibly cause a pandemic. Okay, so we virus hunt, we characterize,

we haul in a record-shattering number of viruses over the five years, at the end of which humanity knows something that it would otherwise not have known, which is that these, let's call them six, previously undiscovered viruses pose a very, very significant pandemic risk. Now, I could see very good arguments for us not wishing to know this information, but it could also see arguments for us wishing to know this information. But what's most significant to me is step three in this process, which so flabbergasted me when I learned about it that my head is frankly still spinning a little bit. And I want to be very clear, and I don't want to exaggerate, what step

three is. And so in order to put this out there in Deep Vision's own words, so to speak, I'm going to quote from their so-called NOFO, which is a Notice of Funding Opportunity. This is something that USID and other agencies put out in the world and say, we want this program created. And Deep Vision's NOFO is over 100 pages long. So it's very, very specific. And then universities and other people can bid on doing this piece or that piece. And all the pieces are eventually assembled by a program officer inside of USAID. So this NOFO, this 100 plus page document in the public sphere, a bit of Googling, you can find it, is as clear and detailed and

certainly official statement of Deep Vision's intentions as exists. So what I'm going to do right now, Kevin, is I'm going to read a few snippets. And for those who find the NOFO, these are scattered, a few phrases and sentences from the bottom of page 16 and the top of 17. And I'll ask you to explain a couple terms and meanings as I go along. So first of all, from the NOFO, since USAID expects that data generated by Deep Vision will be publicly available, and I'm going to skip ahead a few words for efficiency, Deep Vision will assist in linking in-country data with global systems, e.g. GenBank and GIS AID. What are GenBank and GIS AID, and what does it mean to link the data with them? So that's referring to the standard open data

practice of sharing the genome sequences of everything that you find in a given research program. So GenBank is the main repository hosted by the US government of all genomic information that everyone has sequenced and submitted to GenBank. GISAID is the repository specifically of virus strains. Not everyone sends the sequence of every strain to GenBank if there's already a sequence that is very similar there. GISAID is for the detailed virologist, viral evolution specialists who want to see and map out how different are the mutational variants of a given virus. So basically, it is a wildly standard scientific practice now to put any sequence you find up to

the cloud before you have any notion of its significance. So everything they find by definition is going to be made publicly available long before they characterize it. Is that roughly correct? That's exactly right. The principle of open data is you collect data in a scientific experiment, you should really put it online for everyone to see. Okay, a couple words after that last snippet of text, pointing again from the program's nofo. Knowledge gained by deep vision on novel viruses assessed to be zoonotic and significant epidemic slash pandemic threats will be immediately available to the in-country owners of the data and will be expected to be available expeditiously to policymakers,

the private sector, and implementing partners. So I think I know what that means. Could you just play back what that amounts to? If you think there's a virus that poses a major epidemic, that is local outbreak risk, or, God forbid, a pandemic risk, you need to tell the country that you found it in immediately so that they can take action. And it's expected that they will then share it with the international community as soon as possible. So bottom line, if Deep Vision succeeds, everyone on Earth will get

the recipes for the dangerous viruses that we find. They will be put online just as the 1918 flu virus genome was put online. That's right, because remember, the intent of this program is to identify which natural viruses might spill over and cause pandemics, if they spill over into humans, so as to better target interventions to prevent that from happening. And the way they hope to do that is by creating a list of viruses rank-ordered by perceived threat level, which they've already done for the viruses that are highly lethal and don't spread particularly well human to human, but are known to have spilled over. That's the product of a related USAID program called Stop Spillover, which is generally highly admirable with the perhaps exception of this list. Although,

as we discussed previously, there's not a whole lot that's dangerous on that list so far. But what Deep Vision apparently wants to do is as soon as they find anything dangerous, they're going to alert the world to it and put it on that list, presumably in the number one position. So bottom line, if and when Deep Vision succeeds, based on what they've stated themselves in general practices, the genomes of potentially very significant pandemic viruses will be put on the open internet for anybody to find. And given the base of scientists and individuals who are already able to conjure certain viruses from whole cloth in the lab, tens of thousands of people will be in a position to follow those recipes as soon as they're posted and animate that virus, even though they don't personally have a sample from the bat that it originally came from. Did

I get that right? That's exactly correct. And to tie it back to what we were talking about a little while ago, the current population of frightening genomes on the internet is probably not all that bad. But this action could substantially change that by saying, yes, world, 1918, probably not as bad as you think. H5N1, pretty good chance it's not transmissible. But holy cow, people, these whatever, six viruses can really do the trick. That's going to be out there as a result of this program, and tens of thousands of people at first will be able to conjure these things, followed by we don't know how many in the future. Is that an excessively alarmist interpretation? No, it's really not, I'm afraid. And it's worth comparing. COVID has killed many more people than any single nuclear detonation. There are nine commonly acknowledged nation states with access to nuclear devices.

So as soon as viruses likely to cause pandemics are publicly identified with freely available genomes, the number of actors, in security terms, capable of inflicting a million plus deaths in expectation will rise by roughly a thousandfold. So the vulnerability of the world to a deliberately inflicted pandemic will rise tremendously if Deep Vision succeeds. I mean, that's what I get from this. And again, please tell me if I'm being unrealistic in my interpretation. Frankly, I wish you were, but that seems pretty accurate. I'm

going to add it's a little bit worse than that, actually, because a lot of people seem to assume a pandemic's a pandemic, right? It's the same virus. But nature throws, on average, four or so pandemics at us per century. If someone deliberately causes a pandemic, if the list has eight viruses, they could make and release all eight at once. The idea of facing eight different COVIDs, none of them with vaccines or even tests, all at the same time, It just boggles my mind. That's just such a horrifying thought given how hard it was to deal with this one. And it's worse than that, I'm afraid, because a lot of people see our best hope as being vaccines, because obviously that's what got us out of this one, right? Well, as we're talking about this, it's been 102 days since the Omicron variant of COVID was first sequenced and the genome

shared with the world. The goal that the White House has put forward is that we should have vaccines available within 100 days of the genome sequence being identified. But by a couple of days ago, Omicron had infected a very large fraction, maybe not 50%, but in some places, definitely 50% of all humanity. So 100 days is too slow, even though Omicron arose in one place in the world and spread from there. And that's our stretch goal is 100 days. And I agree with you, as you know, I've been aware of that number for a while, and it's just, it's dangerously timid. But it's worse than that. Oh, good. If Omicron

can spread that fast from a single point of release, anyone malicious enough to deliberately cause a new pandemic, let alone several at once, would almost certainly release them in multiple travel hubs, say airports throughout the world. So it wouldn't be a single point of release you have a chance to notice because lots of people are getting sick. It would be people getting sick in cities all over the world all at once. It would substantially diminish our response time. And one would imagine thereby substantially increase the resulting death toll. So even if it's just one virus, a deliberate release is worse than a natural spillover or an accident because both of those are spread from a single

site. Yeah, that's a really interesting and important point. So COVID emerges in Wuhan, and it's two and a half months before it shows up in Detroit. That was nowhere near enough lead time for us, and it could be chopped by 99% by a malevolent actor. That's scary. And there's one more thing I really want to emphasize, which is some people might be saying, well, yeah, but no matter how those four experiments turn out, even if they're all four positive and give values comparable to an endemic human virus of the same family, you might say, well, maybe that's just a 50% chance that it would actually cause a pandemic. Because again, the transmission studies are in animals, not humans. And to be fair, I just

pooh-poohed the H5N1ants, as being actually likely to cause pandemic in humans. So let's say that, okay, they find five viruses that they think could cause pandemics. Let's assume each of them is actually 50% likely to cause one. Well, if someone were to assemble and release all five, they'd have a 96% chance of causing at least one pandemic and an 81% chance of igniting two or more simultaneously Again, presumably across multiple travel hubs. That's pretty terrifying and if you assume that deep vision is only the beginning and the goal is to Find all pandemic capable viruses out there in nature and put them all on a list in order to prevent as many natural pandemics as possible Then you're raising the possibility that someone might do it, and then you'd see copycats,

because that's what happens with mass shootings. It's a socially contagious behavior. Once one person sets the example, then many more people who are mentally ill or captive to a horrific ideology would be more likely to do it now that they know that it's possible. In general, I'm not super worried about civilization falling apart because of a single natural pandemic virus. But if you're talking releasing aid at once, that might be another story depending on how bad they are. I mean, remember, if essential workers aren't willing to go out there and risk their lives, then you start having problems in food and water and power distribution. And if those fall apart, then everything falls apart. So putting those genomes online looks pretty risky, given

that the best case scenario is that we would prevent all of the natural pandemics, which is historically around four per century. Seems a lot to say it's definitely a good deal to prevent four natural spillovers per century in exchange for giving tens of thousands of people the power to launch more pandemics than that simultaneously across multiple travel hubs. In light of all of that, I don't know how you could argue against the statement that if deep vision is spun up and succeeds, the exposure humanity faces to malevolently inflicted pandemics skyrockets, even if deep vision finishes its job and none of this work is ever, ever done again. as its job, and none of this work is ever, ever done again, which is, first of all, a completely naive assumption. I don't think anybody would make that, given that there's momentum to do more and more of this rather than less and less of this in USAID, of all places, which we'll discuss

in a bit. And that brings me to my last quote from Deep Vision's Nofo. The U.S. Agency for International Development, parentheses USAID, seeks to assist a limited number of countries with a focus on Africa, Asia, and Latin America to establish capacity to detect, characterize, and disseminate information and findings regarding previously unknown viruses that have originated in wildlife. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically he says, in addition to doing this stuff ourselves, we are going to be training lots of foreign countries to also do this. And it's noteworthy that if this training, which is currently specialized and will probably

enjoy many breakthroughs as a result of $125 million of funding over five years. They're going to have a lot of smart people concentrating on characterizing better, cheaper, faster, which wouldn't otherwise happen without this program. So if Deep Vision succeeds and society continues tripling down on this stuff, this work will be, as a consequence, done on foreign soil where the U.S. government has absolutely no sway or say, will eventually be done with tools that are far better than what we've got right now, tools and techniques. So this is the horse out of the barn that doesn't actually yet exist on the internet with the relatively limited set of sort of dangerous viruses that are there.

set of sort of dangerous viruses that are there. Now, there is one factor that I should probably point out, which is suppose we're concerned about state bioweapons programs. If they were to say, don't mess with us, we have the ability to launch new pandemics, no one would believe them. I would laugh and say, I can fabricate data too. That's cute. But if it's done by DeepVision, by DeepVision funding a bunch of independent labs who are well-meaning because they want to prevent natural pandemics and they just haven't thought about the security risk, if they publish that data, I believe it. If it's done by independent labs who don't have a motive to have a pandemic in their pocket, it's going to be believable in a way that it won't be if malicious actors try to do it themselves. And I think this is one of the most powerful and original arguments that I've heard

about the danger of this kind of genomic information being out there. And I hadn't thought about it until you first mentioned it to me on the phone before. If, I don't know, an environmental extremist movement or a frightening anonymous source on the internet, or even a state actor like North Korea, were to say, hello world, I am going to inflict a devastating pandemic unless you meet my demands, it would be laughed off. It would freak people out. It would probably get a lot of coverage on CNN. But the scientists who are in a position to inform the national security apparatus in various countries about whether or not to take this threat seriously will say this is just not feasible. That totally changes when a genome that the world would not have known otherwise, is definitively blessed and publicized

by a brilliant scientific group as being that thing. Once that work has been done, which wouldn't be done otherwise, now all of a sudden we know 30,000 and perhaps quite a bit more people can follow that recipe overnight. And what that means is we could suddenly go through a terrifying series of hijackings of the attention and the stress levels of the world with all kinds of people issuing those threats. And they don't even have to have access to one of those 30,000 people that could make that virus. They just have to say it because it's suddenly credible.

Nobody will be able to deny that it's impossible for one of those 30,000 people to be under the control of this terrifying anonymous source online or this terrorist group or this rogue actor or whatever. And that alone is just wildly disruptive. It's one thing if a kid pulls the fire alarm in their school to get out of their science exam or whatever. But if that kid calls the school and says, I have a hydrogen bomb that's ready to go off, no one's going to get that alarmed. The creation of this credibility empowers so many more people than, quote unquote, just

the 30,000 people who could act on it to do awful things in the world. And it's probably even more likely because the people who might make that threat may in their inner conscience say, I'm actually not going to do it. I don't have a gun. You know, I'm just holding up the liquor scorer with a squirt gun. No one's going to get hurt. Might actually make them more likely to move ahead with that kind of thing than it would be for a state actor to do something. Yeah, I'm actually at least as afraid of not just non-state actors, but even just individuals, mentally ill or otherwise. So Seiichi Endo was a member of this apocalyptic terrorist cult, Aum Shinrikyo, in Japan. Aum was responsible for making and releasing chemical

weapons that killed a bunch of people in Japanese cities in the early mid-1990s. But before he joined the cult, Endo was a graduate trained virologist, and he sought to obtain samples of Ebola for use against civilians, and was unsuccessful. James Holmes, who is a convicted mass murderer, the Aurora shooter, quit his life sciences PhD program not long before he opened fire in the theater. And, of course, pre-Al-Qaeda, the most famous terrorist was arguably the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematics professor who referred in his manifesto to the immense power of biotechnology, even though he wrote it decades ago. It's really hard to imagine someone like that who wanted to bring down the industrial system would not have used that power if given access to pandemic virus genome sequences and modern virus assembly protocols. And that's not even

getting to groups like Daesh, ISIS, and other kinds of terrorists, folks who might actually be tempted to use it, even if it would hit their own people. Yeah. And the omnicidal factor, if we can call it that, is something that I think people very frequently miss because it's easy to rule out a majority of bad guys who normally dominate international headlines. We can safely say that Putin, Xi, indeed North Korea, are wildly unlikely to inflict a pandemic on the world because they have so many people to protect and so much to lose. And if we're in the mindset that it takes a major state actor to do such a thing, there is a bit of mutual assured destruction built into that. There's radical deep ecologists who don't think much of humanity in general,

and might think that the world is better off with a whole lot fewer humans. There's folks with those persuasions who have called for it. Certainly, it's unclear whether a group like Al-Qaeda would actually have unleashed something that would hit their supporters as well, but quite possibly. I mean, they did put out a call for brothers with skills in microbiology in 2010 to make biological weapons of mass destruction. And then maybe one of the most haunting ones is folks with the mindset of the Germanwings pilot who decided to commit suicide. He was mentally ill, didn't disclose his mental state, and decided to end

it all by flying the plane into a mountain. Yeah, in the United States, I'll add, we have an average of more than one mass shooting per day. So that suicidal mass murder instinct is out there, and the omnicidal instinct is out there. And then there's just thinking out loud, like there could be other people who don't realize quite how deadly the thing they're doing is and might have some sort of boneheaded cunning plan. Like I could imagine somebody saying, ooh, I remember the markets crashing when COVID came out. I'm going to release something, short the market, make a pile of money and stockpile gas masks. It sounds moronic and absurd, but there's 7 billion people in the world and moronic, absurd ideas occur to at least some of us each and every day.

Okay, now I want to get into the final and in some ways, maybe even the most important part of our conversation with a little bit of a preamble. It's obviously abundantly clear that I am horrified by the agenda and the prospects of this program called Deep Vision, but I'm going to try to do my very best to push back with every argument that I have heard of or have dreamt up on my own in favor of Deep Vision because there is another side to this story. own in favor of deep vision because there is another side to this story. And the people behind this program are extremely smart and well-intentioned. And I'll also add that when I personally first heard about Predict, it was when the news broke about it being shut down. And that actually happened either right before or right as the pandemic was starting. And at the time,

I thought this was insane because zoonotic spillover has obviously happened before. It will obviously happen again. And how can we defend ourselves against it if we don't study our enemies? I'm actually very sympathetic to these arguments. So let's go back and forth. And I'm really going to try to make every argument I'm capable of in favor of this. So as much as the other side as we can possibly deliver. So my first question to you, which is the question that was in my mind when this thing was first shut down, shouldn't we want to know who the bad guys are and where they live before they strike? Shouldn't we want to know where the dangerous pandemics dwell and know

exactly what they look like? Isn't that a bit like putting wanted posters all over the Wild West? It's an extremely intuitive and compelling rationale. And most of the time it's true. The problem is that it's kind of like saying, here's a wanted poster for this particular device, which happens to be the detailed schematics for a hydrogen bomb, and peppering the world with different blueprints for hydrogen bombs or equipment necessary to make hydrogen bombs in order to identify people who might be making hydrogen bombs. in order to identify people who might be making hydrogen bombs. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's hard at the top level to say, okay, best case scenario, we prevent all natural pandemics. Is that worth giving these tens of thousands of people the power to release more pandemics than would normally occur in a century all at once? That just doesn't seem like a good trade. And when you put it in that context, then you kind of have to look back at your basic assumption that it's always good to know more about a threat because that intuition doesn't encapsulate the costs of knowing. That is,

the value of information can be negative. That's the whole point of an information hazard. There's actually a whole field of modeling and information theory on calculating the value of information. When should you run an experiment to learn more? And it tends to assume that the information is always positive. And the question is, is the cost of running the experiment worth reducing your uncertainty about what would happen in the world? But it's also possible for the value of information to be negative. And you can imagine an extreme case. Suppose you figured out some way of creating a singularity on Earth that would devour the planet, to give the absurd example. Would we want humanity, anyone in humanity, to know that that

is possible? Probably better off if no one ever knows that that's possible. And because of the credibility issue and the difficulty of doing this kind of research, it looks a lot like if we don't go there, then there won't be credible pandemic-capable virus blueprints online for quite some time. That's not going to last forever. We will eventually lose. They will eventually go up there, whether through this kind of route or another one. But the longer we can push it off, the more time we have to build actually effective defenses.

And it's important not for listeners to come away with a sense of doom and gloom, because it's also true that even for the scenario where people release multiple pandemic-capable viruses all at once in multiple airports, if we have sequencing-based monitoring systems in place everywhere, we'll pick them up nearly immediately, certainly before they spread too widely through air travel, and be able to put on our protective equipment. And if we actually tried, we could probably build comfortable, even stylish equipment that keeps you from getting infected with viruses. And we could make it available to everyone who is required to keep food and water and

power flowing for as long as it takes to stamp out the virus entirely. And if we had that kind of equipment available and the threat was that salient, we could do it. Even after COVID, even after our manifest failure in so many ways, with that kind of technological advantage, I think we could do it. Even after COVID, even after our manifest failure in so many ways, with that kind of technological advantage, I think we could do it. But we can't do it today. So it's really hard to make the argument that the threat of natural pandemics could ever be enough to justify creating that risk of deliberate misuse that could be so much worse because humans make better terrorists than nature. Even if we can't could be so much worse because humans make better

terrorists than nature. Even if we can't make viruses worse than nature, we make better terrorists. I think the main difference between folks who think that this kind of attitude towards understanding the threat as thoroughly as possible, no matter what, assume that all technologies favor defense. That no matter how bad it is, if we just know more, we can come up with some kind of effective defense. But that's just not how the world necessarily works. And we know that from nuclear weapons, but also, frankly, we should know that from COVID, because we weren't able to effectively defend against COVID, even though we arguably should have been. Certainly some nations did much better than others. But right now, you

can't say that understanding viruses better, especially given our difficulties reliably making vaccines quickly enough, is plausibly going to mitigate the damage from any pandemic enough to warrant the kind of offense that you're giving to individuals. One individual can launch pandemics and the entire world has to frantically make vaccines, test them, approve them, manufacture them, and distribute them, if we can even do that. And then the offense can do it again. It takes so much less effort if you have a list of many different pandemic-capable viruses to choose from. Okay, you mentioned vaccines, so that gets to another argument that I've heard in favor of this approach, and one that I certainly harbored myself for quite some time, which is, if we do identify the spillover bad guys before they spill over,

don't we get a huge head start on creating vaccines and therapies to counteract that spilled over pandemic? And if that's the case, don't we have a great potential to really mitigate an awful lot of deaths? And we need to put that in the benefits column as we also look at the potential cost column. In order to have a head start in vaccine production, you need to be able to establish whether it works. And if you're trying to develop a vaccine against a virus that has never infected a human before, the only way to test efficacy, that is to run what's called a phase two clinical trial, would be to deliberately infect a bunch of people with a virus of unknown lethality that we think might cause a pandemic. That's what's called a challenge trial.

And we weren't willing to do that even for COVID until well over a year into the pandemic. Would we really be willing to do it for a virus that was isolated from animals and might never actually infect a human or certainly ever take off as a pandemic? Would we really be willing to do it for a virus that was isolated from animals and might never actually infect a human or certainly ever take off as a pandemic? What if we discover a couple dozen viruses? Are we going to do it for all of them? Then you have to take into account how fast mRNA vaccines can be designed. Basically, a day. I mean, Moderna's was famously in less than 48 hours. I'm sure we can do it within 24 now. If you can design the vaccine within a day, and you already have production facilities that allow you to churn out tons of doses very quickly, because again, you're just making

RNA, you're just changing the sequence. It's very easy to specify it for a new virus. Then there's no reason why you can't run a combined phase one and phase two trial immediately. Because one of the best things that NIH has called for and is now working on with White House support is a program to develop one vaccine for a virus of every family. Because if you do that, and we actually have some idea of this for many viruses, they're already ongoing, then you know roughly what dose you need to use for your mRNA vaccine against that family. If there's a pandemic already going, you should be

making your mRNA vaccine candidate and getting it in people's arms who are high risk in order to protect them as soon as possible, because you already know that an mRNA vaccine for a related virus at a given dosage was safe and effective. So given that, you wouldn't save even a single full day of vaccine development by knowing the virus in advance. 242 days between when Moderna and most of the non-Chinese world got the genome for COVID. 300 and something, mid to lower 300s of days before the vaccine came out. But what few realize is that roughly two of those days were the total vaccine development timeframe, and the rest of it was testing, safety, regulation. And the point well taken that it doesn't take long at all to make one of these vaccines. But it's really important to note the development of the formula for the vaccine is much briefer than the time necessary, as we've seen with COVID, to create 7 billion of them to vaccinate the world or even 350 million of them to vaccinate our own country.

That just took many months in the case of the US till we got to the point where anybody who wanted a vaccine could get it. And we're nowhere near that point with the world yet. So wouldn't it be beneficial to do the deep vision work, to find the plausible bad guys and to just stockpile billions or hundreds of millions or whatever the appropriate number is of those vaccines

so we are in a position to snuff it immediately. Well, what you just described sounds a lot like spending an awful lot of money stockpiling doses of vaccines that we're not actually sure work yet, so that you can do what amounts to a phase one plus phase two trial of ring vaccination to try to stamp out an epidemic before it comes a pandemic. Define ring vaccination. So ring vaccination is what we use to get rid of smallpox, for example. And it's where you have a case and you essentially give everyone in the area who might plausibly have come in contact with them

a jab, just in case. You do some contract tracing if you can, but it's more like list everyone you know, plus everyone who lives or works within 10 blocks of your home or workplace, respectively. We're just going to vaccinate everyone to a couple of degrees of contact out, or even whole cities, if need be. But that's still actually not that many doses. What you described sounds a whole lot more expensive than just building the capacity to make mRNA vaccines in bulk very quickly in various places throughout the world. I mean, we're going to have these factories for making mRNA vaccines against other things. We're definitely going to be developing mRNA vaccines against other pathogens and probably mRNA versions of existing vaccines because it looks a little

like the mRNA versions may well be better. Chickenpox is probably going to eventually be an mRNA vaccine because it's probably better. And if you have factories making all these other vaccines, you can immediately switch those to be making vaccines against some new zoonotic agent that has just jumped. And that's a heck of a lot cheaper than having to stockpile all those doses in advance for a bunch of viruses that are probably never going to spill over anyway. My immediate rebuttal to that, I think I know your answer to it, but let me just make it, is if that's so easy, why COVID? Why didn't we just do ring vaccination with a vax that took a day to make and snuff that one out in Wuhan? Well, that would have required the Wuhan officials to actually inform the Beijing central government that there was a problem in a timely manner, and for them to have had mRNA vaccines available, which they still don't

have today. I can think of another immediate rebuttal to the ring vaccine strategy, but the rebuttal is so obvious that even though I'm trying to be a good devil's advocate, I'm just going to lay it out there. I mean, yes, it takes a day, but it took 340 days of testing and approval. yes, it takes a day, but it took 340 days of testing and approval. And so how can we really do this ring vaccination strategy? The obvious rebuttal to that is you're going to have the same problem if you have 350 million stockpiled copies of a vaccine that itself by definition has not yet been tested and approved because there was no pandemic against which to test it. So that rebuttal has a built-in rebuttal. But I do actually want to add something here, and I'd like to just hear your take on it. My personal belief is now that we do have mRNA vaccines, and we'll have more in three years,

and they'll be everywhere in some amount of time, and now that the safety profile of mRNA vaccines has been well-established, my own feeling is when something scary emerges, we need to be able to access emergency regulations. We can't have this 340-day test period, which, by the way, was record-settingly quick. We can't have that because, as you pointed out earlier in the podcast, 100 days is nowhere near enough time if something diabolical is on the march. And so this is something I've thought about on my own. I'm wondering if you think it's a crazy idea to have ready-to-go, pre-approved, pre-thought-through, pre-debated, pre-protocolized emergency provisions that if something really awful starts to happen, SocietyX, whether it's us or a country

in the hot human-animal interface, can basically flip a switch and say, as soon as we have a high-confidence vaccine, very high confidence in safety and pretty damn good confidence in efficacy because we've been doing mRNA for X years now, we can at least allow people to take that voluntarily rather than waiting 340 days before they can take

it. What do you think of that as a tool that whether we take the stockpiled approach or the ring vaccination approach, I kind of feel like we need that tool? I mean, what you say makes so much sense that it hurts. And it hurts, especially knowing that so many of those 300 odd days could have been avoided given appropriate institutional incentives that were sadly lacking at both FDA and CDC. But it's not really to single out those agencies in particular because it's not like international agencies did that much better. And to be fair, mRNA vaccines were new. It took time for the manufacturing scale up. It just wasn't there. So even though a lot of lives could have been saved by accelerating the regulatory approval,

which could then let the company's in confidence build up even faster than under Operation Warp Speed, there is a limit to how fast we could have done it when mRNA vaccines were new. And in future, we'll be able to do it much faster, which means that the regulatory approval is the sticking point even more. Having a set of people who are authorized in the event of nascent epidemic to just go ahead with a combined phase one, phase two trial in a ring vaccination format, using an mRNA vaccine targeted to the new agent, using doses similar to those identified for viruses of the same family in the past. I think that's just got to be on the books as something you can do and negotiate internationally to get approval to do it everywhere. If we agree to do it, if our FDA agrees this is okay and we can do it,

then it'd be a lot easier to get regulatory agencies in other countries to agree and just have that as the plan. That would frankly make a heck of a lot more sense, your idea, than what nations are currently arguing about in the World Health Organization for so-called pandemic preparedness. Okay, I think another powerful argument in favor of knowing the precise genome of a potential bad guy in advance is monitoring the hot interfaces between the human world and the animal world, that human-animal interface. Those are in fairly narrow parts of the world. And it seems that if we do identify the likely spillovers from a particular region, we can put a lot of muscle into that interface, specifically targeted at this one bad guy that might emerge from there. And we're going to inevitably put

much more muscle in there, into that early detection in that geographically specific place than we would if we never did the work that Deep Vision proposes to do. I think that's inarguable that you could. It's not clear how much better it would be than just looking at the animal-human interface again without looking for which specific viruses you think would actually cause pandemics, were they to spill over, and instead saying, which animals cause the most spillover events in which communities, and can we work to prevent those? So you're arguing that those hot interfaces between the animal and human world can be

carefully monitored even in the absence of the precise genome. How would that happen? And how easy is that to do? And does it require new technology or enormous budgets? Well, so that's what the technology that's already made Deep Vision's job easier is doing. That is, they're going out there and they're monitoring people who are often exposed to animals and checking to see which animal viruses they have been exposed to, or even they're just getting a lot of samples from the animals that people are most likely to contact and sequencing them. And that would let

you create a model of which creatures are highest risk. And the thing is, identifying that, say, a particular kind of bat is high risk because of the suite of viruses to which is it exposed and how often viruses from it end up in people in regions nearby, that doesn't give anyone blueprints that could be used to cause a new pandemic. But it does let you target interventions in communities, ensuring that anyone who might have been exposed to a bat gets much prompter medical care and diagnostics to see what it is they might have been infected with, and resources to contain that potential outbreak before it actually happens. Okay, next rebuttal, which I actually think is a very strong one and which a number of people

have put to me when I raised this issue. The United States can control whether or not deep vision does this work, but we can't stop the rest of the world from doing it. Based on what you told me about the level of expertise and budget that it would require, there's probably not a lot of actors out there who could do this, and there's obviously no economic incentive for any private actors to do it. But nothing's stopping China, for instance, from doing this work. And wouldn't it be bad for China to do this work under the cloak of darkness, for them to identify six pathogens that we know nothing about, and then we have this information asymmetry. Isn't the danger of that frightening enough that we just can't let it happen and we're

kind of dragged into almost an arms race? Well, you have to ask, what do we really lose and what do they gain from that scenario? I mean, these are viruses that are going to kill their people as well. They're not strategically useful to great powers the way nuclear weapons are, because they can't be effectively targeted. And you could say, well, what if they hypothetically tried to develop vaccines in advance and vaccinate their people in advance? There I would say, I think it's pretty hard to vaccinate a billion people without intelligence

agencies noticing that you're doing it. a billion people without intelligence agencies noticing that you're doing it and presumably getting a sample of whatever it is, or at least finding evidence of it. And even if you somehow manage to accomplish that feat, it's going to be awfully suspicious when it ravages every other country, but even your citizens abroad somehow never get it. That just seems quite a reach. somehow never get it. That just seems quite a reach. I think normal deterrence really operates just fine in that scenario. And again, what do we gain from identifying it in advance? A day, when it comes to vaccine development. If we really do have that capability of make mRNA vaccines very quickly, which I certainly hope we have. And frankly, even if the government fails to invest in it, it looks a lot like the private sector is interested in doing that anyway,

because market forces to the rescue. It doesn't really look to me like we lose anything. So two responses to that. A, it would make no sense for China to do this, unless B, they start mobilizing in plain sight. To which I'll say, governments do stupid things all the time, even though they shouldn't. And as we can see with Russia and Ukraine right now, governments even marshal their forces in plain sight and de facto tell the world, what you're going to do about it. So I'd feel better about the arguments you just presented if I believe that there was a plausible path to, say, the United States deciding vehemently against deep vision and then basically evangelizing that viewpoint to the rest of the world successfully, could that happen realistically? Is there any shot

of that? I think actually we are probably the hardest audience for that one. We'd be the hardest people to change the minds of, you mean? Honestly, yes. I think it's inarguable that if China's leadership decides this kind of thing shouldn't happen, it's not going to happen there. True. Whereas in the US, if we decide that this isn't going to happen and the government isn't going to fund it, then it's actually a lot harder for us to stop the private sector from doing it anyway. The Global Virome Project hoped to raise a couple billion dollars from government, yes, but also a lot of it from philanthropists to do this kind of research and assemble that ranked order list of viruses by threat level for all natural viruses using private money.

It's a lot harder for the United States to say, you can't actually do that. There are some things we could do. Most notably, we could add most viruses with a hint of pandemic potential to the select agent list, which greatly increases the cost of working with them by requiring background checks and ensuring that physical samples are appropriately under lock and key and so forth. That could do a lot, but we still can't actually stop them unless we actually decided to ban the particular class of experiments required to identify a virus as pandemic capable. That is, though, to give your example, can it find the door? Can it find the key to the lock in order to get in? Can it take over the inside once it's there? And can it actually take over others using the animal transmission models?

If we were to say, you know what? A pandemic-capable virus can kill as many people as a nuclear weapon. We spend somewhere between $2 and $70 billion a year on nuclear nonproliferation. Why don't we take pandemic proliferation similarly seriously? Internationally, there is a nuclear test ban treaty. Well, those four sets of experiments are the virological equivalents of nuclear testing. You actually make it a national security matter, then you treat it like a national security matter and a proliferation risk, which is arguably greater than that of nuclear proliferation. Because again, there's nine acknowledged nuclear powers versus tens of thousands of people that

could gain access to these kinds of agents once the genomes are online. So I think that if you can convince USAID, which I think is eminently doable, and if you can convince NIH, which I think is much more difficult, but still possible, then we could absolutely take the case internationally that this is in our shared strategic interest as the international community to prevent people from doing this tiny subset, less than 1% of all virology, that is the equivalent of nuclear weapons testing. So tell me if this is a fair summary of that detailed response. It is definitely not in China's interest that this knowledge be discovered. They have a lot of people to protect. This is not targeted weapons. And even though governments do stupid things all the time,

they're far less likely to do something stupid if it has been strenuously and persuasively argued to them, hey, guys, this is stupid. Okay, here's another. And again, I'm not just being devil's advocate. I think some of the arguments in favor of deep vision are pretty strong, although you've done a decent job of demolishing a couple of them already. But this is one that I think about a lot. I believe one of the greatest and most securing developments science could possibly conjure in the response to COVID would be so-called pan-familial vaccines, which just brief pocket definition for those who aren't familiar with it, the notional panned coronavirus vaccine would immunize the lucky recipient against substantially all coronaviruses,

of which there are countless numbers. And there was talk about, and even I believe the beginning of an effort back in 2003 in the wake of SARS to gin up a pan-coronavaccine effort, which was understood would cost a lot of money and take many years. But after SARS petered out and didn't even kill a thousand people, that focus was lost. Not because it was scientifically impossible. It might be, but not because it was scientifically possible because it became politically uninteresting. And it haunts me to think of how different the world would be right now had that pan-coronavirus vaccine in response to SARS been completed before MERS came along several years later,

another coronavirus, and obviously before COVID came along. Now, isn't it true that the kind of virus hunting Deep Vision is proposing? Isn't it going to get a lot more examples of a lot more corona and other viruses, paramyxoviruses, et cetera, to inform the development efforts of pan-familial vaccines? Because I imagine to do one of those things, you need as many examples as possible because you need to find the vulnerabilities that are conserved throughout the family. That's exactly right. If you want a broad-spectrum vaccine, you need a decent sample of the viruses within that family. What you don't need to know is which ones of those could cause pandemics in

humans. Because if you have a pan-coronavirus vaccine and it works against a good fraction of the diversity, of the extreme diversity throughout the family, then you should believe that it'll work for all of them because you're not going to find every last coronavirus out there. You're only ever going to get a decent enough sample. So yeah, you do need to have the genome sequences of a bunch of the coronaviruses, but you don't need to know which ones of those viruses could cause pandemics. So here's where we will have to draw a really important distinction between the virus hunting part, or just sequencing viruses in nature to get an idea of what's out there,

and the pandemic virus identification, which is where you go back in the lab and you run those four sets of characterization experiments. It's the latter that creates the problem from a security perspective. And you can do the former without doing the latter. So if I was in charge of deep vision, I would say, you know what? We already agreed that we would not continue to fund virus enhancement work, because PREDICT did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology in not just finding a bunch of bat coronaviruses, but they also funded research in which the Wuhan folks made chimeras of some of the more dangerous-looking ones,

the ones that passed one or another of the tests, but not all of them, and mixed and matched the pieces to see if they could make something that was more dangerous. So Deep Vision, to their very great credit, has said, we're not going to fund that anymore. And that's a very important point. I'm glad you surfaced it. I just want to highlight it because there's a little bit of definitions floating around here. Deep Vision is already a step in the right direction. They've already made one sensible step by saying we're not going to do what many call gain of function. And the next step is to say the virus discovery part, the virus hunting, is important, not just the pan-family vaccine development, whether or not it's actually possible, it's worth a shot for exactly the reasons you articulated, but also for pan-family antiviral development.

So if I were in charge of deep vision, I would say, just like we said, no more gain of function. Well, we're still going to go out there and sequence a bunch of viruses to help out the broad spectrum folks, but we're just not going to take them back to the lab and run those experiments to determine which ones are most likely to cause pandemics. And we're certainly not going to add them to a list of viruses rank ordered by threat level. Now, just to drill down a little bit more on that fantasy situation of Kevin Esvelt, Deep Vision director, you pointed out that the characterization work is actually probably a very, very high percentage of the budget. So if you're running

Deep Vision and you got that budget, what else would you do? Spend on the monitoring, not on the prediction. It's that simple. And there's an opportunity cost to budgets. I'll just point out an obvious fact. If they're spending $20 million of the $25 million on characterization, they ain't got that $20 million to spend it on these other things. And I know that takes me a little bit out of my semi-devil's-advocate-y role, but I'm actually done with it because I've made pretty sure all of the arguments that I've heard in favor of deep vision, some of which, as I said, aren't all that bad. So your responses to those arguments and also your assessment of the overall situation seems so intuitively obvious once one hears those arguments. So how is it that this program is going forward with its stated objective of posting what I'm going to call weapons of mass destruction to the internet?

USAID deserves a tremendous amount of credit for recognizing that one of the greatest threats to the poor comes from pandemics. And the problem came when they took the reasonable seeming step of saying, you know what, we could target all these. The new director, Samantha Power, was confirmed only three months before the announcement, which means that the program was pretty much fully established and just needed the stamp. And what's more, even the folks who were working at Predict, like Dennis Carroll, who launched the program, as far as I know, no one ever mentioned that this could pose a security risk, let alone a proliferation risk greater than that of nuclear weapons during all of Predict and afterwards, including in folks who are super worried about pandemics and even do think about security issues. I mean, you yourself, when you heard that

Predict was canceled, you thought that was a bad thing. Absolutely. So no one, I think, pointed out that this was a security risk until after Deep Vision was announced. And that includes folks who do have security experience, which is not something that anyone at USAID is expected to have, is trained to have in any way, shape, or form. These are people who have passed up, frankly, much more lucrative salaries in the private sector in exchange for the opportunity to help some of the most vulnerable people in the

world. The poorest of the poor, the folks who have really been left out of all the benefits that have accrued from all of the technologies that we've developed, all of the economic growth. And they identified pandemics as one of the things that could most harm the poor and vulnerable. And they were right. I mean, remember, they did this before COVID, more than a decade before COVID. And they did their best to come up with a program to prevent them. And they started out by doing the really reasonable thing, saying, we need to know which communities are most at risk. We need to identify what we can do in order to limit potential exposure that could lead to spill over events and cause epidemics. We need to ensure that they have good medical care and diagnostics to identify viruses quickly,

train their medical workers in fast response, give them support for isolation protocols and everything required to give the best chance of containing the epidemic, thereby protecting not just that vulnerable community, but vulnerable communities throughout the world. And they did all this, again, pre-COVID. So that's to their tremendous credit. So bottom line is self-evident is these arguments certainly seem to me having heard them. And they did all this again pre-COVID. So that's to their tremendous credit. pointed to this danger over the 11-year history, I think, of Predict, makes it pretty clear that these are not obvious or natural arguments to rise in the mind of somebody who is not tasked with security or even people who are. That's exactly right. You can't expect folks who have devoted their lives to serving the poor to recognize security risks that their work might be creating when folks who do have that

kind of security background also failed to recognize them. Now, to wrap this up and also to bring it home in a really important way, I'm just going to point out to listeners, the reason we're having this conversation and we're getting it out there as quickly as we can is because although Deep Vision has been approved, it hasn't yet launched. Is there any evidence out there that you're aware of, Kevin, that it is underway? It's really hard to say. There's certainly been the press release of announcing what they were going to do, that the program existed. But there isn't anything out there suggesting that funds

have been dispersed, certainly not to begin the characterization. And remember, the characterization comes after the virus discovery part. So even if they've begun the virus discovery, that doesn't mean they're taking them back to the lab and running those four classes of experiments that are, again, the virological equivalent of nuclear testing. So it's more or less beyond a shadow of a doubt that this train has not left the station, that Deep Vision's objectives might be shaped if people start thinking about them differently, or perhaps all of its budget could be directed toward anti-malaria bed nets, or who knows. And as a statement of obvious fact, it's much easier to influence the shape and

objective of a program before it starts than after X dozen or a hundred people are working for it and are deep into their objectives. So now feels like a really important time to get these arguments out into the world, which is obviously why we're doing this. If anybody who's listening to this is concerned, what might they do to try to influence folks, to try to spread the word, et cetera? Well, I don't want to be irritating and say everyone should do something that would really bury someone who is not even directly involved in this with a mess. But I would suggest, you know, despite social media being consistently identified as being one of the high candidates for a net negative, USAID has a Twitter account, at USAID. You could tweet at them and say, this program could do a lot of good in some ways,

but the security risks inherent in pandemic virus identification seem pretty considerable. I think you should reconsider that and perhaps move all those funds into the other aspects of the program that could really contain a pandemic before it starts. Yeah, and I totally agree that it is probably counterproductive to bury any particular individual with messages on the subject. But in addition to tweeting at USAID, which is a great idea because I'm sure that account is monitored by the folks inside, people can go to USAID.gov slash contact hyphen us, where you will find the following message. General inquiries and messages to USAID may be submitted using the form below. They also have a phone number. And again, we don't know this factually, but it stands to reason that this is an email account or a submission process that is

monitored. And USAID isn't like the IRS where they get literally tens of millions of consumer requests in a very short period of time each year. So I think that's another mechanism. And perhaps a more reliable on-ramp to government is through elected representatives. If you reach out to a representative of whom you're a constituent, they do have staff to field all of those inbound messages. And I know this because I had quite a few friends in college whose job it was during their summers in Washington to deal with these things. I'll give the specifics in the outro. But just for now, if you live in Maryland, Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut,

Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, or Idaho, it's a lot of states, you have a Senate representative on the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the State Department, and USAID management. So those would be good people to alert as well. And then of course, there's social media blogging, whatever megaphones you happen to have. If you feel like spreading this word, there's lots of ways to do it, and please do so, and we thank you. Kevin, is there anything we haven't hit on that you think is important that we should touch? I think just the precedent that this would set. USAID has already done the right thing by stopping virus enhancement research. If they recognize that

this is a problem and decide they're not going to do it, then that is one more step towards the US as a whole, moving away from identifying pandemic-capable viruses and sharing the blueprints online, and thus being able to credibly lead the international community towards something like a virological test ban treaty for pandemic non-proliferation. Which would just be so powerful. Important as it is to do what we can to not allow this work to happen that's being currently contemplated. If it's the start of a series of dominoes that precludes an enormous amount of this work happening on a go-forward basis, that's profoundly powerful and potentially profoundly curative. So please, listeners, don't despair.

There's a lot of concerning information here. But this horse is not out of the barn at all. And we may actually be in an extremely propitious historic moment to dramatically slow and perhaps even put a stop to the most threatening activity that we've talked about today. And that's why both Sam and I think this is a particularly important conversation with what is perhaps extraordinarily significant timing. So thank you, Kevin, very much for joining me today.

Well, thank you for the invitation and for, again, highlighting this potential issue of inadvertent proliferation and what we really can do to stop it. And listeners, please stick around for a brief moment of a couple of outro thoughts and more detail on those 12 states and who your representative is if you are moved to reach out to that person. Okay, so that's a lot to process. But I hope you collected enough background information as well as a rich enough sense for both sides of the debate to make your own informed judgment about whether you share Kevin's concerns. If you do and would like to help the situation, I have a couple more suggestions before I list those senators. First, USAID has designated Washington State

University to coordinate most of the scientific work that Deep Vision is funding. So if you have a WSU tie, then your school or employer or alma mater is Deep Vision Central. And if you know any heavy hitters over there, you may want to share your perspective with them. Next, after Kevin and I wrapped up, it occurred to me that at least someone who's hearing this, and maybe quite a few someones, probably knows Samantha Power, the head of USAID herself, or other heavy hitters inside the agency. If you are that someone and are deeply worried about this, then please pass on your feelings, or just a link to this episode to Samantha or one of her senior lieutenants. Finally, the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on State Department and USAID Management. Quite a mouthful. If you're

from one of the 12 states I mentioned, here are your representatives on that subcommittee. Maryland, it's Ben Cardin, and he is the chair of the committee. Tennessee, it's Bill Hagerty, and he's the ranking member, which means he's the most senior member of the committee. Tennessee, it's Bill Hagerty, and he's the ranking member, which means he's the most senior member of the opposition party, currently the Republicans. For Virginia, Tim Kaine. Kentucky, Rand Paul. For Hawaii, Brian Schatz. For Texas, Ted Cruz. For Connecticut, Chris Murphy. For Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, which does rhyme. For Massachusetts, Ed Markey. For Florida, Marco Rubio. For New Jersey, Bob Menendez. And for Idaho, Jim Risch. And that's all I've got. So thank you so much for listening to all of this with an open mind.