WEBVTT 00:48.404 --> 00:48.664 so so 01:19.701 --> 01:20.482 you you 01:54.558 --> 02:04.182 This is so crazy. 02:04.582 --> 02:05.183 Like goosebumps. 02:05.203 --> 02:06.523 This is so crazy. 02:06.623 --> 02:08.344 I feel so nervous. 02:08.684 --> 02:10.065 Like what in the world, man? 03:06.318 --> 03:07.798 the the the 03:37.331 --> 03:40.534 I have no responsibility for the current pandemic. 03:40.994 --> 03:41.715 Stop lying! 04:08.570 --> 04:12.193 Oh, there was no doubt we were living through a revolution. 04:13.515 --> 04:18.339 I certainly experienced it as such, internalized it in that way. 04:19.360 --> 04:31.591 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. 04:32.492 --> 04:33.893 For the first time, we could 04:34.477 --> 04:39.343 have a biological assay for the genetic activity of an external molecule. 04:40.624 --> 04:51.157 So that publication, next to Francis Ryan, with the molding effects on my career, was talked about quite extensively. 04:51.721 --> 04:55.004 around the department at Columbia. 04:55.665 --> 04:59.008 It turns out we had a couple of people who were important liaisons. 05:00.229 --> 05:06.935 Alfred Murski, who has been remarked on as having been an inappropriate critic. 05:07.755 --> 05:10.637 of Avery McLeod and McCarty. 05:11.038 --> 05:14.120 I don't think it was inappropriate, but it was certainly a severe critic. 05:15.601 --> 05:28.009 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. 05:29.550 --> 05:33.711 But also Harriet Taylor was a graduate student working with L.C. 05:33.771 --> 05:34.051 Dunn. 05:34.071 --> 05:36.572 I had become interested in it as well. 05:37.372 --> 05:46.034 And she in fact went to do post-doctoral work in Avery's laboratory shortly after that time. 05:46.675 --> 05:52.036 So we had very close information linkages to the research that was going on there. 05:52.476 --> 05:54.176 We were very well informed about it. 05:54.196 --> 05:55.277 We reacted to it. 05:55.317 --> 05:55.877 There was a lot of 05:56.717 --> 06:01.119 critical dialectic, but it was not something that could be ignored. 06:01.139 --> 06:17.284 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. 06:17.304 --> 06:20.585 It was too important an issue to just accept casually. 06:21.145 --> 06:25.187 So as long as the debate was alive, that was where the scientific method operates. 06:46.495 --> 06:47.715 I'm damned for what I do. 06:49.355 --> 06:53.556 My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight. 06:54.316 --> 06:56.377 They've set me on a path from which there's no escape. 06:57.509 --> 07:00.630 I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost. 07:00.670 --> 07:04.691 And by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. 07:04.731 --> 07:06.651 What is my, what is my sacrifice? 07:08.492 --> 07:12.513 I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. 07:13.033 --> 07:15.314 I burned my decency for someone else's future. 07:15.714 --> 07:19.375 I burned my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. 07:19.395 --> 07:23.076 Now the ego that started this fight will never have a 07:23.922 --> 07:27.744 a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. 07:29.525 --> 07:30.745 So what do I sacrifice? 07:33.566 --> 07:33.987 Everything! 07:54.150 --> 07:55.771 I think truth is good for kids. 07:56.131 --> 07:59.973 We're so busy lying, we don't even recognize the truth no more in this society. 08:00.433 --> 08:02.054 We want everybody to feel good. 08:02.194 --> 08:04.155 That's not the way life is. 09:02.624 --> 09:03.027 Yeah. 10:14.304 --> 10:15.445 Good morning, everybody. 10:15.545 --> 10:17.267 Hello, welcome to the show. 10:17.347 --> 10:21.931 This is GigaOM Biological, a high-resistance, low-noise information brief brought to you by a biologist. 10:22.592 --> 10:26.976 Coming to you live from my garage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, planet Earth. 10:27.850 --> 10:35.255 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. 10:36.256 --> 10:37.817 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me. 10:37.857 --> 10:42.961 We have a second part of our initial offering of the History of Pseudobiology 432. 10:43.261 --> 10:44.782 This is point two. 10:44.802 --> 10:53.408 I am adopting the stardate version of episode numbering that was originally established by my colleague and 10:54.469 --> 11:00.232 sort of friend on the interwebs, Mr. Mark Kulak of Housatonic Live of Boston. 11:00.692 --> 11:08.895 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. 11:08.955 --> 11:10.756 It's like Dewey Decimals or something like that. 11:10.856 --> 11:17.179 Anyway, this is going to start to be a regular course offering, if you will, a sort of survey course 11:17.859 --> 11:34.349 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 11:38.792 --> 11:45.356 kind of pseudo-anti-vaxxer following the lead of all these national security state actors. 11:46.016 --> 11:50.479 I just had no idea that they were all on the same stage, on the same script. 11:50.559 --> 12:03.707 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. 12:03.927 --> 12:06.289 And it turns out that all of these people 12:07.150 --> 12:20.586 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. 12:20.606 --> 12:24.811 I'm just, I don't know, I'm humbled by the fact that so many of these people 12:25.592 --> 12:30.617 were in one way or another employed to meddle with me and my family. 12:31.638 --> 12:36.784 Someday I think all of them will be apologizing in one way or another. 12:37.805 --> 12:41.329 Let me just slide over here for a second and see if I can say hello to everybody. 12:42.573 --> 12:43.033 Good morning. 12:43.073 --> 12:43.974 My name is Jonathan Cooley. 12:44.014 --> 12:49.997 I come to you live out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania I am a former academic biologist. 12:50.057 --> 13:00.222 I like to say recovering a cat a magician I'm aware that at least Andrew Kaufman may have stolen the recovering Academy academic 13:01.382 --> 13:28.067 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 13:29.261 --> 13:32.123 hamster wheeling can spin out of control very easily. 13:32.163 --> 13:40.247 And I'm afraid we're about 30 plus years into a really bad hamster wheel spinning in terms of molecular biology. 13:40.967 --> 13:58.337 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. 13:58.957 --> 14:05.120 And so that kind of gross generalization has been going on for a long time with respect to reductionist biology. 14:05.880 --> 14:13.903 And I'm afraid that this has led to a lot of basically bankrupt ideas, which have become presuppositions to the current investigations. 14:14.403 --> 14:24.948 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 14:25.808 --> 14:44.832 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? 14:45.012 --> 14:52.034 Self-censoring and self-correcting that we have inevitably gone in the right direction as a group. 14:53.395 --> 15:06.031 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, 15:07.409 --> 15:14.493 that a lot of the prevailing ideas that have become assumptions with regard to biology are essentially wrong. 15:14.693 --> 15:33.443 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. 15:34.565 --> 15:49.194 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. 15:50.868 --> 16:04.037 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. 16:04.498 --> 16:12.103 And then there were a few people who passed through that sieve without that kind of disappointment, without that kind of like, you know, 16:14.969 --> 16:19.454 sort of losing the wind in your sails, thinking you were going to answer the big questions. 16:22.197 --> 16:25.400 And they got through it with Nobel Prizes. 16:27.022 --> 16:29.344 And I'm starting to really see that that 16:31.294 --> 16:42.062 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. 16:42.683 --> 16:57.414 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, 16:59.233 --> 17:13.554 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 17:15.786 --> 17:31.051 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. 17:31.731 --> 17:35.553 But if we did that, all of this illusion of the Baltimore scheme would disappear. 17:36.273 --> 17:44.716 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. 17:45.857 --> 17:49.700 It is because social media has made it even hard for us to see. 17:50.401 --> 17:52.603 Sorry, let me just switch over here now, now that I'm talking. 17:58.749 --> 17:59.210 Oh, I see. 17:59.290 --> 18:00.391 Sorry, I didn't set that up. 18:00.571 --> 18:01.392 My bad! 18:02.153 --> 18:05.476 Hopefully we're not missing too many frames here on this little restore. 18:05.496 --> 18:07.778 I apologize for that. 18:09.045 --> 18:25.542 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 18:26.496 --> 18:27.377 That would have been done already. 18:27.397 --> 18:28.258 I think that looks all right. 18:28.278 --> 18:28.438 Yeah. 18:28.618 --> 18:28.918 Okay. 18:28.938 --> 18:34.203 So I'm really trying to advocate for the idea that repeating this is not bad. 18:34.243 --> 18:35.124 It's actually good. 18:35.184 --> 18:39.748 It's actually the teaching moment that can bring us together with our children. 18:39.788 --> 18:52.259 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. 18:53.615 --> 19:09.725 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. 19:11.025 --> 19:16.469 And because that whole genre of scientists is 19:17.754 --> 19:29.228 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 19:30.293 --> 19:43.701 from the biological perspective, from the academic perspective, non-negotiable because the textbooks are already in their fifth edition with two giant volumes. 19:43.821 --> 19:49.245 The book on prions is like the size of a veterinary manual. 19:49.945 --> 19:55.829 It's a huge field with an enormous amount of sort of 19:57.233 --> 20:10.377 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. 20:12.018 --> 20:24.162 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. 20:24.977 --> 20:45.452 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. 20:48.094 --> 20:49.435 And so the idea with 20:50.430 --> 21:04.625 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. 21:06.166 --> 21:08.409 And so the whole story of virology 21:09.574 --> 21:27.759 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. 21:29.220 --> 21:33.321 And we don't have to worry about what proteins on the outside, except for the spike protein. 21:33.341 --> 21:34.541 Everything else doesn't matter. 21:34.581 --> 21:36.802 The M protein, the E protein, these are silly. 21:39.110 --> 21:45.841 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. 21:45.901 --> 21:53.213 Now that RNA molecule is dangerous all by itself in that little tiny protein tortellini. 21:54.284 --> 22:11.096 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. 22:11.116 --> 22:12.177 And it's a lot of proteins. 22:12.197 --> 22:13.898 It's not just an enzyme. 22:14.358 --> 22:16.520 It's a whole, apparently a whole complex 22:18.504 --> 22:26.655 and it can cause the expression of that complex and then that complex knows somehow how to then copy 22:27.884 --> 22:53.957 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 22:55.191 --> 23:00.575 the E-protein, the M-protein, the spike protein, and how to put them all together. 23:00.636 --> 23:02.717 And it just goes, and then there it is. 23:03.158 --> 23:06.861 You have the RNA inside, and voila, the cycle repeats. 23:09.363 --> 23:17.689 And so this mythology is based on an extraordinary number of assumptions, most of which are based on 23:18.644 --> 23:31.163 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, 23:32.529 --> 23:37.650 then the possibility of faking a whole field is very, very high. 23:37.710 --> 23:51.314 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 23:52.054 --> 24:10.946 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. 24:13.966 --> 24:36.372 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. 24:37.535 --> 24:51.918 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. 24:55.259 --> 24:55.919 I mean, what happened? 24:59.280 --> 25:00.720 What happened to all those people? 25:02.260 --> 25:04.421 Why did that whole field just kind of, 25:06.263 --> 25:10.926 go away, and then all these other people stepped in front of them with animal viruses. 25:13.108 --> 25:26.217 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. 25:26.798 --> 25:27.719 So that's my plan. 25:28.599 --> 25:36.104 And I think that that will help people to kind of get to the stage where they can start to question this narrative usefully. 25:36.524 --> 25:42.107 Remember that this narrative is a national security theater enabled by social media. 25:42.167 --> 25:49.252 Never before 2020 did people use social media with the level of assumption that they use it with right now. 25:50.432 --> 26:07.999 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. 26:08.599 --> 26:16.483 And so pandemic biology and RNA virology are the real concrete myths within biology 101 that we need to get rid of. 26:16.543 --> 26:36.653 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 26:37.273 --> 26:49.580 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. 26:49.660 --> 26:53.242 And that's really just, that's really terrible idea. 26:55.359 --> 27:04.124 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. 27:04.164 --> 27:15.231 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. 27:15.971 --> 27:26.675 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. 27:26.715 --> 27:37.038 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. 27:37.078 --> 27:40.760 And so if we teach the history of it, then our kids will be able to see it. 27:41.724 --> 28:05.032 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. 28:06.038 --> 28:09.182 which is, I think, the most important thing to understand here. 28:09.242 --> 28:16.532 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. 28:17.966 --> 28:21.230 And so that's why I am focusing on trying to get the words right. 28:22.271 --> 28:23.272 I don't know if this one's on. 28:23.312 --> 28:24.413 No, that one's not on either. 28:24.833 --> 28:27.556 I think getting the words right are really important. 28:27.576 --> 28:40.088 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. 28:41.970 --> 28:47.476 And I like to document that a lot and I am working on that in a real sense. 28:48.457 --> 28:54.002 Transfection of healthy humans was a crime because transfection is an old technology that I've used on the academic bench. 28:54.923 --> 28:58.006 It's one of the reasons why I was fired from the University of Pittsburgh by calling a 29:00.117 --> 29:00.978 calling it what it is. 29:01.819 --> 29:02.980 RNA cannot pandemic. 29:03.020 --> 29:09.666 That's a statement that should tap into the very root of what some of your friends understand as biology. 29:10.206 --> 29:19.715 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, 29:20.662 --> 29:33.845 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. 29:34.986 --> 29:37.526 And autism is a meaningless word by design. 29:37.546 --> 29:39.307 It's something that you can say to anybody. 29:39.947 --> 29:46.569 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. 29:47.449 --> 29:53.551 But with regard to regular people who haven't really thought about it very much but think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 29:53.611 --> 29:58.772 is some kind of clown, I think that that's one of the ways that you might suggest that 29:59.492 --> 30:16.496 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. 30:16.536 --> 30:22.177 Yeah, the thing is, all of the people behind RFK are part of this illusion where 30:22.777 --> 30:25.222 autism has become a meaningless word by design. 30:25.262 --> 30:29.289 And in fact, Brian Hooker didn't use the word autism in 2013. 30:29.871 --> 30:34.700 So at some point in time, this pseudo biology was militarily 30:36.866 --> 31:03.961 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. 31:07.492 --> 31:17.457 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. 31:17.497 --> 31:25.582 That's why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were so good in that debate, because they were really good friends. 31:25.722 --> 31:30.865 It's not that they're both really cool, it's that they were both really good friends performing for us. 31:31.977 --> 31:35.939 And so this two-party theater is run by the national security state. 31:35.999 --> 31:41.301 It makes America a very stable country for the controlling powers behind it. 31:42.562 --> 31:45.063 And the question is, since when and for what purpose? 31:45.183 --> 31:46.544 I really think that at least 31:47.383 --> 32:05.337 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. 32:05.777 --> 32:17.046 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. 32:18.769 --> 32:30.684 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. 32:31.610 --> 32:37.555 and collect it in a very reliable and accurate way, which to a certain extent they have made progress on. 32:37.615 --> 32:38.876 It has to also be cheap. 32:39.277 --> 32:49.725 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. 32:49.745 --> 32:53.849 And over the last 10 or 15 years, they have been modifying and 32:58.491 --> 33:12.940 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. 33:13.020 --> 33:27.089 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. 33:27.529 --> 33:33.875 And all of these things are designed to solve problems that incrementally lead to one of the greatest problems of all time. 33:33.915 --> 33:42.042 And that is the inheritance between generations of vertebrates and how it happens. 33:44.244 --> 33:47.387 And it is surprisingly difficult to study that 33:48.342 --> 33:59.011 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. 34:00.352 --> 34:16.425 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. 34:16.465 --> 34:17.706 That's not what happened at all. 34:20.017 --> 34:23.239 And that, from an intellectual perspective, is very curious to me. 34:23.299 --> 34:31.703 I think the reason why is because we are witnessing the concept that the Human Genome Project is the Human Genome Project. 34:31.803 --> 34:33.724 All the other biology is really interesting. 34:34.585 --> 34:46.411 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. 34:46.551 --> 34:50.474 I mean, these mechanisms have all been long exhausted. 34:51.414 --> 35:08.400 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. 35:10.612 --> 35:22.556 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. 35:22.616 --> 35:27.737 And that mechanism suffices to explain our existence. 35:28.257 --> 35:29.498 That's the premise here. 35:29.558 --> 35:31.658 That's the premise here. 35:31.759 --> 35:32.999 That's the premise here. 35:35.137 --> 35:37.859 Mud puddle, lightning bolt, that's about it, right? 35:37.959 --> 35:43.922 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. 35:46.143 --> 35:51.686 And that's just, from an assumption perspective, it's spectacular. 35:52.647 --> 35:54.368 But that's also what this guy believed. 35:55.694 --> 36:06.161 Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest, he also believed, basically, that DNA provoked evolution, and that meant God must have created us with evolution. 36:06.201 --> 36:11.925 He's showing us evolution, and therefore God is giving us permission to take control of it. 36:13.667 --> 36:18.790 It's almost like God bestowed upon us this responsibility. 36:18.810 --> 36:22.673 That's the argument that I get out of this book. 36:24.315 --> 36:38.866 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. 36:38.906 --> 36:39.967 And that's just not true. 36:41.408 --> 36:51.015 But the Human Genome Project is the long-term national security impetus to approach that goal with intention. 36:52.765 --> 37:01.591 And I believe that 9-11, I believe that the coronavirus pandemic, these were all various 37:04.088 --> 37:23.961 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. 37:25.714 --> 37:44.042 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. 37:44.802 --> 37:55.027 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. 37:58.820 --> 38:01.241 And now here we are back again at the same time. 38:01.521 --> 38:11.866 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. 38:11.946 --> 38:17.569 Just kind of very similar to how the day after Charlie Kirk gets shot, Alex Jones knows it's Israel. 38:17.989 --> 38:19.429 It's very, very interesting. 38:21.671 --> 38:26.373 And I think it can be, let's say, stress reducing. 38:27.455 --> 38:40.598 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. 38:41.399 --> 38:47.380 That in 1960, none of these people would have said that in 50 years, right? 38:47.840 --> 38:50.301 In 50 years, we're gonna be nowhere. 38:52.221 --> 38:54.262 None of them would have been able to say that. 38:56.280 --> 39:07.352 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. 39:10.536 --> 39:11.777 And that's the reality of it. 39:13.908 --> 39:17.290 That's why the Human Genome Project is still at the source of this. 39:17.330 --> 39:23.614 That's the reason why Kevin McKernan was involved in the people behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 39:23.674 --> 39:27.657 That's why Robert Malone was involved with the people behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 39:27.697 --> 39:29.178 That's why Meryl Nass is there. 39:29.718 --> 39:31.319 That's why Veera Sharma is there. 39:31.379 --> 39:34.802 That's why Brian Hooker, 16-year employee of the U.S. 39:34.882 --> 39:36.263 Government Department of Energy, 39:37.904 --> 39:44.409 or wherever he worked where he was transforming plants to make medicines, that guy behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 39:44.489 --> 39:46.591 is not just some dad with autism. 39:47.631 --> 39:48.372 Stop lying! 39:48.772 --> 39:50.674 Yes, Brian, stop lying. 39:51.735 --> 39:55.818 For the sake of your son and his future in America, stop lying. 39:57.432 --> 40:19.643 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. 40:22.461 --> 40:23.641 It's just remarkable. 40:24.602 --> 40:42.669 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. 40:43.609 --> 40:45.410 And so there's not a lot worth saving. 40:46.570 --> 40:48.051 But I don't agree with any of that. 40:49.662 --> 40:54.733 I think America's children are definitely worth saving, and more importantly, they're not spoiled yet. 40:57.018 --> 40:59.443 We could still turn them against this. 41:00.919 --> 41:12.929 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. 41:12.949 --> 41:29.422 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. 41:37.423 --> 41:45.269 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. 41:45.929 --> 41:47.610 And they're a problem because they're actors. 41:48.771 --> 41:52.794 I don't have any special sympathy for any of them because they signed up a long time ago. 41:52.814 --> 42:02.761 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. 42:04.756 --> 42:06.117 I can't make this up. 42:06.857 --> 42:08.778 I don't even need to explain this. 42:10.559 --> 42:12.040 That line's not level. 42:12.881 --> 42:18.484 We had control of the red for decades and then lost control of it for two years. 42:18.964 --> 42:26.088 We had relative control over the opioid problems on the streets of America until around 2019. 42:26.548 --> 42:29.049 And then we really let it go wild for a while. 42:29.069 --> 42:33.452 I mean, those are easy things to talk about. 42:42.841 --> 42:59.766 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. 42:59.926 --> 43:02.686 Also their phages and all the different types. 43:05.787 --> 43:09.788 And that background is irreducibly complex within our microbiome. 43:09.828 --> 43:11.929 It's irreducibly complex on our skin. 43:13.382 --> 43:16.085 in our oral cavities, in our lungs even. 43:17.928 --> 43:32.766 And so this irreducibly complex background was never dissected before the pandemic, never characterized as a thing. 43:33.786 --> 43:35.007 We didn't know what was there. 43:35.487 --> 43:41.350 It would be like landing on Earth and having no idea what a bird was, while all the birds are already there. 43:41.390 --> 43:47.193 You could spend a lot of time discovering birds while you traveled the world, not knowing that there were any birds at all. 43:50.054 --> 43:58.959 And so with a disingenuous rollout of a nonspecific PCR test, you could convince people that, wow, there's birds everywhere. 43:59.439 --> 44:02.401 They're loose, because no one else can see them. 44:03.345 --> 44:05.026 unless they use your binoculars. 44:09.450 --> 44:11.371 That's what the PCR test became. 44:11.691 --> 44:14.213 It was, it's a national security operation. 44:14.233 --> 44:20.898 There would be no reason to trust the national security state to provide the tests that proved the crisis. 44:22.480 --> 44:27.163 And yet they even had people in place to ineffectively argue about the tests. 44:27.383 --> 44:29.245 And that's where I came in. 44:31.844 --> 44:36.748 As a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, I was fired for saying this. 44:38.009 --> 44:47.897 And in fact, I was hounded by and followed by and harassed by Kevin McKernan of the Human Genome Project, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 44:48.097 --> 44:55.402 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. 44:55.462 --> 44:59.225 They all harassed and misled me 45:00.816 --> 45:08.762 and tricked me into supporting their endeavors when in reality their endeavors were false and they were actually treasonous to America. 45:10.646 --> 45:32.028 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. 45:32.869 --> 45:34.030 I wonder if we could do that. 45:35.717 --> 45:39.719 And anybody that's interested in doing that and needs my help, I would be more than happy to. 45:40.500 --> 45:46.863 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. 45:47.503 --> 45:53.406 That's why they're worried about social security and the bankrupting of Western societies. 45:54.267 --> 46:02.271 Because there is a bump like that in everyone's population pyramid, because after World War II, people came home and had big families. 46:03.203 --> 46:18.275 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. 46:20.517 --> 46:24.320 That's the reality of things and in 2025 that bump is still coming. 46:25.117 --> 46:27.218 Those people are retiring right now. 46:27.318 --> 46:41.564 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. 46:42.844 --> 46:44.625 You know, five houses, good for me. 46:46.466 --> 46:52.448 And so this is an orchestrated take back of a lot of that property and orchestrated take back a lot of that wealth. 46:53.752 --> 46:59.097 an orchestrated stripping of whatever's left of America as the dollar is meant to crash. 46:59.177 --> 47:00.478 That's what's happening right now. 47:00.898 --> 47:06.483 And I said that from my backyard of a house that I lost in 2021. 47:08.324 --> 47:15.931 That's why I'm here in my garage in Pittsburgh doing this show now today because of that crime. 47:16.926 --> 47:35.234 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. 47:38.515 --> 47:43.938 It's a very, very malevolent place that America is in, but this is a anticipated rise. 47:45.259 --> 47:50.882 in all cause mortality, that they weaponized against us with actors on social media. 47:52.062 --> 47:55.164 And that includes Donald Trump and all the people around him. 47:55.764 --> 47:57.565 That includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 47:57.585 --> 47:58.966 and all the people around him. 47:59.386 --> 48:01.907 That includes ICANN and all the people around them. 48:02.108 --> 48:08.611 Everybody is either wittingly or unwittingly a part of this thing until they start to call it out for what it is. 48:13.240 --> 48:17.926 That's why we have a Harvard, the head of Harvard virology is this child. 48:19.909 --> 48:27.473 who is ready and willing to testify to his belief in vaccines and in next generation vaccines. 48:27.873 --> 48:43.702 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. 48:47.284 --> 48:49.065 Ladies and gentlemen, we were trapped. 48:50.014 --> 48:57.237 Your family and friends were trapped, were fooled by a very elaborate military operation that would have been very hard to see through. 48:58.598 --> 49:02.860 It is possible, remotely possible, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 49:02.980 --> 49:17.826 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. 49:18.806 --> 49:20.607 It is possible he doesn't know that. 49:20.647 --> 49:21.567 It's not very likely. 49:22.848 --> 49:33.434 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. 49:34.054 --> 49:38.596 Maybe he was promised the vice presidency when it would have been a lot easier maybe. 49:40.703 --> 49:45.527 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. 49:46.087 --> 49:49.931 That's why Kevin McKernan called me Chemtrail Retarded. 49:49.971 --> 49:57.297 That's why Kevin McKernan has followed me around on social media, has written substacks about me on social media. 49:57.657 --> 50:04.723 That's why Kevin McKernan, the Research and Development Director of the Human Genome Project, can be linked to Kevin McCairn. 50:05.383 --> 50:23.510 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. 50:23.970 --> 50:31.833 It was the militarization of public health and the slow inversion of our sovereignty. 50:36.451 --> 50:40.235 By this time I was fairly widely published and known in the field. 50:41.116 --> 50:48.343 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. 50:50.425 --> 50:51.446 And he called me and he said, 50:53.351 --> 50:55.393 We're just picking up where we left off yesterday. 50:55.414 --> 51:08.828 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. 51:09.389 --> 51:10.630 He was at Caltech at the time? 51:11.357 --> 51:21.525 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. 51:22.346 --> 51:26.129 It wasn't really departments in the usual sense, but he had space. 51:26.169 --> 51:34.155 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. 51:36.337 --> 51:39.679 And then ensued this wonderful. 51:40.831 --> 51:44.453 uncertainty about whether the Salk Institute was actually going to exist or not. 51:46.034 --> 51:51.637 And I would get these notes from Delbecos or calls from Delbecos. 51:52.158 --> 51:58.862 So yesterday, one of the things that I hope you noticed was that he tells a lot of stories about the people. 51:58.882 --> 52:00.703 He tells a lot of stories about 52:01.463 --> 52:04.504 I don't know, things that don't matter for the science. 52:04.584 --> 52:09.185 And in fact, he often avoids talking about the science because that's for another time. 52:09.685 --> 52:24.170 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. 52:25.060 --> 52:34.503 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. 52:34.863 --> 52:36.483 That would have been the first thing he said. 52:36.523 --> 52:38.184 So, you know, what did you do with your career? 52:38.204 --> 52:39.924 He kind of says, yeah, I don't know. 52:39.984 --> 52:42.085 I just kind of was in the right place at the right time. 52:42.125 --> 52:46.426 You know, nothing that I did is really worth noteworthy of mention, or at least not in this interview. 52:47.986 --> 52:54.208 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. 52:55.399 --> 53:05.731 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. 53:06.672 --> 53:14.041 And instead, they look as though they stole the car and got caught because they got arrested or something. 53:14.101 --> 53:14.422 I don't know. 53:14.482 --> 53:15.082 It's bizarre. 53:15.783 --> 53:29.233 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. 53:29.253 --> 53:31.474 It doesn't come off like that at all. 53:31.995 --> 53:33.236 And so that's where we're starting. 53:33.696 --> 53:39.080 And we're doing this because I think we're trying to figure out what happened between 53:40.686 --> 53:55.114 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 53:55.914 --> 53:59.578 to interact with mammalian cells. 53:59.638 --> 54:12.190 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. 54:12.230 --> 54:13.832 But that's neither here nor there. 54:15.053 --> 54:15.994 Don't make any plans. 54:16.980 --> 54:18.982 because I'm not positive it's going to happen. 54:19.602 --> 54:22.165 But we're having a meeting next week, and I'll get back to you. 54:22.565 --> 54:26.909 So meeting occurs next week, gets back to me and says, looks like it's going to happen. 54:27.189 --> 54:27.930 Start making plans. 54:27.950 --> 54:30.572 A couple weeks later, we're running into trouble. 54:31.853 --> 54:35.477 And so this went back and forth until finally he said, yes, it's going to happen. 54:36.257 --> 54:41.963 And I got in the car and came out to California, which was 54:43.689 --> 54:45.976 By that time, I had once before been to California. 54:46.016 --> 54:49.407 I'd flown out there to lecture at Caltech. 54:49.688 --> 54:50.951 Not so much of a culture shock. 54:51.638 --> 54:52.719 Well, it was a culture shock. 54:52.739 --> 54:54.020 It was an enormous culture shock. 54:55.741 --> 55:09.110 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. 55:09.870 --> 55:21.278 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. 55:22.599 --> 55:27.905 And they had to take a rattlesnake out of the lab in order to get me in there. 55:28.666 --> 55:30.608 That was just, this was the Wild West. 55:34.400 --> 55:37.762 So you were there for three years, and then you wound up coming back to MIT. 55:37.782 --> 55:38.443 SKOLNIKOFF That's right. 55:38.723 --> 55:40.024 INTERVIEWER What was the draw? 55:40.364 --> 55:42.545 SKOLNIKOFF The MIT yo-yo. 55:42.605 --> 55:45.567 The draw was that I loved MIT. 55:45.727 --> 55:49.890 I had loved my two years here as a graduate student and postdoc. 55:52.371 --> 55:58.896 And it was all about Salvador Luria, because while I was at 56:02.511 --> 56:11.237 And I picked up virus work again after my post-doc, and I was publishing some interesting stuff. 56:12.698 --> 56:18.462 And a professor at Harvard became aware of it, Bernie Davis. 56:19.683 --> 56:22.505 And Bernie said, would you come and look at a job at Harvard? 56:24.487 --> 56:27.389 And I said, I'll come, give a seminar. 56:28.590 --> 56:29.190 And so I did. 56:30.655 --> 56:31.676 And Luria heard about it. 56:32.737 --> 56:39.505 And Luria then engineered an offer to me on the basis of what people knew about me. 56:39.565 --> 56:43.589 I don't think I came and gave a little seminar. 56:46.832 --> 56:48.434 Because he didn't want me to go to Harvard. 56:49.315 --> 56:51.057 He said if you're going to go anywhere, you should come to MIT. 56:52.811 --> 57:00.553 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. 57:01.133 --> 57:02.193 It's an interesting story. 57:03.234 --> 57:06.495 And so I had this offer from MIT. 57:06.995 --> 57:13.016 And then it's a sort of long story what made me make the decision. 57:13.036 --> 57:15.217 But anyway, I decided I wanted to leave Salk. 57:15.917 --> 57:20.378 And so I pulled this offer out of my drawer and called up Salva and said I'm coming. 57:24.622 --> 57:27.803 In those days we didn't negotiate for anything. 57:28.503 --> 57:35.525 When I came back as a postdoc, I was actually supported on a training grant of Luria's. 57:36.705 --> 57:39.886 Luria just watched over me the whole time. 57:40.006 --> 57:47.408 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. 57:48.362 --> 57:50.283 The importance of mentors. 57:50.624 --> 57:59.470 I said last night in a tribute to Luria that he's my father in some very real ways. 58:00.871 --> 58:02.933 And I try to be a dutiful son. 58:04.102 --> 58:11.468 That's remarkable because that's basically how Vincent Racaniello would like you to think of him with regards to David Baltimore. 58:11.528 --> 58:18.033 So we could be really two mentor steps away from the truth right now. 58:19.355 --> 58:31.925 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, 58:35.362 --> 58:39.825 then we just could be, you know, taking David Baltimore's word for it. 58:40.865 --> 58:47.589 Taking Vincent Racaniello's word for it is terrifying, but that's essentially where we are right now, as of his death. 58:53.252 --> 59:02.237 Can you walk me through, in a kind of summary fashion, your research after you got here? 59:05.034 --> 59:05.975 Yes, I can. 59:06.315 --> 59:14.219 So I came here having started as a graduate student working on, we'll call it poliovirus. 59:14.259 --> 59:18.201 I was actually working on a relative of polio, but then I switched to working with polio itself. 59:20.602 --> 59:21.582 It's an RNA virus. 59:23.493 --> 59:28.675 has a very particular biology because it is an RNA virus. 59:28.975 --> 59:38.318 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. 59:38.338 --> 59:45.760 I had made a lot of discoveries about it, and there were lots of fascinating things about it. 59:49.824 --> 59:55.793 When I arrived back here, it was to continue to work on poliovirus. 59:55.813 --> 01:00:03.804 I set up the lab to do that, and I got graduate students and postdocs. 01:00:03.864 --> 01:00:04.866 Things were going very well. 01:00:05.934 --> 01:00:09.636 One of the people in my lab, I married, Alice Wong. 01:00:11.837 --> 01:00:16.139 And she had actually come to my lab first at the Salk Institute. 01:00:16.999 --> 01:00:18.640 And we had come east together. 01:00:18.920 --> 01:00:22.622 And it was, by that time, no surprise that we got married. 01:00:23.903 --> 01:00:27.965 And she had, for her thesis. 01:00:29.235 --> 01:00:33.997 worked on a very different kind of RNA virus called vesicular stomatitis virus. 01:00:34.057 --> 01:00:48.003 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. 01:00:48.363 --> 01:00:49.544 So she was working on polio. 01:00:52.406 --> 01:00:58.050 And that was the only object of focus of my lab. 01:00:58.730 --> 01:01:06.415 And she said one day, you know, it might be fun to pick up VSV again, this virus that she'd worked on. 01:01:07.296 --> 01:01:14.661 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. 01:01:15.757 --> 01:01:17.238 So why do you work on it then? 01:01:17.298 --> 01:01:21.062 Is the idea to, I don't know, understand? 01:01:21.082 --> 01:01:28.829 I mean, how can I say this the useful way? 01:01:28.909 --> 01:01:30.931 I don't, I don't fully get it. 01:01:31.791 --> 01:01:33.113 You can do anything you want. 01:01:33.153 --> 01:01:37.116 You can work on anything you want, but you work on polio virus. 01:01:37.136 --> 01:01:37.897 You see, there's a, 01:01:40.265 --> 01:01:49.748 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. 01:01:50.668 --> 01:01:58.091 They're just all entities in and of themselves and he's the expert on them and is sure of that for some reason. 01:01:59.929 --> 01:02:02.211 That's the part of it that doesn't make any sense to me. 01:02:02.251 --> 01:02:13.298 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. 01:02:14.879 --> 01:02:21.864 And instead, what I see is it's very likely that all eukaryotes already signal in this way, extracellularly. 01:02:22.965 --> 01:02:29.069 And it's not, you know, cells that are getting rid of waste material or anything like that, but it's communication. 01:02:30.413 --> 01:02:31.553 it's homeostasis. 01:02:31.833 --> 01:02:36.014 I don't know what it all is, but it's something that already occurs. 01:02:36.275 --> 01:02:44.137 And so these signals that they're telling us are outside of us and do things despite us or, or collaborate against us. 01:02:44.217 --> 01:02:53.279 These are all, these are myths because they require you to not think about the bacteria, the microbiome and their, 01:02:54.059 --> 01:02:58.323 phages and their bactericins. 01:02:58.803 --> 01:03:04.908 They don't want you to think about anything that bacteria do, release, excrete, regulate. 01:03:05.548 --> 01:03:13.635 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. 01:03:14.540 --> 01:03:17.261 Never mind what we are as people. 01:03:17.381 --> 01:03:22.403 If you just think about everything that's not bacteria, we're still pretty darn complex. 01:03:22.503 --> 01:03:41.930 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. 01:03:43.627 --> 01:03:56.290 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. 01:03:59.727 --> 01:04:05.170 And so this new biology is going to be quite exciting to put together. 01:04:05.210 --> 01:04:07.311 It is quite exciting to be putting together. 01:04:07.912 --> 01:04:12.714 And it is the flip side of the coin is this pseudobiology. 01:04:12.754 --> 01:04:15.776 It's what makes the new biology look so good. 01:04:16.256 --> 01:04:19.718 And obviously it's because it fits the whole so much better, right? 01:04:20.839 --> 01:04:28.383 Everything fits into place a lot better when you start talking about life as an irreducibly complex pattern integrity with a trajectory across time. 01:04:31.022 --> 01:04:42.452 rather than the mechanical and chemical product of a single tape of information called DNA, or 23 of them in pairs. 01:04:43.953 --> 01:04:45.334 I'm excited, ladies and gentlemen. 01:04:47.096 --> 01:04:51.820 And by this time, I had been working on polio for much of 10 years. 01:04:53.161 --> 01:04:58.166 And so the idea of doing something new was a good idea. 01:04:59.492 --> 01:05:11.740 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. 01:05:13.221 --> 01:05:17.583 So we started growing it, and I had a graduate student start working on it. 01:05:18.744 --> 01:05:25.028 Alice went back to working on it a little bit, and I did some work, because at that point I worked in the lab. 01:05:27.549 --> 01:05:31.411 We made some really remarkable discoveries about VSV. 01:05:32.891 --> 01:05:37.373 It was fundamentally different than polio in all of its strategies. 01:05:38.934 --> 01:05:44.236 I could describe why, but that's another story. 01:05:44.316 --> 01:05:48.518 I did one last experiment I did with it. 01:05:49.560 --> 01:05:58.504 was to show that it contained a polymerase in the virus particle that copied the genome into complementary RNA. 01:05:59.704 --> 01:06:07.248 Very different than polio, which encoded a polymerase that was made in the infected cells, but didn't carry it in with it. 01:06:09.369 --> 01:06:12.390 And that experiment 01:06:14.136 --> 01:06:23.843 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. 01:06:25.104 --> 01:06:25.805 And so we started. 01:06:26.725 --> 01:06:32.590 And in my humble opinion what it actually does is it belies the national security lie. 01:06:33.601 --> 01:06:50.948 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. 01:06:52.142 --> 01:07:08.934 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 01:07:09.654 --> 01:07:16.199 around N-proteins, bundle it up, and put it into particles that are identical to the particle that came in. 01:07:16.620 --> 01:07:26.788 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. 01:07:28.630 --> 01:07:30.631 And the rest we take on their word. 01:07:31.232 --> 01:07:33.173 The rest we trust to cartoons. 01:07:34.014 --> 01:07:36.116 The rest we trust to people like this. 01:07:37.338 --> 01:07:44.603 It is because David Baltimore says that these particles have enzymes in them that proves how they work. 01:07:45.423 --> 01:07:48.525 And it's in its insistence that that's all it proves. 01:07:48.585 --> 01:08:06.737 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. 01:08:09.775 --> 01:08:10.736 That's all it says. 01:08:12.758 --> 01:08:21.226 And so the coexistence of these particles, the coexistence of these signals with other symptomologies is only that. 01:08:21.306 --> 01:08:23.868 It's only correlation if that. 01:08:24.629 --> 01:08:30.955 If they're telling the truth about the molecular signals that they purport to be finding and reproducing. 01:08:32.745 --> 01:08:53.884 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 01:08:56.093 --> 01:09:04.530 of the poliovirus sequence and transfect cells with it and cause the formation of more poliovirus particles apparently. 01:09:08.587 --> 01:09:29.052 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. 01:09:29.112 --> 01:09:31.692 But somehow or another, that's not part of it. 01:09:31.712 --> 01:09:33.713 He's talking about his wife and VSV. 01:09:36.397 --> 01:09:38.538 gathering viruses from various places. 01:09:38.638 --> 01:09:46.101 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. 01:09:47.761 --> 01:10:03.287 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. 01:10:04.699 --> 01:10:09.304 And that and so he's involved with cancer viruses, just like Bob Gallo. 01:10:14.389 --> 01:10:26.182 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, 01:10:27.469 --> 01:10:30.191 The ones that are still around, they seem very sketch. 01:10:30.291 --> 01:10:36.395 And you can put Robert Malone right damn well right in the middle of that little Lollapalooza of liars, I assure you. 01:10:37.416 --> 01:10:39.698 Had a totally obscure molecular biology. 01:10:40.298 --> 01:10:46.183 How they, what polymerases they used, how they dealt with information, all of that was totally unclear. 01:10:47.389 --> 01:11:00.075 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. 01:11:01.416 --> 01:11:02.257 But he couldn't prove that. 01:11:03.617 --> 01:11:14.403 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. 01:11:16.739 --> 01:11:34.586 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. 01:11:36.158 --> 01:11:42.880 So I did with RNA tumor viruses, what I had done with many other viruses, was to look in the virus particle for polymerase. 01:11:43.460 --> 01:11:51.542 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. 01:11:52.142 --> 01:12:03.305 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. 01:12:04.145 --> 01:12:07.889 which was that DNA made RNA made protein. 01:12:08.269 --> 01:12:20.863 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 01:12:21.623 --> 01:12:35.468 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. 01:12:36.449 --> 01:12:38.109 Understand what he's saying. 01:12:38.970 --> 01:12:45.272 The virology biology has virtually a functional lock 01:12:46.269 --> 01:12:52.653 a monopoly on all of the enzymes that violate the central dogma. 01:12:53.654 --> 01:12:58.737 None of the enzymes that violate the central dogma are ours. 01:12:59.218 --> 01:13:09.084 They are the property of viruses that, to a large extent, have been defined by David Baltimore and his wife. 01:13:16.172 --> 01:13:18.494 And here we're going to say that there's information flow back. 01:13:18.554 --> 01:13:33.446 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. 01:13:36.331 --> 01:13:43.433 And yet somehow or another, this extremely smart Nobel Prize winning man calls it information flow backwards. 01:13:43.953 --> 01:13:48.734 Wouldn't it be pathogenic genetic insertion of information? 01:13:48.774 --> 01:13:56.215 It's not information flow backwards unless it's our own enzyme and unless our system uses that process, right? 01:13:56.695 --> 01:14:00.256 It's a weird sort of semantic inaccuracy. 01:14:02.117 --> 01:14:03.397 That was not a big deal. 01:14:04.522 --> 01:14:06.484 If RNA made DNA, DNA made RNA. 01:14:06.524 --> 01:14:18.334 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. 01:14:19.074 --> 01:14:28.662 From a strategic point of view, in terms of the strategies of information flow in the system, it had enormous implications. 01:14:29.730 --> 01:14:31.770 So I looked for it and it was a two-day experiment. 01:14:31.810 --> 01:14:32.631 I showed it was there. 01:14:36.171 --> 01:14:41.453 He showed it was there and attributed it to the virus and the rest is history. 01:14:42.853 --> 01:14:45.233 Because now you have to argue with his dead body. 01:14:47.594 --> 01:14:52.635 Stopped work for a while to protest against the Cambodia invasion. 01:14:53.395 --> 01:14:56.036 Got back into the lab, finished the experiments and published them. 01:14:57.226 --> 01:14:58.427 That was June 1970. 01:14:58.807 --> 01:15:00.448 What a weird thing to say. 01:15:00.548 --> 01:15:00.809 Wow. 01:15:00.849 --> 01:15:04.011 He protested the Cambodia invasion. 01:15:04.091 --> 01:15:04.351 Nice. 01:15:06.752 --> 01:15:14.898 Howard Temenak, turns out, had a post-doc, Mr. Tani, who at the same time did similar experiments. 01:15:14.958 --> 01:15:16.258 And so we published back to back. 01:15:16.339 --> 01:15:19.581 And five years later we received the Nobel Prize for it. 01:15:19.601 --> 01:15:26.085 INTERVIEWER 1 Did the Nobel Prize, was it a surprise to you? 01:15:26.878 --> 01:15:28.079 a total surprise. 01:15:28.399 --> 01:15:38.828 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. 01:15:41.991 --> 01:15:43.112 My wife wasn't even around. 01:15:43.152 --> 01:15:44.253 She was in 01:15:46.452 --> 01:15:47.413 She had called me. 01:15:47.953 --> 01:15:56.299 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. 01:15:57.139 --> 01:15:57.499 Called me. 01:16:01.582 --> 01:16:04.244 I didn't even know really when the prizes were announced. 01:16:04.524 --> 01:16:05.405 I wasn't aware of them. 01:16:06.625 --> 01:16:08.307 People had said you're going to win a Nobel Prize. 01:16:08.367 --> 01:16:09.868 I figured that someday it'll happen when I'm 60. 01:16:10.648 --> 01:16:14.951 INTERVIEWER 1 Did it turn out to be difficult to get it so young? 01:16:16.568 --> 01:16:17.369 Not difficult. 01:16:17.389 --> 01:16:18.789 What a stupid question. 01:16:19.550 --> 01:16:24.073 No, it was perfectly easy. 01:16:24.813 --> 01:16:27.915 Went to Stockholm and were anointed. 01:16:29.076 --> 01:16:30.917 I thought you had to nominate yourself. 01:16:31.938 --> 01:16:32.798 Is that not true? 01:16:32.858 --> 01:16:33.699 Somebody correct me. 01:16:33.739 --> 01:16:35.080 I thought you had to nominate yourself. 01:16:35.480 --> 01:16:37.921 Did it make a difference in your work? 01:16:38.201 --> 01:16:44.185 Well, it certainly made a difference in my life in the sense that it 01:16:47.378 --> 01:17:00.556 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. 01:17:00.836 --> 01:17:04.641 It gives him a scientific sort of infallibility is what it does. 01:17:05.835 --> 01:17:07.837 It gets people to treat him like a rock star. 01:17:07.937 --> 01:17:13.580 It gets people to stay away from any of the things that they've declared unequivocally true. 01:17:14.641 --> 01:17:31.852 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. 01:17:32.662 --> 01:17:40.564 This science is real, and therefore, we all have to accept that none of this enzymology has anything to do with our own biology. 01:17:40.624 --> 01:17:49.427 It's just the viruses that are all working against us with a great deal of, I don't know, evolutionary determination. 01:17:53.788 --> 01:17:59.190 Venues, and to even want to hear me pontificate on things I didn't know anything about. 01:18:00.256 --> 01:18:05.418 But so it was a distraction to some extent. 01:18:05.438 --> 01:18:07.739 It was an opportunity from other points of view. 01:18:09.600 --> 01:18:12.321 And it was a responsibility. 01:18:13.277 --> 01:18:22.624 because there are very few Nobel laureates, and we are seen as a sort of embodiment of the science in which we're involved. 01:18:23.165 --> 01:18:25.186 So he totally understands, you see. 01:18:25.967 --> 01:18:32.032 It's not at all a humble scientist who just wanted to know like he claims it was. 01:18:32.052 --> 01:18:37.256 It was a guy who understood how easy it was to make and discover new things. 01:18:39.458 --> 01:18:42.300 It was a guy who was enticed by something else, I think. 01:18:44.349 --> 01:18:51.273 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. 01:18:51.914 --> 01:18:55.436 I think what it was is that molecular biology was stalling. 01:18:56.297 --> 01:19:02.561 Molecular biology was stalling in the hands of Max Delbruck and DeBecco and Rebecca and all these guys. 01:19:03.141 --> 01:19:08.264 And it was stalling because bacteria and bacteriophages were an irreducible complexity. 01:19:09.125 --> 01:19:13.688 And the farther they got into it, the more irreducibly complex it seemed. 01:19:15.484 --> 01:19:27.237 And of course, with metagenomic sequencing, we've come to understand the world of phages and bacteria as incredibly complex, irreducibly so. 01:19:28.058 --> 01:19:34.105 The world of viruses in the microplankton of the ocean is a universe in and of itself. 01:19:35.100 --> 01:19:45.968 And so these genetic backgrounds are real and maybe the foundational biological firmware on which we have evolved or emerged. 01:19:47.049 --> 01:19:56.256 The very emergent properties that we are might be dependent on this entire bacteria background that we have on Earth. 01:19:58.772 --> 01:20:17.829 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. 01:20:22.708 --> 01:20:30.650 And so we think of birds and you know, all the stuff that David Attenborough was talking about is life on earth. 01:20:30.750 --> 01:20:50.875 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. 01:20:52.423 --> 01:21:01.190 then all this talk about the Baltimore scheme and about viruses and about all these polymerases that are unique to viruses is just bullshit. 01:21:02.211 --> 01:21:12.980 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. 01:21:15.522 --> 01:21:17.764 You can almost think of us as 01:21:22.722 --> 01:21:24.903 as bio suits for bacteria. 01:21:27.904 --> 01:21:36.548 Or the consequences of, I don't know, it's hard to really say it without, you know, giving away the whole book. 01:21:36.688 --> 01:21:38.789 But it's, I'm really excited. 01:21:38.889 --> 01:21:41.770 I'm really excited because this new biology is real. 01:21:42.551 --> 01:21:49.694 And I think it's at the perfect time in American history for that biology to come out in America first. 01:21:50.620 --> 01:22:07.551 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. 01:22:08.912 --> 01:22:10.072 So that's a responsibility. 01:22:10.092 --> 01:22:13.715 INTERVIEWER 1 I would imagine it makes it easier to get funding for things. 01:22:14.531 --> 01:22:18.876 So everybody imagines it would make it easier to get funding, and it's not really true. 01:22:19.396 --> 01:22:30.067 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. 01:22:33.446 --> 01:22:43.015 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. 01:22:44.036 --> 01:22:46.938 So no, I don't think it's that. 01:22:47.098 --> 01:22:59.970 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. 01:23:01.346 --> 01:23:13.572 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. 01:23:14.572 --> 01:23:19.094 So there is, from those points of view, an opportunity. 01:23:21.767 --> 01:23:30.011 I don't know whether I ever would have been introduced to Jack Whitehead, which is now a story coming up here. 01:23:30.652 --> 01:23:31.272 My next one. 01:23:31.292 --> 01:23:32.132 Yes, okay. 01:23:32.833 --> 01:23:34.213 A story coming up here. 01:23:34.314 --> 01:23:36.094 See, he knows that there's a script. 01:23:36.175 --> 01:23:37.715 She says, yeah, it's the next one. 01:23:37.735 --> 01:23:40.637 They laugh because this is a scripted interview. 01:23:42.138 --> 01:23:46.100 A scripted interview with no science at all. 01:23:49.673 --> 01:23:52.415 I mean, what an archive for MIT, right? 01:23:52.495 --> 01:23:54.577 Like, what a bullshit show. 01:23:56.078 --> 01:24:09.830 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. 01:24:09.950 --> 01:24:12.272 Like, MIT is there, yo. 01:24:16.401 --> 01:24:24.667 If I didn't have a Nobel Prize, I just don't know actually, literally, how much a role that played. 01:24:24.947 --> 01:24:29.550 But it certainly made me a more visible person to him and to other people. 01:24:30.351 --> 01:24:32.092 Yeah, there are a lot of pluses. 01:24:34.880 --> 01:24:40.022 So let's talk about the Whitehead Institute, since you were so involved in its creation. 01:24:41.122 --> 01:24:43.843 And I'm interested in how it came about. 01:24:43.903 --> 01:24:49.825 That kind of makes him Kevin McKernan's boss, because he was Mike Lander's boss. 01:24:50.466 --> 01:24:54.627 It's very interesting, the Whitehead Institute. 01:24:55.327 --> 01:24:58.549 About the objections that existed at the very beginning. 01:25:00.498 --> 01:25:21.184 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. 01:25:23.048 --> 01:25:33.491 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. 01:25:34.211 --> 01:25:37.932 The most wonderful puzzles in biology, the development of the immune system. 01:25:37.972 --> 01:25:43.553 And you can augment the development of the immune system by intramuscularly injecting a combination of substances. 01:25:44.553 --> 01:25:46.014 We've been doing it for centuries. 01:25:49.753 --> 01:25:53.035 Do you see why now you know that he's a scripted actor? 01:25:53.115 --> 01:25:54.376 That's just absurd. 01:25:54.877 --> 01:26:09.307 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. 01:26:09.707 --> 01:26:11.768 And so they call it retroviruses. 01:26:11.788 --> 01:26:12.989 They're all outside of us. 01:26:13.049 --> 01:26:16.712 We don't know where they come from, but they're just floating around and sometimes they get inside. 01:26:18.936 --> 01:26:26.960 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. 01:26:27.020 --> 01:26:27.420 Or 10 years. 01:26:28.541 --> 01:26:36.284 But I hadn't done anything about it because you couldn't work on it from a molecular point of view. 01:26:36.324 --> 01:26:38.105 You could work on it from various other points of view. 01:26:38.886 --> 01:26:46.069 And then Susumu Tanegawa did his great experiment, which opened up the molecular biology of the immune system. 01:26:48.062 --> 01:26:56.008 And I wanted to get into that business and really, I had this itch I hadn't scratched for all those years. 01:26:57.229 --> 01:27:01.492 And so from between 75 and 80, I developed that. 01:27:02.492 --> 01:27:05.334 So Susumu Tonigawa was the guy I mentioned yesterday. 01:27:05.414 --> 01:27:16.322 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 01:27:18.381 --> 01:27:20.166 And... what the hell? 01:27:26.224 --> 01:27:27.805 Oh, I think it's Ravens. 01:27:29.246 --> 01:27:39.673 The DNA can be spliced and somatically mutated to generate almost infinite complexity in the variable region of antibodies. 01:27:39.733 --> 01:27:46.078 And this discovery is a single author paper that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for, really nice work. 01:27:47.038 --> 01:27:50.541 And then later in his career, he switched to neuroscience, and that's how I got to meet him. 01:27:51.561 --> 01:28:02.205 I actually met him at a meeting in Svalbard or on Spitsbergen in Norway, and he's a very interesting, intimidating figure, of course. 01:28:02.925 --> 01:28:11.988 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. 01:28:12.028 --> 01:28:13.189 I didn't do much more than 01:28:13.849 --> 01:28:15.932 ask him a dumb question or two and shake his hand. 01:28:16.873 --> 01:28:20.718 At the time you know there was still no selfies being taken and that kind of thing. 01:28:21.079 --> 01:28:27.547 And unfortunately at that scientific meeting I had to leave the morning that they took the group picture. 01:28:28.489 --> 01:28:30.812 And so I'm not in the group picture which really is 01:28:31.392 --> 01:28:39.577 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. 01:28:39.597 --> 01:28:48.642 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. 01:28:48.662 --> 01:28:55.526 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 01:28:56.788 --> 01:29:01.460 Really, you know great friends and actually my middle son is named after one of those guys. 01:29:01.500 --> 01:29:02.603 So it's a 01:29:04.218 --> 01:29:23.110 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. 01:29:23.591 --> 01:29:26.693 And so everybody got a rumor that I was camping there. 01:29:27.153 --> 01:29:33.577 And of course camping on Svalbard would mean that you would need to have tripwires around your tent because they have polar bears there. 01:29:34.097 --> 01:29:38.419 So the first day that I was at the meeting, everybody was saying, there he is. 01:29:38.460 --> 01:29:40.941 That's the guy from Johan Storm's lab. 01:29:40.981 --> 01:29:42.142 He's camping here, dude. 01:29:42.182 --> 01:29:42.962 He's hardcore. 01:29:43.362 --> 01:29:51.847 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. 01:29:52.227 --> 01:29:54.629 And so I was completely confused for like the first, 01:29:55.169 --> 01:30:01.514 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. 01:30:01.994 --> 01:30:02.754 It was really funny. 01:30:02.895 --> 01:30:13.622 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. 01:30:14.183 --> 01:30:17.445 I'm just very happy that I have my wife and my family. 01:30:18.843 --> 01:30:24.866 and that we're all healthy and still kind of able to laugh about it now after all this awfulness. 01:30:26.147 --> 01:30:29.048 So this is a lot of fun for me now. 01:30:32.230 --> 01:30:34.090 And then carried it forward. 01:30:34.371 --> 01:30:39.433 Many of my discoveries beyond the Nobel Prize were in immunology. 01:30:42.378 --> 01:30:47.319 So in 1980, I got a call from Joshua Lederberg. 01:30:47.379 --> 01:30:50.560 Josh was then president of the Rockefeller University. 01:30:52.500 --> 01:30:54.101 And he was an advisor to Jack Whitehead. 01:30:54.121 --> 01:30:55.441 Jack had a series of advisors, wise people. 01:30:55.461 --> 01:30:56.221 And he said, do you know about 01:31:10.359 --> 01:31:10.959 Mr. Whitehead. 01:31:10.979 --> 01:31:25.186 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. 01:31:26.247 --> 01:31:29.168 And that was in roughly around 75. 01:31:33.604 --> 01:31:42.948 He developed the Technicon Corporation, which sold all of the clinical analysis equipment in the world at that time. 01:31:43.488 --> 01:31:50.871 It developed these huge machines that could in parallel look at a whole range of parameters, very quantitative. 01:31:50.891 --> 01:31:51.812 Who are we talking about? 01:31:51.832 --> 01:31:52.812 Is that Jack Whitehead? 01:31:53.152 --> 01:31:55.854 And had thought about setting up the Nobel Prize. 01:31:55.894 --> 01:31:56.694 We're in immunology. 01:31:59.614 --> 01:32:04.559 So in 1980, I got a call from Joshua Lederberg. 01:32:04.619 --> 01:32:07.783 Josh was then president of the Rockefeller University. 01:32:09.725 --> 01:32:13.088 And he was an advisor to Jack Whitehead. 01:32:14.009 --> 01:32:17.833 Jack had a series of advisors, wise people. 01:32:20.136 --> 01:32:21.917 And he said, do you know about? 01:32:22.898 --> 01:32:37.725 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. 01:32:38.805 --> 01:32:41.726 And that was in roughly around 75. 01:32:46.649 --> 01:32:49.490 He developed the Technicon Corporation. 01:32:51.061 --> 01:32:55.484 which sold all of the clinical analysis equipment in the world at that time. 01:32:56.045 --> 01:33:03.771 It developed these huge machines that could in parallel look at a whole range of parameters very quantitatively. 01:33:05.465 --> 01:33:13.751 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. 01:33:15.753 --> 01:33:17.054 But it had gone public. 01:33:18.155 --> 01:33:24.099 And it made him a billionaire, when a billionaire was a very unusual thing. 01:33:26.681 --> 01:33:30.284 And so he had made a commitment to spend $135 million 01:33:32.791 --> 01:33:39.175 build an institute, which was his form of giving back to the world from which he felt he had derived his fortune. 01:33:40.916 --> 01:33:49.141 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. 01:33:50.322 --> 01:33:54.564 So it was a mixed set of motives that he had. 01:33:54.584 --> 01:34:01.589 And he finally said he's going to do this at Duke University in somewhere around 75. 01:34:04.941 --> 01:34:06.942 And he set it up at Duke. 01:34:07.503 --> 01:34:09.223 But he was meddling too much. 01:34:10.064 --> 01:34:13.426 Duke had bought a bit of a pig and a poke because of all this money involved. 01:34:14.626 --> 01:34:18.409 And they finally splintered, came asunder. 01:34:19.489 --> 01:34:23.491 And so he sort of bought them off. 01:34:23.531 --> 01:34:28.734 He gave them a fair amount of money and closed down that chapter. 01:34:28.814 --> 01:34:31.296 But by this time he had sold the company. 01:34:33.004 --> 01:34:41.978 and had no longer these complicated tax reasons to do this, the idea had captured him of building an institute. 01:34:42.559 --> 01:34:47.045 And he had been convinced by his advisors, Lederberg and others, 01:34:48.426 --> 01:34:52.968 that he should do this in fundamental biology, not in medically oriented biology. 01:34:52.988 --> 01:35:00.831 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. 01:35:00.891 --> 01:35:09.155 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. 01:35:10.255 --> 01:35:14.317 Which is the original idea and where he had gone to Duke because of its medical school. 01:35:16.840 --> 01:35:24.564 And he was looking around for somebody to be the director and to build this thing, to create it. 01:35:26.665 --> 01:35:29.326 And so I got this call from Josh, would you come down and talk to him? 01:35:30.107 --> 01:35:31.107 And so I came down. 01:35:31.127 --> 01:35:33.528 It was in August of 1980, as I remember. 01:35:36.110 --> 01:35:44.134 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? 01:35:46.334 --> 01:35:57.505 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. 01:35:57.785 --> 01:36:09.097 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. 01:36:11.212 --> 01:36:14.836 to be a homologue to eugenics. 01:36:15.116 --> 01:36:21.203 Eugenics being the idea of selecting genes in order to make the next generation better. 01:36:21.884 --> 01:36:33.016 Euthenics would be the selection of developmental processes and developmental choices that optimize the expression of a particular genome. 01:36:33.536 --> 01:36:35.297 It's kind of the flip side of the coin. 01:36:35.337 --> 01:36:45.883 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. 01:36:47.624 --> 01:36:54.829 And we're not even thinking about how that trajectory even manifests, never mind could be optimized by environmental conditions, et cetera. 01:36:55.249 --> 01:37:01.973 And so Joshua Lederberg was intimately aware of that to the extent to which he even coined a word, you know, like microbiome. 01:37:05.776 --> 01:37:15.919 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. 01:37:16.019 --> 01:37:16.819 Listen carefully. 01:37:17.580 --> 01:37:21.121 I didn't say I would build an immunology institute or a virology institute. 01:37:22.290 --> 01:37:29.257 I looked at the currents in biology of the time and said... The currents of biology in the time. 01:37:29.317 --> 01:37:42.431 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. 01:37:45.885 --> 01:37:49.948 But then he got a call from Joshua Lederberg and apparently development was really important. 01:37:50.388 --> 01:37:52.810 That I build an institute focused on developmental biology. 01:37:54.010 --> 01:38:02.736 Because developmental biology was then in a, in a, uh, sort of on a takeoff platform of understanding. 01:38:02.996 --> 01:38:06.218 And there was lots to be done and lots of good people, lots of good trainees. 01:38:07.079 --> 01:38:11.802 Uh, this was a... I guess Swarthmore was in the perfect position to kick some ass at this time, huh? 01:38:13.183 --> 01:38:14.064 Something you could really do. 01:38:16.198 --> 01:38:28.984 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. 01:38:31.265 --> 01:38:36.328 So I got a call back from him not long after that interview and he said, would you consider being director? 01:38:37.742 --> 01:38:41.805 And I spent a little while thinking about that, talking to the family and whatever else. 01:38:41.885 --> 01:38:46.529 And now imagine if Joshua Lederberg's the one who told him to answer that question like that. 01:38:46.609 --> 01:38:47.970 Now, what does he owe Josh? 01:38:49.231 --> 01:38:53.534 How much influence does Josh have over our boy David Baltimore? 01:38:55.976 --> 01:39:02.340 And said, I was willing to sign on as an advisor to him 01:39:05.862 --> 01:39:12.308 And I would then create or try to find the conditions to create the Institute. 01:39:13.509 --> 01:39:20.756 And if I could create it in a form in which I was excited by it, then I would be director. 01:39:23.759 --> 01:39:30.445 And behind that, and Jack recognized that, was a view 01:39:32.165 --> 01:39:33.688 MIT was the place for this. 01:39:34.429 --> 01:39:35.851 He had not thought of MIT. 01:39:36.212 --> 01:39:47.369 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. 01:39:49.437 --> 01:39:55.763 So he said, but you have to do a serious consideration of the venue for it. 01:39:56.924 --> 01:39:57.664 And I said I would. 01:39:58.245 --> 01:40:03.629 And so I talked to people at Stanford, and I talked to people at Harvard, and I talked to people at Rockefeller and elsewhere. 01:40:05.972 --> 01:40:08.574 And it became clear that 01:40:09.764 --> 01:40:10.385 at MIT. 01:40:11.105 --> 01:40:21.352 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. 01:40:21.392 --> 01:40:22.693 I'll tell you about the concept in a minute. 01:40:26.096 --> 01:40:36.003 That perhaps we could do it at Stanford, because Don Kennedy was then president of Stanford and saw the attraction, actually knew Jack. 01:40:38.174 --> 01:40:43.062 They probably couldn't do it at Rockefeller because the faculty at Rockefeller would never do anything new. 01:40:45.957 --> 01:40:51.040 And that you could do it at Harvard Medical School as easily as anywhere else in the world. 01:40:52.581 --> 01:40:53.182 Just easily. 01:40:53.622 --> 01:40:59.946 Because Harvard was already an institution, the medical school in particular, built out of various independent elements. 01:41:00.706 --> 01:41:05.690 Mass General, Brigham and Women's, whatever, Dana-Farber. 01:41:06.810 --> 01:41:10.753 And so another institution, they were all set up for it. 01:41:13.032 --> 01:41:13.673 MIT was not. 01:41:14.835 --> 01:41:22.988 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. 01:41:25.342 --> 01:41:31.565 And what I said was, fine, but it has to be allied with a major center. 01:41:31.705 --> 01:41:38.068 And Jack already knew that because he knew that $135 million, $35 million was built. 01:41:38.088 --> 01:41:53.176 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? 01:41:54.400 --> 01:41:58.423 And we're supposed to believe that that just happened because Joshua Lederberg gave him a call? 01:41:59.745 --> 01:42:03.408 Joshua Lederberg, the guy who writes, like, reviews about bioweapons? 01:42:04.208 --> 01:42:10.013 Back then, he's already working for the government and sitting in on advisory committees to the president? 01:42:11.374 --> 01:42:11.675 Really? 01:42:11.695 --> 01:42:13.736 That Joshua Lederberg called him? 01:42:13.756 --> 01:42:21.683 The $100 million endowment was simply not enough to build a totally freestanding institution. 01:42:24.893 --> 01:42:31.760 And so I then went into this negotiation phase, said to Jack, I think MIT is the right answer. 01:42:33.482 --> 01:42:37.506 He said, well, you started off feeling that way, so it's not a surprise you came up with that answer. 01:42:37.666 --> 01:42:40.789 I admitted that I had a predilection to MIT because 01:42:41.830 --> 01:42:47.497 I felt that I knew how MIT could provide quality control for the institution. 01:42:48.398 --> 01:42:54.065 And quality control was the most important thing that you would get by alliance with a major institution. 01:42:54.886 --> 01:42:56.648 And that was easy to see. 01:42:57.189 --> 01:43:00.372 Because we'd make all of the faculty members of the biology department. 01:43:01.153 --> 01:43:05.997 And then they'd have to fit the same criteria as any other member of the biology department. 01:43:06.577 --> 01:43:12.222 One thing MIT knew how to do very well was to find the very best people in biology and bring them to the institution. 01:43:14.323 --> 01:43:22.590 So that made the Whitehead Institute a sort of arm of the larger biology effort at MIT, and that was great. 01:43:23.837 --> 01:43:28.420 We'd done that with the Cancer Center, but the Cancer Center was not an independent institution. 01:43:28.440 --> 01:43:30.121 It didn't have its own board or finances. 01:43:30.601 --> 01:43:33.263 It was a center of MIT. 01:43:33.703 --> 01:43:35.124 Here we were trying to do something new. 01:43:36.225 --> 01:43:37.926 That ran into a buzzsaw. 01:43:39.487 --> 01:43:45.891 And it was made worse by the fact that it was played up by the Boston Globe. 01:43:47.272 --> 01:43:53.756 as a takeover of MIT biology by this financier, Whitehead. 01:43:56.618 --> 01:43:58.580 There were also some political currents. 01:43:58.660 --> 01:44:16.111 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. 01:44:18.552 --> 01:44:24.585 And so it became an embarrassment in the newspapers. 01:44:25.266 --> 01:44:28.734 It became a cause celeb on campus. 01:44:30.541 --> 01:44:38.065 And we were trying to take it through the faculty and get a faculty vote to agree to this unique situation for MIT. 01:44:38.105 --> 01:44:44.428 Because MIT had never formally affiliated with another organization before. 01:44:44.608 --> 01:44:47.669 MIT had different schools, School of Science, School of Engineering, whatever. 01:44:48.510 --> 01:44:49.610 But that's as far as it went. 01:44:49.690 --> 01:44:52.732 Everything was part of one faculty. 01:44:55.686 --> 01:45:03.388 And they felt that I was going to get too much power as director in dictating who was getting hired at MIT. 01:45:04.208 --> 01:45:12.050 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. 01:45:12.710 --> 01:45:16.811 But people were worried. 01:45:17.671 --> 01:45:17.891 New. 01:45:18.451 --> 01:45:21.672 New at universities is often very hard to sell. 01:45:24.908 --> 01:45:27.689 So we had a stormy period of a year. 01:45:27.709 --> 01:45:39.895 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. 01:45:40.936 --> 01:45:45.778 Hasn't told us about one life-changing moment with any details that really mean anything. 01:45:47.042 --> 01:45:49.803 He just went to summer camp, and that changed his life forever. 01:45:49.923 --> 01:45:52.123 Then he met some people, and that changed his life. 01:45:52.163 --> 01:45:53.583 And he discovered things. 01:45:53.623 --> 01:45:54.544 It was pretty easy. 01:45:55.004 --> 01:45:57.184 And then he went to Stockholm and accepted the prize. 01:45:57.544 --> 01:45:58.985 It's just kind of how it happened. 01:46:01.185 --> 01:46:03.205 He got a call from Joshua Lederberg. 01:46:03.245 --> 01:46:04.426 He gave the right answer. 01:46:04.486 --> 01:46:07.146 The next thing you know, he's starting the Whitehead Institute. 01:46:07.186 --> 01:46:07.986 Why not, right? 01:46:08.226 --> 01:46:08.947 It makes sense. 01:46:09.487 --> 01:46:11.747 He just keeps falling face first into the butter. 01:46:17.088 --> 01:46:20.951 negotiation, and finally a vote in the faculty. 01:46:20.991 --> 01:46:22.753 And the faculty finally voted in favor of it. 01:46:22.773 --> 01:46:24.874 INTERVIEWER 1 What do you think convinced them? 01:46:25.255 --> 01:46:39.326 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? 01:46:40.107 --> 01:46:45.431 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? 01:46:47.250 --> 01:46:51.155 This is like looking through a stuffed animal trying to find the internal organs. 01:46:51.315 --> 01:46:52.457 There's nothing here. 01:46:53.638 --> 01:46:57.723 Ultimately, MIT is a risk-taking institution. 01:46:59.065 --> 01:47:04.192 It takes a long time to get to that point, and they had to be convinced that 01:47:05.970 --> 01:47:17.601 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. 01:47:18.410 --> 01:47:20.532 And so it was a very important time. 01:47:20.572 --> 01:47:24.556 Because initially, when I was putting this thing together, I couldn't have answered a lot of questions. 01:47:25.197 --> 01:47:31.984 But by the time it came to that vote, every question had come up and debated in the biology department. 01:47:32.104 --> 01:47:35.747 I'd had some real skeptics in biology. 01:47:37.309 --> 01:47:38.550 And had to convince them. 01:47:38.950 --> 01:47:51.642 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. 01:47:54.124 --> 01:47:56.226 Howard Johnson played a very important role. 01:47:56.286 --> 01:47:58.868 Howard was, at that point, chairman of the board. 01:48:01.050 --> 01:48:07.254 And he said, from the first time I met him and described it, he said, we have to do this. 01:48:07.274 --> 01:48:11.097 INTERVIEWERS It's someone from MIT that's interviewing him. 01:48:11.117 --> 01:48:16.041 SKOLNIKOFF And he helped me politically and was terrific about it. 01:48:17.682 --> 01:48:18.923 Paul Gray, who was president, was 01:48:21.966 --> 01:48:26.469 little uncertain because he was being torn from various sides by various factions. 01:48:27.369 --> 01:48:30.411 I could understand more. 01:48:30.431 --> 01:48:40.697 INTERVIEWER 1 So from your years as director of the Whitehead Institute, what accomplishments are you most proud of? 01:48:40.717 --> 01:48:46.061 WILCZEK Oh, I'm most proud of the Whitehead Institute as an institution. 01:48:49.904 --> 01:48:58.030 A year after we opened its doors, it was known as one of the premier biological research venues in the world. 01:48:59.692 --> 01:49:03.334 Because we'd aggregated this remarkable group of people. 01:49:04.575 --> 01:49:07.558 And their impact was instantaneous, really. 01:49:09.403 --> 01:49:12.264 Jerry Fink, Harvey Lodish, Bob Weinberg. 01:49:15.604 --> 01:49:24.126 And then we developed a, in terms of programs, I'm most proud of the Fellows Program. 01:49:25.487 --> 01:49:35.889 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. 01:49:37.692 --> 01:49:42.754 The standard track is you go to graduate school, you do a post-doc, and you get a faculty position. 01:49:44.234 --> 01:49:52.017 There's no place in there for somebody who has the strength of independent thinking. 01:49:52.257 --> 01:49:55.058 I love that. 01:49:55.338 --> 01:49:57.459 Heroic stories in bureaucracy. 01:49:57.499 --> 01:49:58.499 That's fantastic. 01:49:58.679 --> 01:49:59.980 Full trappings of faculty. 01:50:00.000 --> 01:50:01.240 That could be a band name. 01:50:01.821 --> 01:50:02.761 Committees and all of that. 01:50:04.522 --> 01:50:08.323 And so I set up that track as a Fellow of the Institute. 01:50:09.864 --> 01:50:13.725 And we had seven slots for that. 01:50:14.025 --> 01:50:23.068 And some of the very best people in America today, in the world, and scientists came through as Fellows. 01:50:25.327 --> 01:50:28.869 And it turned out to be a proving ground for young faculty at Whitehead, too. 01:50:29.269 --> 01:50:30.529 I didn't want it to be that. 01:50:30.629 --> 01:50:33.070 We, in fact, said we were not going to hire these people. 01:50:33.451 --> 01:50:37.792 But then they were so good and so wonderful that we could not hire them. 01:50:38.833 --> 01:50:53.279 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. 01:50:55.117 --> 01:50:55.778 No slouches? 01:50:56.578 --> 01:50:57.499 Oh, we had a slouch or two. 01:50:59.400 --> 01:51:01.442 Why don't we talk first about the Cancer Center? 01:51:01.842 --> 01:51:03.764 Okay. 01:51:07.626 --> 01:51:10.829 Why don't you talk a little bit about your involvement and its importance? 01:51:13.457 --> 01:51:15.799 This again takes us back to Salvador Luria. 01:51:16.520 --> 01:51:24.646 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. 01:51:25.607 --> 01:51:26.387 Luria in 1970, 71. 01:51:32.632 --> 01:51:36.015 Robert Malone being this advisor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 01:51:36.095 --> 01:51:46.184 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. 01:51:48.707 --> 01:51:51.129 Realized that there was going to be a National Cancer Act. 01:51:52.341 --> 01:51:56.624 and that that was going to provide money for building cancer centers. 01:51:58.085 --> 01:51:59.987 And so he came to me. 01:52:00.047 --> 01:52:05.991 I was the only one working on cancer at MIT at the time, at least the only one I know about. 01:52:07.832 --> 01:52:13.657 And said, actually, there were probably some people in food science, but they weren't part of the effort. 01:52:17.463 --> 01:52:22.005 He said, are you up for developing a cancer center here? 01:52:22.125 --> 01:52:34.370 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. 01:52:36.090 --> 01:52:43.696 And he went then to Jerry Wiesner, who was president, and said, I think we should develop this center. 01:52:44.156 --> 01:52:45.957 And Jerry was just terrific. 01:52:46.017 --> 01:52:47.078 He was very supportive. 01:52:47.138 --> 01:52:50.500 He understood the trends in biology. 01:52:51.101 --> 01:52:52.361 He was always near biology. 01:52:53.662 --> 01:53:01.207 And Rosenblith, who was provost at the time, I guess, and who worked in biology. 01:53:05.451 --> 01:53:08.905 We got the blessings of the administration and went forward. 01:53:10.478 --> 01:53:23.621 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. 01:53:24.481 --> 01:53:34.123 And arguably, we have made more contribution to modern cancer understanding than any other institution by keeping our focus on basic issues. 01:53:35.244 --> 01:53:36.224 And of course, now this is 01:53:37.847 --> 01:53:49.049 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. 01:53:50.170 --> 01:53:52.590 Why don't you rattle off a couple of the contributions? 01:53:53.310 --> 01:53:55.731 The Koch Institute. 01:53:55.751 --> 01:53:57.651 So this is in 2015, remember? 01:53:57.931 --> 01:54:00.132 Phil Sharpe's discovery of splicing. 01:54:00.872 --> 01:54:01.732 Phil Sharpe. 01:54:01.872 --> 01:54:03.913 Without that, we would not understand 01:54:05.353 --> 01:54:08.257 how mammalian cells process their information. 01:54:08.737 --> 01:54:13.102 So interesting because Susumu Tonigawa was also talking about splicing, right? 01:54:13.342 --> 01:54:22.293 And specifically how variability in the protein that results can be created through splicing and somatic mutation. 01:54:22.333 --> 01:54:23.534 And so that process 01:54:25.236 --> 01:54:28.597 Just to cite Sharpe is really very, very interesting. 01:54:29.118 --> 01:54:30.278 It's a very interesting guy. 01:54:30.338 --> 01:54:35.301 Great page on Philip Sharpe can be found at the Housatonic Archive at Housatonic Live. 01:54:35.321 --> 01:54:36.862 Don't forget. 01:54:36.882 --> 01:54:42.125 It was as fundamental a discovery as anything made ever in molecular biology. 01:54:44.346 --> 01:54:46.107 Bob Weinberg's discovery that 01:54:50.100 --> 01:54:52.261 Cancer was a genetic disease fundamentally. 01:54:52.281 --> 01:54:59.203 I mean, he showed that when you transform a cell with a chemical, that the chemical actually hits an oncogene. 01:54:59.563 --> 01:55:04.445 And we knew about oncogenes from work on viruses, but we knew nothing about them in cells. 01:55:04.725 --> 01:55:07.326 So that's the second time he's used the word transform. 01:55:08.827 --> 01:55:11.429 And of course, transform is the same as transfect. 01:55:11.469 --> 01:55:26.882 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. 01:55:27.462 --> 01:55:28.443 after cell division. 01:55:28.483 --> 01:55:34.908 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. 01:55:34.968 --> 01:55:42.674 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. 01:55:43.694 --> 01:55:53.822 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. 01:55:56.516 --> 01:56:01.538 a discovery for which I still believe he should have won the Nobel Prize, but he's won everything else but. 01:56:05.659 --> 01:56:21.285 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. 01:56:22.986 --> 01:56:25.908 It is remarkable how he's just not saying anything. 01:56:39.119 --> 01:56:48.222 If these people made remarkable discoveries, you would say things like I would say things that, you know, John O'Keefe discovered place cells. 01:56:48.262 --> 01:56:56.104 And for the first time, we had neurons that fired in patterns that seemed to correlate with locations in space and in time. 01:56:56.164 --> 01:56:58.685 And so it was a pretty remarkable discovery. 01:56:58.745 --> 01:57:04.387 And this model has been used, this model system has been used as a probe to brain function 01:57:04.927 --> 01:57:07.509 for the decades after his initial discoveries. 01:57:07.889 --> 01:57:11.171 You can say that if you know what somebody has discovered. 01:57:13.633 --> 01:57:14.733 You can just say it. 01:57:15.674 --> 01:57:23.879 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. 01:57:24.920 --> 01:57:30.744 And yet the paucity of details here really suggests that this man is full of shit. 01:57:31.834 --> 01:57:32.855 It's unbelievable. 01:57:32.895 --> 01:57:36.117 He is a national security actor without a doubt. 01:57:39.039 --> 01:57:42.321 We were the fifth floor of the Cancer Center, the group that I've just told you about. 01:57:42.441 --> 01:57:47.285 Weinberg, Sharp, me and Nancy and David Hausman. 01:57:48.946 --> 01:57:49.386 Not bad. 01:57:50.667 --> 01:57:52.228 And then it was cell biology downstairs. 01:57:52.328 --> 01:57:53.769 Hines and Solomon. 01:57:55.550 --> 01:57:57.752 and immunology harmonized and came here. 01:57:58.373 --> 01:58:19.353 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 01:58:21.308 --> 01:58:37.534 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. 01:58:44.214 --> 01:59:04.545 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. 01:59:09.002 --> 01:59:18.510 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. 01:59:18.530 --> 01:59:18.950 Right. 01:59:19.711 --> 01:59:23.033 And wound up going to Rockefeller as president. 01:59:23.113 --> 01:59:27.397 Can you talk a little about the appeal of administration? 01:59:29.218 --> 01:59:36.284 Well, I got just a lot of positive personal feedback from developing the Whitehead Institute. 01:59:37.643 --> 01:59:40.326 I love being the HNIC. 01:59:40.706 --> 01:59:41.547 That's what he likes. 01:59:41.607 --> 01:59:43.589 He really likes to be the HNIC. 01:59:43.649 --> 01:59:44.350 That's what he likes. 01:59:44.370 --> 01:59:45.772 It's a lot of work. 01:59:46.853 --> 01:59:47.814 It's a lot of detail. 01:59:48.655 --> 01:59:51.778 But it's mind expanding too. 01:59:52.939 --> 02:00:03.802 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. 02:00:04.102 --> 02:00:08.283 That's a Morgan Freeman reference to a movie where he was a principal. 02:00:09.103 --> 02:00:13.784 And what that takes, both financially and in terms of people. 02:00:15.745 --> 02:00:21.306 And so, I felt I had these capabilities and 02:00:23.192 --> 02:00:27.296 that in a sense I owed it to the biological. 02:00:27.796 --> 02:00:31.620 It is absolutely an admission that he is an administrator. 02:00:31.680 --> 02:00:41.349 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. 02:00:41.549 --> 02:00:44.532 To exercise those skills that I had developed. 02:00:45.658 --> 02:00:47.098 And there is a thrill. 02:00:47.118 --> 02:00:49.199 What about the skills that your wife developed? 02:00:49.259 --> 02:00:50.239 It's really weird. 02:00:50.279 --> 02:00:55.540 It's like all these guys have a wife that's actually also a scientist and made lots of discoveries. 02:00:55.660 --> 02:00:58.660 Like Hilary Koprowski's wife is a virologist. 02:00:58.720 --> 02:01:00.981 Lederberg's wife is a cell culture lady. 02:01:01.741 --> 02:01:07.002 The next door neighbor of Henry Kissinger is like responsible for all the cell cultures of all these people. 02:01:07.062 --> 02:01:10.282 It's all strange, like unnamed women. 02:01:11.623 --> 02:01:12.763 About, um, 02:01:13.963 --> 02:01:22.626 shaping an institution and maintaining its, developing its excellence or maintaining its excellence. 02:01:22.706 --> 02:01:34.049 And so when I was approached literally by David Rockefeller to head the Rockefeller Institute, then now Rockefeller University, and 02:01:36.829 --> 02:01:40.172 I had graduated from there, and so I had a feeling. 02:01:40.212 --> 02:01:42.814 I don't know if you can hear it, but the coughing is actually there. 02:01:42.894 --> 02:01:45.375 It's not at my house or in the garden. 02:01:45.436 --> 02:01:47.817 It's somewhere in the background of that video. 02:01:47.997 --> 02:01:53.602 For the institution, and I thought the institution could be doing a lot more than it was doing. 02:01:54.803 --> 02:01:58.305 And so there was an opportunity for growth and reshaping there. 02:01:59.126 --> 02:02:01.388 I accepted the job. 02:02:02.628 --> 02:02:03.349 I love New York. 02:02:03.869 --> 02:02:05.030 I always did love New York. 02:02:05.431 --> 02:02:07.492 So going to New York to me was a thrill. 02:02:09.894 --> 02:02:10.694 And for my wife. 02:02:11.535 --> 02:02:19.541 Our kid had just gone off to Andover and so whether we were in New York or Boston didn't matter a whole lot. 02:02:19.601 --> 02:02:22.883 She actually ended up becoming a denizen of New York. 02:02:22.923 --> 02:02:23.684 She still lives there. 02:02:24.104 --> 02:02:27.347 So you didn't mind spending less time in the lab at that point? 02:02:29.251 --> 02:02:29.751 I didn't. 02:02:30.712 --> 02:02:33.594 I moved my lab to Rockefeller. 02:02:35.616 --> 02:02:43.762 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. 02:02:43.882 --> 02:02:45.303 Don't make any mistakes here. 02:02:47.607 --> 02:02:50.249 stages, so I kept it here for a while and then moved it down. 02:02:51.190 --> 02:02:52.971 And I had some very good people. 02:02:53.011 --> 02:02:55.814 I got a few more really terrific people at Rockefeller. 02:02:56.994 --> 02:03:07.123 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. 02:03:07.964 --> 02:03:13.008 And the funny thing about developing young talent, which is what a laboratory is about, 02:03:14.273 --> 02:03:21.397 is that what I call benign neglect is about as good a way of training people as any. 02:03:21.437 --> 02:03:23.578 Because then they have to make their own decisions and live with them. 02:03:23.758 --> 02:03:28.901 And they think them through and that makes them very powerful people when they leave the lab. 02:03:29.461 --> 02:03:31.823 because they haven't been coddled along the way. 02:03:31.883 --> 02:03:38.667 They've had to act as independent scientists through that training period with me, anyway. 02:03:39.607 --> 02:03:45.851 And I think it's one of the reasons why the people who come out of my lab have been so successful. 02:03:45.871 --> 02:03:49.073 INTERVIEWER 1 A lot of managers don't know that lesson, though. 02:03:50.234 --> 02:03:55.537 INTERVIEWER 2 Well, you either believe it and prove the myth, or you fail in his lab. 02:03:55.597 --> 02:03:56.878 I'm sure that's what happened, right? 02:03:56.918 --> 02:03:58.159 I mean, I know that. 02:03:59.642 --> 02:04:06.346 So I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but I think we have to talk about the Imanishi Carry. 02:04:06.687 --> 02:04:09.969 So summarize it. 02:04:10.449 --> 02:04:12.010 You know what I'm particularly interested in? 02:04:12.030 --> 02:04:17.694 I'm wondering if now that time has passed, whether you have a sense of what it was really all about. 02:04:19.099 --> 02:04:22.101 No, I had a sense then of what it was about and I haven't changed my mind. 02:04:22.841 --> 02:04:25.323 And it was about political power. 02:04:26.163 --> 02:04:33.828 It was about John Dingell and the way he could exercise unilateral political power in the U.S. 02:04:34.168 --> 02:04:40.272 House of Representatives through his stewardship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. 02:04:42.176 --> 02:04:44.077 He was a bulldog. 02:04:44.477 --> 02:04:45.217 He was a bully. 02:04:47.118 --> 02:05:03.063 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. 02:05:04.847 --> 02:05:07.188 And it was awful. 02:05:09.588 --> 02:05:22.571 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. 02:05:24.231 --> 02:05:26.091 I could stand up to him and did. 02:05:27.472 --> 02:05:33.033 And I paid a heavy price for that, but I'm proud that I did it. 02:05:33.797 --> 02:05:37.778 Wow, I'm very curious how much I believe that. 02:05:37.838 --> 02:05:38.938 I don't know. 02:05:39.778 --> 02:05:44.279 But more important, I stood up for some principles that were important and that he was not. 02:05:44.359 --> 02:05:49.140 That feels a lot like a Fauci-Rand Paul orchestration to me. 02:05:49.480 --> 02:05:51.201 Oh boy, I'm very interested. 02:05:51.481 --> 02:05:54.581 Going to be the arbiter of how science was done. 02:05:56.542 --> 02:05:57.382 No more details. 02:05:59.798 --> 02:06:00.419 That's it. 02:06:02.420 --> 02:06:10.587 You've written a lot about ethics and about who should be in positions to judge science subsequently. 02:06:10.607 --> 02:06:15.492 Do you want to sort of summarize your position on that? 02:06:16.516 --> 02:06:24.098 Well, I haven't actually written much about that or even thought about it in now 15 years. 02:06:25.578 --> 02:06:32.540 That was all sort of over in 1995, I guess it was, 96. 02:06:33.080 --> 02:06:42.843 And I did write a little after that, but certainly in the last 10 years I haven't thought about a lot. 02:06:45.026 --> 02:06:48.989 There's no question who should judge science. 02:06:49.069 --> 02:06:51.430 Other scientists are the only ones who can judge science. 02:06:52.951 --> 02:07:00.296 Because science as it is happening is very technical, very complicated, very tentative. 02:07:00.696 --> 02:07:10.523 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. 02:07:12.409 --> 02:07:19.191 And that, of course, goes against everything that I know about science and knowledge. 02:07:19.251 --> 02:07:26.234 That if you're not a master of something until you can explain it simply as a truth, then this is just ridiculous. 02:07:27.975 --> 02:07:30.676 It's absolutely absurd what he's saying here. 02:07:30.696 --> 02:07:33.477 15 years before the pandemic? 02:07:33.777 --> 02:07:35.277 10 years before the pandemic? 02:07:35.977 --> 02:07:37.018 I mean, this is nuts. 02:07:37.718 --> 02:07:38.278 When was this? 02:07:38.318 --> 02:07:38.839 I think this is 2015. 02:07:42.959 --> 02:07:44.501 No, it was 2010, wasn't it? 02:07:44.521 --> 02:07:46.223 We'll go in the beginning and figure it out. 02:07:46.664 --> 02:07:52.872 If you look at it from the outside, the uncertainty and the tentativeness of it doesn't come through. 02:07:52.912 --> 02:07:53.392 It can't. 02:07:53.973 --> 02:07:55.195 People are looking for certainties. 02:07:57.579 --> 02:08:01.901 And there are, in the larger sense, no certainties in science. 02:08:02.341 --> 02:08:10.305 But certainly in the smaller sense, when things are really going on, when they're being argued in the journals, there is no certainty. 02:08:11.245 --> 02:08:15.728 And coming in from the outside and trying to arbitrate that is just an impossibility. 02:08:16.607 --> 02:08:26.258 So the peer review system, which is the core of American evaluation of science, is the right way to do things. 02:08:26.978 --> 02:08:30.102 And in a deep sense, the only way to do things. 02:08:33.879 --> 02:08:39.223 This is probably a good time to ask about the work you've done on science policy in Washington. 02:08:39.243 --> 02:08:40.124 Interesting. 02:08:40.344 --> 02:08:41.826 Wow. 02:08:41.846 --> 02:08:51.474 So the link that Housatonic Live put in the chat reveals that Emashi Kari co-authored a scientific paper on immunology with David Baltimore. 02:08:51.494 --> 02:08:54.617 The paper published in the scientific journal Cell, which is really good. 02:08:55.558 --> 02:09:01.348 showed unexpected results on how the immune system rearranges its genes to produce antibodies against antigens. 02:09:01.388 --> 02:09:04.553 Of course, Susumu Tonigawa's discovery. 02:09:06.454 --> 02:09:17.498 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. 02:09:17.558 --> 02:09:19.679 Since the research had been funded by the U.S. 02:09:19.719 --> 02:09:23.040 federal government through National Institutes of Health, the matter was taken up by the U.S. 02:09:23.100 --> 02:09:27.642 Congress, where it was aggressively pursued by, among others, Representative Dingell. 02:09:27.782 --> 02:09:28.542 Wow. 02:09:29.382 --> 02:09:36.365 Wow, and then accused her of falsifying the data and barred her from receiving grants for 10 years. 02:09:36.885 --> 02:09:41.628 She sounds like a weird kind of Judy Mikovits kind of, wow. 02:09:41.708 --> 02:09:49.031 And it's not, it's not the supervisor's fault because he leaves people alone in his lab to do their own thing. 02:09:49.091 --> 02:09:53.613 And that's kind of like nurturing them without nurturing them or something like that. 02:09:53.653 --> 02:09:54.753 He just said that. 02:09:55.253 --> 02:09:56.114 Holy shit. 02:09:56.194 --> 02:09:56.814 Nice work. 02:09:57.254 --> 02:09:58.415 Housatonic lives. 02:09:59.625 --> 02:10:02.867 particularly around the search for an AIDS vaccine. 02:10:04.848 --> 02:10:06.228 The AIDS vaccine? 02:10:06.268 --> 02:10:10.510 You mean the one that Bob Gallo announced the day before or the day of, 9-11? 02:10:10.931 --> 02:10:11.951 Holy shit! 02:10:13.792 --> 02:10:17.394 What should be the role of government in supporting science? 02:10:19.192 --> 02:10:24.336 Well, government's the only place that there is the money to do modern science. 02:10:25.357 --> 02:10:25.897 Wow. 02:10:26.337 --> 02:10:29.440 And the government funds science. 02:10:31.121 --> 02:10:35.164 Except for when he started the Whitehead Institute with a private dude's money. 02:10:35.244 --> 02:10:36.665 What is he talking about? 02:10:38.407 --> 02:10:39.087 Open way. 02:10:39.548 --> 02:10:41.549 The Koch Institute. 02:10:41.589 --> 02:10:42.990 What is he talking about? 02:10:43.671 --> 02:10:46.213 So that the results of it are available to everybody. 02:10:47.392 --> 02:10:48.713 Now, there are patents. 02:10:49.093 --> 02:10:54.518 I think this is an argument to invest the amount of money that they've invested in the Human Genome Project. 02:10:54.998 --> 02:10:56.439 That's why he says it. 02:10:58.861 --> 02:11:07.388 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. 02:11:07.488 --> 02:11:12.792 Only the government could use and change the citizenry into an experimental animal. 02:11:14.144 --> 02:11:21.447 And the patents do restrict the availability of science, particularly for commercial development. 02:11:21.468 --> 02:11:24.189 But for basic development, everything's on the table. 02:11:25.669 --> 02:11:33.713 And so the government is doing funding of science in the public's interest in a real sense. 02:11:36.074 --> 02:11:37.495 And that should be their role. 02:11:37.775 --> 02:11:43.178 Now, there are elements of science. 02:11:44.482 --> 02:11:54.926 where the scientific, particularly as they relate to medicine, where the scientific community isn't necessarily excited by working on the problem. 02:11:57.167 --> 02:12:10.113 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. 02:12:11.863 --> 02:12:14.465 And just getting people to focus on it isn't enough. 02:12:14.745 --> 02:12:17.187 You've got to get the very best people to focus on it. 02:12:17.647 --> 02:12:19.028 Because they're the creative ones. 02:12:19.068 --> 02:12:22.330 The number of really creative scientists at any one time is very small. 02:12:24.492 --> 02:12:26.553 What a giant admission that is. 02:12:26.614 --> 02:12:30.817 The amount of creative scientists at any one time is very small. 02:12:31.397 --> 02:12:32.117 No shit. 02:12:32.998 --> 02:12:39.443 That means that controlling these ideas is very easy for a select few of creative mentors. 02:12:41.152 --> 02:12:43.515 Gosh dang, it's too easy. 02:12:43.896 --> 02:12:47.280 It's like dunking on an eight foot rim. 02:12:57.834 --> 02:13:05.560 the really only laboratory of its kind at NIH, a focused laboratory on AIDS vaccine development. 02:13:06.260 --> 02:13:08.802 It's called the Virus Research Center. 02:13:11.203 --> 02:13:13.905 I thought it was the Vaccine Research Center, but okay. 02:13:14.025 --> 02:13:15.506 It's largely focused on HIV. 02:13:16.767 --> 02:13:22.071 And so that aggregated some really very good people all together in the same building with the same focus. 02:13:22.091 --> 02:13:25.954 You see how he is an administrator for all of this? 02:13:27.608 --> 02:13:33.930 And it started with his acceptance of the role of the discovery of these viral enzymes. 02:13:36.910 --> 02:13:39.351 For the love of goodness, girls, be quiet. 02:13:41.772 --> 02:13:46.493 What was your experience like, or what's been your experience working in Washington? 02:13:46.773 --> 02:13:47.733 Is it frustrating? 02:13:48.413 --> 02:13:49.734 Oh, it's frustrating. 02:13:51.334 --> 02:13:54.835 It's frustrating because you're looking for 02:13:56.132 --> 02:14:12.047 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. 02:14:13.629 --> 02:14:15.230 They're very well-meaning people, I must say. 02:14:15.250 --> 02:14:23.516 I mean, I've never found people whose concern is any deeper than the people that work in government agencies on health. 02:14:24.577 --> 02:14:29.120 But they're not necessarily the smartest people from the point of view of making policy. 02:14:30.871 --> 02:14:43.304 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. 02:14:47.628 --> 02:14:51.912 And the AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, I mean, really, this is awesome. 02:14:54.418 --> 02:14:55.879 Is that sort of But I should. 02:14:55.899 --> 02:14:58.321 There is an interesting MIT connection here. 02:14:59.062 --> 02:15:00.583 I was at some event. 02:15:00.603 --> 02:15:02.185 I don't remember where. 02:15:02.805 --> 02:15:05.588 Walter Rosenblith, who at that point was, this is now 1985. 02:15:07.830 --> 02:15:18.739 Walter is long out of administration at MIT, but was very involved in Washington, and particularly in the Academy of Sciences. 02:15:20.066 --> 02:15:37.831 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. 02:15:38.572 --> 02:15:40.992 He gets a lot of really good phone calls, you know. 02:15:41.092 --> 02:15:44.033 I get shitty phone calls, like from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 02:15:44.093 --> 02:15:46.734 and Ron Johnson on the same day. 02:15:50.073 --> 02:15:56.995 And I'm just saying, if you can, I want you to accept and to do this. 02:15:57.035 --> 02:15:58.255 I think it's very important. 02:15:59.335 --> 02:16:04.357 And I did get a call, and I did accept, and it was very important. 02:16:05.077 --> 02:16:14.459 This is the Reagan administration, and Reagan was running from anything that smelled like homosexuals or AIDS or 02:16:15.694 --> 02:16:19.595 I mean, all those sort of Republicans got embarrassed about these things. 02:16:21.076 --> 02:16:33.220 And I felt we had a responsibility in the scientific community to insist that we have a serious program of research in this area. 02:16:34.300 --> 02:16:41.603 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. 02:16:44.093 --> 02:16:50.340 a report called, geez, I used to know the name of that report very well. 02:16:53.043 --> 02:16:56.026 Anyway, the report to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. 02:16:56.507 --> 02:17:00.892 And we said there should be a billion-dollar research program, billion dollars was a lot of money at that point. 02:17:02.133 --> 02:17:06.178 And it was a sort of audacious 02:17:08.129 --> 02:17:10.451 recommendation, but it was accepted. 02:17:11.612 --> 02:17:17.338 And within about two or three years, we had a billion-dollar research program. 02:17:19.820 --> 02:17:27.247 So do you think of that as something, a contribution you've made for public service? 02:17:29.500 --> 02:17:29.981 Absolutely. 02:17:30.041 --> 02:17:30.821 Writing that report. 02:17:31.402 --> 02:17:32.463 Is that photography? 02:17:32.623 --> 02:17:32.943 Oh, no. 02:17:33.083 --> 02:17:34.144 That's a rake in the back. 02:17:34.285 --> 02:17:37.447 I thought that was photography on the video. 02:17:38.528 --> 02:17:42.212 I did that with Shelly Wolf, who was then at Tufts, no longer with us. 02:17:43.373 --> 02:17:45.154 And he was more on the medical side. 02:17:45.174 --> 02:17:46.336 I was more on the research side. 02:17:47.757 --> 02:17:51.160 It was as important as any report ever written at the National Academy. 02:17:53.337 --> 02:18:01.341 So I want to talk about Caltech and your lab, but let me ask just a couple questions, generic questions, about MIT. 02:18:04.403 --> 02:18:09.806 Having spent so much time here, what is it that you think makes MIT unique as an institution? 02:18:12.223 --> 02:18:20.926 I think the good thing is why don't we just join our laboratories and, you know, sort of work. 02:18:22.046 --> 02:18:24.907 Nobody had ever done that before at MIT, or at least in biology. 02:18:24.927 --> 02:18:26.347 I don't know about anywhere else. 02:18:27.507 --> 02:18:36.270 Well, collaboration is something that people talk about all the time and is now, I might say, almost an issue. 02:18:37.318 --> 02:18:51.326 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. 02:18:52.102 --> 02:18:57.447 When I said I want to have a joint laboratory with Harvey Lodish, who was just coming. 02:18:57.507 --> 02:18:58.528 I knew him from before. 02:18:58.988 --> 02:19:04.393 He was coming, this was two years after I came, or maybe a year. 02:19:06.875 --> 02:19:10.118 And I said, well, why don't we just join our laboratories? 02:19:11.059 --> 02:19:17.505 Nobody had ever done that before at MIT, or at least in biology. 02:19:17.565 --> 02:19:18.866 I don't know about anywhere else. 02:19:20.969 --> 02:19:31.956 And that notion of sharing equipment, that your laboratory wasn't your fortress, that was new. 02:19:32.096 --> 02:19:43.784 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. 02:19:45.740 --> 02:19:51.903 and actually set a tone for the whole country of how you built these kinds of places. 02:19:52.444 --> 02:19:57.186 But that's pretty remarkable because core facilities, they were really David Baltimore's idea. 02:19:57.347 --> 02:20:01.429 I think they were more like a national security protocol. 02:20:02.225 --> 02:20:07.348 that was changed once the aim was sequencing things. 02:20:07.388 --> 02:20:14.452 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. 02:20:14.492 --> 02:20:21.015 And so that's why you needed administrators that were read in on the goals, the higher goals of the system. 02:20:21.436 --> 02:20:30.741 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 02:20:31.201 --> 02:20:33.842 what was coming and I said development or something like that. 02:20:34.342 --> 02:20:39.764 This is all an elaborate hoax, an elaborate script with scripted actors. 02:20:40.224 --> 02:20:45.446 No real progress in molecular biology has been made since Max Delbruck retired. 02:20:45.846 --> 02:20:46.546 How about that? 02:20:47.926 --> 02:20:50.627 He is sort of on the forefront. 02:20:50.807 --> 02:20:50.967 Yes. 02:20:51.167 --> 02:20:57.449 Now MIT has really picked up the mantra of collaboration and is focusing on it. 02:20:57.609 --> 02:20:59.630 And I worry about 02:21:00.802 --> 02:21:03.305 I worry about it from the following point of view. 02:21:04.767 --> 02:21:14.180 Collaborative science tends to be complicated science that requires many different inputs. 02:21:16.107 --> 02:21:21.749 but isn't necessarily driven by a single imagination. 02:21:22.109 --> 02:21:22.929 Definitely not. 02:21:22.969 --> 02:21:30.351 That's why Jessica Rose, one of the babbling advisors and meddlers behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 02:21:30.491 --> 02:21:45.536 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. 02:21:47.301 --> 02:22:01.210 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. 02:22:01.250 --> 02:22:02.951 He knew exactly what was happening. 02:22:03.431 --> 02:22:14.798 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 02:22:15.919 --> 02:22:20.663 making invisible the lack of progress in molecular biology and genetics. 02:22:23.025 --> 02:22:28.630 And it is the individual imagination of scientists that makes a difference in the world. 02:22:30.211 --> 02:22:34.134 And so I'm no fan of collaboration per se. 02:22:35.399 --> 02:22:39.343 Certain kinds of projects can only be done collaboratively, should be done collaboratively. 02:22:39.363 --> 02:22:41.005 It's a good thing for those. 02:22:41.905 --> 02:22:48.132 But if we lost the focus on individuals, we would lose the core of innovative science. 02:22:48.993 --> 02:22:51.195 But we have already lost that, a long time ago. 02:22:51.835 --> 02:22:53.176 Already at this time, I think. 02:22:53.737 --> 02:22:54.938 He's not saying anything profound. 02:22:54.958 --> 02:22:56.519 INTERVIEWER 2 That's an important thing to say. 02:22:56.659 --> 02:22:59.662 Look, he thinks he's said something very profound, but he really hasn't. 02:22:59.782 --> 02:23:04.005 Is there anything else you want to say about MIT that you think is important, too? 02:23:04.906 --> 02:23:07.308 I could talk about MIT forever, but no, I needn't. 02:23:07.869 --> 02:23:07.989 OK. 02:23:11.331 --> 02:23:14.833 Let's look at Caltech. 02:23:15.113 --> 02:23:22.377 Talk to me a little bit about the appeal of going there and how you felt about being president and your accomplishments there. 02:23:23.037 --> 02:23:25.518 Let me say one other thing before that. 02:23:26.919 --> 02:23:28.580 Because I came back to MIT again. 02:23:29.700 --> 02:23:30.961 I went to Rockefeller. 02:23:31.992 --> 02:23:38.178 And then the Imanishi-Kari incident exploded in my face in a way. 02:23:39.359 --> 02:23:42.963 And I couldn't continue on as president there. 02:23:43.483 --> 02:23:50.090 I stayed on for a while as professor because I had a laboratory with some momentum. 02:23:50.110 --> 02:23:52.372 And my wife had a good job in New York. 02:23:53.713 --> 02:23:55.555 But I was offered, actually, 02:23:56.716 --> 02:24:03.684 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? 02:24:04.825 --> 02:24:05.586 Do you want to come back? 02:24:06.486 --> 02:24:09.029 And I said, give me a minute to think. 02:24:10.070 --> 02:24:12.052 But I finally decided that is what I wanted to do. 02:24:13.351 --> 02:24:16.314 And so I came back here in 94, 95. 02:24:19.937 --> 02:24:23.780 And I figured that was going to be the rest of my career here. 02:24:23.900 --> 02:24:24.741 It was going to be here. 02:24:25.301 --> 02:24:27.363 I wasn't going to do anything else. 02:24:29.445 --> 02:24:35.250 I didn't even think anybody would ever ask me to do anything else, because it had been such a sort of acrimonious situation. 02:24:36.696 --> 02:24:43.359 I made a couple of mistakes as president of Rockefeller, which I won't talk about, but I could sometimes. 02:24:46.880 --> 02:24:52.682 And so here I was, and I had now laboratories in Building, what was it, 68. 02:24:54.563 --> 02:25:03.406 And I got a call from Caltech saying, would I talk to the search committee for the presidency? 02:25:05.350 --> 02:25:06.612 And I said, sure, I'd talk. 02:25:06.692 --> 02:25:10.456 And I figured they wanted my sage advice about institutions. 02:25:10.536 --> 02:25:16.964 And there weren't that many people who had as much experience as I did in developing institutions at the time. 02:25:19.147 --> 02:25:23.072 And they made it plain that they wanted to consider me for the presidency. 02:25:24.273 --> 02:25:24.874 And I said, 02:25:26.946 --> 02:25:32.670 You've got to know what you're getting into here and be absolutely certain that you're comfortable with it. 02:25:32.870 --> 02:25:41.715 Now, the guy who had written the book about me called The Baltimore Case was a faculty member at Caltech, Dan Kevles. 02:25:42.155 --> 02:25:43.396 He later left and went to Yale. 02:25:45.772 --> 02:25:55.097 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. 02:25:57.158 --> 02:26:07.943 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. 02:26:08.003 --> 02:26:10.044 It's a lot about the incident, isn't it? 02:26:10.104 --> 02:26:11.665 It's a lot about the incident. 02:26:11.805 --> 02:26:12.525 It's amazing. 02:26:13.905 --> 02:26:17.507 And it has nothing to do with the science and whether the science was proven or not. 02:26:17.587 --> 02:26:18.688 It's just the incident. 02:26:19.609 --> 02:26:20.029 Wow. 02:26:21.310 --> 02:26:27.414 But the man who ran the search, Kip Thorne, was a theoretical physicist. 02:26:28.415 --> 02:26:32.217 Caltech, as opposed to any other institution, has the faculty run the search for the new president. 02:26:33.778 --> 02:26:36.220 Although the board ultimately makes the decision. 02:26:38.260 --> 02:26:47.928 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. 02:26:49.830 --> 02:26:56.776 And he finally convinced himself that they were safe offering me the presidency. 02:26:57.779 --> 02:27:01.803 By that time, the emancipatory incident had resolved completely. 02:27:02.323 --> 02:27:09.870 She had been entirely exonerated, and by implication, I had been exonerated for what I had done. 02:27:15.891 --> 02:27:20.414 And so they finally said, you are our favorite candidate. 02:27:20.455 --> 02:27:22.156 They made the recommendation to the board. 02:27:22.176 --> 02:27:25.118 The board came to me and said, you are our chosen candidate. 02:27:25.398 --> 02:27:26.179 Do you want the job? 02:27:27.520 --> 02:27:29.181 Then I had to take the idea seriously. 02:27:29.762 --> 02:27:30.882 And that was really tough. 02:27:31.363 --> 02:27:38.748 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. 02:27:38.788 --> 02:27:40.630 I had a lot of science I wanted to do. 02:27:40.650 --> 02:27:42.131 I was not unhappy about that. 02:27:47.124 --> 02:27:48.706 I got excited by the idea. 02:27:49.926 --> 02:27:53.950 Really what got me excited was that Caltech is a unique institution. 02:27:55.371 --> 02:28:08.140 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. 02:28:10.672 --> 02:28:18.580 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. 02:28:19.340 --> 02:28:29.630 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. 02:28:32.182 --> 02:28:42.129 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. 02:28:43.510 --> 02:28:55.658 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. 02:28:56.946 --> 02:29:04.030 and the slow undermining of our sort of collective planning abilities with our children. 02:29:04.750 --> 02:29:06.231 That's what social media is doing. 02:29:06.291 --> 02:29:08.512 It's taking us off the same page with our kids. 02:29:09.052 --> 02:29:10.993 It's starting to separate us from our kids. 02:29:11.433 --> 02:29:24.260 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. 02:29:25.196 --> 02:29:38.626 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. 02:29:39.407 --> 02:29:47.994 Gingholm Biological understands exactly our obligations to future generations, what we already owe them for what we are borrowing from them. 02:29:49.005 --> 02:30:03.877 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. 02:30:03.957 --> 02:30:08.100 Ladies and gentlemen, the entire pandemic is based on pseudobiology. 02:30:08.161 --> 02:30:09.281 It's fake biology. 02:30:09.321 --> 02:30:10.242 It's bullshittery. 02:30:11.343 --> 02:30:15.746 do not take it seriously except as a subject that can be studied. 02:30:16.106 --> 02:30:21.249 And we will study it here as the History of Pseudobiology 432, a course. 02:30:21.990 --> 02:30:26.493 Racism and COVID are now endemic to America and most of the West. 02:30:27.373 --> 02:30:35.739 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. 02:30:35.819 --> 02:30:43.744 And if you knew the real biology, you would understand why immunology, like endemicity is a myth, both of the process and an endpoint. 02:30:43.764 --> 02:30:49.108 There's a background that they misconstrued as spread placebo made transfection safe. 02:30:49.548 --> 02:30:55.372 And we have been fooling ourselves into thinking that we are ghostbusters by using their own tests against us. 02:30:56.032 --> 02:30:56.673 This is 02:30:57.573 --> 02:31:00.915 Ladies and gentlemen, this is for all the grandchildren of Earth. 02:31:01.335 --> 02:31:04.677 That's why the Baltimore scheme exists as Virology 101. 02:31:06.077 --> 02:31:10.779 And they are very vulnerable right now because they don't have a David Baltimore anymore. 02:31:11.480 --> 02:31:18.203 They only have that guy from Harvard and Vincent Racaniello and a bunch of other people who are not ready to 02:31:18.843 --> 02:31:20.284 to defend this narrative. 02:31:20.704 --> 02:31:22.546 Ladies and gentlemen, now is the time. 02:31:23.106 --> 02:31:24.828 We can teach our kids this problem. 02:31:25.228 --> 02:31:35.656 We can teach our kids these ideas, and we can move forward with another sacred biology, a real biology 101. 02:31:36.717 --> 02:31:42.281 Don't forget, you and your children are trapped in a national security theater if you're using social media willy-nilly. 02:31:42.801 --> 02:31:44.223 So get out while you can. 02:31:44.283 --> 02:31:45.343 Thank you very much for being here. 02:31:45.403 --> 02:31:46.164 See you again soon. 02:31:48.906 --> 02:31:49.546 Oh yeah, that's right. 02:31:49.666 --> 02:31:51.707 Don't believe the red hat nonsense. 02:31:51.767 --> 02:31:53.468 Don't believe the blue hat nonsense. 02:31:54.209 --> 02:31:58.911 Just remember where we are at giga ohm biological intramuscular injections. 02:31:58.951 --> 02:32:00.672 A dumb idea from the late 1800s. 02:32:00.732 --> 02:32:03.213 Transfection of healthy humans was a crime. 02:32:03.773 --> 02:32:07.055 RNA cannot pandemic and autism is a meaningless word by design. 02:32:07.095 --> 02:32:07.835 Thanks for being here. 02:32:07.855 --> 02:32:08.635 See you again tomorrow. 02:32:12.244 --> 02:32:15.692 Could have been music there, but I guess it's the next slide that's going to give me music. 02:32:15.732 --> 02:32:17.295 Don't forget to download PeerTube. 02:32:17.315 --> 02:32:19.079 If you need any help, let me know. 02:32:44.534 --> 02:32:44.614 So, 02:33:22.393 --> 02:33:28.435 I have no responsibility for the current pandemic. 02:33:28.695 --> 02:33:29.956 Stop lying!