Speaker 1: I want you to try a little mental exercise with me,
just for a second. Okay, Imagine you're standing on the
deck of a ship. It's September nineteen fifty, you're out
in the Pacific, maybe I don't know, two miles off
the coast of San Francisco.
Speaker 2: You could feel that Bay Area chill exactly.
Speaker 1: That classic crisp bear and you can see the Golden
gate Bridge, you know, just looming through the fog. To
anyone watching from the shore, you just look like a
standard Navy mind sweeper.
Speaker 2: Just a normal day, a routine patrol, just.
Speaker 1: A routine patrol, keeping the coast safe. But the cargo
on that ship it's anything but routine.
Speaker 3: No, And the mission it's not about sweeping for mines,
not at all.
Speaker 1: You see these crew members on deck and they're wrestling
with these huge industrial hoses and then at a specific
command they open.
Speaker 2: The valves and it's not water.
Speaker 1: It's not water. They're pumping out this thick, synthetic fog.
It's heavy. It kind of clings to the surface of
the water and then the wind just catches it and
starts pushing it, starts pushing it. Yeah, right towards the city.
Speaker 3: Like a blanket, and you have to think within an
hour that fog is moving through the streets. It's seeping
under door cracks, it's drifting into open classroom windows, it's
getting sucked into the ventilation systems of hospitals.
Speaker 1: If you were just a person on the street that day,
you probably thought, oh, it's just a foggy day in
the bay.
Speaker 2: Of course, nothing unusual.
Speaker 1: But you were breathing in biological agents. Your kids were
breathing them in, the most vulnerable people, patients and hospitals
were breathing them in. And the people who did it well,
they were your own.
Speaker 2: Government, and the most shilling part of all of it.
They were taking notes, they were counting, just counting the particles.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host and with
me is our expert. Today we are pulling on a
thread that is, frankly, it's pretty disturbing. It is. Usually
we look at the threads of history that lead to
breakthroughs or scientific marvels, but today.
Speaker 3: Today we're looking at the threads that unravel into f disasters.
We're looking at the well, the dark side of the
scientific method. Yeah, we've got a stack of documents here.
Some are declassified from the fifties, some are from just
last year, twenty twenty five, and they all document what
happens when the question can we do this? Completely drowns
out the question should we do this?
Speaker 1: That's a great way to put it. It's a distinction
that seems so obvious now, right.
Speaker 2: It seems obvious, But looking at this.
Speaker 1: Research, it clearly wasn't. We're talking about germ warfare tests
on American cities, prisoners being used as like human sponges
for pesticides and genetic editing that went casually horrifically wrong.
Speaker 3: And I think the key thing for you to keep
in mind as we go through this is that these
weren't you know, mad scientists in a cartoon basement with
lightning crashing outside.
Speaker 1: Right. This wasn't Frankenstein.
Speaker 3: No, These projects were funded by the Pentagon, by the NIH,
by major universities. This was institutional science.
Speaker 1: That's what's so scary about it, the banality of it. Yeah,
so let's go back to that ship. Let's go back
to San Francisco. This was called Operations Cease FRAE. Why
on earth did the US Navy think it was a
good idea to blanket eight hundred thousand people with bacteria.
Speaker 3: Well, context is it's everything. Really, you have to put
yourself in the headspace of nineteen.
Speaker 1: Fifty the Cold War.
Speaker 2: The Cold War.
Speaker 3: Isn't just a concept, it's this terrifying, everyday reality. The
US military was absolutely convinced, I mean one hundred percent
certain that the Soviet Union had.
Speaker 1: Biological weapons like what kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Anthrax, bubonic plague, you name it, And they believe the
Soviets wouldn't hesitate to use them on a coastal city
like San Francisco or New York.
Speaker 1: So this was was it a defensive drill? Were they
trying to figure out how to protect people.
Speaker 2: In their minds? Yes, that was a justification. They needed
a model.
Speaker 3: They had to know if a Soviet submarine surface and
spray of virus, how would the wind carry it, would
the tall buildings block it, would.
Speaker 1: It reach the suburbs, how far would it go? All
of that?
Speaker 3: And you can't really simulate that in a wind tunnel,
not with the technology they had in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: So they needed a city.
Speaker 2: They needed a city, a real world Petrie Dish precisely.
Speaker 3: They needed that complex urban environment with hills and fog
and skyscrapers and a dense population to see how the
airflow actually worked.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, but hold on, they didn't spray anthrax on them.
I'm assuming, or at least hoping, they weren't trying to
just wipe out San Francisco to prove a point about
wind pattern.
Speaker 3: No, no, of course not. They used what they called simulants.
They chose two specific bacteria, Bacillisk will begi and Seratiu marceessens.
Speaker 1: And the thinking was that these were harmless.
Speaker 3: They believed they were completely harmless stand ins for the
really deadly stuff Siatia.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard of that. Isn't that the
stuff that makes that pink ring in your shower if
you don't scrub it enough.
Speaker 2: That's the one.
Speaker 3: It's a really common soil bacteria. And the Navy scientists
they loved it for one very specific reason, which was
it produces a bright red pigment, so it's essentially color coded. Ah,
if you put a Petrie dish out on a street
corner and a particle of Serratia lands on it, the
culture that grows turns bright red. It made tracking the
spread of their fog incredibly easy.
Speaker 1: So the logic was just, well, it's in the soil,
it's in the shower, it must be harmless.
Speaker 3: That was the core assumption. They viewed it as biologically
in a tracer bullet essentially.
Speaker 1: And did it work from their perspective.
Speaker 3: Oh, it worked better than they could have imagined. They
set up forty three monitoring stations all across the Bay
Area rooftops, street corners, parks, and the data they got
back was just staggering.
Speaker 2: The spray covered everything, everything, everything.
Speaker 3: They estimated that nearly every single one of the eight
hundred thousand residents inhaled millions of spores millions millions per person.
It proved without a doubt that a biological attack would
be devastatingly effective. So from a purely strategic military standpoint,
the experiment was a massive success.
Speaker 1: They proved the vulnerability of the entire West Coast exactly.
But biologically, I feel a very big but coming.
Speaker 2: Biologically it was a catastrophe.
Speaker 3: See that harmless assumption has well, it has a fatal flaw.
Ceratia is what's known as an opportunistic pathogen. So if
you're healthy, you breathe it in your immune system z
aps it, you're fine.
Speaker 2: You never know.
Speaker 3: But if your elderly, or if your immune system is
compromised for any reason, or and this is the key part,
if you're recovering from surgery, it's.
Speaker 1: A totally different story.
Speaker 3: It finds a way in, it sees an opportunity. And
about a week after the spray, doctors at Stanford Hospital started.
Speaker 2: Scratching their heads what was happening.
Speaker 3: They had a sudden, weird influx of eleven patients, all
with severe urinary tract infections. Now, UTIs are common, but
not like this, and not caused by this specific, very
rare bacteria.
Speaker 1: And when they cultured the samples from these patients.
Speaker 2: They saw the red pigment.
Speaker 3: Yea, it was Seratium arsessens, the exact same bacterium the
Navy was spraying all over the city.
Speaker 1: This is where I get to the story of Edward Nevin.
Speaker 3: Edward Nevin, Yes, he was a retired pipe fitter. He
was in that very hospital recovering from a routine prostate surgery.
He was exactly the kind of person the Navy.
Speaker 2: Got to account for. Someone vulnerable, someone vulnerable.
Speaker 3: The bacteria got into his bloodstream, probably through his catheter
and it colonized his heart valves. This wasn't a mild
infection for him.
Speaker 2: It killed him.
Speaker 1: And his family had no idea what really happened.
Speaker 3: How could they The Navy didn't announce the test, The
public didn't know. The doctors were baffled because at the time,
ciratia infections were almost unheard of.
Speaker 1: So when did the truth come out?
Speaker 3: Not until nineteen seventy six, twenty six years later. It
came out during a series of Senate hearings on government
intelligence activities.
Speaker 1: Twenty six years.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine being his grandson reading in the newspaper
that your grandfather wasn't just sick, that he was essentially
collateral damage in a secret wind pattern test.
Speaker 1: The violation of consent is just it's breath taking. This
brings up the whole concept of informed consent. We talk
about it all the time. Now you sign a waiver
before you get a flu shot. Did that concept just
not exist for the military in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3: It existed, but it was completely overruled by the idea
of national security.
Speaker 1: The trump card. It was the.
Speaker 2: Ultimate trump card.
Speaker 3: The calculus was cold, It was okay, we might hurt
a few people, but if we don't understand how these
bioweapons work, the Soviets might kill millions. It's the ultimate
utilitarian trap.
Speaker 1: And because they classified the entire operation, there was no
oversight none.
Speaker 3: There was no one from the outside, no civilian board
to say, hey, uh, guys, maybe spraying of bacteria, even
one you think is harmless, directly onto a hospital is
a fundamentally bad idea.
Speaker 1: It's the arrogance of it that gets me. The idea
that this small group of people in a room decided
the acceptable risk for almost a million others who had
no say, no.
Speaker 3: Knowledge, nothing, and that attitude. Sadly, it didn't just stop
at the coastline. It moved inland. It moved into our
prisons and onto our own military.
Speaker 1: Ships, which brings us to our next loose thread.
Speaker 2: The captives subjects.
Speaker 1: We're shifting from un witting civilians to people who on
paper technically volunteered. But I used that word very loosely.
Very Let's talk about the University of California, San Francisco
UCSF and their experiments on prisoners in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3: This is another one that just flew under the radar
for so long. This was happening at the California Medical
Facility in Vacaville.
Speaker 1: And it's important to understand who the subjects were here.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, these were not sick inmates who were hoping for
a cure for some condition they had.
Speaker 2: These were healthy men.
Speaker 1: They're just human guinea pigs.
Speaker 2: That's essentially what it was.
Speaker 3: Yes, researchers from UCSF and other places used them because
they were quite literally a captive.
Speaker 2: Audience, easy to access, easy to.
Speaker 3: Access, They lived in a totally controlled environment, and they
had very very little power to say no.
Speaker 1: The details of these experiments are just yeah, they're visceral.
They weren't testing a new kind of aspirin.
Speaker 3: No, they were rubbing pesticides and herbicides directly onto the
prisoner's skin to see how much was absorbed into the bloodstream.
They were injecting experimental chemicals directly into their veins.
Speaker 1: And this one, this one really got to me when
I was reading the files. They strapped cages of live
mosquitos to the prisoner's arms.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to test insect reactions and new repellents.
Speaker 1: Can you even imagine that just sitting there in a
cell or a lab room with a cage of hungry
mosquitos strapped to you, just waiting to be bitten over
and over and over again.
Speaker 2: For what for data?
Speaker 3: Pharmaceutical companies and chemical manufacturers. They wanted human exposure data.
And this is where the ethics get really.
Speaker 1: Really murky, because the inmates were paid.
Speaker 2: They were paid, but how much.
Speaker 1: Not much, I'm guessing small.
Speaker 3: Amounts by any outside standard, maybe thirty dollars a month.
But you have to understand the prison economy of the
nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Thirty bucks was a fortune.
Speaker 2: It was a fortune.
Speaker 3: It could buy you protection, extra food, cigarettes, special privileges.
Speaker 2: It could fundamentally.
Speaker 3: Change your day to day existence. So can you really
call that voluntary consent?
Speaker 1: No, it's I'm a coercion. That's what it is. If
you're in that harshened environment and someone offers you something
that dramatically improves your quality of life, you aren't really
free to choose.
Speaker 2: You're desperate. You're desperate exactly.
Speaker 3: And on top of that, later investigations showed the consent
forms were a total joke. They were often missing or
they were incomplete. The prisoners likely had no real idea
about the long term cancer risks of having experimental herbicides
rubbed into their pores day.
Speaker 1: After day, and this went on for a while.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 3: The practice wasn't banned in California until nineteen seventy seven,
but the acknowledgment from the institution that took much much longer.
Speaker 1: When did UCSF finally apologize.
Speaker 3: UCSF only formally apologized for their role in this in
November of twenty.
Speaker 1: Eight, eighty eighteen.
Speaker 2: That's practically yesterday, decades of silence.
Speaker 3: It just shows how hard it is for these massive
institutions to turn around and admit, you know what, we
messed up.
Speaker 2: That was wrong, And.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just prisoners, it was our own soldiers too.
We have to talk about Project one twelve and Project.
Speaker 3: SACHAD, right, SAHAD that stands for Shipboard Hazard and Defense.
This was happening in the nineteen sixties. It was very
similar in concept to the San Francisco fog test. The
military wanted to know how chemical and biological agents would
affect naval ships at sea, so they used their own
sailors and marines as the test subjects.
Speaker 1: Again, the deception is the key here, isn't it. They
didn't come out and say, hey, we're going to spray
you with some nerve gas simulants today. I hope you
don't mind, not even close.
Speaker 2: They told them this is routine.
Speaker 1: Training, routine training.
Speaker 2: So these young.
Speaker 3: Guys, they're scrubbing decks, they're running drills, doing their jobs,
and meanwhile a plane flies overhead and they're being sprayed
with chemicals, seren simulants, incapacitating agents, hallucinogens that cause vomiting
and disorientation.
Speaker 1: And they just thought it was part of the drill.
Speaker 3: They had no idea they were being monitored, the reactions
were being recorded, but the men themselves didn't know why
they were suddenly getting sick or dizzy.
Speaker 1: And the long term consequences of this devastating.
Speaker 3: Years decades later, these veterans started reporting all sorts of
chronic health issues, chronic fatigue, debilitating migraines, respiratory problems, major
cognitive decline, and for the longest time, the VA and
the government just denied it.
Speaker 1: Of course, yes, because the program was classified.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you can't claim benefits for an injury that was
caused by a program that officially doesn't even exist.
Speaker 1: No change.
Speaker 3: It took decades of these veterans speaking out, finding each other,
comparing notes, and finally, political pressure forced the declassification of
documents that proved thousands of service members were deliberately exposed.
Speaker 1: It just brings us right back to that power dynamic.
Whether you're a prisoner in vacaville or a sailor on
a destroyer, the institution holds all the cards. All that
they say, jump, you say how high? They say, stand here?
You stand there? And that obedience, that trust, it was exploited.
Speaker 3: It raises a really profound question for anyone listening. Is
consent ever truly valid if there's a massive of power imbalance.
If your boss asks you to do something risky, or
your commanding officer or your warden, can you really truly
say no without consequence?
Speaker 2: History suggests that often the answer is no.
Speaker 1: It's a chilling thought. Okay, let's shift gears a little bit.
We've talked about external exposure, chemicals, bacteria. Now let's go internal.
Let's talk about the very fabric of life itself. Genetics.
Speaker 3: This is where the stakes get even higher, if that's
even possible, because when you mess with chemicals, you hurt
an individual. When you mess with genetics, potentially you hurt
the entire human gene pool.
Speaker 1: We're going to look at two cases here that are
just there. Are world's apart in some ways but so
similar in others. Let's jump forward. We're leaving the Cold
War paranoia behind it, moving to the late nineteen.
Speaker 2: Nineties, the era of dot com optimism.
Speaker 1: Totally. The Internet is booming, the human genome project is
nearing completion, and medicine feels like it's on the verge
of solving everything.
Speaker 3: And the absolute height of that optimism was gene therapy.
The nineties were kind of the wild West for this field.
Speaker 1: The theory was so elegant, though, oh it was beautiful.
Speaker 3: If a disease is caused by a single broken gene,
you don't just treat the symptoms forever.
Speaker 2: You go in and you fix the gene. You replace
the flat tire. Simple.
Speaker 1: But you can't just pop a microscopic pill that changes
your DNA. You need a delivery system.
Speaker 3: You need a delivery system, and nature has already perfected one,
the virus.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Viruses are basically biological machines that are designed to do
one thing. Break into a cell and dump their own
genetic cargo inside.
Speaker 2: So scientists thought, great, let's.
Speaker 3: Just hollow out of virus, take out the infectious parts,
put in the healthy human gene we want, and inject it.
Speaker 1: It sounds like biohacking.
Speaker 3: It is exactly biohacking. And that brings us to Jesse Delsinger.
It's nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: He's eighteen years old, just a kid, just a kid.
Speaker 3: He has a rare metabolic disorder OTC deficiency. It means
his liver can't process ammonia properly.
Speaker 1: But and looking at the files on this, this seems
like the most crucial detail of the whole story.
Speaker 3: He wasn't dying, was he, No, That is the absolute
core of the tragedy. He had a mild form of
the disease. He managed it with a strict diet and medication.
Speaker 2: He had a normal life ahead of him.
Speaker 1: So why volunteer for such a risky experimental trial.
Speaker 2: Pure altruism.
Speaker 3: He wanted to help the babies who were born with
the severe fatal version of his disease. He thought if
this worked, it could save them.
Speaker 1: So he goes to the University of Pennsylvania. They inject
him with this modified virus and danovirus carrying the corrective gene.
Speaker 3: What went wrong The researchers just they completely underestimated the
power of the body's own defense system. The vector they used,
the ad NO virus, is basically a common cold virus.
Speaker 2: Your body knows what.
Speaker 1: It is and knows to attack it right.
Speaker 3: So when they injected a massive dose of it directly
into Jesse's liver, his immune system didn't see a cure.
It saw a massive, overwhelming viral invasion. You panicked, it
went nuclear. It's a phenomenon called a cytokine storm. His
immune system just attacked everything in sight, including his own organs.
Within an hour, he was jaundiced, his kidneys shut down,
then his lungs fail.
Speaker 2: He was brain dead in four days.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just a freak accident, was it. When
the of FDA started investigating, when they pulled on that thread,
the whole thing just fell apart.
Speaker 2: It was ugly.
Speaker 3: It turned out the lead scientist had a major financial
stake in the biotech company that was running the trial,
a huge conflict of interest.
Speaker 2: Oh but worse than.
Speaker 3: That, they had ignored clear warning signs in the pre
clinical trials. Monkeys they tested this on had died from
similar liver failure. They hadn't fully disclosed that risk to
Jesse or his family in the consent forms.
Speaker 1: That's not just a mistake, that's negligence, that's a cover up.
Speaker 3: It was, and it was a disaster for the field.
The FDA shut it down, and it basically froze gene
therapy research for a decade. But it taught us a
lesson that we seem to have to keep relearning, which
is biology is messy.
Speaker 2: It's chaotic.
Speaker 3: You cannot treat the human body like a piece of
computer code. You can't just install a patch without expecting
the rest of the system to push back, sometimes violently.
Speaker 1: Which makes what happened in twenty eighteen even more insane
because apparently the scientist Hijiankoui did not learn that lesson
at all.
Speaker 2: He Jiankouey the Crisper babies.
Speaker 3: This is where we moved from institutional failure to just
well to rogue.
Speaker 1: EGO explain that difference for me. The Gelsinger case was
a university trial with an institution behind it. Jiuan Kouy
was what just some guy in a.
Speaker 3: Lab by himself, not quite a garage, but he was
operating in near total secrecy. He recruited couples where the
father was HIV positive. He then used the Crisper gene
editing tool, which acts like a pair of molecular scissors,
to edit their embryos. He disabled a gene called CCR five.
Speaker 1: And why CCR five? What does that do?
Speaker 3: CCR five is basically the doorknob that the HIV virus
uses to get into ourselves. If you break off the doorknob,
the person becomes highly resistant to HIV infection.
Speaker 1: Okay, so on the surface, that sounds I mean, it
sounds good, doesn't it preventing HIV?
Speaker 2: No, that is the trap. That's the seductive logic.
Speaker 3: First of all, the father of these twin girls was
HIV positive, but we have excellent standard treatments to prevent
transmission to a child. There was absolutely zero medical necessity
to edit these embryos.
Speaker 2: The babies were not at high risk.
Speaker 1: So if he didn't do it to save the babies.
Speaker 2: He did it to be the first. He did it
to go down in history.
Speaker 3: It was about his legacy, not their health, and the
risks he took with their lives were astronomical.
Speaker 2: How So, Crisper isn't perfect.
Speaker 3: Especially back then, it can make off target cuts. You
might be aiming for the CCR five gene and you
accidentally snip a gene nearby that's responsible for suppress and cancer.
Speaker 1: And unlike Jesse Gelsinger, where the tragedy, as horrible as
it was ended with him, these were embryos. These girls
are alive.
Speaker 3: They're growing up exactly, and if they have children one
day that edit.
Speaker 2: Gets passed down.
Speaker 1: It's in the gene pool forever.
Speaker 3: This is called germline editing. He permanently altered the human
gene pool. He made a decision for every future generation
of that family without their consent.
Speaker 1: And we're still learning about c's. It's not just an
HIV doornumb.
Speaker 2: Not at all.
Speaker 3: We now know it's involved in brain development and our
immune response to other diseases like West Nile virus and
the flu. So by disabling it to prevent one thing,
he might have made them more susceptible to other things,
or even affected their cognitive function.
Speaker 2: We just don't know.
Speaker 1: The scientific backlash was immediate, Oh, it was universal.
Speaker 3: Scientists weren't just angry, they were terrified he had bypassed
all ethical oversight. He'd forged approval documents, and he had
experimented on children in a way that was illegal in
almost every developed.
Speaker 1: Country, and you went to prison for it.
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 3: He was sentenced to three years in twenty nineteen. But
the damage was done. The Pandora's box was opened. It
showed the world that if a rogue actor with enough
money and ambition wants to ignore the rules, the technology
is now accessible.
Speaker 2: Enough that they can try.
Speaker 1: It's the contrast between Jesse Gelsinger and he John Koy
that really strikes me. Jesse's case was institutional failure, a
whole system getting sloppy and greedy. Right Hubris he Jan
Kui is a singular rogue ego, But in both cases
the result is the same. Human safety took a back
seat to the desire for a scientific breakthrough.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: It's the classic Jurassic Park quote, isn't it. Your scientists
were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they
didn't stop to think if they should.
Speaker 1: So true, Okay, let's thread this needle towards something a
little less physically dangerous, but still dangerous in its own way.
Let's talk about bad science, right.
Speaker 3: And bad data, because not every dangerous experiment involves explosions
or viruses. Sometimes the danger is to the truth itself.
Speaker 1: And we have to talk about arsenic life. Do you
remember this whole thing from twenty ten?
Speaker 2: Vividly?
Speaker 3: I remember it so well. NASA held this huge press conference,
it was all over the news. A team led by
a scientist named Felisa wolf Simon claimed that they'd found
a bacteria in Mono Lake, California that was unlike anything
else on Earth.
Speaker 1: Mono Lake, that's that really weird, super salty, arsenic rich lake.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, a very extreme environment. And the claim was
that this bacteria gfaj one was building its DNA using
arsenic instead of phosphorus.
Speaker 1: Okay, unpacked that for us? Why is that a big deal?
Speaker 3: Well, for everyone listening. Phosphorus is one of the six
essential building.
Speaker 2: Blocks of all life as we know it.
Speaker 3: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus.
Speaker 2: It forms the backbone of DNA.
Speaker 3: The idea that something could just swap it out for arsenic,
which is in the same column on the periodic table
but is.
Speaker 2: Usually highly toxic, it was revolutionary.
Speaker 1: It would rewrite the textbooks.
Speaker 2: It would rewrite the biology textbooks.
Speaker 3: It implied that alien life on other planets could look
totally fundamentally different from US.
Speaker 1: I remember the headlines. It was all NASA finds alien
life on Earth. It felt like we were moments away
from meeting et.
Speaker 2: The hype was immense.
Speaker 3: But then the scientific process, the real scientific process, kicked in.
Speaker 1: Which isn't about the press conference.
Speaker 3: No, it's about replication. Other labs around the world got
samples of the bacteria. They tried to replicate the experiment.
They grew it, they tested it, nothing, They couldn't make
it work.
Speaker 1: So it was really going on. Was it a hoax?
Speaker 3: It wasn't a hoax. It was a massive error in interpretation.
It turns out the bacteria wasn't using arsenic in its DNA.
It was just incredibly good at scavenging the tiny trace
amounts of phosphors that were still left in the sample.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't evolving. It was starving.
Speaker 3: It was starving, and it was coping. The original paper
was eventually retracted by the journal Science. The team had
just overinterpreted their data. They saw what they wanted to see.
It's a text bookcase of confirmation bias.
Speaker 1: And while nobody died from that, it still did damage
didn't it.
Speaker 3: Of course, it wasted millions of dollars in grant money,
years of research time for other labs trying to replicate it,
and it erodes public trust in science. When you make
a massive claim, you need massive, undeniable evidence, and they
just didn't have it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of trust and well paperwork, we have to touch
on the EcoHealth Alliance. This is a very recent thread
from five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a bureaucratic shutdown, but it's a really
significant one. The US government banned the EcoHealth Alliance and
its president, Peter Dazac from receiving any federal funding for
five years.
Speaker 1: And these were the people researching bat coronaviruses.
Speaker 3: Yes, and the issue wasn't necessarily that they proved they
created some monster bug.
Speaker 2: It was about the rules. It was about compliance.
Speaker 1: What kind of research were they doing.
Speaker 3: They were involved in what's called gain of function research.
That's where you deliberately make a virus more active or
more transmissible in a lab so you can study.
Speaker 2: How it works.
Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly high risk.
Speaker 3: It is the definition of high risk work. And because
of that, it requires perfect transparency, perfect documentation, perfect reporting.
Investigators found they hadn't properly reported experiments, and that crucial
safety documentation was missing.
Speaker 1: It sounds boring paperwork, but when you're dealing with potential
pandemic causing pathogens, the paperwork is literally the firewall between
safety and a global disaster.
Speaker 2: That is exactly it. The oversight is the safety mechanism.
Speaker 3: So the government stance was, if you can't follow the
basic administrative rules, you lose the privilege of doing the
most dangerous science.
Speaker 1: Okay, wow, we have been through a lot of heavy
dark stuff, bacteria clouds, prisoners with mosquitoes, gene editing gone wrong.
I promised the listeners we would end on something of
a good note, a sign of progress. Yes, let's talk
about the beagles.
Speaker 3: The twenty twenty five beagles shut down. This is a
great story.
Speaker 1: Actually, for decades, the NIH used beagles in their labs
for research, mostly on sepsis and infectious diseases. And for
anyone listening who's asking why beagles, the answer is heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: It's because they're docile. They're forgiving, they're bread not to
fight back.
Speaker 1: It's awful, they're easy to handle and for years, animal
welfare groups were you know, screaming about this. Photos circulated
online of these dogs being deliberately infected, kept in restraints.
Speaker 3: It was ugly, it was very ugly, But the scientific
argument was also shifting.
Speaker 2: And this is the.
Speaker 3: Important It wasn't just about feeling bad for the puppies.
Speaker 1: It was about the data.
Speaker 2: It was about the data.
Speaker 3: Scientists were increasingly realizing that the results from dogs, they
often didn't translate well to humans. A dog's immune system
isn't a human's immune system. So we were hurting these
dogs for data that was often useless or even misleading
when we tried to apply it to people.
Speaker 1: So is bad science and bad ethics the worst combination.
Speaker 3: So in May of twenty twenty five, the NIH quietly
confirmed that they had shut down their last in house
beagle lab.
Speaker 1: And here's the really cool part. What are they using instead?
Speaker 2: AI?
Speaker 1: Artificial intelligence?
Speaker 3: Artificial intelligence modeling. We now have computer simulations that can
predict how a disease moves through a biological system, or
how a drug interacts with cells, and they can do
it better and more accurately than an animal model can.
Speaker 1: This feels like a genuine win win. It's better science
because the simulations are more accurate for humans, and it's
better ethics because we aren't harming man's best friend to
do it it is.
Speaker 3: It's a perfect example of technology finally allowing us to
retire a cruel and outdated practice. It shows that science
can evolve, it can get better.
Speaker 2: We don't have to keep.
Speaker 3: Doing things the way we did them in nineteen fifty
or nineteen seventy just because that's how we've always done it.
Speaker 1: So after all of this, what does it all mean.
We've pulled on all these different threads, from the fog
of San Francisco to the digital labs of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: I think the common thread, the one that ties all
of these stories together, is that science is incredibly powerful,
but it is not inherently good. It's a tool, and
like any power tool, if you take off the safety guards,
someone's going to get hurt or in these cases, people's
lives are ruined or loss.
Speaker 1: It's about people, isn't it. At the end of the day.
Whether it's the arrogance of the Navy in nineteen fifty,
or the desperation of the gene therapy researchers in ninety nine,
or the massive ego of Hijion Kouei, it's human nature
crashing into scientific capability.
Speaker 3: And it's about consent. That is the bright red line.
You cannot use people as a means to an end.
You cannot treat a city like a Petri dish. You
can't treat a prisoner like a labyrinth, and you can't
treat an embryo like a software program.
Speaker 2: You're debugging.
Speaker 3: The moment you stop seeing the subject as a human
being with rights an agency, you've crossed the line.
Speaker 1: Here's the thought I want to leave everyone with. We
look back at Operation Ceespry or the prisoner experiments, and
we think, how could they That's barbaric. We would never
do that now. But history is a moving target.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: So I have to ask, what are we doing today
right now? Maybe with artificial intelligence, maybe with the way
we harvest massive amounts of personal data, maybe with new
neural implants or brain computer interfaces. What are we doing
that people in twenty fifty are going to look back
on and say, I cannot believe they allowed that.
Speaker 3: That is the really uncomfortable question, isn't it. We always
think we're the enlightened ones standing at the end of history,
but we probably have our own massive blind spots, right now.
Speaker 1: We absolutely do, and that's where we want to hear
from you. Where do you draw the line? Is there
ever a I mean a truly desperate one, like a
global plague or an asteroid headed for Earth where the
potential cure or solution justifies the risk to a few
people without their consent, or is consent always one hundred
percent absolute, no matter what.
Speaker 3: It's the ultimate ethical dilemma, the trolley problem, but with
beakers and lab coats exactly.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think, Drop a comment, send
us a message on social media. We really want to
know where you stand on this.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us on this one. I know it
was a heavy thread, but it's a really important one.
Speaker 1: It really is. Thanks for listening to thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Stay curious and stay skeptical.