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I got my first real job in journalism at the Washington Post. It was the 1980s. I was 23. I had never written a newspaper story before. I had no idea what I was doing. All around me, people were shouting into telephones, banging out stories on deadline. I sat there, mute, terrified, convinced that I would be found out and fired. And then I was rescued.
by this crazy, opinionated, insanely productive, brilliant genius of a reporter who, if memory serves, used to cruise the newsroom every Passover handing out matzah. His name was Michael Spector.
I was rescued by Michael Spector. He fed me stories, he wrote my leads, he shared his byline. He taught me how to handle critics, which I'd never forgotten. Somebody would call him up to register one complaint or another, and Michael would interrupt them and say, "You seem to have forgotten one thing. I don't work for you!" Sage advice that has guided my career ever since. I was the tadpole trying to stay afloat. Michael was my big, friendly guardian frog.
Now, why am I going on and on about Michael? Because when I look out from my office here at Pushkin, whose office do I see? Michael Spector. Tadpole and Frog still together. Michael, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Mal. I'm happy to be here.
Michael Spector, friend of the show, New Yorker science writer, MIT professor, seer of the future, total ham. No, normally, when I do these things, normally I have like champagne in the green room. And where is that? Well, you'll have to talk to Malcolm about that. Yeah, okay. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
I'm Malcolm Glaupo. Today on the show, an old friend gives me the inside scoop on the future of life on Earth. For Michael, the real significance of the last few years was not COVID-19. It's the mRNA vaccines. Because the synthetic biology technology behind those vaccines is going to change everything about our world.
It's a revolution on the scale of the first computers. And Michael has written an audiobook about that revolution. Hire animals, vaccines, synthetic biology, and the future of life. And it is amazing. So I asked Michael to sit down for a chat about some of the big ideas in the audiobook and to play some of it for me. One of the things that struck me when I was reading your book was you make this very compelling and convincing argument that
This is a revolution on the order of electricity being invented. It's that kind of level revolution. People refer to Twitter as being a revolution. Twitter is like, if that's a revolution, you know. We have problems. We have problems. There should be like a revolution pyramid and we give, there's like A level, B level, C level, D level, G level. Twitter is like F revolution.
Electricity is A. This is A. This is top- This is A or A plus because we're taking a physical science, biology, and we're turning it into an information science.
What that means is that if I think of something clever to do, like, for instance, create a vaccine against COVID, I can put it up on the Internet and people all over the world can download it within minutes, which is why we had a vaccine. Which is what happened so rapidly for COVID. It was the first vaccine that was ever made in a lab.
The sequences were uploaded to the internet, scientists all over the world downloaded it, put the parts together, made the virus and infected cells. Moderna, the company that was the first of one of two to have an mRNA vaccine, they essentially had that vaccine in seven days. Yeah. The fastest vaccine that has ever been developed in humanity before was mumps, and that took four years.
Polio took 50. HIV, we're pushing 50 now and it's killed tens of millions of people and many very brilliant people have dedicated their lives to figuring it out. Yeah, yeah. Here's the puzzle I have. If this is a level A or A plus revolution and yet
It seems to be that nobody knows about it. Like, for example, not a day passes when you can't hear some lament from some Silicon Valley person, which is all about how, you know, remember the famous, they promised us flying planes and all we got was 14 characters. Actually,
We did get something way better than flying planes, but for some reason you're not paying any attention to it. Why have we ignored this revolution? Well, a lot of it is expectations. And I have to say I'm, in this respect, not a lover of Silicon Valley's approach because their approach to synthetic biology is often...
there are no billionaires. There's no billion dollar companies. You can't quadruple your investment in an hour and a half. We don't want that. And the fact is, it's going to take a little while, but there have been remarkable advances constantly. And I go into them in this book in some detail. But I think when I tell people who are not
scientists that biology has become like information. It's just like computers, except instead of bits and bytes, we use DNA letters, A, C, T, and G. They're like, what? But how do you make it? Well, we have DNA printers. We can write DNA. We can put them together. We can create DNA and we can rearrange DNA in any way that we want.
If that's not a revolution, if being able to sort of rewrite the basic elements of life isn't a revolution on this planet, I just don't know what that word means. Yeah, yeah. When you were doing this book, what was the coolest, weirdest, most fun moment?
Well, I mean, for me, in chapter four, I interviewed a black-footed ferret. So that's a defensive ferret chatter, they say. And I do mean wow. Wait, you interviewed the ferret? Yeah, it's very rare that I get to interview it.
an endangered animal of any kind. It happens to be the most endangered species in America. And it's endangered because, for a lot of reasons, but one of them, the significant one, is it gets the plague, the black plague. Ferrets get the black plague? Well, they get a thing called sylvatic plague, but it's the same. I thought life was hard enough for a ferret without being susceptible to... It's hard. It's really hard. And the thing is...
There's a vaccine for the plague and it works on ferrets. You can't run around Wyoming, Utah, all the Western states vaccinating every ferret. It's just crazy. Why? Because they're vaccine skeptics? You just can't catch them all. They're in the wrong part of the country. Live free or die. Maybe that's New Hampshire. Yeah.
What you can do is you can take that vaccine and you can splice it into the DNA of a ferret so that it passes on the antibodies to its progeny. So basically it is a heritable vaccine and you're born vaccinated against the plague. So are we going to do that with us, with non-ferrets?
I mean, yeah, we will eventually do that, but I'm not sure we'll do it with vaccines. I think when it comes to changing our DNA, I think the first thing we have to say is, is there a really compelling reason to do that? And if you have a vaccine, if you have something you can like shoot in your arm or swallow that'll take care of a disease, I'm not so sure that rewriting the basic fundamental code of humanity is the way to go. Yeah. But there will be diseases. Yeah.
That people want to eliminate and we will be able to eliminate them in that way. And it will start a kind of interesting slippery slope of how do we decide what to do? Yeah. Wait, so interviewing the ferret, that was high on the list. Yeah. The vaccine skeptic ferret. What's the number two?
Well, this is a personal highlight for me because I've spent so many years writing about things like genetically modified products and having people scream about how dangerous they are and which they are not. And a company called Ginkgo Bioworks went public in late 2021. And I went to the day on the New York Stock Exchange when they were announcing their offering and
And the whole floor of the New York Stock Exchange was chanting DNA, DNA. And there were huge pictures all around. I love GMOs. And it was like I died and went to some weird perverted heaven. Finally found your people on Wall Street. Wait, if you're a company that's doing work on genetic modification and you want to avoid the kind of bad publicity and...
Not jobs that have plagued your field. Don't call yourself Dinko Bioworks. Whatever. Ginkgo. Ginkgo. It's worse. Call yourself Acme, you know, Better Products Inc. or something. Ginkgo is a 3,000-year-old Chinese tree. But I mean, you're right. Look.
Synthetic biology is not an ideal name for a discipline in which we make things with biology because it scares the crap out of a lot of people. But it's hard to undo a name that exists and replace it. And so that's where we are. And so I think the thing we need to do, like if you go to Ginkgo, their motto is we want to grow biology. We don't want to make it. We don't want factories. We don't want chemicals.
We're just going to grow stuff in a vat. We're going to grow nitrogen in a vat. We're going to grow dyes that are completely benign so that you don't have to use these horrible chemicals to make blue jeans.
And they're doing that. And it's really kind of interesting. Wait, Michael, in a book that began with smallpox, moved on to some of the most serious existential questions. Yeah, we get to blue jeans. You end up getting to someone who solved the blue jean dye problem. It's all of a piece. It's an environmental problem that is a result of us having to rely on chemicals. And what they're saying is,
We don't need to build with chemistry. We can build with biology and we can do all sorts of stuff. We can do medicines. We can do environmental remediation. If there's something like, I mean, it would boggle your mind to know how much blue dye is made and how ruinous it is for the environment. So if you could get rid of those millions of tons a year and just grow it in a vat in a way that isn't chemically derived,
I taught bioengineering for a while at Stanford and those students were more engineers than they were biologists and they were trying to figure out how to apply engineering to cells. And in a lab now, you'll have people who know a lot about biology, but they might know more about systems biology and computers.
and engineering, and you can't really do biology anymore unless you have those people ready to call on. This reminds me of the son of a friend of mine is one of those brainy Stanford engineering types, and he does computer science, and he works at some startup, you know. But if you talk to him, it's really interesting. So he's, whatever he is, 22,
It's clear. He talks about things going on in the world of science in exactly the way he talks about computer code. It's all the same. It is. It's really interesting. It's like, you know, I grew up.
Like you writing about these disciplines as if they were each in a kind of fortified castle on a different hill in southern Italy, right? And you had to storm the hill and, you know, jump, get over the drawbridge in order to understand what was going on in the discipline. Now it's like... Those walls are down. Those walls are... And that's sort of what your book is about, that if the walls come down, it's...
It's exciting, but it's also kind of terrifying. I hope I make that point clearly in the book. I mean, I think this is a really exciting time, and I don't think it's hype to say we're going to create a lot of solutions to terrible problems. I also don't think it's hype to say that, you know, it used to be, this is like moving from...
giant mainframe computer where it used to take up four rooms to a computer on our phone that's more powerful than what sent astronauts to the moon. Well, that's going to happen. It's beginning to happen with biology. And while that is great, it also means there are going to be lots of people who are going to be able to design things on their phone. And some of those things are
either on purpose or by accident, are not going to be things we want whipping around the universe or made. And so we have to really start paying attention to how easy it's going to be to make viruses, to alter viruses. And that's one of the things with smallpox. I mean, it is now possible, very, very hard to do, and not a lot of people could do it, to make smallpox. Yes.
A scientist in Canada famously made horsepox, which was a cousin of smallpox. Once you start being able to make those things, you can make them in such a way that they evade the current vaccines. We can then develop new vaccines and you're in a really ugly arms race. So we need to be careful about that. And for once, we need to ask a question that we never ask, which is, are there technologies we shouldn't use? Yeah. Yeah. So you've written...
Higher Animals is essentially a book about this revolution. Yeah. I mean, I started with smallpox, which there's a bit in the first chapter about the last great smallpox scare in the United States, which was in 1947 in New York. Which...
Yeah, I mean, a person got on a bus and came to the city and he could have wiped out the entire population. Oh, so he did? Yeah, someone came to New York City carrying smallpox. In 1947? In 1947, yeah. And you don't know that. It's not written on your shoulder. There's no way of knowing you're infected and you can create an incredible epidemic. So there was a legitimate fear that...
In the lifetime of my mom and your mom, that New York City could have been wiped out by one of the most, one of the scariest disasters.
epidemics in human history. Incredibly legitimate fear. And the chapter we're going to play for you is about what happened next. And I won't give anything away except to say that New York City still exists. Yes. We can confirm that the city is still there. I just thought of a better title for your book.
Where were you three months ago? Yeah, what? Pandora's Pox. That is good. That's good. Michael, this has been wonderful. The book, Higher Animals, is amazing. And I encourage all of you listening to stick around and listen to chapter one. Thanks, Mal. It's been great. Wonderful.
Okay, there's your cliffhanger. The near destruction of New York City. How did they stop it? You'll find out in this amazing chapter excerpt right after the break. The year is 1947. A man named Eugene Labar has come to New York City and died of smallpox. And the health commissioner, the amazingly named Israel Weinstein, has to figure out how to stop the disease before it wipes out the whole city.
Oh, and a lot of people are about to gather in one place for a big parade. Let me just say, this is an amazing, gripping story. Like, you think The Last of Us is good? You haven't seen anything yet. Roll tape! Many city officials were dismayed to find Israel Weinstein in charge of this crisis. He was new on the job and had come from the Bureau of Health Education, where he'd mainly worked with the press. Also, Weinstein seemed kind of strange.
He installed a chin-up bar at the door of his office and he rarely walked in or out without doing a few pull-ups. Few members of the medical establishment had even met this new commissioner and he was about to face the biggest challenge any American health official had seen in decades. James Imparato, who would later serve as commissioner himself, knows the kind of challenge Weinstein faced. He was appointed and many of the leadership
Kind of treated that somewhat scornfully. I didn't think he had what it took. Weinstein got the lab results on Good Friday, April 4th. That weekend, New Yorkers would pack churches throughout the city and gather for the annual Easter parade. Each year, the Easter parade brings out much finery and startling millinery and some unusual participants.
If just one person at the parade had been infected, even among a vaccinated population, the resulting outbreak could paralyze the city. Weinstein had to plan for the worst possible outcome, and that meant New York would need to launch the most aggressive public health campaign in American history. It simply wasn't going to be enough to vaccinate the hospital staff. Somehow, they would have to vaccinate everyone.
For your own sake, and for that of your families and friends, please don't take a chance. Be vaccinated. Tonight. Dr. Weinstein, the New York City Health Commissioner, knew how quickly a virus can spread in one of the world's most densely populated cities, and he needed to stop it before it really started. The Easter parade came only two days after the city received the test results, and a million people turned out. At that point...
fewer than a thousand had been vaccinated. There was one ray of hope: if a smallpox vaccine is administered soon enough, it can protect people even after they've been exposed. So there was a clear reason to get one. And just days after the parade, news broke that smallpox had infected several other people. The epidemiologist James Imparato has studied this period and says New Yorkers were practically storming local clinics demanding to be inoculated.
The department was held in very, very high esteem. It really was. And it had a large infrastructure of district health centers and milk stations, which were really well baby clinics. And they were called milk stations? Yeah, they were called milk stations. I didn't even know that. Yeah, they would give free milk out to mothers for their infants, usually in resource-disadvantaged areas of the city.
Was that one of the key places where people were vaccinated in 1940s? They vaccinated people everywhere. They even vaccinated them in police stations. They used every possible venue that was available. And certainly they mustered private practitioners, of which there were many in those years. They were not really group practices at that point.
The mayor received his vaccination in front of the press corps. World War II air marshals went door to door, making sure people knew where they could get their shots. Members of the New York Philharmonic received their shots after a concert at the Lyric Theater. Anybody who had been exposed was offered a choice. Get vaccinated or endure 21 days of surveillance by the health department. Everybody, it seemed, was getting vaccinated.
At the time, the health department possessed 250,000 doses of smallpox vaccine. That was not remotely enough to meet the demand. The mayor convened an emergency meeting with the heads of the seven American pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines. He asked for a commitment to provide 6 million doses. The Army and Navy also chipped in.
The campaign was dramatic, but somehow the city met the demand. Thousands of people stood in line, often through the night, to get their shots. James Imparato was a child in New York at the time. He remembers those events as if they happened last week. Two of my uncles were Cornell graduates and they had private practices and one of them vaccinated me.
I recall that very well. He came at me with a huge long needle, which I thought he was going to inject in its entirety into my arm. But it was to scrape in the vaccine. So they had widespread cooperation and they did not have any difficulty getting people to come out to be vaccinated. They really didn't.
Some of that theatrical atmosphere was captured years later in a dark, melodramatic film called The Killer That Stalked New York, about a woman who started what else? A smallpox outbreak. No, she didn't deal death out of the end of a gun or off the point of a knife. She delivered it wholesale, just by walking through a crowd. The tragedy was she didn't know she was deaf either. All Sheila knew, she had a headache.
It's pretty standard noir stuff. Not exactly high art. But the best part, the strangest part, is the vaccination montage. We have to stop it. Get to the people first. Beat the disease. Vaccinate the whole city. That's really how it happened. Six million people vaccinated in a month, most of them in the course of about two weeks.
Almost unimaginably, the city was declared free of smallpox by the middle of April, just weeks after the Easter parade. In all, two people died: Labarre and the pregnant wife of the man he infected. Twelve other New Yorkers became ill. Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein had to deal with the type of misinformation that has now become so familiar. But vaccination was an easy sell to New Yorkers in 1947.
The truth had little competition. At no time has any such number been vaccinated in such short period and at such short notice. It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the city's achievement. It prevented a potentially disastrous outbreak. And yet, almost nobody has heard of Israel Weinstein today. Where is his statue, his plaque,
When James Imparato was appointed to Weinstein's old job, New York City Health Commissioner, in 1976, Weinstein was still alive, although he had already been forgotten. Imparato decided to give him a call. And he was then living in Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn. And I did tell him something. You know, he used to keep a chinning bar.
at the doorway of the commissioner's office. And I asked him if he was still doing it. He said, oh, of course I am. He said, I took the bar with me when I left. Did you like him? Did you think he was a good guy? Well, he was very agreeable on the phone. Yes, he was. I think in person, he generally was considered that way. I mean, when I was in the health department in the 1970s, there were many people who remembered him.
They remembered him most, of course, for the smallpox vaccination campaign and also for his chinning bar. Dr. Weinstein left his job as city health commissioner soon after the outbreak, but his massive smallpox eradication campaign influenced more than a few of today's public health officials.
New York City, in March and April of 1947, vaccinated 6,350,000 people, 5 million of which they did in two weeks. I was a six-year-old boy who was one of those who got vaccinated. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States' leading infectious disease expert, has tried to do with COVID for all of America what Weinstein did for New York.
And the response could hardly be more different. Throughout the COVID pandemic, Fauci has been threatened with death on a near daily basis. Members of Congress have tried to have him indicted and attempted to pass laws to prevent him from being paid. Fauci has frequently been accused of what he has spent his entire adult life being, a government scientist.
At one point during the 1947 smallpox scare, Weinstein stated that universal vaccination was the only safeguard against an epidemic. I began writing this book in the story of the 1947 vaccination drive at the height of the fourth wave of the COVID pandemic in the United States. And it was far from the last.
That wave came in spite of the widespread availability of vaccines that are far safer than the smallpox vaccine they used in 1947. Sure, America was a different country then. It was a society that sought to protect people from harm. Authority was trusted and respected. The words science and progress were cheered, not denounced.
Those 6 million New Yorkers required little coercion, few incentives, and no meaningful debate. Over the years, I have often asked myself, what changed? Why did we become a country so suspicious of authority and of science that millions of people would rather risk death than take a vaccine that has perhaps the best safety profile of any in history? I needed some wider context for what's happened to us.
For that, there's no better person to visit than Juan Enriquez. Few people have thought more deeply about the impact that vaccines have had on human civilization. Enriquez, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at the Harvard Business School, is a futurist, a genomic entrepreneur, and a historian of science.
Together with J. Craig Venter, who led the team that assembled the first draft of the Human Genome Project, Enriquez also founded Synthetic Genomics. Enriquez lives in a pleasant suburb of Boston. When I told him I was looking into the history of the smallpox vaccine, he abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a long, narrow, and ornately illustrated book, clearly something old and valued, and he began to page through it.
What it is, is it's an inquiry into the causes and effects of variolation vaccine in Gloucestershire and the cowpox. And this is done by Edward Jenner. And the fact that some of our listeners don't immediately know who Edward Jenner is, even though he saved more lives than almost anybody else before or since, is really important. He and I were both staring at this antique folio with genuine reverence. And so what you're looking at is, you know, when he...
addressed the king and talked about the public causes of vaccines and such, and the inquiry into variolation. Jenner understood that the science of his discovery would only take him so far. Vaccination works on a population, not just a person. And it's a political problem as much as it is a scientific one. So Jenner couldn't just be a scientist.
He was an advocate. And the report Enriquez held in his hands was part of Jenner's advocacy. It looked more like the Magna Carta than what it was, a statistical analysis like those that appear in modern medical journals every day. This is one of the most important medical records in the world. And so it's a report on how you saved hundreds of millions of human beings. And very few people value it. And one of the scenarios that you wouldn't come up with
is that a political party where most of the people in the senior levels of that party have been vaccinated would advocate for their followers not to be vaccinated. And that's just such a perverse scenario that even in a Michael Crichton, Andromeda strain type book, it would be unbelievable. What's extraordinary about these days is that
the unbelievable has become reality. We never expected American democracy to be questioned. We never expected science, which is what's made this country the country it is. And having that question is, I think, not just questioning the science, but questioning the very idea of what America is. I wonder if people really are questioning the idea of America. I think maybe it's more that we just take our remarkable achievements for granted.
achievements like the development of vaccines. What's fascinating is how many times we've forgotten this. So we go through these cycles where we forget just how important vaccines are. We go through cycles where we forget to develop vaccines. We go through cycles where we make it too expensive to develop vaccines. And one of the things that's terribly frustrating about the medical system until COVID, which is a horrendous tragedy, but one of the
things that happened during COVID as we remembered again just how important vaccines are. The COVID vaccines will almost certainly prove to be one of the major scientific advances of our time. We produced them by the hundred million safely and with remarkable speed. So clearly one is right. We've been reminded of the critical role vaccines play in all our lives.
And yet, with so many people refusing the vaccine, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, have died needlessly. Reluctance is a perfectly understandable reaction to anything new. People often reject truly disruptive technologies, at least for a while. The telegraph was shunned when it was introduced. People once recoiled at the thought of entering an elevator without a human operator. The debate over driverless cars seems as if it will rage for decades.
But these vaccines are not just another challenging new technology. They are our main defense against a novel pathogen passing like a wrecking ball through the human population. They are the clearest sign yet of a revolution in biology, one that can save and enhance the lives of people everywhere. If we can figure out how to trust science again, and if scientists can figure out how to earn that trust.
That was an abridged version of Chapter 1 of Higher Animals, Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life by Michael Spector. Get your copy at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever you buy your audiobooks. Religionist History is produced by Ben-Nadav Hafri, Lehman Gistu, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith.
Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Sarah Bruguier, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to Julia Barton, who also edited Higher Animals, and to the rest of the Audiobooks team. I'm Malcolm Glabaugh.