Speaker 1: Pushkin. I got my first real job in journalism at
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. It was the nineteen eighties. I was
Speaker 1: twenty three. I had never written a newspaper story before.
Speaker 1: I had no idea what I was doing. All around me,
Speaker 1: people were shouting into telephones, banging out stories on deadline.
Speaker 1: I sat there, mute, terrified, convinced that I would be
Speaker 1: found out and fired. And then I was rescued by
Speaker 1: this crazy, opinionated, insanely productive, brilliant genius of a reporter who,
Speaker 1: if memory serves, used to cruise the newsroom every passover
Speaker 1: handing out mazza. His name was Michael Specter. I was
Speaker 1: rescued by Michael Specter. He fed me stories, he wrote
Speaker 1: my leads, he shared his byline. He taught me how
Speaker 1: to handle critics, which I'd never forgotten. Somebody would call
Speaker 1: him up to register one complaint or another, and Michael
Speaker 1: would interrupt them and say, you seem to have forgotten
Speaker 1: one thing. I don't work for you, sage advice that
Speaker 1: has guided my career ever since I was the tadpole
Speaker 1: trying to stay afloat. Michael was my big, friendly guardian frog.
Speaker 1: Now why am I going on and on about Michael,
Speaker 1: because when I look out from my office here at Pushkin,
Speaker 1: whose office do I see? Michael Spector, Tadpole and Frog
Speaker 1: still together? Michael, thank you for joining me today. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to be here. Michael Spector a friend of
Speaker 1: the show. New Yorker science writer, m I t Professor,
Speaker 1: Seer of the Future total An. Now, normally when I
Speaker 1: do these things, normally I have like champagne in the
Speaker 1: green room, and where's them? Well, you'll have to talk
Speaker 1: to Malcolm about that. Okay, welcome to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Globe. Today
Speaker 1: in the show, an old friend gives me the inside
Speaker 1: scoop on the future of life on Earth. For Michael,
Speaker 1: the real significance of the last few years was not
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen. It's the mRNA vaccines because the synthetic biology
Speaker 1: technology behind those vaccines is going to change everything about
Speaker 1: our world. It's a revolution on the scale of the
Speaker 1: first computers. And Michael has written an audiobook about that revolution,
Speaker 1: Higher Animals, Vaccines, synthetic biology, and the future of life,
Speaker 1: and it is amazing. So I asked Michael to sit
Speaker 1: down for a chat about some of the big ideas
Speaker 1: in the audiobook and to play some of it. For me,
Speaker 1: one of the things that struck me is when I
Speaker 1: was reading a book, was you make this very compelling
Speaker 1: and convincing argument that this is a revolution on the
Speaker 1: order of electricity being invented. It's that kind of level revolution.
Speaker 1: People refer to Twitter as being a revolution. Twitter is like,
Speaker 1: if that's a revolution, you know, we rubbed there should
Speaker 1: be like a revolution pyramid and we give there's like
Speaker 1: a level B, level, C level, D level, G level.
Speaker 1: Twitter is like F. Electricity is a this is a
Speaker 1: this is a your A plus because we're taking a
Speaker 1: physical science biology and we're turning it into an information science.
Speaker 1: What that means is that if I think of something
Speaker 1: clever to do, like, for instance, create a vaccine against COVID,
Speaker 1: I can put it up on the Internet and people
Speaker 1: all over the world can download it within minutes, which
Speaker 1: is why we had a vaccine, which is what happened
Speaker 1: so rapidly for COVID. It was the first vaccine that
Speaker 1: was ever made in a lab. Up the sequences were
Speaker 1: uploaded to the internet. Scientists all over the world downloaded it,
Speaker 1: put the parts together made the virus and infect itself.
Speaker 1: Moderna the company that was the first of one of
Speaker 1: two to have an mRNA vaccine. They essentially had that
Speaker 1: vaccine in seven days. Yeah. The fastest vaccine that has
Speaker 1: ever been developed in humanity before was months, and that
Speaker 1: took four years. Polio it took fifty HIV we're pushing
Speaker 1: fifty now and it's killed tens of millions of people
Speaker 1: in many very brilliant people have dedicated their lives to
Speaker 1: figuring it out. Yeah. Yeah, here's the puzzle I have.
Speaker 1: If this is a level A plus revolution, and yet
Speaker 1: it seems to be that nobody knows about it. Like,
Speaker 1: for example, not a day passes when you can't hear
Speaker 1: some lament from some Silicon Valley person, which is all
Speaker 1: about how you remember the famous they promised us flying
Speaker 1: planes and all we got was fourteen characters. Actually we
Speaker 1: did get something way better than flying planes. But for
Speaker 1: some reason you're not paying any attention to it. Why
Speaker 1: have we ignored this revolution? Well, a lot of it
Speaker 1: is expectations. And I have to say I'm in this
Speaker 1: respect not a lover of Silicon Valley's approach because their
Speaker 1: approach to synthetic biology is often there are no billionaires,
Speaker 1: there's no billion dollar companies. You can't quadruple your investment
Speaker 1: in an hour and a half. We don't want that,
Speaker 1: and the fact is to take a little while. But
Speaker 1: there have been remarkable advances constantly, and I go into
Speaker 1: them in this book in some detel But I think
Speaker 1: when I tell people who are not scientists that biology
Speaker 1: has become like information, it's just like computers, except instead
Speaker 1: of bits and bytes, we use DNA letters act And
Speaker 1: they're like, what how do you make it? Well, we
Speaker 1: have DNA printers, we can write DNA, we can put
Speaker 1: them together, we can create DNA, and we can rearrange
Speaker 1: DNA in any way that we want. If that's not
Speaker 1: a revolution, If being able to sort of rewrite the
Speaker 1: basic elements of life isn't a revolution on this planet,
Speaker 1: I just don't know what that word means. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you were doing this book, what was the coolest, weirdest,
Speaker 1: most fun moment? Well, I mean, for me, in chapter four,
Speaker 1: I interviewed a blackfooted ferret. Well that's a defensive ferret chatter,
Speaker 1: and I do mean, well, wad you interviewed the ferret? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very rare that I get to interview an endangered
Speaker 1: animal of any kind. It happens to me the most
Speaker 1: endangered species in America. And it's endangered because for a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons, but one of them, the significant one,
Speaker 1: is it gets the plague, the black plague. Fair to
Speaker 1: get the black well, they get a thing called silvotic plague.
Speaker 1: But it's thought life was hard enough for a ferret
Speaker 1: without being susceptible too. It's hard. It's really hard. And
Speaker 1: the thing is there's a vaccine for the plague, and
Speaker 1: it works on ferrets. You can't run around Wyoming, Utah,
Speaker 1: all the Western States vaccinating every ferret. It's just crazy.
Speaker 1: Why because their vaccine skeptics, or because you just can't
Speaker 1: catch them all. They're in the wrong part of the country,
Speaker 1: live free or diet maybe the New Hampshire. What you
Speaker 1: can do is you can take that vaccine and you
Speaker 1: can splice it into the DNA of a ferret so
Speaker 1: that it passes on the antibodies to its progeny. So
Speaker 1: basically it is a heritable vaccine and you're born vaccinated
Speaker 1: against the plague. And that's so we gonna do that
Speaker 1: with us with non ferrets. I mean, yeah, we will
Speaker 1: eventually do that, but I'm not sure we'll do it
Speaker 1: with vaccines. I think when it comes to changing our DNA,
Speaker 1: I think the first thing we have to say is
Speaker 1: is there a really compelling reason to do that? And
Speaker 1: if you have a vaccine, if you have something you
Speaker 1: can shoot in your arm or swallow, that'll take care
Speaker 1: of a disease. I'm not so sure that rewriting the
Speaker 1: basic fundamental code of humanity is the way to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there will be diseases that people want to eliminate,
Speaker 1: and we will be able to eliminate them in that way,
Speaker 1: and it will start a kind of interesting slippery slope
Speaker 1: of how do we decide what to do? Yeah? Wait,
Speaker 1: so interviewing the ferret that was high in the list, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the vaccine skeptic ferret. What's the number two? Well, this
Speaker 1: is a personal highlight for me because I've spent so
Speaker 1: many years writing about things like genetically modified products and
Speaker 1: having people scream about how dangerous they are and which
Speaker 1: they are not. And a company called Ginko Bioworks went
Speaker 1: public in late twenty twenty one, and I went to
Speaker 1: the day on the New York Stock Exchange when they
Speaker 1: were announcing the they're offering, and the whole floor of
Speaker 1: the New York Stock Exchange was chanting d n A,
Speaker 1: d n A, and there were huge pictures all around.
Speaker 1: I love GMOs And it was like I died and
Speaker 1: went to some weird, perverted heavens because they found your
Speaker 1: people on all street. Wait, if you're a company that's
Speaker 1: doing work on genetic modification and you want to avoid
Speaker 1: the kind of bad publicity and nut jobs that have
Speaker 1: plagued your field, don't call yourself Dnko, bioworks, whatever, Ginko, Ginko,
Speaker 1: it's worse. We'll call yourself ACNE, you know, better Products
Speaker 1: inc Or something. Ginko is a three thousand year old
Speaker 1: Chinese tree, it's suppose, But you're I mean, you're right. Look,
Speaker 1: Synthetic biology is not an ideal name for a discipline
Speaker 1: in which we make things with biology because it scares
Speaker 1: the crap out of a lot of people. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's hard to undo a name that exists and replace it.
Speaker 1: And so that's where we are. And so I think
Speaker 1: the thing we need to do, Like if you go
Speaker 1: to Gainco, their motto is we want to grow biology.
Speaker 1: We don't want to make it. We don't want factories,
Speaker 1: we don't want chemicals. We're just going to grow stuff
Speaker 1: in a vat. We're going to grow nitrogen in a fact,
Speaker 1: we're going to grow dye so that you that are
Speaker 1: completely benign, so that you don't have to use these
Speaker 1: horrible chemicals to make blue jeans. And they're doing that,
Speaker 1: and it's really kind of interesting. Wait, Michael, in a
Speaker 1: book that began with smallpox moved on to some of
Speaker 1: the most serious existential questions. Yeah, we get the blue jeens.
Speaker 1: You end up getting to someone who solved the blue
Speaker 1: jean dye problem. It's all of a piece. It's an
Speaker 1: environmental problem that is a result of us having to
Speaker 1: rely on chemicals. And what they're saying is we don't
Speaker 1: need to build with chemistry. We can build with biology,
Speaker 1: and we can do all sorts of stuff. We can
Speaker 1: do medicines, we can do environmental remediation. If there's something
Speaker 1: like I mean, it would bible your mind to know
Speaker 1: how much blue dye is made and how ruinous it
Speaker 1: is for the environment. So if you could get rid
Speaker 1: of those millions of tons of a year and just
Speaker 1: grow it into vat in a way that isn't chemically derived.
Speaker 1: You know, I taught bioengineering for a while at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and those students were more engineers than they were biologists,
Speaker 1: and they were trying to figure out how to apply
Speaker 1: engineering to cells. And in a lab now you'll have
Speaker 1: people who know a lot about biology, but they might
Speaker 1: know more about systems biology and computers and engineering. And
Speaker 1: you can't really do biology anymore unless you have those
Speaker 1: people ready to call. This reminds me of the son
Speaker 1: of a friend of mine is one of those brainy
Speaker 1: Stanford engineering types, and he does computer science and he
Speaker 1: works at some startup, you know, but if you talk
Speaker 1: to him, it's really interesting. So he's whatever he is
Speaker 1: twenty two. It's clear he talks about things going on
Speaker 1: in the world of science in exactly the way he
Speaker 1: talks about computer code. It's all the same, it is.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. It's like, you know, I grew up
Speaker 1: like you, writing about these disciplines as if they were
Speaker 1: each in a kind of fortified castle on a different
Speaker 1: hill in southern Italy, right, and you had to stroll
Speaker 1: on the hill and you know, jump get over the
Speaker 1: drawbridge in order to understand what was going on the discipline.
Speaker 1: Now it's like those walls are down. Those walls are
Speaker 1: and the sort of what your book is about that
Speaker 1: if the walls come down, it's it's exciting, but it's
Speaker 1: also kind of terrifying. I hope I make that point
Speaker 1: clearly in the book. I mean, I think this is
Speaker 1: a really exciting time, and I don't think it's hyped
Speaker 1: to say we're going to create a lot of solutions
Speaker 1: to terrible problems. I also don't think it's hyped to
Speaker 1: say that, you know, it used to be. This is
Speaker 1: like moving from a giant mainframe computer where it used
Speaker 1: to take up four rooms to a computer on our
Speaker 1: phone that's more powerful than what's sent astronauts to the moon. Well,
Speaker 1: that's going to happen. It's beginning to happen with biology.
Speaker 1: And while that is great, it also means there're going
Speaker 1: to be lots of people who are going to be
Speaker 1: able to design things on their phone, and some of
Speaker 1: those things, either on purpose or by accident, are not
Speaker 1: going to be things we want whipping around the universe
Speaker 1: or made. And so we have to really start paying
Speaker 1: attention to how easy it's going to be to make viruses,
Speaker 1: to alter viruses, and that's one of the things with smallpox.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is now possible, very already hard to do,
Speaker 1: and not a lot of people could do it. To
Speaker 1: make smallpox, scientists in Canada famously made horsepox, which was
Speaker 1: a cousin of smallpox. Once you start being able to
Speaker 1: make those things, you can make them in such a
Speaker 1: way that they evade the current vaccines. We can then
Speaker 1: develop new vaccines, and you're in a really ugly arms race.
Speaker 1: So we need to be careful about that. And for
Speaker 1: once we need to ask a question that we never ask,
Speaker 1: which is are there technologies we shouldn't use? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you've written Higher Animals is essentially a book about
Speaker 1: this revolution. Yeah, I mean I started with smallpox, which
Speaker 1: there's a bit in the first chapter about the last
Speaker 1: great smallpox scare in the United States, which was in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven in New York. Yeah. I mean a
Speaker 1: person got on a bus and came to the city,
Speaker 1: and he could have wiped out the entire population. Did Yeah,
Speaker 1: someone came to New York City carrying smallpox in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven, in nineteen forty seven. Yeah, And you don't
Speaker 1: know that it's not written on your shoulder. There's no
Speaker 1: way of knowing you're infected, and you can create an
Speaker 1: incredible epidomen So there was a there was a legitimate
Speaker 1: fear in the lifetime of my mom and your mom
Speaker 1: that New York City could have been wiped out by
Speaker 1: one of the most one of the scariest epidemics in
Speaker 1: human history. Incredibly legitimate fear. And you're The chapter we're
Speaker 1: going to play for you is about what happened next.
Speaker 1: And I won't give anything away to except to say
Speaker 1: that New York City stories. Yes, yes, we can, we can,
Speaker 1: we can confirm that the city is there. Um, I
Speaker 1: just thought of a better title for your book. Where
Speaker 1: were you three months ago? Yeah? What pandos pox? That
Speaker 1: is good. That's good, Michael. This has been wonderful. The
Speaker 1: book Higher Animals is amazing, and I encourage all of
Speaker 1: you listening to stick around and listen to chapter one. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Mouth's been great, wonderful. Okay, there's your cliffhanger, the near
Speaker 1: destruction of New York City. How did they stop it?
Speaker 1: You'll find out in this amazing chapter excerpt right after
Speaker 1: the break. The year is nineteen forty seven. A man
Speaker 1: named Eugene Labarre has come to New York City and
Speaker 1: died of smallpox, and the health commissioner, the amazingly named
Speaker 1: Israel Weinstein, has to figure out how to stop the
Speaker 1: disease before it wipes out the whole city. Oh, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people are about to gather in one
Speaker 1: place for a big parade. Let me just say, this
Speaker 1: is an amazing, gripping story. Like you think the Last
Speaker 1: of Us is good, you haven't seen anything yet. Roll tape.
Speaker 1: Many city officials were dismayed to find Israel Weinstein in
Speaker 1: charge of this crisis. He was new on the job
Speaker 1: and had come from the Bureau of Health Education, where
Speaker 1: he'd mainly worked with the press. Also, Weinstein seemed kind
Speaker 1: of strange. He installed a chin up bar at the
Speaker 1: door of his office, and he rarely walked in or
Speaker 1: out without doing a few pull ups. Few members of
Speaker 1: the medical establishment had even met this new commissioner, and
Speaker 1: he was about to face the biggest challenge any American
Speaker 1: health official had seen in decades. James Imperato, who would
Speaker 1: later serve as commissioner himself, knows the kind of challenge
Speaker 1: Weinstein faced. He was appointed, and many of the leadership
Speaker 1: kind of treated that somewhat scornfully, who I didn't think
Speaker 1: he had what it took. Weinstein got the lab results
Speaker 1: on Good Friday, April fourth. That weekend, New Yorkers would
Speaker 1: pack churches throughout the city and gather for the annual
Speaker 1: Easter Parade. Each year, the Easter Parade brings out much
Speaker 1: finery and startling millinery and some unusual participants. If just
Speaker 1: one person at the parade had been infected, even among
Speaker 1: a vaccinated population, the resulting outbreak could paralyze the city.
Speaker 1: Weinstein had to plan for the worst possible outcome, and
Speaker 1: that meant New York would need to launch the most
Speaker 1: aggressive public health campaign in American history. It simply wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be enough to vaccinate the hospital staff. Somehow,
Speaker 1: they would have to vaccinate everyone. For your own seat,
Speaker 1: and for that if your families and brand me, please
Speaker 1: don't take a chat. Be vaccine easy to night. Doctor Weinstein,
Speaker 1: the New York City Health Commissioner, knew how a virus
Speaker 1: can spread in one of the world's most densely populated cities,
Speaker 1: and he needed to stop it before it really started.
Speaker 1: The Easter Parade came only two days after the city
Speaker 1: received the test results. And a million people turned out.
Speaker 1: At that point, fewer than a thousand had been vaccinated.
Speaker 1: There was one ray of hope. If a smallpox vaccine
Speaker 1: has administered soon enough, it can protect people even after
Speaker 1: they'd been exposed. So there was a clear reason to
Speaker 1: get one. And just days after the parade, news broke
Speaker 1: that smallpox had infected several other people. The epidemiologist James
Speaker 1: and Parato has studied this period and says New Yorkers
Speaker 1: were practically storming local clinics demanding to be inoculated. The
Speaker 1: department is held in very, very high esteem. It really was,
Speaker 1: and it had a large infrastructure of district health centers
Speaker 1: and milk stations which were really well baby clinics, and
Speaker 1: they were called milk stations. Now they were called milk stations. Yes,
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that. Yeah, they would give free
Speaker 1: milk out to you to mothers for their infants, and
Speaker 1: usually in resource disadvantage areas of city. Was that one
Speaker 1: of the key places where people were vaccinated. In the
Speaker 1: vaccinated people everywhere. They even vaccinated them in police stations.
Speaker 1: They used every possible venue that was available, and certainly
Speaker 1: they must private practitioners, of which there were many in
Speaker 1: those years. They were not really group practices at that point.
Speaker 1: The mayor received his vaccination in front of the press Corps.
Speaker 1: World War two air marshals went door to door making
Speaker 1: sure people knew where they could get their shots. Members
Speaker 1: of the New York Philharmonic received their shots after a
Speaker 1: concert at the Lyric Theater. Anybody who had been exposed
Speaker 1: was offered a choice get vaccinated or endure twenty one
Speaker 1: days of surveillance by the Health Department. Everybody, it seemed,
Speaker 1: was getting vaccinated. At the time, the Health Department possessed
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand doses of smallpox vaccine. That
Speaker 1: was not remotely enough to meet the demand. The mayor
Speaker 1: convened an emergency meeting with the heads of the seven
Speaker 1: American pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines. He asked for a
Speaker 1: commitment to provide six million doses. The Army and Navy
Speaker 1: also chipped in. The campaign was dramatic, but somehow the
Speaker 1: city met the demand. Thousands of people stood in line,
Speaker 1: often through the night, to get their shots. James and
Speaker 1: Protto was a child in New York at the time.
Speaker 1: He remembers those events as if they happened last week.
Speaker 1: Two of my uncles were Cornwell graduates and they had
Speaker 1: private practices, and one of them vaccinated me. I recall
Speaker 1: that very well. He came at me with a huge,
Speaker 1: long needle, which I thought he was going to inject
Speaker 1: in its entirety into my arm, But it was to
Speaker 1: scrape and scrape in the vaccine. So they had they
Speaker 1: had widespread cooperation, and they were and they did not
Speaker 1: have any difficulty of getting people to come out to
Speaker 1: be vaccinated. They really didn't. Some of that theatrical atmosphere
Speaker 1: was captured years later in a dark melodramatic film called
Speaker 1: The Killer That Stalked New York about a woman who
Speaker 1: started what else a smallpox outbreak. Oh no, she didn't
Speaker 1: feel that out of the end of a gun or
Speaker 1: off the point of a life. She delivered it hosy,
Speaker 1: just by walking through a crowd. The tragedy was she
Speaker 1: didn't know she was dead even all she lak you
Speaker 1: she had a headache. It's pretty standard more stuff, not
Speaker 1: exactly high art. But the best part, the strangest part,
Speaker 1: is the vaccination montage. We have to stop it, get
Speaker 1: to the people first, beat the disease, vaccinate the whole city.
Speaker 1: That's really how it happened. Six million people vaccinated in
Speaker 1: a month, most of them in the course of about
Speaker 1: two weeks. Almost unimaginably, the city was declared free of
Speaker 1: smallpox by the middle of April, just weeks after the
Speaker 1: Eastern Parade. In all, two people died labar and the
Speaker 1: pregnant wife of the many infected twelve other New Yorkers
Speaker 1: became ill. Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein had to deal with
Speaker 1: the type of misinformation that has now become so familiar.
Speaker 1: But vaccination was an easy cell to New Yorkers in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. The truth had little competition at no
Speaker 1: dime as any such number of and vaccinated and such
Speaker 1: rot period I had such thought. Now it's hard to
Speaker 1: overstate the magnitude of the city's achievement. It prevented a
Speaker 1: potentially disastrous outbreak, and yet almost nobody has heard of
Speaker 1: Israel Weinstein today. Where's his statue, his plaque? When James
Speaker 1: Improcto was appointed to Weinstein's old job, New York City
Speaker 1: Health Commissioner in nineteen seventy six, Weinstein was still alive,
Speaker 1: although he had already been forgotten, and Procto decided to
Speaker 1: give him a call, and he was then living in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn, and I did tell him something.
Speaker 1: And I used to keep a shinning bar at the
Speaker 1: doorway of the Commissioner's office, and I asked him he
Speaker 1: was still doing it. He said, oh, of course, I
Speaker 1: ammy said, I took the bar with me and I left.
Speaker 1: Did you like him? Did you think he was a
Speaker 1: good guy or oh? He was very agreeable on the phone. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was. I think in prison he generally was considered
Speaker 1: that way. I mean when I was in the health
Speaker 1: department in the nineteen seventies, there were many people who
Speaker 1: remembered him. They remembered him most of course for the
Speaker 1: smallpox vaccination campaign and also for his chinning bar. Doctor
Speaker 1: Weinstein left his job as city health commissioner soon after
Speaker 1: the outbreak, but his massive smallpox eradication campaign influenced more
Speaker 1: than a few of today's public health officials. New York
Speaker 1: City in March and April of nineteen forty seven vaccinated
Speaker 1: six million, three hundred and fifty thousand people, five million
Speaker 1: of which they did in two weeks. I was a
Speaker 1: six year old boy who was one of those who
Speaker 1: got vaccinated. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States leading infectious
Speaker 1: disease expert, has tried to do with COVID for all
Speaker 1: of America what Weinstein did for New York, and the
Speaker 1: response could hardly be more different. Throughout the COVID pandemic,
Speaker 1: Fauci has been threatened with death on a near daily basis.
Speaker 1: Members of Congress have tried to have him indicted and
Speaker 1: attempted to pass laws to prevent him from being paid.
Speaker 1: Fauci has frequently been accused of what he has spent
Speaker 1: his entire adult life being a government scientist. At one point,
Speaker 1: during the nineteen forty seven smallpox scare, Weinstein stated that
Speaker 1: universal vaccination was the only safeguard against an epidemic. I
Speaker 1: began writing this book in the Story of the nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven vaccination Drive at the height of the fourth
Speaker 1: wave of the COVID pandemic in the United States, and
Speaker 1: it was far from the last. That wave came in
Speaker 1: spite of the widespread availability of vaccines that are far
Speaker 1: safer than the small vaccine they used in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: Sure America was a different country then. It was a
Speaker 1: society that sought to protect people from home authority was
Speaker 1: trusted and respected. The words science and progress were cheered,
Speaker 1: not denounced. Those six million New Yorkers required little coercion,
Speaker 1: few incentives, and no meaningful debate. Over the years, I
Speaker 1: have often asked myself what changed? Why did we become
Speaker 1: a country so suspicious of authority and of science that
Speaker 1: millions of people would rather risk death than take a
Speaker 1: vaccine that has perhaps the best safety profile of any
Speaker 1: in history. I needed some wider context for what's happened
Speaker 1: to us. For that, there's no better person to visit
Speaker 1: than one Enriquez. Few people have thought more deeply about
Speaker 1: the impact that vaccines have had on human civilization. Enriquez,
Speaker 1: the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at the
Speaker 1: Harvard Business School, is a futurist, a genomic entrepreneur, and
Speaker 1: a historian of science. Together with J. Craig Venter, who
Speaker 1: led the team that assembled the first draft of the
Speaker 1: Human Genome Project, Enriquez also founded Synthetic Genomics. Enriquez lives
Speaker 1: in a pleasant suburb of Boston. When I told him
Speaker 1: I was looking into the history of the smallpox vaccine,
Speaker 1: he abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned
Speaker 1: a few minutes later with a long, narrow and ornately
Speaker 1: illustrated book, clearly something old and valued, and he began
Speaker 1: to page through it. What it is is, it's an
Speaker 1: inquiry into the causes and effects of variolation vaccine in
Speaker 1: Gloucestershire on the cowpox. And this is done by Edder Jenner.
Speaker 1: And the fact that some of our listeners don't immediately
Speaker 1: know who Eder Jenna is, even though he saved more
Speaker 1: lives than almost abody else before or since, is really important.
Speaker 1: He and I were both staring at this antique folia
Speaker 1: with genuine reverence, and so what you're looking at is
Speaker 1: you know. When he addressed the King, talked about the
Speaker 1: public causes of vaccines and such, and the inquiry into varilation.
Speaker 1: Jenner understood that the science of his discovery would only
Speaker 1: take him so far. Vaccination works on a population, not
Speaker 1: just a person, and it's a political problem as much
Speaker 1: as it is a scientific one. So Jenner couldn't just
Speaker 1: be a scientist. He was an advocate, and the report
Speaker 1: Enriquez held in his hands was part of Jenner's advocacy.
Speaker 1: It looked more like the Magna Carta than what it was,
Speaker 1: a statistical analysis like those that appear in modern medical
Speaker 1: journals every day. This is one of the most important
Speaker 1: medical records in the world, and so it's a report
Speaker 1: on how you saved hundreds of millions of human beings,
Speaker 1: and very few people value it. And one of those
Speaker 1: scenarios that you wouldn't come up with is that a
Speaker 1: political party where most of the people in the senior
Speaker 1: levels of that party have been vaccinated, would advocate for
Speaker 1: their followers not to be vaccinated. And that's just such
Speaker 1: a perverse scenario that even in a Michael Crichton Andromeda
Speaker 1: Strained type book, it would be unbelievable. What's extraordinary about
Speaker 1: these days is that the unbelievable has become reality. We
Speaker 1: never expected American democracy to be questioned. We never expected science,
Speaker 1: which is what's made this country the country it is.
Speaker 1: And having that question is, I think, not just questioning science,
Speaker 1: but questioning the very idea of what America is. I
Speaker 1: wonder if people really are questioning the idea of America.
Speaker 1: I think maybe it's more that we just take our
Speaker 1: remarkable achievements for granted, achievements like the development of vaccines.
Speaker 1: What's fascinating is how many times we've forgotten this so
Speaker 1: we go through these cycles where we forget just how
Speaker 1: important vaccines are. We go through cycles, or we forget
Speaker 1: to develop vaccines. We go through cycles where we make
Speaker 1: it too expensive to develop vaccines. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that's terribly frustrating about the medical system until COVID,
Speaker 1: which is a horrendous tragedy, but one of the things
Speaker 1: that happened during COVID as we remembered again just how
Speaker 1: important vaccines are. The COVID vaccine will almost certainly prove
Speaker 1: to be one of the major scientific advances of our time.
Speaker 1: We produced them by the hundred million, safely and with
Speaker 1: remarkable speed, so clearly one is right. We've been reminded
Speaker 1: of the critical role of vaccines playing all our lives,
Speaker 1: and yet with so many people refusing the vaccine, hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands, maybe even millions, have died needlessly. Reluctance is
Speaker 1: a perfectly understandable reaction to anything new. People often reject
Speaker 1: truly disruptive technologies, at least for a while. The telegraph
Speaker 1: was shunned when it was introduced. People once recoiled at
Speaker 1: the thought of entering an elevator without a human operator.
Speaker 1: The debate over driverless cars seems as if it will
Speaker 1: rage for decades. But these vaccines are not just another
Speaker 1: challenging new technology. They are our main defense against a
Speaker 1: novel pathogen passing like a wrecking ball through the human population.
Speaker 1: Are the clearest sign yet of a revolution in biology,
Speaker 1: one that can save and enhance the lives of people everywhere,
Speaker 1: if we can figure out how to trust science again,
Speaker 1: and if scientists can figure out how to earn that trust.
Speaker 1: That was an abridged version of chapter one of Higher Animals, Vaccines,
Speaker 1: Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life by Michael Spector.
Speaker 1: Get your copy at Pushkin dot Fm, Slash Audiobooks, or
Speaker 1: wherever you buy your audiobooks. Religionous History is produced by
Speaker 1: Ben nadaf Haafrey Leeman, Gistu, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Our share runner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luiscera,
Speaker 1: mastering by Sarah Bragare, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Julia Barton, who also edited Higher Animals, and
Speaker 1: to the rest of the audiobooks team. I'm Malcolm Grapper.