The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Matt Ridley: The Origins of COVID-19

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

(The Origins Podcast will appear every other Thursday.) Matt Ridley is a veteran journalist and science writer, with a training in genetics. He is also a Conservative member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and I were able to discuss his training, and his move from scientist to journalist, as well as the spectrum of his experiences in his various roles. We then moved on to the centerpiece of our dialogue: His newest book, Viral, written with geneticist Alina Chan. Together they produced what I view to be a masterpiece of science writing and detective work, exploring the origins of Covid-19. Our discussion, like the book, allowed us to illustrate a lot of the science related to the virus, and the current pandemic.There are numerous surprises. One of the most remarkable was the realization that much of the important detective work uncovering the possible origin of the pandemic came from self-trained internet sleuths who were able to uncover masters theses, as well as online registries that had either not been referenced in the professional literature, or incorrectly referenced.One comes away from the discussion with the realization that we still do not know for certain the origin of Covid-19, in spite of claims to the contrary. Recent, highly publicized scientific articles suggesting the Wuhan Seafood Market as the origin still have to deal with the fact that no direct evidence of the virus has yet to be uncovered from any of the animals at the market. At the same time, there is clear evidence that the Wuhan Virology Institute was working on Covid viruses, including viruses from bats that had caused Covid-like symptoms coming from a cave located far away in China. Neither Ridley nor Chan advocate any particular scenario for the current outbreak. But it is clear that open, transparent discussion of the available evidence is very important if the world is to understand better how this pandemic started, and how to possibly head off, or prepare for the next one. I found our discussion, and the book, incredibly informative, and Matt is a lucid and experienced explicator of both science, and social issues. I hope you enjoy the in-depth discussion we had in this, our most recent episode of The Origins Podcast. Note that all future ad-free video podcasts will be available to paid subscribers only. The audio version will always be free to all, and a video version on Youtube will also always be available. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. This episode is with the veteran science journalist Matt Ridley, who started out doing a PhD in biology essentially and moving on to become a journalist in a variety of areas. And most recently has written a riveting book called Viral with his colleague Alina Chen, who's a researcher, looking at the origins of COVID-19. And I found it incredibly eye-opening, exciting, and it reads like a detective story.

I think it was important that Matt and I talk about his experience in science journalism, which we've done, the experience of a scientist moving into journalism, which happens a lot, and his views on that and the nature of scientific communication, before we moved in to the nature of his most recent book, and then we dived in there. Viral is a discussion of the origins of COVID-19. In fact, we still don't know the origins of COVID-19, and it's a comprehensive. comprehensive analysis of the possible origins, looking at all sides of the issue. And what is really exciting is that you learn not just perhaps to view with skepticism the statements

of some in the scientific community and certainly the Chinese government on the nature of the origins of COVID. But what I found fascinating was a discussion of the fact that there's a community of internet sleuths, amateurs who train themselves, who have since discovered very important things like master's he's detailing the appearance of COVID-like symptoms and coming from a bat cave, not near Wuhan, but basically almost at the other end of China. And Ridley and Chan look at all of the evidence and do so impartially and examine all of the possibilities and allow the reader in some sense to come to their own conclusion, but more importantly, realize that there is no conclusion yet.

We really still do not know the origin. and it's important to know the origin if we're going to think about potential protection from future pandemics. And this became particularly important, in fact, a week or two ago when a group of scientists, I believe in Science Magazine, came out and claimed to have more or less definitive evidence that the virus began at the Wuhan seafood market. In fact, that evidence is not definitive. There's demographic evidence, which is interesting that the cases began near there. but no direct evidence linking any animals at the seafood market to COVID-19 virus itself

have yet been discovered. And I think it's worth taking those claims still with a grain of salt. And it's important to realize that I don't think the book is yet closed on this. In any case, reading the book, one learns a tremendous amount of science, as well as something about the sociology of science. And as I said before, fortune favors the prepared mind. and doing the kind of analysis they've done helps prepare our minds. So I found the book great,

and I really enjoyed my discussion with Matt about these and other issues, and I hope that you too will enjoy it. Now, if you're watching on YouTube, we hope you'll subscribe. If you want to see the ad-free versions of this podcast or listen to them, I remind you that the Origins podcast has now moved to be hosted by Substack on my site, Critical Mass. Lawrence Krause.substack.com and there you can watch ad-free versions of the podcast or listen to it. So I hope you'll either subscribe to YouTube if you watch it there or that you'll subscribe to that site so you get notices when new podcasts come out. And you can watch all of them ad-free.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Matt Ridley. Well, hello, Matt. It's nice to meet you virtually. I've read your stuff for a long time and I've been a fan. So it's great. I really appreciate you coming on the program. Well, Lawrence, I've read your stuff too and followed you for years. So it's great to meet you. It's great. At least it's one of the virtues of Zoom and the pandemic,

at least as we can get together with people we want to meet, even if we can't actually meet them. But someday, someday I'll get to meet you. Exactly. And this is the Origins podcast. And I want to say right off that I want to talk, I'll spend a lot of time talking about your book viral, because I think it's, I wrote you and told you,

I think it's a masterpiece and I really do and and congratulations on it. But you've written a lot and done a lot. So I want to talk about your origins, which I find interesting actually. You originally studied zoology, right? Correct. And a PhD in zoology. Yes. And yeah, so I was at Oxford undergraduate and then I stayed there to do a PhD.

I think it's called the defil at Oxford, but it's the same thing. in basically evolution of animal behavior was the field I was in. But then I went no further in research. I didn't stay in science. I went off and became a journalist. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that in a second. But by the way, were you at Oxford? I guess you got to know Richard Dawkins then when you were either an undergraduate.

Very much so. I read the selfish gene. It was published just as I arrived at Oxford by chance, 1976 and people kept saying this guy's written this amazing new book and so I read it and it puzzled me because unlike every other book on science I've read it didn't say here's the answer believe it it said here's a mystery here's a puzzle here's an enigma I'm going to take you by the hand and I'm going to show you how weird and wonderful the world is more weird than you could imagine and get you to see the world in a different way.

And so, you know, that was, and it was, I mean, I can sort of still almost feel the wonder of reading that book for the first time and just seeing the world in a different way. So it was then a thrill to find that this guy was going to teach me at some point. I think, I think the only course I took from Richard actually as an undergraduate was either a statistics course or a computer programming course, You know, it wasn't. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, he used to do that to look at. Yeah, he did. But then he became a friend. He wasn't my thesis supervisor. That was Chris Perrin's, but I knew him when I was a graduate student to. And then when I began writing books, we became friends again then. Yeah, I know. As you know, he's spoken highly of you to me. But did that, well, I'm jumping ahead, actually. But did Richard's book impact on your decision to write? science popularized at all? Yes, I think it probably did. I mean, towards the end of my PhD, I realized that I was quite good at writing

and I wasn't necessarily any good at research. And one of my undergraduate tutors had said that to me. He said, you're so fluent that you can cover up some sloppy thinking or something like that. It was one of those compliments dressed up as a criticism. And so I decided that writing was the thing. But I knew in the back of my mind, even when I became a journalist, that what I really wanted to do was write about science.

I didn't want to write about, you know, economics or love or anything like that, you know, novels or anything like that. I wanted to write about science. You know, it had to be about this extraordinary way of understanding the world that we've developed. And Richard was certainly a perfect example of the sort of person who I think was transforming the way we wrote about science from a very didactic form into something else. Because the other book that blew me away as an undergraduate was the double helix by Jim Watson. Sure. Because again, it didn't portray science as a stately progress towards the answer. It portrayed it as a rather chaotic, slightly naughty, somewhat competitive.

scramble to get to an extraordinary insight about the world before other people. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Andrew Watson was a unique character. It was sort of a little bit self-serving, but I remember reading that book too, and it was, it did not read like a science book. Yeah, in some ways, I don't think it is self-serving, because he portrays himself as a blundering idiot in the book. Yeah, I guess so.

And, you know, he famously had a terrible, I wrote biography of Francis Crick later. And Watson had famously began the double helix with, I've never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. And Crick wrote him an absolutely furious letter saying, I'm never going to speak to you again. You've misportrayed it, et cetera, et cetera. And Watson's response was, well, I know nobody with less to be modest about. It's a compliment. It's a common. Yeah, Watson had a way of, even if he was compliment, I've interacted with him once or twice. Even if he's complimenting you, it sounds like a criticism.

Indeed, he's a very complicated individual. Yeah. Well, look, I want to go even further back, though. I want to ask what got you interested in science. I mean, you come from a, I don't know how to say it. I was going to say distinguished. You come from a upper class, British peerage background. And that could have, I assume, led to many comfortable alternatives. So what got you interested in science? Yeah, you're right. I mean, I've had an incredibly fortunate upbringing.

As you say, my father was a lord. I'm now a lord. You know, lived in the north of England in a rural setting. And he was almost a scientist, my father. He was a very keen naturalist. And I wrote a few scientific papers actually on one or two things, but as a bird watcher, you know, not as a professional scientist. But he got me interested in bird watching very early on.

I can remember being lifted up on his shoulders to look into a bird box and see the nest of a bird. And so I guess that's where it starts. Sure, absolutely. And I became a obsessive. A lot of British biologists start out birding. It's interesting. student in the US too. And but it was only, I don't know when I realized that this isn't just a hobby.

This is a way into science, into this incredible process of hypothesis testing that reveals deep insights about the world. But, you know, things like, ever. by natural selection, deep geological time, the size of the universe, etc., etc., you know, are just wonderful concepts to come across when you're a young human being. And at some point, at least I, and I assume other people thought that's more interesting than anything else. Yeah, well, I can't disagree.

And that's one of the things they are wonderful concepts. It always saddens me that some kids are shielded from that. a sense because they're so for one reason or another it's not always religious give me many reasons but but um it's there's such amazing concepts that it's you want it's such a gift if you're a kid to be able to to learn about these things actually i i witnessed this firsthand when my son was growing up and um there there was some um books called horrible science and they're illustrated and they're flippant slightly smuttle funny, you know, designed for rebellious teenagers rather than serious people.

And I would hear him laughing himself to sleep with these books in bed. And it turned out he knew more about galaxies and dinosaurs than, you know, at the age of 12 or something, than almost anybody. But by contrast, what he was getting at school was Boyle's law or Hook's law. you know from scratch in a sort of rather boring way yeah I do think we get it the wrong way around somewhere we should start with the black holes and the dinosaurs yeah no exactly no I mean in physics it's always when I tell young kids who are interested in physics just get past the you know the inclined planes with sliding blocks which are so boring and eventually you'll get to it you know and I saw when I tried to teach introductory physics and

there's there's a lot in physics and there's there's a lot in physics at least. And I suspect it's true in biology and nowadays. When I was growing up, unfortunately, it was just dissecting a frog and memorizing the parts of it. And that's one of the reasons I didn't go into biology. But nowadays, it's probably not the case. But in physics, there's lots of ways to introduce really modern concepts when you're talking about introductory science. And of course, that's what's so fascinating for kids and adults. That's one of the reasons I write, but like you do. Did your mother have it? So your father was the primary influence.

Did your mother have any background in science or anything either or no? No, not at all. My mother was a remarkable woman and one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. But with barely any education, she had refused to go to school. And for some reason, my grandmother went along with this. Initially in Bombay and India. And then later in Durham in the north of England, her sisters went to school, but she didn't like it. So my mother, my grandmother managed to track down a Jewish refugee professor living on, you know, sort of, you know, what's the word?

I'm teaching. Like a tutoring, tutoring, tutoring, exactly. That's the word I'm looking for. in Newcastle, the city, near where she lived. And they agreed, I can't remember the name of this woman, sadly, but my mother used to talk about her. They agreed on day one that would be no arithmetic of any kind, but that everything else was fair game. And so she was very, very literary, very well read,

but most of science and maths was a close book to her. Yeah, clearly if you don't do arithmetic, It's the rest is closed. Well, unfortunately for, yeah, unfortunately for a lot of women at that time, that was not, I mean, in her case, she chose it, but some of them were encouraged not to. But so, by the way, your birding thing is interesting to me because I don't know if you, you know, I wrote a book about Feynman. I don't know if you ever know this story about Feynman, whose father took him walking in the woods and, and among other things, looking at birds. And Feynman asked what the name of this bird was. And his father said, the name doesn't matter.

It's, it's, you got to watch, what really matters is, you know, it's not classifying it. It's watching what it does and looking at its behavior and everything else. And I've always thought that's kind of fascinating. That's very good. And that's the trap that an awful lot of birders and indeed biologists get into and that I was in for a long time, which is that you treat it as stamp collecting. You don't treat it as, as, and you know, so for example, to this day, I'm much more interested in a common bird doing something interesting than a rare bird that shouldn't be here turning up you know exactly yeah

yeah a little bit more maybe not much more i'm i'm my my problem is i'm colorblind and that sort of put me off about i could okay at least in terms of classifying them i'm very happy that out in my backyard i have two bald eagles now and and some great herons here and and so they're fun to watch and and and and actually one of my favorite you this is totally an aside but uh my friend bernar heard so once convinced me to read a book called the Peregrine. Do you know this famous? Yes. It's a beautiful, unbelievable book of science, in a sense, literary science writing. It's really kind of amazing. Yeah, I love that book. You mentioned Jim Watson earlier, and I did go birding with him once or twice. And of course, he had this extraordinary experience

as going birding with his dad in Chicago. Very, very keen he was on this. And one of the people he his dad went birding with became a very famous murderer oh man i can't remember the details of the story but it's a it was an extraordinary experience yeah well you know that people have different vocations and people could do many things at the same time um the the you went i want to now jump ahead to the decision i guess you kind of explained why you went why you didn't go to science namely you felt you were better at writing than research. And that naturally led you towards journalism? Or is that? Yes. And I, you know, cast around, was lucky enough to get an internship, a three-month trial job on the economist. And that, and I managed to turn that to a permanent job. And then I

became the science editor there for a while. And I then actually did other kinds of journalism for them. I was a political reporter for quite a long time. Yes. The key thing about the economist was that it was a very good, quite tough school in how to write concisely. Yeah. You were edited to death by really good writers until you knew how to express something very precisely, but very concisely as well.

Yeah, no, let's say, in fact, yeah, that's a, and it's funny because people often, once I'd become known for my writing and people wanted to think of doing courses or something in writing and I didn't know how I basically said the way to learn how to write is to just write. Yes, I agree. When people ask me that question, I don't know how to answer it either. You know, I know good writing when I see it. Yeah, and just well, and you get better and you learn. As you say, you know, you write, if you have the experience of writing short pieces for papers or other things,

you learn how to make it concise. and you learn if you and you when you write stuff and other people read it and can't understand it you learn what works and what doesn't yeah so it's just right and um yeah but you but you mentioned became a political reporter look i if i weren't if weren't for viral i would spend a lot more time talking about because i find your history and all the things you've written fascinating actually um as i say i loved your book genome uh which was one of the first ways that i i i first began to understand it and it was a great a great way a great hook for thinking about about about about those topics.

It was a lucky way of dealing with a subject that was infinite and growing all the time. In other words, how do you write about the genes that are being discovered at the rate of knots in the human genome as we sequenced it? And it was really an excuse to have a ringside seat during the sequencing of the human genome. I knew this was the first time in four billion years that a creature was going to read a, term recipe. I want to be hanging around. You know, talking to the people are doing it. How do I get to do that? I'll say I'm writing a book. Yeah, sure. It wasn't quite that simple, but it was roughly that. But then this, this wacky idea that if I could find a gene on each chromosome that enabled me to tell a different story that would add up to a hole, then I needn't worry about the genes that I

hadn't written about because they weren't on the right chromosome. Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. And it's a way to take, you know, again, as a physicist, so, you know, people are intimidated and it's a way to take, and they're partly intimidated because of, in the case of physics, sometimes because of math, but also because of the vast amount of stuff and it seems so impossible to get any footing. So it's nice to find a way to compartmentalize a little bit so people feel less, you know, they're a gentle entry. And, you know, again, it's something I've been pretty aware. I mean, the model that gave me the idea, of course, was that book. the periodic table by Primo Levy was it?

Prima Levitt, Prima Levy, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's another great book. In fact, actually that, yeah, those were both influential. I think when I wrote, anyway, Primo's book, when I wrote my book, Adam, which was about the life history of an oxygen atom from the beginning of the universe to the end. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and it's, and like you, I think it's probably worth talking about this for young writers.

I often write books when it gives me an opportunity or an excuse to learn, to do something I wouldn't do otherwise that I might have wanted to do, but I wouldn't have put time aside to do it. Um, and you know, I learned it's like it's licensed curiosity in a way. Well, for me it motivated if I have to, I look at order to write this, I have to and if I don't have to, I'm not going to do it. You know, I learned some, I knew no biochemistry for Adam and it turned out to be that way. And when I wrote the book on Feynman that I mentioned was partly because it was, I said, when they asked me to do it, I said, well, this will allow me to read all his papers. And I know I, I, I, something I want.

wanted to do, but I would, I just wouldn't have gotten around to it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but then you, anyway, you said you became, I want to jump to politics because you, because our politics, although as they get older, they probably differ less, but, but they, they have differed and, and you're, you're, you've been a member of the House of Lords and a member of the Conservative Party, right? And, and, and, and it's worthwhile saying an advocate for Brexit. And I just wanted to, you know, why? Where does all that come from? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I would have described myself as standard left of center until I went to live in Washington for three years. In the late 1980s,

just at the end of Reagan's period in the beginning of Bushes. And I, there, There I came across, as it were, libertarian free market economics for the first time, through think tanks, but also politicians and stuff that people was writing and so on. And it had quite an impact on me. I'd sort of thought in a very top-down way about the economy, you know, that the world is run by governments. And then I realized it wasn't. It's run by people.

So I became a classical liberal, I would put it, which is this phrase for someone who thinks that economic liberalism, freedom for people to do what they want economically is a very good thing within, obviously, the rule of law. And that didn't make me a political conservative. and that took a lot longer. And I still wouldn't describe myself as a very conservative conservative, you know, on all the sort of hot-button issues that matter, particularly in the US like abortion, et cetera. I'm still the liberal. You're social liberal, but economic conservative.

Exactly. Well, social liberal and economic liberal is the way I'd put it. Oh, classically liberal. Yeah. Exactly. Using the word with a small L. Sure. Yeah.

And the party. that was closest to what I was interested in, particularly under, I would say, David Cameron when I joined the House of Lords was indeed the Conservative Party. And I had this opportunity to join the House of Lords. There's a weird system. Most Lords are appointed nowadays after reforms by Tony Blair. But a small rump of hereditary Lords are still there, sort of waiting for the phase two of reform which has never come they keep trying to make it come and it keeps not and those are self-selecting they choose who is to join them from among the hereditary lords who are not in the parliament and they chose me oh you didn't have to run for election did you

well it's a very odd election there were 27 candidates and 48 voters oh okay so okay yeah so there are some that are elected like like martin reese No, he's not elected. He's appointed. He's a life peer. So the vast majority are, as I say, appointed by the prime minister or the government. I see the nominated, the ones who are like you, you had a finite term. Is that right? No, and I didn't actually have a finite term. The fact that I've now left the lords is entirely my own decision by December of last year. I had come to the conclusion that it was taking too much my time. I wasn't able to do it, give it the time it deserved. and that basically governments are run by officials and parliamentarians have very little purchase on that process and i might as well write books instead that's a simplified way of okay that's interesting okay so it wasn't as if you were eager to enter politics you were you were a lord but you could you know it was an opportunity to be involved and that's why you opened yourself to the no yes and i i went to the lords knowing that what i would do is pick certain topics and uh become either a thorn in the government's side or a, you know, a helper to it on those particular

topics. Science, innovation being the sort of main ones, but one or two others too. Then, of course, we had Brexit, which was a huge three-year parliamentary battle following the referendum that none of us expected, as it were. And I felt at that point very strongly that it was wrong to undo what had been decided in the referendum. Was that your reason for being in favor of Brexit because of the referendum? No, my reason for being in favor of Brexit was because I think the European Union is a over-centralized, top-down institution that is preventing Europe being good at innovation. and that when David Cameron suggested some sensible reforms

and was told to get lost by Angela Merkel, I decided, well, in that case, I'm in favour of leaving. It was that sort of conversation with oneself. I've actually had that conversation with David Cameron since, and he said, look, you don't understand how tough it was for Angola to offer even the concessions she did. And I said, well, that makes me even more. determined that we were right because there was such pathetic concession.

Okay, well we can we can have a whole program Brexit. Maybe we will because I'd be interested. I have my own view of it and I'm sure you do exactly. And but but I'm intrigued by one thing before we get into viral that I want to I really want well there are two things I guess because your interest in innovation is something that obviously I'm interested in and I just want to make sure where I want to see if we're in the same side here or whether we just have a fundamentalist agreement you have obvious you hit the point there you don't like top-down government and I understand in many not just government but many scientific organizations are run by officials and not the people who actually do it which is why

I become disillusioned with scientific organizations and by the way science magazines like nature and and science and all that many of these groups but yeah I'm noting oh yeah I know I see you nodding and those who are listening should know you're nodding um although those who are watching will know but you there's some quotes from you which I want to I kind of understand but I want to see a how far you go you said government is the problem not the solution the more we limit the growth of government the better off we'll all be a kind of standard libertarian kind of argument but I suspect and I hope that you agree with me that however there are some things that only government could do in particular

related to science you agree with me there okay I mean there well let me let me get my argument is that there's some things industry I mean like bell labs wouldn't have monopoly could afford to fund curiosity different research But when there's research which is not going to have a payoff for 50 or 60 years down the road, it's hard to imagine private enterprise funding that research or having their resources, or the ability to sometimes in the modern world with big science put billions or tens of billions of dollars into that research. And the only group that really can fund those long-term things, it seems to me, is government. So I wanted to see what you thought about that.

Well, I half agree with you, but I don't think quite as much as, you know, you're hoping, or maybe fearing. I'm just interesting. And where I do agree with you is that if government is going to take 45% of my income off me one way or another through different taxes, I would like some of that money to find its way back into innovation. Because I think innovation is what really delivers benefits to humankind and as well as discovery and exciting things. And so it would be a shame if that money was lost to innovation. So the government has a duty to spend some of that on stuff that that does, you know, that needs to be done if we're to be progressing and seeing improvements in human living standards

and improvements in knowledge of the world. But I think there is quite a good case to be made. And my friend Terence Keely makes it that government spending on science crowds out other possible sources of spending on science, that quite a lot of philanthropic spending on science would step forward in the absence of government spending. And this is the point he makes, is that sound of big knowledge is like a sort of club good. If you're in the club, you get this knowledge. You know, if you're at the forefront, if you're part of the team that's making discoveries, you get bits of information that give you an insider advantage. And so even,

esoteric research of no particular value might well be funded by private industry to some degree. And after all, there's lots of, there's been tons of private funding of art and indeed science over the centuries before governments got involved. And what, you know, what people like Terence point out is that the two countries that spent least public money on science before World War II were Britain and America, whereas the two countries that spent most were France and Germany. And it's not clear that one side of that argument did better than another. But after the World War, where science became big science and the United States started spending,

it had a huge impact on the American economy, among other things. Yes, it did. But then the private sector also had a huge impact. Yes, yes. But let me, let me, I mean, you, the human genome project, which she said you loved in a sense to be a part of was something government did. And, you know, Craig Venter might have done it otherwise. Yeah, Craig Venter ambushed it. And I was very much on the other side of that argument. I mean, I was a friend of John Saldons and Jim Watson's and these people who were part of the public project. And they were horrified by Craig Venter's intervention, particularly the stuff about how he was going to patent. parts of the human genome. And rightly so, you know, that would have been, would have been outrageous. But he didn't have shake it up. You know, he came along and said, look, come on, stop wasting a time plodding through the foothills. Let's shotgun the thing and see whether we can do it quickly. And he wasn't entirely right. You know, he couldn't have done it without the public project,

but on the other hand, he did speed it up. Yeah, I think it's that need, you know. And I mean, I threw that out as kind of an easy as a softball. because I know a inventor and I know him. But there are other things like particle physics that just are just no way. There's no way that private issues. Nah, you may say, and some people do, they may say, I don't, you know, it's not worth it. I happen to think it's worth it. But, but, you know, CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, the discoveries we've made.

And I would never be funded by, by, I think, by private. You're almost certainly right. But I just wonder whether Bezos or Gates, would do it. Well, you know, I've been involved with some of them on a few things early. And, you know, and then if it's just a billion dollars here or there, which used to be a lot of money, maybe, but not, I don't know if it's 10 billion or 20 billion. And, you know, and again, I'm not a huge fan of human space exploration.

I should say that. But, but the space program, again, you know, you see Tesla. I mean, you see SpaceX doing wonderful things, but without, I think without the initial investment that NASA had done into going to orbit. And I know, Ilan must. I mean, he would agree, I think. Yeah, but then government could create the stuff and then private industry can piggyback on it

and take it to places government would never do. Correct. But then my more libertarian, I basically agree with you. I'm just disagreeing you here for the sake of it. But my more libertarian friends would say, yeah, but look at the way Goddard was funded by the Guggenheim Foundation at a very early stage,

which actually gave a surprising platform for NASA to build on blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, but then I guess you have to take Vernabon Brown into the equation. I don't know how you fit that. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I think I'm influenced also. I have to stress this because for a while I was working with a number of people, including some well-known industrial types to try and, especially, I think, was during the Bush era,

to try and encourage the government to actually spend money on science and to support fundamental research, not just applied research. And the point was that there was a big study done, and it might have been when you're in Washington, but a very important study done, that claimed that maybe up to 50% of the GNP of the United States was based on investments in one way or another, not necessarily government investments,

but investments in curiosity-driven research, and that was, again, at a time when Bell Labs could afford to do that and that sort of thing. Where I think you and I will definitely agree is that I think, certainly in the UK, and I'm pretty sure in the US too, recent research funding has become very prosaic in its demands that stuff be relevant

and will lead to technologies. And my wife's a practicing scientist, so I sort of hear some of this from her, but you know, you fill in the grant proposal and you've got to say what its impact is going to be, which, I mean, if you can say that, it's not very interesting. Exactly. That's right. I used to say I would lie. When I would write grant proposals, you'd have to say what, what you're going to be doing three years down the road. And I'd say that's always just a lie because if I know what I'm doing three years down the road, it's not kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, I'll do it now or hopefully to be, you know, if there's a new surprise coming along the way. And now and again, I completely agree with you that that we should with the science funding we have, we have, we should encourage a lot more blue sky stuff that will will have dividends sometimes, but quite often won't. And I won't spend the whole program in this because I've talked to others about it.

But it's even worse now because you now not only have to justify that it's relevance, but you have to somehow explain there's a case of a colleague of mine. I know who's a chemist who didn't get grant funding to buy a piece of instrument for a spectrometer because he had to explain how that would help diversity. And that has now become, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's that famous exchange between, I can't remember which physicist it was and a senator,

you know, about an accelerator. Oh, Robert Wilson. Yeah. Rob Wilson, exactly. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that makes the country worth defending. Yeah, exactly.

Will it help the net? I think you should see it in the same way as art, actually. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you don't say to Leonardo, come on, what use is the Mona Lisa going to be? And for me, for me, the discovery of black holes or evolution or something is in that category. It's a fantastic fruit of civilization.

It doesn't have to be the seed of something else. Yeah, I often say the unfortunate thing, although it's not unfortunate, but the unfortunate thing is that science breeds technology, because if it didn't, people wouldn't ask that question. Because exactly in music, or I use the same thing, Da Vinci or Bach, or, you know, what use is a Bachan, you know, and actually that's part of my motivation for saying,

although this annoyed some scientists, but I think wrongly so, in how innovation works, that technology often breeds science, just as often as the other way around. Yeah, absolutely. You know, vaccination led to immunology. Thermodynamics came out of the steam engine

rather than the other way around. If you look at CRISPR gene editing, it's sort of the yogurt industry played a key role before academia, really, et cetera. So I think it's a two-way street. And the linear model that you start with science and end with technology is something that almost nobody,

even going back to Vannevar Bush and people like that, they didn't, they knew it was wrong. Yeah. And yet politicians still think it's the main deal. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, and I think science is yeah, it's the ideas of science ultimately that are in some sense. So what science is all about and the technology, the relationship with technology is wonderful and fortunate and it's changed our lives and made it better. But it's, but it's not the excuse for trying to understand how the world works.

That's an amazing, amazing thing we're fortunate enough to be able to do, just like we're fortunate enough to be able to appreciate music and heart and literature. That's the prize, actually. Yeah, isn't it? You know, the other is the means to an end. Yeah, exactly. Now, last thing before we get to viral, because I have to, because I don't know if you know, I wrote a book recently called The Physics of Climate Change last year, it came out. And the purpose of it, by the way,

was actually for a libertarian friend of mine, believe we're not, because, because he had told me that, you know, he didn't want to, he, what turns people off as being, read these books telling him what they have to do. and what they have to sacrifice and this and that. And so I thought, well, if you really want to have sensual public policy, you should at least know what the issues are. And if you can't get people to listen by talking about policy, I just wanted to write a book about the science.

There's not one policy proposal. There's not one thing in there. Perfect. I'm read it. I should do. I hope you. I'd like you do it. I'll try and have it sent to you by British publisher because I'm pleased with

because it's also short. I also think science book should be short. Biography should be long, but science book should be short. But I know that at least you're portrayed in some sense as, you know, on the climate issue as as as poo-pooing concerns. And I want to just touch on that because it's an issue obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've written about climate science and climate policy as a journalist for damn near 40 years, I now realize.

because the science editor of the economist, 1987, it first started to come up as an issue. I was covering it then. I've not covered it continuously. I've not been, as it were, a beat reporter on this, but I've written about it on and off. And I've gradually become less alarmed over the decades. And I've seen the rest of the world become more alarmed. And I think they're making a mistake by being too catastrophic about it. I think I'm what's called a lukewarmer. I think it's real, it's happening. I think it's happening towards the lower end of the range that the IPCC talks about. You know, we've had roughly half the warming per decade that the first IPCC report said was the minimum we were going to get. 0.3 degrees per decade.

We've actually had 0.15 or 1.17, if you like. So I think we're making more of a mistake by exaggerating the problem than underplaying the problem. But more importantly, I think that it's resulting in us taking measures that are damaging and dangerous for people's welfare, like not allowing people to use fossil fuels in developing countries where a billion people have not got access to electric. Yeah, yeah. No, that's absolutely, yeah. I would agree with you there. That part about that developing countries need to develop.

And this is, yeah, exactly. Absolutely, I agree with that. And, you know, so, you know, it's a vast topic. Yeah. And I try not to get too stuck in it, but every, you know, it's so unfortunately, it's hard that one has to have a view on it. And if people ask me what I think, that's what I say is that I think it's an issue. We need to tackle it.

But I think we mustn't rush into premature. technologies that do more harm than good. And also there are other environmental issues that I think are more important, actually, at the moment. I think invasive species are a greater threat to biodiversity and extinction. And I think overfishing of the oceans is a bigger issue than climate change. But that does annoy people tremendously when I say that. And I don't mean to annoy either you or any listener. No, no, I don't get, I know. I'm, I think these, I think the whole point of things does not be annoyed to have discussions and try and learn and um and and and it's and even to disagree because you know i this is my main point for not censoring because sometimes you discover you're

wrong um when you learn when you hear someone who says something you disagree with and um and and you know boy am i going to be embarrassed if in my 90s in the 2050s um it uh turns out that we're living in a uh uh um roasting hell well i I don't know about roasting out, but I think my argument for, and I don't want to, this isn't, as people will remind me when they hear this, this isn't about me, but I will say that, that my, Mike, I'm completely in agreement that I really hate the catastrophic group of people who say your children are going to be dead in 10 years and that. They're just as, in my mind, they're, they're equally, almost worse than the people who, who deny it because they just don't want to hear it.

But I guess for me, because of the reason there's some urgency, and it wouldn't be otherwise, because these effects on the whole will take decades, is the fact that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. And if you don't do any, you know, if we had done something over the last decade, that would have been, that would have been basically 100 gigatons of carbon that wouldn't have been, you know, at least, or in principle, at least 50 gigatons of carbon. And every time it just becomes harder to address the problem, the longer you wait.

And for me, that's where the sense of urgency of, you know, it just becomes harder technologically and politically to address the problem if you wait another decade or two before you do anything. So we can have that discussion. Anyway, you may you want to, you can comment on if you want or not. But I had the, the counter to that, which I was writing about last week, actually,

is that if, as I increasingly think is likely, fusion is going to be a practical reality, but not before 2050, then, rushing to net zero by 2050 might be a bit premature we might be better off choosing 2070 or something like that well you know and and it's true i just tweeted for the first time that maybe the eternal statement of fusion of these 25 years in the future might might change we'll see i mean that the uk experiment that was just that you probably wrote about as is interesting and we'll see if it's here i mean you know it's what look i'm a huge fan of the research i'm still there are a lot of issues

I mean, even if we can do it, it's a highly intensive centralized investment with a lot of money. And it's a really important for human future, but it's not going to be a silver bullet that's going to solve. I agree. Although I think allowing nuclear fission to innovate, which we've effectively stopped it from doing. I agree with you completely. Is much more of a silver bullet. Oh, yeah. It's much more important. I don't think it can be 100%. I think some people say it can, but because there are a lot of issues, but yeah, I mean, you know, this notion of the fear of nuclear fission is something I've talked about a lot. So I'd interesting, we don't, I mean, I'd like to have that discussion

sometime, even privately. And I'll send you the book and you can let me know what you think about it. I look forward to reading it. Yeah. But now let's talk about your book because I think, well, I forget how I first heard of it, but but I, but I did. And it is, I was just so impressed it's it's a it's like the best detective stories but it's better because we don't know who did it and and that's what that to me that's the great thing is here you read these stories trying all the different clues and and and it's all and as a scientist I love not knowing who did it because it means there's something to learn but in this case in some sense as far as I can tell the purpose of writing it is that not knowing who did it is an issue that that is of some importance and that's

probably might have motivated why you wrote it well I'm really pleased you put it that way because that's exactly what I feel about it. I feel that the book is all the better for the fact that we don't know, we say we don't know, but we take the reader by the hand and we lead him and her down every tunnel we can find. And sometimes there's a brick wall at the end of the tunnel. And sometimes there's a great big gaping cave. And so it very much, I mean, writing it was like a detective novel.

I can tell. Do you follow this lead or not? Do you, you know, and that was. That's why it's so incredibly valuable to have a co-author, Alina Chan, because she was able to tell me not to be so stupid as to follow that lead for the following reasons. And also not to speculate. You know, she wouldn't let me speculate in the book. She said, let's stick to stuff we can be pretty sure about.

You know, if you say, so why did they do that? Let's have a paragraph on that. Nope, that's speculation. So we actually, you must have gotten a few in because there's a few, I'll get some quotes where there are. There are. You know, but how could this have been the case if they didn't know that? And so, yeah, no, I mean, you can't. It's impossible to not.

I was going to say Alina was going to be on the program, but couldn't as well. I would have been. I'm so sorry. She was unable to join. Yeah, it would have been a first for me because I've never done a podcast with sort of two people, but it would have been interesting to see your take. Well, of course, then if we'd done it, I wouldn't have focused on your you so much. So I've enjoyed this as well. Oh, well.

then it's a pity she's not here because she wouldn't know she wouldn't let me bang on about my youth I'm sure no no I think it's important she's a fantastically articulate person so yeah well maybe I don't know why I didn't work up at it yeah no no any in any case I want to go through it and and and and in the next of a while and obviously I'm not going to take the six hours that all my notes might might mean might take but but but because I have a lot but but but I want to start your interest kind of began with pieces you wrote for the Wall Street Journal April in May of 2020. Correct. And that's what led you to Lena Chen.

I mean, that's what got you interested in writing the P, the Wall Street Journal pieces in the first place? Oh, because I knew that the beginning of pandemics is always interesting. There's always an animal to human story. It didn't even cross my mind at the early stages that there might be a laboratory link. You know, I thought, so when I first, proposed to the Wall Street Journal that there should be an article about the bats behind the pandemic. It was very much saying, you know, which bats? Why? What, you know, are people eating these bats? If not, what are they eating? How are they coming into contact them? Where are they

finding them? That kind of thing. I thought there was enough, particularly because in the first weeks, there was that theory. It came from snakes. There was, then there was the Pangolin story. you know, it was a bit confused and I thought it needed sorting out. And Gary Rosen of the Wall Street Journal was kind enough to let me have a crack at sorting it out. So yeah, so I'm coming at it saying this is a big story. It's got genetics in it, but it's also got zoology in it. That's one of my things. I want to write a story about it. And then and then I think it was Alina. I mean, the key, you know, we'll talk about smoking guns, but I guess a key. potential smoking gun that makes one wonder about its origins.

And I should say the book is really about to search for the origins of, and both what happened. And also I'm happy to say the science of it as well, which is really, I think, interesting and we'll get to. But the thing that begins to make you worry, there are a few things, of course, right away, besides the Humphrey Bogart line, which we'll get to, is the fact that at least I think Alina in one of her papers,

said, you know, it looks, it's strange because it looks like this thing, this, this now what is now pandemic, which has just begun, is that this virus seems unusually well adapted for humans for the beginning of such a pandemic. And that, that was, that was sort of the first worry, and that's what got you in touch with Alina. Am I right? Correct. And it's, it's what got me to start taking the lab leak seriously. Because I, in February and March, I read the paper in the Lancet, the paper in nature medicine saying, whatever it happens, it can't possibly be a lab leak. And I thought, well, these guys are virologists, they must know what they're talking about. So, fine, I'll take that on trust.

I don't fully follow their arguments. When I've got time, I'll try and understand exactly why they're saying that, but they must be right. They must know what they're doing. And then I read this paper by Alina and two colleagues, which said the virus is surprisingly well adapted to infected human beings, affecting human beings right at the start of a pandemic. That's unusual. Normally, it's not very good at transmitting between people when it's just jumped out of an animal. And the other thing she said was it's not changing very fast. Normally, and she had this chart showing that in SARS, the first cases showed a lot of genetic variation early on as the virus essentially learns in an evolutionary sense how to infect this new host.

And that period just doesn't seem to be there. The genome of the virus was very stable in the early cases. We knew enough to know that. And at that very week, the Centers for Disease Control head in Beijing, George Gao, announced that they thought it had not started in the model. after all. They thought the market was a super spreader event. The market was a victim, as he put it, not a perpetrator. And the coincidence of those two things made me revisit my conviction that it hadn't come out of the laboratory, made me look more closely into the laboratory, and made me look more

closely at the papers which had rubbish the laboratory theory. And I found they were actually very weak in their arguments. Yeah, we'll talk about that. And so that's when I became convinced that it's an open question, not that it was definitely the lab. Sure. Still not convinced of that nearly two years later. But I did find Alina's arguments both in her papers and in her emails to me,

just helping me as a journalist, to be very perceptive, very clear and very well argued. And so I came to rely on her as a source more and more. And then I made this proposition that we write a book together. It was clearly beneficial. I think for both of you. I hope she feels it's beneficial too. I haven't had a chance to ask her, but I assume so, although maybe. I think so because I don't think either of us could have done it without the other. Yeah, I think that's, yeah. It clearly was a great collaboration. You get that sense. of the give and take when you read the book about, well, you know, Alina said this and led me to this, right?

You know, and then you can see your history as a science journalist pushing in a certain direction. The book begins with, interestingly enough, and it's important because it kind of comes back to it. And once again, you know, there's a lot of, as you say, there are a lot of red herrings, and I thought it was amusing. You said some of them are little, and some of them are huge caves,

and I thought that's metaphorical and literary, literally that as well. But it begins, in a sense, with a cave, or at least a tunnel. And because the book is really trying to look at the origins of this, as I say, historically, but also scientifically. And it begins with 2012 with six men in the hospital, Kunming, who had been cleaning out bat guano. And I think I know why, but why did you begin there? Well, what we're after is evidence of bat viruses that infect people directly. And there was an incident we now knew, although we didn't really know this at the start.

It hadn't been properly reported. There was an incident in which six people got sick while shoveling back guano in a disused copper mine, and top virologists from all over China were summoned to try and understand what was going on. And the conclusion that all of them reached, as this medical thesis reports, was that it probably was a bat virus that they had caught, which would be the first time that a SARS-like bat virus had been caught directly from a bat by a human. So it was therefore of great interest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in not only looking at this human samples, but also going to the bat cave and seeing if they could find

viruses in the bats. And to just now, two years later, Dr. Xi Jinping Li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology says she thinks the miners did not die of a virus. They died of a fungus infection. Well, maybe, but that wasn't what they thought at the time. so it's still relevant and they did find in that mine shaft we now know a number of SARS-like viruses that they took back to Wuhan which is a long way away 1800 kilometres by road and one of those turned out to be the closest relative at the time of SARS-CoV-2 the virus that was

causing the pandemic so effectively they found the closest relative in their freezer Yeah. Which is interesting. It's interesting. Let me interrupt for a second. Okay, go ahead. No, I was just going to say. And for us as sort of amateur detectives, what was particularly troubling was to find that when

they published the first genome of the virus that was infecting human beings, and they said we found another virus in our freezer, that wasn't the way they put it. said another virus has been discovered, which is called our ATG 13. And I spent a couple of days saying, right, well, where did they find it? I know, where's the first report? What does, you know, what does it look like? Who was there? You know, under what conditions was it found? And it didn't exist before this paper. And we now know the reason it didn't exist is because they had renamed it for that paper, but given no reference or link. Yeah, no. That looks awfully like an attempt. to have us not look into the background of that sample and what happened in that mine shaft and the

fact that people got sick. That might not be the reason, but there's never been any other good reason brought forward for that renaming. And it did put people off the trail for a couple of months. It took us that long to work out and to find, thanks to various internet sleuths, to find the theses that gave us all these details. So that's why we start with that story, because we're not saying that virus that killed those three people is the same as the virus that caused the pandemic. Clearly it's not. It wasn't very infectious. It's six years ago, et cetera. But it is an indication of where to look, perhaps, for where the virus may have come from, and an indication of how it might have got to Wuhan, which is the big question. We know that we need to get a virus

all the way from southern Yunnan, all the way to Wuhan. And we don't know how to do that easily. And that's what we need to solve. Yeah, no, of course, you anticipated my next few questions. Sorry. No, no, it was great. I'm glad you did. You anticipated my introduction. Because it's interesting that you'd think that this, and any person who, if this had been known, would think that that's immediately what we will go to. If in 2012, there had been this, this, outbreak and if and if there was and indeed it was sequenced and found later very early on to be a close relative you'd think that'd be the first thing people would turn to and so that incident becomes important later on in the book because it took a long time before people knew about it

instead of instead of no instead of the researchers pointing directly at what was an obvious interesting direction independent of pointing blame or anything else but you know here's a here's a a SARS-like virus that is the closest thing to the one we have you know that's infecting humans and it was causing and and there were and whether it was causing or not there were people who were seriously ill at that time boy you'd think that'd be the first thing we would have heard when when it came up but none of us heard it yeah and just to illustrate that when i wrote my piece about the bats behind the pandemic for the wall street journal um i wanted to say exactly where they'd found that virus because they denounced that virus alongside the genome of the pandemic virus. As I say, I couldn't

find the source. And so I remember, you know, I read all their papers from that institute. And I worked out that they often got viruses from a cave called the Shittu Cave. And I thought, well, that must be where they found this thing. But I can't get them to reply to emails. And I can't find any links. And so in my first draft for the Wall Street Journal, I said they've found this very similar virus in the Chitou Cave, brackets, question mark, question mark, to remind myself to go back and check if that was true. And I had to take that out because I couldn't verify it. And I thank God I did because that would have been completely false information. Yeah. But it shows that one was being misled by what was being published.

Absolutely. It's this misleading aspect that is very concerning. And I have a quote about that in a second, but you also illustrated that you eventually found out about this, as did the world, because of internet sleuths that I was, I found this one of the most fascinating stories and in a sense humbling because I realized I couldn't do what they do. And every time if someone does something, I don't think I could do, I'm always impressed. And these are some of these people self-trained took it upon themselves in their own time without pay to ultimately discover things that worked out to be true that the scientific community was either confused about or was being withheld. And there's a community of them who worked

unbelievably hard. And they're in law, except for your book, I guess they're largely unheralded. This group drastic that got together and the original person who found this medical thesis, I think named Seeker. So could you talk a little bit about those people? Because I think they're worth some time. Yeah, I think this is one of the most first aspects of this. Because to put it bluntly, Alina and I have done our best to find out what's gone on. And we've found the mainstream media, with one or two honorable exceptions, not much use. We've found the scientific establishment not much help. Most scientists are not looking into this story. We found the intelligence agencies, not much use. I mean, I had long chats with intelligence

agents in the US, and they would say to me in breathless tone stuff I knew already. as they sometimes do. That's fine. It's what you expect. But the people who over, who overdelivered, as it were, were these amateurs. And it's a very nice example of citizen science.

Absolutely. The contribution that ordinary, talented, motivated amateurs can make to scientific work. We do this. in ornithology in the UK that, you know, amateurs go out and collect data on birds. SETI is another example, isn't it?

People are helping to, etc. In principle, it's a make work project, but yeah. Yeah, fair enough. Go ahead. But in this case, it was more than that, because these guys dug out stuff, you know, actual data,

whether it was a thesis or a list of virus genomes or whatever. And I think it's worth just illustrating it with two of them. You mentioned the seeker. He's a young man in Buba, Eshwa in India, who's been a science teacher, but he's not particularly science trained. As he put it to us, I'm good at making search engines work for me. And he got hold of logins for a Chinese database that stored academic feces. And he simply searched the database for any.

thesis that related to these kinds of topics. And he found not just this medical thesis about the treatment of the men in Wuhan, but a whole bunch of other theses, including one from 2018 that gave enormous details about other viruses that they'd found, etc. So that was an extraordinary piece of work. Then there's a Spaniard called Francisco de Ribeira, who's really a technology consultant, a business consultant, very smart, very numerate, out of a job at the start of the pandemic, nothing to do. So he just starts to accumulate a spreadsheet. And what he wants to put in this spreadsheet is the name, the serial number of every virus sample that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has ever collected. And he's going to get them from published papers, but also from

genome databases, eventually also from the Chinese genome data. basis when the seeker helped him get into those. And he's going to piece together where they found each virus. And then he's going to work out what and what experiment they did with it. He calls it his big Sudoku. And it was fantastically helpful. And just to give you an idea of how good it was, he estimated that the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists had collected 1,322 different virus samples

from the Mujian site where the Bat-Guano shovelers had got infected. When six months later, an addendum to a nature paper was published, they said it was 1,322. Right. So he was out by two. And then he, I mean, he's at the moment, he's very interested in a question, which is a very simple one, which is when they actually grow a virus live in the lab, when they get one of these viruses to actually replicate in the lab, which isn't at all easy, they give it a different name. They call it WIV1, WIV2, and so on. WIV1 and WIV 16 are SARS-like viruses that they've managed to do this to, which are key parts of their experiments.

and the other ones are not SARS-like, so they're not of interest. And there's one, WIV-15, that he's been unable to find anything about at all. And he would just like to know, it might be completely irrelevant, might not even be a coronavirus for all we know. But the analogy he gives is that when he was an auditor, going through a company's accounts, If there's a series of invoices and there's a missing serial number, then ask for that. Absolutely.

Ask for the one that's not there. Ask for the dog that doesn't bark in the night. Yeah. You know, in that regard, there's sort of heroes and I don't want to put it as villains, but there are people that don't come out. I will say in advance, China doesn't come out looking very well after I read your book. I was in all. I've always been concerned about China's control of information for many reasons.

Maybe we'll get to it. But boy, they don't come out very well in the book, I have to say, even if it makes me almost sound like Trump. But there are also some scientists who don't, and in my opinion, at least, and Peter Dasick is one who seems to be one who's been involved with the scientists and the Wuhan Institute of Ruralogy, who at several times either accidentally or intentionally seem to give information that that is incorrect or distracting or obviates what would otherwise be important lines of investigation. And maybe we'll talk about him.

But I want to read this one paragraph because it really, again, when I looked at smoking guns, I wrote smoking gun when I read. So when you're talking about the coronaviruses that he had said had been left in the freezer and not known were there, they'd actually been sequenced in 2017 and 2018. And it said when a sequence was found to closely match the sequence of the virus as causing COVID-19, the Wuhan scientists published it under a new name and failed to cite their own paper detailing its discovery or to reveal that they have been studying the virus over the past few years or to mention that it had come from a mind where there had been a fatal outbreak of pneumonia. I mean, that's when you read that.

It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And I don't know whether you want to talk about Peter Dazek at all in terms of the throughout this. He's someone who's been involved in trying to understand viruses and catalog them and involved in a program we'll maybe talk about called Predict, which some scientists thought was useless and he didn't. And he's clearly been very good at getting funds. And he was not only involved with the key scientists at when it's a virology,

but then was later, I believe, on the WHO committee that was the first one to try and examine the sources of it. And it's at least it appears that when you read it, that there's a lot of obfuscation occurring when he's, question and as as as as as we'll get to he led to he he led the creation of that famous letter to science that said it's not a lab leak and so i don't want to answer it actually but yeah yeah yeah um well just i mean to start so right at the end um he was quoted in in a article in um mity technology review this week as saying that um uh he wished people would give him a chance to respond to accusations. But we sent him something like 15 summaries of what we were going to say about him in our book and gave him several weeks to get back to us and tell us if he wanted

anything changed and we got no response at all. So it's not as if we haven't been trying to get his side of each story, he just won't give it to us. And if you take that Lancet letter, it appeared in February 2020 and it said it could rule out a lab-based scenario for the origin of the virus. His name appeared in alphabetical order. It had the statement, we have no conflicts of interest. He'd been working very closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for many years. years and had funneled funds from the US government to them for their research. And he had actually orchestrated that letter. He had written to a bunch of scientists on the 6th of February 2020 saying, I think we should

send a letter to the Lancet, exonerating the laboratory. And here's a draft. Would you all please agree to sign it? And he didn't, that came out later because of emails. leaks. The Lancet eventually had to put a statement on saying, well, sorry, there are conflicts of interest here. We should have mentioned them. Many pages, of course. Yeah, they go on from about two pages. So, and then worse, in August, September 2021, thanks to drastic, a document came into the public domain, which was a grant application by Peter Dazzak with Xi Zhang Li as a co-applicant,

requesting $14 million from DARPA part of the Department of Defense to do a series of studies on SARS-like viruses in Wuhan. And it included an unbelievably crucial piece of information, which was that they would like to insert a fearing cleavage site, which is this little bit of genetic technology. We'll come back to that. Yeah, we're going to come back to that. To a SARS-like virus.

And just, you know, this is nearly two years after the start of the pandemic, and he hasn't told us this useful piece of information that they had applied to do this experiment. it does seem as if we aren't being given the information that we would need to solve this puzzle. Now, if the lab is innocent and Peter Dazzac's work did not contribute to the start of this pandemic, then they ought to be rushing into the public domain with everything and anything they've got because it would show that they couldn't possibly have done this, instead of which information has to be got out by leaks and freedom of information requests and so on.

And you can see how painful it is for someone like Peter Dasak. He's devoted his career to tracking down wild viruses that might cause pandemics. And the purpose of that research was to predict and prevent the next pandemic. It failed in that sense. They weren't able to predict and prevent this one. and he's now possibly standing accused of worse than failure of having started one by mistake. And that, you know, is something that cognitively, it must be very, very painful to confront. Yeah, I think that's the point I want to jump in, both for your sake and my sake.

No one, neither you nor I would be suggesting any malicious intent here. It's just, you know, and it's very easy to understand how someone who may firmly be convinced and has every reason and is for many reasons he may know and don't know he knows much more about the situation than you and I at this point in terms of what actually happened but be convinced that there is no possibility that's a lab leak and may and may feel therefore that these efforts are just an intrusion and a distraction for what's being done so the so it may have every good reason to say I don't want to waste time with these people who I who are down the wrong track but you're right there are a lot of there are a lot of issues that so you can understand the psychology

i think that's important without without without arguing that there's some intent to uh completely agree with that but you know back in march and april of 2020 i was not someone who was trying to get beat at azac into trouble i was someone who was trying to find out the story over the subsequent two years i've become someone who will find it very hard now to believe that he's telling me the whole truth about something until I can verify it for certain. Absolutely. Well, in the whole, that's not a bad policy anyway. But let me throw in here, because there's someone whose name appears once here and one hears a lot about it, in terms of funneling American money to Wuhan, Anthony Fauci, because, you know,

when here is these, you know, Anthony Fauci is loved and hated in the United States at the same time, and maybe around the world as far as I know. You don't talk about much about it, but some people are saying that he was funding, you know, the research that, so the money that, was it true that the money that was going to be funneled to Wuhan came from the organization, Anthony Fauci leads, right? I assume.

Yes, a lot of it did. The money that went from the US taxpayer to fund research in Wuhan, some of it went through the Pentagon, some of it went through US AID, and some of it went through the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is the organization that Anthony Fauci heads. A lot of it, a lot of the money will, of course, have come from the Chinese Academy of Sciences

and other Chinese government sources. So it's not as if Fauci is the main funder of research in Wuhan. I would never allege that. And in that sense, for that reason, Alina and I are a bit reliant. to make too much out of the role of Anthony Fauci, because we think these experiments would have happened with or without the US funding. We also think he's probably right

when he insists that no experiments were done that intended to increase the infectivity of viruses in Wuhan, even though we now know that experiments did dramatically increase the infectivity of viruses. another subject we'll get to. So and that question of intent versus whether it happens is a sort of semantic one that ran Paul and Anthony Fauci can argue about. And I particularly don't want to get terribly into that because I'm not an American. It's not my government.

He's not my government's medical advisor. Rand Paul is not my senator, you know what I mean? I don't have a dog in that hunt, as it were. And we mustn't get to the point where we take the pressure off the Chinese scientists by making it into too much of a US political story. I agree. But that said, I do think there are serious questions to answer about the degree to which explicitly or not, Anthony Fauci discouraged anyone from investigating the lab leak properly,

partly because he knew that some funding had gone there and it wouldn't look good. Now, I'm not saying that to sort of, as I said, consciously or unconsciously. I'm talking about human nature. Yeah, sure, sure. May have felt, well, that's one, once again, if you're convinced it was a relevant, you don't want to distract people by focusing on it. So there can be, you know, the intent can be very good on everyone's parts. But there, but, you know, so more Fawtzac than Fauci,

certainly if you were a reader comes out of this, well, with the impression I just gave you and, and I think it's accurate. Yes, I think that's fair. Okay, I want to, before we get on, and we'll talk about everything from Fioran cleavage to to gain a function, because I think those are important issues. I do, I want to go, you, I love the part where you, especially for someone like me, you talk about the science of viruses and bacteria and discovery of viruses,

which all these things are fascinating to me. I've been lately thinking about the origins of life for other reasons. And so you want to explain the difference between, I'm coming back in focus there I am about a virus versus the bacteria. Yes, I mean, basically a bacterium is a very small creature, but a self-sufficient living. creature. A virus is not. It's just a bunch of rogue genes pitched up in such a way that they can take over the machinery of another cell, whether it's a human cell or an animal cell or a bacterium cell, and commandeer its machinery to make more copies of the virus. So it really is a digital thing when we talk about computer viruses, and I think Richard Dawkins was the first person to really talk about them actually in some ways in the selfish gene.

Then it's a surprisingly accurate metaphor. They are both just digital devices for copying themselves. And viruses are therefore much smaller than bacteria. The way I put it is if a malaria parasite is a dog, then a bacterium is a No, you know, is a cat and a bacterium is a mouse and a virus is a flea. You know, that's very roughly the sort of scale. It was useful for me. I would use that analogy was used for me.

But of course, the point is that you can't attack the machinery of a virus because it doesn't have a machinery. That's why it's so difficult to develop antiviral drugs. The antiviral drugs we do have attack our own machinery, which the virus is using, but they do it in such a way that they don't quite kill us, but they kill the virus. It's amazing to me. I'm in awe of what modern biology can do in many ways. But that's a useful analogy. I wanted to ask you, well, and it's peripheral, but it's an interesting scientific question to me. So would you say a virus is alive? Yeah, this is a very good question. The general answer that pretty well everybody gives is you can't, a virus is not alive because it can't replicate itself independently. I don't like that. I'd prefer to

say it is alive. It's obviously a derivative of life. It's a part of life. It does replicate itself, albeit with the help of others. I think it's just a highly refined parasite. Yeah, yeah, it seems to me it just replicates when it has a symbiotic relationship. I mean, maybe symbiotic isn't the right way to put it, but when it uses something else. But in that regard also, I'm, but the genome of viruses is RNA based, right? Not DNA based. Well, that's not true. some of them are DNA based and some of them are RNA-based. The coronavirus is... The viruses. Yeah.

The coronavirus is... The coronavirus is RNA. Yeah. Now, yeah, no, so that's... Oh, good. I'm glad I didn't know it was that some of them were DNA-based too. So the coronavirus is RNA-based, and that leads me to ask another peripheral question I'm just interested in.

In terms of thinking about the origins of life, many people talk about an RNA world as as proceeding in DNA world because for a variety of reasons, it's DNA is very... it would be natural to imagine a process by which RNA preceded DNA. And since viruses have their genome, or some of them have their genome based on RNA, is there any possibility or has anyone talked about the fact of viruses being, you know, before our care, I mean, being precursors to living systems? Yes. People do talk about that.

I don't find it very convincing because I can't see who they were parasitizing, as it were. They'd have needed someone else to do their replicating in or with. So I think it's more likely that they are derived, that they are essentially the genes of bacteria and of animals that have gone rogue and have turned into parasites. But I think there's quite a good argument. I haven't looked at it recently to say that that's true of most of them, but there are some that may be derived directly from extinct life forms that precede our care

and that were self-sufficient but no longer are they now parasites. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, of course I do. I can't quite think what the evidence for that would be. But I should have another look at it. I don't know enough to know the evidence. I'm looking at this. Actually, you know, if you don't do it, I should write a book about.

that next well we can maybe do one together but but i'd have to learn a lot but um but yeah but i mean it hit me though and i thought wow an rn you know when people talk about an rna world and here's something with an RNA genome it well that is certainly intriguing isn't it that quite a lot of viruses have RNA genes yeah yeah that's worth thinking about we'll talk about it but anyway um but by the way RNA is less stable than dna yes of course it's it's tough to maintain a large RNA genome, 30,000 base pairs, which is the coronavirus genome, is about as big as you can get without having real problems, keeping it from collapsing into too much mutation. Yeah, no, in fact, that's what I'd always heard. I didn't know the reasons why, but I had

always heard that RNA was much less stable than DNA and that was a problem. But, and it's largely because it can't do those knee double helixes that stabilize it. Exactly. Okay. That's that simple. That's almost a physics answer. I like that one. I hope it's true. It might not be. Anyway, it works for me. Okay, there's another thing that you mentioned, and it's somewhat of an aside, but I want to ask you because it's relevant now with Omicron, which wasn't around when you wrote the book,

or at least it wasn't known as being around. Maybe it was. But you talk about Paul Ewald and his, a very interesting question about which, whether, deadly or milder virus is spread better. And you say Ewald argued that the motor transition indicates a trade-off between virulence and contagion, which is clearly true. You don't want to kill everyone immediately. Otherwise you can't get propagated. Yes, but that's true for some modes of transmission and not others. Exactly. And you say diseases spread by direct contact and which cannot survive for long outside the body will evolve to be low in virulence so that the

infected person remains active as possible, interacting with a large number of people. When I read that, I mean, that's something I kind of knew, but it suddenly hit me that, does that enact, is therefore in some sense, Omicron an example of what you might have naturally have expected this virus to do, which is to become more contagious, but less virulent? Exactly that. And I'm in a minority here. Most virologists and epidemiologists say, this is nonsense. There's no evidence that diseases evolved to become more mild. Look at smallpox. That didn't do. So look at polio or whatever. And I say, but you're forgetting about the mode of transmission. Paul Ewald has this very, very crucial point. If you're spread by coughs and sneezes,

it's quite different from if you're spread by insects, where actually you want the guy lying delirious in the darkened room, not noticing the mosquitoes before he dies. because the mosquitoes are going to do the spreading. And so I can't claim that this is definite scientific certainty, but I think Paul Ewald has made a very, very good point. There are 200 or so kinds of virus that cause the common cold, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, coronaviruses, mainly. And none of them kill you.

Well, sorry, most of them don't kill you. Yeah. They'll kill most people. Let me put that one. Don't kill most people, exactly. And that can't be a coincidence. You know, it does look like respiratory viruses don't stay lethal for long. Now, one thing that worries me about lockdown, and this is a point that lockdown skeptics on the whole don't make, so it's a different one, is that it might have prevented the emergence of milder variance taking over.

Why? Because in the first lockdown in particular, if you had a mild case you were told to stay at home. If you had a severe case, you were told to go to the hospital where you infected healthcare workers who then passed it on to other people who took it to care homes and so on. So we were actually encouraging the nasty versions of the virus to spread more than we were encouraging the mild ones to spread. That's my worry. And I think it was only therefore once we sort of started opening up a bit that we could get Omicron evolving and coming along. But other people say, well, the mildness of Omicron is all to do with the fact that we're boosted and injected. And that's certainly partly true. But, you know, the Australian, the South African doctor who first discovered and characterized Omicron was insistent from the start that this is a milder.

the virus and she was she was actually chastised for saying so um which is quite shocking actually you know the truth is what it matters here yeah yeah so i want to get omicrom before my booster fades actually i've not had either i've not done any any version of it yet oh really i think i don't want to wait another year and then you know my booster will have faded and then omicron might hit me quite badly you know so we'll see well you could get you could yeah you could do you i'm sure there ways you could get omicron i i should it's a full disclosure point out that i have the i i i Not like, I have a lot of, a number of friends and my daughter and stepdaughter both got the Omicron, but I got the good old Alpha or whatever it was.

I had, I had it early on. You're a match, you, man. And then, and then I had, I mean, I've had the booster. I've had all three. So I kind of, anyway, but I haven't caught, I did risk getting Omicron because I went to Arizona a few weeks ago, but didn't get it. But I have had friends who had it after the others as well. If, if I knew that friend A had Delta and friend B had Omicron,

I would see friend B, but I wouldn't see friend A. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can understand that in any case. Okay. I want to go back now. I think those are interesting questions, and a lot of them are open questions, but again, my first suspicion, similar to yours, when I saw Omercron, was, hey, this is great. This is great news.

Instead of being, you know, the press at the time was, oh, my God, there's this new one. And I was really, you know, I understand. It's important. But I'm, of course, it's also easier to sell papers and get clicks, if you make people afraid, but which unfortunately is a large part of things nowadays. But, but yeah, so anyway, I'm in favor of in some ways, well, I'm not in favor of people getting any anything. But if Omicron can effectively take over, it's a good thing for the world, I think, personally. Since it's here to stay as far as I can tell. Okay, but the the you then spent time and and there's another group of not quite unheralded people, but but this effort, the whistleblowers in Wuhan and the people who really tried to get information out, man, in spite of an incredible crackdowns and and again, it doesn't look good. I think you say this somewhere else. It does it. It just you can't infer things, but it doesn't look good when the government says, yes, you have this.

information, but you can't give it out. And that happened a lot in China as the whole thing began to be involved. And you have, one thing intrigued me was Zhang, this in Dr. Zhang, who, who in January 5th, and again, it amazes me within like two days after getting it sequenced the full genome. But then that was supposed to be sequestered or whatever the word is or or that in bargode. Embargoed. Yeah. He sent it to and did a nature paper until July 12th.

And if it hadn't been for various whistleblowers, it might have been embargoed. That doesn't, that amazed me that January 5th they had it. And obviously it's useful for the world. And you make the point that China didn't want it, probably didn't want it going out because they wanted to, it was, it was, I don't know whether you'd say capitalism at work, but they wanted to, they wanted to be able to have their own.

people develop test kits that would make a lot of money. And that's an awful thing if true. And then it's, yeah, I think it's important, though, to put it in the context of the time. I don't think in January, you know, early January of 2020, anyone realizes that we're talking about a global pandemic. You know, they're expecting a little local difficulty in China, which will take a month or two to get under control. And therefore, you know, they've kind of in that crony capitalist way that China has, they've handed the rights to develop the test to some company. And that's important to allow it to protect that.

And he's a friend of the party boss or whatever. That kind of thing is going on, I'm sure. But I think a lot of the early stuff needs to be seen in the, You know, telling that ophthalmologist that he shouldn't be talking about this virus, punishing people for taking precautions and things like that, urging the World Health Organization to say it's not transmissible between humans, demanding that they don't declare an emergency. These things need to be seen in the context of nobody yet.

expecting it to turn into a global issue and they're not therefore expecting westerners to pour over their decisions two years later yeah otherwise i think they might have behaved a little differently but i think it's a useful lesson that the danger of restricting it when you don't know that it's always better for science to give out the information if you don't know and and any time you're exactly information it's and it's not as if china had behaved properly over saus yeah they got a you know grow hall and bruntland the head of the world health organization tore a strip off the Chinese government in 2003. It said, don't you ever do this again? When one of these wings breaks out, you tell us, you tell us everything you know and you don't

let us find out the hard way. But that's what happens. And that's what happened. Yeah. And in fact, but it also doesn't, you know, I'm not a big fan of nature or science now. And I publish in both, to be honest in the past. But it doesn't reflect well on them. I mean, the fact that they had, they had a submission with the sequence. And again, because of probably publication issues, did not make a point of letting people know they had it either. Yes. It's a question of, when you submit a paper to nature about a new virus,

and you say you've sequenced the genome, you have to deposit that genome, not with nature, but with one of the international genome database. And it was the deposit in the genome database that was embargoed till the following July. Until Dr. Ed Holmes in Australia stepped in and persuaded Dr. Zhang to send it to a blog site, actually, so that it could be published. So, yeah, it ended up wasting only a week. But it could have been longer. It could have been longer and that, you know, as soon as it was available in the West,

Moderna starts work on its messenger RNA vaccine and within a day. So, you know, every day does count at that stage. And it wasn't right for Nature magazine to be part of a publishing of a paper that did not insist that this was made available immediately. just as it was not right for nature to publish that paper without letting them say where they'd found that other bat virus that we talked about earlier. Yeah. Yeah. So nature has some very serious questions to answer here. I don't think they have behaved well.

And you have to remember that the model of publishing that they have is a significant Chinese investment in exchange for waiving the fees of Chinese scientists who publish in nature, at least to some. extent. I don't know quite how far it goes. So there is a conflict of interest that needs to be looked at in the scientific publishing world, in my view. I don't want to be unfair to anyone, but I think it's not unreasonable to ask how that might affect the way people talk about things. Yeah, no, I think it's right. Well, I'm in a, I'm happy to say in physics, which spearheaded this, the archive, that, you know, used to be, we on journals, or at least a lot of people around the world dependent on journals for information, a lot of scientists. And that hurt people in the third world because they wouldn't

get preprints from, you know, when I was at Harvard that we'd send out our preprints to a few select papers groups of people who'd have the, who'd have access to our papers well before they're published. And now, in the physics world, basically you submit to an archive and the, the journals are just for archival purposes. But the, but where you go to look for the new research is not in a journal, but it's all there the day the paper comes out, whether well before it's been published or even accepted. That's very interesting. Yeah. In any case, I want to, there's so many things I can do, but I want to jump ahead because

I don't want to spend 10 hours on this, but what is intriguing is the red herrings, the seafood market, which is essentially the more one learns about it. You know, as an outsider, I'll I think it's important. I try to step back. And as an outsider, there are two things that, that, um, hit me right away. One was the question that everyone still, you know, still ask some sense, why Wuhan? I mean, you know, it is interesting that, you know, it occurred to me, oh, it's unfortunate that occurred in the same place that they have a major institute of virology, but it is interesting. And, and I thought, oh, poor, bad luck. And then, but then the seafood market, and everyone was told right away, the seafood market. It's the seafood market. And then, and then,

that was promoted as by a variety of scientific groups as the origin of this, as the likely still is being. And as far as I know, there's zero evidence of that, right? In fact, negative evidence in the sense that there's no way. Let me put it this way. There's never been a sample. There was never a sample from the market taken with any, any virus, any SARS virus, right? Is that right?

No, well, that's not quite right because there was no food sample or animal sample from the market that had the virus in it. There were signs of the virus on what they call environmental samples, which is door tops, I mean, doorknobs, countertops, sewage and things like that. But they look like the human virus. They don't look like, as it were, a 99% cousin that might have been in an animal. So yeah, no, they expected to find, as they had found in the case of SARS, mainly in civet cats, infected animals, infected people, people with antibodies who had shown signs of previous infection, all these things were missing. And there wasn't, there weren't that many animal stalls in the market, it was only about 10. and there was no association of those environmental samples with those 10 stalls. Now, since then, a very important paper has emerged, which we do talk about in the book,

which was held up in peer review for a ridiculously long time, which it basically describes a coincidental sampling of how much wildlife trade there was in that and other Wuhan markets up until 2019. And it finds that there were live mammals for sale in that market, which the World Health Organization was told that weren't. So it's clear that in sampling the market, the Chinese scientists missed something, didn't find all the animals that were for sale.

And it's possible that one of those was infected. But, you know, we still don't know that for sure. And as you say, there is no direct evidence implicating the market. Some of the early cases were associated with the market. There was a big row about a month ago, about a couple of months ago, about the difference between a case on the 8th of December and a 10th of December. And the 8th of December guy had, he was an accountant, he had no connection with the Rwana and seafood market. But Dr. Michael Warreby then said, hang on.

He didn't go to hospital for pneumonia that day. He went for a dental problem. And that turned out not to be right. It was his son who went for the dental problem, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, if he didn't get it for another few days, then the first case is indeed the 10th of December. And that was a shrimp seller in the market. But shrimp sellers don't sell, you know, civet cats and bamboo rats.

Shrimp is a rule. Shrimp, the word is in the, you know, and there's no way this. is a shrimp virus. So it doesn't really help us. And anyway, nobody thinks 8th or 10th of December is the first case. Everybody thinks there will have been cases earlier. And in fact, the Chinese have got evidence of cases going back to the 17th of November. So without good information on the index cases, we can't be sure how strong the association of the market is. And it looks like the market was a super spreader event where, you know, the shrimp seller gave it to a bunch of people.

They gave it to other people. In fact, what I meant by negative evidence, and I think you sort of say this indirectly, and I think Alina did in their paper that the fact there was no evidence in the market, except for the fact that there might be environmental evidence and might suggest that it came from humans. And it was already well adapted to humans at that point, which you might think might be a smoking gun that that it came from humans. I think pretty well everybody. thinks that even if someone brought it to the market themselves in an animal or in themselves,

that it had already been spreading a bit by then somewhere, whether it's in a lab or in a market, a different market or somewhere else. The market is not the very, very origin of it. It's an early amplifier of it, not pretty well everybody, but a lot of people think that. Okay, and then I don't want to spend a lot of time, but you talk about the pangolin papers, a lot of papers on pangolins. And you make this statement, and some of us who might have been following, but hear about the potential, and I didn't even know what a pangolin was before I read your book. But that, and your point was that I think that there are a lot of papers and claiming that there are SARS like viruses and pangolins. And I think your point there is that that was another red herring because it gives the impression, because people didn't reference things properly, it makes it look like it's much more prevalent in pangolins than it is. I think you say, because the world received the impression that the SARS coronavirus infection in pangolins is a common phenomenon, which makes the event of a human catching the virus from pangolins more probable.

And the point is that that was just not the case, that people were overreporting or selecting the rare cases. rather than the average cases. Yeah, yeah. Well, as far as we can tell, there's only a handful of pangolins infected. They all came from one intercepted, smuggled batch. They didn't have a 99% similar virus, as was announced in the first press conference.

They had a 90%. Well, that's nothing like close enough to explain it. And there were no pangolines for sale in Wuhan. of that were pretty short because that study of illegal wildlife sales that was going on was looking at all illegal animals and they never found a pangolin. So and Alina found that the papers that were rushed out after that press conference, four different papers all pointing at the pangolines, had all sorts of methodological and other issues with them that really meant they needed

to be heavily corrected. And they have been, you know, some lengthy. corrections have been printed to those papers, thanks to her work. So pangolins are a red herring. We're pretty certain of that. Mind you, it's curious how a panglin did pick up a SARS-like coronavirus of some kind while being smuggled in southern China. They picked up a bunch of other viruses. They're very vulnerable in captivity to getting viruses, it seems. But quite where they got them from, we don't know. Yeah, no, it's, yeah. Again, an interesting question. But if you want to to do the science right you've got to do the science right um and okay now i i i want to i

want to move on to some interesting questions relating to lab leak gain the function i i did want to mention i did i found this pretty i wanted to talk a little about about predict and and um and this large scale project which is really i mean on the surface it sounds interesting and potentially useful, which is the idea was, and this is where Peter Dazak was involved and got a lot of money to do, was to basically look at as many viruses as could be taken from the nature and explore them and try in some sense by cataloging them and maybe understanding and maybe enhancing their function, but cataloging them initially to try and understand what might be the biggest threat to humans.

And at the same time, it was rather interesting that there were a lot of scientists who are saying, that's useless because it won't give you any useful information. You know, you won't be able to predict anything. So do you want to talk about that for a few minutes? Yeah, no, it's a very interesting debate. I mean, right up until 2018, you're having, you're seeing these arguments in the scientific literature between two sides of an argument, one saying, look, you know, this is the most important thing we can do to prevent the next pandemics, to go out there, sample all the viruses in the world,

It was originally called Predict. The daughter is now called the Global Varum Project. And to get a catalogue of every virus with pandemic potential in a bat in southern China, but also elsewhere in the world and in other animal species, with the idea that we can sort of rank them and say this one's potentially dangerous because it does seem to be able to infect human cells in the lab. this one isn't dangerous and therefore let's try and eventually develop a vaccine against the ones that might cause pandemic so that we're ready for it when it comes and other scientists respond by saying you know good

virologists say I don't think this is a good use of money at all I think what you should be doing is having good surveillance in rural areas where people come into contact with wildlife so you can pick up a virus very early when it's starting to infect human beings. And then you can characterize it very quickly as we can now and start to develop strategies for preventing it turning into a pandemic. In other words, you know, stop looking for potential fires, but look very carefully for real fires. Yeah, exactly.

For a small real fire. You get this big disagreement and you get Peter Dasak in particular sort of furiously saying, no, no, you don't understand. We're doing incredible work and it's very exciting. And to some extent, I think they got carried away with the doing incredible work, you know, that they were, and they were doing spectacular work, you know, the fact that you could not just sequence these viruses, you could then manipulate the sequences, you could insert parts of the spike gene of one that you couldn't grow into one that you could grow and that way you could test how dangerous it spike was without actually growing it. You know,

these were clever techniques. But they got a bit carried away. with them without really thinking whether there was any chance they would prevent a pandemic. And, you know, the so-called diffuse proposal to DARPA is a pretty extreme example of this. I mean, you know, they're talking about developing an app on a phone for soldiers fighting in wars so that they know when they're in an area with a dangerous virus in it. Yeah. Or they're talking about spraying a vaccine into a cave to immunise bats against a virus. you know yeah these are pretty far-fetched ways of spending taxpayers money frankly if you've ever seen

darper proposals they're off i was one i was once involved okay in in evaluating them um they're a lot wilder ones because that's the whole point they they're you know they basically say here's a for us it's nothing 40 million dollars in defense budget is nothing that's just you know let any person come up with any crazy idea because maybe one of the crazy ideas is useful but it's but they're yeah that's darper's job because Right, right. Yeah. And boy, yeah. When it came to physics ones, there were some wild ones. The one of the things you point out, because we're now, I want to now sort of go through the things which more or less than on my mind all give kind of smoking guns about the potential of a lab leak. But you make a really important point that is that there is a big difference between this SARS outbreak and other lab leaks.

And so if you're, if it's worthwhile stepping back and saying there have been lab leak. of viruses and there are differences here. So maybe you want to go, to be fair, you want to go through them. Yeah. Most lab leaks have not resulted in epidemics. The one exception that we know about is the 1977 flu epidemic that went around the world, which we were pretty sure came from a failed vaccine, I mean, a full, vaccine, not quite a killed vaccine, but other ones tend to cause local outbreaks and tend to

beat her out. So in the case of SARS, after the epidemic was over, and so there's no SARS circulating in human population, and therefore you can tell when it breaks out in a lab that it's come from the lab and not from the community. We know of probably six. cases, one in Singapore, one in Taiwan and four in Beijing, where people got infected. And we don't actually know how they got infected in all but one of those. All we know is that someone working on SARS in a lab ended up catching SARS. They didn't drop a flask or punctual their gloves or whatever. So these kind of lab leaks do happen on quite a significant.

scale because there's so many labs working on dangerous viruses and other pathogens around the world. But they don't generally lead to pandemics. And that is the big difference. If this was a lab leak, it has led to a global pandemic. And that would be pretty well a first, apart from that 1977 case. Okay. Well, let's talk about some of the things that are of concern. So some of which I'd heard of in reading and I learned a lot more about it in your book. But the first thing, which, again, if you're standing back, sounds like a crazy thing, but I think it's worth pointing out why people do it. And that's this gain of function research.

The idea is you want to take something that isn't particularly dangerous and make it something that is pretty effective at infecting humans. And you might say, why on earth would you want to do that? And the important thing was, the question was, was that research being done? And as you pointed out, there was at least, well, there was that research being done, not necessarily on SARS viruses, but there was that proposal to do that very thing in some sense. And so. Well, no, it's it's not quite that. I mean, the experiments that Ben Hu and his colleagues did, part of which they published in 2017, but we later had leaked documents showing more details of that series of experiments did include experiments in which they took the part of the spike gene of a. newly discovered virus, inserted it into a virus that they could grow in the lab, a live virus, WIV1 or WIV16, they were called.

So you're swapping the key part of the genome of this newly discovered virus into one that you can grow. And you're then challenging human cells derived from human airways in the lab or humanized mice with this virus. That's to say a mouse with a human gene in it. And the effect was, in some cases, up to 10,000 times greater transmissibility of the virus, and in other cases, up to three or four times greater lethality to the mouse. So these were significant gains of function. In other words, the experiment made WIV1 or WIV 16 into a more dangerous virus because it had been given a different spike gene that was more dangerous.

So there's no question that those are, gain of function experiments. Now, the purpose of them was to say, how dangerous is this spike gene that we've just discovered? Is it very dangerous or not at all dangerous? And the experiment answers that question. And if you go back to the very first gain of function experiments that set off the whole debate about this topic about 10 years ago, it involves influenza viruses that are infecting birds. And the question is, can this virus be altered so that it infects mammals? Can we mutate it, give it to a ferret, and then have that ferret infect another ferret the other side of the room? And the answer in both of those experiments, which basically did that

similar experiment, was that yes, it could, to which a lot of other scientists ran up the alarm bells and said, hang on, should you really be changing a bird virus into a mammal virus so that it's more likely to infect human beings, even under various careful and strict conditions. And that's, you know, there was a big argument about that. Dr. Fauci said, yes, you should. It's important we understand these things. And others saying, no, you're looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the point. I mean, for the, again, I don't want to use the word late person, but so when you first hear about it, you say, gee, that's crazy. But then you realize, hey, there, there are rational reasons for trying to to understand in advance how dangerous something will be. So at least, I mean, I think when the reason I want to stress this is when people hear about gain of function, I think the first thing they think about is weaponizing. Yes.

And it's really important to realize that that's not the purpose behind it. No. Now, we don't think that anyone that we've, any experiment that we've come across in Wuhan was done with the intention of making something more dangerous. so that it could be used as a bioweapon. We've seen no evidence for that, and we think they'd be very unlikely to do that in a civilian lab, in the middle of a city, and all that kind of thing.

Exactly, and I wanted to stress that because when you talk about gain of function, the natural thing some people are going to jump at is, hey, they're weaponizing. And of course, you hear that, and it's important to discount that, I think, as much as to say, yes, at the same time, A, there were scientists who questioned it, and B, this kind of thing was being done,

So maybe, you know, if you had a virus that wasn't so effective in humans and you were doing some gain of functionary sperm, and somehow there was a leak, it might not be so surprising that it could come from that facility. That's what I call, I guess it clearly makes it a smoking gun. The next smoking gun was one I read of independently, I think because it's involved even then for the bullet in the atomic scientists, which had published an article on it. But I and it came I mean the first I I I knew David Baltimore and when I heard about this furin cleavage site which I had no idea what furin or cleavage or site was at the time but but but that's a problem and I think it's worth discussing it it's a technical issue but I think it's very interesting anyway it's a very interesting bit of science and it's important to realize it well so when I think it was I do think it was the fact that David Baltimore raised this at least

in an article that someone was reporting on that caused a lot of people to stand up and take notice and say, for me, it was the first time I began to think, hey, maybe there's a lab leak. So why don't, why don't you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, well, you're right. David Baltimore is an extraordinarily talented scientist and he doesn't throw out speculations lightly. A fearing cleavage site is a feature in a virus genome in the middle of a spike gene that enables the virus to get its protein reshaped using an enzyme that's already in lots of human cells called furein. And this makes, this primes the virus to be more infectious. And SARS-CoV-2 has a furoin cleavage site in it, as do other viruses. And this is why SARS-Co-V-2 can mount a pandemic,

because it makes it much more transmissible. It can infect many more tissues in the body, and it can spread much more easily. So the fact that this virus has a fearing cleavage site is interesting. It's particularly interesting because no SARS-like virus has ever been found with one. Other coronaviruses have one, but they are pretty distant relatives. You know, I mean, they're like sort of, you know, antelopes are to horses. You know, there's an analogy here, which I'm working towards, which is Alinas, which is that the fearing cleavage site is like. like a horn on a horse. It's the fact that there are horns on antelopes doesn't tell you very much.

Finding a horn on a horse is very unusual. A horn on a horse is about as rare as a fearing cleavage site in a SARS-like virus, right? And we'll come back to unicorns in a bit. Yeah, okay. But when you know that putting horns on horses, putting fearing cleavage sites into viruses, was a frequent experiment done, as far as we can count at least 11 times around the world in the last 10 years, in order to make them easier to grow in the laboratory.

And often these experiments weren't done with whole viruses. They were done with parts of viruses or with so-called pseudoviruses that can't replicate, etc. So they were totally safe experiments. But sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they used whole viruses. that did happen it happened with a two coronaviruses in Wuhan that we know of one was a a collaboration between Wuhan and Rotterdam or Utrecht I can't remember which in the Netherlands

to put a fearing cleavage site into a pig coronavirus and the other other was at the Wuhan Institute of virology and it was to put a fearing cleavage site into a pig coronavirus and the other was to put a interfering cleavage site into a MERS-like virus. MERS being Middle East respiratory syndrome, a particularly lethal coronavirus. Not a sensible experiment to be doing, in our view, at all, because it's a very dangerous virus. You don't want to make it more dangerous.

It wasn't MERS they were working on. It was a MERS-like virus to see whether, if you made it more like MERS, it would be infectious. And then we find, and not until the later, to 2021, that there was actually a plan to put one into a SARS-like coronavirus and that Wuhan Institute of Arrology was part of that plan, although it's hard to tell from the application whether the experiment was going to be done in North Carolina or Wuhan. But, you know,

the point is they were contemplating putting a unicorn on a horse. Yeah. And a unicorn, sorry, a horn on a horse. and a unicorn has turned up in Wuhan. Yeah, exactly. Now, there's one other aspect of this, which I think is the thing that intrigued Baltimore. It's not just at the Fioran cleavis site. It said it was CGG. Yes.

The point being that there are different ways that RNA, RNA three sets of letters are used to code to produce amino acids. And there's redundancy, so different sets of letters, will produce the same amino acids. But CGG, which is repeated twice in this spheroine-cleavage site, as I think Baltimore pointed out, is something you see from human, well, why don't you say it?

You'll say it more. If you want to specify arginine, which is one of the amino acids in a protein sequence, then there are several codes you can use. I can't remember codons. I can't remember whether it's four or six, but I think it's six, actually. And one of them is CGG, but viruses very, very rarely use CG for arginine.

They use one of the other codons for some reason. And nowhere in SARS-CoV-2's genome where it wants to do arginine, does it use CGG? Human cells, on the other hand, do use CGG very often. It's the commonest of the codons for arginine. Now, when you insert a sequence into a virus, you sometimes humanize it. That is to say, you use codons that are more likely to attract the attention of a human enzyme. So you actually deliberately don't use the same dictionary that the virus is using. You're using a slightly more human dictionary.

This was known. It's called codon optimization. And the Furing cleavage site has two inserted arginines in sequence. RR is the abbreviation. And they are both CGG. So to find a CGG doublet in a SARS-like virus is highly unusual to say the least. And because, and slightly hints that maybe it was put there deliberately. That's what David Baltimore was saying.

And not everybody finds that convincing. Christian Anderson has made some quite good arguments about how actually, if you're mutating to get to CGG, then you start with CGA. It's not difficult to end up with CG, et cetera. And so I don't, neither Linen or I want to. place too much emphasis on that argument. But it is yet another small hint that this doesn't look natural. And that's what some of the scientists were saying to each other right at the start is we've looked at the genome and there are bits of it that don't look natural. Yeah. And I think,

you know, whether or not, yeah, and you're right, there are important things. It's important to point out that other people have different views. But since it gained a lot of attention, I wanted to, I want to mention that it's great to have been able to get into that topic because that one is usually a little too complicated for most podcasts, but good for you. There we go. Okay. I probably didn't explain it very well. No, no, you did. No, no. And I think it's important. No, these are important issues. And I think people, you know, my own feeling is that people can understand. I'm confident, if properly explained, people can understand lots of things. And the significance of that, I think,

is important. Well, I'm sure that you are from the same school of science writing as me, which is that actually leaving stuff out to help the reader understand things doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work. And you know what? And appealing to authority doesn't work, but actually explaining it, you know, some leaders can always, you know, my feeling is that readers can just skip over it if they don't want to read it. And that's fine, but other people do. But here's the more interesting, the reason I mentioned, I wanted to get in a sure insight, wow, there's lots of reasons and maybe CGG is what is surprising is you've already pointed out it's a unicorn yet in the paper in the paper where she at all you know sequence discuss

the genome sequence they don't somehow i mean it's the most you'd think seeing a unicorn would be the one thing you'd comment on and it is very surprising that the that the head of that lab who was working on these things when they sequenced um that genome did not mention the fear and cleager site so so you want to talk about that yeah um and worse than that they had a diagram of the first half of the spike gene. And it showed the sequence comparing it with other bad coronavirus sequences. And it stops just before you get to the furin cleavage site. Now, that's immediately upstream of where the split happens when Furin goes to work.

So that's the end of the first half is the split of the genome, of the gene, sorry. And so the logical thing would be to end there just after the fearing cleavage site, not just before the fearing cleavage site. It also, typographically, in terms of that page of the nature paper, also makes sense because actually there is space for it to end there. There's a white space in the diagram. So there's a deliberate decision has been taken to truncate that sequence just before it gets to the fearing cleavage site. Now, why that should be, we can't speculate, obviously. No, but it's it's, it's, it's, it's, it is most peculiar to, to find a unicorn and not, as Alina puts it, to describe the details of the hooves of the horses, but not the horn.

Yeah. And it's the dog that doesn't bark in the night, as, you know, Sherlock Holmes put it. Yes. And they, you know, it wasn't just that paper. they published another paper a couple of days later, and they didn't mention it there either, and they could have done. It's hard for me to believe that they didn't spot it.

It's much more easy for me to believe that they did spot it and didn't particularly want to draw attention to it, perhaps for reasonable reasons, that they hadn't understood the significance of it. Or they might want to, again, they might not have wanted to lead to. This is what we would love to sit down with Xi Jingley and ask her. Yeah, that's something. Yeah, well, that's good. I'm glad you would.

Well, look, I want to get close to wrapping it up. This has been fascinating for me, but, well, I still have a little more. But what I particularly liked was the last was I was thinking in those terms and you guys explicitly said it. You basically say near the end of the book, okay, this is a court case. We're going to be a lawyer for the prosecution one foot events. There's people, you know, will present the case for spillover from some animal or, you know, zoonosis and and and and and and and i and i and i and i and i and i and i don't know what we need to go over because i think we've already sort of gone over a lot of the issues that

that that you raise anyway and and the listener in some sense can can but can i just say one thing about those two chapters where we hand hand the microphone as it were to the defense lawyer and the prosecution lawyer um and the the the thing i wanted to say is that when i read one of those chapters, I find it quite convincing. Yeah. And that's true of both of them. I mean, I come out of reading the chapter saying it's not a lab leak and think, yeah, that's quite persuasive.

And then I read the other one and I find that quite so too, which is the way it should be in a court, as it were, if the lawyers are doing their job well and if the case is evenly balanced. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. We find it very unfair when reviewers or critics say our book is just a, long attempt to prove the lab leak. We don't think we do that at all. We think we give both sides of the thing. And at the end, we make it pretty clear that we think it's more likely that it's a lab leak, but only just, and we don't have any definitive evidence either way. Yeah, no, I'm glad to say

that I never read a single review of the book. So, which is, which is fine. I thought it's the best best to read the book. And all I'll say is that some people seem to review books without reading them. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And some be, listen, I've written a book, The Universe of Nothing, which a lot of people like to criticize my definition of nothing without ever having actually read what I say, but instead of what people say, I say. So I'm very aware of that. But there is one thing that I mentioned briefly, you know, in presenting both sides, there is the one elephant in the room, if you wish, which is this Humphrey Bogart line,

of all the gin joints in the world. And it is interesting that if you're thinking it comes from bats, the bats are 1,800 kilometers away, and somehow the virus first appears in Wuhan, the one place which has taken those viruses in, worked on them, sequenced them, studied them, changed some things. And, you know, it is, you can't help, it would be unfair not at least.

I mean, that's a real fact. Yeah, and just to give a parallel, Well, in 2007, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease on a farm in southern England at a place called Purbright, 13 miles from the world's leading reference laboratory for foot and mouth diseases, viruses. That was not a coincidence. It immediately became clear that there was a leaking pipe at the lab. The contractor had mended the pipe had gone straight to the farm to mend a pipe there and it infected the animals. So it's about as extreme in this case, the coincidence. There are thousands of cities in China. Many of them have much bigger markets, much bigger wildlife sales. Wildlife markets are a feature of Canton, of Guangdong, southern China, not so much of northern China or central China.

There are thousands of Chinese cities where this virus could have broken out, either because they're closer to where the bats live because they have more wildlife trade or they've got more communication networks with others. The only thing that makes Wuhan stand out is that it has the world's leading laboratory for studying SARS-like coronaviruses. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you make a point. Okay, so having said that, I think it is interesting that you point out a difference in the court case

or after the court case. You point out that people, for some reason, have a difference of, about burdens of proof that somehow the presumption is it's zoonosis. The presumption is that it comes from some animal and you have to, and the burden on you is to prove it comes from the lab. But in advance, you say, well, no, I mean, the burden of proof is, we don't know where it came from. And therefore, it should be, it shouldn't be so asymmet.

Yeah, so I think it's, I think it's quite wrong to give the lab the benefit of the doubt, to put it another way. And the problem is because the amount of secrecy we're dealing with, which we wouldn't be dealing with in the West, you know, we weren't dealing with it in the case of Purb-right, you know, and foot and mouth. The secrecy then exonerates the lab if you regard it as innocent and will prove guilty, whereas the market is guilty on so proven innocent. That doesn't feel fair to me.

In this case, I think you should treat each of those. possibilities as equally likely to start with until you understand where the evidence is pointing you and i think you and i'm surprised by the reservoir because i think you say that and then make it quite clear both remain possible you say it explicitly and openly it's true i i mean there are lots of smoking guns and we've tried to go through a number of them in the time we can and but but both remain possible and we'll get i want to get to your personal view at the end but i i want to say people may say why why worry about this why are we having this discussion and i think you make a key point well two key points i think one is we now know

that pandemics it's obvious that pandemics are possible and and um and understanding the origin of this particular one can do nothing but help on understand future possible pandemics but also the damage to science that's being done by hiding information is and and this is a clear example of how hiding or distorting information hurts science, which can therefore hurt the public. And therefore, it's a vitally important to understand this. We need to understand this because, not just because we're curious, but because it will reveal a lot about not just this pandemic, but where we may have missed and etc., etc. So maybe I could give you a chance. Yeah, no. And you know, remember, I'm going back to what we started talking about a couple of hours ago.

I'm a big fan of science. I think it's humanity's greatest achievement bar none. I don't want to see science constrained or prevented or diminished. I'm a big fan of biotechnology. I think it has enormous potential to help in both medicine and agriculture. So that's all the more reason why. If something's gone wrong as a result of a scientific experiment here, scientists should be the ones investigating, desperate to find out, and quick to hold up the hands and say,

we need to change our procedures and not do some kinds of research in order to be able to go on doing other kinds of research. Because otherwise, if they just say, no, no, it was nothing to do with us, nothing to do with us, and it eventually emerges that it was something to do with them, then the whole of science gets tainted by this. And lots of, you know, people who are working on other, you know, working on aging or, you know, something else will suddenly find their labs are harder to run. And I'm asternic, you know, going back to my libertarianism, I'm astonished by some of the libertarian lines coming out of scientists. Leave us alone. Don't over-regulate us. We know what we're doing.

Trust us. You know, they sound like some of these guys who are going to hole up in the mountains in Montana with an AK-47. Yeah. I exaggerate. Do you know what I mean? You know. Yeah. No, I think they could take a valuable lesson from Richard Nixon that the cover-up is

is worse. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Let me, let me give you the last word in that regard. And then I just want to ask about the personal question one or two at the end. I want to read the last paragraph of your book because I think it's important. If another pandemic of ambiguous origin occurs in the next decade, and whether it's SARS-CoV-3 or MERS Cove-2 or influenza or whatever,

then unless we learn key lessons from this pandemic, we will make the same mistakes. The world shows little sign yet of either finally shutting down the wildlife trade or addressing the risks of the burgeoning pathogen research worldwide, let alone both. There is little progress, if any, of governments designing a better system to encourage whistleblowers or transparency in science,

public health and global pathogen surveillance. Rather than the reverse, honest discussions among leaders and scientists appear to be happening increasingly on burner phones and in secure email channels. We can but hope like Shakespeare's Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice that, quote, at length, truth will win out. And I find that incredibly important. And it's a real reason for the wonderful description and detective story that you describe in the book that I love. Thank you very, very much. It's really nice to have.

have someone of your experience and standing to say nice things about our book. I'm really appreciate that. Oh, no worries. Well, it's well deserved. But let me just end with a few things. First of all, I think you already indicated. I was going to ask personally what I mean, you try to be, I think you try to be immensely fair in the book. But I certainly got the sense from what you said that you personally think the lab leak is now in your mind more credible. Yes, I do. But, you know, I caveat that by saying we don't have any direct evidence for the lab leak. We don't have any direct evidence for the markets, but either.

We don't have a direct evidence for anything, actually. But I think looking at everything, I think it probably was a research-related accident of some kind. Either a research are getting infected in the field or the virus infecting someone in the laboratory. But I might be wrong. Well, that's the important thing. And knowing you can be wrong and being will to be wrong is what makes it science, I think. Do you think we'll find, do you think we'll find get the answer to this question? Do you think it's going to happen?

I answer that question usually with yes. And the reason I say that is it's surprising. There's a lot of information. Alina says the same thing. There's a lot of information that people have. There's a lot of emails. There's a lot of messages. There's a lot of facts.

There's a lot of database entries which can't all have been destroyed. And there are a lot of people who know much more about what took place. I think the Chinese regime is keeping a lid on it for now, but I will be surprised if they managed to achieve that forever. And I think that applies to the market too, because I think if they are in possession of evidence that actually there was a mammal for sale in the market that was infected. They just didn't dare say so because they knew Xi Jinping likes traditional Chinese medicine

and doesn't like to hear these kind of things. Then that'll come out too. It may take a long time. And I often mention the anthrax leak in Svodlovsk in 1979, which the Soviets insisted was not an anthrax leak. And an international inquiry said wasn't. And then the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists involved came forward and said, yeah, we left an exhaust pipe filter off that day. So it took a long time, but it did come out in the end.

So yes, I will be surprised in 10 years' time if we still don't know how it started. Okay, that's good. I agree with you. I think it's pretty hard. I keep telling whenever in the old days when I used to debate UFO people, I'd say, you know, you're imagining this in vast conspiracy where all it takes is one person who really knows. something and could make a lot of money from it to say something. Absolutely. And, you know, it's very tough for Chinese whistleblowers, but it's not completely impossible.

Yeah. And over time, it eventually, generally, happily, these things come out. Do you think what's the likelihood for this to happen again? Well, that depends on how it started. I would say, if this was a laboratory accident, then it reinforces my view that, actually were reducing rather than increasing the chances of natural events of this kind, because we've got such good genetic surveillance, and because, frankly, people are moving into cities, the contact with wildlife isn't as great as it was, the eating of exotic species,

certainly the bushmeat trade is gradually giving way to people buying chickens in supermarkets in much of the world, etc. So I think bit by bit we will get to a place where yes there are nasty zoonotic transfers into the species but a bit like Ebola they're not good enough at spreading to mount pandemics

without a bit of help from some kind of something else that went on and we don't know what and so that might be the lesson of this is that this pandemic couldn't have happened without a bit of help in a lab but that's a slightly optimistic

way of looking at it. I think it's safer for me to say, yes, of course, it's going to happen again someday, naturally as well, you know, even if it, even if this one wasn't natural, then it probably will happen naturally too. And we have to learn really critical lessons about how to manage pandemics. And of course, the big one is transparency right up. We could have stopped this in January. You know, even if it was from a lab, we could have stopped it if we had full information right from the start and Chinese medics had been allowed to know what was happening in their own hospitals. Yeah, you know, this was wonderful because you went right into my thought. In fact, in the end, the conclusion is that we what we've learned is once again, something I said at the beginning,

that withholding information is bad for science. It's bad for the public. And it's the, and transparency, the only way and it's the only way science functions and you know i can't i i have to tell you i'll end with an anecdote and again i know people say it's not about you laurence but when i was in china i was at the world economic forum for a few years and there was one in china and it was the whole point of it was it was on innovation a subject of greatest to you and me yep um and what was funny was it was in um it wasn't in Beijing was another city but um one of the way the world economic forum works is that there's a big um sort of of I think Google and Twitter board

where people tweet their thoughts about this. But of course, you're not allowed to use that in China. And so the first day, it was blank. And then the Chinese with their incredible abilities, took that one square mile or less and made it accessible. And the second day was all over the place. And I think I sent a public tweet. I said, if you're talking about innovation,

it's not with, you know, censoring information is not the way to make it happen. Interesting enough for five hours, my phone didn't get was, yeah, so I was very impressed. It may have been a, it may have been a fluke. But I think the lesson from this would learn, and I hope the Chinese learn is that transparency is the key to science and the key for a better world for all of us. And I have to say thank you for your transparency and thank you for this. It's been an ultimate joy. And I hope, as he might have said from another, Humphrey Bogart movie are actually the same one. Maybe this will be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Beginning of a beautiful friendship. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I hope you enjoyed today's

conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org