Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks | Lex Fridman Podcast #193

The following is a conversation with Rob Reed, entrepreneur, author and host of the after on podcast. Sam Harris recommended that I absolutely must talk to Rob about his recent work on the future of engineer pandemics. I then listened to the four hour special episode of Sam's Making Sense podcast with Rob titled Engineering the Apocalypse and I was floored and knew I had to talk to him. Quick mention of our sponsors Athletic Greens, Belcampo, fundrise and Netsuite. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis which proposes that COVID 19 is a product of gain of function research on coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error. For context, this lab is biosafety level 4 BSL4 and it investigates coronaviruses. BSL4 is the highest level of safety, but if you look at all the human in the loop pieces required to achieve this level of safety, it becomes clear that even BSL4 labs are highly susceptible to human error. To me, whether the virus leaked from the lab or not, getting to the bottom of what happened is about much more than this particular catastrophic case. It is a test for our scientific, political, journalistic and social institutions of how well we can prepare and respond to threats that can cripple or destroy human civilization if we continue gain of function research on viruses. Eventually these viruses will leak and they will be more deadly and more contagious. We can pretend that won't happen, or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks involved. This research can both save and destroy human life on Earth as we know it. It's a powerful double edged sword. If YouTube and other platforms censor conversations about this, if scientists self censor conversations about this, we become merely victims of our brief Homo sapiens story, not its heroes. As I said before, too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth. And without truth, we don't have a fighting chance against the Great Filter before us. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Rob Reed. I have seen evidence on the Internet that you have a sense of humor, allegedly. But you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization. What do you think of the Elon Musk hypothesis? That the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And he, I think followed on to say a scene from an external observer, like if somebody was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing Our civilization. That's fun to watch.

Yeah, so exactly. He said, from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant, I think. Right. And so what's interesting about that is those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding tweets and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context. So it's left to the mind of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about. So that's kind of like. It provokes some interesting thoughts. Like, first of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer, and it also presupposes that the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire to be entertained. So there's, like, a lot underpinning that. And to me, that suggests, particularly coming from Elon, that it's a reference to simulation theory, that somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability to, let's say, peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and either a happy or tragic ending, or they have an incredible meta view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and full of plot twists and. And surprises and a happy or unhappy ending. So, okay, so we're presupposing an observer. Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer, because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and other developments that you weren't foreseeing. I have reread my own novels, and that's fun because it's something I worked hard on and I slaved over and I love. But there aren't a lot of surprises in there. So now I'm thinking, well, we need a producer and an observer for that to be true. And on top of that, it's gotta be a very competent producer, because Elon said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely one. So there's lots of layers for thinking about that. And when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think of there was a South park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show, and somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to. So the Earth show was going to get canceled, et cetera. So taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be most entertaining? Now, you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc of civilization. Other lives levels as well, I'm sure. But just looking from my own life, I think I'd make a pretty lousy show. I spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer. I don't think that's very entertaining. And there's just a completely inadequate level of shootouts and car chases in my life. I mean, I'll go weeks, even months without a single shootout or car chase.

That just means that you're one of the non player characters in this game. You're just waiting.

I'm an extra.

You're an extra. That waiting for you. One opportunity for a brief moment to actually interact with one of the main characters, one of the main characters in the play.

Interesting. Okay, that's good. So, okay, so we rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed at anyway. But then even the arc of civilization, I mean, there have been a lot of really intriguing things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened. But, you know, I would have some werewolves, I'd have some zombies, I would have some really improbable developments, like maybe Canada absorbing the United States, maybe, you know, so I don't know. I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment, but if we are, that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years ahead. So I kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment.

Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada, but do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent? So, meaning it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the Internet, the funny ones, the entertaining ones, spread more efficiently.

They do.

I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up en masse funny things much more sort of aggressively. It's more viral in the full sense of that word. Is there some sense that whatever this, the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining outcome, the most memeifiable outcome, the most viral outcome, if we were to share it on Twitter? Yeah.

That's interesting. Yeah, we do have an incredible ability. Like, I mean, how many memes are created in a given day and the ones that go viral are almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor. Yeah, I'd have to think about that. We are definitely Great at creating atomized units of funny. Like in the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging whether this meme is retweetable or not. And so that sort of atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything else that's going on. But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the Earth driving for a level of entertainment that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would necessarily follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very, very aptly selected for. So I don't know.

Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains? So almost thinking about the ideas or the memes, this is the Dawkins thing as the organisms and then the humans as just like vehicles for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread.

Yeah. For propagating them, mutating them, putting selective pressure on them, et cetera. I mean, I found Dawkins interpret or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene. Like what a. P.S. to put at the end of a long chunk of writing, it's profoundly interesting. I view the relationship though, between humans and memes is probably an oversimplification, but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees. Right. Do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers? And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi independent roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other. And so in the case of bees, obviously you could see the flower as being this monolithic structure physically in relation to any given bee, and. And it's the source of food and sustenance. So you could kind of say, well, flowers have bees. But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed, they weren't being pollinated by the bees. So you could kind of say, well, you know, bees, you know, flowers are really expression of what the bees need and the truth is a symbiosis. So with memes in human minds, our brains are clearly the petri dishes and in which memes are either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated. They are the venue in which competition, selective competition, plays out between different memes so all of that is very true. And you could look at that and say, really, the human mind is a production of memes, and ideas have us, rather than us having ideas. But at the same time, let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme. That catchy tune did originate in a human mind. Somebody had to structure that thing. And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk about how the universe I'm simplifying, but kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful TED Talk. It's very lyrical. She talked about ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds. And, you know, she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to write that down. I love that. I find that beautiful. As a writer, as a novelist myself, I've never had that experience. And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind. And so like the bees and the flowers, I think there's a great symbiosis. And they both kind of have one another. Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real.

If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King, on writing you as a great writer, you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you. It's a grind of sort of. It's almost like you're mining for gold. It's more of a very deliberate, rigorous daily process. So maybe can you talk about the writing process? How do you write? Well, and maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer. What does it take to write the best work of your life?

Well, it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction, and. And I've done both. I've written two nonfiction books and two works of fiction. Two works of fiction being more recent. I'm going to focus on that right now because that's more toweringly on my mind amongst novelists. Again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of two schools of thought. Some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants, and some people really, really like to outline, to plot. So there's plotters and pantsers, I guess, is one way that people look at it. And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between, and I'm somewhere on that continuum. But I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter. And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going to end. And I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin. And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story. But trying to make an outline that gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters and so forth. But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately, inevitably morphs a great deal. And I think if I were personally a rigorous outliner, I would not allow that to happen. I also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before I start. So I think people who are really in that plotting, outlining mode are people who write page turners, people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures where you really want a relentless pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera. And that is really the bone. That's really the skeletal structure. So I think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side. And I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction, for lack of a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is more likely to fly by the seat of their pants. And I know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go. A little bit more on the plotting side. Now, you asked what makes something, at least in the mind of the writer, as great as it can be for me, it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing, as opposed to the initial writing. For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, stuff that, you know, new bits of the book, I probably spend. I mean, I wish I kept account. Like, I wish I had, like, one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time I've been doing this, that. But I would say it's at least four or five hours. And maybe as many as 10 that I spend editing. And so it's relentless for me.

For each one hour of writing, you.

Said, I'd say that I write because I edit. And I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning. And sometimes on the micro level of just, like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right? Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done. But the book is 750 pages long and it's way too bloated. I need to lop a third out of it. Problems on those two orders of magnitude and everything in between. That is an enormous amount of my time. And I also write music, write and record and produce music. And there the ratio's even higher. Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just right. So I think that's true of a lot of creative processes. I know it's true of sculpture. I believe it's true of woodwork. My dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing at the end. So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process, any creative process.

Can I ask about the psychological, the demon side of that picture? In the editing process, you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work, and you're judging and judging and judging. How much of your time will do you spend hating your work? How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful for how good the work that you put together is?

I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those, but leaning toward gratitude. I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have I like, I like quite a bit. And I can make it better and better and better with every time I go through it. So I spend most of my time in a state of optimism.

I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two where I wouldn't be able to find the average. I go pretty deep. Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in science and research is to hate everything you do you've ever done in the past. I mean, at least he was speaking about himself, that the key to his success was to hate everything he's ever done. I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too. Just sort of always be exceptionally self critical, but almost like self critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be able to do the work, if that makes sense.

Makes perfect sense.

But that, you know, each one of us have. Have to strike a certain kind of. A certain kind of balance.

Yeah.

But back to the destruction of human civilization. If humans destroy ourselves in the next hundred years, what will Be the most likely source, the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves.

Well, let's see, 100 years, it's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far. And it's something to give a lot more thought to, I think than, you know, normal folks. Simply because I am a science fiction writer and you know, I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard to foresee out more than just a few decades. I mean comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now, a century later, it would have been so unforeseeable. And I just don't know what's going to happen, particularly with exponential technologies. I mean our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing and synthetic biology. And how we might destroy ourselves in the 100 year timeframe might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate. But in the nearer term that I'm comfortable predicting, let's say 30 years, I would say the most likely route to self destruction would be synthetic biology. And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that I find. And I'll abbreviate synthetic biology to synbio just to save us some syllables. I believe synbio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves. So I'm not an anti synbio person by any stretch. I mean synbio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment, helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable. So it's electrifying the field, but in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent. In the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much much greater odds, has much, much greater odds of leading to our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real possibility and one we need to be concerned about. But in the 30 year timeframe I think it's a lesser one. Or nuclear weapons or anything else that I can think of.

Can you explain that a little bit further? So your concern is on the man made versus the natural side of the pandemic front here. So we humans engineering pathogens, engineering viruses is the concern here. Yeah, and maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of is it malevolent or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes?

Well, both of them are a danger and I think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things. One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, foresighted steps that we are absolutely capable of taking right now to forestall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something that could have annihilating impacts? And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that. So do we take those steps? And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing a sin with synbio can plummet. But it's always a question of if. And we have a bad, bad and very long track record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us. So that's variable number one. Variable number two is, is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government or private industry? And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas to create pathogens that if released, could wipe out humanity, if we think that's fine, and if that kind of work starts happening in one lab, five labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in one country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo boo starts rising astronomically. And this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that I presented those two things, but I think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks. The easier one to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch, because it would have to be something that all nations agree on. But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens that if they escape from a lab, could annihilate us. There's no line of research that justifies that. And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we'd need to have. We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies leaked out of BSL4 labs. And some of the work that's been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which we can talk about, is actually done at BSL3. And so fundamentally, any lab can leak. We have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious to leaks. So why in the world would we create something where if, God forbid, it leaked, could annihilate us all? And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks. What happens if you have a malevolent insider? And we could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something annihilating in a bit. I'm sure that we will. But what if you have a malevolent insider? Virtually none of the standards that go into Biosafety Level 1, 2, 3 and 4 are about preventing somebody hijacking the process. I mean, some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents. They're imperfect against accidents. And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs, with every lab you add, the odds of there being a malevolent insider naturally increase arithmetically as the number of labs goes up. Now, on the front of somebody outside of a government, academic or scientific, traditional government, academic, scientific environment, creating something malevolent, again, there's protections that we can take, both at the level of synbio architecture, hardening the entire synbio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out there by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can do to dramatically mitigate that risk. And I think we do both of those things to decide that, no, we're not going to experimentally make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs, and B, yes, we are going to take countermeasures that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation. Then I think both risks get managed down. But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome.

So can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the positives and negatives of it? So if we look at gain of function research and the kind of stuff that's happening level three and level four, BSL labs, what's the whole idea here? Is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave? You want to understand the dangerous ones?

Yeah. So that would be the logic behind doing it. And so gain a function can mean a lot of different things. Viewed through a certain lens. Gain of function research could be what you do when you create GMOs, when you create hearty strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides. I mean, you could view that as gain of function. So I'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly. And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative and it's also very chilling. Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another. I assume there was some kind of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects. One in Holland and one in Wisconsin did gain a function research on something called H5N1 flu. H5N1 is something that, at least on a lethality basis, makes Covid look like a kitten. Covid, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and 1%. H5N1 is closer to 60%. 6, 0. And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola. This is a very, very, very scary pathogen. The good news about H5N1, it is that it is barely, barely contagious. And I believe it is in no way contagious human to human. It requires, you know, very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases chickens. And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting intensely with foul who as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes. But there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of, human to human. Not that it just doesn't exist. I think the World Health Organization did a relentless survey of the number of H5N1 cases. I think they do it every year. I saw one 10 year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of a decade. And that's a drop in the bucket kind of fun fact. I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is 70,000 deaths. So we think getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk, H5N1 much, much lower than that. What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make H5N1 that would be contagious. That could create airborne transmission. And so they basically passed it. I think in both cases they passed it through a large number of ferrets. And so this wasn't like crispr. There wasn't even any CRISPR back in those days. This was relatively straightforward, selecting for a particular outcome. And after guiding the path and passing them through again, I believe it was a series of ferrets. They did in fact come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne transmission. Now, they didn't unleash it into the world, they didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen. And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been. But if it was as contagious as Covid, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen. And why would you do it? Well, the people who did it were good guys, they were virologists. I believe their agenda as they explained it was much as you said, let's figure out what a worst case scenario might look like so we could understand it better. But my understanding is in both cases it was done in BSL3 labs. And so potential of leak significantly non zero, hopefully way below 1%, but significantly non zero. And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation on whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering expected cost for this work. So it should never have been carried out. Now, you might make an argument if you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on an inevitable path to airborne transmission and it's only going to be a small number of years, A and B, if it makes that transition, There is one set of changes to its metabolic pathways and its genomic code and so forth, one that we have discovered. So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B. We have reliably engineered point B. That is the destination. And we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away. Now that'd be a very different world. That'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the earth and is five years off. And yes, you marshal everything you can to resist that. Well, there's two problems with that perspective. The first is, in however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting this planet, there has never been a transmissible form of H5N1. And influenza has been around for a very long time. So there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission. So we're not on a freight train to that outcome. And if there was inevitability around that, it's not like there's just one set of genetic code that would get there. They're just there's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind of an outcome, unbelievable diversity of mutations. And so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face, but we are creating something. We are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative card and injecting it in the deck that nature never put into the deck. So in that case, I just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind of work. And interestingly, there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the work came out. One of the teams was going to publish their results in science, the other in Nature, and there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying, this is crazy. And publication of those papers did get suspended. And not long after that, there was a pause put on US Government funding NIH funding on gain of function research. But both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed. Those papers did ultimately get published, and that pause on funding ceased long ago. And in fact, those two very projects, my understanding, has resumed their funding, got their government funding back. I don't know why a Dutch project's getting NIH funding, but whatever. About a year and a half ago. So as far as the US government and regulators are concerned, it's all systems go for gain of function at this point, which I think I find very troubling.

Now, I'm a little bit of an outsider from this field, but it has echoes of the same kind of problem I see in the AI world with autonomous weapon systems. Nobody in my colleagues, my colleagues, friends, as far as I can tell, people in the AI community are not really talking about autonomous weapon systems as now US and China full steam ahead on the development of both.

Right.

And that seems to be a similar kind of thing on gain of function. I've, you know, have friends in the biology space, and they don't want to talk about gain of function publicly, and I don't. That makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain of function. It makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapon systems. I'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapon systems, and I certainly don't know how to communicate effectively by gain of function. What is the right path forward here? Should we seize all gain of function research? Is that really the solution here?

Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of what we're assessing, because you could say almost anything that you do to make biology more effective as gain of function. So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing, I think it would be easy Enough for level headed people in all of the countries, level headed governmental people in all the countries that realistically could support such a program to agree we don't want this to happen because all labs leak. I mean an example that I use, I actually didn't use it in the piece I did with Sam Harris as well is the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001. I mean talk about an example of the least likely laboratory leaking into the least likely place. This was shortly after 911 for folks who don't remember it. And it was a very, very lethal strand of anthrax that as it turned out based on the forensic genomic work that was done and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security U.S. army lab, probably the one at Fort Detrick in Maryland. It might have been another one, but who cares? It absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab. And where did it leak to this highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security minded organization? Well, it leaked to places including the Senate Majority Leader's office, Tom Daschle's office, I think it was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications including bizarrely the National Enquirer. But let's go to the Senate Majority Leader's office. It is hard to imagine a more security minded country than the United States two weeks after the 911 attack. I mean it doesn't get more security minded than that. And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States military. We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and $24,000 wrenches and so forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that. Despite that level of focus and concern and competence, just a few days after the 911 attacks, something comes from the inside of our military industrial complex and ends up in the office of someone, I believe the Senate Majority Leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession that tells us everything can leak. So again, think of a level headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of countries. Thinking through I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, just discussing briefly things like the anthrax leak, things like this foot and mouth disease outbreak or leaking that came out of a BSL4 level lab in the UK. Several other things, talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say folks, can we agree that this just shouldn't happen? I mean if we were able to agree on the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty which we were Bioweapons convention, which we did agree on, we the World, for the most part, I believe agreement could be found there. But it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to get to consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together and browbeat them into banning this stuff. Now that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this. But in well regulated, carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded academic research, anything going on in the government itself, you know, things going on in, you know, companies that have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives, I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it.

But there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in which is for really kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus, making viruses more dangerous is the question of whether Covid leaked from a lab. Sort of not even answering that question, but even asking that question, it seems like a very important question to ask to catalyze the conversation about whether we should be doing gain of function research. I mean, from a high level, why do you think people, even colleagues of mine, are not comfortable asking that question? And two, do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab?

I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough again for the hypothetical rational national leaders watching this simple PowerPoint. If you could put the possibility at 1% and you look at the unbelievable destructive power that Covid had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it. Now, as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making the pro argument of that. So I don't pretend to be an expert on that and I don't have point of view. I just don't know. But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons. One is that There is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I believe it's the only BSL4 in China. I could be wrong about that. But it definitely had a history that alarmed very sophisticated US diplomats and others who were in contact with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID hit the world. And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified. I believe one sophisticated scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb. And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic of great interest at wiv. SARS obviously came out of China, and that's a coronavirus that would be make an enormous amount of sense for it to be studied there. And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government that we just don't know. So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me, looking at it from the outside. And that's something that one could imagine. Now we're going to the realm of thought.