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Higher Animals with Michael Specter · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. I got my first real job in journalism at
0:22
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. It was the nineteen eighties. I was
0:25
Speaker 1: twenty three. I had never written a newspaper story before.
0:31
Speaker 1: I had no idea what I was doing. All round
0:33
Speaker 1: me people were shouting into telephones, banging out stories on deadline.
0:37
Speaker 1: I sat there, mute, terrified, convinced that I would be
0:41
Speaker 1: found out and fired. And then I was rescued by
0:47
Speaker 1: this crazy, opinionated, insanely productive, brilliant genius of a reporter who,
0:52
Speaker 1: if memory serves, used to cruise the newsroom every passover
0:56
Speaker 1: handing out matza. His name was Michael Spector. I was
1:00
Speaker 1: rescued by Michael Specter. He fed me stories, he wrote
1:04
Speaker 1: my leaves, he shared his byline. He taught me how
1:06
Speaker 1: to handle critics, which I had never forgotten. Somebody would
1:09
Speaker 1: call him up to register one complaint or another, and
1:12
Speaker 1: Michael would interrupt them and say, you seem to have
1:15
Speaker 1: forgotten one thing. I don't work for you, sage advice
1:19
Speaker 1: that has guided my career ever since I was the
1:22
Speaker 1: tadpole trying to stay afloat. Michael was my big, friendly
1:27
Speaker 1: guardian frog. Now why am I going on and on
1:35
Speaker 1: about Michael, because when I look out from my office
1:38
Speaker 1: here at Pushkin, whose office do I see Michael Spector,
1:43
Speaker 1: Tadpole and Frog still together? Michael, thank you for joining
1:50
Speaker 1: me today.
1:51
Speaker 2: Thank you now. I'm happy to be here.
1:53
Speaker 1: Michael Spector, friend of the show, New Yorker, science writer,
1:56
Speaker 1: mit professor, seer of the Future, total Ham.
2:00
Speaker 2: Now, normally when I do these things, normally I have
2:04
Speaker 2: like champagne in the green room and where is that?
2:07
Speaker 1: Well, you'll have to talk to Malcolm about that. Okay,
2:10
Speaker 1: Welcome to Revision is History, my podcast about things overlooked
2:13
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Glaubwe. Today in the show, an
2:18
Speaker 1: old friend gives me the inside scoop on the future
2:21
Speaker 1: of life on Earth. For Michael, the real significance of
2:30
Speaker 1: the last few years was not COVID nineteen. It's the
2:34
Speaker 1: mRNA vaccines because the synthetic biology technology behind those vaccines
2:40
Speaker 1: is going to change everything about our world. It's a
2:44
Speaker 1: revolution on the scale of the first computers. And Michael
2:48
Speaker 1: has written an audiobook about that revolution, Higher Animals, Vaccines,
2:53
Speaker 1: Synthetic biology, and the Future of life, and it is amazing.
2:58
Speaker 1: So I asked Michael to sit down for a chat
3:01
Speaker 1: about some of the big ideas in the audiobook and
3:03
Speaker 1: to play some of it.
3:04
Speaker 3: For me.
3:06
Speaker 1: One of the things that struck me is I was
3:08
Speaker 1: reading your book, was you make this very compelling and
3:11
Speaker 1: convincing argument. This is a revolution on the order of
3:16
Speaker 1: electricity being invented. It's that kind of level revolution. People
3:20
Speaker 1: refer to Twitter as being a revolution. Twitter is like,
3:23
Speaker 1: if that's a revolution, you know, they problem we have
3:26
Speaker 1: rob there should be like a revolution pyramid and we
3:29
Speaker 1: give there's like a level B, level, C, level, D
3:32
Speaker 1: level G level. Twitter is like F. Electricity is a
3:37
Speaker 1: this is a this.
3:38
Speaker 2: Is a R A plus because we're taking a physical science,
3:42
Speaker 2: biology and we're turning it into an information science. What
3:47
Speaker 2: that means is that if I think of something clever
3:50
Speaker 2: to do, like, for instance, create a vaccine against COVID,
3:54
Speaker 2: I can put it up on the Internet and people
3:56
Speaker 2: all over the world can download it within minutes, which
3:59
Speaker 2: is why we had a vaccine, which is what happened
4:02
Speaker 2: so rapidly for COVID. It was the first vaccine that
4:06
Speaker 2: was ever made in a lab. Loaded, the sequences were
4:10
Speaker 2: uploaded to the internet. Scientists all over the world downloaded it,
4:15
Speaker 2: put the parts together made the virus and infect itself. Moderna,
4:19
Speaker 2: the company that was the first of one of two
4:22
Speaker 2: to have an mRNA vaccine. They essentially had that vaccine
4:27
Speaker 2: in seven days. Yeah. The fastest vaccine that has ever
4:32
Speaker 2: been developed in humanity before was months, and that took
4:36
Speaker 2: four years.
4:37
Speaker 1: Polly, it took fifty.
4:40
Speaker 2: HIV we're pushing fifty now and it's killed tens of
4:43
Speaker 2: millions of people, and many very brilliant people have dedicated
4:47
Speaker 2: their lives to figuring it out.
4:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, here's the puzzle I have. If this is
4:53
Speaker 1: a level A A plus revolution, and yet it seems
4:59
Speaker 1: to be that nobody knows about it. Like, for example,
5:02
Speaker 1: not a day passes when you can't hear some lament
5:05
Speaker 1: from some Silicon Valley person, which is all about how
5:09
Speaker 1: you know the Remember the famous they promised is flying planes,
5:12
Speaker 1: and all we got was fourteen characters. Actually we did
5:16
Speaker 1: get something way better than flying planes. But for some
5:19
Speaker 1: reason you're not paying any attention to it. Why have
5:22
Speaker 1: we ignored this revolution?
5:23
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of it is expectations, and I have
5:25
Speaker 2: to say I'm in disrespect not a lover of Silicon
5:30
Speaker 2: Valley's approach because their approach to synthetic biology is often
5:35
Speaker 2: there are no billionaires, there's no billion dollar companies. You
5:38
Speaker 2: can't quadruple your investment in an hour and a half.
5:42
Speaker 2: We don't want that, and the fact is to take
5:45
Speaker 2: a little while. But there have been remarkable advances constantly,
5:50
Speaker 2: and I go into them in this book and some
5:53
Speaker 2: to tell. But I think when I tell people who
5:56
Speaker 2: are not scientists that biology has become like information, it's
6:01
Speaker 2: just like computers, except instead of bits and bytes, we
6:04
Speaker 2: use DNA, letters, ACTNG. They're like, what how do you
6:09
Speaker 2: make it? Well, we have DNA printers, we can write DNA,
6:12
Speaker 2: we can put them together, we can create DNA, and
6:16
Speaker 2: we can rearrange DNA in any way that we want.
6:19
Speaker 2: If that's not a revolution, If being able to sort
6:22
Speaker 2: of rewrite the basic elements of life isn't a revolution
6:27
Speaker 2: on this planet, I just don't know what that word means.
6:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, when you were doing this book, what was
6:33
Speaker 1: the coolest, weirdest, most fun moment?
6:37
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, for me, in chapter four, I interviewed
6:42
Speaker 2: a blackfooted ferret. Well that's a defensive ferret, chatter way,
6:48
Speaker 2: And I do mean, well, when you interviewed the ferret, Yeah,
6:52
Speaker 2: it's very rare that I get to interview an endangered
6:55
Speaker 2: animal of any kind. It happens to me the most
6:58
Speaker 2: endangered species in America. And it's endangered because for a
7:02
Speaker 2: lot of reasons, but one of them, the significant one,
7:05
Speaker 2: is it gets the plague, the black plague, get the
7:09
Speaker 2: black well, they get a thing called silvadic plague.
7:11
Speaker 1: But it's thought life for a ferret without being susceptible too.
7:15
Speaker 2: It's hard, It's really hard. And the thing is, there's
7:19
Speaker 2: a vaccine for the plague and it works on ferrits.
7:22
Speaker 2: You can't run around Wyoming, Utah, all the Western States
7:27
Speaker 2: vaccinating every ferret. It's just crazy.
7:29
Speaker 1: Why because they're vaccine skeptics.
7:31
Speaker 2: Or because you just can't catch them all.
7:34
Speaker 1: They're in the wrong part of the country.
7:36
Speaker 2: Live free or die of maybe, I'm sure. What you
7:41
Speaker 2: can do is you can take that vaccine and you
7:45
Speaker 2: can splice it into the DNA of a ferret so
7:51
Speaker 2: that it passes on the antibodies to its progeny. So
7:55
Speaker 2: basically it is a heritable vaccine and you're born vaccinated
8:00
Speaker 2: against the plague. And that's so.
8:03
Speaker 1: Are we going to do that with us with non ferrets?
8:07
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, we will eventually do that, but I'm
8:10
Speaker 2: not sure we'll do it with vaccines. I think when
8:13
Speaker 2: it comes to changing our DNA, I think the first
8:15
Speaker 2: thing we have to say is is there a really
8:17
Speaker 2: compelling reason to do that? And if you have a vaccine,
8:21
Speaker 2: if you have something you can like shoot in your
8:23
Speaker 2: arm or swallow, that'll take care of a disease. I'm
8:26
Speaker 2: not so sure that rewriting the basic fundamental code of
8:29
Speaker 2: humanity is the way to go. Yeah, but there will
8:33
Speaker 2: be diseases that people want to eliminate, and we will
8:37
Speaker 2: be able to eliminate them in that way, and it
8:39
Speaker 2: will start a kind of interesting slippery slope of how
8:43
Speaker 2: do we decide what to do?
8:44
Speaker 1: Yeah? Wait, so interview in the ferret that was high
8:49
Speaker 1: on the list. Yeah, the vaccine skeptic ferret. What's the
8:53
Speaker 1: number two?
8:55
Speaker 2: Well, this is a personal highlight for me because I've
8:57
Speaker 2: spent so many years writing about things like genetically modified
9:01
Speaker 2: products and having people scream about how dangerous they are
9:05
Speaker 2: and which they are not. And a company called Ginkgo
9:10
Speaker 2: Bioworks went public in late twenty twenty one, and I
9:14
Speaker 2: went to the day on the New York Stock Exchange
9:19
Speaker 2: when they were announcing their offering, and the whole floor
9:23
Speaker 2: of the New York Stock Exchange was chanting DNA, d A,
9:29
Speaker 2: and there were huge pictures all around. I love GMOs,
9:34
Speaker 2: And it was like I died and went to some weird,
9:36
Speaker 2: perverted heavens.
9:37
Speaker 1: Because only found your people on Wall Street. Wait, if
9:40
Speaker 1: you're a company that's doing work on genetic modification and
9:44
Speaker 1: you want to avoid the kind of bad publicity and
9:48
Speaker 1: nut jobs that have plagued your field, don't call yourself Dinko, bioworks, whatever, Ginko, Ginko,
9:55
Speaker 1: it's worse. Call yourself acme. You know, better products inc
10:00
Speaker 1: or something.
10:01
Speaker 2: Ginko is a three thousand year old Chinese tree. It's
10:04
Speaker 2: the both. But you're I mean, you're right. Look, Synthetic
10:08
Speaker 2: biology is not an ideal name for a discipline in
10:11
Speaker 2: which we make things with biology because it scares the
10:14
Speaker 2: crap out of a lot of people. But it's hard
10:17
Speaker 2: to undo a name that exists and replace it. And
10:22
Speaker 2: so that's where we are, and so I think the
10:24
Speaker 2: thing we need to do, Like if you go to Ginko,
10:26
Speaker 2: their motto is we want to grow biology. We don't
10:28
Speaker 2: want to make it. We don't want factories we don't
10:30
Speaker 2: want chemicals. We're just going to grow stuff in a vat.
10:34
Speaker 2: We're going to grow nitrogen in a vat. We're going
10:36
Speaker 2: to grow dyes so that you that are completely benign,
10:40
Speaker 2: so that you don't have to use these horrible chemicals
10:43
Speaker 2: to make blue jeens. And they're doing that, and it's
10:46
Speaker 2: really kind of interesting.
10:48
Speaker 1: Wait, Michael, in a book that began with smallpox moved
10:53
Speaker 1: on to some of the most serious existential questions.
10:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, we get the blue jens.
10:58
Speaker 1: You end up getting to someone who solved the blue
11:01
Speaker 1: jen dye problem.
11:03
Speaker 2: It's all of a piece. It's an environmental problem that
11:07
Speaker 2: is a result of us having to rely on chemicals.
11:11
Speaker 2: And what they're saying is we don't need to build
11:14
Speaker 2: with chemistry. We can build with biology, and we can
11:17
Speaker 2: do all sorts of stuff. We can do medicines, we
11:21
Speaker 2: can do environmental remediation. If there's something like I mean,
11:26
Speaker 2: it would bottle your mind to know how much blue
11:30
Speaker 2: dye is made and how ruinous it is for the environment.
11:33
Speaker 2: So if you could get rid of those millions of
11:36
Speaker 2: tons of year and just grow it into that in
11:39
Speaker 2: a way that isn't chemically derived, you know, I taught
11:44
Speaker 2: bioengineering for a while at Stanford, and those students were
11:47
Speaker 2: more engineers than they were biologists, and they were trying
11:50
Speaker 2: to figure out how to apply engineering to cells. And
11:55
Speaker 2: in a lab now you'll have people who know a
11:58
Speaker 2: lot about biology, but they might know more about systems
12:01
Speaker 2: biology and computers and engineering. And you can't really do
12:07
Speaker 2: biology anymore unless you have those people ready to call.
12:12
Speaker 1: This reminds me of the son of a friend of
12:14
Speaker 1: mine is one of those brainy Stanford engineering types, and
12:18
Speaker 1: he does computer science and he works at some startup,
12:21
Speaker 1: you know, but if you talk to him, it's really interesting.
12:24
Speaker 1: So he's whatever he is twenty two. It's clear he
12:28
Speaker 1: talks about things going on in the world of science
12:31
Speaker 1: in exactly the way he talks about computer code. It's
12:35
Speaker 1: all the same, it is. It's really interesting. It's like,
12:39
Speaker 1: you know, I grew up like you, writing about these
12:43
Speaker 1: disciplines as if they were each in a kind of
12:46
Speaker 1: fortified castle on a different hill in southern Italy, right,
12:50
Speaker 1: and you had to throw on the hill and you know,
12:52
Speaker 1: jump get over the drawbridge in order to understand what
12:54
Speaker 1: was going on the discipline. Now it's like those walls
12:57
Speaker 1: are down, those walls are and sort of what your
13:00
Speaker 1: book is about that if the walls come down, it's
13:05
Speaker 1: it's exciting, but it's also kind of terrifying.
13:09
Speaker 2: We hope I make that point clearly in the book.
13:11
Speaker 2: I mean, I think this is a really exciting time,
13:13
Speaker 2: and I don't think it's hyped to say we're going
13:16
Speaker 2: to create a lot of solutions to terrible problems. I
13:20
Speaker 2: also don't think it's hyped to say that you know
13:23
Speaker 2: it used to be. It is like moving from a
13:26
Speaker 2: giant main frame computer where it used to take up
13:29
Speaker 2: four rooms to a computer on our phone that's more
13:32
Speaker 2: powerful than what's sent astronauts to the moon. Well, that's
13:36
Speaker 2: going to happen. It's beginning to happen with biology. And
13:39
Speaker 2: while that is great, it also means there's going to
13:41
Speaker 2: be lots of people who are going to be able
13:43
Speaker 2: to design things on their phone. And some of those things,
13:46
Speaker 2: either on purpose or by accident, are not going to
13:49
Speaker 2: be things we want whipping around the universe or made.
13:53
Speaker 2: And so we have to really start paying attention to
13:57
Speaker 2: how easy it's going to be to make viruses, to
14:01
Speaker 2: alter viruses, and that's one of the things with smallpox.
14:04
Speaker 2: I mean, it is now possible, very very hard to do,
14:10
Speaker 2: and not a lot of people could do it. To
14:12
Speaker 2: make smallpox. Uh, scientists in Canada famously made horsebox, which
14:16
Speaker 2: was a cousin of smallpox. Once you start being able
14:21
Speaker 2: to make those things, you can make them in such
14:23
Speaker 2: a way that they evade the current vaccines. We can
14:27
Speaker 2: then develop new vaccines, and you're in a really ugly
14:30
Speaker 2: arms race. So we need to be careful about that.
14:32
Speaker 2: And for once we need to ask a question that
14:35
Speaker 2: we never ask, which is are there technologies we shouldn't use?
14:40
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, so you've written Higher Animals is essentially a
14:44
Speaker 1: book about this revolution.
14:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I started with smallpox, which there's a
14:52
Speaker 2: bit in the first chapter about the last great smallpox
14:56
Speaker 2: scare in the United States, which is in nineteen forty
14:59
Speaker 2: seven in New York. Yeah. I mean a person got
15:02
Speaker 2: on a bus and came to the city and he
15:04
Speaker 2: could have wiped out the entire population. So, yeah, someone
15:08
Speaker 2: came to New York City carrying.
15:10
Speaker 1: Small parks in nineteen forty seven.
15:12
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty seven. Yeah, and you don't know that
15:17
Speaker 2: it's not written on your shoulder. There's no way of
15:20
Speaker 2: knowing you're infected. And you can create an incredible epanemen.
15:26
Speaker 1: So there was legit. There was a legitimate fear in
15:30
Speaker 1: the lifetime of my mom and your mom that New
15:35
Speaker 1: York City could have been wiped out by one of
15:37
Speaker 1: the most one of the scariest epidemics in human history.
15:42
Speaker 2: Incredibly legitimate fear.
15:44
Speaker 1: And the chapter we're going to play for you is
15:48
Speaker 1: about what happened next.
15:50
Speaker 2: And I won't give anything away to accept to say
15:53
Speaker 2: that New York City stories.
15:55
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, we can, we can. We can confirm that
16:01
Speaker 1: the city is vexxillare I just thought of a better
16:04
Speaker 1: title for your book.
16:06
Speaker 2: Where were you three months ago? Yeah?
16:08
Speaker 1: What pandor pox?
16:10
Speaker 2: That is good.
16:11
Speaker 1: That's good, Michael. This has been wonderful. The book Hire
16:17
Speaker 1: Animals is amazing, and I encourage all of you listening
16:22
Speaker 1: to stick around and listen to chapter one.
16:24
Speaker 2: Thanks Mausman. Great wonderful.
16:27
Speaker 1: Okay, there's your cliffhanger, the near destruction of New York City.
16:31
Speaker 1: How did they stop it? You'll find out in this
16:34
Speaker 1: amazing chapter excerpt right after the break. The year is
16:43
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. A man named Eugene Lebar has come
16:47
Speaker 1: to New York City and died of smallpox, and the
16:50
Speaker 1: health commissioner, the amazingly named Israel Weinstein, has to figure
16:54
Speaker 1: out how to stop the disease before it wipes out
16:57
Speaker 1: the whole city. Oh and a lot of people are
17:00
Speaker 1: about to gather in one place for a big parade.
17:03
Speaker 1: Let me just say, this is an amazing, gripping story.
17:07
Speaker 1: Like you think the Last of Us is good, you
17:09
Speaker 1: haven't seen anything yet. Roll tape.
17:13
Speaker 2: Many city officials were dismayed to find Israel Weinstein in
17:16
Speaker 2: charge of this crisis. He was new on the job
17:20
Speaker 2: and had come from the Bureau of Health Education, where
17:23
Speaker 2: he'd mainly worked with the press. Also, Weinstein seemed kind
17:27
Speaker 2: of strange. He installed a chin up bar at the
17:33
Speaker 2: door of his office, and he rarely walked in or
17:35
Speaker 2: out without doing a few pull ups. Few members of
17:39
Speaker 2: the medical establishment had even met this new commissioner, and
17:42
Speaker 2: he was about to face the biggest challenge any American
17:45
Speaker 2: health official had seen in decades. James Imperato, who would
17:51
Speaker 2: later serve as commissioner himself, knows the kind of challenge
17:54
Speaker 2: Weinstein faced.
17:57
Speaker 4: He was appointed, and many of the leadership kind of
18:02
Speaker 4: treated that somewhat scornfully. I didn't think he had what
18:06
Speaker 4: it took.
18:10
Speaker 2: Weinstein got the lab results on Good Friday, April fourth.
18:14
Speaker 2: That weekend, New Yorkers would pack churches throughout the city
18:18
Speaker 2: and gather for the annual Easter Parade.
18:21
Speaker 5: Each year, the Easter Parade brings out much finery and
18:24
Speaker 5: startling millinery, and some unusual participants.
18:28
Speaker 2: If just one person at the parade had been infected,
18:31
Speaker 2: even among a vaccinated population, the resulting outbreak could paralyze
18:36
Speaker 2: the city. Weinstein had to plan for the worst possible outcome,
18:40
Speaker 2: and that meant New York would need to launch the
18:42
Speaker 2: most aggressive public health campaign in American history. It simply
18:47
Speaker 2: wasn't going to be enough to vaccinate the hospital staff somehow,
18:52
Speaker 2: they would have to vaccinate everyone.
18:55
Speaker 3: For your own sea and for that of your family's
18:57
Speaker 3: and friends. Please don't take a jack be vaccinating too night.
19:05
Speaker 2: Doctor Weinstein, the New York City Health Commissioner, knew how
19:08
Speaker 2: quick cleovirus can spread in one of the world's most
19:11
Speaker 2: densely populated cities, and he needed to stop it before
19:15
Speaker 2: it really started. The Easter Parade came only two days
19:18
Speaker 2: after the city received the test results, and a million
19:21
Speaker 2: people turned out. At that point, fewer than a thousand
19:26
Speaker 2: had been vaccinated. There was one ray of hope. If
19:33
Speaker 2: a smallpox vaccine is administered soon enough, it can protect
19:37
Speaker 2: people even after they've been exposed. So there was a
19:41
Speaker 2: clear reason to get one. And just days after the parade,
19:45
Speaker 2: news broke that smallpox had infected several other people. The
19:49
Speaker 2: epidemiologist James Imprato has studied this period and says New
19:54
Speaker 2: Yorker's were practically storming local clinics demanding to be inoculated.
20:00
Speaker 4: The department has held him very very high esteem. It
20:03
Speaker 4: really was, and it had a large infrastructure of district
20:06
Speaker 4: health centers and milk stations which were really well baby.
20:11
Speaker 2: Clinics, and they were called milk stations.
20:14
Speaker 4: Now they were called milk stations.
20:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't even know that. Yeah.
20:18
Speaker 4: They would give free milk out to mothers for their infants,
20:23
Speaker 4: and usually in a resource disadvantage areas of sitting.
20:30
Speaker 2: Was that one of the key places where people were
20:31
Speaker 2: vaccinated in lintin four.
20:33
Speaker 4: They vaccinated people everywhere. They even vaccinated them in police stations.
20:38
Speaker 4: They used every possible venue that was available, and certainly
20:42
Speaker 4: they mustered private practitioners, of which there were many in
20:46
Speaker 4: those years.
20:47
Speaker 2: They were not.
20:48
Speaker 4: Really group practices at that point.
20:51
Speaker 2: The mayor received his vaccination in front of the press Corps.
20:54
Speaker 2: World War two air marshals went door to door making
20:58
Speaker 2: sure people knew where they could get their shots. Members
21:01
Speaker 2: of the New York Philharmonic received their shots after a
21:04
Speaker 2: concert at the Lyric Theater. Anybody who had been exposed
21:09
Speaker 2: was offered a choice get vaccinated or endure twenty one
21:13
Speaker 2: days of surveillance by the Health Department. Everybody, it seemed,
21:18
Speaker 2: was getting vaccinated. At the time, the Health Department possessed
21:25
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand doses of smallpox vaccine. That
21:29
Speaker 2: was not remotely enough to meet the demand. The mayor
21:33
Speaker 2: convened an emergency meeting with the heads of the seven
21:36
Speaker 2: American pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines. He asked for a
21:40
Speaker 2: commitment to provide six million doses. The Army and Navy
21:45
Speaker 2: also chipped in. The campaign was dramatic, but somehow the
21:50
Speaker 2: city met the demand. Thousands of people stood in line,
21:53
Speaker 2: often through the night, to get their shocks. James in
21:57
Speaker 2: Prato was a child in New York at the time.
22:00
Speaker 2: He remembers those events as if they happened last week.
22:04
Speaker 4: Two of my uncles were Cornwell graduates, and they had
22:07
Speaker 4: private practices. In one of them vaccine me. I recall
22:11
Speaker 4: that very well. He came at me with a huge,
22:13
Speaker 4: long needle, which I thought he was going to inject
22:16
Speaker 4: in its entirety into my arm, But it was to
22:19
Speaker 4: scrape and scrape in the vaccine. So they had they
22:23
Speaker 4: had widespread cooperation, and they were and they did not
22:26
Speaker 4: have any difficulty getting people to come out to be vaccinated.
22:29
Speaker 4: They really didn't.
22:34
Speaker 2: Some of that theatrical atmosphere was captured years later in
22:37
Speaker 2: a dark melodramatic film called The Killer That Stalked New
22:42
Speaker 2: York about a woman who started what else a smallpox outbreak.
22:48
Speaker 5: Oh no, she didn't field death out of the end
22:50
Speaker 5: of a gun or off the point of a night.
22:53
Speaker 5: She delivered at holesing, just by walking through a crowd.
22:57
Speaker 5: The tragedy was she didn't know she was dead. Even
23:00
Speaker 5: all Sheila knew she had a headache.
23:03
Speaker 2: It's pretty standard more stuff, not exactly high art. But
23:09
Speaker 2: the best part, the strangest part, is the vaccination montage.
23:15
Speaker 3: We have to stop it, get to the people first,
23:19
Speaker 3: beat the disease, vaccinate the whole city.
23:23
Speaker 2: That's really how it happened. Six million people vaccinated in
23:27
Speaker 2: a month, most of them in the course of about
23:29
Speaker 2: two weeks. Almost unimaginably, the city was declared free of
23:34
Speaker 2: smallpox by the middle of April, just weeks after the
23:37
Speaker 2: Easter parade. In all, two people died Lebar and the
23:43
Speaker 2: pregnant wife of the many infected. Twelve other New Yorkers
23:47
Speaker 2: became ill. Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein had to deal with
23:52
Speaker 2: the type of misinformation that has now become so familiar.
23:56
Speaker 2: But vaccination was an easy sell to New Yorkers in
23:59
Speaker 2: nineteen forty seven. The truth had little competition.
24:03
Speaker 3: At no time has any such number been vaccinated and
24:08
Speaker 3: such work period and thought noble.
24:13
Speaker 2: It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the city's achievement.
24:17
Speaker 2: It prevented a potentially disastrous outbreak, and yet almost nobody
24:23
Speaker 2: has heard of Israel Weinstein today. Where's his statue, his plaque?
24:28
Speaker 2: When James Improtu was appointed to Weinstein's old job, New
24:32
Speaker 2: York City Health Commissioner in nineteen seventy six, Weinstein was
24:36
Speaker 2: still alive, although he had already been forgotten and Proto
24:40
Speaker 2: decided to give him.
24:41
Speaker 4: A call, and he was then living in Brooklyn Heights
24:44
Speaker 4: in Brooklyn, and I did. I did tell him something.
24:48
Speaker 4: And I used to keep a schinning bar at the
24:52
Speaker 4: doorway of the Commissioner's office, and I asked him he
24:55
Speaker 4: was still doing it. He said, oh, of course I am,
24:58
Speaker 4: he said. I took the bar with me and I left.
25:02
Speaker 2: Did you like him? Did you think he was a
25:04
Speaker 2: good guy?
25:05
Speaker 4: Oh? He was very agreeable on the phone, Yes he was.
25:10
Speaker 4: I think in person he generally was considered that way.
25:15
Speaker 4: I mean when I was in the health department in
25:17
Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies, there were many people who remembered him.
25:21
Speaker 4: They remembered him, most of course for the smallpox vaccination
25:25
Speaker 4: campaign and also for his chinning boar.
25:29
Speaker 2: Doctor Weinstein left his job as city health commissioner soon
25:32
Speaker 2: after the outbreak, but his massive smallpox eradication campaign influenced
25:39
Speaker 2: more than a few of today's public health officials.
25:43
Speaker 6: New York City in March and April of nineteen forty
25:46
Speaker 6: seven vaccinated six million, three hundred and fifty thousand people,
25:52
Speaker 6: five million of which they did in two weeks. I
25:55
Speaker 6: was a six year old boy who was one of
25:57
Speaker 6: those who got vaccinated.
26:03
Speaker 2: Anthony S. Fauci the United States leading infectious disease expert
26:08
Speaker 2: has tried to do with COVID for all of America
26:11
Speaker 2: what Weinstein did for New York, and the response could
26:15
Speaker 2: hardly be more different. Throughout the COVID pandemic, Fauci has
26:20
Speaker 2: been threatened with death on a near daily basis. Members
26:24
Speaker 2: of Congress have tried to have him indicted and attempted
26:27
Speaker 2: to pass laws to prevent him from being paid. Fauci
26:32
Speaker 2: has frequently been accused of what he has spent his
26:34
Speaker 2: entire adult life being a government scientist. At one point,
26:41
Speaker 2: during the nineteen forty seven smallpox scare, Weinstein stated that
26:45
Speaker 2: universal vaccination was the only safeguard against an epidemic. I
26:50
Speaker 2: began writing this book in the Story of the nineteen
26:53
Speaker 2: forty seven vaccination Drive at the height of the fourth
26:57
Speaker 2: wave of the COVID pandemic in the United States, and
27:00
Speaker 2: it was far from the last. That wave came in
27:04
Speaker 2: spite of the widespread availability of vaccines that are far
27:07
Speaker 2: safer than the small pop vaccine they used in nineteen
27:10
Speaker 2: forty seven. Sure America was a different country then. It
27:15
Speaker 2: was a society that sought to protect people from home.
27:19
Speaker 2: Authority was trusted and respected. The words science and progress
27:24
Speaker 2: were cheered, not denounced. Those six million New Yorkers required
27:30
Speaker 2: little coercion, few incentives, and no meaningful debate. Over the years,
27:39
Speaker 2: I have often asked myself what changed? Why did we
27:42
Speaker 2: become a country so suspicious of authority and of science
27:47
Speaker 2: that millions of people would rather risk death than take
27:50
Speaker 2: a vaccine that has perhaps the best safety profile of
27:53
Speaker 2: any in history. I needed some wider context for what's
27:58
Speaker 2: happened to us. For that, There's no better person to
28:02
Speaker 2: visit than one Enriquez. Few people have thought more deeply
28:07
Speaker 2: about the impact that vaccines have had on human civilization.
28:12
Speaker 2: And Rikaz, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project
28:15
Speaker 2: at the Harvard Business School, is a futurist, a genomic entrepreneur,
28:19
Speaker 2: and a historian of science. Together with J. Craig Venter,
28:24
Speaker 2: who led the team that assembled the first draft of
28:27
Speaker 2: the Human Genome Project, and Rica has also founded Synthetic Genomics.
28:32
Speaker 2: Enricas lives in a pleasant suburb of Boston. When I
28:36
Speaker 2: told him I was looking into the history of the
28:38
Speaker 2: smallpox vaccine, he abruptly stood up and left the room.
28:43
Speaker 2: He returned a few minutes later with a long, narrow
28:46
Speaker 2: and ornately illustrated book, clearly something old and valued, and
28:51
Speaker 2: he began to page through it.
28:54
Speaker 7: What it is is, it's an inquiry into the causes
28:56
Speaker 7: and effects of variolation vaccine in Gloucestershire on the cowpox.
29:01
Speaker 7: And this is done by Edar Jenner. And the fact
29:03
Speaker 7: that some of our listeners don't immediately know who Edward
29:06
Speaker 7: Gender is, even though he saved more lives than almost
29:08
Speaker 7: anybody else before a sense is really important.
29:14
Speaker 2: He and I were both staring at this antique folio
29:17
Speaker 2: with genuine reverence.
29:20
Speaker 7: And so what you're looking at is you know, when
29:23
Speaker 7: he addressed the kinge and talked about the public causes
29:29
Speaker 7: of vaccines and such and the inquiry into.
29:33
Speaker 2: Varulation, Jenner understood that the science of his discovery would
29:38
Speaker 2: only take him so far. Vaccination works on a population,
29:43
Speaker 2: not just a person, and it's a political problem as
29:47
Speaker 2: much as it is a scientific one. So Jenner couldn't
29:50
Speaker 2: just be a scientist. He was an advocate and the
29:54
Speaker 2: report Enriquez held in his hands was part of Jenner's advocacy.
29:59
Speaker 2: It looked more like the magnet carta than what it was,
30:02
Speaker 2: a statistical analysis like those that appear in modern medical
30:06
Speaker 2: journals every day.
30:09
Speaker 7: This is one of the most important medical records in
30:11
Speaker 7: the world, and so it's a report on how you
30:14
Speaker 7: saved hundreds of millions of human beings, and very few
30:19
Speaker 7: people value it. And one of the scenarios that you
30:24
Speaker 7: wouldn't come up with is that a political party where
30:29
Speaker 7: most of the people in the senior levels of that
30:31
Speaker 7: party have been vaccinated, would advocate for their followers not
30:37
Speaker 7: to be vaccinated. And that's just such a perverse scenario
30:41
Speaker 7: that even in a Michael Crichton Andromeda Strained type book,
30:46
Speaker 7: it would be unbelievable. What's extraordinary about these days is
30:52
Speaker 7: that the unbelievable has become reality. We never expected American
30:57
Speaker 7: democracy to be questioned. We never expected science, which is
31:01
Speaker 7: what's made this country the country it is. And having
31:06
Speaker 7: that question is, i think, not just questioning this science,
31:09
Speaker 7: but questioning the very idea of what America is.
31:21
Speaker 2: I'm wonder if people really are questioning the idea of America.
31:25
Speaker 2: I think maybe it's more that we just take our
31:27
Speaker 2: remarkable achievements for granted, achievements like the development of vaccines.
31:34
Speaker 7: What's fascinating is how many times we've forgotten this. So
31:38
Speaker 7: we go through these cycles where we forget just how
31:41
Speaker 7: important vaccines are. We go through cycles where we forget
31:44
Speaker 7: to develop vaccines, We go through cycles where we make
31:47
Speaker 7: it too expensive to develop vaccines. And one of the
31:50
Speaker 7: things that's terribly frustrating about the medical system until COVID,
31:56
Speaker 7: which is a horrendous strategy, but one of the things
32:02
Speaker 7: that happened during COVID is we remembered again just how
32:05
Speaker 7: important vaccines are.
32:08
Speaker 2: The COVID vaccine will almost certainly prove to be one
32:11
Speaker 2: of the major scientific advances of our time. We produced
32:15
Speaker 2: them by the one hundred million safely and with remarkable speed,
32:20
Speaker 2: so clearly one is right. We've been reminded of the
32:23
Speaker 2: critical role vaccines play in all our lives, and yet
32:27
Speaker 2: with so many people refusing the vaccine, hundreds of thousands,
32:31
Speaker 2: maybe even millions, have died needlessly. Reluctance is a perfectly
32:36
Speaker 2: understandable reaction to anything new. People often reject truly disruptive technologies,
32:42
Speaker 2: at least for a while. The telegraph was shunned when
32:45
Speaker 2: it was introduced. People once recoiled at the thought of
32:49
Speaker 2: entering an elevator without a human operator. The debate over
32:53
Speaker 2: driverless cars seems as if it will rage for decades.
32:57
Speaker 2: But these vaccines are not just another challenging new technology.
33:02
Speaker 2: They are our main defense against a novel pathogen passing
33:05
Speaker 2: like a wrecking ball through the human population. Are the
33:09
Speaker 2: clearest sign yet of a revolution in biology, one that
33:13
Speaker 2: can save and enhance the lives of people everywhere, if
33:17
Speaker 2: we can figure out how to trust science again, and
33:20
Speaker 2: if scientists can figure out how to earn that trust.
33:28
Speaker 1: That was an abridge version of chapter one of Higher Animals, Vaccines,
33:32
Speaker 1: Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life by Michael Spector.
33:36
Speaker 1: Get your copy at Pushkin dot Fm, Slash Audiobooks, or
33:41
Speaker 1: wherever you buy your audiobooks. Revision's history is produced by
33:49
Speaker 1: Ben Nadaph Haffrey, Leeman, Gesteu, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith.
33:55
Speaker 1: Our share runner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luisqira,
33:58
Speaker 1: mastering by Sarah Bruguer, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special
34:03
Speaker 1: thanks to Julia Barton, who also edited Higher Animals, and
34:07
Speaker 1: to the rest of the audiobooks team. I'm Malcolm glam