The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


310. Viral： The Origin of Covid 19 ｜ Matt Ridley


Summary

Matt Ridley is a British writer, journalist, and public speaker. He has a BA and DPhil degree from Oxford University, and worked for The Economist for nine years as science editor. He worked as a Washington correspondent and American editor as well, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman. Matt writes a weekly column in the Times of London, and also writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal. As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013, and served on the Science and Technology Select Committee from 2014 to 2017. He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon Award in 2012, and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014. His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and have won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and The revised and expanded version of his latest book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Coevid19. He is honorary President of the International Center for Life in Newcastle, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences and a Foreign honorary member of the Academy of Sciences and Sciences. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be. And we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, who might be feeling this way? in his new series, Dr. B. P. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feel this way. Dr. P Peterson s new series. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone, and there's a way to find your way forward. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordyn R. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety, now and so you can start to feel better. . - Rachel Maddow, Rachel Maddows, Rachel Streibold, The Good Mr Goodbois, Matt Ridley, , and more? - Rachel Goodboi, and much more! Thank you for listening to this episode of the Daily Wire PLUS?


Transcript

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm happy today to be speaking with Dr. Matt Ridley, one of the world's most well-known and lucidly-minded rationalists.
00:01:19.720 I've spoken with Matt before on my podcast, and we're going to talk today about, among other things, about the origin of the COVID virus, so that should be entertaining.
00:01:30.020 Matt Ridley is a British writer, journalist, and public speaker.
00:01:33.880 He has a BA and DPhil degree from Oxford University.
00:01:38.880 Matt also worked for The Economist for nine years as science editor.
00:01:43.180 He worked as a Washington correspondent and American editor as well, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman.
00:01:50.660 Matt writes a weekly column in the Times of London and also writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:57.300 As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013
00:02:02.540 and served on the Science and Technology Select Committee from 2014 to 2017.
00:02:09.080 He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon Award in 2012,
00:02:16.620 and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014.
00:02:22.200 He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences
00:02:26.960 and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
00:02:32.160 He is honorary president of the International Center for Life in Newcastle.
00:02:37.200 Matt also holds honorary doctorates from Buckingham University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
00:02:45.100 and University of Francisco, American, Guatemala.
00:02:49.180 His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and have won several awards.
00:02:56.020 His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture,
00:03:05.600 Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works,
00:03:13.900 and the revised and expanded version of his latest book, Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
00:03:21.240 We're going to talk about a variety of issues, including not least the politicization of science
00:03:27.740 and perhaps the politicization of everything.
00:03:31.420 But I think maybe we'll start by walking through your book on the origin of COVID-19.
00:03:39.320 And so the first thing I'm curious about, I suppose, is why did you decide to investigate the origin of COVID-19?
00:03:47.220 Why didn't you just accept the idea that it emerged in the exotic meat market and in Wuhan?
00:03:56.340 And like a good boy, let's say, and leave it at that.
00:04:00.660 It's a good question.
00:04:02.220 And the answer is, to start with, I did accept the conventional version.
00:04:05.940 But I was interested, I'm a zoologist by background, and I was interested in how these diseases jump.
00:04:13.020 And I thought it was highly likely this one had jumped like SARS did from a bat through the food chain.
00:04:19.520 But I wanted to know where and when and how.
00:04:22.020 And I knew that the scientists in Wuhan had an idea about a similar virus.
00:04:27.740 So I got the Wall Street Journal to commission an article from me called The Bats Behind the Pandemic.
00:04:34.920 What was it about horseshoe bats that was harboring such viruses?
00:04:40.520 How were people coming into contact with them?
00:04:42.660 What did we know?
00:04:43.800 What was the story in this case?
00:04:45.500 It was a very interesting story in the case of SARS in 2003 to do with food markets near Hong Kong.
00:04:52.120 What was going to be the story in this case?
00:04:54.100 And in investigating it, I came upon anomalies, like the fact that this virus was not particularly closely related to the bat one they had.
00:05:06.600 Like they couldn't tell me where they found the bat one.
00:05:09.980 The paper that I read didn't give the location.
00:05:13.580 And the name of the virus, the bat virus, was one that didn't appear in the scientific literature.
00:05:19.300 And yet they said they'd found it previously.
00:05:21.320 So I was rather puzzled by all this.
00:05:23.860 And I called up a number of virologists.
00:05:25.780 And they said, well, yes, there's some anomalies here we don't understand.
00:05:31.180 But it's nothing to do with a lab leak.
00:05:34.240 You can rule that out.
00:05:35.560 Now, I believed that for about two and a half months.
00:05:38.840 And then I came across the work of Alina Chan, who eventually became my co-author on this book.
00:05:44.460 And she was saying, actually, we can't rule out a lab leak.
00:05:48.680 There's quite a lot of things about this story that make it really quite plausible that what's happened here is an escape from a lab.
00:05:57.200 Because we're dealing with a virus that turns up in the city, which has the lab that does work on SARS-like coronaviruses more than any other lab in the world.
00:06:09.420 And that geographical coincidence has to be taken seriously, particularly when we find that the virus from the bat that they identified as being closely related to SARS-CoV-2 had been found effectively in their own freezer.
00:06:28.420 And that's a starting point for a query.
00:06:32.520 So by the middle of May 2020, the Chinese were announcing they didn't think it started in that market.
00:06:41.320 Alina Chan was saying there's lots of evidence to suggest this thing is well adapted to human beings.
00:06:46.960 And the geographical coincidence all got me interested in this being an open question, not a closed one, and one that needed further investigation.
00:06:56.980 And the deeper I dug, the more emerged.
00:07:00.960 Okay, so let me summarize that.
00:07:03.340 So the first smoking pistol, in some sense, as you point out, is the coincidence of the location of this lab which studies exactly this kind of virus and the outbreak itself.
00:07:18.060 And that's a problem, right?
00:07:20.100 So that means that it's reasonable to look at that and think that, well, it could have escaped from a lab there.
00:07:27.100 That's the first conclusion.
00:07:28.580 And that it has to be demonstrated in some sense that it didn't.
00:07:33.340 And then, so that's a problem.
00:07:35.140 And I can't see how that's anything but an incontrovertible problem.
00:07:40.120 The mere fact that that lab is there and that it does research on those types of viruses and that that's where the outbreak was doesn't prove that it originated in the lab, but it certainly makes that a plausible hypothesis.
00:07:52.980 But then you add this additional twist, which is, I think, more complicated for people to understand, and you detail this out, you provide some detail for this in the book, that this virus is somewhat remarkably well adapted to human beings.
00:08:09.580 Now, there are literally trillions and trillions of different forms of viruses, and so obviously most of them aren't particularly well adapted to human beings because otherwise we would have trillions of viruses producing pandemics all the time.
00:08:26.160 So it's generally the case that viruses are not well adapted to transmission in human beings, and that's true for the overwhelming majority of viruses.
00:08:36.160 And so the fact of this human adaptation or adaptation to human transmission is something of signal importance.
00:08:44.340 And so maybe you could walk me and everyone else listening through why a typical virus isn't adapted to human transmission and what it means that one is and how that develops.
00:08:56.880 Yes. The normal pattern when a virus first emerges into the human species is for it to be very difficult for the virus to spread human to human.
00:09:10.660 It can infect someone, it can even possibly kill someone, but they're not very good at passing it on to people.
00:09:16.400 The virus is not really very good at transmitting between members of this new host.
00:09:22.460 Now, if enough time goes by with enough infections happening, then eventually it will get good at it.
00:09:28.940 And that's what was starting to happen with SARS in 2003.
00:09:33.700 It first infected people in the fall of 2002.
00:09:38.360 By the spring of 2003, you were starting to see chains of transmission from person to person.
00:09:44.520 And the reason for this is that the virus has to evolve, it has to change its genetic code in such a way that it can better fit the receptors on the cells of humans as opposed to the receptors on the cells of bats, or in the case of SARS, the intermediate host, which was a palm civet.
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00:11:42.660 So we should point out that the problem of transmission that a virus has to solve is no different from the problem of the virus determining in some sense or evolving so that it can live.
00:11:59.400 Transmission in a virus is the same thing as propagation in the environment.
00:12:04.480 And so this is a very naughty problem, K-N-O-T-T-Y, for a virus to solve.
00:12:09.720 It's not simple at all because it has to not kill the host too quickly.
00:12:14.620 And it has to be able to replicate within an individual.
00:12:17.640 But then it not only does it have to manage those things, which is very difficult,
00:12:20.860 but it also has to figure out how to transmit itself with some degree of effectiveness.
00:12:25.380 And thank God most viruses can't solve that problem.
00:12:28.140 So this is a very thorny problem.
00:12:30.520 And maybe you can outline for everyone how viruses do solve that problem and why most don't,
00:12:38.880 and why the fact of human adaptation to humans is so important.
00:12:44.120 Yeah.
00:12:44.740 So just to give you a good example, bird flu, which is a big problem at the moment in poultry flocks and wild birds,
00:12:52.720 is not very good at infecting human beings.
00:12:55.700 People can catch it.
00:12:56.700 People have even died of it.
00:12:58.460 If you're exposed to a huge dose by working in a poultry farm, you can get sick and you'll probably die.
00:13:04.520 But you probably won't give it to anybody else.
00:13:06.600 We've not seen any human-to-human transmission of that virus.
00:13:10.460 This virus was good at transmitting between human beings from the word go,
00:13:14.520 from the November or December of 2019.
00:13:18.200 And the reason for that, we now know in molecular terms, it has a so-called receptor binding domain on its spike gene,
00:13:26.380 which is well adapted to the human ACE2 receptor on our cells.
00:13:31.300 Not very well adapted to other species receptors, which is intriguing.
00:13:37.680 So it's a specific human adaptation.
00:13:41.700 Well, not specific.
00:13:43.400 It's not completely specific.
00:13:44.560 It's quite good at lots of animals, but it's really good at us.
00:13:48.720 Okay.
00:13:49.280 And the other feature that it has that is very striking and very surprising is that it has something called a furin cleavage site.
00:13:57.320 Now, this is a small section of the spike gene that is coded by about 12 letters of RNA genetic code,
00:14:07.180 which has been inserted into it compared with all its close relatives.
00:14:12.500 And that gives it the ability to use a human enzyme called furin that is in many of our cells
00:14:21.180 in order to reconfigure the virus as it leaves a cell to make it, as it were, prime it to attack another cell.
00:14:32.420 So it's actually using one of our enzymes to spread in the body.
00:14:36.760 This enables it to infect more tissues in the body and to multiply much more effectively.
00:14:43.120 So it's the reason we're having a pandemic is the furin cleavage site.
00:14:47.300 If this virus didn't have that, it would probably have been pretty easy to control in the early months.
00:14:54.240 You said something very interesting, and this is another piece of the puzzle, I presume,
00:14:58.360 is that compared to other viruses of its type, it has this interesting furin cleavage site.
00:15:06.440 I've got that right.
00:15:07.800 And you said that it had been inserted.
00:15:10.380 And that's a, well, that's an anomalous statement, let's say.
00:15:15.860 So there's something about this particular virus that sets it out against other viruses of its type.
00:15:22.500 And it's this particular ability to use a human enzyme.
00:15:26.620 And you described that as inserted.
00:15:28.700 And so I presume that could be inserted as a consequence, hypothetically, of natural selection processes
00:15:34.680 or that there's other alternative explanations.
00:15:38.080 So what do you see when you look at that?
00:15:40.840 What I mean by inserted here is that it's an extra piece of genetic information.
00:15:49.040 We can look at 20 or 30 other very similar viruses, and we can line their genomes up and match them up against this one.
00:15:59.240 And the furin cleavage site is not an altered bit.
00:16:03.140 It's an added bit.
00:16:04.880 It's an extra chunk that's been added in the middle of the spike gene.
00:16:08.940 So how do you differentiate between added and different?
00:16:15.000 I presume that's a consequence of degree of divergence.
00:16:18.940 So you could imagine that there's a set of viruses that are genetically and evolutionarily similar,
00:16:26.700 so they stem from a similar source, and they have a predictable pattern of variation.
00:16:31.980 And you're saying that this is an anomaly that exists outside that.
00:16:36.600 Well, you line them up.
00:16:39.200 You align the genetic codes of the viruses.
00:16:42.700 And in this particular part of the spike gene, they all align up quite well.
00:16:46.520 You know, the sequence is mostly the same.
00:16:49.040 You can tell it's been added because you can align the spike genes of other viruses alongside each other
00:16:56.380 and see that this is an extra piece of RNA, not a changed piece of RNA.
00:17:01.900 It's about 12 letters long.
00:17:03.820 And this spells out a sequence that allows, it's called a furin cleavage site,
00:17:09.600 and it allows the virus to use a human enzyme called furin to spread from cell to cell, from tissue to tissue,
00:17:15.660 and effectively makes the virus much more dangerous and much more transmissible.
00:17:22.400 It's the reason we're having a pandemic.
00:17:23.980 If the virus didn't have this furin cleavage site, we'd probably have been able to get it under control very easily early in the pandemic.
00:17:30.760 Now, what's interesting is that a number of Western virologists, when they first saw the sequence of this virus,
00:17:37.840 said, whoa, it's got a furin cleavage site in.
00:17:41.100 That's very unusual for a SARS-like virus.
00:17:43.940 In fact, it's unique.
00:17:44.940 We've never seen one with this before.
00:17:47.060 There are other coronaviruses with furin cleavage sites, but not SARS-like coronaviruses.
00:17:51.500 And they said, I'm afraid that suggests it might have been engineered.
00:17:57.520 Now, they kept those thoughts to themselves.
00:17:59.720 We only know about them now because of leaks of emails that have emerged more than a year later.
00:18:07.760 But they got on a conference call at the beginning of February, U.S. and U.K. and other virologists, about a dozen of them.
00:18:16.180 Who are these people, this they that you're referring to, in these stages of speculation?
00:18:25.080 Yeah, these are virologists.
00:18:26.600 So senior virologists who've been studying this kind of virus.
00:18:29.720 Or other similar outbreaks.
00:18:32.260 There's about a dozen of them.
00:18:33.780 But also on the call was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases in the U.S.
00:18:41.280 And the main advisor to the president on this.
00:18:44.920 And Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a senior advisor to the British government and the head of the Wellcome Trust in the U.K.,
00:18:50.080 which had funded a lot of research of this kind.
00:18:51.820 And they discussed on this call their doubts that this virus was natural and their worry that it might have been engineered.
00:19:03.040 Within two days, however, that same group of virologists started drafting an article,
00:19:08.400 which was eventually published in Nature Medicine, saying it couldn't possibly have been engineered.
00:19:15.840 The fearing cleavage site will probably turn up in a wild bat virus.
00:19:19.960 Well, it hasn't so far.
00:19:21.260 And the reason they have given for changing their mind after these emails emerged showing what they were actually thinking in February
00:19:29.180 is that the Chinese had announced they'd found a virus in a pangolin.
00:19:33.960 You probably remember that.
00:19:35.980 A scaly anteater that is trafficked because of the belief that it contributes to good medical health and so on.
00:19:47.080 If you eat its scales, it's not true.
00:19:50.100 They're made of the same stuff as fingernails.
00:19:51.780 You might as well eat your fingernails.
00:19:53.060 But still, it's a widely held belief.
00:19:54.820 And as a result, many of these scaly anteaters are trafficked into China.
00:19:58.500 Well, it turns out that a university in China announced in February 2020 that they'd found a very similar virus,
00:20:08.660 a 99% similar virus in pangolin.
00:20:11.420 And people thought, right, case closed.
00:20:13.620 We found the intermediate animal.
00:20:15.020 We know what's happening.
00:20:16.340 Well, there's three problems with that.
00:20:18.100 One, when they eventually published the sequence of this pangolin virus, it was not very similar.
00:20:25.000 It was 90% similar.
00:20:26.400 That's not good enough.
00:20:27.400 It's nothing like close enough.
00:20:29.940 Two, it didn't have the furin cleavage site in.
00:20:33.120 And three, there were no pangolins on sale in Wuhan.
00:20:35.860 So it couldn't have explained how the outbreak happened in Wuhan.
00:20:38.900 Those are problems.
00:20:40.480 Those are big problems.
00:20:41.820 So we're in this strange situation where this particular feature has alarmed Western virologists,
00:20:48.480 but they've kept the information to themselves.
00:20:50.820 We didn't find out about all this for months, remember.
00:20:53.740 No, it's worse than that.
00:20:54.800 It's worse than that because these virologists that you're talking about include Fauci.
00:20:59.360 And so it's not just virologists.
00:21:03.220 It's the virologists who end up being in charge of the entire response.
00:21:07.360 And so the question that emerges for me there is that if they were concerned about this being a lab leak,
00:21:13.720 then why the strenuous attempt to deflect?
00:21:19.380 Now, there's two possible reasons.
00:21:21.120 One is that they didn't want to move forward with their presumption that it was a lab leak without a smoking pistol.
00:21:27.900 And that's fair enough because you might think, well, we're concerned and we're incurring,
00:21:34.060 but we're not going to beat the drum about the lab leak till we're certain.
00:21:39.640 And then there's whatever other reasons might be lurking in the background.
00:21:43.020 And I suppose that's partly what we're trying to investigate.
00:21:46.120 And so that would be the scandal that would emerge perhaps if it was a lab leak
00:21:50.740 and what that might do to Chinese-American relationships
00:21:53.060 and what it says about virology research in general.
00:21:56.420 And God only knows what other host of explanations.
00:21:59.620 And so, but it's very striking to me.
00:22:01.520 So you've laid out a story that goes, well, first of all, there was a lab in Wuhan that was doing research
00:22:09.440 that was strikingly similar on viruses that were strikingly similar to the virus that caused the pandemic.
00:22:16.120 And that is the geographical locale of the origin of the pandemic.
00:22:20.160 And then the virus itself has peculiarities that might indicate engineering.
00:22:25.420 And so that's two pieces of evidence that are starting to converge pretty hard
00:22:29.800 and unlikely convergence.
00:22:32.440 And then you have the virologists themselves,
00:22:35.340 including those who are in charge of the response or who will be eventually,
00:22:38.940 also noting that this looks suspicious to say the least.
00:22:43.980 And then for some reason, and in a great scientific journal,
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00:22:53.000 And so what's the motivation here?
00:22:56.360 What's going on precisely?
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00:24:12.740 Well, there was an exchange of emails among these scientists
00:24:22.020 in which some of them said,
00:24:25.700 it's important that we don't damage international harmony.
00:24:31.380 That was the phrase used by Francis Collins,
00:24:33.740 the head of the NIH, in these emails.
00:24:36.260 And another one says,
00:24:37.360 we mustn't damage the reputation of science,
00:24:39.900 and of Chinese science in particular.
00:24:43.580 Now, at the same time,
00:24:45.200 another letter was being prepared for the Lancet.
00:24:46.260 You mean by pointing out that something unbelievably
00:24:50.360 and god-awfully and unforgivably dangerous
00:24:52.940 had actually happened?
00:24:55.260 That was how we were going to damage the reputation,
00:24:58.400 so to speak,
00:24:59.720 by just admitting that something catastrophic had happened.
00:25:03.420 And so it was reputation management.
00:25:05.100 Yes, but clearly, you know,
00:25:08.820 if you,
00:25:10.120 there is a risk
00:25:11.440 that the world rushes off
00:25:13.360 and comes to the conclusion
00:25:14.320 it came out of a lab
00:25:15.360 and this damages biotechnology,
00:25:16.960 and it's not true.
00:25:17.860 It might have come in a natural way.
00:25:20.680 And then we've done,
00:25:21.500 and then we've done
00:25:22.520 unnecessary damage to science,
00:25:24.200 which is a great pity.
00:25:25.260 And I, you know,
00:25:25.940 I'm a big fan of biotechnology.
00:25:27.780 I would think that was a problem.
00:25:29.980 So that is one risk.
00:25:30.980 But the other risk is that we are so worried
00:25:34.320 about doing damage to the reputation of science
00:25:36.840 that we overlook the possibility
00:25:38.320 that this thing did start in a laboratory.
00:25:41.980 Now, at the same time,
00:25:44.040 also in February 2020,
00:25:46.520 the closest collaborator of the Wuhan lab in the West,
00:25:50.620 a man named Peter Daszak,
00:25:51.780 who runs an organization called the EcoHealth Alliance,
00:25:54.560 which had funneled millions of dollars
00:25:56.800 from US taxpayers
00:25:58.120 to this research in Wuhan over the years.
00:26:01.440 He was preparing a letter for the Lancet,
00:26:04.460 which he got 27 scientists to sign,
00:26:07.580 saying it was,
00:26:09.480 it couldn't possibly have come from a lab
00:26:11.220 and we've got to shut down that possibility.
00:26:14.360 He didn't reveal his role in orchestrating that.
00:26:19.640 He was just one of the signatures.
00:26:21.700 He didn't note his conflict of interest in that letter,
00:26:25.780 the fact that he was a very close collaborator and friend
00:26:28.300 of the Wuhan lab.
00:26:30.860 It took 18 months before the Lancet published
00:26:33.560 a statement of conflict of interest
00:26:35.320 under pressure on that.
00:26:37.300 But more important than any of that,
00:26:40.360 the one crucial thing that Peter Daszak didn't reveal
00:26:43.280 and that we didn't find out until September 2021,
00:26:46.360 was that he had put in an application
00:26:50.580 to the Pentagon,
00:26:53.620 to the DARPA,
00:26:54.900 the research arm of the Pentagon,
00:26:58.920 in 2018,
00:27:01.520 in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:27:04.860 among others,
00:27:05.880 to do experiments on SARS-like viruses
00:27:09.540 that they found in bats.
00:27:11.060 And those experiments were to include,
00:27:14.120 if they found ones that weren't very similar to SARS-1,
00:27:17.400 that were new,
00:27:19.060 were to include putting a furin cleavage site
00:27:23.100 into such a virus.
00:27:25.600 Now that is a major discovery.
00:27:29.500 And as I say,
00:27:30.260 we found that out from a leaked document.
00:27:32.420 It's called the Project D-FUSE.
00:27:34.080 It came to light in September 2021
00:27:36.240 because someone in DARPA,
00:27:38.460 I think,
00:27:38.980 leaked it to people
00:27:41.120 who were investigating this.
00:27:43.600 And Peter Daszak hadn't bothered to tell us
00:27:46.780 that he was the lead investigator
00:27:50.400 on exactly this proposal.
00:27:53.520 Now, you know,
00:27:54.900 for me as a citizen of the planet Earth,
00:27:58.560 that's pretty annoying.
00:28:00.440 As a scientist
00:28:01.860 and a writer about science,
00:28:04.700 it's even more annoying
00:28:06.320 because, you know,
00:28:07.800 we all want to know what happened here.
00:28:10.040 You know,
00:28:10.300 I don't go into this
00:28:11.280 wanting it to be a lab leak.
00:28:13.040 I just want to know the truth.
00:28:14.960 And it seems absolutely vital
00:28:16.860 to get us as much information as we can.
00:28:20.120 Now, some of that information is in China
00:28:21.760 and they're not being very forthcoming.
00:28:23.680 But information that is in America
00:28:25.500 ought to be volunteered in this case.
00:28:29.900 The other thing,
00:28:30.880 but the thing that the Chinese have failed to do
00:28:34.380 is tell us what's in their database.
00:28:37.540 They had a database of,
00:28:39.760 with 22,000 entries in it
00:28:41.960 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:28:44.440 which was wildlife pathogens.
00:28:48.100 It was bacteria and viruses
00:28:50.520 that affected wildlife.
00:28:51.840 About 15,000 of them related to bats.
00:28:54.920 And most of those were viruses.
00:28:56.840 So these were the viruses
00:28:58.020 they'd been collecting from,
00:28:59.720 mostly not from Wuhan,
00:29:01.040 but from a long way away
00:29:02.060 from southern China and Laos
00:29:04.000 and other neighboring countries.
00:29:06.200 And they'd been collecting
00:29:07.160 thousands of these viruses
00:29:08.380 and they'd been sequencing them
00:29:10.100 and they'd been characterizing them
00:29:11.660 and describing them.
00:29:12.740 And they had a database.
00:29:13.960 And the purpose of this database,
00:29:16.700 partly funded with US money,
00:29:18.760 was to predict and prevent future pandemics.
00:29:22.540 When, on the 12th of September, 2019,
00:29:29.400 that is about two months
00:29:31.360 before the pandemic started,
00:29:33.240 as far as we can tell,
00:29:35.100 at two o'clock in the morning,
00:29:37.000 that database went offline.
00:29:39.540 It's never come back online.
00:29:42.460 We've never, therefore,
00:29:43.660 been able to access it
00:29:44.860 and look at what viruses
00:29:46.400 they had in that lab.
00:29:49.240 Now, when we asked them,
00:29:50.720 why won't you show us that database,
00:29:53.640 which, after all,
00:29:54.520 the purpose of which
00:29:55.500 was to share with the world
00:29:56.560 so that we could predict pandemics,
00:29:58.100 remember,
00:29:59.080 they say,
00:30:00.060 oh, well, people might hack it.
00:30:02.280 Well, that's a meaningless statement.
00:30:04.480 You know, if you're going to share it,
00:30:05.680 you don't need to worry
00:30:06.460 about people hacking it.
00:30:07.680 You know,
00:30:08.060 it's a sort of circular non-argument,
00:30:11.000 if you like.
00:30:12.180 Yeah.
00:30:12.400 And remember,
00:30:15.400 showing us what's in that database
00:30:17.100 would be the quickest way
00:30:19.220 to exonerate
00:30:20.560 the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:30:22.680 because it would show,
00:30:24.400 look,
00:30:24.620 they didn't have a virus
00:30:26.040 resembling SARS-CoV-2
00:30:27.620 in their database.
00:30:31.260 And so case closed.
00:30:33.020 But they won't show us that document.
00:30:35.640 And that, for me,
00:30:37.020 is a very, very important
00:30:38.880 piece of information.
00:30:40.560 Yeah, well,
00:30:42.160 this begs a broader,
00:30:43.180 this begs a broader question, too,
00:30:45.300 that was popping up in my mind.
00:30:46.900 And perhaps this is a reasonable place
00:30:48.560 to interject,
00:30:50.220 to broaden out the conversation.
00:30:54.640 We don't really know
00:30:55.900 what the preconditions are
00:30:57.820 for science to function
00:31:00.660 as it has functioned,
00:31:02.080 let's say, in the West
00:31:03.020 for the last 400 years.
00:31:04.380 But it's certainly the case
00:31:05.460 that real scientists,
00:31:08.040 and there are very few of them,
00:31:09.440 because most scientists
00:31:11.960 are technicians
00:31:13.960 in some real sense
00:31:15.060 and they're certainly
00:31:15.640 not on the cutting edge
00:31:16.700 and they're worried
00:31:18.000 about the pushing forward
00:31:19.460 of their career,
00:31:20.300 let's say,
00:31:20.720 and other extraneous issues
00:31:22.740 rather than concentrating
00:31:23.840 on the science at hand.
00:31:25.220 It's an unbelievably,
00:31:27.060 stringently ethical enterprise.
00:31:29.520 If you want to be
00:31:30.580 a good scientist,
00:31:31.680 you have to assume
00:31:33.640 that what you don't know
00:31:36.340 should take priority
00:31:37.380 over what you do know.
00:31:38.900 That's hypothesis testing
00:31:40.340 in some real sense.
00:31:42.220 And you also have to
00:31:44.980 be willing to go
00:31:46.320 where the data takes you
00:31:47.920 and you have to do
00:31:48.740 your statistical analysis
00:31:49.940 in the most honest
00:31:51.720 possible manner.
00:31:53.420 And all of that requires
00:31:55.780 the abiding by
00:31:57.600 an extraordinarily stringent ethic.
00:31:59.840 And yet,
00:32:00.700 we tend to think of science
00:32:01.900 as a technical enterprise
00:32:03.500 and when we presume
00:32:05.500 that it's a technical enterprise,
00:32:06.940 we also presume that,
00:32:09.040 for example,
00:32:09.700 it could take place
00:32:10.680 in any real sense
00:32:11.900 in a totalitarian country,
00:32:13.500 that you can do science
00:32:14.620 in a totalitarian country.
00:32:16.420 And it isn't obvious
00:32:17.440 to me at all
00:32:18.120 that you can do science
00:32:19.020 in a totalitarian country.
00:32:20.560 And the reason for that
00:32:21.540 is that in a totalitarian country,
00:32:23.840 everyone lies about everything
00:32:25.500 all the time.
00:32:26.500 And that's a very good point.
00:32:30.120 And that actually brings up
00:32:32.940 questions that were raised
00:32:34.680 in a report that came from
00:32:36.440 the Senate in recent weeks.
00:32:39.400 The HELP Committee of the Senate,
00:32:41.720 the Republican side of that committee,
00:32:44.920 has employed experts
00:32:47.200 to spend a couple of,
00:32:50.660 several months,
00:32:52.100 a year and a bit, actually,
00:32:54.580 investigating exactly
00:32:56.000 what was going on
00:32:56.880 in that laboratory
00:32:57.960 in Wuhan in 2018, 19, and 20.
00:33:02.380 And what they discovered
00:33:03.320 was that there was
00:33:03.980 some kind of crisis
00:33:05.040 over biosafety in the lab
00:33:07.980 in November of 2019.
00:33:12.560 There were meetings,
00:33:13.600 very high-level meetings.
00:33:15.280 Beijing got involved.
00:33:16.960 Xi Jinping himself
00:33:18.000 seems to have been consulted.
00:33:20.540 And the lab was basically
00:33:22.060 given a major ticking off
00:33:23.640 about failures on biosafety.
00:33:26.640 And there's a lot of sort of
00:33:27.980 self-examination going on.
00:33:29.600 But to your point,
00:33:32.400 these documents that revealed this
00:33:34.860 are Communist Party documents.
00:33:38.700 That is to say,
00:33:40.140 like every organization in China,
00:33:42.880 the Wuhan lab
00:33:44.080 is basically run by
00:33:45.520 the Communist Party.
00:33:46.440 And as part of that,
00:33:47.960 you, as a scientist,
00:33:49.700 have to keep reporting
00:33:52.020 to the party
00:33:53.260 what you're doing,
00:33:54.480 how hard you're working,
00:33:55.760 and how it's going to glorify
00:33:57.340 the Communist Party.
00:33:58.520 Right, right, right.
00:33:59.700 To the party.
00:34:00.460 Yes, exactly.
00:34:01.640 And that's not science, Dan.
00:34:04.500 Well, you can do good science
00:34:07.320 while doing that,
00:34:08.120 but it's very clear
00:34:09.180 that the direction
00:34:10.100 the party is giving you
00:34:11.580 in 2019
00:34:12.600 is,
00:34:14.020 come on,
00:34:14.400 we want more results
00:34:15.460 out of this science.
00:34:16.460 We haven't seen enough
00:34:17.380 from these virology experiments.
00:34:19.820 We need to,
00:34:21.300 why aren't you
00:34:22.340 getting more results,
00:34:24.100 getting more papers published,
00:34:25.400 et cetera.
00:34:26.000 There's a real pressure
00:34:27.060 on these scientists.
00:34:28.240 You can read it
00:34:29.620 in these documents
00:34:30.440 to do more work.
00:34:32.140 But then there's also
00:34:33.240 real pressure to,
00:34:34.820 for God's sake,
00:34:35.820 stop having these accidents
00:34:37.080 or whatever it is.
00:34:38.160 It's never quite that explicit,
00:34:39.240 but, you know,
00:34:40.600 what can you do
00:34:42.520 to solve these biosafety problems
00:34:44.360 that you've got in the lab?
00:34:45.780 Now, all of that suggests
00:34:47.340 that there was pressure
00:34:48.700 to do risky experiments
00:34:50.760 and there was pressure
00:34:52.560 to clean up
00:34:53.920 the safety record of the lab
00:34:55.460 at the time
00:34:56.580 that something started in Wuhan.
00:35:00.620 Now, again,
00:35:01.520 none of that proves
00:35:02.760 that that's how it began.
00:35:04.700 But given the experiments
00:35:06.100 that we know they were doing,
00:35:07.660 that they published,
00:35:08.540 these were chimera virus experiments
00:35:11.800 where you take part of the gene
00:35:14.940 from one virus
00:35:15.820 and you insert it into another
00:35:17.420 in order to make a hybrid virus
00:35:19.700 to see how dangerous
00:35:21.200 the spike gene
00:35:22.200 of the newly discovered virus is
00:35:24.280 in a live virus
00:35:26.080 that you know how to grow.
00:35:27.720 And those experiments resulted
00:35:29.240 in up to 10,000 times increases
00:35:32.420 in the infectivity of viruses
00:35:34.540 in human cells,
00:35:36.220 human airway epithelial cells,
00:35:38.280 in the lab.
00:35:38.720 Is that the gain-of-function research
00:35:40.480 that people refer to constantly?
00:35:41.540 Yes.
00:35:42.520 And the function that's being gained
00:35:44.160 is transmissableness,
00:35:47.640 is the capacity of the virus
00:35:49.080 to be transmitted.
00:35:49.700 The original gain-of-function debate,
00:35:51.480 yeah,
00:35:52.240 the original gain-of-function debate
00:35:53.560 was about how to turn a bird flu
00:35:55.340 into a mammal flu,
00:35:56.260 how to give it the new function
00:35:57.640 of infecting mammal.
00:35:59.400 But the term then came to be used
00:36:03.300 for increases in the infectivity
00:36:06.320 or the virulence of viruses
00:36:09.000 in the laboratory.
00:36:10.520 Okay, so let me ask you a question.
00:36:11.840 That are capable of infecting human beings.
00:36:13.460 All right, so let me ask you a question
00:36:14.840 about that.
00:36:15.640 So we've already established
00:36:18.060 earlier in this conversation
00:36:19.280 that there are trillions upon trillions
00:36:21.600 of viral variants.
00:36:23.500 And a very, very tiny fraction of those
00:36:26.880 pose a human risk,
00:36:28.480 almost an infinitesimally small fraction.
00:36:31.880 And so the vast majority of viruses
00:36:34.780 are harmless.
00:36:37.380 And so, and then the theory would be,
00:36:39.980 well, there are some that are still harmful
00:36:41.900 and we need to understand those,
00:36:44.160 and fair enough.
00:36:45.320 And one of the ways of understanding them
00:36:47.420 is to produce more dangerous viral variants
00:36:49.960 in the lab,
00:36:50.780 and then we can study
00:36:52.860 these more dangerous variants.
00:36:55.180 But that seems to me to assume
00:36:56.760 that you're presuming
00:36:59.600 that the more dangerous functions
00:37:01.540 that you're adding to the viruses
00:37:03.180 are in some sense going to be representative
00:37:06.560 of more dangerous viruses in general
00:37:09.760 so that you can generalize beyond them.
00:37:12.180 And you're also assuming that
00:37:13.580 the risk of an accident or an outbreak
00:37:16.700 in relationship to poor handling
00:37:18.960 of these new viruses
00:37:20.100 that you're creating
00:37:21.180 is less of a risk
00:37:22.840 than natural variation
00:37:24.640 in the viruses themselves
00:37:25.940 would be likely to produce.
00:37:28.280 It isn't obvious to me at all,
00:37:29.980 a priori,
00:37:30.620 that any of those presumptions
00:37:31.840 are even vaguely correct.
00:37:34.840 That's exactly right.
00:37:36.560 That's exactly the calculation
00:37:38.000 that they were making,
00:37:39.740 that it was worth doing this research
00:37:41.980 because you would identify viruses
00:37:45.240 that could cause a pandemic this way
00:37:48.300 and that the risk of causing an accident
00:37:52.320 was less than that risk
00:37:54.020 that we're running naturally.
00:37:56.740 There was a lot of criticism of this.
00:37:58.980 When they began this sort of research,
00:38:02.320 not just in Wuhan,
00:38:03.400 but elsewhere in the world,
00:38:05.200 about 10 years ago,
00:38:07.500 under a US-funded program
00:38:11.820 called Prevent,
00:38:13.460 there was a number of virologists
00:38:16.400 who quite openly said,
00:38:19.460 we think this is a mistake.
00:38:21.720 We think you're looking for a needle
00:38:23.120 in the haystack.
00:38:23.900 You'll probably find the wrong needle.
00:38:26.740 We don't think that you're going to find
00:38:28.900 anything useful this way.
00:38:31.240 And they didn't also add,
00:38:33.440 but there was other people saying,
00:38:36.540 and by the way,
00:38:37.400 aren't you creating the very risk
00:38:39.160 that you're worrying about?
00:38:40.880 You're looking for a gas leak
00:38:42.900 with a lighted match,
00:38:44.500 as someone put it.
00:38:46.420 Now, I think most of us now looking
00:38:49.300 at what was going on in Wuhan,
00:38:51.020 in that laboratory,
00:38:52.380 in the years leading up to the pandemic,
00:38:54.760 are convinced that even if this one
00:38:57.200 didn't happen that way,
00:38:58.980 it could have,
00:39:00.440 and that going forward,
00:39:01.620 we should not be doing.
00:39:03.440 This kind of research.
00:39:05.020 Well, after a short pause,
00:39:07.340 the US government resumed
00:39:08.960 its donations
00:39:10.640 to the EcoHealth Alliance
00:39:13.120 to work with partner labs
00:39:14.740 doing this kind of research
00:39:16.100 elsewhere in the world,
00:39:17.360 during and after the pandemic.
00:39:20.800 Recently,
00:39:21.800 and recently means October 27th,
00:39:24.740 in the journal Science Online,
00:39:27.660 and so just for everyone watching
00:39:29.240 and listening to know,
00:39:30.060 there's two journals in the world,
00:39:31.600 Science and Nature,
00:39:32.320 that are regarded by scientists
00:39:33.820 in virtually every discipline
00:39:35.520 as the pinnacle of scientific publication.
00:39:39.100 And so if you're a career scientist
00:39:40.900 and you publish in science or nature,
00:39:43.240 that's a career-making publication.
00:39:45.780 It's the equivalent of a bestseller,
00:39:47.900 let's say,
00:39:48.440 or a hit movie in the scientific community.
00:39:50.840 And both Science and Nature
00:39:52.540 are among the oldest of scientific journals
00:39:55.680 and the most prestigious,
00:39:56.720 and they had their origin in the UK.
00:39:59.600 And so everyone in the scientific community
00:40:01.700 has been, for decades,
00:40:05.520 very impressed with science and nature.
00:40:07.240 So I'm telling everyone that
00:40:08.300 just so you know the significance
00:40:09.980 of this publication outlet.
00:40:12.720 Now, there's an article there
00:40:14.640 that was written by John Cohen
00:40:16.880 on October 27th, 22,
00:40:19.220 talking about this Senate investigation
00:40:21.200 that Matt just referred to.
00:40:24.440 And let me read a little bit about this.
00:40:27.980 The mysterious origin of the COVID-19 pandemic,
00:40:31.260 like so many aspects of the response,
00:40:33.240 has created deep divides
00:40:34.760 along party lines in the United States.
00:40:37.420 Okay, so that's the opening statement.
00:40:39.200 And so basically,
00:40:40.320 the opening statement
00:40:41.800 is designed to convince
00:40:45.080 both the writer and the reader
00:40:46.460 that the primary issue here
00:40:48.300 with regards to the lab leak hypothesis
00:40:51.760 is one of politics
00:40:53.140 and not of fact or science.
00:40:55.520 And then the article continues,
00:40:58.560 many virologists and evolutionary biologists
00:41:01.060 who have studied the origins of outbreaks
00:41:03.520 dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
00:41:06.660 Many virologists, let's say,
00:41:09.120 but other scientists have complained
00:41:10.820 that the possibility was too readily downplayed.
00:41:14.360 Okay, so there's this dispute.
00:41:15.660 But then the writer continues,
00:41:19.120 and it has become increasingly popular
00:41:21.160 among conservative media outlets
00:41:23.080 and some Republican politicians.
00:41:25.400 So instantly politicizing it again.
00:41:28.060 Now, this Senate report,
00:41:32.660 which is reported here as a minority staff,
00:41:35.740 concludes in its 30-page report,
00:41:37.520 35-page report,
00:41:38.620 that the COVID pandemic
00:41:40.300 was more likely than not
00:41:42.660 the result of a research-related incident.
00:41:46.120 And then the author
00:41:47.660 immediately jumps to this statement,
00:41:49.860 which is,
00:41:50.320 that conclusion stands in sharp contrast
00:41:52.420 to that of other panels,
00:41:54.420 including from the World Health Organization
00:41:56.420 and U.S. intelligence agencies,
00:41:59.000 which have deemed a zoonotic jump
00:42:01.060 more likely or remain neutral
00:42:02.800 given the lack of direct evidence
00:42:04.920 on the origin of the virus.
00:42:06.260 Okay, so we're being enjoined
00:42:08.460 by the journal Science itself
00:42:11.540 to assume that all of this discussion
00:42:14.800 about the origin of the lab leak
00:42:16.440 is somehow politicking.
00:42:18.340 Okay, so let's take that apart for a minute.
00:42:20.140 So that's predicated on the assumption
00:42:22.220 that the Republicans and the conservatives,
00:42:26.320 let's say,
00:42:27.280 both narrowly and more broadly,
00:42:29.600 have something specific to gain,
00:42:32.900 right, in a power-related manner,
00:42:35.000 by advancing the claim
00:42:37.280 that the origin of the virus
00:42:39.820 was, in some sense, a lab leak.
00:42:41.860 And for the life of me,
00:42:43.000 I can't understand why that's political.
00:42:47.100 It's like,
00:42:47.620 it was either a lab leak or it wasn't.
00:42:50.800 That's pretty damn evident.
00:42:52.320 And it isn't obvious to me
00:42:53.620 that the facts stand on one side
00:42:56.480 of the political divide or another.
00:42:57.840 So then I'm wondering,
00:42:59.040 why in the world is it
00:43:00.500 that Science Magazine
00:43:01.440 is publishing an article
00:43:02.580 claiming that
00:43:03.900 the real reason
00:43:05.060 that anybody's concerned
00:43:06.280 about whether or not
00:43:07.040 this was a lab leak
00:43:08.020 is because of
00:43:09.060 Republican Party
00:43:10.720 shenanigans.
00:43:12.180 And so what do you think about that?
00:43:17.400 Well, it's true that America
00:43:20.380 is very politically polarized.
00:43:23.000 And there's a tendency
00:43:24.340 in much of the media
00:43:26.240 to see everything
00:43:27.200 in a Republican versus Democrat
00:43:29.540 lens these days.
00:43:33.280 That doesn't work for the rest of us
00:43:35.440 who aren't Americans.
00:43:37.040 We don't have to see the world that way.
00:43:39.380 We can think of it
00:43:41.160 as a scientific question
00:43:42.720 rather than a political question.
00:43:45.620 And it's true
00:43:49.040 that early in the pandemic,
00:43:52.900 a Republican president,
00:43:54.540 Donald Trump,
00:43:56.080 kept saying
00:43:57.480 it might have come from a lab.
00:44:00.000 Well, we happen to know
00:44:01.200 that a number of scientists
00:44:02.220 privately agreed with him
00:44:03.420 but didn't say so at the time.
00:44:04.960 But the real divide here,
00:44:07.480 and we see this on social media
00:44:09.360 all the time,
00:44:10.040 we get active debates
00:44:11.780 about this going on,
00:44:13.040 the real divide
00:44:13.820 is not between people
00:44:14.880 who think it was a lab leak
00:44:16.120 and people who think
00:44:16.880 it was a market zoonosis,
00:44:19.600 but people who think
00:44:21.060 that we haven't answered
00:44:23.000 the question yet
00:44:24.140 and we need to keep looking
00:44:25.480 at both hypotheses,
00:44:27.500 what I call the open question
00:44:29.100 side of the debate,
00:44:30.340 which I'm on,
00:44:31.460 which my co-author's on,
00:44:32.560 which everybody
00:44:33.860 who thinks a lab leak
00:44:36.160 is possible thinks.
00:44:37.360 I don't know anyone
00:44:38.520 who thinks it's 100% certain
00:44:40.060 it was a lab leak.
00:44:41.580 And on the other side
00:44:42.540 of the question
00:44:43.120 are the case-closed crowd
00:44:45.200 who say,
00:44:46.340 no, no,
00:44:46.640 we can already rule out
00:44:48.540 a lab leak for certain.
00:44:50.960 And that seems to me
00:44:52.340 immensely premature.
00:44:53.940 And here's why.
00:44:55.180 In the case of SARS,
00:44:56.940 we were able to rule out
00:44:58.400 a lab leak
00:44:59.020 and know that it came
00:44:59.860 over a market
00:45:00.520 because we found
00:45:01.400 the infected animal.
00:45:02.780 We found the civet cat
00:45:03.900 that had caught the virus
00:45:05.640 from the bat
00:45:06.260 and gave it to people.
00:45:07.480 And we found the index cases.
00:45:09.340 You know,
00:45:09.500 these were food handlers
00:45:10.500 and chefs
00:45:11.100 and people who were
00:45:12.140 cooking civet cats.
00:45:13.520 You know,
00:45:13.720 the chain of transmission
00:45:15.080 was very clear.
00:45:17.340 In this case,
00:45:18.600 we found no infected animals.
00:45:21.800 We found no evidence
00:45:23.120 in blood banks
00:45:24.380 of previously infected people.
00:45:26.300 We found nobody
00:45:27.100 who looks like an index case.
00:45:28.500 The only thing we found
00:45:30.540 is that there was
00:45:31.960 a concentration
00:45:33.400 of early cases
00:45:34.840 in that food market
00:45:36.480 in Wuhan.
00:45:38.020 And a number of scientists,
00:45:39.560 the ones referred to
00:45:40.440 in that John Cohen article
00:45:41.640 in Science,
00:45:43.200 regard that evidence
00:45:44.700 that there were
00:45:45.900 quite a lot of early cases
00:45:47.460 in that market
00:45:48.380 or near that market
00:45:49.680 as so-called dispositive.
00:45:52.660 In other words,
00:45:53.380 we can close the case.
00:45:55.060 We can go home,
00:45:56.280 shut up the inquiry
00:45:57.120 and say we know for certain
00:45:58.260 it came out of that.
00:45:59.180 And the rest of us say,
00:46:00.280 no, hang on,
00:46:00.960 you haven't found
00:46:01.460 an infected animal,
00:46:02.400 you haven't found
00:46:02.880 an early case.
00:46:03.860 And by the way,
00:46:04.540 we know why
00:46:05.260 there was a concentration
00:46:06.340 of cases in that market
00:46:07.840 because in the early days
00:46:09.420 of the pandemic,
00:46:10.820 if you had pneumonia
00:46:12.040 and you went to hospital,
00:46:15.040 they were told
00:46:15.860 to consider COVID
00:46:17.140 as a cause
00:46:18.100 only if you lived
00:46:19.740 near that market.
00:46:21.100 So it's a circular argument.
00:46:22.500 Of course the early cases
00:46:25.240 were near the market
00:46:26.100 because that's the only place
00:46:27.020 they were looking.
00:46:27.920 It's like the drunk
00:46:28.640 who says,
00:46:29.580 I'm looking for my car keys
00:46:33.140 under this streetlight
00:46:34.100 because that's where
00:46:34.700 the light is.
00:46:36.420 So, you know,
00:46:38.460 again,
00:46:39.060 I'm not making the case
00:46:39.940 that the market
00:46:40.440 couldn't have been
00:46:41.260 the place where it happened.
00:46:42.700 I'm making the case
00:46:43.660 that we can't
00:46:44.580 definitively conclude that yet.
00:46:47.660 Well, you're actually,
00:46:48.920 you're making a stronger case.
00:46:50.380 Well, you're making
00:46:51.100 a stronger case than that,
00:46:52.420 I would say,
00:46:52.880 in some sense
00:46:53.500 because you're saying
00:46:55.240 that when we've done
00:46:56.800 similar things previously,
00:46:58.160 we've been able
00:46:59.200 to find animals
00:46:59.980 who had that virus variant
00:47:03.180 and we just haven't been able
00:47:04.720 to find those animals at all.
00:47:06.040 So what you're saying
00:47:07.520 is that the only evidence
00:47:08.780 that it came from the market
00:47:09.980 is that there are cases
00:47:11.680 that were reported earlier
00:47:13.240 that were associated
00:47:14.540 with the market.
00:47:15.520 But that's the only piece
00:47:16.980 of evidence
00:47:17.460 that it's coming from the market.
00:47:18.920 And so I think
00:47:19.980 it seems to me,
00:47:21.340 and correct me if I'm wrong,
00:47:22.520 that you're being cautious
00:47:23.940 and underplaying the evidence
00:47:25.440 that suggests
00:47:26.120 that something is rotten
00:47:27.740 in the state of Denmark,
00:47:28.880 let's say.
00:47:29.920 I mean, we...
00:47:31.300 Well, it's slightly...
00:47:32.940 The evidence, to be fair,
00:47:34.360 the evidence is slightly
00:47:35.220 better than that
00:47:35.900 because there were
00:47:37.040 a number of samples
00:47:38.120 in the market
00:47:38.940 that were taken
00:47:39.880 that were positive
00:47:40.660 for this virus.
00:47:42.220 They were environmental samples,
00:47:44.120 that is to say,
00:47:44.860 doorknobs, countertops,
00:47:46.400 sewage, things like that.
00:47:47.640 You know,
00:47:47.800 they weren't animals or people.
00:47:49.340 They were swabs taken.
00:47:55.160 So we know the virus
00:47:56.220 was circulating there.
00:47:58.740 Exactly.
00:47:59.660 But they're all but one
00:48:02.220 of one strain of the virus,
00:48:04.040 which is one
00:48:04.640 of the early human strains.
00:48:06.020 The other is
00:48:06.520 the other human strain,
00:48:08.160 and there's one swab
00:48:09.940 that shows that one.
00:48:11.420 But most of the other swabs,
00:48:13.200 most of the other early cases
00:48:15.100 of that one
00:48:15.640 come from the other side
00:48:16.620 of the river,
00:48:17.200 of the Yangtze River,
00:48:17.940 as it happens.
00:48:18.980 So it looks like
00:48:19.600 one strain was certainly
00:48:21.480 circulating in the market
00:48:22.620 and maybe the other,
00:48:24.560 but it could easily
00:48:25.360 have been circulating
00:48:26.040 in people.
00:48:27.000 There's no evidence
00:48:27.820 that it was animals.
00:48:29.180 Right, right.
00:48:29.420 Now, there's a slight
00:48:30.140 concentration of those samples
00:48:32.580 in one corner of the market,
00:48:34.520 which is where animals
00:48:35.520 were on sale.
00:48:36.460 So that's perhaps suggested.
00:48:39.560 OK, well, is there any...
00:48:41.000 Where the toilets were
00:48:43.420 and the mahjong clubs were
00:48:45.460 and things like that.
00:48:46.300 So, you know,
00:48:46.720 there's lots of other reasons
00:48:47.760 why it might have been
00:48:48.660 in that corner.
00:48:49.800 But they tested 80,000 animals.
00:48:52.180 Is there any evidence
00:48:53.140 of animal-to-animal
00:48:54.280 transmission of this virus?
00:48:57.120 Well, since the pandemic began,
00:48:59.340 animals like mink and deer
00:49:01.080 have caught it
00:49:01.800 and are transmitting it
00:49:02.920 to each other.
00:49:03.580 So, yes, it is capable
00:49:05.600 of transmitting in other animals.
00:49:10.140 But...
00:49:11.020 Does it do it effectively?
00:49:13.120 Much less effectively
00:49:14.220 than it does in people
00:49:15.380 or monkeys or mice.
00:49:18.440 OK, so that's a big problem, right?
00:49:20.520 Because we have these
00:49:21.400 trillions of viruses
00:49:22.620 and this variant,
00:49:25.720 this COVID variant,
00:49:29.060 doesn't transmit very well
00:49:30.700 in animals.
00:49:31.700 And so that also makes it
00:49:32.840 incumbent upon the people
00:49:34.180 who claim that it had
00:49:35.180 an animal origin
00:49:35.960 to explain that
00:49:37.040 how, given that it isn't
00:49:39.180 very transmissible in animals
00:49:40.600 and that the probability
00:49:43.220 of a human transmitted virus
00:49:44.880 is very unlikely,
00:49:46.820 that puts additional constraints
00:49:49.680 on the notion
00:49:50.460 that this was
00:49:51.200 an animal transmitted virus.
00:49:54.580 Right?
00:49:55.280 Because it's not very good
00:49:56.300 at doing that.
00:49:57.540 Yeah.
00:49:58.420 I mean, remember,
00:50:00.260 the one thing we do know about it
00:50:01.560 is that it's originally
00:50:02.600 a bat virus.
00:50:03.600 That it's...
00:50:04.800 These SARS-like coronavirus,
00:50:06.980 SARS-bicoviruses,
00:50:08.280 are found in horseshoe bats.
00:50:09.980 They're not found
00:50:10.680 in other kinds of bats
00:50:11.640 or other kinds of animals.
00:50:12.740 That's their natural reservoir.
00:50:14.720 And in those bats,
00:50:16.060 they're not particularly lethal
00:50:17.780 and they cause mainly a intestinal disease
00:50:21.400 rather than a respiratory disease
00:50:23.220 and they use very different receptors.
00:50:26.440 So something's happened to enable that virus
00:50:30.380 to adapt to causing a respiratory disease in human beings
00:50:34.260 rather than an intestinal disease in bats.
00:50:36.940 Now that something could have been an intermediate host
00:50:40.240 like a bamboo rat or something on sale in a market
00:50:43.400 or it could have been a humanized mouse in a lab
00:50:47.120 because what the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing,
00:50:50.160 they were infecting humanized mice.
00:50:52.620 Now these are mice that have had the ACE2 receptor gene
00:50:57.440 from human beings inserted into them
00:51:00.780 in place of their own ACE2 receptor.
00:51:03.860 So their lungs are expressing a particular protein
00:51:07.400 that is only found in human beings.
00:51:10.200 And so if you infect an animal, this mouse, with the virus,
00:51:15.540 you're effectively testing how dangerous this virus is on human beings.
00:51:19.620 Now the worry here is that if one of those mice escapes
00:51:23.280 or if it bites a lab worker or something like that,
00:51:30.580 we're dealing with a virus that's been trained in these mice
00:51:34.840 and in human cells in the lab to infect human beings.
00:51:39.340 And that's the concern with this kind of experiments.
00:51:44.920 The mouse experiments were done at biosafety level three.
00:51:48.420 That's pretty good.
00:51:49.700 That's a negative pressure cabinet, you know, completely sealed
00:51:54.220 where, you know, the air is properly filtered before it can get out.
00:51:59.980 But the human airway epithelial cell culture experiments,
00:52:06.480 also done with the same chimeric viruses,
00:52:09.260 were done at biosafety level two in some cases.
00:52:12.940 Now that's wear a glove and masks.
00:52:16.160 Sorry, wear gloves and a mask.
00:52:19.220 In fact, you don't even have to wear a mask at biosafety level two.
00:52:23.560 Now, if this thing was, you know, if SARS-CoV-2 was in one of these
00:52:29.900 human airway epithelial cell cultures and at biosafety level two,
00:52:36.580 it's more likely than not that the researcher would have picked it up
00:52:40.540 and might well have been asymptomatic.
00:52:43.100 You know, it's not a very severe disease in many people.
00:52:45.580 And he might well have gone to the market.
00:52:47.640 You know, he might have gone to the Marjohn Club or something.
00:52:50.360 And so something could have happened along those lines.
00:52:53.220 The, you know, the contortions you have to go through
00:52:59.760 to say that we can close the case on this are pretty extraordinary.
00:53:05.400 I mean, for a start, you've got to assume that the Chinese are telling us
00:53:09.560 everything we need to know about the early cases.
00:53:12.300 Were some of the early cases lab workers?
00:53:15.340 The CIA says they were.
00:53:17.640 They won't give us the evidence as to how they know that.
00:53:20.800 The Chinese say they weren't.
00:53:23.220 The South China Morning Post reported that the earliest case was a man who
00:53:27.720 caught it in November the 17th, 2019.
00:53:32.440 Well, since then, the official Chinese, that was based on a leaked document,
00:53:36.560 the official Chinese have disavowed that document, said,
00:53:38.760 no, no, the first case was in early December.
00:53:41.040 Well, we don't know.
00:53:42.440 Now, if this was in the West, we would be all over this.
00:53:46.540 The media would be all over this, demanding more transparency.
00:53:49.520 And yet the extraordinary thing is we don't hear much criticism of the Chinese regime over this.
00:53:56.900 We don't hear it at the G7 or the, what's it called, the COP27 meeting.
00:54:06.020 You know, we hear criticism of China, quite rightly, over their treatment of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs.
00:54:11.540 But this, to me, is an even more scandalous thing, that 20 million people, or nearly that, may be dead.
00:54:20.600 And an awful lot of people have had their lives turned upside down.
00:54:24.740 And we know where it started.
00:54:26.740 And we know there are two possible things that could have happened there.
00:54:29.760 And we're not doing anything to try to push back against the regime's lack of transparency.
00:54:38.140 And we're continuing to engage in gain-of-function research.
00:54:42.860 Yes.
00:54:44.120 And in cities, too.
00:54:45.880 You know, I mean, my co-author, Alina Chan, makes the point that we shouldn't be doing this kind of research in cities.
00:54:51.400 You know, you should, if you're going to have a lab doing this kind of work at all, it should be in an isolated area.
00:54:56.420 Yeah, like Mars.
00:54:59.100 Like Greenland or Mars.
00:55:00.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:55:03.480 You know, we don't do, we don't cite nuclear power stations in the middle of cities.
00:55:09.340 Why should we cite virology labs in the middle of cities?
00:55:12.620 It's exactly the same argument.
00:55:14.280 You know, I follow genomics, molecular biology, pathology quite closely as a writer, not as a practitioner.
00:55:26.920 And yet I didn't know that these experiments were being done.
00:55:31.480 And when I first heard the argument that it might have come from a lab, I said, no, no, we're not nearly clever enough to design a virus this good.
00:55:38.840 Well, once I found out what we were doing, or what they were doing, and how it goes completely against the rules that biotechnology set itself in the 1970s,
00:55:51.640 saying, look, let's do this kind of work, but not on dangerous pathogenic viruses, because that could be dangerous.
00:55:59.600 I was really shocked by how far into the manipulation and testing of dangerous viruses we have gone in the last 10 years.
00:56:11.940 Well, so I guess part of the reaction might be, because I'm trying to understand why there would be motivation to shut down, let's say, speculation, investigation into the possibility of a lab leak.
00:56:26.900 And I guess maybe part of the reason is that it reveals a reality that, in some sense, is too dreadful to conveniently comprehend.
00:56:36.100 And we have a lot of problems like that confronting us at the moment, apocalyptic problems of one variety of another.
00:56:45.720 And the problem here is that we're doing potentially, we're stupidly doing potentially dangerous things on a scale that can produce exactly the kind of result that perhaps has already been produced.
00:57:00.880 And it'd be easier, in some sense, in the short term, just to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.
00:57:07.900 And then you could add the complication there that, well, we don't want to upset whatever international harmony we've managed to establish with the Chinese.
00:57:16.700 And I can understand why people would be loath to reinvestigate that problem, too, because we have an associated problem here.
00:57:24.740 So we're engaged with the Chinese in a multitude of different ways.
00:57:29.500 And to some degree, that's very beneficial.
00:57:31.600 I mean, there are far fewer Chinese people facing acute privation than there were, say, a few decades ago.
00:57:39.780 And the Chinese have been relatively successfully integrated into the world economy.
00:57:45.040 And we have all of the cheap and desirable goods that the Chinese are producing.
00:57:50.300 And all of that seems a lot more positive than, you know, two antagonistic populations facing each other in a state of absolute economic privation.
00:58:00.680 But we also have another problem, which is, well, the Chinese are pretty damn authoritarian and they're still run by the Communist Party, which is a dreadful organization.
00:58:09.860 And then we don't know how much our entanglement with the Chinese tilts us towards that totalitarian structure.
00:58:17.340 And so one of the things I've been noting is that when the pandemic emerged, the totalitarians acted first.
00:58:26.600 And they acted in a totalitarian way, which is, well, why don't we just lock everyone down, which is sort of the totalitarian answer to everything.
00:58:34.400 And then in our herd-like panic in the West, we immediately imitated them.
00:58:40.180 And so that's the spread of a pathogen, too, right?
00:58:44.880 That's the spread of a totalitarian pathogen of ideas.
00:58:48.460 And that's also shook us up terribly in the West.
00:58:52.120 It isn't obvious to me at all that the lockdowns were the least bit justifiable.
00:58:58.700 They certainly were justifiable ethically, as far as I'm concerned.
00:59:02.060 And it isn't obvious to me at all that they were justifiable practically.
00:59:05.880 And so we have a pathogen of COVID to contend with, but we also have a pathogen of totalitarianism to contend with.
00:59:15.100 And I would say the latter poses a much bigger threat than the former, lest we keep mucking about with gain-of-function research.
00:59:21.820 Yeah, well, you're absolutely right that a lot of the proponents of lockdown in the early days were very explicit about saying we'd never have contemplated this policy if we hadn't seen it work in Wuhan.
00:59:38.800 Work.
00:59:39.220 So there was a deliberate work, yes, exactly.
00:59:42.120 Well, it worked for a while, and then it didn't work, and so on.
00:59:47.180 And so there was a very explicit sort of China envy going on.
00:59:51.820 But I think, you know, I completely agree with you that, you know, China's transformation in the last 50 years has been spectacular,
00:59:59.740 from one of the poorest nations on earth to a middle-income country, lifting more people out of poverty than has happened in any generation in tens of thousands of years.
01:00:11.880 That's magnificent.
01:00:13.500 And it was done by liberation.
01:00:16.520 It was done by Deng Xiaoping's policy of economic liberation.
01:00:20.460 You can start a business.
01:00:22.560 You can make money.
01:00:25.620 You can, you know, trade.
01:00:28.240 You can do all these things as long as you don't set up a rival to the Communist Party.
01:00:34.440 There was economic liberation but not political liberation.
01:00:37.620 That was continued under his successor, particularly under Hu Jintao, and very successful it was too.
01:00:43.700 It took a long time for us to realize, and certainly for me to realize, that Xi Jinping is not like that.
01:00:51.380 Right.
01:00:51.600 He is not sticking to that policy at all.
01:00:53.720 He has completely abandoned any idea of free enterprise for ordinary Chinese people and gone to a completely state-directed view of the economy as well as society,
01:01:05.720 and a police state of the most brutal kind, and that does change the calculation.
01:01:13.260 Can I just tell you one little story in respect of that, about the Soviet Union, that I think is quite interesting here?
01:01:19.320 Because people often say to me, look, we'll never know, because the Chinese are not going to let us find out what happened in Wuhan in the autumn of 2019.
01:01:26.760 So why bother speculating?
01:01:29.580 Well, in Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union in 1979, there was some kind of industrial accident, and 65 people died of what the American intelligence community said was anthrax poisoning as a result of a leak from a biowarfare plant.
01:01:50.900 The Russians said, no, it's not a biowarfare plant.
01:01:53.880 No, they weren't handling anthrax.
01:01:55.400 No, that's not what happened.
01:01:56.720 They got food poisoning.
01:01:57.880 You're wrong.
01:01:59.780 The Russians invited in an international panel of scientists to investigate, led by a Nobel Prize winner, a wonderful guy called Matt Meselson.
01:02:10.780 And after looking around and visiting Sverdlovsk, now called Ekaterinburg, but it was then called Sverdlovsk, they concluded that the Russians were right, the Americans were wrong, this was not an anthrax leak.
01:02:23.940 And the case closed.
01:02:26.980 And the international community was satisfied.
01:02:29.740 Then the Soviet Union collapsed.
01:02:32.740 And scientists who had worked in the biowarfare plant, because that's what it was in Sverdlovsk, came to the West and told us exactly what had happened on that day.
01:02:42.160 One shift had taken off a filter to repair it and had not put it back on.
01:02:48.320 They hadn't told the next shift what they'd done.
01:02:51.380 And as a result, a plume of anthrax spores was sent over the city of Sverdlovsk, killing 65 people.
01:02:57.340 If it had gone the other way, it would have killed hundreds of thousands, because it went over a relatively unpopulated suburb.
01:03:04.280 So it took the best part of a decade before the truth came out.
01:03:08.740 And the lie had survived an international investigation, but the truth did eventually come out in that case.
01:03:18.480 Yeah, so the moral of that story is that not only do these things happen, but that they can be covered up quite effectively, although in that case, not finally, and perhaps not in this case.
01:03:30.040 And so I think it's, so do you accept the psychological hypothesis, let's say, of convenience in some sense, this hoping that an inconvenient truth will go away as motive for those who are attempting to make the case that the assumption of a leak is just politicization?
01:03:53.540 Or do you think, what else is going on here?
01:04:00.420 Well, there's also a sort of priesthood aspect to it.
01:04:05.220 Virologists have been talking to each other and living in their own world for a while, and they've now got scruffy people like journalists and people on the internet and people who've done a little bit of research coming along and invading their space and saying,
01:04:23.540 I want answers to questions, I want answers to questions, and they find that impertinent, they find that annoying, and it's sort of, you know, it's sort of beneath them to have to answer questions from these people.
01:04:41.220 So that's another motivation.
01:04:44.060 A third motivation is that there was a lot of, there was a big buildup behind the idea that the reason we had a pandemic was because we're interfering with Mother Nature, we're encroaching on habitats of bats and things like that.
01:05:00.040 They wanted it to be an ecological cautionary tale.
01:05:03.840 And so there's a reluctance to have it teach a very different cautionary tale instead.
01:05:09.400 So there's a whole slew of motivations that are causing establishment science to behave a bit like a priesthood here.
01:05:19.960 I mean, there's also financial.
01:05:21.560 Remember, there's big money in virology research.
01:05:24.980 And, you know, a lot of scientists spend a lot of their time thinking about where's the next million dollars going to come from to support my lab.
01:05:32.660 Quite rightly, it's a very competitive world.
01:05:35.160 And they fear that if the world concludes that high-risk virology research led to this accident, that there will be no more funding for high-risk virology research.
01:05:48.440 You or I might think that's a good thing, but it genuinely affects these people's livelihoods.
01:05:52.820 So no wonder they're going to fight their corner.
01:05:54.600 It's also a complicated thing.
01:05:56.460 I mean, I am an advocate of, an admirer, let's say, for what it's worth, of open inquiry.
01:06:05.140 And it isn't obvious to me that it's certainly not a simple thing, a simple matter to conclude that there's an area of investigation that's now permanently off-limits.
01:06:17.640 And then there's always the danger that deciding that that area of scientific inquiry is permanently off-limits leads to the spread of areas that are permanently off-limits.
01:06:29.240 And that becomes politicized, which it would, instantaneously.
01:06:33.220 So I know already that there is politicking taking place on the genetic database front, such that those who are investigating such heresies as the heritability of intelligence, the multifactorial heritability of intelligence, are having a very difficult time getting access to the previously publicly accessible databases that made such investigation possible.
01:06:57.040 And so being concerned about arbitrary restrictions being placed on the domain of scientific inquiry by well-meaning politicians is definitely something to be concerned about.
01:07:07.000 So this is a very complicated problem.
01:07:09.460 I mean, do you think it's even possible to conclude, let's say, that, well, maybe gain-of-function research is like an exception to the rule.
01:07:19.560 We're not going to fund a lot of random experimentation on the new development of atomic weapons in the middle of cities.
01:07:27.660 And we shouldn't be doing, we should be doing, we should be equally cautious with regards to gain-of-function research in relationship to viruses.
01:07:34.740 But then, you know, can we constrain the constraints themselves so they don't interfere with the scientific process?
01:07:41.560 And that doesn't, the answer to that certainly doesn't seem to be obvious.
01:07:44.900 Well, the sheer lack of curiosity about investigating this question has shocked me.
01:07:53.840 I approached the Royal Society.
01:07:57.480 I knew some senior people at the Royal Society and I approached them and said, look, this is developing into a very interesting debate.
01:08:04.140 Lots of interesting evidence has been put forward on the lab leak side and lots on the market side.
01:08:09.100 Don't you think it would be a good subject for a set-piece debate at the Royal Society with some experts?
01:08:15.540 It doesn't have to be me.
01:08:16.300 I'm not necessarily pushing myself forward to talk about this.
01:08:21.200 And they said, oh, no, we only discuss scientific topics, as if this was a political topic.
01:08:30.900 Right, right, right.
01:08:31.740 So I approached the Academy of Medical Sciences and I got roughly the same answer.
01:08:36.860 Oh, it's too controversial.
01:08:38.920 Well, you know, I'm sorry.
01:08:41.900 A new virus has erupted into the human species, forming, causing the worst pandemic in several hundred years,
01:08:51.240 killing close on 20 million people, as far as we can make out, totally turning upside down the world economy.
01:08:58.120 And we don't want to investigate how it happened and whether it'll happen again.
01:09:03.600 I'm sorry, but I find that bizarre.
01:09:05.960 Well, and we also insist that all such investigations are nothing but politicking,
01:09:11.020 which is also a sign, on a broader sense, of the almost universal acceptance of certain postmodern dictums, right?
01:09:19.320 That there's no science without politics, let's say, which is, well, a problematic claim, let's say, to say the least.
01:09:28.380 Based on that, I mean, you know, I haven't been a practicing scientist for 30, 40 years,
01:09:35.900 but most of what I did had no political edge to it.
01:09:41.560 Now, when I opened the journals, I find pretty well every article, even, you know, scientific papers,
01:09:48.420 seem to have to nudge their conclusions towards some sort of quasi-political issue, you know,
01:09:58.640 whether it's climate change or economic inequality or whatever.
01:10:02.880 Rather than just saying, here's what I've found, and I don't know what it means, if you see what I mean.
01:10:10.860 I actually went, for completely different reasons, I was doing some digging into the scientific literature
01:10:16.880 about what happened at the end of the ice age in the UK, you know, when the ice melted.
01:10:23.080 It wasn't because I was interested in modern climate change or anything like that.
01:10:27.980 I just wanted to know, you know, when did the ice disappear from different parts of Britain
01:10:33.000 and what did the landscape look like at the time and how long did it take for vegetation to appear?
01:10:38.900 You know, this was, you know, there's no particular reason for doing this, but this just intrigued me one day.
01:10:45.620 And I spent a few days digging into the scientific papers, and I found a very interesting pattern,
01:10:51.340 which was that any paper published in the last seven or eight years was sort of political.
01:10:58.680 It had this sort of angle to it.
01:11:00.780 Either it wanted to use the information that it was digging up about the ice age
01:11:06.300 to tell a moral story about today's climate change or something,
01:11:11.960 or it was sort of interested in a kind of political argument between two factions in science.
01:11:20.540 And I had to go back to the 1990s, where I found some very refreshingly good papers
01:11:25.780 that were saying things like, well, here's what we think happened,
01:11:28.780 and here's a map of what we think happened, and I don't agree with Fred, who thinks something else.
01:11:34.680 You know, and I just suddenly had a moment where I thought, hang on,
01:11:39.980 are we losing the Enlightenment view of science where inquiry on its own is good?
01:11:46.240 Yeah, well, I've got an idea about that, and so it's a complicated idea,
01:11:56.340 but I wouldn't mind discussing it with you, and just tell me what you think about it.
01:12:01.520 Because I am, it is obviously the case that what we might describe as the postmodern critique,
01:12:08.480 which has a Marxist edge to it, for reasons we could get into,
01:12:12.780 has definitely made itself manifest on the scientific front, right?
01:12:22.220 And that the claim of the postmodernists, in some real sense,
01:12:27.480 is that there never was any science without politicking,
01:12:31.240 and that science itself is a political enterprise, and if you deny that,
01:12:36.040 and usually conduct it on behalf of those who have the current power,
01:12:41.720 and that if you deny that, that's only an indication of the degree to which you're captured by the narrative of power.
01:12:48.380 It's something like that.
01:12:49.960 And there's no doubt that that's had an unbelievably corrosive effect on the scientific endeavor
01:12:56.720 in the social sciences, and also on the philosophic endeavor on the humanities front,
01:13:02.940 and I saw years ago that this was eventually going to be aimed at the STEM types,
01:13:08.420 the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics types,
01:13:11.160 and at that point, nobody believed that was a possibility,
01:13:14.520 but I saw it as a certainty, and I thought that the postmodernists would go through the scientists
01:13:20.140 like a hot knife through butter.
01:13:21.560 And that made me ask myself, you know, what are the preconditions for the scientific enterprise?
01:13:28.160 Because we shouldn't be thinking, us scientists, that being able to think scientifically
01:13:34.320 or being allowed or encouraged to think scientifically is something like a deep norm.
01:13:40.720 In fact, it's exactly the opposite, right?
01:13:42.820 It's an unbelievable exception, and it only emerged in the domain of human cognitive endeavor
01:13:51.260 once in history, and that was, say, 500 years ago, and it's had its run in some real sense
01:13:58.320 and made us technologically powerful.
01:14:00.140 But it's reasonable to view it as a very fragile enterprise,
01:14:05.740 the preconditions for which we don't understand.
01:14:08.400 And so, let me outline a precondition, and you tell me what you think about this.
01:14:13.400 So, I've been very interested in the Nietzschean idea of the death of God, right?
01:14:18.680 And the Nietzsche believed, like Dostoevsky, that once our faith in a transcendent being collapsed,
01:14:29.520 that the political, in some sense, would immediately become religious
01:14:34.260 or that nihilism would prevail.
01:14:38.160 Those were the basic two outcomes.
01:14:40.020 And both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky took that farther.
01:14:43.220 They also prophesied that not only would the political become sacred
01:14:48.660 as it took the place of what was sacred,
01:14:51.580 but that there would be a particular kind of political endeavor that would become sacred,
01:14:56.200 and that would be the endeavor that eventually manifested itself as in the communist ethos.
01:15:01.980 And that all came true with a vengeance.
01:15:04.940 But I was wondering more recently,
01:15:08.240 the Judeo-Christian claim, and this is the monotheistic claim,
01:15:12.740 is that there's a transcendent spirit to which we must pledge allegiance,
01:15:19.460 that we must worship and celebrate, let's say, that we must mimic.
01:15:22.420 And that constitutes the basis of the religious enterprise.
01:15:27.500 But then there's an analogous claim, which I think is derived from that claim,
01:15:32.520 that there's a transcendent object whose fundamental nature escapes our apprehension,
01:15:40.400 and that pursuit of a relationship with that transcendent object
01:15:44.520 is the proper activity of the scientist.
01:15:48.520 And so that would be the scientist who always assumes that his epistemology,
01:15:53.600 that his theories are incomplete,
01:15:55.920 that something real and comprehensible lies outside the domain of that theory,
01:16:02.000 and that attempting to make contact with that transcendent domain
01:16:05.840 is actually the proper mode of conduct for a scientist.
01:16:10.020 And I can't help but see that as both deeply analogous to
01:16:15.120 and maybe even a derivation of that more fundamental religious orientation.
01:16:20.280 And so then I've been wondering more recently,
01:16:22.380 is that if the death of God, so to speak,
01:16:26.720 also, although surprisingly,
01:16:29.620 will mean the demise of the Enlightenment enterprise,
01:16:32.800 because it was predicated on an unconscious religiosity
01:16:37.200 that presumed the existence of a transcendent object
01:16:40.960 and the possibility of a beneficial relationship
01:16:44.080 between the inquirer, the scientist, and that object itself.
01:16:48.420 And so, well, I know that brings us somewhat far afield
01:16:52.840 with regard to our discussion of COVID, but...
01:16:56.800 Yeah, but no, no, that's fascinating.
01:17:00.040 And I'm going to pick up on a couple of points
01:17:03.780 and may forget to address some of the very interesting points you just made.
01:17:09.420 The first thing to say is that, like you,
01:17:14.700 it dawned, I mean, not as soon, but it eventually dawned on me
01:17:17.860 that the postmodern revolution was going to consume
01:17:22.380 not just the soft sciences and humanities,
01:17:27.100 but hard sciences too.
01:17:29.660 And I remember realising that there was a sort of...
01:17:33.100 You know, anthropology departments 20 years ago
01:17:35.300 had a sort of line down the middle of the corridor
01:17:38.540 in each department, in each university.
01:17:41.040 On one side were rational people who looked at bones
01:17:44.800 or did ethnography or something,
01:17:47.640 and on the other side were people who were very politicised,
01:17:50.880 very postmodern, very meta in their approach.
01:17:54.880 And these two tribes were at each other's throats in anthropology.
01:17:59.240 Now, that then happened to psychology,
01:18:02.780 it happened to quite a lot of other sciences,
01:18:04.840 and, you know, those of us who thought,
01:18:07.000 well, it'll never happen to maths,
01:18:09.040 well, I'm afraid mathematics is already being challenged.
01:18:12.920 You know, is it sufficiently feminist?
01:18:15.940 Is it sufficiently non-white?
01:18:19.100 You know, all these sort of things are trying to dismantle
01:18:24.380 what seems to me a completely objective discipline
01:18:28.620 at the same time.
01:18:30.680 Now, how far it'll go, I don't know.
01:18:32.940 I, like you and like that other great Canadian, Stephen Pinker,
01:18:36.800 I'm really worried about the fragility
01:18:38.820 of the Enlightenment philosophy.
01:18:41.360 I think the sort of high point of people like Richard Feynman
01:18:45.680 and Francis Crick saying wonderfully open-minded
01:18:51.340 and sceptical things about everything,
01:18:53.460 and as a result, challenging each other
01:18:56.400 to find out things about the world,
01:18:58.920 looks a little to me like it's harder to do these days.
01:19:03.980 And it's as if I'm living through the period
01:19:08.060 at the end of the Roman Republic
01:19:10.340 when the tremendous open-mindedness
01:19:13.960 of people like Lucretius and others like that
01:19:17.280 got swept away in the book-burning
01:19:22.400 and idea-suppressing stuff that came, frankly,
01:19:25.960 with Christianity.
01:19:26.640 And so I'm less sympathetic than you, I suspect,
01:19:33.980 to the role of religion here.
01:19:36.600 I don't think religion was a friend of open inquiry
01:19:41.100 into mysteries of the world.
01:19:46.800 Well, we should, maybe, let me differentiate
01:19:51.040 two subcategories in relationship to that.
01:19:55.240 I've talked a lot to people like Sam Harris
01:19:57.580 and to Richard Dawkins about exactly these issues,
01:20:00.100 say, about the antagonism between religion and science.
01:20:03.240 And so one of the things that I really saw,
01:20:05.580 so Dawkins regards the religious enterprise
01:20:08.320 as pseudoscientific, all that,
01:20:11.920 that body of pseudoscientific proclamation
01:20:15.020 that impedes the rational progress
01:20:19.120 of Enlightenment science.
01:20:21.120 And so that's his perspective.
01:20:22.420 And I'm not trying to parody it
01:20:25.060 or to put it down in any sense.
01:20:26.940 I'm just trying to relate it.
01:20:28.440 And whereas Harris,
01:20:30.640 and I'm using these two people
01:20:31.900 because they're examples, perhaps,
01:20:34.200 of the world's most famous atheists.
01:20:36.180 Harris' argument is more emotional than that,
01:20:43.780 in some sense.
01:20:44.940 And I don't mean irrational.
01:20:46.240 I mean, based in a deeper emotion.
01:20:49.140 Harris identifies the spirit of totalitarianism
01:20:53.960 and malevolence with a religious enterprise.
01:20:58.320 And I think that's an error
01:20:59.820 because he's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
01:21:04.860 And it's interesting to me in relationship to,
01:21:06.960 well, so I would say,
01:21:08.640 you're talking about the antagonism
01:21:10.340 between religion and science.
01:21:11.560 But so one of the things I really admired about Dawkins,
01:21:15.200 and his work has been quite helpful to me,
01:21:16.920 by the way,
01:21:17.480 is that he has this clear-headed faith in science,
01:21:21.660 this inrationality that's typical of the best scientists,
01:21:25.380 perhaps someone like Feynman, for example.
01:21:29.880 But Dawkins, like all true scientists,
01:21:34.680 believes that there is a transcendent truth
01:21:37.100 and that the pursuit of that truth will set us free.
01:21:40.680 And it's those claims that I think are essentially religious.
01:21:44.960 And so I think it's useful to differentiate
01:21:47.400 between the religious impulse towards truth,
01:21:50.140 if you can call that the religious impulse,
01:21:52.840 and the totalitarian aspect of the imposition of religious dogma,
01:21:59.700 which I see actually as a variant not of the religious spirit,
01:22:02.560 but of the totalitarian spirit.
01:22:04.180 Because I do believe the greatest scientists that I've known
01:22:08.540 have a religious reverence for truth.
01:22:13.160 Now, they say objective truth, and that's fine.
01:22:17.040 It's a perfectly reasonable variant of truth.
01:22:19.400 But the reverence itself doesn't seem to me to be scientific.
01:22:23.240 It's predicated on whatever it is that drives reverence.
01:22:26.860 And I'm afraid that what's happening
01:22:28.960 at the level of the postmodern critique
01:22:30.700 is that it's actually a corrosive critique of that reverence itself.
01:22:35.880 It's the claim that that reverence is nothing but a mask
01:22:38.980 for power claims, for example.
01:22:41.380 And that, man, that is a corrosive criticism.
01:22:44.700 And it might be corrosive enough
01:22:46.200 to bring the whole damn enterprise to a halt.
01:22:48.560 And I see it shuddering forward
01:22:50.380 with the corruption of journals like Nature and Science
01:22:53.280 and the increasing politicisation of every scientific discussion.
01:22:59.060 No, no, I'm with both you and Dawkins there
01:23:03.980 in the sense that I, like him,
01:23:06.120 have got this reverence for science and truth
01:23:10.000 and somewhat sceptical of whether religion shares that
01:23:14.140 because I think faith is antithetical to it.
01:23:16.280 But he is perhaps wrong that the enemy is conventional religion
01:23:24.980 because actually creeping up on us
01:23:29.020 has been a much more dangerous anti-enlightenment force,
01:23:32.100 as you say, the postmodernism
01:23:34.700 and a lot of other things that go with it
01:23:38.720 and totalitarianism, exactly.
01:23:40.800 And, you know, I think the critique you can make of atheists like me
01:23:47.500 very validly is that when we throw out the baby,
01:23:53.100 sorry, the bathwater, the baby goes too
01:23:56.100 and we end up with something far worse.
01:23:58.800 Well, that's the issue, right?
01:24:01.520 The cult of Stalin or the cult of Foucault
01:24:04.760 or whatever it might be, you know.
01:24:06.540 So, and so in that sense,
01:24:11.280 and, you know, actually Richard concedes this,
01:24:14.000 that if you're going to have,
01:24:15.780 if you can't extirpate faith from the human spirit,
01:24:22.240 then you might as well have a mild version of it
01:24:24.480 called the Church of England.
01:24:26.020 Oh, okay.
01:24:26.900 Well, so let me push you a little bit on that too
01:24:30.620 because I'm very curious about this issue
01:24:33.780 of the faith-predicated presumption
01:24:38.440 of the properly functioning scientist.
01:24:41.420 So it seems to me,
01:24:44.320 so imagine that,
01:24:46.480 tell me if you think I've got any of these presuppositions wrong
01:24:49.100 because they're crucially important to this argument.
01:24:52.140 So the first is the belief in the existence
01:24:54.860 of a transcendent object.
01:24:56.540 And I would say that's a faith-based belief.
01:24:58.920 And here's why.
01:24:59.760 So you have a scientific theory
01:25:02.660 and you can't help but look at the world of objects
01:25:06.220 through that theory.
01:25:07.640 So when you see the world of objects in your discipline,
01:25:11.320 that vision, that perception is informed by your epistemology.
01:25:16.460 But you know as a scientist that you're wrong.
01:25:20.160 But the knowledge that you're wrong
01:25:22.600 is predicated on an assumption.
01:25:24.440 And the assumption is that there is a domain of information
01:25:27.560 that exists as yet outside your presuppositions.
01:25:34.020 And that has to be a faith-based axiom
01:25:36.700 because given that that source of information exists
01:25:40.520 beyond your current set of axioms,
01:25:43.460 you can't encounter it.
01:25:44.960 You have to just accept it as a continuing reality.
01:25:49.620 And it would be the reality of that knowledge that currently lies beyond us.
01:25:54.680 Well, I certainly think that the purpose of science is to find new mysteries.
01:26:05.140 It's not just to solve them.
01:26:07.720 Because in solving one, you always come upon more.
01:26:11.140 You know, in finding out that we're just a marble,
01:26:14.920 a blue marble spinning through space,
01:26:17.760 we then find there are things like suns and galaxies and black holes and things,
01:26:21.580 each of which is a new mystery that we have to address.
01:26:25.280 And I love that aspect about science,
01:26:27.580 that, you know, the more trees we chop down in the clearing of knowledge,
01:26:32.140 the more forest comes into view, as it were,
01:26:34.880 the more stuff we don't know and don't understand.
01:26:38.140 And I think it's worth reminding ourselves that, you know,
01:26:42.380 what gets scientists up in the morning in a lab
01:26:46.760 is not the things they know already.
01:26:51.000 You put them on the shelf and feed them to the students.
01:26:54.220 It's the things you don't yet know.
01:26:56.440 It's the part of the puzzle you haven't yet found out.
01:27:00.100 And we mustn't lose that.
01:27:02.120 Well, and you did refer to that,
01:27:04.920 and I think this is extremely interesting,
01:27:06.840 you referred to that as a love.
01:27:08.980 And that's not an objective observation in some sense, right?
01:27:15.000 It's a reference to a particular kind of motivation.
01:27:18.160 And so, but then let's say we could look,
01:27:20.080 we can inquire into that a little bit more deeply.
01:27:21.920 We might say, well, what's that love predicated on?
01:27:25.640 And one possible source is that,
01:27:29.300 well, you see that it engages you in a meaningful enterprise, right?
01:27:33.060 So there's a sense of implicit meaning
01:27:34.800 in this search to make contact with that which still lies beyond you.
01:27:41.100 And so that's engaging, and it's deeply engaging.
01:27:43.980 It's part of the instinct of meaning as far as I'm concerned.
01:27:47.180 But it's also predicated on the idea,
01:27:49.400 and I can't help but think that this is fundamentally a religious axiom.
01:27:53.140 And I think it's a Judeo-Christian-derived religious axiom,
01:27:57.460 which is that you also believe that the truth will set you free.
01:28:02.380 And in some sense, Matt, our whole bloody discussion today
01:28:05.140 centers on that, right?
01:28:06.620 I mean, you're delving into the COVID-19 mystery
01:28:10.040 because you are making a presumption here
01:28:12.860 against those who would take the pathway of convenience and deceit,
01:28:17.820 let's say, that, no, you don't get to do that.
01:28:20.620 I don't care what your rationales are.
01:28:23.880 Something actually happened in Wuhan,
01:28:26.900 and the reason we need to find out what it is
01:28:31.340 is because finding out what is true
01:28:34.840 is actually the best pathway forward,
01:28:37.640 regardless of your bloody political preconceptions.
01:28:40.680 And I can't see, and this is a genuine question to you,
01:28:43.980 I don't see that as anything different
01:28:47.020 than a reference to the idea, for example,
01:28:50.940 that the divine word or that the word of truth itself is divine
01:28:54.900 and that the manifestation of that truth is, in fact, freeing.
01:29:02.280 And I don't think that's a within-science claim.
01:29:07.360 I'm completely happy with that.
01:29:09.260 I can give you some very dull, practical reasons
01:29:14.380 why we need to find out how the pandemic started
01:29:17.180 so that we can predict where the next one's coming from,
01:29:20.360 so that we can deter bioterrorists and bad actors
01:29:23.080 who might be thinking of copying what happened, etc., etc.
01:29:27.020 But those aren't my real motivation.
01:29:29.800 My real motivation is because I think truth matters more than anything else.
01:29:34.100 There's a wonderful quote somebody gave me the other day,
01:29:36.180 which he said was from Solzhenitsyn, but I don't think it is.
01:29:39.660 I'd like to know who said it.
01:29:41.100 Truth matters more than consequence.
01:29:43.660 You know, people who don't want us to know what happened
01:29:48.220 are worried about the consequence of finding out what happened.
01:29:51.360 But I'm sorry, the truth comes first.
01:29:53.540 We have to deal with the consequences of finding out the truth.
01:29:56.520 But the truth is what I really care about.
01:30:00.000 And I do think, in a sense, it'll set me free,
01:30:02.980 and you free, and all of us free.
01:30:04.680 It may be uncomfortable, just as finding out that, you know,
01:30:09.540 we're not at the centre of the universe, we're not a unique creature,
01:30:12.280 we have the same genes as others,
01:30:14.280 we're 40% genetically the same as a banana.
01:30:17.340 You know, these are all humiliating things science has found.
01:30:20.680 But they're not...
01:30:22.560 But for me, they're liberating as well.
01:30:25.060 Well, and you made a very strong argument there on the consequence front.
01:30:29.520 So, because, look, here's the totalitarian presumption, essentially,
01:30:34.780 is that, well, we have a political theory,
01:30:37.360 so let's say it's Marxism in this case,
01:30:39.340 and we bloody well know it's right.
01:30:42.220 And so, because we already have the truth at hand,
01:30:45.600 then all of our endeavours should be devoted towards the promotion of that truth.
01:30:51.540 And it's a final truth, and we have it at hand.
01:30:54.040 There's no transcendent truth there, apart from the doctrine itself.
01:30:58.200 Now, your proposition, and I think this is the proposition of true scientists,
01:31:01.840 is, no, no, you have to abandon your political presumptions completely.
01:31:09.500 And that means that you have to face even those truths
01:31:12.340 that make you tremendously uncomfortable cognitively and emotionally in the moment.
01:31:16.540 You cannot use that discomfort as evidence.
01:31:20.060 You have to assume, regardless of such evidence, strangely enough,
01:31:25.140 that in the final analysis, all things considered,
01:31:29.500 there's nothing that's more liberating than the truth.
01:31:32.840 And, Matt, I think that that's the core doctrine,
01:31:36.300 I do believe that's the core doctrine upon which Judeo-Christian society itself is founded.
01:31:43.780 Because the doctrine of the divine word is something like this,
01:31:48.160 as far as I've been able to tell.
01:31:49.620 It's something like the proper action of the consciousness that liberates us
01:31:55.460 is the forthright confrontation with possibility itself,
01:32:02.780 with potential itself,
01:32:04.440 and the willingness to confront that head-on in truth.
01:32:08.560 And the consequence of that confrontation
01:32:10.440 is the construction of the habitable world that is good.
01:32:13.800 That seems to me to be the doctrine of the word at the beginning of Genesis.
01:32:17.600 And there's a notion there that human beings,
01:32:20.620 men and women alike, are made in that image.
01:32:23.380 And I suppose you could argue about my theological interpretation,
01:32:27.600 but that does seem to be the doctrine.
01:32:30.620 Yeah.
01:32:31.000 I'm no theologian, but I think what you're describing,
01:32:33.940 and this is perhaps where I do differ from you,
01:32:36.060 is Judeo-Christian philosophy as tamed or refracted by the Enlightenment,
01:32:45.540 by Spinoza and Descartes and David Hume and Adam Smith and Voltaire.
01:32:49.960 And by the Greeks before that.
01:32:51.960 Well, no, but I think the problem,
01:32:55.280 I think if you go back and look at the early history of the church,
01:32:57.780 it was a brutally nihilistic cult that stamped out a lot of openness
01:33:05.140 that came from the Greeks.
01:33:07.220 And so I don't think, you know,
01:33:09.320 I don't think that it was as harmless for its first 1,000,
01:33:16.640 first 1,500 years as bishops and priests like to tell us.
01:33:22.060 Now, in that sense, I think it was like the modern Communist Party,
01:33:26.320 which in China says the party matters most.
01:33:30.660 Xi Jinping is right about everything.
01:33:32.760 You must see everything through the lens of how you can help to further our aims,
01:33:37.620 which is, you know, a deeply unimaginative way of seeing the world.
01:33:41.640 I think a lot of modern Islam is like that.
01:33:44.400 And I think quite a lot of, you know,
01:33:45.860 the most fanatical parts of Christianity are like that.
01:33:48.660 And I think Christianity was like that for most of its first 1,500 years,
01:33:55.220 or at least in bursts it was.
01:33:58.480 And then it came to terms with the wonderful ideas of the Enlightenment.
01:34:05.820 And I just want to introduce another word here that I think is very important,
01:34:10.540 and that word is wonder.
01:34:11.620 I do love the wonder that I get from deep understanding of, I don't know,
01:34:18.300 deep geological time or the scale of the universe or where a virus came from or whatever.
01:34:23.520 It's wonderful in the literal meaning of the word.
01:34:28.060 And I don't feel that Christianity or religion generally has a monopoly on that wonder.
01:34:35.100 I think Richard Dawkins has made a very good point here that unweaving the rainbow,
01:34:41.120 finding out what a rainbow is made of, has not made it less wonderful, it's made it more so.
01:34:47.500 And Keats was wrong about that.
01:34:49.540 Well, that, I agree with that, by the way.
01:34:53.700 I also think, and this is why we have to be very careful about our use of terminology,
01:34:58.600 is that I would say that the negative religious phenomena that you're describing
01:35:08.240 are a manifestation not of the religious spirit, but of the totalitarian spirit,
01:35:13.100 and that those are often conflated.
01:35:15.480 Okay, and then I would say, and to put this into a deeper context,
01:35:20.220 that sense of wonder that you described,
01:35:23.300 I don't think that there is any difference between that and proper worship.
01:35:26.960 because I think attending to the wonder of being
01:35:30.880 is the fundamental religious act in some real sense.
01:35:34.620 And there are preconditions for that, and one of them is an epistemic humility, right?
01:35:40.860 You have to allow yourself to apprehend that which is beyond.
01:35:45.700 And that is an instinct, and I think it's part of the instinct that drives love itself.
01:35:49.900 And so I'd be very interested, for example, in the psychophysiology of awe
01:35:55.560 and that's associated with wonder.
01:35:58.940 And so one of the things that's extraordinarily interesting about awe
01:36:03.180 is that it involves piloerection.
01:36:06.260 And so, you know, when you see a cat puff itself up in a burst of fur,
01:36:12.540 when it sees a giant predator,
01:36:15.280 it's piloerection that's driving that.
01:36:18.460 And when you get those chills up and down your back,
01:36:20.720 and maybe your hair stands on end,
01:36:22.680 it's that same apprehension of,
01:36:26.180 you could think about a predator as an unsolved mystery to an animal.
01:36:30.340 We use that same framework of wonder and awe to apprehend the unknown itself.
01:36:35.420 And we've learned to contend with the unknown as a potential predator, obviously,
01:36:40.540 but also as a potential source of redemption.
01:36:42.440 And that, I would say, being guided by that sense of wonder,
01:36:46.460 which is humility predicated and driven by a desire to pursue the truth,
01:36:51.020 that is the manifestation of the most fundamental religious instinct.
01:36:55.200 And I think that needs to be differentiated from religion as a dogmatic structure,
01:37:00.640 which can degenerate towards totalitarianism like any other human endeavor.
01:37:05.740 And does, right?
01:37:06.560 And we have to be on the watch for that.
01:37:09.040 But we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:37:12.620 Yeah.
01:37:13.240 That distinction between religion as an institution
01:37:17.980 and religion as a psychology and epistemology is vital,
01:37:24.500 and one that I see in science now, too.
01:37:27.220 I keep saying science is a fantastic human achievement.
01:37:33.520 I think it's the greatest human achievement.
01:37:35.560 You know, the knowledge that we've acquired of the world is, to me,
01:37:39.000 more important than music, poetry, art, et cetera.
01:37:43.000 Now, that marks me out as a bit of a philistine, I fear, but it's what I think.
01:37:47.820 But that doesn't make me a fan of science as an institution.
01:37:52.180 Increasingly, I'm disaffected with it, with the way that it turns into a cult,
01:37:58.280 so the way it behaves in a self-interested way, the way it turns its back on knowledge.
01:38:06.760 And I think there's a real problem with science as an institution,
01:38:10.720 but not a problem with science as a philosophy.
01:38:13.320 Well, OK, so I want to make a differentiation there, too,
01:38:16.300 because you talked about science and your admiration for science
01:38:19.860 in part as an admiration for the body of knowledge that's being generated.
01:38:24.440 And I can understand the utility of that, because that delivers for us
01:38:30.040 our technological and pragmatic capability, let's say.
01:38:35.540 But I don't think that by your own testimony, so to speak,
01:38:39.520 that that is what you admire most about the scientific enterprise,
01:38:43.100 because you said to me that—you spoke to me about your love of inquiry.
01:38:48.660 And it seems to me you could distinguish science as a practice from science as a body of knowledge.
01:38:55.620 And you could say, well, that the attempt to put forward that body of knowledge
01:38:59.180 can degenerate into a totalitarian enterprise or become corrupted by political matters.
01:39:04.120 So let's just parse that off for a second.
01:39:06.200 We could say this is worth thinking about in relationship to what universities do,
01:39:10.900 is that when you're training a scientist,
01:39:13.180 you're not stuffing someone's head full of scientific facts.
01:39:17.360 Not primarily, although you may also be doing that.
01:39:20.140 What you're doing is training a certain—you're training an adherence to a certain spirit of inquiry.
01:39:26.740 And then I would say that the great achievement of the scientific enlightenment
01:39:31.280 is not the production of that body of knowledge,
01:39:34.400 even though that's admirable in and of itself.
01:39:37.040 It's the training and fostering of a spirit of inquiry that's passed forward from, let's say,
01:39:47.220 PhD supervisor to student in the entire scientific enterprise.
01:39:52.000 And that the valid—
01:39:53.540 You're quite right.
01:39:54.100 The most valid—
01:39:54.560 Okay, okay.
01:39:55.420 So—and then I would say it isn't obvious to me that true—
01:40:00.040 Those who pursue a genuine religious or alternative creative path
01:40:06.360 are distinguishable in some sense in their ethical orientation from genuine scientists.
01:40:13.320 It's the same spirit.
01:40:15.240 It's a spirit of humility.
01:40:16.360 It's a spirit of pursuit of truth.
01:40:18.600 It's a desire for relationship with the transcendent.
01:40:22.260 I know that's viewed differently by scientists because of their emphasis on the object.
01:40:26.920 But it isn't obvious what the transcendent object is.
01:40:31.000 I mean, it gets less obvious as we investigate it in some real sense.
01:40:37.360 And so I'm afraid that this battle—and you already made allusions to this—
01:40:43.600 this continuing battle between those who profess religious belief in the most fundamental sense
01:40:49.500 and those who profess scientific belief is blinding us to the fact that
01:40:53.620 there's an enterprise afoot that will bring both down.
01:40:58.200 Absolutely.
01:40:58.980 I think that's extremely well put.
01:41:00.300 And just back to your—the point you made about how it's not the body of knowledge,
01:41:08.220 it's the method of inquiry that turns me on, as it were, philosophically, psychologically at least.
01:41:14.580 I had a very vivid experience.
01:41:19.100 First term at university, new book published by one of the professors who was about to teach me,
01:41:25.660 it turned out.
01:41:26.680 His name was Richard Dawkins.
01:41:28.040 The book was called The Selfish Gene.
01:41:29.600 And that sent the hairs up on the back of my neck reading it because it was the first science book I'd read
01:41:38.340 that didn't say, here's the answer to the question.
01:41:42.540 It said, here's a question, and I don't know the answer,
01:41:46.740 but I'm going to take you on a journey to try and understand my way of framing this mystery.
01:41:54.460 And it was suddenly, it was like being shown the edge of the world.
01:41:59.980 It was like being shown, you know, the opening up of the mysteries was so important.
01:42:07.560 The early pages of that book that he does very, very beautifully.
01:42:11.380 And so I think you're absolutely right.
01:42:14.400 There was something almost religious in the way that the famous atheist Richard Dawkins
01:42:19.540 came across to me in those early days.
01:42:23.780 Yeah, well, you know, I've met Dawkins a number of times.
01:42:26.400 And as I said, his thinking has had quite a lot of influence on the way I think in many, many ways.
01:42:33.100 And I can't help but admire him.
01:42:36.120 And it's an interesting thing because I believe that his insistence that the religious enterprise
01:42:43.740 is nothing but a superstitious impediment to the clear progress of science,
01:42:51.040 I think that that's insufficiently differentiated because it doesn't differentiate spirit from totalitarianism.
01:43:00.680 It conflates them.
01:43:01.860 And the totalitarian spirit is subtle enough so that identifying it with a given domain of endeavor,
01:43:11.140 let's say the religious, is a dangerous understatement of the true danger of that ethos.
01:43:17.520 Because it can permeate everything and is likely to.
01:43:21.460 And so if we put the enemy in the wrong place, so if the scientific types, for example,
01:43:26.920 assume that it's manifestation of the religious spirit that's the primary impediment to the scientific endeavor,
01:43:34.260 then we're going to be fighting the wrong war.
01:43:36.700 And we're going to make enemies out of people who should be allies.
01:43:40.360 I think that's a key point.
01:43:41.920 I completely agree with you on that.
01:43:45.440 All right.
01:43:46.140 Well, so let me recap because we're running out of time.
01:43:49.920 And so we've been delving into the origin of the COVID virus.
01:43:55.920 And we've also been trying to answer the question,
01:43:59.740 well, why should we, why is this not merely a political enterprise?
01:44:03.560 And even more deeply than that,
01:44:05.460 why should we care beyond the mere practicalities of specifying the origin?
01:44:12.940 And there are obvious practical reasons to specify the origin because if it was a lab leak,
01:44:18.120 then, well, maybe we shouldn't be doing gain-of-function research in labs in cities.
01:44:23.640 Or maybe not in totalitarian countries, for that matter.
01:44:27.340 Certainly not with Western aid.
01:44:28.900 And those are all relevant questions.
01:44:30.860 But then we also addressed a deeper question, which is,
01:44:34.720 well, is this investigation into the origin of the COVID virus
01:44:40.680 not also an exemplar of faith in the pursuit of the truth itself,
01:44:47.920 regardless of short-term and convenient political considerations?
01:44:53.440 And is it not also an expression of the idea that there is a pursuit
01:44:58.320 whose value transcends that of any set of short-term or even medium-term political considerations?
01:45:05.640 And so that's really where we, that's what we investigated at the end of the conversation.
01:45:11.000 And so that's a summary for everyone watching and listening.
01:45:16.560 It's been very helpful to me, actually, to have this conversation,
01:45:20.540 to clarify that point, that, you know, my motivation,
01:45:25.220 and I believe the motivation the world should have to answering this question,
01:45:29.420 is not just practical, but is, in some sense,
01:45:33.440 you know, predicated on the transcendent importance of truth.
01:45:40.680 Right, right, right.
01:45:41.800 Well, you're right.
01:45:42.520 And, you know, I mean, I do believe that the West at its best,
01:45:47.220 and that would be the West insofar as the West has been,
01:45:51.620 has carried the beacon of freedom and human dignity.
01:45:55.180 And, of course, we've faltered in that in many ways,
01:45:58.040 that at its best, the West acts out that claim that the truth will set you free.
01:46:04.760 And we've done that on the religious front when we've been properly religious,
01:46:07.920 and we've done it on the scientific front when we've been properly scientific.
01:46:11.900 And we lose that fundamental faith at our immense peril,
01:46:17.140 unless we're willing to believe that human-engineered deceit,
01:46:22.160 which is not a bad definition of totalitarianism,
01:46:25.380 is a desire, or nihilism itself, as belief in everything collapses.
01:46:31.060 We don't want to, do we want a world where we accept either of those alternatives,
01:46:36.100 or their dreadful marriage, let's say, as the alternative?
01:46:40.160 And this is a decision that we're all making,
01:46:42.560 not least those of us who are scientists.
01:46:45.300 And so the scientists who are listening, I would also say,
01:46:47.800 you great scientists, or not so great even,
01:46:52.580 you bend the truth to political purposes,
01:46:55.080 not only at your own great peril,
01:46:57.140 as practicing scientists and as human beings,
01:46:59.840 but you also warp the entire structure of the world.
01:47:03.340 And that is an absolute abdication of the opportunities
01:47:08.500 that have been granted to you by a society
01:47:10.960 that strived for hundreds of years
01:47:13.020 to give you the privilege of engaging in this pursuit of the truth.
01:47:18.100 Couldn't put it better myself.
01:47:20.860 All right.
01:47:21.700 Well, to everyone who's watching and listening,
01:47:24.020 I'm going to talk to Matt for another half an hour,
01:47:27.660 as I do always with my guests,
01:47:30.220 on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
01:47:32.020 And we're going to talk about,
01:47:33.520 well, I think what we're probably going to talk about
01:47:35.460 is how that spirit of wonder
01:47:38.240 made itself manifest in Dr. Ridley's life,
01:47:42.540 and how following the manifestation of that spirit
01:47:45.860 informed the development of his extraordinarily interesting
01:47:50.620 and successful career.
01:47:53.540 Hello, everyone.
01:47:54.920 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation
01:47:57.880 with my guest on dailywireplus.com.
01:48:01.460 Thank you.
01:48:02.460 Thank you.
01:48:03.460 Thank you.
01:48:04.460 Thank you.