Stream.Transcripts/twitch/2568735512 (2025-09-17) - History of Pseudobiology 432 - Brief (17 SEPT 2025)/2568735512 (2025-09-17) - History of Pseudobiology 432 - Brief (17 SEPT 2025).vtt

WEBVTT

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Yeah.

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The End

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Oh, there was no doubt we were living through a revolution.

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I certainly experienced it as such, internalized it in that way.

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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.

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for the first time we could have a biological assay for the genetic activity of an external molecule.

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So that publication, next to Francis Ryan, with the molding effects on my career, was talked about quite extensively around the department at Columbia.

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It turns out we had a couple of people who were important leaders on

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Alfred Murski, who has been remarked on as having been an inappropriate critic of Avery McLeod and McCarty, I don't think it was inappropriate, but it was certainly a severe critic, was also the greatest herald of the story.

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So you 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.

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But also Harriet Taylor was a graduate student working with L.C.

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Dunn, had become interested in it as well, and she in fact went to do post-doctoral work in Avery's laboratory shortly after that time.

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So we had very close information linkages to the research that was going on there.

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We were very well informed about it.

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We reacted to it.

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There was a lot of critical dialectic, but it was not something that could be ignored.

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It was the most exciting thing that had happened in many, many decades.

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And it 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

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for the most critical examination.

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It was too important an issue to just accept casually.

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So as long as the debate was alive, that was the way the scientific method operates.

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It has come to our attention that a mysterious force is loose somewhere in outer space.

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The mysteries of creation are there.

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Up in the sky?

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Up in the sky.

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The moon and the planets are there.

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And new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

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And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

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I think truth is good for kids.

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We're so busy lying, we don't even recognize the truth no more in this society.

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We want everybody to feel good.

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That's not the way life is.

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Causes vessels to circulate Like constellations reflect at night off the lake Word to the Father and Mother Earth Seek an everlasting life through this hell for what it's worth Look, listen, and observe And watch another sea cycle pulling my peeps to the curb Heed the words, it's like ghetto-style proverbs The righteous pay a sacrifice to get what they deserve Cannot afford to be confined to a cell Brainwaves swell, turning a desert to a well

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Experience the best teacher.

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Thoughts will spray like street sweepers.

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Little daddy street preacher.

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Illustrious feature.

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Narrator you select.

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Accompanied by deck.

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Plus the DJ you respect.

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Seven and a half combined.

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Over the front line.

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The ten percenters.

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Promoting slander in the airtime.

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Bear in mind.

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Jewels be the tools of the trade.

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Sharp blades, heavenly praise, the dues I pay.

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Above the crowds, above the clouds, where the sounds are original.

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Infinite skills create miracles, warrior spiritual.

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Above the clouds raining down, holding it down.

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Yeah, I leave scientists mentally scarred.

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Triple extra large, wild like rock stars who smash guitars.

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Poison bars from the gods, bust holes in your mirage.

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Catch a charge, shake them down like the riot squad.

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Invade your zone, ruin like ancient Rome.

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I span the universe and return the earth to claim my throne.

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The maker, owner, plus soul controller.

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Ayatollah rest in the sky, the clouds my sofa.

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Stand like colossus, regardless to whom or what.

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Numerous attempts in my life, so who to trust?

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Who but us?

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To supply it with the fire The burning truth 150 absolute proof On the mic like Moses Spoken Golden Squad Survivor of the oldest tribe Whose soldiers die I know the five families We shed tears and mourn But our hands are on the ammo Cause the battle's still on Sound the horn

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We come rumbling through the function Precise laser beam technique to touch something When we die hard and build a monument to honor us with Humongous effect in the world, we could've conquered it Above the clouds, above the clouds where the sounds are original Infinite skills create miracles, warrior spiritual Above the clouds raining down, holding it down

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Above the clouds, above the clouds where the sounds are original.

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Infinite skills create miracles, warrior spiritual.

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Above the clouds raining down, holding it down.

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Good morning, everybody.

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Good morning, good morning.

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Let me get my volume all good here in my head.

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Testing one, two, test.

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Give me a little more there.

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Thank you.

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Good morning, everybody.

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Welcome to the show.

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This is Giga on biological high resistance, low noise information brief brought to you by biologists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, coming to you live from my garage.

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I am very happy today to be moving forward just a little bit at a time, just incrementally a little bit at a time.

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And we are still kind of fighting this little, you know, narrative about a

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a, I don't know, a social media that's real and a politics that's real and a national security state that's real and does real things with real people that we see in front of podiums.

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And it is essentially like looking at the

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The video that you see here, if you see Tulsi Gabbard at a podium, that's really what you're looking at.

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If you see some of these people from Britain in front of a podium, that's what you're looking at.

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If you see that lady from the EU in front of a podium, this is what you're looking at at this stage, ladies and gentlemen.

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The transition has already essentially occurred.

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And now it's just a question of whether we will wake up while the legal structures that still leave an opening for us still exist, whether we can use those to work together with our children to leave the trap before the doors are closed forever.

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I think one of the reasons why biology is so important is because there was a core group of people from the very beginning of this little thing that thought it was going to take about their lifetimes to accomplish.

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And it's turned out not to be a very good, accurate timeline.

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And in fact, it's going to take a lot longer.

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They grossly underestimated the task at hand.

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But at the time when this whole plan was hatched out, I would suggest to you that the timeline was about 30 or 40 years.

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And it's turned out it's going to be a few more generations than that at the very bare minimum.

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for them to even get a rehearsal over.

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And so this is really an exciting time to be alive because some of these players have been already taken off stage by, you know, our Almighty, you know, in heaven.

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We, we, they've already gone off to the, you know, sunset in the sky or whatever you say, whatever these people have done there in the afterlife.

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They're dead.

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And as they go away, the people that they leave behind are going to be woefully underprepared to sustain the illusion that these people, because of a national security priority, have put in place for

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20 or 30 years now behind the scenes and now on TV and then on newspapers and then in Time Magazine and then in Rolling Stone and now we have Governance by Podcast where all of these myths are being doubled down upon and all of these sort of

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let's say mentors, are trying to hand off these myths to a whole, you know, naive population of people that will go on running in these hamster wheels for long enough for the goal to still be achieved.

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But this is not where they wanted to be.

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It's not where they thought they would be.

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These people who put together these ideas in the book Man and His Future did not think that in 2025 we'd be where we are.

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By 2025 they thought we would already be past this.

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And we would already know all of the ways that, you know, we could potentially improve and genetically engineer the human species and target a particular thing in the future, you know, like high intelligence or telepathy or telekinesis.

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I don't know.

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These people at this time, when they wrote this book, really thought that by 2025, there would be some science fiction shit going on.

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And it's not the case.

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But understand that that impetus morphed into a national security priority where all resources, including scripted actors, were bent on changing the population into an experimental animal status in order to

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in order to crack a puzzle.

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And they never thought that they would need this many.

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They thought maybe a few hundred would be okay.

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Maybe it's going to be a few thousand.

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But they never in their wildest imagination

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thought that they would need all the genomic data available on earth that they could possibly collect.

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And now think about that task, because that task is not simply writing things down in a notebook and having a notebook for every person and then a big library full of notebooks that you're then going to use to crack the puzzle.

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It's about assembling a genetic data set

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that is electronically accessible enough so that a machine learning algorithm can process them as several instances of the same pattern.

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That's exactly the same way it was done with millions of games of Go or millions of games of chess.

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And the complexity of the problem would dictate the number of iterations that would be necessary for a sufficient pattern to emerge.

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And so that theory is possible to apply to such a problem as the human genome, such a problem as a bacterial genome.

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But heretofore, applying that to these

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these codes hasn't worked.

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And so there's something that isn't being admitted here and we're going to have to go back far enough in history and the history of these ideas in order to find where things you know people just kind of started to just say yeah never mind that one and you know never mind that for now and here's a ship in a bottle operator here we're just going to assume that we're going to figure that out at some point and then here's another ship in the bottle operator over here that

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We're also going to figure out, we'll just put it on the need, the to-do list and assume that we're going to get that answer.

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And from a biological perspective, that's very dangerous because the central dogma, DNA to RNA to protein, is a horrible simplification that does no way, shape, or form any justice to the system that it purports to summarize, nor does it do any, you know, sufficient real arguable evidence for the idea that that supports evolution.

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And so we're really in a crucial place in the history of humanity where, again, this pondering of who we are as a species, pondering who we are as people, pondering who we are as individuals and families and how we want to think about ourselves as communities, this is all being distorted on purpose.

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And it's being distorted on and by our use of social media.

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Sooner rather than later.

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I will be off of social media completely.

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I've turned it up a little bit on X I'm just gonna make that place It's awful and I I'm gonna behave

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Not awfully, but awfully there because I think it's an awful place and people need to realize that it's an awful place.

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And so I think it's all terrible what they're doing there and what kinds of traps people have fallen into thinking that, you know, that interaction is real, that putting time into that platform is real, that trying to make friends or win arguments on that platform is real.

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The only thing that platform is a gigantic waste of time and more importantly, you're training their algorithms, their chatbots, and you're giving them ideas that they can make substacks on and use a chatbot to write a substack on and then dupe another 100,000 people.

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You gotta stop interacting with their platforms and start creating things on your own.

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And that's really the truth.

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And I'm not saying that everybody needs to have a peer tube,

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But I think you need to clearly see the value of it and clearly see why maybe high schools should have peer tubes and hobby groups should have peer tubes.

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And you can just take the platform and make it what you want to make it with, you know, open source videos, videos that you get permission to repost there.

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You can create all kinds of libraries and archives that are completely independent of

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and do not need the personal data of their users and at the same time can be shared in a very organic way like email or even a phone text message where you send the link.

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And so this is really a crucial time where we can get together with our kids and see this as a way forward, this as a way that's not in the system.

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put parallel to it, taking advantage of all of the great things about the internet and the ability for us to all connect, just like ham radio could probably be ruined if we didn't have the bandwidth to use as we will, but instead it was all commercialized and carefully controlled and encrypted.

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So I don't know what to say other than I'm trying to make that effort as best as possible.

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And all of these streams are still going to mesh in terms of what their focus is and what the direction we're trying to get to, what we're trying to accomplish.

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And so this is titled History of Pseudobiology 432 with the intention of it being a new series.

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Maybe it will even morph into a course at some point.

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But first, the course material really needs to be charted and identified.

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And that means that we just need to get a number of different histories and accounts of what happened.

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and how this transition from the 40s or the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, what happened with physics and biology there is really a crucial story.

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I've got about 10 books on my bookshelf.

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I'm in my fourth one now that kind of recounts the transition of these

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these biologists to, sorry, these physicists to biology.

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One of my favorites is called phage, phage back, I can't even remember them all now.

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Is it even upstairs again?

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Maybe I took it upstairs again, sorry.

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Yeah, I think I just took it upstairs again, but there's another one that I was also, oh no, here it is, sorry, it was here.

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Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, a very fantastic book.

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It is a collection of invited essays where these people all wrote about what they

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attributed to or learned from the work of Max Delbruck.

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So it's really a really cool book and I highly recommend that you get yourself a version of it.

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It was published by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1966 and it's got this nice picture of Max there.

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It's a sweet book and it is very

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enlightening into what these people found and what they didn't find.

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And what I think you will come to the conclusion of is they found a very complex, if not irreducibly complex system.

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within biology, within bacteria, within phages of bacteria.

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And so it's a really spectacular insight into, you know, what happened after these guys were off the stage is something very weird.

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It's like a pivot to animal viruses without ever really figuring it out in the bacteria.

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without ever really understanding how it works.

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And a lot of these people being resigned to the idea that we might not be able to figure out how it works, and certainly not if we kept focused on this DNA thing.

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It's a really curious thing.

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There's another one of those books about the same time period in America.

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So there's a lot of, and it is in America, there's a lot of

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There's a lot of history out there that needs to be well understood, and it's good to have accounts of these stories that overlap.

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So that's the kind of stuff that I'm trying to do in the background.

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I am a slow reader.

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I take a lot of notes, so I'm slow, but then I make big progress.

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Sometimes I'll sit down for four or five hours a day and get one book done in a couple days, and then other days I'm not reading for a long time because I'm reading these smaller papers.

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which I'm also digesting a lot now too because I finally have a really idea of where I want to go with biology 101 and this history of pseudobiology 432 is kind of the flip side of it in the sense of the history of science is extremely interesting when you think about theories of the solar system and theories of astronomy and theories of physics and astral bodies and this kind of thing.

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The way that people work that out with observation and careful measurement and that kind of deal, I really like that a lot.

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The history of science is really interesting.

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And so therefore, how we got here with the bookshelf of assumptions that have not really been adequately justified from an experimental basis, but still fuel our whole assumption set,

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is really extraordinary.

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And so I think this is how we go forward.

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I might start a new channel, but if you're on the PeerTube app, it won't matter.

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It'll all just show up in the app itself.

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I still do believe that this is for all the marbles.

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I think that's why there's a fake anti-vax movement in America.

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I also think that's why the Human Genome Project has been so

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consistently exaggerated in both its success and sort of its breadth and depth of knowledge.

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They constantly repeat that, oh, now we got it.

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Oh, now we really got a new milestone.

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And they've said that throughout Francis Collins' career.

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And he's even joked about that at certain, you know, with certain audiences during certain appropriate times where these people are either, you know, sufficiently on board or sufficiently naive not to understand what he's actually admitting.

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But what he's actually admitting is that the Human Genome Project is kind of an illusion.

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It is nothing more than a set of restriction enzyme maps that were considered kind of landmark maps that, you know, how much to what extent is the human genome, you know, to be generalized across individuals and what they learn from the Human Genome Project, the more that they

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made these restriction maps, the more they realized that there was too much variation for them to conquer with this primitive technique.

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But that was the only technique they had.

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You had to cut these large pieces of DNA into tiny pieces that could be amplified by bacterial culture to a sufficient quantity and purity so that they could be read as molecules, you know, with lasers or with light or with some other means that only a pure enough, strong enough signal will give them a reading.

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And so the whole error rate in Sanger sequencing, as I understand it, will be the relative purity of the fragments that are made.

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And whether or not the original PCR product is really being amplified is the one that you wanted.

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There's lots of stuff there that, of course, people say that have been methodologically conquered.

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But being able to make better photocopies of Chinese encyclopedias doesn't mean that you're getting better at reading the Chinese encyclopedia.

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And that is the extreme preposterous nature of what we have done with regard to teaching children and teaching me.

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as a grad student about what the implications of our understanding of DNA are.

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And they are not what is being taught in university.

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It's simply not true that we have already sequenced full genomes and we can just kind of walk you through the list of genes and what's there and what's not.

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And we know what's useful and what's not, what's extra DNA or junk DNA or any of these other things that people have said.

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Even though at the same time we understand that in

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In the limited sort of work that we've done in vitro with cell cultures and with gene expression and using, you know, vectors to express genes in mammalian cells or in bacteria, we have already discovered that there are all sorts of gene sequences that can be used as initiating signals, enhancing signals, timing signals, temporal delay signals,

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And so all of these things are still hidden clockwork in the genome that even 10 years ago, people didn't really understand to what extent these things could be interactive and nevermind across genes and across protein expression timeframes, across tissue dependent mechanisms like the RNA dependent RNA, I'm sorry, the ribosome and it's dependent on RNA folding.

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So the whole,

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machinery that is doing the translation from RNA to protein is a combination of RNA and protein that everybody in biology seems to want to ignore even though it's the most important transition because supposedly DNA and RNA are just kind of mirror copies of each other in the sense of RNA copies one active strand of the DNA and then gets sent out of the nucleus kind of be used as a disposable copy.

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And so the magic actually happens in the ribosome, but the central dogma rarely even mentions that machine.

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It's so bizarre because, you know, it's as far as my understanding goes, it's really weird, but mitochondria have their own ribosomes.

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Not only do they have their own DNA, but they have their own ribosomes.

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It's strange because in one hand, we're told that mitochondria are just kind of the,

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leftover endosymbiotic husks of early bacteria that now just serve the purpose of providing a proton gradient from which ATP is generated, but it just feels a little weak.

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just feels a little weak to me.

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And that's the gut basis that I'm going on.

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And then that combined with the fact that I think I have at least 15 books in this room that prove that intramuscular injection is just a dumb idea from the late 1800s.

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I know for sure from my professional experience as a neurobiologist, the transfection of healthy humans was a crime.

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from the start of the pandemic onward, and anybody that tells you that they were a whistleblower and had any experience at all with either vaccinology or bioethics or maybe even anti-vax or public health freedom or health freedom or I don't know what, anti-mandate stuff, is full of baloney.

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because it's very very simple.

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It's an old technology that's been renamed and they are the only way to explain why there is no one in the public sphere that has been able to say this for six years is because a national security state operation has been in charge of controlling this narrative so that no one would ever use the word in a place where it mattered and certainly the word would never catch on.

28:47.352 --> 28:49.935
And this goes back to the Human Genome Project as well.

28:49.995 --> 28:57.423
The only way that we're ever going to be able to get any useful information about humans is to use humans as the experimental animal.

28:58.023 --> 29:07.373
There is sufficient biological difference and uniqueness between species, never mind across vertebrates.

29:08.314 --> 29:24.544
that anything that's learned in one of these model organisms might have a or might not have a molecular counterpart in its, let's say, temporal conspecifics and temporal peers.

29:25.184 --> 29:30.748
And when I say temporal peers, I mean everything on Earth right now is a temporal peer of one another.

29:30.828 --> 29:33.649
Our blue whales are our temporal peers.

29:34.350 --> 29:37.812
As far as we can tell, blue whales haven't always been on Earth.

29:39.264 --> 29:42.405
As far as we can tell, they might've not always been on earth.

29:42.465 --> 29:50.969
And so there are temporal, it's, I'm just going out there here and trying to get you to get into the right page with regard to where this stuff fits in.

29:51.749 --> 29:52.990
Because we can know.

29:54.910 --> 29:55.651
That's the trick.

29:55.751 --> 30:00.373
Don't think for one second because social media has convinced you that you can't know.

30:00.433 --> 30:08.096
You can know, you just can't use social media to find it, at least not without a lot of different outlook and skill use.

30:10.103 --> 30:12.385
And you don't need to, there's books and stuff like that.

30:14.507 --> 30:27.699
Although the, you know, the internet, if you use it right, you use it with intention, go to Housatonics archive, you go to, I don't know, Wikipedia, you go to, you know, download a book, a PDF of a book and make sure that it's there.

30:27.739 --> 30:31.743
I mean, this is all possible uses of the internet, but social media is not good for you.

30:32.584 --> 30:35.907
Um, RNA cannot pandemic autism is a meaningless word by design.

30:37.088 --> 30:49.211
And so I've been asking you to consider the possibility that for a long time we have been playing sort of a game with what we believe versus how we act.

30:50.292 --> 30:57.594
I think I have for a long time believed that it was a two-party system that was actually one party putting on a show.

30:58.674 --> 31:03.255
you know, agreeing to have dinner with each other, but then arguing in public about different things.

31:03.335 --> 31:23.461
And to a certain extent, it made sense to me, but as sort of my experience with current American history over the last 53 years, certainly over the last 35 years, I've really come to understand that I haven't really taken that to a logical conclusion.

31:23.601 --> 31:27.062
And if that's really the case, then shouldn't we also assume

31:28.464 --> 31:32.538
that the people that are elected are already kind of okay with everybody.

31:33.519 --> 31:36.300
Shouldn't it be that that's the reason why, right?

31:36.340 --> 31:38.401
That we are where we are.

31:38.441 --> 31:44.243
And so we put a lot of energy into things that we probably don't need to put energy into anymore.

31:44.543 --> 31:47.645
And that sounds scary at first, but actually it's not.

31:47.725 --> 31:55.168
Because once you realize that if none of us voted, they would still elect somebody and they would still make the drama on TV.

31:55.248 --> 32:00.210
And maybe they would even tell you that most people still voted, even though you know that nobody did.

32:01.270 --> 32:06.494
That's the extent to which they control social media and the mainstream media.

32:06.614 --> 32:08.735
I want you to hear that analogy again.

32:09.196 --> 32:16.901
If all of us, and we could verify it by walking down the street and everybody that puts up a white flag has decided not to vote,

32:18.072 --> 32:32.641
and everybody in Pittsburgh was flying a white flag, they might still tell you that the president was elected and everybody but Pittsburgh voted or, you know, a lot of people voted but put up a white flag anyway because they were afraid of what their neighbors would think.

32:33.919 --> 32:37.740
A lot of people mailed in their votes and then they put up the white flag anyway.

32:38.140 --> 32:40.101
So there's, you see what I'm saying?

32:40.881 --> 32:43.242
There's, there's lots of contingency plans.

32:43.282 --> 32:44.622
There's lots of scripts here.

32:44.662 --> 32:46.923
The most important thing is how do we get out of this?

32:47.423 --> 32:51.024
And maybe one of the ways to get out of it is to elect people that you trust.

32:51.204 --> 32:55.125
I don't know, but I think right now, anybody that comes into Clearview is a need to know

32:55.845 --> 33:01.048
scripted actor, a need-to-know basis scripted actor, meaning they don't know what's coming.

33:01.529 --> 33:02.929
They haven't been told everything.

33:02.969 --> 33:06.031
They don't know who all the people who are in on it.

33:06.091 --> 33:15.937
And that's part of the reason why they can remain controlled, because they're each sort of run by a different handler, and they have no idea whose handlers are working with whose handlers.

33:16.838 --> 33:19.560
And that's really what makes this so magical.

33:20.992 --> 33:31.381
But make no mistake about it, if you want to know what's going on, you got to ask the right question, and then you got to come up with a plausible answer.

33:31.961 --> 33:43.170
And I don't think very many people have a more plausible answer than the Human Genome Project when it comes to why would it be that America would be run by a false two-party theater?

33:44.231 --> 33:45.032
Why would it be?

33:46.351 --> 33:58.234
that maybe world powers and weaponized piles of money are fighting over control of America and its infrastructure and its military and its government.

33:58.294 --> 34:09.557
Why would people take that so seriously that they would take control of elections by taking control of what essentially all the citizens in America know?

34:11.697 --> 34:13.158
It's the Human Genome Project.

34:14.098 --> 34:14.638
It's about

34:16.545 --> 34:18.026
getting rid of the FDA.

34:18.107 --> 34:28.877
It's about all these things that, from the beginning, the American, specifically the American system, is really not set up to allow.

34:30.518 --> 34:32.380
And it's a unique system in that way.

34:33.459 --> 34:41.871
That's why in Canada and in the European Union, they're going to push forward with digital ID and it's going to be almost irresistible for the citizens.

34:42.452 --> 34:46.658
That's why they're already, they've had this plan for a long time, right?

34:47.199 --> 34:49.803
And so America will be one of the last places where

34:50.283 --> 34:55.591
you know, the Internet will be free or that anonymousness will be tolerated or something like that.

34:55.631 --> 35:06.606
And then maybe there'll be even a rift between whether or not Americans can go on the Internet or be seen on the Internet in certain places or in certain locations or with certain Internet providers.

35:07.307 --> 35:13.011
Because again, we need to control the identity of people on the internet.

35:13.051 --> 35:27.681
And all this will do, like the guy from Dune said, was if you turn your intelligence and your thinking over to machines so that you can be free, all that's going to do is open you up to being enslaved by men with machines.

35:28.121 --> 35:29.482
And that's what's happening right now.

35:29.963 --> 35:31.644
Unless we are the ones who are

35:33.665 --> 35:40.749
creating the network, you know, creating the community, then it's always gonna be controlled.

35:40.809 --> 35:42.730
And that's really where we are.

35:42.750 --> 35:50.655
This Human Genome Project is going full tilt now, and any chance of knocking it off of its tracks is now, in the next 10 years.

35:51.495 --> 35:57.359
After that, I don't really see that we can make it.

35:57.879 --> 35:59.180
I don't really see that we can make it.

36:00.450 --> 36:05.195
So again, there's nobody in front of you explaining why this line is not level.

36:05.235 --> 36:12.101
There's no one explaining to you how it is that we lost control of pneumonia for a couple of years and then just seem to get control of it again.

36:12.662 --> 36:17.306
There's no one trying to frame this in the context of the opioid crisis.

36:17.726 --> 36:21.430
There's no one trying to say anything about supplementary oxygen.

36:21.490 --> 36:25.634
They just want to talk about, I don't know anymore, mostly the COVID shot.

36:27.452 --> 36:29.474
And so it is kind of a disaster right now.

36:29.554 --> 36:31.796
It's kind of a worst case scenario, I would say.

36:31.816 --> 36:32.817
I think that's true.

36:33.918 --> 36:39.883
We do have a worst case scenario because there is a fraud at the HHS secretary's desk.

36:39.943 --> 36:42.885
There is a fraud at the director of the NIH.

36:42.905 --> 36:45.047
There's a fraud at the Oval Office.

36:46.548 --> 36:51.453
We are essentially being governed by actors, or at least that's what they want us to believe.

36:51.533 --> 36:53.975
Even Tulsi Gabbard, are you kidding me?

36:57.168 --> 37:02.292
I mean, she's exactly as, as, as adult as like Barry Weiss.

37:02.953 --> 37:09.658
They're just not, they've been scripted for so long and prepared for their role for so long.

37:09.698 --> 37:11.179
They are not natural people.

37:12.360 --> 37:15.523
They don't have a natural explanation for their flaws.

37:15.643 --> 37:18.005
They don't even have any flaws as far as they know.

37:19.286 --> 37:23.449
And you can see that with all of these people, they don't have any flaws.

37:23.509 --> 37:25.491
There's no edge to their behavior.

37:25.531 --> 37:26.332
They're not real.

37:27.213 --> 37:28.034
They're acting.

37:30.336 --> 37:34.540
And you can, well, anybody that's been in the room, you can see there's no script here.

37:34.700 --> 37:38.844
I don't know where I'm going with this except a general feeling of what video I wanna discuss.

37:38.884 --> 37:48.633
But when I see these slides and I think in this stream, it's just something that comes out and none of these people are doing that and they've never been doing that.

37:49.815 --> 37:58.762
They are improvising within a script provided to them by this national security state that needed to manage a problem, right?

37:58.902 --> 38:00.604
A specific problem.

38:01.845 --> 38:07.169
A specific problem that had been coming since I graduated from high school in 1990.

38:07.629 --> 38:08.770
This bump right here.

38:10.351 --> 38:17.317
And this biological signal was something that the national security state planned for to use

38:20.859 --> 38:37.991
And it is likely that 9-11 was something that was in this time frame as a biological attack, which would have been one of those stepping stones toward removing the sovereignty from American citizens by first maybe starting with the sovereignty of the American military.

38:38.731 --> 38:42.334
Not that dissimilar to what they tried to do at the beginning of COVID as well.

38:43.598 --> 38:54.167
And so this was an anticipated signal that the national security state intended to use in order to solidify its control of the civilian population.

38:54.207 --> 38:57.250
It's a national security issue.

38:58.071 --> 39:10.442
And so when you hear these people that have been put in front of us to say, it's the DOD, they're not really saying it correctly because the human genome project would be the DOE, just like nukes is the DOE.

39:12.048 --> 39:14.030
And so something happened on 9-11.

39:14.070 --> 39:24.479
I'm not sure what happened, but it is extremely interesting that Joe Biden was on television talking about bioterrorism the day before.

39:24.519 --> 39:33.447
It is extremely interesting that the book, Big Shot AIDS Vaccine, or whatever it was, came out like the day before.

39:36.350 --> 39:38.612
It's just really, really interesting.

39:42.867 --> 39:47.388
And so this anticipated rise in all-cause mortality was not overlooked.

39:48.469 --> 39:49.109
It was used.

39:49.129 --> 39:52.810
If you want to weigh in, they can.

39:53.830 --> 40:02.173
Now, yesterday I was watching this TWiV with you, but I actually didn't have time to watch the crucial part of the video that I wanted you to see.

40:02.193 --> 40:09.095
And that's good because it's a good introduction to the David Baltimore interview, which we will not have time to finish today because

40:09.895 --> 40:20.812
I will probably collapse if I stand here for the whole video while I also stop it to talk, but I will try to do quite a bit until I need to stop for lunch before the basketball this afternoon.

40:21.798 --> 40:24.139
So this is the guy from Harvard, right?

40:24.159 --> 40:30.462
He's the head of Harvard Virology and he's being pested by Vincent Racaniello.

40:30.482 --> 40:40.646
Now Vincent Racaniello is the kind of the all-star student of David Baltimore, very famous for having been on the paper where they

40:41.566 --> 40:51.697
used a DNA copy of the polio virus and transformed a set of cells and it packaged, I guess, more virus or something like that.

40:51.757 --> 40:53.059
They were the ones who invented

40:53.812 --> 40:57.093
the synthetic DNA cloning of viruses.

40:57.694 --> 41:00.755
Yes, Vincent Racaniello and David Baltimore.

41:00.775 --> 41:02.555
And David Baltimore died last week.

41:03.296 --> 41:17.121
So it's important to collect the videos of David Baltimore, make sure they're not lost because any teaching moments that he might've had, any special insights or unique analogies that he might've had,

41:18.325 --> 41:24.109
could remain an insight into key biological ideas that maybe no one will ever come up with again.

41:24.149 --> 41:29.772
And so it's a valuable resource that we have all of these videos of David Baltimore.

41:29.832 --> 41:33.675
On the other hand, maybe these videos will be like the videos of Elon Musk, where

41:34.355 --> 41:43.482
this seemingly smart guy will say nothing of interest and nothing of report and nothing profound.

41:43.582 --> 41:44.703
It's also very possible.

41:45.244 --> 41:50.388
So again, this is first to illustrate that the myth of virology is in danger

41:51.636 --> 42:09.351
the people that sit at the chair of Harvard biology or virology at Columbia, et cetera, they are, these are the people that we would potentially be discussing RNA cannot pandemic, discussing that intramuscular injection might be a dumb idea from the late 1800s.

42:09.391 --> 42:19.239
And I wanna hear, I want you to hear what they think about these ideas because we were set up on the health freedom side

42:20.307 --> 42:25.954
to either believe in gain of function or to believe that there are no viruses at all.

42:26.915 --> 42:31.540
That's the extreme version of the Scooby-Doo where it's a lab leak or it's a natural virus.

42:32.481 --> 42:38.128
Because in that Scooby-Doo mystery, the lab leak is still just a natural virus that was growing in the lab.

42:40.359 --> 42:52.736
And in our version of the Scooby-Doo, there are no viruses in some people's minds, and there are magic viruses that are a gain of function and could kill billions of people in the theoretical mind of others.

42:53.888 --> 43:04.817
And so if you recognize the cognitive fracture that they have brought us to, it's actually much worse than I've ever been able to explain it because it's not a natural virus or a lab leak.

43:04.917 --> 43:19.669
It, it is a natural virus or a lab leak embedded in two absurdities, no virus or a gain of function mystery virus with extra properties that are doing extra damage.

43:21.946 --> 43:33.870
And yet when we were in this trap and as you're in this trap, it doesn't feel like that, but actually it doesn't matter where you went on the skeptical spectrum, you were lost.

43:35.330 --> 43:41.472
And the easy choices were a natural virus that got out of a lab or a natural virus that got out of a bat cave.

43:43.393 --> 43:44.813
And so like 70% of the population is here.

43:49.153 --> 44:11.184
and many people have been chased, coerced, or goaded into taking one of these two absolutely absurd positions which makes this guy sitting firmly in the yes there are viruses, yes vaccines work, there's no questioning this, making him feel very confident in his position but nervous

44:12.366 --> 44:16.607
because he's talking to one of these godfather dudes, Vincent Racaniello.

44:16.647 --> 44:18.167
Now listen to this discussion.

44:18.187 --> 44:19.388
I'll try not to interrupt it.

44:19.448 --> 44:21.828
And I know that's kind of a joke, but I promise.

44:22.208 --> 44:38.993
No, but in general, my research program has largely been centered on using protein engineering as ways to tinker with proteins in order to kind of direct or redirect the immune response to understand how we respond to pathogens and particular viruses.

44:39.053 --> 44:40.453
That's what we focus on.

44:40.993 --> 44:54.538
And so what I'm very interested in trying to understand is, what is the way that our immune system sees a pathogen, and how antibodies are made to it, and how can we use that information to potentially guide next-generation viral vaccines?

44:55.038 --> 45:07.743
And one thing also that we're interested in trying to understand is, once you make an immune response to a particular pathogen, how does that pathogen sense that immune pressure, and how does it evolve away from that immune pressure

45:08.263 --> 45:09.784
And how does viral escape happen?

45:09.844 --> 45:11.346
And how does viral evolution happen?

45:11.726 --> 45:22.174
So we're trying to use that information to ultimately try to design better vaccines or new vaccines against some of the most pressing viral diseases around.

45:24.676 --> 45:29.640
So as you know, the head of HHS doesn't believe in vaccines, right?

45:30.421 --> 45:33.203
Doesn't believe in infectious diseases, in fact.

45:33.323 --> 45:37.086
So do you think there is a future for new vaccines?

45:39.420 --> 45:41.822
I just said I was worried about what was coming out of your mouth.

45:41.942 --> 45:44.483
I know it's a hard question.

45:44.724 --> 45:46.245
No, but it's an important one.

45:46.365 --> 45:54.350
And all joking aside, I absolutely believe that there is a path and a necessary path for new vaccines to be developed.

45:54.410 --> 45:56.151
I'm a strong believer in vaccines.

45:56.231 --> 45:57.772
I'm an advocate for vaccines.

45:58.273 --> 46:07.599
And I think that the work that we're doing can certainly be used as blueprints for approaching potentially new pandemics that could enter into the human population.

46:08.039 --> 46:09.040
And so I would

46:09.680 --> 46:13.024
vehemently disagree with what is currently being put out.

46:13.124 --> 46:14.305
It's really cool, right?

46:14.345 --> 46:18.889
It's almost like he's testifying and he's, you know, I believe in the virus.

46:18.969 --> 46:20.351
I believe in novel viruses.

46:20.431 --> 46:25.676
I believe that the vaccine saved millions of people and I believe that another virus could come again.

46:26.216 --> 46:32.502
He's actually, you know, not even asked to, but he is reciting all the tenements of the faith.

46:33.720 --> 46:51.965
by our government and am a strong believer in vaccines and the importance of making sure that our communities are well-versed and knowledgeable in what vaccines can do in terms of protecting them against viruses and other diseases that could have other rather severe consequences.

46:52.225 --> 46:54.686
It's almost like he's being coerced right now.

46:54.766 --> 46:57.167
You know, like there's some dude behind the curtain with a gun.

46:57.707 --> 46:58.227
It's crazy.

46:59.807 --> 47:01.328
He wants that microphone back.

47:04.835 --> 47:05.655
What a guy.

47:08.097 --> 47:11.078
Remember yesterday, we were already laughing about them clapping.

47:11.158 --> 47:11.458
Wow.

47:11.518 --> 47:13.319
It's just, it's remarkable.

47:14.600 --> 47:15.140
Great audience.

47:15.460 --> 47:15.961
Really good.

47:16.221 --> 47:17.061
Great audience.

47:17.081 --> 47:18.322
I feel like I'm Johnny Carson.

47:22.164 --> 47:24.605
I see so much cool technology.

47:25.245 --> 47:32.929
Now, what I want you to think about is the fact that this is now one of the virology experts on earth.

47:34.451 --> 47:37.313
He calls himself Earth's virology professor.

47:37.353 --> 47:40.896
He streams hours and hours a day with other virologists.

47:43.439 --> 48:00.353
And so just listen to the way that he talks, listen to the questions that he asks and think about whether that suggests that this guy knows anything about molecular biology or just really knows what he thinks he did in David Baltimore's lab and that's it.

48:00.693 --> 48:01.574
Everything else is,

48:02.506 --> 48:09.090
He's read some virology books and has taken every single word in those texts for granted.

48:10.871 --> 48:27.402
Never questioned them, never thought about whether there's any contradictory things being displayed here, whether this jives with what he understands about the central dogma, nothing like that, just accepting it and the Baltimore scheme all just, yep, that's the way it is, because I worked for him.

48:29.329 --> 48:31.211
This is an amazing little discussion.

48:31.231 --> 48:32.391
I'm going to try and get through it.

48:33.292 --> 48:33.953
Gee, I can't.

48:34.513 --> 48:35.934
That can be applied to vaccines.

48:35.994 --> 48:40.598
And it makes me sad in a way that we have a leader who doesn't embrace that.

48:40.638 --> 48:42.239
But I agree with you.

48:42.540 --> 48:43.460
I have great optimism.

48:43.480 --> 48:44.501
And we're going to get past this.

48:45.042 --> 48:45.462
We will.

48:45.622 --> 48:46.263
We have to.

48:46.883 --> 48:51.127
Because the alternative is much too much suffering.

48:52.413 --> 48:54.496
All right, so I read a couple of your papers.

48:55.617 --> 48:59.702
And it was good to put me asleep.

49:01.144 --> 49:02.145
Just kidding.

49:02.345 --> 49:03.727
You're good to joke.

49:03.947 --> 49:05.088
He's a good jokester, right?

49:06.030 --> 49:07.071
Oh, you know this already.

49:07.611 --> 49:08.432
OK, I didn't know.

49:08.452 --> 49:09.754
I'd never met him before.

49:09.974 --> 49:10.735
So here's one.

49:11.596 --> 49:17.578
Conserve sites on flu H1, H3, HA recognized by human antibodies, right?

49:17.618 --> 49:22.519
These can be used as a template to design a vaccine that elicits them.

49:22.579 --> 49:25.200
So I always wonder how you could do that.

49:25.260 --> 49:29.361
So you know which antibodies are important, which epitopes induce them.

49:29.681 --> 49:31.902
How do you focus a vaccine on those?

49:33.254 --> 49:34.975
Yeah, so that is a great question.

49:35.035 --> 49:53.350
So what we often do is look at how in that particular paper that you are referring to is actually the lead author on that was Daniel Maurer, who was actually a virology graduate student who has recently graduated and is now at Moderna doing research there as a scientist.

49:53.750 --> 50:01.437
And so one thing that we're interested in doing is, as you pointed out in that paper, is that we identified human antibodies that recognize particular parts on the influenza

50:02.711 --> 50:08.778
Yeah, so that was good to put me asleep.

50:08.798 --> 50:11.221
Just kidding.

50:11.441 --> 50:12.823
You're good to joke.

50:13.023 --> 50:14.164
He's a good jokester, right?

50:15.126 --> 50:16.147
Oh, you know this already.

50:16.707 --> 50:16.968
OK.

50:17.088 --> 50:17.508
I didn't know.

50:17.528 --> 50:18.850
I'd never met him before.

50:19.070 --> 50:19.811
So here's one.

50:20.672 --> 50:26.657
Conserve sites on flu H1, H3, HA recognized by human antibodies, right?

50:26.677 --> 50:31.601
These can be used as a template to design a vaccine that elicits them.

50:31.641 --> 50:40.167
So I always wonder how you could do that, so you know which antibodies are important, which… And I think the most important thing to point out here is that, again,

50:41.069 --> 50:50.330
We're having a discussion in 2025 about the immune system and the primary model of immunity and the primary measurement of immunity, the primary sort of

50:51.431 --> 51:04.238
knob that they are trying to fine-tune is our understanding on how antibody specificity is produced and how it you could coerce antibody specificity.

51:04.298 --> 51:10.521
Now it's interesting because a discovery by the guy by the name of Susumu Tonigawa

51:11.314 --> 51:15.218
and I believe 1983 or 1984 is when he got the Nobel Prize for it.

51:16.159 --> 51:28.452
He discovered the genetic mechanism by which infinite variability in the variable region of antibodies can be generated by gene reassortment and somatic mutation.

51:33.095 --> 51:35.576
It's a single paper written by a single guy.

51:35.616 --> 51:36.716
He's really a badass.

51:37.837 --> 51:53.162
And what's cool about that is that that mechanism is sort of assumed to only be unique for B cells, which I think is a likely a national security myth designed to make you think that

51:53.662 --> 52:00.507
you know, genes and gene expression aren't really that complicated, except for in this unique case of antibodies.

52:00.887 --> 52:13.956
And what I find so fascinating about that is that's also the unique biological conundrum that all these virologists and all these immunologists that are paid by the national security state seem to be stuck in.

52:15.777 --> 52:18.479
Even though there was a Nobel Prize awarded in 1980-something,

52:21.676 --> 52:29.983
for the genetic mechanisms underlying the infinite potential antibody diversity available to everyone.

52:31.724 --> 52:45.855
Which is, of course, probably the main molecular reason why the antibody patent paradox finally came crashing down in 2020 after a Yale's law school review paper was cited by the Supreme Court.

52:45.935 --> 52:48.397
So this is crucial to see.

52:50.646 --> 53:03.694
Because this is a Harvard virology retreat where all the acolytes will go on to be virologists at virology departments around the United States and around the world, potentially.

53:06.416 --> 53:19.584
All regurgitating this half-baked nonsense about some kind of high-fidelity understanding about a molecular world we can only probe if we create large quantities of those molecules and then measure them indirectly.

53:20.725 --> 53:24.168
And so how in the world do we know what's going on at that size scale?

53:24.188 --> 53:25.008
We simply don't.

53:27.350 --> 53:28.911
Epitopes induce them.

53:29.231 --> 53:31.513
How do you focus a vaccine on those?

53:32.814 --> 53:34.555
Yeah, so that is a great question.

53:34.595 --> 53:47.906
So what we often do is look at how, in that particular paper that you are referring to, is actually the lead author on that was Daniel Maurer, who was actually a virology graduate student who has recently graduated and is now at Moderna.

53:50.227 --> 53:52.889
doing research there as a scientist.

53:53.289 --> 54:02.475
And so one thing that we're interested in doing is, as you pointed out in that paper, is that we identified human antibodies that recognize particular parts on the influenza hemagglutinin in particular.

54:03.055 --> 54:16.203
And the hemagglutinin and the vaccines that we have against flu are largely, from year to year varies quite a lot, but in terms of efficacy, and it's no greater than usually about 50 to 60% efficacious from year to year.

54:16.563 --> 54:18.564
And then sometimes it can be as low as 3%

54:19.665 --> 54:24.383
And so keep in mind he hasn't said why that's related to the hemagglutinin molecule yet.

54:25.607 --> 54:27.008
and sometimes not effective at all.

54:27.468 --> 54:42.879
And so what we're trying to do is to understand from those vaccines that are used routinely, the seasonal vaccines, or through natural infection, the antibodies that are made in response to those, either natural infection or the vaccines.

54:43.339 --> 54:55.047
And what we did in that paper was to understand where these antibodies... What we did in that paper was to understand where these antibodies, period, period, period, really?

54:56.247 --> 55:06.390
What we did in that paper is understand where these antibodies, please, tell me more, bound on the hemagglutinin, used structural biology to determine their epitopes.

55:06.910 --> 55:12.991
And once we understood where these antibodies were binding, we then further characterized these antibodies.

55:16.772 --> 55:22.737
broadly could they bind to other different hemagglutinins, or how potent were they in neutralizing the virus?

55:23.037 --> 55:39.050
And we use those as metrics, as ways to say, these are the types of antibodies that we want to potentially elicit by next generation viral vaccines because they have quote unquote superior quality than the other antibodies that are made by our standard seasonal vaccines or through natural infection.

55:39.090 --> 55:45.736
So we're trying to fish out those needles in the haystack, if you will, that are the best, baddest, broadly neutralizing antibody.

55:46.096 --> 55:48.598
which I don't often want to go after, but at least to some degree.

55:48.638 --> 56:07.690
Which are all generated by a Nobel Prize winning mechanism, or a mechanism, the discovery of which was awarded the Nobel Prize, where a nearly infinite variability, a nearly infinite possible variable collection of epitopes is possible to manufacture in B cells.

56:09.611 --> 56:15.433
So think about this hyper focus on what just happens to be a really lucky thing, right?

56:15.473 --> 56:17.914
Because these cells are freely available in blood.

56:19.595 --> 56:37.382
If you wanted to study any kind of phenomenon like this, where a huge diversity of genetic variants was being generated in the protein output of a set of genes that itself was not really varied, that would be a pretty hard thing to study in any other tissue.

56:38.666 --> 56:47.129
If that was happening in any other tissue on any other scale, in any other context, it would be almost impossible to detect and measure and monitor.

56:47.249 --> 56:57.332
But in the immune system, because of the nature of the way the immune system behaves and because of the unique nature of what B cells and their plasma cells do,

56:58.459 --> 57:09.023
We have this one kind of rudimentary magic trick that we can do where there seems to be some specificity, we can probe it, we can measure it, we can reproduce it.

57:10.423 --> 57:14.245
But the specificity is always emerging from this galactic

57:15.834 --> 57:21.356
bouquet of possibilities that's each all dependent on our unique genetic background.

57:21.416 --> 57:43.382
And so he's still talking about viruses evolving relative to humans, has basically two teams, instead of a galactic diversity in humans and a molecular diversity in nature that can't be quantified, nevermind called influenza as a separate entity

57:44.520 --> 57:46.722
It's probably not even really that accurate.

57:48.683 --> 57:58.049
So it's a remarkable place for us to be right now where there are people who are absolutely convinced they are right because the books they have read are really heavy.

58:00.191 --> 58:02.532
And the books that they have memorized are really heavy.

58:02.713 --> 58:05.515
And other people agree that those heavy books are important.

58:05.535 --> 58:11.879
You know, like the two volume Fields Virology or the book Vaccines by Plotkin, Orfstein and Offit.

58:14.189 --> 58:18.493
And as long as they can regurgitate these books, it seems like they really know their stuff.

58:18.533 --> 58:26.620
And that's all he's really doing here is trying not to hit any third rails, trying not to make any mistakes in front of all of his apprentices.

58:28.305 --> 58:29.486
and it's gonna get painful.

58:29.506 --> 58:45.593
Something that can be used then for a template because once we recognize on the structural level how this antibody sees the hemagglutinin or the epitope of interest, we then take that epitope and then design strategies for our immune system to only see that epitope.

58:46.013 --> 58:46.794
And so we use that.

58:46.874 --> 58:54.097
So they say reciting a grant application because what they're gonna do next is comic book fantasy.

58:55.216 --> 58:57.018
We're going to design strategies.

58:57.118 --> 58:59.100
What the hell does that mean?

59:03.144 --> 59:06.788
One of the approaches that we take is epitope scaffolding.

59:06.848 --> 59:11.854
So we take that particular epitope and put it onto something that our immune system has never seen before.

59:12.294 --> 59:14.777
And so that the focus can be just on that epitope.

59:16.107 --> 59:22.791
So you put the epitope on something that the immune system has never seen before, but the immune system never reacts to it.

59:22.851 --> 59:24.111
So how, what is that?

59:24.292 --> 59:24.532
Wow.

59:24.592 --> 59:25.292
That's interesting.

59:25.952 --> 59:26.153
Hmm.

59:26.933 --> 59:32.556
Or an orthogonal strategy that we use is to take that orthogonal strategy.

59:34.157 --> 59:35.458
Gosh, I hate that phrase.

59:35.958 --> 59:43.282
Epitope that is naturally on the hemagglutinin and use glycans or sugars as a way to sterically block the ability of the immune system.

59:44.103 --> 59:58.814
So all of these strategies require them to produce proteins which are identical and then to measure an effect of that quantity of protein relying on the idea that it's pure, therefore the signal will resolve against the noise.

59:59.534 --> 01:00:15.203
It is the exact phenomenon that all these physicists use, and it's the exact phenomenon that we go over in Biology 101, the first few lectures that we did where we were working on this book and where I just kind of stopped.

01:00:15.583 --> 01:00:26.229
But this book, What is Life and Mind and Matter, this has a whole discussion about how physicists are, by definition, taught to think about

01:00:26.969 --> 01:00:39.761
particles in quantity and that it is signals that emerge from the behavior of the quantity that allow them to imagine and theorize what's happening at the particle level.

01:00:40.201 --> 01:00:46.467
And so that's not that dissimilar to what we are able to do with the technology provided by the Human Genome Project.

01:00:46.507 --> 01:00:48.209
We make a lot of synthetic

01:00:48.849 --> 01:00:58.473
pure DNA and by making a lot of synthetic pure DNA, it is possible to measure it chemically and sequence it.

01:00:58.533 --> 01:01:00.433
That's about as far as we've gotten.

01:01:02.514 --> 01:01:11.818
We've gotten really pretty competent at making copies of DNA in sufficient pure quantity that we can sequence it.

01:01:11.858 --> 01:01:12.558
That's about it.

01:01:15.003 --> 01:01:21.630
And making that cheaper and cheaper and more convenient or maybe more reliable has really been the last 30 years.

01:01:21.990 --> 01:01:25.874
All with the idea that eventually we were going to figure all this stuff out.

01:01:25.894 --> 01:01:27.676
It would just be an exponential thing.

01:01:28.056 --> 01:01:31.440
It's only 10 years from now when nobody's going to die anymore.

01:01:31.480 --> 01:01:34.743
You can upload your consciousness into the computer and you can live forever.

01:01:37.688 --> 01:01:41.552
That's the time frame that they were on when they were writing this book.

01:01:41.632 --> 01:01:53.783
And so the mentors of the people that are currently trying to run the clock out, hoping that they're going to be able to successfully hand this off to the next generation, it's not going to happen.

01:01:54.424 --> 01:01:59.389
We can break this right now because academia is not ready for the truth.

01:01:59.469 --> 01:02:00.730
They can't handle the truth.

01:02:03.410 --> 01:02:07.471
And Giga Home Biological and a few other people, I think, can help us teach this.

01:02:07.531 --> 01:02:11.392
If we can just reach a few hundred high school teachers, think about that.

01:02:11.932 --> 01:02:26.675
If we could just get a few hundred high school teachers to question the central dogma in a useful way so that we raise a generation of children that can successfully challenge that, it will be remarkable.

01:02:27.836 --> 01:02:32.597
What a remarkable way to try and plant trees under whose shade we will not shelter.

01:02:33.621 --> 01:02:38.923
other parts of the hemagglutinin that would otherwise distract from that particular epitope that we're interested in.

01:02:39.444 --> 01:02:50.809
So we use a lot of, as I said in the very beginning of this, protein engineering as a way to tinker with these proteins, as a way to trick the immune system to only see the epitopes that we're interested in getting our immune system to recognize.

01:02:51.509 --> 01:02:58.652
And so imagine the arrogance that they think they're tricking the immune system, that they think they know enough about the immune system to trick it.

01:02:59.033 --> 01:02:59.813
Stop lying!

01:03:00.253 --> 01:03:01.574
I mean, it's, whew, wow.

01:03:02.731 --> 01:03:05.994
It's interesting you say 50% efficacy, right?

01:03:06.034 --> 01:03:15.922
So Daniel Griffin always says, he says he has a patient who is hospitalized with influenza and they say, doc, I got the flu vaccine and I still got sick.

01:03:16.282 --> 01:03:18.264
And Daniel will say, but did you die?

01:03:19.645 --> 01:03:22.947
So you may get sick, but it often protects you.

01:03:23.368 --> 01:03:24.308
So you would like

01:03:25.249 --> 01:03:31.091
broadly neutralizing epitopes because that way you might not need a vaccine every year, okay?

01:03:31.411 --> 01:03:37.554
So, and there are two places where, there's one main place where you find such broadly neutralizing antibodies, right?

01:03:39.134 --> 01:03:40.135
Which is the stem.

01:03:40.175 --> 01:03:40.895
Tell us about that.

01:03:45.469 --> 01:03:47.811
So you hit a hot button issue on me for this one.

01:03:47.951 --> 01:04:03.343
So yeah, stem is a student in the audience and they're talking about the hemagglutinin molecule and how it has a stem and a head not that dissimilar to the spike protein, you know, having a stalk and having this ACE2 receptor where the fear and cleavage site is or whatever.

01:04:04.366 --> 01:04:06.490
And so it's a very similar narrative.

01:04:06.530 --> 01:04:12.923
It's a very similar hamster wheel that academia has been put in, I think by people like David Baltimore.

01:04:14.778 --> 01:04:24.926
It's a hamster wheel that by definition accepts the existence of animal viruses that are completely independent of bacteria or phages or any of these other signals.

01:04:25.407 --> 01:04:28.169
They're just animal viruses that grow in us.

01:04:28.349 --> 01:04:31.251
And we're supposed to accept that on face value.

01:04:31.772 --> 01:04:36.916
And these people have in fact accepted that on face value because they've read books that say it.

01:04:38.103 --> 01:04:53.168
And I'm humbly suggesting that if you have been a biologist your whole life and really tried to understand the concepts of modern biology, you will see why there's something really wrong right here, right now.

01:04:53.828 --> 01:04:55.488
I think Joshua Lederberg knew it.

01:04:55.548 --> 01:04:56.969
I think a few other people knew it.

01:04:57.029 --> 01:05:05.512
I think David Baltimore knows that he was actively, actively concealing our lack of knowledge under the,

01:05:07.333 --> 01:05:11.496
under the guise of certainty and, you know, it's just what I did.

01:05:11.516 --> 01:05:13.757
No, no, no.

01:05:13.818 --> 01:05:28.207
In all seriousness, I think that for me personally, I do feel or I do believe that the stem can be a good target for antibodies that could help contribute to control and protection against influenza.

01:05:28.748 --> 01:05:29.909
However, I am a

01:05:30.989 --> 01:05:34.431
a huge proponent of the receptor binding site and the head domain.

01:05:34.471 --> 01:05:39.374
And so I sit on the opposite camp than Peter Pallese and others and Florian Kramer.

01:05:39.414 --> 01:05:40.714
I mean, is this any different?

01:05:40.774 --> 01:05:46.658
Florian Kramer is somebody who was on Twitter all through 2020 and 2021 arguing that it was a lab leak.

01:05:47.238 --> 01:05:50.080
Florian Kramer is supposedly a guy who's on the stem.

01:05:50.100 --> 01:05:58.104
You know, it's like, it's so remarkable that they have gotten and convinced academia

01:05:59.815 --> 01:06:03.317
what the important issues are just by funding those people.

01:06:03.377 --> 01:06:19.948
So you can even hear it in his discussion that he's very careful not to question the premise of his funding, but also to try and, you know, stake out very clear differences between the dogma that funds his lab and what he thinks is true.

01:06:20.308 --> 01:06:26.853
He's very careful not to actually shake the tree, but just wants you to know that there are other fruit trees in the orchard.

01:06:27.313 --> 01:06:36.596
Daniel Lingwood, my esteemed colleague at the Reagan Institute, who also believes that the stem is should be the target of next generation influenza vaccines.

01:06:37.576 --> 01:06:48.959
I have no doubt that they will help as a useful component, but those antibodies are largely important for ADCC or ADCP dependent mechanisms of protection.

01:06:49.079 --> 01:06:52.701
Those are antibody dependent cellular toxicity mechanisms.

01:06:52.781 --> 01:06:53.581
So when the

01:06:54.401 --> 01:07:01.646
T-cells or the natural killer cells recognize that a cell is producing a protein that it shouldn't, they can be destroyed.

01:07:01.686 --> 01:07:07.370
And so that can be an easy way to, you know, stop a, I guess, a respiratory virus.

01:07:07.410 --> 01:07:09.111
For example, if the epithelial cell

01:07:09.671 --> 01:07:11.853
just needs to be targeted, then it's all good.

01:07:12.373 --> 01:07:17.917
And he wants you to believe that that's not a very good way because then the virus is already doing its work.

01:07:17.957 --> 01:07:22.700
And so we should try to develop antibodies that stop the virus from doing the infection.

01:07:22.760 --> 01:07:37.429
But if the infection is happening at the epithelium, which it most certainly is with flu, no matter which epithelium you choose, then the cytotoxic T cell response to the presentation of a viral antigen will inevitably be

01:07:38.530 --> 01:07:40.111
a non-self protein.

01:07:40.151 --> 01:07:42.833
So there might not even need to be that much specificity.

01:07:43.233 --> 01:07:46.595
And that's also an antibody independent mechanism.

01:07:46.635 --> 01:07:55.541
So there's multiple ways that the immune system can interfere with the free expression of a foreign RNA or DNA.

01:07:55.581 --> 01:07:57.723
And so this is just absurdity again.

01:07:59.045 --> 01:08:03.967
what he's doing is reciting the dogma that funds his laboratory.

01:08:04.007 --> 01:08:09.249
He's not reciting something that he knows, he's reciting something that he has learned to accept.

01:08:10.369 --> 01:08:14.451
And so those are only after the virus has actually established an infection.

01:08:15.071 --> 01:08:25.560
And so the first line of defense, in my view, should be those that block the receptor binding site and actually inhibit the virus from actually getting into the target cell before it can establish an infection.

01:08:25.961 --> 01:08:34.228
And so our efforts have largely been focused on finding ways to direct our immune system to that conserved receptor binding site, because the vast majority of influenzas

01:08:34.688 --> 01:08:41.411
except for several of the bat H17s and H18s, use sialic acid as a way to get into a target cell.

01:08:41.771 --> 01:08:50.335
And that receptor binding site that chelates the sialic acid in order to enter is largely conserved across many different influenza hemagglutinins.

01:08:50.715 --> 01:08:57.018
So that's the target that we should be going after, in my view, and secondarily, should also focus on the stem region.

01:08:57.762 --> 01:09:01.123
So the stem antibodies are not neutralizing, you're saying?

01:09:01.963 --> 01:09:02.163
No.

01:09:03.164 --> 01:09:15.828
And so one of the naive things that you hear here is that he's saying that these viruses that he believes in and calls flu viruses are targeting the salicylic acid, or is it sialic acid?

01:09:15.848 --> 01:09:16.628
I don't know which one it is.

01:09:17.368 --> 01:09:19.569
And that's the receptor that they bind to.

01:09:19.630 --> 01:09:22.331
They chelate it and then that gets them into the cell.

01:09:22.771 --> 01:09:25.633
And those regions are conserved.

01:09:25.693 --> 01:09:36.299
Now, I'm wondering if he's ever thought about the possibility that making antibodies to that would be making antibodies to an epitope that might be related to a self-epitope.

01:09:38.781 --> 01:09:46.225
In other words, you don't want your antibodies that are anti-hemagglutinin to be really good for your own salicylic acid.

01:09:47.148 --> 01:09:51.812
And so that concept isn't even on his radar.

01:09:51.872 --> 01:10:03.000
He is reciting an argument that he's made in a grant and has gotten funded and therefore has some financial reason to believe that that's a good idea to stick to right now.

01:10:04.061 --> 01:10:08.044
But it makes no logical sense, certainly not from a broad biological sense.

01:10:08.064 --> 01:10:09.725
There's no real understanding here.

01:10:09.765 --> 01:10:15.590
There's an acceptance of a cartoon and the designing of and writing grants that will confirm that cartoon.

01:10:16.767 --> 01:10:26.852
In the traditional assays that you're used to determine neutralization, you do not see neutralization with stem-directed antibodies, only with those that bind to the receptor binding site.

01:10:29.714 --> 01:10:30.914
That's some nice discussion.

01:10:31.194 --> 01:10:36.857
So there are conserved epitopes on the head, you're saying.

01:10:36.917 --> 01:10:39.199
Are those inducing neutralizing antibodies?

01:10:39.259 --> 01:10:40.199
That is correct, yes.

01:10:40.419 --> 01:10:43.221
And one thing that I also want to

01:10:44.661 --> 01:10:50.144
I don't necessarily subscribe to the one epitope only in terms of receptor binding site or stem.

01:10:50.464 --> 01:10:57.228
I think we need to think of the hemagglutinin as a continuous epitope that there have been antibodies that can target various portions of this.

01:10:57.288 --> 01:11:02.171
So no one in the audience is sophisticated enough and either

01:11:04.598 --> 01:11:11.489
David Baltimore's apprentice, Vincent Racaniello, is not sophisticated enough to know or understands this is the third rail.

01:11:12.451 --> 01:11:17.459
He's asking whether or not people have the

01:11:19.560 --> 01:11:24.221
genetic propensity to be able to be steered to produce the same antibody.

01:11:24.261 --> 01:11:31.063
In other words, let's just think about all the natural ways that you could make my breath smell differently.

01:11:31.643 --> 01:11:37.745
Isn't it easy to imagine that the same treatments might not have the same effect on you as they do on me?

01:11:38.405 --> 01:11:42.567
Maybe garlic will make me smell better, but garlic will make you smell like a trash can.

01:11:42.947 --> 01:11:49.351
Maybe a combination of lemon juice and vinegar is something that I should gargle, but when you gargle, it's something else happens.

01:11:49.791 --> 01:12:07.560
Now, I know that these are very rudimentary examples, but what I'm trying to get at is, is that the immune response produced by a human with a unique genetic background, and thereby a unique genetic bouquet of possibilities in their B cells, is not necessarily gonna end up on the same

01:12:08.340 --> 01:12:11.841
at the same end point, at the same conclusion of that process.

01:12:12.761 --> 01:12:18.103
It's by definition random, which I think is one of the most beautiful things about it potentially.

01:12:19.063 --> 01:12:29.586
And yet somehow or another, these very high ranking virologists are discussing the immune system in a way that absolutely ignores

01:12:30.836 --> 01:12:40.679
the irreducible complexity found in a single example of a human being, nevermind the collective population of human beings.

01:12:42.760 --> 01:12:49.822
Again, it's an irreducible complexity that has been reduced to a comical level on the academic bench.

01:12:51.302 --> 01:13:00.525
And it is their commitment to that comic level of simplicity that allows them to say, I'm absolutely committed to vaccines.

01:13:03.487 --> 01:13:13.011
It's just like saying he believes in the stem more than he believes in the head or whatever because it's all the same level of commitment, the same level of sort of blind faith.

01:13:13.091 --> 01:13:22.755
It's not any dissimilar to how someone reads the Bible and then believes what they read after reading it several times and memorizing it and quoting it.

01:13:24.956 --> 01:13:27.617
And I believe that there is a knowledge to know, I do.

01:13:28.197 --> 01:13:32.179
I believe that you can have a genuine appreciation for the

01:13:33.863 --> 01:13:46.407
for what you can't have, what's unreachable, and still look at nature with enough precision to try and understand something about it, to appreciate its complexity.

01:13:47.328 --> 01:13:53.110
That's not even close to what the Human Genome Project ever thought that they were.

01:13:53.130 --> 01:13:56.131
The Human Genome Project was the culmination

01:13:57.688 --> 01:14:07.730
of this imaginary thing that these physicists in the 1950s thought they were crossing over to do, to finally, you know, get the last rules of the universe.

01:14:08.471 --> 01:14:09.211
And we're not there.

01:14:09.571 --> 01:14:23.114
Stan, or excuse me, of the entire hemagglutinin and not just one discrete epitope, and that all of these working together could help control the spread of these viruses or influences.

01:14:23.154 --> 01:14:28.198
So the head, the conserved head epitopes, are they also broadly neutralizing?

01:14:28.758 --> 01:14:35.043
So those that target the receptor binding site, what you often trade for potency is breath.

01:14:35.343 --> 01:14:42.268
And so those antibodies that are very good at binding the receptor binding site for H1 influences, for example.

01:14:42.728 --> 01:14:49.072
They are broad against many of the H1s, but then can't cross, if you will, to group 2 influenzas like H3s.

01:14:49.473 --> 01:14:53.295
However, they are extremely potent within the particular subtype of interest.

01:14:53.355 --> 01:15:00.821
And so... Let's just say right here that neutralizing antibodies is a pretty antiquated way of measuring antibody specificity.

01:15:00.861 --> 01:15:02.082
I don't know if they'll get to that or not.

01:15:02.102 --> 01:15:06.645
I could imagine that if you're trying to develop a next-generation viral vaccine for influenza like we are,

01:15:07.085 --> 01:15:14.692
that it's a quite tall order to suggest that you would get one that is universal against all of the influenza subtypes.

01:15:15.092 --> 01:15:30.446
And maybe a more practical way of approaching it is to have a very good next-generation vaccine that targets group 1 influenzas and one that targets group 2, and to use them together as a way to combat both group 1 and group 2 influenzas, as opposed to trying to get one that covers all of them.

01:15:30.734 --> 01:15:40.199
All right, and what you said before is you would make a platform to present these epitopes, which is not related to influenza virus at all, right?

01:15:40.339 --> 01:15:41.140
That's correct, yes.

01:15:41.460 --> 01:15:41.760
Okay.

01:15:42.101 --> 01:15:51.106
So, can you- So, he's developing technologies to present epitopes to, see, that's all academia is now, is a stepwise

01:15:51.866 --> 01:15:57.534
development of technologies which might be able to peer behind the curtain of the human genome and inheritance.

01:15:58.115 --> 01:16:04.463
So the best we can do is have probably two groups of broadly neutralizing epitopes that generate antibodies, right?

01:16:04.984 --> 01:16:09.450
And can you get resistance to those broadly neutralizing antibodies?

01:16:09.810 --> 01:16:10.330
You can.

01:16:10.530 --> 01:16:30.799
And so there was some work that we and others have done that when you take these very potent H1-specific antibodies that block the receptor binding site, you can, for that particular antibody, select for resistance and show that, even though they are very potent, that resistance can develop quite rapidly, actually.

01:16:31.619 --> 01:16:35.041
Even after one or two passages, you can get resistance mutations that come up.

01:16:35.481 --> 01:16:43.469
However, the key observation in those studies is that yes, you can lose binding to... So again, now he's referencing other people's work.

01:16:43.509 --> 01:16:44.710
He hasn't done any of that.

01:16:44.790 --> 01:16:51.537
He hasn't enriched a flu virus to not see his antibodies anymore.

01:16:51.577 --> 01:16:53.599
He's just seen other papers that have done that.

01:16:54.700 --> 01:16:57.482
of the antibodies that recognizes the receptor binding site.

01:16:57.942 --> 01:17:07.487
But through structural analyses, you can show that there are other antibodies that still recognize the receptor binding site and the conserved elements of that, but that approach from a completely different angle.

01:17:07.887 --> 01:17:10.249
And because of that, they are not sensitive to that

01:17:10.789 --> 01:17:14.670
mutation that escaped the first set of RBS directed antibodies.

01:17:14.710 --> 01:17:24.874
And so the idea there would be if you had a immunogen that could elicit... So he's still running around in this little circle where, you know, three monoclonal antibodies might be the trick.

01:17:25.882 --> 01:17:38.211
You know, like that lady who was trying, from Canada, was trying to cure Ebola or being tested against remdesivir, where it was three antibodies that were doing the cure for Ebola.

01:17:38.231 --> 01:17:46.517
So it's really, really remarkable how little progress and understanding, nevermind what target they're aiming at, is really changing here.

01:17:46.978 --> 01:17:52.822
And that can only be because of one reason, because this is largely a national security theater.

01:17:52.862 --> 01:17:53.923
Whether these people know,

01:17:54.644 --> 01:17:55.205
I doubt it.

01:17:55.546 --> 01:17:57.690
I don't think he's sophisticated enough to know.

01:17:57.750 --> 01:18:05.126
I think that if I was to be able to sit down with this guy in a naive situation where he didn't know who I was and start drinking.

01:18:06.627 --> 01:18:19.139
I think at the second beer, if I started to pivot toward the genome and genetics and inheritance and the experiments that he knows and understands, I would blow him away.

01:18:19.540 --> 01:18:29.370
In fact, I think one of the ways that I want to spend some of my travel time now is to try and do that, to try and go to like a virology conference and be at a bar

01:18:29.910 --> 01:18:51.208
Hanging out and have a bunch of virology kids come up and start talking to me on camera because it would be an amazing capturing of how You know this whole group of people in this room would probably love To listen to me do stand-up comedy because I could make them laugh about themselves so deeply

01:18:53.553 --> 01:19:05.238
antibodies that target from a variety of different angles, all recognizing that conserved site, that the likelihood that you would get resistance to all the entire class of antibodies that are recognized in that would be very small.

01:19:05.258 --> 01:19:10.380
I mean, he's still explaining models and he's explaining cartoons with no data.

01:19:10.661 --> 01:19:22.786
So even though you can get resistance to one, I don't think that you would be able to get resistance to all of them because at that point you'd be compromising the viral fitness and the ability of that virus to chelate or bind sialic acid to get in.

01:19:23.436 --> 01:19:31.860
So your message to the non-scientists listening is that we're going to have a different kind of flu vaccine in the future.

01:19:33.641 --> 01:19:38.924
I think the way it was designed, yes.

01:19:39.484 --> 01:19:45.607
But the way that it's going to be administered is going to be the same, if that makes sense.

01:19:45.807 --> 01:19:51.230
I just want to make sure that that's clear, that this isn't going to be a new platform or modality, I would say.

01:19:53.343 --> 01:20:03.613
I just can't help but mentioning that there's this NIH initiative to make next generation flu vaccines, which is just to take virus and inactivate it, just like we've always done, right?

01:20:03.893 --> 01:20:07.817
And they're saying this is brand new technology that's going to protect against all phyla.

01:20:07.957 --> 01:20:08.458
Do you remember?

01:20:08.618 --> 01:20:09.258
Did you hear that?

01:20:09.679 --> 01:20:10.479
All phyla.

01:20:11.681 --> 01:20:12.421
What do you think about that?

01:20:14.023 --> 01:20:16.585
See, so I don't think Vincent Racaniello understands.

01:20:16.645 --> 01:20:17.946
I think he's kind of a dope.

01:20:18.755 --> 01:20:22.938
And I think that's why the loss of David Baltimore is extreme.

01:20:23.838 --> 01:20:32.444
Because the more people that they don't have which know the script and can improvise within it, the more danger the script is in.

01:20:33.624 --> 01:20:36.046
Robert Malone can improvise within the script.

01:20:37.887 --> 01:20:45.872
Kevin McKernan can improvise within the script, but I don't think that any of the people on the stage right there can improvise within their script.

01:20:45.912 --> 01:20:57.379
And I think if they were exposed to the right people, they wouldn't be able to explain why intramuscular injection is used right now, why that makes any sense from the perspective of the immune system,

01:20:58.019 --> 01:21:00.461
or even exposure to toxic compounds.

01:21:00.902 --> 01:21:08.808
I mean, we're talking about a paucity of knowledge that is only possible because of the way that academia teaches people.

01:21:10.790 --> 01:21:16.835
And I would be there just like them if I hadn't grown up with the grandmother that I grew up with, quite frankly.

01:21:21.277 --> 01:21:24.202
Do I have to answer every question you ask me?

01:21:24.423 --> 01:21:27.949
No, I agree with your incredulousness at that statement.

01:21:28.049 --> 01:21:28.590
Well, fine.

01:21:28.630 --> 01:21:29.352
OK.

01:21:29.452 --> 01:21:31.495
One more paper, then we'll move on.

01:21:31.536 --> 01:21:32.798
This other paper caught my eye.

01:21:33.829 --> 01:21:40.511
Antigenic drift expands influenza viral escape pathways through recalled humoral immunity.

01:21:41.051 --> 01:21:42.591
So recalled, is that memory?

01:21:42.811 --> 01:21:42.991
Yes.

01:21:43.391 --> 01:21:44.472
I want you to listen.

01:21:44.992 --> 01:21:52.533
They're going to repeat the title, and then he's going to try to explain it, and he loses his train of thought, and it's just pathetic.

01:21:52.713 --> 01:21:53.734
It's just pathetic.

01:21:53.914 --> 01:21:54.794
Why don't you call it memory?

01:21:57.694 --> 01:22:00.376
Is this an immunological thing that you have to have different words?

01:22:00.536 --> 01:22:00.777
Okay.

01:22:01.017 --> 01:22:04.520
No, I agree with your incredulousness at that statement.

01:22:04.640 --> 01:22:05.180
Well, fine.

01:22:05.220 --> 01:22:05.941
Okay.

01:22:06.041 --> 01:22:08.082
One more paper, then we'll move on.

01:22:08.102 --> 01:22:09.404
This other paper caught my eye.

01:22:10.424 --> 01:22:16.149
Antigenic drift expands influenza viral escape pathways through recalled humoral immunity.

01:22:16.809 --> 01:22:17.090
Okay.

01:22:17.670 --> 01:22:19.191
So recalled, is that memory?

01:22:19.412 --> 01:22:19.612
Yes.

01:22:20.112 --> 01:22:21.033
Why don't you call it memory?

01:22:23.875 --> 01:22:26.818
Is this an immunological thing that you have to have different words?

01:22:29.192 --> 01:22:32.493
I'm going to punt on that one and say the editor made us change the title of that.

01:22:32.513 --> 01:22:32.813
Oh, really?

01:22:32.833 --> 01:22:33.414
Really?

01:22:33.594 --> 01:22:36.735
Because originally, Antigenic Sin is basically memory, right?

01:22:36.875 --> 01:22:40.196
And it's just special for flu, but it's memory, right?

01:22:40.516 --> 01:22:42.997
So what does the title mean?

01:22:43.177 --> 01:22:45.918
That's really hard for a non-scientist to figure out.

01:22:47.679 --> 01:22:48.699
Can you read me the title again?

01:22:51.260 --> 01:22:58.403
Antigenic Drift Expands Influenza Viral Escape Pathways Through Recalled Humoral Immunity.

01:22:59.191 --> 01:23:01.774
So that, again, is from Daniel Maurer.

01:23:02.214 --> 01:23:05.617
So maybe he should be sitting here fielding these questions instead of me.

01:23:06.178 --> 01:23:22.974
So what that essentially meant is that as the virus evolves in the human population and drifts, so when H1s, for example, were reintroduced into the human population in 1977, and as that virus circulated in the human population,

01:23:23.875 --> 01:23:32.561
We made immune responses to that virus as in your lifetime, whether you were exposed through vaccination or if you're infected with that virus.

01:23:33.121 --> 01:23:40.146
And you essentially recalled every time that you were infected with that virus, a recall memory response.

01:23:40.166 --> 01:23:46.791
So those antibodies that recognized features of that virus that was conserved from year to year to year.

01:23:46.811 --> 01:23:48.492
A giant assumption.

01:23:50.137 --> 01:24:08.292
that the immune system is making memory to conserved epitopes on specific pathogens, as opposed to trying to generalize across all the molecular signals that it sees and targeting specifically those epitopes associated with damage or toxicity.

01:24:09.613 --> 01:24:15.818
And so again, this is just a spectacular list of assumptions upon which we did these experiments.

01:24:16.789 --> 01:24:18.470
And that's how virology works.

01:24:18.590 --> 01:24:23.714
That's how a lot of molecular biology with this aim is done.

01:24:24.055 --> 01:24:25.456
The assumptions are.

01:24:26.747 --> 01:24:29.768
The list is so long, it's really hard to codify all of them.

01:24:29.808 --> 01:24:31.589
Even as the virus was drifting.

01:24:32.209 --> 01:24:50.557
And so what the paper was looking at is, how does that recall response actually influence both the evolution of the virus, but then also, are there many antibodies that, by targeting the influenza hemagglutinin, could potentially

01:24:53.027 --> 01:24:54.727
Now I've even lost my train of thought.

01:24:57.448 --> 01:24:58.268
Let me start over there.

01:24:58.988 --> 01:25:09.350
So the point would be that as the virus is drifting, and it's recalling that memory response, that the virus is finding many more opportunities to escape that.

01:25:09.470 --> 01:25:13.051
Think about the amount of anthropomorphism that's going on here.

01:25:13.231 --> 01:25:15.332
The virus finds ways to escape.

01:25:15.392 --> 01:25:17.192
The virus is acting on its own.

01:25:17.712 --> 01:25:21.893
The virus has all these mechanisms that have no basis in reality.

01:25:24.315 --> 01:25:26.939
You're not making a cuckoo clock make toast.

01:25:27.059 --> 01:25:33.507
There's no way in hell these signals are outside of us and are trying to, you know, attack us.

01:25:35.190 --> 01:25:37.713
These signals are not coming from somewhere else.

01:25:38.614 --> 01:25:41.759
And therefore you can't speak like this about them.

01:25:43.228 --> 01:25:45.188
and yet they have all accepted it.

01:25:46.049 --> 01:25:54.310
Not as a background signal that could be generated from a wide variety of sources that might also be generated by our microbiome or interact with it.

01:25:54.650 --> 01:25:59.251
They're not talking about the possibility that we could be looking at a very complex bacteriophage.

01:25:59.631 --> 01:26:01.131
They're not talking about anything.

01:26:01.171 --> 01:26:08.252
They are assuming that this little package includes like three DNA plasmids and a couple enzymes and they always get it right.

01:26:08.713 --> 01:26:11.113
And it's just ridiculous amount of assumptions.

01:26:12.438 --> 01:26:20.910
And then they look at the evolution of it as if they're getting some kind of high fidelity signal for which they have enough background knowledge to know exactly what's happening when they never do.

01:26:23.173 --> 01:26:29.282
The whole premise of his paper is layers and layers and layers of assumptions.

01:26:32.188 --> 01:26:44.996
Somebody like Joshua Lederberg, if he could be awakened and forced to speak honestly, would probably lambast this person as a snake oil salesman who couldn't rationalize his way out of a wet paper bag.

01:26:45.417 --> 01:26:46.397
Humoral response.

01:26:46.457 --> 01:26:58.545
And so it's actually doing a disservice to have that memory recall and that what we'd want to do is actually to stimulate new responses that aren't relying on the memory recall from those previous exposures.

01:26:58.825 --> 01:27:01.307
I just remembered who he reminds me of.

01:27:03.533 --> 01:27:04.334
Terry Dermody.

01:27:04.354 --> 01:27:07.418
Who's Terry Dermody?

01:27:07.458 --> 01:27:08.420
You don't know who he is?

01:27:08.500 --> 01:27:09.781
I know who Terry Dermody is.

01:27:10.402 --> 01:27:11.183
Look him up.

01:27:11.544 --> 01:27:12.225
You got a similar.

01:27:14.522 --> 01:27:34.135
Yeah, I think what Housatonic Live in the chat says is something very close to the infectious swarm idea and the idea that a swarm of viruses is actually a collection of genetic backgrounds and variations and reassortments and that

01:27:34.855 --> 01:27:37.456
the virus acts as an average of that.

01:27:37.576 --> 01:27:46.158
I'm not really sure I like that because that's really, really, really close to what this guy would argue is the fundamental phenomenon of life.

01:27:46.298 --> 01:27:54.220
And so that would also kind of mean that a lot of the signals that we have in our own bodies would be signals that can only be detected on an average.

01:27:54.280 --> 01:27:56.581
And to a certain extent, yes, that's true.

01:27:57.701 --> 01:28:03.443
But then we're not thinking about it like the antibody diversity generating mechanism, but we're thinking about it

01:28:04.493 --> 01:28:05.894
like a noise mechanism.

01:28:05.914 --> 01:28:11.397
And I'm not sure that noise is built into protein function.

01:28:11.457 --> 01:28:15.320
I'm not sure that we should, I mean, we should consider that.

01:28:15.360 --> 01:28:16.741
I like considering that idea.

01:28:18.238 --> 01:28:37.652
But I like to think that there is something a bit more substantial to it simply because from a person to person to person, from structure to structure to structure, there's an awful lot of similarity if you cut me open and look inside of me versus cutting somebody else open and looking inside of them.

01:28:37.692 --> 01:28:38.652
And that similarity

01:28:40.194 --> 01:28:47.445
has a lot to do with where proteins are, what proteins are doing, what proteins are interacting with what, and what proteins are combined with what other proteins.

01:28:47.485 --> 01:28:49.148
And so for me, that's

01:28:50.549 --> 01:29:15.148
That's evidence of a consistently read out plan that doesn't rely on sort of shotgun targeting of a function where the virology people have you believe that a shotgun sort of display of genetic variants can be summarized by a consensus sequence that can be thought of as the net effect of the virus.

01:29:15.208 --> 01:29:16.168
And while

01:29:17.029 --> 01:29:18.711
It's a very enticing idea.

01:29:18.731 --> 01:29:27.419
It is an idea that stems directly from these physicists who can only understand the world in that way if they are stuck with physics and chemistry.

01:29:27.459 --> 01:29:31.823
And so I would suggest that that by definition almost reveals it as

01:29:33.284 --> 01:29:43.989
shortcoming because it's not taking into the account that life is an emergent property of physics and chemistry and therefore all the properties of life emerge from life.

01:29:44.170 --> 01:29:49.952
They don't emerge from the physics and chemistry that upon which they are presupposed.

01:29:50.893 --> 01:29:51.633
That's the trick.

01:29:51.813 --> 01:29:52.874
Emergent properties

01:29:54.161 --> 01:29:57.343
cannot be understood from their components.

01:29:57.383 --> 01:30:06.289
And if the components of life are physics and chemistry, then we can't understand any of the emergent properties by understanding physics and chemistry alone.

01:30:06.749 --> 01:30:17.857
And that's really, this book suggests that we can understand life because it comes from physics and chemistry alone, rather than what I would make the argument is kind of what

01:30:19.878 --> 01:30:46.948
what Buckminster Fuller was trying to say is that a pattern integrity and its emergent properties are foundationally built from physics and chemistry but they merge as properties of life itself and so that's the trick here and these people are talking about a molecule or a set of molecules or a collection of molecules that can be summarized as an average or a consensus and that the biological effect is

01:30:47.849 --> 01:30:52.000
What we see is the result of that consensus despite all of this noise.

01:30:52.521 --> 01:30:56.431
And although I understand that noise can often be informative,

01:30:57.278 --> 01:31:04.882
And I'm a neuroscientist and a neurobiologist, so I know that there are a lot of contexts in information where noise can be informative or useful.

01:31:06.063 --> 01:31:15.969
But in the case of molecular expression and a case of thinking about heredity, I don't think that's quite where we want to go as a foundational principle.

01:31:16.009 --> 01:31:19.411
But anyway, that's just me talking off the cuff here.

01:31:20.231 --> 01:31:21.412
Interacting with the chat.

01:31:24.465 --> 01:31:26.048
Is it playing still or is that the end?

01:31:26.148 --> 01:31:27.009
That might have been the end.

01:31:27.250 --> 01:31:27.510
Oh no.

01:31:28.472 --> 01:31:29.534
Sorry, I'm going to escape.

01:31:30.355 --> 01:31:30.856
Here we go.

01:31:31.177 --> 01:31:31.717
Play again.

01:31:32.807 --> 01:31:34.808
If you want to weigh in, they can.

01:31:35.849 --> 01:31:52.640
No, but in general, my research program has largely been centered on using protein engineering as ways to tinker with proteins in order to kind of direct or redirect the immune response to understand how we respond to pathogens and particular viruses.

01:31:52.800 --> 01:31:54.161
That's what we focus on.

01:31:54.642 --> 01:32:00.586
And so what I'm very interested in trying to understand is what is the way that our immune system... Do you remember?

01:32:00.726 --> 01:32:01.386
Did you hear that?

01:32:01.806 --> 01:32:02.487
Ophila.

01:32:03.768 --> 01:32:04.509
What do you think about that?

01:32:10.596 --> 01:32:13.519
Do I have to answer every question you ask me?

01:32:13.760 --> 01:32:17.264
No, I agree with your incredulousness at that statement.

01:32:18.785 --> 01:32:20.828
One more paper, then we'll move on.

01:32:20.868 --> 01:32:22.129
This other paper caught my eye.

01:32:23.146 --> 01:32:29.831
Antigenic drift expands influenza viral escape pathways through recalled humoral immunity.

01:32:30.392 --> 01:32:31.913
So recalled, is that memory?

01:32:32.153 --> 01:32:32.333
Yes.

01:32:32.833 --> 01:32:33.754
Why don't you call it memory?

01:32:36.616 --> 01:32:39.539
Is this an immunological thing that you have to have different words?

01:32:41.923 --> 01:32:45.224
I'm going to punt on that one and say the editor made us change the title of that.

01:32:45.244 --> 01:32:45.564
Oh, really?

01:32:45.584 --> 01:32:46.524
Really?

01:32:46.544 --> 01:32:49.465
Because originally, antigenic sin is basically memory, right?

01:32:49.625 --> 01:32:52.946
And it's just special for flu, but it's memory, right?

01:32:53.246 --> 01:32:55.527
So what does the title mean?

01:32:55.907 --> 01:32:58.668
That's really hard for a non-scientist to figure out.

01:33:00.408 --> 01:33:01.429
Can you read me the title again?

01:33:03.169 --> 01:33:04.389
Maybe we did watch it to the end.

01:33:04.409 --> 01:33:06.110
We call memory response glutenin.

01:33:11.201 --> 01:33:12.902
Now even I've even lost my train of thought.

01:33:15.622 --> 01:33:16.423
Let me start over there.

01:33:17.143 --> 01:33:25.445
So the point would be that as the virus is drifting and it's recalling that memory response, that the virus is finding many more opportunities.

01:33:25.465 --> 01:33:25.966
I didn't see it before.

01:33:25.986 --> 01:33:27.446
There's a huge red flag here.

01:33:27.546 --> 01:33:30.627
I'm sorry, but anybody that wears their watch like that is an idiot.

01:33:32.348 --> 01:33:35.088
That's just a statement and it's the truth.

01:33:35.269 --> 01:33:36.189
You know, it's kind of like,

01:33:36.929 --> 01:33:39.590
Dogs and cats, like you either accept the truth or you don't.

01:33:40.990 --> 01:33:43.071
Shout out to Kara and Jeff in Canada.

01:33:44.011 --> 01:33:45.992
Anybody that wears their watch like that's an idiot.

01:33:46.572 --> 01:33:48.353
Gape, that humoral response.

01:33:48.393 --> 01:33:51.954
And so it's actually doing a disservice to have that memory recall.

01:33:52.334 --> 01:33:58.776
And that what we'd want to do is actually to stimulate new responses that aren't relying on the memory recall.

01:33:58.996 --> 01:34:12.425
So that's funny because again, this reliant on new responses and new responses and trying to get new responses out of the immune system is suggesting that there's a regulatory element that they don't know about yet.

01:34:12.946 --> 01:34:17.649
It's suggesting that this progression of immune memory could be

01:34:18.289 --> 01:34:21.671
reset and then generate it again and reset and generate it again.

01:34:21.751 --> 01:34:33.257
Maybe not that dissimilar to how enzymes might evolve over the course of your lifespan to do different things at different times or to have different, you know, enzymatic properties at different times in your life.

01:34:33.377 --> 01:34:42.402
All of these things could potentially be happening under the same script and the same genetic mechanisms by which the infinite diversity of antibodies is generated.

01:34:44.031 --> 01:34:52.716
And yet these people are hyper-focused on it as if it is the only place where this genetic diversity generated by splicing and somatic mutation could occur.

01:34:52.756 --> 01:34:55.337
And that's just absolutely absurd.

01:34:55.998 --> 01:34:57.859
You just got to think on longer timescales.

01:35:00.320 --> 01:35:01.641
From those previous exposures.

01:35:01.941 --> 01:35:04.463
I just remembered who he reminds me of.

01:35:06.664 --> 01:35:07.424
Terry Dermody.

01:35:09.601 --> 01:35:10.502
Who's Terry Dermott?

01:35:10.542 --> 01:35:11.303
You don't know who he is.

01:35:11.603 --> 01:35:12.784
I know who Terry Dermott is.

01:35:12.884 --> 01:35:13.965
Oh, I know who he is.

01:35:14.045 --> 01:35:14.625
No, you didn't.

01:35:14.705 --> 01:35:15.526
You didn't know who he was.

01:35:15.586 --> 01:35:20.690
OK, so we're going to start this David Baltimore interview.

01:35:20.750 --> 01:35:23.932
Remember, I believe that we are under a spell.

01:35:25.193 --> 01:35:31.336
And the spell is Donald Trump and the Democrats and all this other crap all around the world.

01:35:32.337 --> 01:35:35.479
This competition with China or not and Russia or not.

01:35:35.939 --> 01:35:38.640
It's all the Human Genome Project, ladies and gentlemen.

01:35:38.660 --> 01:35:47.685
The main thing that everybody's concerned about is taking advantage of the existing population and collecting the data as fast as possible so that it's not lost.

01:35:50.246 --> 01:35:51.667
Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

01:35:53.100 --> 01:35:55.281
They've only got a few more decades.

01:35:57.022 --> 01:36:01.645
And then... This is the 150th anniversary interview with David Baltimore.

01:36:02.445 --> 01:36:06.167
And let me start by asking where you were born, where'd you grow up?

01:36:07.308 --> 01:36:09.109
I was born in New York City.

01:36:09.549 --> 01:36:11.590
I grew up largely in Great Neck, New York.

01:36:13.311 --> 01:36:17.133
Went to Great Neck High School and Swarthmore College.

01:36:19.054 --> 01:36:20.375
Tell me a little bit about your family.

01:36:22.511 --> 01:36:31.583
My family were sort of middle class people, coming from actually quite poor background in New York.

01:36:33.787 --> 01:36:35.970
My father never went to college.

01:36:38.900 --> 01:36:44.305
Went to college, graduated from NYU, actually was a great scholar in her time, a great student.

01:36:46.487 --> 01:36:47.829
And went back to school.

01:36:47.969 --> 01:36:53.354
Now one of the things I want to point out here is what I mean by he never teaches, is that he never explains anything.

01:36:53.394 --> 01:36:57.938
There's never any insightful explanation from the guy who supposedly figured it out.

01:36:58.479 --> 01:37:00.400
Where, you know, like, for example,

01:37:01.121 --> 01:37:16.807
When you read the book that is supposedly written by Carey Mullis about how he figured out PCR, there's some level of amazement and sort of humility in terms of what he found and how he was lucky enough to find it.

01:37:16.867 --> 01:37:20.649
And you'll often find that missing from David Baltimore's demeanor.

01:37:23.150 --> 01:37:26.911
She graduated about 1930 and went back to school in 43 about.

01:37:29.545 --> 01:37:41.931
after my brother was born, and became an experimental psychologist, taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, and became a tenured professor at Sarah Lawrence at age 62.

01:37:44.136 --> 01:37:47.421
INTERVIEWER 1 Good for her.

01:37:47.441 --> 01:37:54.551
Were there any particular influences or events in your childhood that you think helped to shape your career path?

01:37:54.571 --> 01:37:55.592
SKOLNIKOFF Absolutely.

01:37:56.714 --> 01:38:00.639
Between my junior and senior years of high school,

01:38:02.256 --> 01:38:25.868
My mother had told me about it, and I applied for and was accepted at a program at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where high school students came and learned a little about research, and learned a little about genetics, and lived together as this group of 27 students or something.

01:38:26.228 --> 01:38:30.690
I discovered research science that summer, and I never looked back.

01:38:32.409 --> 01:38:34.831
Had you been interested in the sciences up to that point?

01:38:34.851 --> 01:38:38.635
SKOLNIKOFF Well, I was a good science math student.

01:38:39.976 --> 01:38:42.378
My mother recognized that.

01:38:43.159 --> 01:38:48.324
I didn't have any passionate interest in a particular kind of science.

01:38:48.964 --> 01:38:55.530
I had the sense of accomplishment of having really positive feedback from doing very well on the courses.

01:38:57.177 --> 01:38:59.299
understanding it very easily.

01:39:00.720 --> 01:39:05.485
But this summer just transformed me.

01:39:08.047 --> 01:39:09.949
What do you think it was about research?

01:39:10.089 --> 01:39:12.231
It's funny he doesn't have any specifics about that.

01:39:12.251 --> 01:39:14.173
It just was a summer camp and it was awesome.

01:39:14.794 --> 01:39:15.975
I mean it was awesome.

01:39:16.035 --> 01:39:17.076
And then he repeats it again.

01:39:17.236 --> 01:39:18.998
Summer camp and it was awesome.

01:39:20.083 --> 01:39:26.704
He'd think he'd have one little anecdotal thing, you know, where he's like, I just realized on that weekend that everything has DNA.

01:39:26.724 --> 01:39:32.925
And so that really fascinated me and started to make me believe that maybe DNA was really important.

01:39:33.325 --> 01:39:36.326
And that idea really got set in my head at this summer camp.

01:39:36.366 --> 01:39:37.186
But did he say that?

01:39:38.346 --> 01:39:39.306
No, he did not.

01:39:39.366 --> 01:39:41.427
That's why he's not teaching right now.

01:39:41.527 --> 01:39:44.547
He's, he's, he's, he's staying safe.

01:39:45.707 --> 01:39:48.828
Remember, if you tell the truth, there's nothing to remember.

01:39:50.125 --> 01:39:53.007
that kind of flipped that switch?

01:39:53.027 --> 01:39:57.970
MINDELLS Oh, I think it was the ability to discover things that nobody else knew.

01:39:59.591 --> 01:40:03.113
And it's easy, actually, to do that.

01:40:04.774 --> 01:40:15.240
And when the faculty there presented me with certain opportunities to study this, that, or the other thing, and I did that, and I found an answer.

01:40:15.260 --> 01:40:16.180
It wasn't terribly important.

01:40:16.220 --> 01:40:17.661
I can't even tell you much about it now.

01:40:19.029 --> 01:40:21.632
But it was something that no one else knew.

01:40:23.133 --> 01:40:26.336
That just captured me as a way of life.

01:40:27.176 --> 01:40:28.418
And I've been doing it ever since.

01:40:30.019 --> 01:40:32.081
INTERVIEWER 1 What made you decide to go to Swarthmore?

01:40:33.502 --> 01:40:34.423
A mixture of things.

01:40:35.824 --> 01:40:46.712
The connection to the school of psychology that my mother was involved in, the Gestalt School, which was centered at Swarthmore and the new school.

01:40:48.713 --> 01:40:51.595
The school in exile from Germany.

01:40:53.837 --> 01:41:01.123
Is that the same school that Alex Karp and Peter Thiel went to Germany to study, like the same idea?

01:41:02.363 --> 01:41:03.805
Am I wrong there?

01:41:04.245 --> 01:41:08.810
And so she introduced me to faculty there, and I knew them.

01:41:09.030 --> 01:41:17.859
I had also, at that summer program, met a number of people who were going to Swarthmore, one of whom I later shared the Nobel Prize with, Howard Temin.

01:41:17.879 --> 01:41:22.463
INTERVIEWER 1 You were fated to cross paths.

01:41:22.583 --> 01:41:23.804
We seemed to have been fated.

01:41:26.889 --> 01:41:31.232
So you started out majoring in biology and then you switched to chemistry.

01:41:31.252 --> 01:41:33.514
Can you tell me a little bit about that, why that happened?

01:41:34.153 --> 01:41:36.673
I switched to chemistry for logistical reasons.

01:41:36.733 --> 01:41:40.914
First of all, I had a chemistry minor anyway and enjoyed chemistry.

01:41:41.694 --> 01:41:50.996
But the chemistry department at Swarthmore had some younger faculty and faculty who really understood the desire to do research.

01:41:51.716 --> 01:42:02.418
Whereas the biological faculty was, somebody recently said, Swarthmore at that time had a great 19th century biology department.

01:42:04.139 --> 01:42:15.272
It was much more observational, interested in embryological problems and developmental problems, but not in molecular biology or not in biochemistry.

01:42:16.073 --> 01:42:17.435
And that's what I cared about.

01:42:17.715 --> 01:42:21.820
Embryology and developmental biology, keep that in the back of your mind.

01:42:23.602 --> 01:42:27.844
is what was the biology program at Swarthmore, so he chose chemistry.

01:42:28.184 --> 01:42:36.707
So I found my soulmates in chemistry, and they said, why don't you switch into chemistry, and then you can do an experimental thesis.

01:42:36.927 --> 01:42:38.327
It's all about doing experiments.

01:42:38.367 --> 01:42:46.390
And I did an experimental thesis at the University of Pennsylvania, actually, which they set up, the connection which they set up for me.

01:42:46.410 --> 01:42:48.651
INTERVIEWER 1 And what was the nature of that?

01:42:50.051 --> 01:42:51.012
I was studying.

01:42:53.365 --> 01:43:04.813
the equilibrium of ATP hydrolysis to either a, to AMP or to ADP.

01:43:05.214 --> 01:43:09.657
That sounds like mitochondria, studying mitochondria.

01:43:12.279 --> 01:43:17.823
And the issue was how much energy, what was the energy differential between those two reactions?

01:43:20.689 --> 01:43:20.809
OK.

01:43:20.969 --> 01:43:25.231
Not surprisingly, that doesn't mean a lot to me, but I'm You asked.

01:43:25.671 --> 01:43:26.191
Yes, I did.

01:43:27.872 --> 01:43:29.512
Wow, he's such a dick.

01:43:29.732 --> 01:43:33.053
Did you have in college influential mentors?

01:43:34.354 --> 01:43:39.155
Well, the professor of chemistry, Gilbert Haight, was a wonderful mentor.

01:43:39.175 --> 01:43:46.438
Pete Thompson, a younger professor of chemistry, was.

01:43:47.178 --> 01:43:49.379
But aside from that, not really.

01:43:49.949 --> 01:43:50.249
Okay.

01:43:51.070 --> 01:43:52.411
George Streisinger et al.?

01:43:53.171 --> 01:43:54.532
Oh, well, he wasn't at Swarthmore.

01:43:54.612 --> 01:43:55.412
Oh, he was later.

01:43:55.813 --> 01:44:01.216
He was at Cold Spring Harbor and I, between my junior and senior years of... So he was a chemist, you see?

01:44:01.316 --> 01:44:14.444
So he is exactly from the same school of thought that chemistry and physics are going to be able to explain life and that emergent properties of life are just explainable by chemistry and physics and by definition.

01:44:15.620 --> 01:44:18.304
If it's really an emergent property, then that's not happening.

01:44:18.344 --> 01:44:20.367
Can anybody confirm that we're still good here?

01:44:20.648 --> 01:44:22.210
I just saw a flash on my screen.

01:44:22.230 --> 01:44:24.454
I don't know if we're still live and everything.

01:44:24.514 --> 01:44:26.937
So he's really from this school.

01:44:28.530 --> 01:44:31.191
And of course, he's going to confirm that in a little bit.

01:44:31.391 --> 01:44:32.152
Thank you, Jason.

01:44:32.172 --> 01:44:34.793
In college, I went to Cold Spring Harbor.

01:44:35.593 --> 01:44:50.299
And that played another central role in my life, partly because of George, whom I worked with that summer, and just the exposure to the greatest biologists living, who all came to Cold Spring Harbor in the summer.

01:44:51.520 --> 01:44:53.461
So tell me a little bit more about what you did there.

01:44:54.958 --> 01:45:01.103
I was part of what was called the Undergraduate Research Participation Program, ERP.

01:45:02.484 --> 01:45:06.127
This was the first class of ERPs at Cold Spring Harbor.

01:45:06.487 --> 01:45:08.849
It was funded by the National Science Foundation.

01:45:09.950 --> 01:45:12.732
I grew up, as I said, in Great Neck.

01:45:12.772 --> 01:45:15.454
Great Neck is not far from Cold Spring Harbor.

01:45:16.354 --> 01:45:20.678
And so one April vacation where I was home, I

01:45:21.869 --> 01:45:42.121
I went out to Cold Spring Harbor and made contact with a couple of faculty there whose work I'd read about, because I wanted to ask them to come to Swarthmore as speakers, and I wanted to get some materials that we could play with in the laboratory at Swarthmore.

01:45:45.003 --> 01:45:46.984
One of those turned out to be George Streisinger.

01:45:47.024 --> 01:45:50.306
I had not heard of him before, but somebody directed me to him.

01:45:51.761 --> 01:45:57.245
George said, well, if you'd like to, you could come here for the summer as an IRB.

01:45:57.425 --> 01:46:00.167
I said, I would like to.

01:46:00.187 --> 01:46:05.870
I had some other plans for the summer, and when they heard that I had the opportunity to go to Cold Spring Harbor, they said, go.

01:46:06.511 --> 01:46:06.971
So I went.

01:46:07.271 --> 01:46:09.073
It was an incredible summer.

01:46:10.874 --> 01:46:16.678
It's just because Cold Spring Harbor was the center of this very nascent field of molecular biology.

01:46:16.698 --> 01:46:17.138
We're now in 1959.

01:46:23.484 --> 01:46:30.413
Most of the work that's in this book was done before 1959, so he kind of came in after all these guys were retiring.

01:46:30.954 --> 01:46:38.664
He's going to refer to a couple of them, but they were already well into, you know, emeritus status by then, and so he's kind of a guy who

01:46:39.625 --> 01:46:48.452
maybe even got recruited to sort of take over the narrative of what they accomplished, because he is going to move on to animal viruses.

01:46:48.512 --> 01:46:54.316
Screw the bacteria and bacteriophages that all these guys are working on at Cold Spring Harbor.

01:46:54.836 --> 01:46:55.417
Screw that.

01:46:55.457 --> 01:46:57.018
I'm going to go into animal viruses.

01:46:57.078 --> 01:46:57.838
That's what he says.

01:46:57.858 --> 01:47:02.061
You seem to wind up in the, you know, place that your timing's good.

01:47:03.522 --> 01:47:03.863
I don't know.

01:47:04.903 --> 01:47:06.224
I lived through the right times.

01:47:09.682 --> 01:47:15.723
So what made you think about MIT for graduate school?

01:47:16.324 --> 01:47:33.467
SKOLNIKOFF In that summer, two people, Salvador Luria and Cy Leventhal, both relatively new faculty at MIT, were, as I said last night, trolling for graduate students.

01:47:34.690 --> 01:47:38.174
to start a program of graduate education in molecular biology.

01:47:39.195 --> 01:47:48.165
And they saw me, and maybe they talked to George, I don't know, and said, would you like to come to MIT?

01:47:48.646 --> 01:47:50.528
And basically I didn't apply anywhere else.

01:47:50.848 --> 01:47:53.631
I just came to MIT because I'd been invited.

01:47:54.742 --> 01:47:59.564
And there weren't many places to go to get an education in molecular biology in 1960.

01:48:00.865 --> 01:48:09.529
You could go to Rockefeller, which is where I ended up, but didn't really want to go directly there.

01:48:12.170 --> 01:48:21.474
You could go to Caltech, but I was... So he was kind of in the perfect place to be recruited at the start of the Human Genome Project to make sure

01:48:23.888 --> 01:48:25.709
that the narrative could be controlled, you know?

01:48:25.789 --> 01:48:38.293
It's like they all crossed, and what's weird is that he started the Whitehead Institute, you know, the place where Mark Lander and Francis Collins and Kevin McKernan all worked?

01:48:38.333 --> 01:48:40.534
Well, Francis Collins maybe didn't, but he was at NIH.

01:48:40.634 --> 01:48:43.975
He's an Eastern person, and the thought of going to California

01:48:45.155 --> 01:48:47.256
Was I mean might as well go to Japan?

01:48:48.657 --> 01:48:50.278
I just had never been there.

01:48:50.678 --> 01:48:55.260
My parents had never been there It wasn't part of the world.

01:48:55.320 --> 01:48:58.782
I knew anything about so he's gonna explain it but think about this.

01:48:58.802 --> 01:49:11.368
This is only 50 years ago ladies and gentlemen And we have been bamboozled to believe in that 50 years we've gone from barely even being able to go to California without having to stay for a few months to

01:49:13.823 --> 01:49:20.027
to believing that we are on the cusp of being able to genetically engineer humans, which is just a lie.

01:49:20.087 --> 01:49:21.548
It's an absolute lie.

01:49:22.088 --> 01:49:24.810
I probably would have enjoyed going to Caltech, actually.

01:49:25.550 --> 01:49:27.031
And that's where Howard Timmon had gone.

01:49:27.531 --> 01:49:31.514
But air travel wasn't so easy.

01:49:32.014 --> 01:49:33.955
When you went to California, you were in California.

01:49:34.015 --> 01:49:36.376
And what do I know from palm trees?

01:49:37.617 --> 01:49:40.239
So just around the time jets were starting, was it?

01:49:40.539 --> 01:49:40.719
Yeah.

01:49:43.827 --> 01:49:47.931
Do you remember when you got to MIT what your first impressions were?

01:49:47.951 --> 01:49:54.417
SKOLNIKOFF What were my first impressions?

01:49:54.477 --> 01:49:59.903
Well, I was only here for a year as a graduate student, and then I went to Rockefeller.

01:50:01.064 --> 01:50:02.125
During that year.

01:50:05.020 --> 01:50:14.064
A number of the faculty were really very helpful to me in thinking through what I wanted to focus my attention on.

01:50:15.024 --> 01:50:18.365
And I decided what I wanted to focus on was animal viruses.

01:50:20.026 --> 01:50:22.587
And I went to Cy Leventhal and said,

01:50:23.936 --> 01:50:34.463
I'm thinking that maybe animal viruses could be a probe of animal cells the way bacterial viruses had already been a probe of bacterial physiology.

01:50:34.483 --> 01:50:35.403
And molecular biology.

01:50:37.084 --> 01:50:40.646
And he said he thought that was an interesting idea.

01:50:40.706 --> 01:50:41.707
He'd been thinking about that.

01:50:42.848 --> 01:50:45.129
But he had no idea what to do about it.

01:50:46.110 --> 01:50:49.472
And I went to Luria, Salvador Luria, with the same question.

01:50:50.922 --> 01:51:07.068
And Luria, who had written about animal viruses in his textbook in virology, and was one of the very few people in the phage world who understood that there were other kinds of viruses and that they could be useful to think about.

01:51:07.268 --> 01:51:08.109
Interesting, right?

01:51:08.149 --> 01:51:11.090
That there's only one guy who understood that concept.

01:51:11.510 --> 01:51:18.633
Out of that whole group of people that trained under Max Delbruck, there was only one guy that understood that there were animal viruses.

01:51:20.623 --> 01:51:23.764
that cared about their being, and think about what he just said there.

01:51:25.505 --> 01:51:27.106
It's almost like it's a myth.

01:51:30.907 --> 01:51:35.729
He set me up to work the following summer for Luria with the same question.

01:51:37.110 --> 01:51:43.553
And Luria, who had written about animal viruses in his textbook in virology and was

01:51:44.696 --> 01:51:53.263
one of the very few people in the phage world who, uh, understood that, that there were other kinds of viruses and that they could be useful to think about.

01:51:54.024 --> 01:52:02.171
He set me up to think about that statement, that he was one of the only people in the phage world that understood that there were other viruses worth thinking about.

01:52:04.332 --> 01:52:10.898
It's almost like they had no real biological presence or effect, but we should think about them.

01:52:12.799 --> 01:52:22.049
I want you to hear this very carefully and very well, because I do not think that this is a real story about intellectual progress.

01:52:22.189 --> 01:52:31.680
I think this is a recounting of a mythological intellectual washing away

01:52:33.027 --> 01:52:45.402
of the lack of evidence for animal viruses and the sort of distortion into everything's an animal virus and bacteria and bacteriophages don't matter at all in the context of understanding animal viruses.

01:52:45.462 --> 01:52:47.385
That's his main shtick.

01:52:49.730 --> 01:53:03.675
worked the following summer, it's always in the summer when things happen, at Albert Einstein with a man named Phil Marcus, and to take the animal virus course at Cold Spring Harbor.

01:53:04.876 --> 01:53:08.537
So I went back out to Cold Spring Harbor in August of 1961.

01:53:08.637 --> 01:53:08.697
No, 1960.

01:53:08.777 --> 01:53:08.857
Yes.

01:53:19.457 --> 01:53:20.978
No, 61, has to be 61.

01:53:24.581 --> 01:53:26.822
And took the animal virus course.

01:53:27.282 --> 01:53:32.446
And there I met a guy whom I decided I wanted to work with, Richard Franklin.

01:53:33.227 --> 01:53:34.748
And he was a professor at Rockefeller.

01:53:36.229 --> 01:53:40.752
So I scrambled to get admitted to the Rockefeller program.

01:53:40.832 --> 01:53:46.456
Luckily there was a guy who had dropped out of the program, so they had one slot open, because it was a very small program.

01:53:47.242 --> 01:53:48.684
It was all onesies.

01:53:51.828 --> 01:53:56.755
But this guy decided he wanted to play cello, as I remember, and not do biology.

01:53:59.653 --> 01:54:13.964
There was a slot and Luria helped me get into it, which was just the most wonderful thing he could have done because he had worked hard to get me to MIT and it was being very successful.

01:54:15.405 --> 01:54:18.487
But he recognized that I had found what I wanted to do.

01:54:19.308 --> 01:54:24.612
So I went to Rockefeller and I did my thesis actually in two years at Rockefeller.

01:54:25.232 --> 01:54:29.035
I walked into the most incredible scientific opportunities.

01:54:31.677 --> 01:54:31.779
Um...

01:54:33.992 --> 01:54:40.855
Was the Rockefeller- In Dutch, you say you're falling face first into the butter if you walk into all these scientific opportunities.

01:54:40.955 --> 01:54:42.115
That's not what happens.

01:54:42.636 --> 01:54:43.476
That's not either.

01:54:43.876 --> 01:54:46.017
That's also not what happened with Elon Musk.

01:54:46.417 --> 01:54:55.981
He didn't walk into all these business opportunities because he's really smart and put the right people in the right places or spent the right money on the right phone calls or the right trips in person.

01:54:56.461 --> 01:54:58.182
He is a scripted clown.

01:54:58.602 --> 01:55:02.484
And I'm sorry, but this guy is a scripted national security actor.

01:55:03.024 --> 01:55:08.512
and was central to laying down this dogma of molecular biology that is a farce.

01:55:09.254 --> 01:55:13.821
I don't know all the details of the farce, but I will dedicate the rest of my life

01:55:15.465 --> 01:55:16.205
figuring it out.

01:55:16.666 --> 01:55:17.266
I'm excited.

01:55:17.286 --> 01:55:18.787
It's good to have a reason.

01:55:18.807 --> 01:55:20.528
INTERVIEWER 2 It's good to have a different feel than MIT?

01:55:20.548 --> 01:55:22.089
WILSON Oh, totally different.

01:55:22.309 --> 01:55:24.850
I mean, MIT is a big teaching institution.

01:55:25.510 --> 01:55:31.233
Rockefeller is a research institution that had a few boutique graduate students whom they pampered.

01:55:32.494 --> 01:55:39.678
We were just delightfully pampered and had the opportunity to live in the middle of New York.

01:55:40.958 --> 01:55:44.420
By that time, my parents lived in Manhattan, so it was great.

01:55:44.460 --> 01:55:46.301
I sort of crossed down from them.

01:55:48.082 --> 01:55:53.265
INTERVIEWER 1 So let me go back to MIT.

01:55:55.447 --> 01:56:04.932
In the year that you were there, were you able to sort of characterize the culture or the students or the faculty in any way?

01:56:05.352 --> 01:56:07.874
Did you have any impressions of

01:56:09.956 --> 01:56:11.955
what it was like as an institution back then.

01:56:13.510 --> 01:56:18.795
You know, as a first-year graduate student, you don't really know a whole lot about the institution.

01:56:18.875 --> 01:56:20.576
And MIT was very siloed.

01:56:21.437 --> 01:56:25.260
So I knew about biology and about the biology people.

01:56:25.861 --> 01:56:31.806
I didn't even know much about chemistry, and certainly didn't know much about what other things that went on around.

01:56:32.146 --> 01:56:39.973
Although sometimes I would wander the halls and find people playing computer games, and that was amazing to me because I didn't know anything about either computers or games.

01:56:41.073 --> 01:56:43.135
or that kind of game.

01:56:43.635 --> 01:56:52.601
But you know, at two in the morning they'd be playing these games in the halls of the physics department.

01:56:55.463 --> 01:57:04.429
But let me say that MIT at that time was just on a cusp

01:57:05.456 --> 01:57:22.351
of going from a school that had no real biology, that had sanitary engineering, it had physical developments like the electron microscope, it had some neurobiology.

01:57:22.451 --> 01:57:24.853
Frank Schmidt had done that.

01:57:24.933 --> 01:57:29.197
But it had, over the period from about 55 to 60,

01:57:32.538 --> 01:57:44.087
had brought in faculty in biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, and was really shaping itself for the future.

01:57:44.348 --> 01:57:45.188
It was terrific.

01:57:45.529 --> 01:58:00.280
Alex Rich, who's still here, Vernon Ingram, who I think has passed away, Salvador Luria, who has passed away, and others were really creating a unique department here.

01:58:01.241 --> 01:58:09.389
unique in the sense that it didn't have the antecedents of zoology and botany that so many other schools had.

01:58:09.930 --> 01:58:11.992
So it didn't have that baggage to worry about.

01:58:12.052 --> 01:58:15.675
On the other hand, it also had absolutely no organismal

01:58:16.656 --> 01:58:18.018
material to work with.

01:58:18.578 --> 01:58:22.142
So it was all being, it was all biophysics, biochemistry and molecular.

01:58:22.182 --> 01:58:23.283
Hear him saying that?

01:58:23.363 --> 01:58:23.604
Right?

01:58:23.644 --> 01:58:28.869
They don't, the baggage of having a zoology department or a biology department wasn't really there.

01:58:28.950 --> 01:58:29.931
So it was really nice.

01:58:30.471 --> 01:58:33.134
And, but we just didn't have the animal material to work on.

01:58:33.194 --> 01:58:36.177
It's almost as if he is,

01:58:37.282 --> 01:58:38.183
It's remarkable.

01:58:38.203 --> 01:58:39.844
It's such a bunch of bullshit.

01:58:39.864 --> 01:58:52.230
MINDELLOF-SCHREIBERSCHEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEITZEIT

01:59:06.978 --> 01:59:10.220
just because that seemed like stuff I ought to know.

01:59:11.740 --> 01:59:14.841
And I passed my prelims in the first year.

01:59:15.902 --> 01:59:35.369
So I was a biophysicist for about 20 years and one of my main focuses for the first training of that biophysics part, where I was actually doing biophysics, was patch clamping recombinant SK channels and recording from large quantities of them to get accurate readings on their average kinetics.

01:59:36.349 --> 01:59:38.613
And so I was a biophysicist.

01:59:38.673 --> 01:59:40.916
I've read biophysics for a long time.

01:59:41.357 --> 01:59:43.640
And so he is being very general.

01:59:44.662 --> 01:59:50.829
Because he says that molecular biology is hard to define, so he won't do that here.

01:59:51.289 --> 01:59:58.577
But ten minutes later, or five minutes later, he's talking about biophysics as if it's a field that doesn't need any clarification.

01:59:58.617 --> 02:00:00.439
You can just be a biophysicist.

02:00:00.499 --> 02:00:01.260
Bullshit!

02:00:01.721 --> 02:00:06.566
If you didn't work on ion channels, then what did you work on to qualify you as biophysicist?

02:00:08.311 --> 02:00:10.093
year that I was here in biophysics.

02:00:11.555 --> 02:00:15.841
But that was just convenience, I guess.

02:00:16.461 --> 02:00:24.511
INTERVIEWER 1 This might be a good time for you to talk a little bit about where the first Nobel Prizes at MIT were.

02:00:27.225 --> 02:00:28.946
First Nobel Prizes at MIT.

02:00:29.026 --> 02:00:30.526
So she's reading a script, right?

02:00:30.567 --> 02:00:32.828
This might be a good time for you to talk about those.

02:00:32.888 --> 02:00:35.289
So a couple times he got caught off guard there.

02:00:35.329 --> 02:00:40.911
It was pretty funny how general he talked, how many times he had to drop a name instead of a concept.

02:00:41.531 --> 02:00:44.553
Received were in economics and in biology.

02:00:45.513 --> 02:00:48.075
I think the literal first may have been in economics.

02:00:48.175 --> 02:00:48.775
Samuelson.

02:00:49.536 --> 02:00:54.679
And there were three, Modigliani and Solow had all won the prize.

02:00:56.500 --> 02:00:58.761
And in biology, Luria.

02:01:04.485 --> 02:01:08.647
Well, I won it, but that gets us to a later time.

02:01:09.088 --> 02:01:14.191
But it was all, I don't remember exactly when Luria's prize was.

02:01:16.263 --> 02:01:19.745
Probably in the 70s.

02:01:22.708 --> 02:01:24.129
And his was the first.

02:01:24.729 --> 02:01:28.332
But there were no other Nobel Prizes at MIT.

02:01:28.352 --> 02:01:32.274
There were no prizes in physics or chemistry.

02:01:33.755 --> 02:01:41.561
Things that you might have thought would have been the first places to be recognized.

02:01:42.001 --> 02:01:45.744
Because MIT really was set up as an engineering school.

02:01:47.233 --> 02:01:49.834
And everything else was sort of ancillary.

02:01:50.535 --> 02:01:54.217
The term hacking comes from the MIT train club, as far as I understand.

02:01:54.257 --> 02:01:58.639
They had a really, really interesting train club there.

02:01:58.739 --> 02:02:08.824
Until after World War II, when there started to be a real thrust in basic science, as near as I can tell it anyway at MIT.

02:02:11.189 --> 02:02:15.172
I have a real mirror to that, which is Caltech.

02:02:16.152 --> 02:02:25.339
Caltech was set up to be a school where it was also an engineering school, but the engineering was set up to be a derivative from the science.

02:02:26.199 --> 02:02:40.529
And so Hale, who really set the template for Caltech, said we have to have strong physics, strong mathematics, strong biology even.

02:02:42.074 --> 02:02:45.555
and strong chemistry and strong biology from the very beginning.

02:02:46.276 --> 02:02:50.697
And that they are going to feed into the engineering disciplines rather than the other way around.

02:02:52.278 --> 02:03:00.921
And so Caltech was never a sort of build a bridge engineering school.

02:03:02.721 --> 02:03:08.583
But Caltech started winning Nobel Prizes in the 30s.

02:03:08.963 --> 02:03:10.504
I think the first prize was about 30.

02:03:12.830 --> 02:03:13.991
Well, it was early in the 30s.

02:03:15.212 --> 02:03:21.556
And Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in biology for his work in genetics, was then at Caltech.

02:03:24.138 --> 02:03:31.663
Carl Anderson was the first one to win a prize for work actually done at Caltech, and that was in the 30s.

02:03:32.084 --> 02:03:38.148
So it was a really very different mindset between MIT and Caltech.

02:03:40.723 --> 02:03:58.729
Hale, I might say, came from MIT, got his degree here, and was once invited back to be president and said, no, I want to be in Pasadena, and I want to build a school on somewhat different principles here.

02:04:00.409 --> 02:04:04.250
And then stole the chemistry professor from MIT.

02:04:04.651 --> 02:04:04.911
Noise.

02:04:07.853 --> 02:04:11.075
So after you finished your doctorate, you came back to MIT.

02:04:13.356 --> 02:04:14.497
Tell me a little bit about that.

02:04:14.918 --> 02:04:17.479
SKOLNIKOFF So as I said, I did my thesis in two years.

02:04:18.100 --> 02:04:29.107
And Rockefeller said, we have a three-year residence requirement, but there's clearly nothing else you need to do.

02:04:29.127 --> 02:04:34.331
And anyway, my professor had left Rockefeller to go to Colorado, where he got a nice job.

02:04:36.056 --> 02:04:39.979
So they said, why don't you just be on leave?

02:04:40.119 --> 02:04:46.763
Because Rockefeller was really, as I said, very focused on its students.

02:04:47.263 --> 02:04:52.066
And they had a program where if you wanted to go somewhere for a year, you could do that.

02:04:53.447 --> 02:04:55.509
So I came back to MIT.

02:04:55.569 --> 02:04:59.791
And meanwhile, MIT had hired Jim Darnell, and Darnell was

02:05:01.562 --> 02:05:08.128
probably the most forward-looking person working with animal viruses in the United States.

02:05:09.289 --> 02:05:13.593
And so I wanted to learn the technology that he was applying to these problems.

02:05:13.813 --> 02:05:17.897
Still no details, just names and technology.

02:05:19.519 --> 02:05:25.885
Worked with him and the whole atmosphere he had created here, which was really very special.

02:05:27.352 --> 02:05:28.413
So I came for a year.

02:05:29.033 --> 02:05:31.055
Actually, I just came as a postdoc.

02:05:31.095 --> 02:05:34.718
I planned to spend a couple of years as a postdoc.

02:05:34.818 --> 02:05:38.221
I hadn't really made a scheme out of it.

02:05:38.962 --> 02:05:42.845
But then Jim left after I was here a year.

02:05:43.045 --> 02:05:45.207
See, it's really contradictory in a way, right?

02:05:45.247 --> 02:05:49.811
Because he's living in a time when moving is not a trivial thing.

02:05:51.427 --> 02:05:53.128
when moving requires commitment.

02:05:53.248 --> 02:05:59.912
And sometimes he's like, it's really nice that I was in New York because I could go see my mom on the other side of the city, but I would never go to California.

02:05:59.952 --> 02:06:01.292
That's like moving to Japan.

02:06:01.653 --> 02:06:06.635
But now he says he's going on a postdoc, but he doesn't really know how long he's going to go, maybe a couple of years.

02:06:07.235 --> 02:06:17.341
So it's all just feels like a person who's lying and, you know, leaving out details that matter, which is that he is basically a scripted actor.

02:06:18.461 --> 02:06:31.129
who has been part of a program of people that were put in place, whether they wittingly or unwittingly were participating in the beginning, they know at some point that they are maintaining a narrative of bullshit about animal viruses.

02:06:32.069 --> 02:06:34.110
And went to Albert Einstein.

02:06:35.251 --> 02:06:39.754
And so I, you know, my reason for being here dissolved.

02:06:39.794 --> 02:06:42.335
So I only spent that year between

02:06:46.552 --> 02:06:48.793
63, 64 here.

02:06:50.314 --> 02:06:53.195
And then I also went to Albert Einstein, but not with Jim.

02:06:53.396 --> 02:06:56.157
I went to work with a biochemist, Jerry Hurley.

02:06:56.197 --> 02:07:05.801
I mean, I want you to think about the idea that people that were physicists that worked on the Manhattan Project and then switched to biology started with bacteria and their phages.

02:07:06.822 --> 02:07:14.425
And then supposedly, when we discovered that there are also animal viruses, all of them decided to stop working.

02:07:15.711 --> 02:07:17.492
They weren't interested in animal viruses.

02:07:17.693 --> 02:07:22.056
Only one of those guys was interested in animal viruses.

02:07:24.958 --> 02:07:26.720
I mean, that doesn't even make any sense.

02:07:28.141 --> 02:07:33.485
We are transitioning out of a world that didn't even know about DNA and inheritance.

02:07:33.766 --> 02:07:37.889
As I played in the beginning with Joshua Lederberg talking about the Avery paper,

02:07:39.130 --> 02:07:49.714
But now we're transitioning to animal viruses without ever having solved the problem at the bacterial level, even with our best physicist minds on it.

02:07:52.335 --> 02:07:53.955
I hope you can see where this is going.

02:07:55.075 --> 02:08:03.678
It's because I really felt I needed some rigorous training in biochemistry and I did and it was held.

02:08:03.798 --> 02:08:05.979
I mean, I probably never would have won the Nobel prize without it.

02:08:07.940 --> 02:08:08.020
Um,

02:08:10.965 --> 02:08:13.788
And after that you wound up going to the Salt Institute?

02:08:13.808 --> 02:08:15.210
MADRICKIAN I did.

02:08:15.230 --> 02:08:21.337
So I was at Einstein and Renato Delbecco came through.

02:08:22.599 --> 02:08:24.902
He was giving some lectures, I think at Rockefeller actually.

02:08:26.078 --> 02:08:29.641
And he sort of knew what I had been doing in animal viruses.

02:08:29.661 --> 02:08:33.404
By this time I was fairly widely published and known in the field.

02:08:34.304 --> 02:08:38.268
And my mentor wasn't anywhere near, wasn't any better known than I was.

02:08:38.328 --> 02:08:41.530
So we were seen as sort of two young Turks.

02:08:43.612 --> 02:08:48.375
And he called me and he said, we're going to set up, he was at Caltech at the time.

02:08:49.221 --> 02:08:53.125
He did refer to himself as two young Turks.

02:08:53.285 --> 02:08:54.025
He did say that.

02:08:54.266 --> 02:08:57.989
He made a commitment to go to the New Salk Institute, which is going to be formed in La Jolla.

02:08:58.970 --> 02:09:03.134
And I would love to have you come as a junior faculty member in my unit.

02:09:03.974 --> 02:09:06.497
It wasn't really departments in the usual sense.

02:09:07.217 --> 02:09:12.882
So do you think he crossed paths with Inder Verma and his grad student, Robert Malone?

02:09:13.123 --> 02:09:13.463
I wonder.

02:09:14.485 --> 02:09:23.027
He had space, he could do anything he wanted with it, and he was offering me some of that space to do my program in working on RNA viruses.

02:09:25.207 --> 02:09:33.329
And then ensued this wonderful uncertainty about whether Salk Institute was actually going to exist or not.

02:09:34.929 --> 02:09:42.471
And I would get these notes from Delbecco, or calls from Delbecco saying, don't make any plans.

02:09:43.482 --> 02:09:45.403
Because I'm not positive it's going to happen.

02:09:46.084 --> 02:09:48.685
But we're having a meeting next week, and I'll get back to you.

02:09:49.066 --> 02:09:50.487
So meeting occurs next week.

02:09:51.387 --> 02:09:53.409
Gets back to me and says, looks like it's going to happen.

02:09:53.669 --> 02:09:54.429
Start making plans.

02:09:54.449 --> 02:09:57.071
A couple weeks later, we're running into trouble.

02:09:58.332 --> 02:10:01.974
And so this went back and forth until finally he said, yes, it's going to happen.

02:10:02.755 --> 02:10:08.439
And I got in the car and came out to California, which was

02:10:10.171 --> 02:10:12.478
By that time, I had once before been to California.

02:10:12.498 --> 02:10:15.166
I'd flown out there to give a lecture, actually at Caltech.

02:10:15.267 --> 02:10:17.433
INTERVIEWER 1 Not so much of a culture shock.

02:10:18.143 --> 02:10:19.224
Well, it was a culture shock.

02:10:19.244 --> 02:10:22.306
It was an enormous culture shock.

02:10:23.046 --> 02:10:35.575
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.

02:10:36.355 --> 02:10:47.743
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.

02:10:49.064 --> 02:10:54.367
And they had to take a rattlesnake out of the lab in order to get me in there.

02:10:55.148 --> 02:10:57.069
That was just, this was the Wild West.

02:11:00.868 --> 02:11:04.891
So you were there for three years, and then you wound up coming back to MIT.

02:11:05.611 --> 02:11:06.492
What was the draw?

02:11:06.752 --> 02:11:09.013
WIDDOWSON The MIT yo-yo.

02:11:09.073 --> 02:11:12.035
The draw was that I loved MIT.

02:11:12.215 --> 02:11:16.358
I had loved my two years here as a graduate student and postdoc.

02:11:18.839 --> 02:11:21.741
And it was all about Salvador Luria.

02:11:22.522 --> 02:11:25.924
Because while I was at Saul.

02:11:28.975 --> 02:11:37.698
And I picked up virus work again after my post-doc, and I was publishing some interesting stuff.

02:11:39.158 --> 02:11:44.920
And a professor at Harvard became aware of it, Bernie Davis.

02:11:46.140 --> 02:11:48.961
And Bernie said, would you come and look at a job at Harvard?

02:11:50.942 --> 02:11:53.862
And I said, I'll come, give a seminar.

02:11:55.043 --> 02:11:55.643
And so I did.

02:11:57.142 --> 02:11:58.142
And Luria heard about it.

02:11:59.223 --> 02:12:06.065
And Luria then engineered an offer to me on the basis of what people knew about me.

02:12:06.125 --> 02:12:09.987
I think I came and gave a little seminar.

02:12:11.024 --> 02:12:15.106
It's so crazy because nothing that he's saying is profound.

02:12:15.526 --> 02:12:18.087
How he's saying it is not profound.

02:12:18.547 --> 02:12:21.488
The details that he offers are not profound.

02:12:21.568 --> 02:12:23.569
The stories are not entertaining.

02:12:24.010 --> 02:12:27.271
It's almost like he's skeptical of the interviewer's motives.

02:12:28.502 --> 02:12:30.223
even though the interviewer is scripted.

02:12:30.243 --> 02:12:33.426
I'm going to pick up where we leave off here now, tomorrow.

02:12:33.446 --> 02:12:40.811
I think that endemicity is a myth, and that's one of those myths that the Baltimore scheme hides.

02:12:40.911 --> 02:12:45.475
And now we have Vincent Racaniello being the foremost authority on the Baltimore scheme.

02:12:45.895 --> 02:12:52.180
The Baltimore scheme is as nonsensical as using a nonspecific PCR test to track something in the background.

02:12:52.840 --> 02:12:56.642
or the idea that most people were fine after they were transfected.

02:12:56.682 --> 02:13:04.044
But in reality, placebo made it safe and it also made it possible to produce billions of doses without breaking a sweat.

02:13:04.505 --> 02:13:09.026
If you use their test to find their ghosts, you are definitely not a ghostbuster.

02:13:09.066 --> 02:13:12.348
Ladies and gentlemen, please remember, we've got a lot of work to do.

02:13:12.388 --> 02:13:20.911
There's a lot of study halls to come, a lot of journal clubs to come as the final touches are put on these couple books that we're trying to do here.

02:13:21.371 --> 02:13:40.158
has a family don't believe the red hat shit don't believe the blue hat shit everything on the shitter net is terrible ladies and gentlemen intramuscular injection is dumb transfection was dumb rna pandemicking is dumb and autism is a dumb word yes ladies and gentlemen it's a semantic game

02:13:40.658 --> 02:13:41.479
Thanks for being here.

02:13:41.999 --> 02:13:45.142
I'm sorry that we're trapped in this theater, but I do see a way out.

02:13:45.182 --> 02:13:46.183
The doors are still open.

02:13:46.223 --> 02:13:47.724
They'll be open for a few more years.

02:13:48.185 --> 02:13:52.469
We can get our kids off and we can imagine a world together and then we can create it together.

02:13:53.570 --> 02:13:57.353
If you want to, I think it's a good idea to download the PeerTube app and watch on your phone.

02:13:57.373 --> 02:14:02.638
It's a lot better than the website, but the website does allow you to download the videos and upload them wherever you want to.

02:14:02.698 --> 02:14:03.879
I encourage you to make your own

02:14:04.454 --> 02:14:12.062
YouTube version of GigaOM biologicals, you know, streams or shorts or whatever you wanna do, I encourage you to do it.

02:14:13.323 --> 02:14:17.768
And in the meantime, download the PeerTube app, start using it, stream.gigaom.bio.

02:14:18.188 --> 02:14:19.490
And Bob is your uncle.

02:14:19.610 --> 02:14:20.390
Thanks for being here.

02:14:20.410 --> 02:14:21.572
See you again tomorrow.

02:14:22.433 --> 02:14:23.534
Gosh, isn't that scary?

02:14:34.895 --> 02:14:35.938
What the hell happened there?

02:14:39.367 --> 02:14:40.791
Oh, man, that hurt.

02:15:52.455 --> 02:15:52.576
you