so so
you you
This is so crazy.
Like goosebumps.
This is so crazy.
I feel so nervous.
Like what in the world, man?
the the the
I have no responsibility for the current pandemic.
Stop lying!
Oh, there was no doubt we were living through a revolution.
I certainly experienced it as such, internalized it in that way.
When the paper by Avery, McLeod and McCarty came along, I didn't use the phraseology, but my exclamations were equivalent, saying, this is the dawn of molecular genetics.
For the first time, we could
have a biological assay for the genetic activity of an external molecule.
So that publication, next to Francis Ryan, with the molding effects on my career, was talked about quite extensively.
around the department at Columbia.
It turns out we had a couple of people who were important liaisons.
Alfred Murski, who has been remarked on as having been an inappropriate critic.
of Avery McLeod and McCarty.
I don't think it was inappropriate, but it was certainly a severe critic.
Chet was also the greatest herald of the story, so we would hear about what was going on at the Rockefeller Institute on the other side of town, as if we had been at the same institution.
But also Harriet Taylor was a graduate student working with L.C.
Dunn.
I had become interested in it as well.
And she in fact went to do post-doctoral work in Avery's laboratory shortly after that time.
So we had very close information linkages to the research that was going on there.
We were very well informed about it.
We reacted to it.
There was a lot of
critical dialectic, but it was not something that could be ignored.
It was the most exciting thing that happened in many, many decades, and was precisely because it was so important, that is, the identification of DNA as genetic material, that I empathize with the view that it should be subjected to the most critical examination.
It was too important an issue to just accept casually.
So as long as the debate was alive, that was where the scientific method operates.
I'm damned for what I do.
My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight.
They've set me on a path from which there's no escape.
I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost.
And by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is my, what is my sacrifice?
I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.
I burned my decency for someone else's future.
I burned my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see.
Now the ego that started this fight will never have a
a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude.
So what do I sacrifice?
Everything!
I think truth is good for kids.
We're so busy lying, we don't even recognize the truth no more in this society.
We want everybody to feel good.
That's not the way life is.
Yeah.
Good morning, everybody.
Hello, welcome to the show.
This is GigaOM Biological, a high-resistance, low-noise information brief brought to you by a biologist.
Coming to you live from my garage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, planet Earth.
Just in case this broadcast is getting out past the solar system, I want you to know where we're coming from and what's happening.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me.
We have a second part of our initial offering of the History of Pseudobiology 432.
This is point two.
I am adopting the stardate version of episode numbering that was originally established by my colleague and
sort of friend on the interwebs, Mr. Mark Kulak of Housatonic Live of Boston.
He often calls his episodes some number with a variant number or a version number afterward, I guess maybe from, I don't know, it just, it makes sense.
It's like Dewey Decimals or something like that.
Anyway, this is going to start to be a regular course offering, if you will, a sort of survey course
where I will just kind of expose myself as an armchair biologist to the open air of the internet and explore these myths and try to reason my way back to reality after a long career in academia and a long career as a
kind of pseudo-anti-vaxxer following the lead of all these national security state actors.
I just had no idea that they were all on the same stage, on the same script.
I thought I was bouncing between independent actors that were all trying to, some in their own way, fight for the history or the future of America for their children.
And it turns out that all of these people
have been recruited and scripted and agreed to play along to the extent to which, yeah, we are just really scratching the surface of what's really going on here.
I'm just, I don't know, I'm humbled by the fact that so many of these people
were in one way or another employed to meddle with me and my family.
Someday I think all of them will be apologizing in one way or another.
Let me just slide over here for a second and see if I can say hello to everybody.
Good morning.
My name is Jonathan Cooley.
I come to you live out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania I am a former academic biologist.
I like to say recovering a cat a magician I'm aware that at least Andrew Kaufman may have stolen the recovering Academy academic
joke, but I say a catamagician, because a lot of what happens in academic science is essentially a kind of magic, because probabilities are used to test null hypotheses, and this sort of strategy, if it is not vigorously validated, and the models that underlie these questions are not vigorously validated regularly, then this kind of
hamster wheeling can spin out of control very easily.
And I'm afraid we're about 30 plus years into a really bad hamster wheel spinning in terms of molecular biology.
And especially with regard to what we might be able to learn on the smaller scale in bacteria and archaea and in yeast, as opposed to what those molecular mechanisms might have anything to do with what's going on in any particular cell in our body, nevermind all the cells or whatever.
And so that kind of gross generalization has been going on for a long time with respect to reductionist biology.
And I'm afraid that this has led to a lot of basically bankrupt ideas, which have become presuppositions to the current investigations.
And I think if you want to seek the truth, together with me and other people who watch this show, I think this is always the premise that we're starting with, because before
let's say 2019 or 2020, I also assumed that what was going on in academic biology was largely an honest pursuit, an objective pursuit, and one that was so open and sort of self- what is the right word?
Self-censoring and self-correcting that we have inevitably gone in the right direction as a group.
And I'm afraid that because there have been what I would essentially call scripted actors in place and acting in concert for many decades,
that a lot of the prevailing ideas that have become assumptions with regard to biology are essentially wrong.
And it comes down to really starting to try and get down to the history of biology in the last 30 or 40 years where we can really understand what they were able to prove, solve, and what blocks are building on what other blocks, and what blocks are just kind of hanging in air.
Because I think what we're going to find is that there was a transition that occurred somewhere after the Manhattan Project and somewhere before the Human Genome Project where a bunch of assumptions just kind of like, yeah, I guess this is it.
And a lot of the early thinkers that came out of physics, went into biology, still looking for fundamental laws of the universe, kind of got stuck, kind of gave up, kind of were disappointed.
And then there were a few people who passed through that sieve without that kind of disappointment, without that kind of like, you know,
sort of losing the wind in your sails, thinking you were going to answer the big questions.
And they got through it with Nobel Prizes.
And I'm starting to really see that that
part of American history where all this thought came together in a few people and in a few labs or in a few sort of ecosystems of thought.
You can see how corruption of that field by a few influential thinkers and then just a few good men being convinced not really to object to it, to stay in their lane, if you will,
30 years later we could be where we are with a whole field which is essentially based on a series of assumptions that were never approved or never proved, excuse me, have never been thoroughly tested or verified and we're just going along with the model
using the dated techniques as verification or gold standards still, even though we have, of course, decades of finer technologies that we could apply to the same questions to verify that our basic cartoon models of these phenomenon are real.
But if we did that, all of this illusion of the Baltimore scheme would disappear.
So again, I'm just trying to give you a good introduction to why I want to talk about David Baltimore, listen to David Baltimore, and listen to his take on the history.
It is because social media has made it even hard for us to see.
Sorry, let me just switch over here now, now that I'm talking.
Oh, I see.
Sorry, I didn't set that up.
My bad!
Hopefully we're not missing too many frames here on this little restore.
I apologize for that.
be better I think that should be better I think no because that's not in focus goodness sakes where is my production crew if I just had you know somebody setting up my cameras or picking my ISO settings or you know whatever
That would have been done already.
I think that looks all right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm really trying to advocate for the idea that repeating this is not bad.
It's actually good.
It's actually the teaching moment that can bring us together with our children.
If we can show them that this last five years was something that was collectively used against us, a biological phenomenon, an increase in all cause mortality was misconstrued as something else.
And the national security state had been preparing itself internally, preparing the academics and academic biology internally with conferences and papers and journals and papers about these phenomena.
And because that whole genre of scientists is
is very intimately controlled by funding that is, of course, scrutinized under a national security basis, they have essentially created a pocket of science which is almost
from the biological perspective, from the academic perspective, non-negotiable because the textbooks are already in their fifth edition with two giant volumes.
The book on prions is like the size of a veterinary manual.
It's a huge field with an enormous amount of sort of
precedence seeming to exist in the academic literature, and that precedence is still supported by a number of people that claim to be those investigators that have established those precedents.
And so with regard to virology, and particularly RNA virology, one of these people that is most important for this is David Baltimore, who recently died about a week ago.
David Baltimore was awarded the Nobel Prize for finding reverse transcriptase, which is the enzyme that supposedly explains the more or less the viral cycle or whatever that HIV, the virus underlying AIDS, supposedly undergoes with respect to the immune system.
And so the idea with
with David Baltimore is this idea that viruses are these packages of genetic material that also often contain the enzymes necessary to copy them when they get to where they're going.
And so the whole story of virology
of coronavirus biology, for example, if we're trying to seek the truth about the pandemic, what they tell us in their papers is that coronavirus is a very long, single-stranded RNA in a lipid particle with some proteins on the outside.
And we don't have to worry about what proteins on the outside, except for the spike protein.
Everything else doesn't matter.
The M protein, the E protein, these are silly.
And we don't have to worry about the end protein, which is supposedly the protein that this long molecule of RNA is curled around.
Now that RNA molecule is dangerous all by itself in that little tiny protein tortellini.
And the reason why is because once it gets inside your cell, by some magic means, that RNA is able to hijack your protein manufacturing machinery and instruct it to make the proteins necessary.
And it's a lot of proteins.
It's not just an enzyme.
It's a whole, apparently a whole complex
and it can cause the expression of that complex and then that complex knows somehow how to then copy
the foreign RNA specifically and not all the other RNA that's in that cell but just that RNA and it's supposed to copy it and then that RNA uses the machinery of our cells to then package itself in identical viral particles to the one that came in because apparently in that long RNA are the instructions on how to make
the E-protein, the M-protein, the spike protein, and how to put them all together.
And it just goes, and then there it is.
You have the RNA inside, and voila, the cycle repeats.
And so this mythology is based on an extraordinary number of assumptions, most of which are based on
the word of or the publication of a few papers which, you know, if they're just graphs, if they're just, you know, graphs with error bars,
then the possibility of faking a whole field is very, very high.
Now I'm not saying that I know that that's possible, I just want you to understand that academia really rests on a few papers and every field has this potential where if somebody was really just lame
and decided to tell a story about some behavior in rats that they were regularly able to create with some stimulation here, stimulation there, it could go on for a very long time before anybody would be able to invest the time and the experimental energy necessary to check the claim.
And the farther back you go in history, like let's say you go back in history far enough to where not everybody has ever flown on a jet plane before or where going to California meant basically packing up and moving and not really knowing when you'd come back, then you can imagine a scenario where faking a field starts to become very, very interesting.
If, for example, you know, after the greatest minds in physics decided to go into biology, they went into the simplest system, bacteria, they found this phenomenon called phages, and then kind of everything just went, just kind of disappeared.
I mean, what happened?
What happened to all those people?
Why did that whole field just kind of,
go away, and then all these other people stepped in front of them with animal viruses.
I think you're going to find that this question is really, these kinds of questions, trying to formulate this question or this list of questions in the best way is going to be a very, very well-spent time and energy.
So that's my plan.
And I think that that will help people to kind of get to the stage where they can start to question this narrative usefully.
Remember that this narrative is a national security theater enabled by social media.
Never before 2020 did people use social media with the level of assumption that they use it with right now.
These scripted conversations using scripted actors that all trust the script allows social media to convince people that there are movements like the conservative movement or the health freedom movement when in fact there are not those movements except for the theater that is social media.
And so pandemic biology and RNA virology are the real concrete myths within biology 101 that we need to get rid of.
The Human Genome Project is another one of these gross exaggerations that we need our children to be able to see through so that they can, you know, hear the exaggerations that are going on on television with regard to fidelity, with certainty, and with the insult to your sovereignty that is this movement of
I don't know if it should be called transhumanism or not, but it's just, it's this arrogance that we can somehow, from a molecular perspective, take over the evolution of the species.
And that's really just, that's really terrible idea.
And so it is murder and lies that they used in the pandemic, but it wasn't that much murder because there was already an anticipated rise in all cause mortality.
All they had to do is agree to do dumb things about it in response to it, to take advantage of it, and then to agree to tell everybody on TV and on social media.
in a coordinated chorus of liars that there was a novel virus that killed millions of people, but millions more were saved from it by ivermectin or by transfection, but we're just not gonna call it that.
We'll just say vaccines and confuse people with that idea and that methodology for another 10 or 15 years until all of their children believe this pseudobiology.
And so if we teach the history of it, then our kids will be able to see it.
And more importantly, our kids will be able to find their way to a new biology, one that essentially starts with the assumption that there is an irreducible complexity at the heart of our existence that we're never going to be able to scratch, but we want to see if we can clear off of as much of it as possible so that we can kind of understand a little bit more about our collective interdependence.
which is, I think, the most important thing to understand here.
If this is the, you know, the garden and we're supposed to be the gardeners, then we better understand our interdependence with the garden a lot better than we do.
And so that's why I am focusing on trying to get the words right.
I don't know if this one's on.
No, that one's not on either.
I think getting the words right are really important.
I think that's why documenting with real books and real citations the fact that intramuscular injection of any combination of substances with the intent of augmenting the immune system is a dumb idea from the late 1800s.
And I like to document that a lot and I am working on that in a real sense.
Transfection of healthy humans was a crime because transfection is an old technology that I've used on the academic bench.
It's one of the reasons why I was fired from the University of Pittsburgh by calling a
calling it what it is.
RNA cannot pandemic.
That's a statement that should tap into the very root of what some of your friends understand as biology.
And as long as they're arguing that evolution is a real thing, because DNA, then the whole idea of RNA pandemicing, the RNA going endemic,
The RNA traveling through all the population of white-tailed deer and zoo animals in North America should start to make less sense to them with regard to what they thought was possible.
And autism is a meaningless word by design.
It's something that you can say to anybody.
and it'll be a little bit like a cognitive slap in the face if they think they have autism or some minor form of it.
But with regard to regular people who haven't really thought about it very much but think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is some kind of clown, I think that that's one of the ways that you might suggest that
RFK might be on a script because him and his friends, you know, like Brian Hooker who worked for the government for 16 years trying to genetically modify plants to grow medicine, not that dissimilar to something that maybe a guy who worked for the Human Genome Project might be interested in doing.
Yeah, the thing is, all of the people behind RFK are part of this illusion where
autism has become a meaningless word by design.
And in fact, Brian Hooker didn't use the word autism in 2013.
So at some point in time, this pseudo biology was militarily
inserted into our society's thoughts and inserted into our society's media and into the undercurrents of discussions on social media so that the anti-vax movement in America would already exist and be under control when the population pyramid bump arrived and it was time to declare the pandemic.
And that's the same reason why your gut feeling is right, you know, that America is a two-party theater and both sides have steak dinners together and laugh about their performances.
That's why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were so good in that debate, because they were really good friends.
It's not that they're both really cool, it's that they were both really good friends performing for us.
And so this two-party theater is run by the national security state.
It makes America a very stable country for the controlling powers behind it.
And the question is, since when and for what purpose?
I really think that at least
from the brass tacks and from the, I don't know what the right terms are, but from the nuts and bolts of it, what really are making the wheels turn, it's the Human Genome Project and it's DOD, DOE classified part of the iceberg.
The tip of the iceberg that you can see of the Human Genome Project is Francis Collins and his guitar over and over again, announcing a new milestone with regard to what they're able to do or how cheap it is.
And the rest of the iceberg is the idea that for about 30 years already, they've known that they're going to have to figure out a way to be able to collect the genomic data of everyone.
and collect it in a very reliable and accurate way, which to a certain extent they have made progress on.
It has to also be cheap.
They also have to have the data infrastructure necessary to store that data in a uniform sort of format so that it can be fed into a machine learning algorithm.
And over the last 10 or 15 years, they have been modifying and
And the word is optimizing the various forms of these machine algorithms in the form of chatbots, in the form of chess algorithms, in the form of Go algorithms.
And they're learning a lot about how this data needs to be fed in, how the data should be represented, different strategies for representing the data that allow easier access and easier comparison across segments or yada, yada, yada.
And all of these things are designed to solve problems that incrementally lead to one of the greatest problems of all time.
And that is the inheritance between generations of vertebrates and how it happens.
And it is surprisingly difficult to study that
It is surprisingly difficult to make progress because it is surprisingly difficult to do some of the basic experiments that you can do with bacteria and bacteriophages, for example.
And so it's not that all these people that went into bacteria and bacteriophages answered a bunch of questions there, cleared it up, figured out how it works and bacteria, and then moved on to animal viruses and their homologue, you know, in nature.
That's not what happened at all.
And that, from an intellectual perspective, is very curious to me.
I think the reason why is because we are witnessing the concept that the Human Genome Project is the Human Genome Project.
All the other biology is really interesting.
And it's really neat to know, but any biology that you learn from inbred mice is almost only applicable to that inbred mouse strain, never mind applicable across all vertebrates.
I mean, these mechanisms have all been long exhausted.
These hypotheses have all been long exhausted and now it is the irreducibly complex diversity of molecular strategies and physiological strategies and structural strategies that exist on this, you know, genetic background that is the Earth.
And we have been sort of conditioned to believe that the mechanism of evolution acts on the individual and its ability to contribute to the next generation.
And that mechanism suffices to explain our existence.
That's the premise here.
Mud puddle, lightning bolt, that's about it, right?
As long as the sun and the earth stay about the same distance apart and there's some seasons, apparently this is what you get.
And that's just, from an assumption perspective, it's spectacular.
But that's also what this guy believed.
Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest, he also believed, basically, that DNA provoked evolution, and that meant God must have created us with evolution.
He's showing us evolution, and therefore God is giving us permission to take control of it.
It's almost like God bestowed upon us this responsibility.
That's the argument that I get out of this book.
And it jives very well with the arguments that are made by these early physicists and chemists that thought that the discovery of DNA meant that in about 10 years, all the knobs of creation would be at our fingertips.
And that's just not true.
But the Human Genome Project is the long-term national security impetus to approach that goal with intention.
And I believe that 9-11, I believe that the coronavirus pandemic, these were all various
stumbling blocks, incremental crisis situations that have allowed them to nudge our society closer to a society where the sovereignty of its citizens can be negated in the betterment of the whole, in the interest of the whole, and that would be public health.
And I think Mark Kulak is doing an incredible job of sort of outlining how in 9-11, it was probably going to be a biological attack that would allow the never before precedence to be set where they would just immunize the entire military with an investigational vaccine, like a DNA vaccine.
And that didn't happen for some reason, but we did get this, I don't know, buildings exploding and terrorism for 10 years and a lot of expenditure in the Middle East.
And now here we are back again at the same time.
And it's interesting because Alex Jones, the day after 9-11, according to the findings and archiving of Mark Kulak, suddenly decided that it wasn't the US government, but it was Israel.
Just kind of very similar to how the day after Charlie Kirk gets shot, Alex Jones knows it's Israel.
It's very, very interesting.
And I think it can be, let's say, stress reducing.
to understand it from the perspective of it being a 30 or 40 or 50 year scientific endeavor that has horribly missed its projected goals.
That in 1960, none of these people would have said that in 50 years, right?
In 50 years, we're gonna be nowhere.
None of them would have been able to say that.
None of them would have been able to say that despite adding all this academic infrastructure and all this funding and all these core facilities, we haven't gotten that much farther.
And that's the reality of it.
That's why the Human Genome Project is still at the source of this.
That's the reason why Kevin McKernan was involved in the people behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That's why Robert Malone was involved with the people behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That's why Meryl Nass is there.
That's why Veera Sharma is there.
That's why Brian Hooker, 16-year employee of the U.S.
Government Department of Energy,
or wherever he worked where he was transforming plants to make medicines, that guy behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is not just some dad with autism.
Stop lying!
Yes, Brian, stop lying.
For the sake of your son and his future in America, stop lying.
Pauly Tommy was an actor in the UK, swaying votes for autism awareness, trying to get jobs for kids with autism back in the early 2000s, and then moved to America, got a big ranch in Austin, Texas, you know, the same town where Joe Rogan and all these other performing clowns podcast from.
It's just remarkable.
We as a country have been bamboozled by our own countrymen who have sold us out because I guess they underestimate us as a country or they see the vast majority of Americans as being the deplorables that they were called by Hillary Clinton.
And so there's not a lot worth saving.
But I don't agree with any of that.
I think America's children are definitely worth saving, and more importantly, they're not spoiled yet.
We could still turn them against this.
we could still come up with a plan together with our children, with a new vision of the future that doesn't involve their enslavement, doesn't involve their digitization.
It doesn't involve their being locked in a, essentially an experimental cage that can adequately monitor them so that enough data can be uniformly collected across all experimental animals during their entire lifetime from birth until death.
I guess I'm wasting too much time on this, but all the people that got into Clearview, all the people that got into Clearview, ladies and gentlemen, are a problem.
And they're a problem because they're actors.
I don't have any special sympathy for any of them because they signed up a long time ago.
It has to be that they either are naive, and they just need to keep hearing the truth until it sinks in, or they are actively a part of this, because the truth can't be simpler.
I can't make this up.
I don't even need to explain this.
That line's not level.
We had control of the red for decades and then lost control of it for two years.
We had relative control over the opioid problems on the streets of America until around 2019.
And then we really let it go wild for a while.
I mean, those are easy things to talk about.
It's also very easy to talk about the irreducibly complex background that is composed of bacteria, archaea, their bactericins, and all these, there's so many compounds that they release.
Also their phages and all the different types.
And that background is irreducibly complex within our microbiome.
It's irreducibly complex on our skin.
in our oral cavities, in our lungs even.
And so this irreducibly complex background was never dissected before the pandemic, never characterized as a thing.
We didn't know what was there.
It would be like landing on Earth and having no idea what a bird was, while all the birds are already there.
You could spend a lot of time discovering birds while you traveled the world, not knowing that there were any birds at all.
And so with a disingenuous rollout of a nonspecific PCR test, you could convince people that, wow, there's birds everywhere.
They're loose, because no one else can see them.
unless they use your binoculars.
That's what the PCR test became.
It was, it's a national security operation.
There would be no reason to trust the national security state to provide the tests that proved the crisis.
And yet they even had people in place to ineffectively argue about the tests.
And that's where I came in.
As a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, I was fired for saying this.
And in fact, I was hounded by and followed by and harassed by Kevin McKernan of the Human Genome Project, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
of Children's Health Defense, Meryl Nass of Children's Health Defense, Brian Hooker of Children's Health Defense, Mary Holland of Children's Health Defense.
They all harassed and misled me
and tricked me into supporting their endeavors when in reality their endeavors were false and they were actually treasonous to America.
And so if there is any lawyer out there with whom that might ring a sort of, wow, maybe we can sue Children's Health Defense for having lied to Jonathan Cooey and having misled him about their intentions and sue them as a nonprofit organization for defrauding their funders.
I wonder if we could do that.
And anybody that's interested in doing that and needs my help, I would be more than happy to.
One of the things you have to remember is since I graduated from high school, there's this big bump in the population pyramid they've known was coming.
That's why they're worried about social security and the bankrupting of Western societies.
Because there is a bump like that in everyone's population pyramid, because after World War II, people came home and had big families.
The reason why the population pyramid doesn't continue with that arc is because they spent the next 20 years trying to convince people that there were too many people on the planet and therefore lots and lots of families went from having six kids to went to having two.
That's the reality of things and in 2025 that bump is still coming.
Those people are retiring right now.
Those older ages that have stopped paying taxes and started pulling out of the system, those are some of the richest Americans that will ever live, owning the most property of any American generation that will ever live.
You know, five houses, good for me.
And so this is an orchestrated take back of a lot of that property and orchestrated take back a lot of that wealth.
an orchestrated stripping of whatever's left of America as the dollar is meant to crash.
That's what's happening right now.
And I said that from my backyard of a house that I lost in 2021.
That's why I'm here in my garage in Pittsburgh doing this show now today because of that crime.
the crime of the pandemic, the crime of using this population pyramid biology against us, lying about it, and then more importantly, using that lie to conveniently murder a few of these people that will cost the system the most, that had the least to offer us after their retirement.
It's a very, very malevolent place that America is in, but this is a anticipated rise.
in all cause mortality, that they weaponized against us with actors on social media.
And that includes Donald Trump and all the people around him.
That includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and all the people around him.
That includes ICANN and all the people around them.
Everybody is either wittingly or unwittingly a part of this thing until they start to call it out for what it is.
That's why we have a Harvard, the head of Harvard virology is this child.
who is ready and willing to testify to his belief in vaccines and in next generation vaccines.
And the only useful opposition that we really have on our side to this illusion are those clowns that say there are no viruses at all that are from New Zealand or from the same town as Piper Stover in New York.
Ladies and gentlemen, we were trapped.
Your family and friends were trapped, were fooled by a very elaborate military operation that would have been very hard to see through.
It is possible, remotely possible, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is a victim of that national security operation, that he himself is not aware that his friends and trusted advisors are all selling him out, using him, and are about to throw him under the bus.
It is possible he doesn't know that.
It's not very likely.
It's much more likely that he signed up a long time ago and he knows that what he's doing is part of what he signed up for, even if he didn't know that this would be where he would be.
Maybe he was promised the vice presidency when it would have been a lot easier maybe.
I don't really know, I don't have all the answers, but I know for sure that this is about the Human Genome Project.
That's why Kevin McKernan called me Chemtrail Retarded.
That's why Kevin McKernan has followed me around on social media, has written substacks about me on social media.
That's why Kevin McKernan, the Research and Development Director of the Human Genome Project, can be linked to Kevin McCairn.
can be linked to Steve Kirsch, can be linked to Meryl Nass and Robert Malone and Brian Hooker and the authors of the Corman-Jorston report that include Mike Yeadon and Claire Craig of the 100,000 Genomes Project in the UK.
It was the militarization of public health and the slow inversion of our sovereignty.
By this time I was fairly widely published and known in the field.
And my mentor wasn't anywhere near, wasn't any better known than I was, so we were seen as sort of two young Turks.
And he called me and he said,
We're just picking up where we left off yesterday.
We're talking about how he was invited to the Salk Institute by Dalbeco and then went back to MIT to work with Salvador Luria, I believe.
He was at Caltech at the time?
He said, I have made a commitment to go to the New Salk Institute, which is going to be formed in Ohio, and I would love to have you come as a junior faculty member in my unit.
It wasn't really departments in the usual sense, but he had space.
He could do anything he wanted with it, and he was offering me some of that space to do my program in, working on RNA viruses.
And then ensued this wonderful.
uncertainty about whether the Salk Institute was actually going to exist or not.
And I would get these notes from Delbecos or calls from Delbecos.
So yesterday, one of the things that I hope you noticed was that he tells a lot of stories about the people.
He tells a lot of stories about
I don't know, things that don't matter for the science.
And in fact, he often avoids talking about the science because that's for another time.
And so this is quite extraordinary, given that he's supposed to be an incredibly influential godfather of molecular biology, who's made a number of discoveries worthy of potentially a Nobel Prize and having been awarded one.
So it's remarkable how like, you know, if you were talking to Miles Davis, his answer would be, well, I changed music five times in my life.
That would have been the first thing he said.
So, you know, what did you do with your career?
He kind of says, yeah, I don't know.
I just kind of was in the right place at the right time.
You know, nothing that I did is really worth noteworthy of mention, or at least not in this interview.
It's almost like the three guys coming back from the moon and they're just not really that excited about having gotten back alive.
not very happy to be telling everybody about how exciting it was to have pulled off the greatest, you know, feat in American and human history, walking on the moon.
And instead, they look as though they stole the car and got caught because they got arrested or something.
I don't know.
It's bizarre.
And this guy doesn't come off to me as a Nobel Prize winner with great insight into biology that because he has such great insight is able to share very easily.
It doesn't come off like that at all.
And so that's where we're starting.
And we're doing this because I think we're trying to figure out what happened between
bacteria and bacteriophages being the primary model of genetic investigation to the pivot to animal viruses and the assumption that we have animal viruses that we can culture and use
to interact with mammalian cells.
And so then there's no reason to work on bacteria and bacteriophages anymore, except for in the context of, of course, you know, all the pharmaceutical manufacturing of protein biologics in the world.
But that's neither here nor there.
Don't make any plans.
because I'm not positive it's going to happen.
But we're having a meeting next week, and I'll get back to you.
So meeting occurs next week, gets back to me and says, looks like it's going to happen.
Start making plans.
A couple weeks later, we're running into trouble.
And so this went back and forth until finally he said, yes, it's going to happen.
And I got in the car and came out to California, which was
By that time, I had once before been to California.
I'd flown out there to lecture at Caltech.
Not so much of a culture shock.
Well, it was a culture shock.
It was an enormous culture shock.
And particularly in this sort of unformed world of La Jolla at the time, where they were just starting up the university, and the Salk Institute was brand new, and we were working these temporary buildings.
When I arrived at the Salk Institute, they built labs for me in the basement of this temporary building while the main building was going up.
And they had to take a rattlesnake out of the lab in order to get me in there.
That was just, this was the Wild West.
So you were there for three years, and then you wound up coming back to MIT.
SKOLNIKOFF That's right.
INTERVIEWER What was the draw?
SKOLNIKOFF The MIT yo-yo.
The draw was that I loved MIT.
I had loved my two years here as a graduate student and postdoc.
And it was all about Salvador Luria, because while I was at
And I picked up virus work again after my post-doc, and I was publishing some interesting stuff.
And a professor at Harvard became aware of it, Bernie Davis.
And Bernie said, would you come and look at a job at Harvard?
And I said, I'll come, give a seminar.
And so I did.
And Luria heard about it.
And Luria then engineered an offer to me on the basis of what people knew about me.
I don't think I came and gave a little seminar.
Because he didn't want me to go to Harvard.
He said if you're going to go anywhere, you should come to MIT.
And anyway, in the end, Bernie Davis didn't offer me a job because I didn't show enough enthusiasm for teaching to satisfy him.
It's an interesting story.
And so I had this offer from MIT.
And then it's a sort of long story what made me make the decision.
But anyway, I decided I wanted to leave Salk.
And so I pulled this offer out of my drawer and called up Salva and said I'm coming.
In those days we didn't negotiate for anything.
When I came back as a postdoc, I was actually supported on a training grant of Luria's.
Luria just watched over me the whole time.
So I felt very comfortable that I was coming back to a situation where I'll be treated well and I'll get what I need to do what I want to do.
The importance of mentors.
I said last night in a tribute to Luria that he's my father in some very real ways.
And I try to be a dutiful son.
That's remarkable because that's basically how Vincent Racaniello would like you to think of him with regards to David Baltimore.
So we could be really two mentor steps away from the truth right now.
If Salvador Luria was a guy who understood the limitations of molecular biology and went ahead under the pretenses that animal virology was animal virology and that's it,
then we just could be, you know, taking David Baltimore's word for it.
Taking Vincent Racaniello's word for it is terrifying, but that's essentially where we are right now, as of his death.
Can you walk me through, in a kind of summary fashion, your research after you got here?
Yes, I can.
So I came here having started as a graduate student working on, we'll call it poliovirus.
I was actually working on a relative of polio, but then I switched to working with polio itself.
It's an RNA virus.
has a very particular biology because it is an RNA virus.
There was very, very little known about the biochemistry of RNA virus infections, and so that's why I say I had walked into a totally open situation.
I had made a lot of discoveries about it, and there were lots of fascinating things about it.
When I arrived back here, it was to continue to work on poliovirus.
I set up the lab to do that, and I got graduate students and postdocs.
Things were going very well.
One of the people in my lab, I married, Alice Wong.
And she had actually come to my lab first at the Salk Institute.
And we had come east together.
And it was, by that time, no surprise that we got married.
And she had, for her thesis.
worked on a very different kind of RNA virus called vesicular stomatitis virus.
And she'd made very important discoveries about it and then had originally come to work with me in order to develop her skills in various new approaches to viruses that we were using on polio.
So she was working on polio.
And that was the only object of focus of my lab.
And she said one day, you know, it might be fun to pick up VSV again, this virus that she'd worked on.
Now, I find it very curious, first of all, that somebody would work on poliovirus when essentially there's a vaccine that makes polio irrelevant.
So why do you work on it then?
Is the idea to, I don't know, understand?
I mean, how can I say this the useful way?
I don't, I don't fully get it.
You can do anything you want.
You can work on anything you want, but you work on polio virus.
You see, there's a,
Of course the great big assumption here is that all of these signals that they're measuring are outside of us and independent of us or our microbiome.
They're just all entities in and of themselves and he's the expert on them and is sure of that for some reason.
That's the part of it that doesn't make any sense to me.
And all the books that I've read so far and all the papers that I've read so far in my entire lifetime have never given me any, you know, even cartoon level understanding of how that would be possible.
And instead, what I see is it's very likely that all eukaryotes already signal in this way, extracellularly.
And it's not, you know, cells that are getting rid of waste material or anything like that, but it's communication.
it's homeostasis.
I don't know what it all is, but it's something that already occurs.
And so these signals that they're telling us are outside of us and do things despite us or, or collaborate against us.
These are all, these are myths because they require you to not think about the bacteria, the microbiome and their,
phages and their bactericins.
They don't want you to think about anything that bacteria do, release, excrete, regulate.
They don't want you to think about any of the genetic signals that might come from that in and of itself irreducibly complex background.
Never mind what we are as people.
If you just think about everything that's not bacteria, we're still pretty darn complex.
But we wouldn't exist at all without the compost heap that we carry around in our guts, without the microbiome that we have on our skin and lining the mucosal layer of our internals, a mucosal layer that is very homologous to the mucus on coral reefs.
The microbiome that is compartmentalized very homologous to that in insects and lots of other, you know, life forms, even the microbiome of the roots of plants.
And so this new biology is going to be quite exciting to put together.
It is quite exciting to be putting together.
And it is the flip side of the coin is this pseudobiology.
It's what makes the new biology look so good.
And obviously it's because it fits the whole so much better, right?
Everything fits into place a lot better when you start talking about life as an irreducibly complex pattern integrity with a trajectory across time.
rather than the mechanical and chemical product of a single tape of information called DNA, or 23 of them in pairs.
I'm excited, ladies and gentlemen.
And by this time, I had been working on polio for much of 10 years.
And so the idea of doing something new was a good idea.
Anyway, I had various interests in viruses, and so I could have a look at a new virus and see how it related to the virus I'd worked on.
So we started growing it, and I had a graduate student start working on it.
Alice went back to working on it a little bit, and I did some work, because at that point I worked in the lab.
We made some really remarkable discoveries about VSV.
It was fundamentally different than polio in all of its strategies.
I could describe why, but that's another story.
I did one last experiment I did with it.
was to show that it contained a polymerase in the virus particle that copied the genome into complementary RNA.
Very different than polio, which encoded a polymerase that was made in the infected cells, but didn't carry it in with it.
And that experiment
led me to think maybe there are a lot of other viruses that have polymerases in their virion because that would provide a unifying notion of how these viruses work.
And so we started.
And in my humble opinion what it actually does is it belies the national security lie.
Because rather than the magic of viruses being that they contain the instructions to make more of themselves, and once they get inside of your cells, they are able to hijack that machinery and instruct it to make the proteins that are unique to it.
that those proteins will fold and assemble correctly and then know enough and be directed to copy that new foreign RNA genome and then instruct the machinery of the cell to make the proteins necessary to package that mRNA
around N-proteins, bundle it up, and put it into particles that are identical to the particle that came in.
And this DNA code is about 30,000 base pairs long, and all we really know is that there's a spike protein, an N-protein, an S-protein, and da-la-la-la.
And the rest we take on their word.
The rest we trust to cartoons.
The rest we trust to people like this.
It is because David Baltimore says that these particles have enzymes in them that proves how they work.
And it's in its insistence that that's all it proves.
When in fact, what it shows is that the human body and a lot of other mammalian systems are capable of packaging RNA and maybe also an appropriate enzyme into a small exosome and secrete it.
That's all it says.
And so the coexistence of these particles, the coexistence of these signals with other symptomologies is only that.
It's only correlation if that.
If they're telling the truth about the molecular signals that they purport to be finding and reproducing.
Now, keep in mind, during this time at MIT that he says he worked on the polio virus and VSV virus and made lots of discoveries with his lover and to become his wife, is when him and Vincent Ranson Yellow were able to use the technology for the Human Genome Project to create the RNA
of the poliovirus sequence and transfect cells with it and cause the formation of more poliovirus particles apparently.
So the first ever employment of synthetic pure quantities of DNA or RNA in order to transform cell cultures to produce exosomes with particularly, let's say, predictable quantities inside of them was accomplished by him at MIT with poliovirus.
But somehow or another, that's not part of it.
He's talking about his wife and VSV.
gathering viruses from various places.
And in fact, it turned out to be true, that a lot of other viruses had polymerases, and we published a number of papers on it and worked on it.
And by that time, we could pretty well characterize most viruses in terms of their overall strategy, except for the RNA tumor viruses, which caused cancer as their primary interest.
And that and so he's involved with cancer viruses, just like Bob Gallo.
He's involved in the myth of cancer, just like Bob Gallo, you see, all these people that went through that, that lab, that area, that timeframe,
The ones that are still around, they seem very sketch.
And you can put Robert Malone right damn well right in the middle of that little Lollapalooza of liars, I assure you.
Had a totally obscure molecular biology.
How they, what polymerases they used, how they dealt with information, all of that was totally unclear.
But Howard Temin had, for 10 years, been saying that their RNA viruses, they pretty well have to copy their RNA into DNA to make any sense out of the way they transform cells, the way they cause cancer.
But he couldn't prove that.
And really, almost nobody believed him until about the last year before I got involved with it, where there started to be some glimmers of suggestion that maybe he was right.
I think that David Baltimore was inserted in front of Howard Temin so that reverse transcriptase would never be identified as an endogenous enzyme, but would be assigned to the foreign entity of the viruses.
So I did with RNA tumor viruses, what I had done with many other viruses, was to look in the virus particle for polymerase.
But in this case, because of the possibility that it might copy into DNA, we looked for an enzyme that would copy RNA into DNA.
Such an enzyme had never been seen before, and its existence would have, and did, violate the central dogma of molecular biology as enunciated by Crick.
which was that DNA made RNA made protein.
And so the point of it is, is that if David Baltimore and his work are responsible for making sure that you never realize that our RNA can be back translated into DNA or modify the DNA
or anything like that might happen, then you'll never attribute this to our own biology, but instead attribute all these magic, magic enzymes to the world of viruses.
Understand what he's saying.
The virology biology has virtually a functional lock
a monopoly on all of the enzymes that violate the central dogma.
None of the enzymes that violate the central dogma are ours.
They are the property of viruses that, to a large extent, have been defined by David Baltimore and his wife.
And here we're going to say that there's information flow back.
Now, when you think about it, from a chemical point of view... When you think about it, if it's a pathogen and it's putting its DNA where it's not supposed to be, it's not information flow back.
And yet somehow or another, this extremely smart Nobel Prize winning man calls it information flow backwards.
Wouldn't it be pathogenic genetic insertion of information?
It's not information flow backwards unless it's our own enzyme and unless our system uses that process, right?
It's a weird sort of semantic inaccuracy.
That was not a big deal.
If RNA made DNA, DNA made RNA.
It was all the same sort of polymerization reaction and the same basic biochemistry, but it had never been seen and nobody knew it could happen.
From a strategic point of view, in terms of the strategies of information flow in the system, it had enormous implications.
So I looked for it and it was a two-day experiment.
I showed it was there.
He showed it was there and attributed it to the virus and the rest is history.
Because now you have to argue with his dead body.
Stopped work for a while to protest against the Cambodia invasion.
Got back into the lab, finished the experiments and published them.
That was June 1970.
What a weird thing to say.
Wow.
He protested the Cambodia invasion.
Nice.
Howard Temenak, turns out, had a post-doc, Mr. Tani, who at the same time did similar experiments.
And so we published back to back.
And five years later we received the Nobel Prize for it.
INTERVIEWER 1 Did the Nobel Prize, was it a surprise to you?
a total surprise.
I was actually on sabbatical in New York when it was announced, and I got on the first shuttle flight that I could find and flew up to Boston to celebrate.
My wife wasn't even around.
She was in
She had called me.
She told me I'd won the prize first because she was at a scientific meeting in Scandinavia and heard about it a little before it was formally announced.
Called me.
I didn't even know really when the prizes were announced.
I wasn't aware of them.
People had said you're going to win a Nobel Prize.
I figured that someday it'll happen when I'm 60.
INTERVIEWER 1 Did it turn out to be difficult to get it so young?
Not difficult.
What a stupid question.
No, it was perfectly easy.
Went to Stockholm and were anointed.
I thought you had to nominate yourself.
Is that not true?
Somebody correct me.
I thought you had to nominate yourself.
Did it make a difference in your work?
Well, it certainly made a difference in my life in the sense that it
It gave me a public, I mean not real public, but scientific public notoriety that led people to invite me to all sorts of fancy.
It gives him a scientific sort of infallibility is what it does.
It gets people to treat him like a rock star.
It gets people to stay away from any of the things that they've declared unequivocally true.
And essentially by giving him the Nobel prize, everything that he stands for as an RNA virologist and a guy that thinks that the viruses have come up with all these unique ways to violate the central dogma with fancy enzymes, this guy is real.
This science is real, and therefore, we all have to accept that none of this enzymology has anything to do with our own biology.
It's just the viruses that are all working against us with a great deal of, I don't know, evolutionary determination.
Venues, and to even want to hear me pontificate on things I didn't know anything about.
But so it was a distraction to some extent.
It was an opportunity from other points of view.
And it was a responsibility.
because there are very few Nobel laureates, and we are seen as a sort of embodiment of the science in which we're involved.
So he totally understands, you see.
It's not at all a humble scientist who just wanted to know like he claims it was.
It was a guy who understood how easy it was to make and discover new things.
It was a guy who was enticed by something else, I think.
I think it's very interesting that he passed through all of these laboratories, but never really tells you what he got out of all of them.
I think what it was is that molecular biology was stalling.
Molecular biology was stalling in the hands of Max Delbruck and DeBecco and Rebecca and all these guys.
And it was stalling because bacteria and bacteriophages were an irreducible complexity.
And the farther they got into it, the more irreducibly complex it seemed.
And of course, with metagenomic sequencing, we've come to understand the world of phages and bacteria as incredibly complex, irreducibly so.
The world of viruses in the microplankton of the ocean is a universe in and of itself.
And so these genetic backgrounds are real and maybe the foundational biological firmware on which we have evolved or emerged.
The very emergent properties that we are might be dependent on this entire bacteria background that we have on Earth.
We might be the second or third layer of emergent properties from physics and chemistry that originate from the genetic background that is created by the genetic noise that is created by the entire bacteria, archaea, all this stuff that is the microflora of our planet.
And so we think of birds and you know, all the stuff that David Attenborough was talking about is life on earth.
But if that life on earth is just the tip of the iceberg, and that the actual iceberg that's under the water is all the microbiome of the earth, and all of the genetic signaling and all the proteomics of that microbiome is the foundational soil, the genetic soil that we grow in.
then all this talk about the Baltimore scheme and about viruses and about all these polymerases that are unique to viruses is just bullshit.
It's bullshit that's trying to tell you a ridiculous story about an irreducibly complex microbiome of the earth, of which we are an emergent property.
You can almost think of us as
as bio suits for bacteria.
Or the consequences of, I don't know, it's hard to really say it without, you know, giving away the whole book.
But it's, I'm really excited.
I'm really excited because this new biology is real.
And I think it's at the perfect time in American history for that biology to come out in America first.
And so we become the spokesman for all those thousands of other people who don't have Nobel Prizes, but who are working toward exactly the same aims that I'm working toward in terms of development of knowledge about biological systems.
So that's a responsibility.
INTERVIEWER 1 I would imagine it makes it easier to get funding for things.
So everybody imagines it would make it easier to get funding, and it's not really true.
In fact, the panels that review you are as likely to turn down a Nobel laureate as anybody else if they don't think you're making sense.
I think there's always a suspicion, in fact, that you're trying to coast on your laurels rather than getting down there in the trenches with everybody else.
So no, I don't think it's that.
Now, from other points of view, particularly if you're getting money not from the federal government through the peer review system, but through other venues, charitable organizations and things like that.
Then having a Nobel Prize gives you a visibility, and they want you in their stable, because then they can say we're funding 20 Nobel laureates or whatever.
So there is, from those points of view, an opportunity.
I don't know whether I ever would have been introduced to Jack Whitehead, which is now a story coming up here.
My next one.
Yes, okay.
A story coming up here.
See, he knows that there's a script.
She says, yeah, it's the next one.
They laugh because this is a scripted interview.
A scripted interview with no science at all.
I mean, what an archive for MIT, right?
Like, what a bullshit show.
Don't forget that MIT is right at the heart of this, because Stephanie Seneff is MIT, because Steve Kirsch is MIT, because the guy with Gene Drives is MIT Media Lab's runner.
Like, MIT is there, yo.
If I didn't have a Nobel Prize, I just don't know actually, literally, how much a role that played.
But it certainly made me a more visible person to him and to other people.
Yeah, there are a lot of pluses.
So let's talk about the Whitehead Institute, since you were so involved in its creation.
And I'm interested in how it came about.
That kind of makes him Kevin McKernan's boss, because he was Mike Lander's boss.
It's very interesting, the Whitehead Institute.
About the objections that existed at the very beginning.
Well, in 1980, so I won the prize in 75, and I came back to MIT, and now I actually switched my research focus from viruses to immunology, and then carried actually both interests in parallel for many years thereafter.
So I become interested in cellular systems and in the development of the immune system, which is just one of the most wonderful puzzles in biology.
The most wonderful puzzles in biology, the development of the immune system.
And you can augment the development of the immune system by intramuscularly injecting a combination of substances.
We've been doing it for centuries.
Do you see why now you know that he's a scripted actor?
That's just absurd.
But it's really nice because if our immune system was to use retroviruses, I don't know, to modify T-cells across, you know, the entire body or modify the function of immune cells across the entire body, that would be a terrible thing for us to understand.
And so they call it retroviruses.
They're all outside of us.
We don't know where they come from, but they're just floating around and sometimes they get inside.
It was a problem that I had an interest in from the time I'd been at the Salk Institute, so for maybe 15 years.
Or 10 years.
But I hadn't done anything about it because you couldn't work on it from a molecular point of view.
You could work on it from various other points of view.
And then Susumu Tanegawa did his great experiment, which opened up the molecular biology of the immune system.
And I wanted to get into that business and really, I had this itch I hadn't scratched for all those years.
And so from between 75 and 80, I developed that.
So Susumu Tonigawa was the guy I mentioned yesterday.
He's the guy who discovered the way that a set of genes in B cell clones, in B cells can be used, spliced and
And... what the hell?
Oh, I think it's Ravens.
The DNA can be spliced and somatically mutated to generate almost infinite complexity in the variable region of antibodies.
And this discovery is a single author paper that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for, really nice work.
And then later in his career, he switched to neuroscience, and that's how I got to meet him.
I actually met him at a meeting in Svalbard or on Spitsbergen in Norway, and he's a very interesting, intimidating figure, of course.
Anybody who's won the Nobel Prize, if you meet him at a scientific meeting, is in his, you know, in his home waters, and so it's pretty intimidating.
I didn't do much more than
ask him a dumb question or two and shake his hand.
At the time you know there was still no selfies being taken and that kind of thing.
And unfortunately at that scientific meeting I had to leave the morning that they took the group picture.
And so I'm not in the group picture which really is
quite disappointing for me because there were like three Nobel Prize winners at that meeting and a lot of people that I still love and respect were at that meeting.
It was just a great moment in my career as a neuroscientist and it was a transition from working in Oslo, Norway to working in Trondheim.
So everybody that was in the Moser lab that was at that meeting, it was my first time meeting all of them and a lot of them would become
Really, you know great friends and actually my middle son is named after one of those guys.
So it's a
It's a really, I loved that time in my life because it really felt like I was a biologist living on the cutting edge of biology, meeting three Nobel Prize winners on one airplane ride to one conference where we were all staying at the same hotel, except for me, because I was staying up the street at a hostel.
And so everybody got a rumor that I was camping there.
And of course camping on Svalbard would mean that you would need to have tripwires around your tent because they have polar bears there.
So the first day that I was at the meeting, everybody was saying, there he is.
That's the guy from Johan Storm's lab.
He's camping here, dude.
He's hardcore.
And so they all came to me and asked me where my rifle was because I had walked into the place without a rifle, but they assumed that I was camping, said I must have a rifle.
And so I was completely confused for like the first,
Half day I was there because I was keeping having to explain to everybody that I wasn't in danger last night and everything would be okay.
It was really funny.
Anyway, I just I can't believe how far this journey has been and how far I've come on it and and the wild and crazy place it has brought me.
I'm just very happy that I have my wife and my family.
and that we're all healthy and still kind of able to laugh about it now after all this awfulness.
So this is a lot of fun for me now.
And then carried it forward.
Many of my discoveries beyond the Nobel Prize were in immunology.
So in 1980, I got a call from Joshua Lederberg.
Josh was then president of the Rockefeller University.
And he was an advisor to Jack Whitehead.
Jack had a series of advisors, wise people.
And he said, do you know about
Mr. Whitehead.
And I said, well, I did know a little bit, because he had once come through Cambridge and had thought about setting up his institute in Cambridge, but had decided not to originally.
And that was in roughly around 75.
He developed the Technicon Corporation, which sold all of the clinical analysis equipment in the world at that time.
It developed these huge machines that could in parallel look at a whole range of parameters, very quantitative.
Who are we talking about?
Is that Jack Whitehead?
And had thought about setting up the Nobel Prize.
We're in immunology.
So in 1980, I got a call from Joshua Lederberg.
Josh was then president of the Rockefeller University.
And he was an advisor to Jack Whitehead.
Jack had a series of advisors, wise people.
And he said, do you know about?
Mr. Whitehead, and I said, well, I did know a little bit, because he had once come through Cambridge and had thought about setting up his institute in Cambridge, but had decided not to originally.
And that was in roughly around 75.
He developed the Technicon Corporation.
which sold all of the clinical analysis equipment in the world at that time.
It developed these huge machines that could in parallel look at a whole range of parameters very quantitatively.
And he'd sold that to, well at the time when I met him first, that is when he came through here, he hadn't yet sold it.
But it had gone public.
And it made him a billionaire, when a billionaire was a very unusual thing.
And so he had made a commitment to spend $135 million
build an institute, which was his form of giving back to the world from which he felt he had derived his fortune.
But he was doing it in a very tax-efficient way that was going to allow him to get all sorts of benefits from it.
So it was a mixed set of motives that he had.
And he finally said he's going to do this at Duke University in somewhere around 75.
And he set it up at Duke.
But he was meddling too much.
Duke had bought a bit of a pig and a poke because of all this money involved.
And they finally splintered, came asunder.
And so he sort of bought them off.
He gave them a fair amount of money and closed down that chapter.
But by this time he had sold the company.
and had no longer these complicated tax reasons to do this, the idea had captured him of building an institute.
And he had been convinced by his advisors, Lederberg and others,
that he should do this in fundamental biology, not in medically oriented biology.
And I think it's interesting to point out here that I know from Mark Kulak's work that Lederberg was also kind of a good friend and advisor to the Sackler family.
So it's interesting that he's advising a lot of extremely rich dudes on what to do with their money in terms of biological things.
Which is the original idea and where he had gone to Duke because of its medical school.
And he was looking around for somebody to be the director and to build this thing, to create it.
And so I got this call from Josh, would you come down and talk to him?
And so I came down.
It was in August of 1980, as I remember.
And he said, if you were going to build an institute like this, or how would you advise me to focus an institute like this?
And Jack later told me that my answer to that question was the first time that he'd asked that question and gotten an answer which was not about the individual's own research.
And I'm going to make the assertion here that actually Joshua Lederberg is the one who told him to give this answer because Joshua Lederberg is the guy who coined the term euphenics.
to be a homologue to eugenics.
Eugenics being the idea of selecting genes in order to make the next generation better.
Euthenics would be the selection of developmental processes and developmental choices that optimize the expression of a particular genome.
It's kind of the flip side of the coin.
If you believe that there's a genome, you also have to understand that there is a, that it codes for a pattern integrity with a trajectory across time and that trajectory could be optimized.
And we're not even thinking about how that trajectory even manifests, never mind could be optimized by environmental conditions, et cetera.
And so Joshua Lederberg was intimately aware of that to the extent to which he even coined a word, you know, like microbiome.
And so it's very curious that he says he was called by Joshua Lederberg, Joshua Lederberg encouraged him to imply, and then his answer was very Joshua Lederberg-esque.
Listen carefully.
I didn't say I would build an immunology institute or a virology institute.
I looked at the currents in biology of the time and said... The currents of biology in the time.
Don't forget that he told you earlier that Swarthmore biology was kind of an old biology, like an 1800s biology program because they were working on embryology and development.
But then he got a call from Joshua Lederberg and apparently development was really important.
That I build an institute focused on developmental biology.
Because developmental biology was then in a, in a, uh, sort of on a takeoff platform of understanding.
And there was lots to be done and lots of good people, lots of good trainees.
Uh, this was a... I guess Swarthmore was in the perfect position to kick some ass at this time, huh?
Something you could really do.
And Jack was very impressed that I didn't tell him, I didn't ask him for the money so that I could do my own work, that I was really looking at it from a sort of global perspective.
So I got a call back from him not long after that interview and he said, would you consider being director?
And I spent a little while thinking about that, talking to the family and whatever else.
And now imagine if Joshua Lederberg's the one who told him to answer that question like that.
Now, what does he owe Josh?
How much influence does Josh have over our boy David Baltimore?
And said, I was willing to sign on as an advisor to him
And I would then create or try to find the conditions to create the Institute.
And if I could create it in a form in which I was excited by it, then I would be director.
And behind that, and Jack recognized that, was a view
MIT was the place for this.
He had not thought of MIT.
He was still focused either in the Ivy League or in schools that had medical schools, Stanford, although Rockefeller was on his list because Josh was from Rome.
So he said, but you have to do a serious consideration of the venue for it.
And I said I would.
And so I talked to people at Stanford, and I talked to people at Harvard, and I talked to people at Rockefeller and elsewhere.
And it became clear that
at MIT.
And it became clear that, first of all, I could do it at MIT, but it was going to take a lot of political work, because it was some just totally brand new concept.
I'll tell you about the concept in a minute.
That perhaps we could do it at Stanford, because Don Kennedy was then president of Stanford and saw the attraction, actually knew Jack.
They probably couldn't do it at Rockefeller because the faculty at Rockefeller would never do anything new.
And that you could do it at Harvard Medical School as easily as anywhere else in the world.
Just easily.
Because Harvard was already an institution, the medical school in particular, built out of various independent elements.
Mass General, Brigham and Women's, whatever, Dana-Farber.
And so another institution, they were all set up for it.
MIT was not.
The ground rules of this from Jack's side were this has to be an independent institution with its own board of directors and its own finances.
And what I said was, fine, but it has to be allied with a major center.
And Jack already knew that because he knew that $135 million, $35 million was built.
So are we supposed to believe that up until this point, he just led a lab about RNA viruses working on polio, and now he's going to lead a national institute funded to the tune of millions and millions of dollars from one of the few billionaires in America?
And we're supposed to believe that that just happened because Joshua Lederberg gave him a call?
Joshua Lederberg, the guy who writes, like, reviews about bioweapons?
Back then, he's already working for the government and sitting in on advisory committees to the president?
Really?
That Joshua Lederberg called him?
The $100 million endowment was simply not enough to build a totally freestanding institution.
And so I then went into this negotiation phase, said to Jack, I think MIT is the right answer.
He said, well, you started off feeling that way, so it's not a surprise you came up with that answer.
I admitted that I had a predilection to MIT because
I felt that I knew how MIT could provide quality control for the institution.
And quality control was the most important thing that you would get by alliance with a major institution.
And that was easy to see.
Because we'd make all of the faculty members of the biology department.
And then they'd have to fit the same criteria as any other member of the biology department.
One thing MIT knew how to do very well was to find the very best people in biology and bring them to the institution.
So that made the Whitehead Institute a sort of arm of the larger biology effort at MIT, and that was great.
We'd done that with the Cancer Center, but the Cancer Center was not an independent institution.
It didn't have its own board or finances.
It was a center of MIT.
Here we were trying to do something new.
That ran into a buzzsaw.
And it was made worse by the fact that it was played up by the Boston Globe.
as a takeover of MIT biology by this financier, Whitehead.
There were also some political currents.
There was, in particular, a very strong socialist-oriented faculty member in political science, whose name I now forget, who said this was a corporate takeover of MIT.
And so it became an embarrassment in the newspapers.
It became a cause celeb on campus.
And we were trying to take it through the faculty and get a faculty vote to agree to this unique situation for MIT.
Because MIT had never formally affiliated with another organization before.
MIT had different schools, School of Science, School of Engineering, whatever.
But that's as far as it went.
Everything was part of one faculty.
And they felt that I was going to get too much power as director in dictating who was getting hired at MIT.
Of course, I'd set this up so that, in fact, the director wouldn't have that power because the biology department would be centrally involved in every appointment.
But people were worried.
New.
New at universities is often very hard to sell.
So we had a stormy period of a year.
I just find it remarkable that a guy whose career is based on life-changing, science-changing, seminal discoveries hasn't told us about a single one of them in any context at all.
Hasn't told us about one life-changing moment with any details that really mean anything.
He just went to summer camp, and that changed his life forever.
Then he met some people, and that changed his life.
And he discovered things.
It was pretty easy.
And then he went to Stockholm and accepted the prize.
It's just kind of how it happened.
He got a call from Joshua Lederberg.
He gave the right answer.
The next thing you know, he's starting the Whitehead Institute.
Why not, right?
It makes sense.
He just keeps falling face first into the butter.
negotiation, and finally a vote in the faculty.
And the faculty finally voted in favor of it.
INTERVIEWER 1 What do you think convinced them?
INGRAHAM I think, why do we need so much history about how they voted on the Whitehead Institute if the Whitehead Institute ended up to be some kind of new model for how science was done with all kinds of seminal discoveries as the result of the investment?
Why would you spend so much time on that story if you weren't running out the clock on this interview in the first place?
This is like looking through a stuffed animal trying to find the internal organs.
There's nothing here.
Ultimately, MIT is a risk-taking institution.
It takes a long time to get to that point, and they had to be convinced that
That we thought through every question, but there was no question that anybody could ask in the faculty meeting, for instance, that we couldn't answer, that we hadn't thought through, that we didn't have an answer to.
And so it was a very important time.
Because initially, when I was putting this thing together, I couldn't have answered a lot of questions.
But by the time it came to that vote, every question had come up and debated in the biology department.
I'd had some real skeptics in biology.
And had to convince them.
And finally Boris Magasanik was the most important skeptic who turned around and said, I'm convinced that we've put in place all of the things that will make this a success for MIT and for itself.
Howard Johnson played a very important role.
Howard was, at that point, chairman of the board.
And he said, from the first time I met him and described it, he said, we have to do this.
INTERVIEWERS It's someone from MIT that's interviewing him.
SKOLNIKOFF And he helped me politically and was terrific about it.
Paul Gray, who was president, was
little uncertain because he was being torn from various sides by various factions.
I could understand more.
INTERVIEWER 1 So from your years as director of the Whitehead Institute, what accomplishments are you most proud of?
WILCZEK Oh, I'm most proud of the Whitehead Institute as an institution.
A year after we opened its doors, it was known as one of the premier biological research venues in the world.
Because we'd aggregated this remarkable group of people.
And their impact was instantaneous, really.
Jerry Fink, Harvey Lodish, Bob Weinberg.
And then we developed a, in terms of programs, I'm most proud of the Fellows Program.
Because I said one of the things, I said this very early on, that one of the things I wanted to see us do was to find another track for the development of young people.
The standard track is you go to graduate school, you do a post-doc, and you get a faculty position.
There's no place in there for somebody who has the strength of independent thinking.
I love that.
Heroic stories in bureaucracy.
That's fantastic.
Full trappings of faculty.
That could be a band name.
Committees and all of that.
And so I set up that track as a Fellow of the Institute.
And we had seven slots for that.
And some of the very best people in America today, in the world, and scientists came through as Fellows.
And it turned out to be a proving ground for young faculty at Whitehead, too.
I didn't want it to be that.
We, in fact, said we were not going to hire these people.
But then they were so good and so wonderful that we could not hire them.
And so we hired David Page, who is now the director of Whitehead, and Peter Kim, who's the research director at Merck Corporation, and lots of others.
No slouches?
Oh, we had a slouch or two.
Why don't we talk first about the Cancer Center?
Okay.
Why don't you talk a little bit about your involvement and its importance?
This again takes us back to Salvador Luria.
Don't forget that Robert Malone also set up a cancer center at the Winbur Institute, which is still being talked about in the news today.
Luria in 1970, 71.
Robert Malone being this advisor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and the anti-vax, fake anti-vax movement in America, one of the probably longtime advisors of Merrill Nass and advisors to Brian Hooker as well.
Realized that there was going to be a National Cancer Act.
and that that was going to provide money for building cancer centers.
And so he came to me.
I was the only one working on cancer at MIT at the time, at least the only one I know about.
And said, actually, there were probably some people in food science, but they weren't part of the effort.
He said, are you up for developing a cancer center here?
And it was very exciting to me because it would really increase my capabilities as well as providing a group of colleagues, interesting colleagues to work with.
And he went then to Jerry Wiesner, who was president, and said, I think we should develop this center.
And Jerry was just terrific.
He was very supportive.
He understood the trends in biology.
He was always near biology.
And Rosenblith, who was provost at the time, I guess, and who worked in biology.
We got the blessings of the administration and went forward.
And this was the only designated specialized cancer center in the country that wasn't connected to a medical school, that was just freestanding research in the fundamentals of cancer.
And arguably, we have made more contribution to modern cancer understanding than any other institution by keeping our focus on basic issues.
And of course, now this is
malooned out into the Koch Institute, which brings together cancer research scientists and engineers in the same brand new building that will be occupied a little later this year.
Why don't you rattle off a couple of the contributions?
The Koch Institute.
So this is in 2015, remember?
Phil Sharpe's discovery of splicing.
Phil Sharpe.
Without that, we would not understand
how mammalian cells process their information.
So interesting because Susumu Tonigawa was also talking about splicing, right?
And specifically how variability in the protein that results can be created through splicing and somatic mutation.
And so that process
Just to cite Sharpe is really very, very interesting.
It's a very interesting guy.
Great page on Philip Sharpe can be found at the Housatonic Archive at Housatonic Live.
Don't forget.
It was as fundamental a discovery as anything made ever in molecular biology.
Bob Weinberg's discovery that
Cancer was a genetic disease fundamentally.
I mean, he showed that when you transform a cell with a chemical, that the chemical actually hits an oncogene.
And we knew about oncogenes from work on viruses, but we knew nothing about them in cells.
So that's the second time he's used the word transform.
And of course, transform is the same as transfect.
It's the same family of verbs, but transfect usually refers to naked DNA or RNA that is applied to a cell, whereas transform really means that the genome or the DNA is really inscribed and can be passed along.
after cell division.
So again, he's using the terms that I suggest to you are terms that should have been used from the beginning of the pandemic.
And it's suggested to you for six years, are the reason why I was fired from the University of Pittsburgh, and no one has ever disputed that fact.
And here we have the one of the godfathers of molecular medicine or molecular biology telling us in using that vocabulary very precisely, accurately, exactly as I have.
a discovery for which I still believe he should have won the Nobel Prize, but he's won everything else but.
And I think the work that we did on Abelson virus, which set the basis for making Gleevec, and taught us a lot about the development of the immune system at the same time, was important.
It is remarkable how he's just not saying anything.
If these people made remarkable discoveries, you would say things like I would say things that, you know, John O'Keefe discovered place cells.
And for the first time, we had neurons that fired in patterns that seemed to correlate with locations in space and in time.
And so it was a pretty remarkable discovery.
And this model has been used, this model system has been used as a probe to brain function
for the decades after his initial discoveries.
You can say that if you know what somebody has discovered.
You can just say it.
And even if they haven't discovered anything, you can say what they're interested in thinking about, especially if you were the head of their department and hired them based on that.
And yet the paucity of details here really suggests that this man is full of shit.
It's unbelievable.
He is a national security actor without a doubt.
We were the fifth floor of the Cancer Center, the group that I've just told you about.
Weinberg, Sharp, me and Nancy and David Hausman.
Not bad.
And then it was cell biology downstairs.
Hines and Solomon.
and immunology harmonized and came here.
And how many of those needed to be scripted actors, national security state actors that were either performing for the national security state or executing experiments that were directed by the national security state, and therefore making discoveries that would be framed in the context of the national security state narrative, which would primarily be
that all of these really special enzymes that go against the central dogma are all outside of us, could never be a part of our own irreducible complexity, but are part of these things we call viruses and are the exclusive purview of virology departments.
and set up a fabulous immunology program, Susumu Togawa, who did such important work in immunology, and he didn't actually do his Nobel-winning experiment here, but he came here and developed that, and then moved himself into neurobiology, where he has been so important.
There was, I don't know if it had anything to do with being director of the Whitehead Institute, but you developed an interest in administration.
Right.
And wound up going to Rockefeller as president.
Can you talk a little about the appeal of administration?
Well, I got just a lot of positive personal feedback from developing the Whitehead Institute.
I love being the HNIC.
That's what he likes.
He really likes to be the HNIC.
That's what he likes.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of detail.
But it's mind expanding too.
begin to understand the full range of an institution and all of the kinds of problems that go into maintaining it, the requirements for excellence.
That's a Morgan Freeman reference to a movie where he was a principal.
And what that takes, both financially and in terms of people.
And so, I felt I had these capabilities and
that in a sense I owed it to the biological.
It is absolutely an admission that he is an administrator.
He never did any science and if he did it, he did it because he had to in order to keep the lid on the secret, to fake the data, to fake the discovery and control the idea.
To exercise those skills that I had developed.
And there is a thrill.
What about the skills that your wife developed?
It's really weird.
It's like all these guys have a wife that's actually also a scientist and made lots of discoveries.
Like Hilary Koprowski's wife is a virologist.
Lederberg's wife is a cell culture lady.
The next door neighbor of Henry Kissinger is like responsible for all the cell cultures of all these people.
It's all strange, like unnamed women.
About, um,
shaping an institution and maintaining its, developing its excellence or maintaining its excellence.
And so when I was approached literally by David Rockefeller to head the Rockefeller Institute, then now Rockefeller University, and
I had graduated from there, and so I had a feeling.
I don't know if you can hear it, but the coughing is actually there.
It's not at my house or in the garden.
It's somewhere in the background of that video.
For the institution, and I thought the institution could be doing a lot more than it was doing.
And so there was an opportunity for growth and reshaping there.
I accepted the job.
I love New York.
I always did love New York.
So going to New York to me was a thrill.
And for my wife.
Our kid had just gone off to Andover and so whether we were in New York or Boston didn't matter a whole lot.
She actually ended up becoming a denizen of New York.
She still lives there.
So you didn't mind spending less time in the lab at that point?
I didn't.
I moved my lab to Rockefeller.
And gave up on RNA viruses, you see, because the discoveries were made, the truth was established, and now there's no reason to test it anymore.
Don't make any mistakes here.
stages, so I kept it here for a while and then moved it down.
And I had some very good people.
I got a few more really terrific people at Rockefeller.
And I learned how to interact with a lab on an intermittent basis to still continue to be an effective leader, but spend a lot less time at it.
And the funny thing about developing young talent, which is what a laboratory is about,
is that what I call benign neglect is about as good a way of training people as any.
Because then they have to make their own decisions and live with them.
And they think them through and that makes them very powerful people when they leave the lab.
because they haven't been coddled along the way.
They've had to act as independent scientists through that training period with me, anyway.
And I think it's one of the reasons why the people who come out of my lab have been so successful.
INTERVIEWER 1 A lot of managers don't know that lesson, though.
INTERVIEWER 2 Well, you either believe it and prove the myth, or you fail in his lab.
I'm sure that's what happened, right?
I mean, I know that.
So I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but I think we have to talk about the Imanishi Carry.
So summarize it.
You know what I'm particularly interested in?
I'm wondering if now that time has passed, whether you have a sense of what it was really all about.
No, I had a sense then of what it was about and I haven't changed my mind.
And it was about political power.
It was about John Dingell and the way he could exercise unilateral political power in the U.S.
House of Representatives through his stewardship of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
He was a bulldog.
He was a bully.
He was out to aggrandize himself as the center focus of the Congress, and he was using this particular controversy to prove that NIH didn't know how to govern itself and therefore had to answer to him.
And it was awful.
When I talked to members of the MIT Corporation about it, many of them said, we have been in the same situation in relation to John Dingell, but because we were public corporations, we couldn't stand up to him.
I could stand up to him and did.
And I paid a heavy price for that, but I'm proud that I did it.
Wow, I'm very curious how much I believe that.
I don't know.
But more important, I stood up for some principles that were important and that he was not.
That feels a lot like a Fauci-Rand Paul orchestration to me.
Oh boy, I'm very interested.
Going to be the arbiter of how science was done.
No more details.
That's it.
You've written a lot about ethics and about who should be in positions to judge science subsequently.
Do you want to sort of summarize your position on that?
Well, I haven't actually written much about that or even thought about it in now 15 years.
That was all sort of over in 1995, I guess it was, 96.
And I did write a little after that, but certainly in the last 10 years I haven't thought about a lot.
There's no question who should judge science.
Other scientists are the only ones who can judge science.
Because science as it is happening is very technical, very complicated, very tentative.
And so all you need to do is control the people that specialize in a field, and a field can be falsified, faked, and maintained.
And that, of course, goes against everything that I know about science and knowledge.
That if you're not a master of something until you can explain it simply as a truth, then this is just ridiculous.
It's absolutely absurd what he's saying here.
15 years before the pandemic?
10 years before the pandemic?
I mean, this is nuts.
When was this?
I think this is 2015.
No, it was 2010, wasn't it?
We'll go in the beginning and figure it out.
If you look at it from the outside, the uncertainty and the tentativeness of it doesn't come through.
It can't.
People are looking for certainties.
And there are, in the larger sense, no certainties in science.
But certainly in the smaller sense, when things are really going on, when they're being argued in the journals, there is no certainty.
And coming in from the outside and trying to arbitrate that is just an impossibility.
So the peer review system, which is the core of American evaluation of science, is the right way to do things.
And in a deep sense, the only way to do things.
This is probably a good time to ask about the work you've done on science policy in Washington.
Interesting.
Wow.
So the link that Housatonic Live put in the chat reveals that Emashi Kari co-authored a scientific paper on immunology with David Baltimore.
The paper published in the scientific journal Cell, which is really good.
showed unexpected results on how the immune system rearranges its genes to produce antibodies against antigens.
Of course, Susumu Tonigawa's discovery.
And so interestingly, Margaret O'Toole, a researcher in Ishmani Kari's lab, claimed she could not reproduce some of the experiments in the paper and accused Imani Kashi Kari of fabricating the data.
Since the research had been funded by the U.S.
federal government through National Institutes of Health, the matter was taken up by the U.S.
Congress, where it was aggressively pursued by, among others, Representative Dingell.
Wow.
Wow, and then accused her of falsifying the data and barred her from receiving grants for 10 years.
She sounds like a weird kind of Judy Mikovits kind of, wow.
And it's not, it's not the supervisor's fault because he leaves people alone in his lab to do their own thing.
And that's kind of like nurturing them without nurturing them or something like that.
He just said that.
Holy shit.
Nice work.
Housatonic lives.
particularly around the search for an AIDS vaccine.
The AIDS vaccine?
You mean the one that Bob Gallo announced the day before or the day of, 9-11?
Holy shit!
What should be the role of government in supporting science?
Well, government's the only place that there is the money to do modern science.
Wow.
And the government funds science.
Except for when he started the Whitehead Institute with a private dude's money.
What is he talking about?
Open way.
The Koch Institute.
What is he talking about?
So that the results of it are available to everybody.
Now, there are patents.
I think this is an argument to invest the amount of money that they've invested in the Human Genome Project.
That's why he says it.
Because he is an example of how private money can fund science, and successfully, but only the government can afford to do the Human Genome Project.
Only the government could use and change the citizenry into an experimental animal.
And the patents do restrict the availability of science, particularly for commercial development.
But for basic development, everything's on the table.
And so the government is doing funding of science in the public's interest in a real sense.
And that should be their role.
Now, there are elements of science.
where the scientific, particularly as they relate to medicine, where the scientific community isn't necessarily excited by working on the problem.
But the public policy implications may be so important, as in the AIDS epidemic, that the government should use whatever power it has to get people to focus on the issue.
And just getting people to focus on it isn't enough.
You've got to get the very best people to focus on it.
Because they're the creative ones.
The number of really creative scientists at any one time is very small.
What a giant admission that is.
The amount of creative scientists at any one time is very small.
No shit.
That means that controlling these ideas is very easy for a select few of creative mentors.
Gosh dang, it's too easy.
It's like dunking on an eight foot rim.
the really only laboratory of its kind at NIH, a focused laboratory on AIDS vaccine development.
It's called the Virus Research Center.
I thought it was the Vaccine Research Center, but okay.
It's largely focused on HIV.
And so that aggregated some really very good people all together in the same building with the same focus.
You see how he is an administrator for all of this?
And it started with his acceptance of the role of the discovery of these viral enzymes.
For the love of goodness, girls, be quiet.
What was your experience like, or what's been your experience working in Washington?
Is it frustrating?
Oh, it's frustrating.
It's frustrating because you're looking for
very intelligent responses and you're getting responses which are political and which are often not from the very best people because the sort of bureaucratic machinery that runs the government isn't necessarily the very best people.
They're very well-meaning people, I must say.
I mean, I've never found people whose concern is any deeper than the people that work in government agencies on health.
But they're not necessarily the smartest people from the point of view of making policy.
So I ran the AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, which was a committee sort of advising the government on research focus, and all of us were frustrated on that committee.
And the AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, I mean, really, this is awesome.
Is that sort of But I should.
There is an interesting MIT connection here.
I was at some event.
I don't remember where.
Walter Rosenblith, who at that point was, this is now 1985.
Walter is long out of administration at MIT, but was very involved in Washington, and particularly in the Academy of Sciences.
And he came to me at this, it was a cocktail party or something, and said, David, you're going to get a call to ask you to co-chair a committee to consider what we should be doing about the AIDS epidemic for the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
He gets a lot of really good phone calls, you know.
I get shitty phone calls, like from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Ron Johnson on the same day.
And I'm just saying, if you can, I want you to accept and to do this.
I think it's very important.
And I did get a call, and I did accept, and it was very important.
This is the Reagan administration, and Reagan was running from anything that smelled like homosexuals or AIDS or
I mean, all those sort of Republicans got embarrassed about these things.
And I felt we had a responsibility in the scientific community to insist that we have a serious program of research in this area.
And I was able to put together some very good people to look at that question and to come up with that recommendation, and we did.
a report called, geez, I used to know the name of that report very well.
Anyway, the report to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
And we said there should be a billion-dollar research program, billion dollars was a lot of money at that point.
And it was a sort of audacious
recommendation, but it was accepted.
And within about two or three years, we had a billion-dollar research program.
So do you think of that as something, a contribution you've made for public service?
Absolutely.
Writing that report.
Is that photography?
Oh, no.
That's a rake in the back.
I thought that was photography on the video.
I did that with Shelly Wolf, who was then at Tufts, no longer with us.
And he was more on the medical side.
I was more on the research side.
It was as important as any report ever written at the National Academy.
So I want to talk about Caltech and your lab, but let me ask just a couple questions, generic questions, about MIT.
Having spent so much time here, what is it that you think makes MIT unique as an institution?
I think the good thing is why don't we just join our laboratories and, you know, sort of work.
Nobody had ever done that before at MIT, or at least in biology.
I don't know about anywhere else.
Well, collaboration is something that people talk about all the time and is now, I might say, almost an issue.
But when I went, when I came up at MIT, we had very little collaboration, even within the department, never mind the silos of the individual departments, but even within the department.
When I said I want to have a joint laboratory with Harvey Lodish, who was just coming.
I knew him from before.
He was coming, this was two years after I came, or maybe a year.
And I said, well, why don't we just join our laboratories?
Nobody had ever done that before at MIT, or at least in biology.
I don't know about anywhere else.
And that notion of sharing equipment, that your laboratory wasn't your fortress, that was new.
And when I actually set up the Whitehead Institute and set it up to be collaborative and to have central cores of equipment rather than having his equipment and her equipment and whatever, that was new.
and actually set a tone for the whole country of how you built these kinds of places.
But that's pretty remarkable because core facilities, they were really David Baltimore's idea.
I think they were more like a national security protocol.
that was changed once the aim was sequencing things.
So you needed to have a core facility to do a lot of these measurements because no one lab could afford to have this kind of infrastructure.
And so that's why you needed administrators that were read in on the goals, the higher goals of the system.
That's why you needed a guy like this to get a phone call from Joshua Lederberg so he could get a heads up on the right answer to the question and then just kind of naively say that I saw
what was coming and I said development or something like that.
This is all an elaborate hoax, an elaborate script with scripted actors.
No real progress in molecular biology has been made since Max Delbruck retired.
How about that?
He is sort of on the forefront.
Yes.
Now MIT has really picked up the mantra of collaboration and is focusing on it.
And I worry about
I worry about it from the following point of view.
Collaborative science tends to be complicated science that requires many different inputs.
but isn't necessarily driven by a single imagination.
Definitely not.
That's why Jessica Rose, one of the babbling advisors and meddlers behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and the Health Freedom Movement in America and Canada and Israel and elsewhere, is claiming that she did five postdocs, which she calls secondary degrees, and all she did was do some math modeling in every lab that she was in.
And so he's describing exactly the problem with modern academia that was probably starting to become exponentially exacerbated in the time that he took over and started administrating these institutions.
He knew exactly what was happening.
He knew exactly how this huge sums of money were being used to dilute and dilute and dilute the real investigations into real issues and diluting and
making invisible the lack of progress in molecular biology and genetics.
And it is the individual imagination of scientists that makes a difference in the world.
And so I'm no fan of collaboration per se.
Certain kinds of projects can only be done collaboratively, should be done collaboratively.
It's a good thing for those.
But if we lost the focus on individuals, we would lose the core of innovative science.
But we have already lost that, a long time ago.
Already at this time, I think.
He's not saying anything profound.
INTERVIEWER 2 That's an important thing to say.
Look, he thinks he's said something very profound, but he really hasn't.
Is there anything else you want to say about MIT that you think is important, too?
I could talk about MIT forever, but no, I needn't.
OK.
Let's look at Caltech.
Talk to me a little bit about the appeal of going there and how you felt about being president and your accomplishments there.
Let me say one other thing before that.
Because I came back to MIT again.
I went to Rockefeller.
And then the Imanishi-Kari incident exploded in my face in a way.
And I couldn't continue on as president there.
I stayed on for a while as professor because I had a laboratory with some momentum.
And my wife had a good job in New York.
But I was offered, actually,
Right when everything, when the day I announced that I was stepping down, I got a call from the president of MIT saying, you want to come back?
Do you want to come back?
And I said, give me a minute to think.
But I finally decided that is what I wanted to do.
And so I came back here in 94, 95.
And I figured that was going to be the rest of my career here.
It was going to be here.
I wasn't going to do anything else.
I didn't even think anybody would ever ask me to do anything else, because it had been such a sort of acrimonious situation.
I made a couple of mistakes as president of Rockefeller, which I won't talk about, but I could sometimes.
And so here I was, and I had now laboratories in Building, what was it, 68.
And I got a call from Caltech saying, would I talk to the search committee for the presidency?
And I said, sure, I'd talk.
And I figured they wanted my sage advice about institutions.
And there weren't that many people who had as much experience as I did in developing institutions at the time.
And they made it plain that they wanted to consider me for the presidency.
And I said,
You've got to know what you're getting into here and be absolutely certain that you're comfortable with it.
Now, the guy who had written the book about me called The Baltimore Case was a faculty member at Caltech, Dan Kevles.
He later left and went to Yale.
And he was the chairman of the faculty, actually, at the time, the man who had appointed the committee that then sought the presidency, sought the president.
So he had certainly vouched for me and knew as much about the incident as anybody in the world and could answer almost any question.
It's a lot about the incident, isn't it?
It's a lot about the incident.
It's amazing.
And it has nothing to do with the science and whether the science was proven or not.
It's just the incident.
Wow.
But the man who ran the search, Kip Thorne, was a theoretical physicist.
Caltech, as opposed to any other institution, has the faculty run the search for the new president.
Although the board ultimately makes the decision.
Kip talked to, and I know this, to every single person who had anything to do with me at any point in my life, if they were still alive.
And he finally convinced himself that they were safe offering me the presidency.
By that time, the emancipatory incident had resolved completely.
She had been entirely exonerated, and by implication, I had been exonerated for what I had done.
And so they finally said, you are our favorite candidate.
They made the recommendation to the board.
The board came to me and said, you are our chosen candidate.
Do you want the job?
Then I had to take the idea seriously.
And that was really tough.
Because I, as I said, had more or less made up my mind that I wasn't going to take on any more administrative activities.
I had a lot of science I wanted to do.
I was not unhappy about that.
I got excited by the idea.
Really what got me excited was that Caltech is a unique institution.
It has 900 undergraduates, 1,200 graduate students, 300 faculty, and it hasn't changed those numbers, except for a little creep in the graduate student side, in 30 years.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's a reason why he hasn't said anything in more than two hours of listening to him that has anything to do with fundamental biology.
That's because social media is a national security theater that is populated by national security actors that have been working behind the scenes in academia for decades already.
They have been curating a narrative about viruses and about the enzymes that they have that violate the central dogma, and this is all an illusion.
But they are all actors that trust the script because they understand the long-term vision of what's being done here, which includes the slow undermining of our understanding of who we are and what sovereignty means.
and the slow undermining of our sort of collective planning abilities with our children.
That's what social media is doing.
It's taking us off the same page with our kids.
It's starting to separate us from our kids.
And if we don't realize that that's the fundamental danger to the family and to the contiguous sort of sustaining of the human population on earth, these people are well aware of that.
and that they are willing and able to lie to us in order to govern us because they think the vast majority of us are too dumb to understand the responsibility that we have to future generations, where it's exactly the opposite.
Gingholm Biological understands exactly our obligations to future generations, what we already owe them for what we are borrowing from them.
The Human Genome Project is an abomination that may have made sense on paper 40 years ago, but now that we can see the irreducibly complex problem better than ever, the Human Genome Project is an abomination.
Ladies and gentlemen, the entire pandemic is based on pseudobiology.
It's fake biology.
It's bullshittery.
do not take it seriously except as a subject that can be studied.
And we will study it here as the History of Pseudobiology 432, a course.
Racism and COVID are now endemic to America and most of the West.
This is the kind of thing that makes sense to say on social media and maybe even makes sense to say on Meet the Press, but actually it's absolute bullshit.
And if you knew the real biology, you would understand why immunology, like endemicity is a myth, both of the process and an endpoint.
There's a background that they misconstrued as spread placebo made transfection safe.
And we have been fooling ourselves into thinking that we are ghostbusters by using their own tests against us.
This is
Ladies and gentlemen, this is for all the grandchildren of Earth.
That's why the Baltimore scheme exists as Virology 101.
And they are very vulnerable right now because they don't have a David Baltimore anymore.
They only have that guy from Harvard and Vincent Racaniello and a bunch of other people who are not ready to
to defend this narrative.
Ladies and gentlemen, now is the time.
We can teach our kids this problem.
We can teach our kids these ideas, and we can move forward with another sacred biology, a real biology 101.
Don't forget, you and your children are trapped in a national security theater if you're using social media willy-nilly.
So get out while you can.
Thank you very much for being here.
See you again soon.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Don't believe the red hat nonsense.
Don't believe the blue hat nonsense.
Just remember where we are at giga ohm biological intramuscular injections.
A dumb idea from the late 1800s.
Transfection of healthy humans was a crime.
RNA cannot pandemic and autism is a meaningless word by design.
Thanks for being here.
See you again tomorrow.
Could have been music there, but I guess it's the next slide that's going to give me music.
Don't forget to download PeerTube.
If you need any help, let me know.
So,
I have no responsibility for the current pandemic.
Stop lying!