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Speaker 1: I want you to try a little mental exercise with me,

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just for a second. Okay, Imagine you're standing on the

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deck of a ship. It's September nineteen fifty, you're out

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in the Pacific, maybe I don't know, two miles off

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the coast of San Francisco.

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Speaker 2: You could feel that Bay Area chill exactly.

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Speaker 1: That classic crisp bear and you can see the Golden

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gate Bridge, you know, just looming through the fog. To

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anyone watching from the shore, you just look like a

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standard Navy mind sweeper.

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Speaker 2: Just a normal day, a routine patrol, just.

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Speaker 1: A routine patrol, keeping the coast safe. But the cargo

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on that ship it's anything but routine.

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Speaker 3: No, And the mission it's not about sweeping for mines,

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not at all.

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Speaker 1: You see these crew members on deck and they're wrestling

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with these huge industrial hoses and then at a specific

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command they open.

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Speaker 2: The valves and it's not water.

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Speaker 1: It's not water. They're pumping out this thick, synthetic fog.

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It's heavy. It kind of clings to the surface of

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the water and then the wind just catches it and

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starts pushing it, starts pushing it. Yeah, right towards the city.

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Speaker 3: Like a blanket, and you have to think within an

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hour that fog is moving through the streets. It's seeping

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under door cracks, it's drifting into open classroom windows, it's

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getting sucked into the ventilation systems of hospitals.

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Speaker 1: If you were just a person on the street that day,

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you probably thought, oh, it's just a foggy day in

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the bay.

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Speaker 2: Of course, nothing unusual.

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Speaker 1: But you were breathing in biological agents. Your kids were

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breathing them in, the most vulnerable people, patients and hospitals

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were breathing them in. And the people who did it well,

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they were your own.

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Speaker 2: Government, and the most shilling part of all of it.

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They were taking notes, they were counting, just counting the particles.

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Speaker 1: Welcome back to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host and with

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me is our expert. Today we are pulling on a

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thread that is, frankly, it's pretty disturbing. It is. Usually

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we look at the threads of history that lead to

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breakthroughs or scientific marvels, but today.

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Speaker 3: Today we're looking at the threads that unravel into f disasters.

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We're looking at the well, the dark side of the

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scientific method. Yeah, we've got a stack of documents here.

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Some are declassified from the fifties, some are from just

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last year, twenty twenty five, and they all document what

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happens when the question can we do this? Completely drowns

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out the question should we do this?

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Speaker 1: That's a great way to put it. It's a distinction

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that seems so obvious now, right.

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Speaker 2: It seems obvious, But looking at this.

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Speaker 1: Research, it clearly wasn't. We're talking about germ warfare tests

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on American cities, prisoners being used as like human sponges

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for pesticides and genetic editing that went casually horrifically wrong.

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Speaker 3: And I think the key thing for you to keep

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in mind as we go through this is that these

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weren't you know, mad scientists in a cartoon basement with

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lightning crashing outside.

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Speaker 1: Right. This wasn't Frankenstein.

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Speaker 3: No, These projects were funded by the Pentagon, by the NIH,

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by major universities. This was institutional science.

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Speaker 1: That's what's so scary about it, the banality of it. Yeah,

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so let's go back to that ship. Let's go back

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to San Francisco. This was called Operations Cease FRAE. Why

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on earth did the US Navy think it was a

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good idea to blanket eight hundred thousand people with bacteria.

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Speaker 3: Well, context is it's everything. Really, you have to put

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yourself in the headspace of nineteen.

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Speaker 1: Fifty the Cold War.

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Speaker 2: The Cold War.

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Speaker 3: Isn't just a concept, it's this terrifying, everyday reality. The

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US military was absolutely convinced, I mean one hundred percent

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certain that the Soviet Union had.

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Speaker 1: Biological weapons like what kind of stuff.

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Speaker 3: Anthrax, bubonic plague, you name it, And they believe the

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Soviets wouldn't hesitate to use them on a coastal city

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like San Francisco or New York.

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Speaker 1: So this was was it a defensive drill? Were they

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trying to figure out how to protect people.

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Speaker 2: In their minds? Yes, that was a justification. They needed

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a model.

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Speaker 3: They had to know if a Soviet submarine surface and

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spray of virus, how would the wind carry it, would

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the tall buildings block it, would.

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Speaker 1: It reach the suburbs, how far would it go? All

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of that?

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Speaker 3: And you can't really simulate that in a wind tunnel,

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not with the technology they had in nineteen fifty.

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Speaker 1: So they needed a city.

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Speaker 2: They needed a city, a real world Petrie Dish precisely.

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Speaker 3: They needed that complex urban environment with hills and fog

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and skyscrapers and a dense population to see how the

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airflow actually worked.

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Speaker 1: Okay, okay, but hold on, they didn't spray anthrax on them.

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I'm assuming, or at least hoping, they weren't trying to

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just wipe out San Francisco to prove a point about

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wind pattern.

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Speaker 3: No, no, of course not. They used what they called simulants.

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They chose two specific bacteria, Bacillisk will begi and Seratiu marceessens.

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Speaker 1: And the thinking was that these were harmless.

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Speaker 3: They believed they were completely harmless stand ins for the

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really deadly stuff Siatia.

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Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard of that. Isn't that the

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stuff that makes that pink ring in your shower if

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you don't scrub it enough.

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Speaker 2: That's the one.

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Speaker 3: It's a really common soil bacteria. And the Navy scientists

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they loved it for one very specific reason, which was

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it produces a bright red pigment, so it's essentially color coded. Ah,

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if you put a Petrie dish out on a street

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corner and a particle of Serratia lands on it, the

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culture that grows turns bright red. It made tracking the

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spread of their fog incredibly easy.

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Speaker 1: So the logic was just, well, it's in the soil,

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it's in the shower, it must be harmless.

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Speaker 3: That was the core assumption. They viewed it as biologically

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in a tracer bullet essentially.

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Speaker 1: And did it work from their perspective.

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Speaker 3: Oh, it worked better than they could have imagined. They

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set up forty three monitoring stations all across the Bay

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Area rooftops, street corners, parks, and the data they got

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back was just staggering.

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Speaker 2: The spray covered everything, everything, everything.

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Speaker 3: They estimated that nearly every single one of the eight

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hundred thousand residents inhaled millions of spores millions millions per person.

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It proved without a doubt that a biological attack would

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be devastatingly effective. So from a purely strategic military standpoint,

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the experiment was a massive success.

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Speaker 1: They proved the vulnerability of the entire West Coast exactly.

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But biologically, I feel a very big but coming.

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Speaker 2: Biologically it was a catastrophe.

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Speaker 3: See that harmless assumption has well, it has a fatal flaw.

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Ceratia is what's known as an opportunistic pathogen. So if

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you're healthy, you breathe it in your immune system z

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aps it, you're fine.

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Speaker 2: You never know.

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Speaker 3: But if your elderly, or if your immune system is

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compromised for any reason, or and this is the key part,

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if you're recovering from surgery, it's.

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Speaker 1: A totally different story.

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Speaker 3: It finds a way in, it sees an opportunity. And

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about a week after the spray, doctors at Stanford Hospital started.

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Speaker 2: Scratching their heads what was happening.

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Speaker 3: They had a sudden, weird influx of eleven patients, all

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with severe urinary tract infections. Now, UTIs are common, but

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not like this, and not caused by this specific, very

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rare bacteria.

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Speaker 1: And when they cultured the samples from these patients.

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Speaker 2: They saw the red pigment.

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Speaker 3: Yea, it was Seratium arsessens, the exact same bacterium the

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Navy was spraying all over the city.

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Speaker 1: This is where I get to the story of Edward Nevin.

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Speaker 3: Edward Nevin, Yes, he was a retired pipe fitter. He

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was in that very hospital recovering from a routine prostate surgery.

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He was exactly the kind of person the Navy.

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Speaker 2: Got to account for. Someone vulnerable, someone vulnerable.

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Speaker 3: The bacteria got into his bloodstream, probably through his catheter

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and it colonized his heart valves. This wasn't a mild

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infection for him.

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Speaker 2: It killed him.

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Speaker 1: And his family had no idea what really happened.

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Speaker 3: How could they The Navy didn't announce the test, The

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public didn't know. The doctors were baffled because at the time,

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ciratia infections were almost unheard of.

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Speaker 1: So when did the truth come out?

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Speaker 3: Not until nineteen seventy six, twenty six years later. It

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came out during a series of Senate hearings on government

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intelligence activities.

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Speaker 1: Twenty six years.

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Speaker 3: Can you imagine being his grandson reading in the newspaper

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that your grandfather wasn't just sick, that he was essentially

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collateral damage in a secret wind pattern test.

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Speaker 1: The violation of consent is just it's breath taking. This

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brings up the whole concept of informed consent. We talk

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about it all the time. Now you sign a waiver

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before you get a flu shot. Did that concept just

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not exist for the military in nineteen fifty.

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Speaker 3: It existed, but it was completely overruled by the idea

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of national security.

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Speaker 1: The trump card. It was the.

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Speaker 2: Ultimate trump card.

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Speaker 3: The calculus was cold, It was okay, we might hurt

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a few people, but if we don't understand how these

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bioweapons work, the Soviets might kill millions. It's the ultimate

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utilitarian trap.

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Speaker 1: And because they classified the entire operation, there was no

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oversight none.

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Speaker 3: There was no one from the outside, no civilian board

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to say, hey, uh, guys, maybe spraying of bacteria, even

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one you think is harmless, directly onto a hospital is

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a fundamentally bad idea.

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Speaker 1: It's the arrogance of it that gets me. The idea

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that this small group of people in a room decided

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the acceptable risk for almost a million others who had

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no say, no.

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Speaker 3: Knowledge, nothing, and that attitude. Sadly, it didn't just stop

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at the coastline. It moved inland. It moved into our

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prisons and onto our own military.

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Speaker 1: Ships, which brings us to our next loose thread.

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Speaker 2: The captives subjects.

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Speaker 1: We're shifting from un witting civilians to people who on

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paper technically volunteered. But I used that word very loosely.

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Very Let's talk about the University of California, San Francisco

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UCSF and their experiments on prisoners in the sixties and seventies.

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Speaker 3: This is another one that just flew under the radar

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for so long. This was happening at the California Medical

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Facility in Vacaville.

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Speaker 1: And it's important to understand who the subjects were here.

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Speaker 3: Absolutely, these were not sick inmates who were hoping for

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a cure for some condition they had.

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Speaker 2: These were healthy men.

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Speaker 1: They're just human guinea pigs.

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Speaker 2: That's essentially what it was.

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Speaker 3: Yes, researchers from UCSF and other places used them because

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they were quite literally a captive.

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Speaker 2: Audience, easy to access, easy to.

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Speaker 3: Access, They lived in a totally controlled environment, and they

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had very very little power to say no.

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Speaker 1: The details of these experiments are just yeah, they're visceral.

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They weren't testing a new kind of aspirin.

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Speaker 3: No, they were rubbing pesticides and herbicides directly onto the

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prisoner's skin to see how much was absorbed into the bloodstream.

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They were injecting experimental chemicals directly into their veins.

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Speaker 1: And this one, this one really got to me when

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I was reading the files. They strapped cages of live

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mosquitos to the prisoner's arms.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, to test insect reactions and new repellents.

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Speaker 1: Can you even imagine that just sitting there in a

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cell or a lab room with a cage of hungry

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mosquitos strapped to you, just waiting to be bitten over

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and over and over again.

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Speaker 2: For what for data?

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Speaker 3: Pharmaceutical companies and chemical manufacturers. They wanted human exposure data.

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And this is where the ethics get really.

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Speaker 1: Really murky, because the inmates were paid.

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Speaker 2: They were paid, but how much.

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Speaker 1: Not much, I'm guessing small.

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Speaker 3: Amounts by any outside standard, maybe thirty dollars a month.

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But you have to understand the prison economy of the

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nineteen sixties.

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Speaker 1: Thirty bucks was a fortune.

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Speaker 2: It was a fortune.

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Speaker 3: It could buy you protection, extra food, cigarettes, special privileges.

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Speaker 2: It could fundamentally.

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Speaker 3: Change your day to day existence. So can you really

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call that voluntary consent?

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Speaker 1: No, it's I'm a coercion. That's what it is. If

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you're in that harshened environment and someone offers you something

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that dramatically improves your quality of life, you aren't really

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free to choose.

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Speaker 2: You're desperate. You're desperate exactly.

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Speaker 3: And on top of that, later investigations showed the consent

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forms were a total joke. They were often missing or

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they were incomplete. The prisoners likely had no real idea

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about the long term cancer risks of having experimental herbicides

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rubbed into their pores day.

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Speaker 1: After day, and this went on for a while.

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Speaker 2: It did.

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Speaker 3: The practice wasn't banned in California until nineteen seventy seven,

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but the acknowledgment from the institution that took much much longer.

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Speaker 1: When did UCSF finally apologize.

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Speaker 3: UCSF only formally apologized for their role in this in

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November of twenty.

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Speaker 1: Eight, eighty eighteen.

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Speaker 2: That's practically yesterday, decades of silence.

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Speaker 3: It just shows how hard it is for these massive

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institutions to turn around and admit, you know what, we

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messed up.

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Speaker 2: That was wrong, And.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't just prisoners, it was our own soldiers too.

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We have to talk about Project one twelve and Project.

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Speaker 3: SACHAD, right, SAHAD that stands for Shipboard Hazard and Defense.

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This was happening in the nineteen sixties. It was very

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similar in concept to the San Francisco fog test. The

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military wanted to know how chemical and biological agents would

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affect naval ships at sea, so they used their own

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sailors and marines as the test subjects.

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Speaker 1: Again, the deception is the key here, isn't it. They

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didn't come out and say, hey, we're going to spray

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you with some nerve gas simulants today. I hope you

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don't mind, not even close.

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Speaker 2: They told them this is routine.

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Speaker 1: Training, routine training.

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Speaker 2: So these young.

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Speaker 3: Guys, they're scrubbing decks, they're running drills, doing their jobs,

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and meanwhile a plane flies overhead and they're being sprayed

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with chemicals, seren simulants, incapacitating agents, hallucinogens that cause vomiting

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and disorientation.

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Speaker 1: And they just thought it was part of the drill.

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Speaker 3: They had no idea they were being monitored, the reactions

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were being recorded, but the men themselves didn't know why

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they were suddenly getting sick or dizzy.

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Speaker 1: And the long term consequences of this devastating.

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Speaker 3: Years decades later, these veterans started reporting all sorts of

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chronic health issues, chronic fatigue, debilitating migraines, respiratory problems, major

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cognitive decline, and for the longest time, the VA and

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the government just denied it.

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Speaker 1: Of course, yes, because the program was classified.

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Speaker 3: Exactly, you can't claim benefits for an injury that was

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caused by a program that officially doesn't even exist.

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Speaker 1: No change.

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Speaker 3: It took decades of these veterans speaking out, finding each other,

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comparing notes, and finally, political pressure forced the declassification of

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documents that proved thousands of service members were deliberately exposed.

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Speaker 1: It just brings us right back to that power dynamic.

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Whether you're a prisoner in vacaville or a sailor on

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a destroyer, the institution holds all the cards. All that

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they say, jump, you say how high? They say, stand here?

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You stand there? And that obedience, that trust, it was exploited.

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Speaker 3: It raises a really profound question for anyone listening. Is

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consent ever truly valid if there's a massive of power imbalance.

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If your boss asks you to do something risky, or

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your commanding officer or your warden, can you really truly

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say no without consequence?

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Speaker 2: History suggests that often the answer is no.

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Speaker 1: It's a chilling thought. Okay, let's shift gears a little bit.

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We've talked about external exposure, chemicals, bacteria. Now let's go internal.

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Let's talk about the very fabric of life itself. Genetics.

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Speaker 3: This is where the stakes get even higher, if that's

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even possible, because when you mess with chemicals, you hurt

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an individual. When you mess with genetics, potentially you hurt

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the entire human gene pool.

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Speaker 1: We're going to look at two cases here that are

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just there. Are world's apart in some ways but so

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similar in others. Let's jump forward. We're leaving the Cold

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War paranoia behind it, moving to the late nineteen.

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Speaker 2: Nineties, the era of dot com optimism.

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Speaker 1: Totally. The Internet is booming, the human genome project is

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nearing completion, and medicine feels like it's on the verge

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of solving everything.

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Speaker 3: And the absolute height of that optimism was gene therapy.

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The nineties were kind of the wild West for this field.

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Speaker 1: The theory was so elegant, though, oh it was beautiful.

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Speaker 3: If a disease is caused by a single broken gene,

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you don't just treat the symptoms forever.

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Speaker 2: You go in and you fix the gene. You replace

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the flat tire. Simple.

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Speaker 1: But you can't just pop a microscopic pill that changes

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your DNA. You need a delivery system.

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Speaker 3: You need a delivery system, and nature has already perfected one,

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the virus.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: Viruses are basically biological machines that are designed to do

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one thing. Break into a cell and dump their own

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genetic cargo inside.

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Speaker 2: So scientists thought, great, let's.

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Speaker 3: Just hollow out of virus, take out the infectious parts,

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put in the healthy human gene we want, and inject it.

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Speaker 1: It sounds like biohacking.

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Speaker 3: It is exactly biohacking. And that brings us to Jesse Delsinger.

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It's nineteen ninety nine.

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Speaker 2: He's eighteen years old, just a kid, just a kid.

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Speaker 3: He has a rare metabolic disorder OTC deficiency. It means

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his liver can't process ammonia properly.

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Speaker 1: But and looking at the files on this, this seems

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like the most crucial detail of the whole story.

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Speaker 3: He wasn't dying, was he, No, That is the absolute

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core of the tragedy. He had a mild form of

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the disease. He managed it with a strict diet and medication.

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Speaker 2: He had a normal life ahead of him.

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Speaker 1: So why volunteer for such a risky experimental trial.

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Speaker 2: Pure altruism.

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Speaker 3: He wanted to help the babies who were born with

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the severe fatal version of his disease. He thought if

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this worked, it could save them.

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Speaker 1: So he goes to the University of Pennsylvania. They inject

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him with this modified virus and danovirus carrying the corrective gene.

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Speaker 3: What went wrong The researchers just they completely underestimated the

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power of the body's own defense system. The vector they used,

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the ad NO virus, is basically a common cold virus.

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Speaker 2: Your body knows what.

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Speaker 1: It is and knows to attack it right.

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Speaker 3: So when they injected a massive dose of it directly

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into Jesse's liver, his immune system didn't see a cure.

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It saw a massive, overwhelming viral invasion. You panicked, it

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went nuclear. It's a phenomenon called a cytokine storm. His

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immune system just attacked everything in sight, including his own organs.

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Within an hour, he was jaundiced, his kidneys shut down,

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then his lungs fail.

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Speaker 2: He was brain dead in four days.

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Speaker 1: And this wasn't just a freak accident, was it. When

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the of FDA started investigating, when they pulled on that thread,

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the whole thing just fell apart.

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Speaker 2: It was ugly.

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Speaker 3: It turned out the lead scientist had a major financial

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stake in the biotech company that was running the trial,

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a huge conflict of interest.

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Speaker 2: Oh but worse than.

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Speaker 3: That, they had ignored clear warning signs in the pre

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clinical trials. Monkeys they tested this on had died from

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similar liver failure. They hadn't fully disclosed that risk to

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Jesse or his family in the consent forms.

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Speaker 1: That's not just a mistake, that's negligence, that's a cover up.

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Speaker 3: It was, and it was a disaster for the field.

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The FDA shut it down, and it basically froze gene

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therapy research for a decade. But it taught us a

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lesson that we seem to have to keep relearning, which

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is biology is messy.

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Speaker 2: It's chaotic.

401
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Speaker 3: You cannot treat the human body like a piece of

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computer code. You can't just install a patch without expecting

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the rest of the system to push back, sometimes violently.

404
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Speaker 1: Which makes what happened in twenty eighteen even more insane

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because apparently the scientist Hijiankoui did not learn that lesson

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at all.

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Speaker 2: He Jiankouey the Crisper babies.

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Speaker 3: This is where we moved from institutional failure to just

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well to rogue.

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Speaker 1: EGO explain that difference for me. The Gelsinger case was

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a university trial with an institution behind it. Jiuan Kouy

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was what just some guy in a.

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Speaker 3: Lab by himself, not quite a garage, but he was

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operating in near total secrecy. He recruited couples where the

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father was HIV positive. He then used the Crisper gene

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editing tool, which acts like a pair of molecular scissors,

417
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to edit their embryos. He disabled a gene called CCR five.

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Speaker 1: And why CCR five? What does that do?

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Speaker 3: CCR five is basically the doorknob that the HIV virus

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uses to get into ourselves. If you break off the doorknob,

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the person becomes highly resistant to HIV infection.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so on the surface, that sounds I mean, it

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sounds good, doesn't it preventing HIV?

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Speaker 2: No, that is the trap. That's the seductive logic.

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Speaker 3: First of all, the father of these twin girls was

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HIV positive, but we have excellent standard treatments to prevent

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transmission to a child. There was absolutely zero medical necessity

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to edit these embryos.

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Speaker 2: The babies were not at high risk.

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Speaker 1: So if he didn't do it to save the babies.

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Speaker 2: He did it to be the first. He did it

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to go down in history.

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Speaker 3: It was about his legacy, not their health, and the

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risks he took with their lives were astronomical.

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Speaker 2: How So, Crisper isn't perfect.

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Speaker 3: Especially back then, it can make off target cuts. You

437
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might be aiming for the CCR five gene and you

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accidentally snip a gene nearby that's responsible for suppress and cancer.

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Speaker 1: And unlike Jesse Gelsinger, where the tragedy, as horrible as

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it was ended with him, these were embryos. These girls

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are alive.

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Speaker 3: They're growing up exactly, and if they have children one

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day that edit.

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Speaker 2: Gets passed down.

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Speaker 1: It's in the gene pool forever.

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Speaker 3: This is called germline editing. He permanently altered the human

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gene pool. He made a decision for every future generation

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of that family without their consent.

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Speaker 1: And we're still learning about c's. It's not just an

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HIV doornumb.

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Speaker 2: Not at all.

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Speaker 3: We now know it's involved in brain development and our

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immune response to other diseases like West Nile virus and

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the flu. So by disabling it to prevent one thing,

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he might have made them more susceptible to other things,

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or even affected their cognitive function.

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Speaker 2: We just don't know.

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Speaker 1: The scientific backlash was immediate, Oh, it was universal.

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Speaker 3: Scientists weren't just angry, they were terrified he had bypassed

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all ethical oversight. He'd forged approval documents, and he had

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experimented on children in a way that was illegal in

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almost every developed.

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Speaker 1: Country, and you went to prison for it.

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Speaker 2: He did.

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Speaker 3: He was sentenced to three years in twenty nineteen. But

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the damage was done. The Pandora's box was opened. It

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showed the world that if a rogue actor with enough

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money and ambition wants to ignore the rules, the technology

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is now accessible.

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Speaker 2: Enough that they can try.

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Speaker 1: It's the contrast between Jesse Gelsinger and he John Koy

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that really strikes me. Jesse's case was institutional failure, a

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whole system getting sloppy and greedy. Right Hubris he Jan

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Kui is a singular rogue ego, But in both cases

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the result is the same. Human safety took a back

476
00:21:07,759 --> 00:21:09,920
seat to the desire for a scientific breakthrough.

477
00:21:10,039 --> 00:21:10,519
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

478
00:21:10,599 --> 00:21:13,559
Speaker 3: It's the classic Jurassic Park quote, isn't it. Your scientists

479
00:21:13,559 --> 00:21:15,440
were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they

480
00:21:15,440 --> 00:21:16,880
didn't stop to think if they should.

481
00:21:17,279 --> 00:21:20,880
Speaker 1: So true, Okay, let's thread this needle towards something a

482
00:21:20,880 --> 00:21:24,119
little less physically dangerous, but still dangerous in its own way.

483
00:21:24,519 --> 00:21:26,680
Let's talk about bad science, right.

484
00:21:26,680 --> 00:21:31,440
Speaker 3: And bad data, because not every dangerous experiment involves explosions

485
00:21:31,480 --> 00:21:35,559
or viruses. Sometimes the danger is to the truth itself.

486
00:21:35,279 --> 00:21:37,160
Speaker 1: And we have to talk about arsenic life. Do you

487
00:21:37,240 --> 00:21:39,279
remember this whole thing from twenty ten?

488
00:21:39,519 --> 00:21:39,960
Speaker 2: Vividly?

489
00:21:40,039 --> 00:21:43,000
Speaker 3: I remember it so well. NASA held this huge press conference,

490
00:21:43,039 --> 00:21:45,440
it was all over the news. A team led by

491
00:21:45,480 --> 00:21:48,880
a scientist named Felisa wolf Simon claimed that they'd found

492
00:21:48,880 --> 00:21:53,400
a bacteria in Mono Lake, California that was unlike anything

493
00:21:53,440 --> 00:21:54,200
else on Earth.

494
00:21:54,359 --> 00:21:57,839
Speaker 1: Mono Lake, that's that really weird, super salty, arsenic rich lake.

495
00:21:57,799 --> 00:22:00,680
Speaker 3: Right exactly, a very extreme environment. And the claim was

496
00:22:00,720 --> 00:22:04,400
that this bacteria gfaj one was building its DNA using

497
00:22:04,680 --> 00:22:06,400
arsenic instead of phosphorus.

498
00:22:06,440 --> 00:22:08,599
Speaker 1: Okay, unpacked that for us? Why is that a big deal?

499
00:22:08,839 --> 00:22:12,000
Speaker 3: Well, for everyone listening. Phosphorus is one of the six

500
00:22:12,279 --> 00:22:13,759
essential building.

501
00:22:13,359 --> 00:22:16,039
Speaker 2: Blocks of all life as we know it.

502
00:22:15,640 --> 00:22:20,480
Speaker 3: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus.

503
00:22:21,119 --> 00:22:22,799
Speaker 2: It forms the backbone of DNA.

504
00:22:22,880 --> 00:22:25,240
Speaker 3: The idea that something could just swap it out for arsenic,

505
00:22:25,319 --> 00:22:27,720
which is in the same column on the periodic table

506
00:22:27,759 --> 00:22:28,000
but is.

507
00:22:28,039 --> 00:22:31,119
Speaker 2: Usually highly toxic, it was revolutionary.

508
00:22:31,240 --> 00:22:32,519
Speaker 1: It would rewrite the textbooks.

509
00:22:32,599 --> 00:22:34,359
Speaker 2: It would rewrite the biology textbooks.

510
00:22:34,440 --> 00:22:37,039
Speaker 3: It implied that alien life on other planets could look

511
00:22:37,200 --> 00:22:39,039
totally fundamentally different from US.

512
00:22:39,079 --> 00:22:42,039
Speaker 1: I remember the headlines. It was all NASA finds alien

513
00:22:42,079 --> 00:22:46,039
life on Earth. It felt like we were moments away

514
00:22:46,160 --> 00:22:47,880
from meeting et.

515
00:22:48,279 --> 00:22:49,400
Speaker 2: The hype was immense.

516
00:22:49,880 --> 00:22:54,519
Speaker 3: But then the scientific process, the real scientific process, kicked in.

517
00:22:54,480 --> 00:22:55,839
Speaker 1: Which isn't about the press conference.

518
00:22:55,880 --> 00:22:58,559
Speaker 3: No, it's about replication. Other labs around the world got

519
00:22:58,559 --> 00:23:01,440
samples of the bacteria. They tried to replicate the experiment.

520
00:23:01,480 --> 00:23:03,640
They grew it, they tested it, nothing, They couldn't make

521
00:23:03,680 --> 00:23:03,960
it work.

522
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:05,720
Speaker 1: So it was really going on. Was it a hoax?

523
00:23:06,079 --> 00:23:09,079
Speaker 3: It wasn't a hoax. It was a massive error in interpretation.

524
00:23:09,359 --> 00:23:13,079
It turns out the bacteria wasn't using arsenic in its DNA.

525
00:23:13,240 --> 00:23:16,680
It was just incredibly good at scavenging the tiny trace

526
00:23:16,720 --> 00:23:19,279
amounts of phosphors that were still left in the sample.

527
00:23:19,480 --> 00:23:21,359
Speaker 1: So it wasn't evolving. It was starving.

528
00:23:21,599 --> 00:23:24,480
Speaker 3: It was starving, and it was coping. The original paper

529
00:23:24,559 --> 00:23:27,920
was eventually retracted by the journal Science. The team had

530
00:23:27,960 --> 00:23:30,920
just overinterpreted their data. They saw what they wanted to see.

531
00:23:30,960 --> 00:23:33,960
It's a text bookcase of confirmation bias.

532
00:23:34,240 --> 00:23:37,680
Speaker 1: And while nobody died from that, it still did damage

533
00:23:37,680 --> 00:23:38,119
didn't it.

534
00:23:38,200 --> 00:23:41,400
Speaker 3: Of course, it wasted millions of dollars in grant money,

535
00:23:41,480 --> 00:23:44,559
years of research time for other labs trying to replicate it,

536
00:23:45,079 --> 00:23:48,599
and it erodes public trust in science. When you make

537
00:23:48,640 --> 00:23:52,720
a massive claim, you need massive, undeniable evidence, and they

538
00:23:52,759 --> 00:23:53,519
just didn't have it.

539
00:23:53,559 --> 00:23:56,799
Speaker 1: Speaking of trust and well paperwork, we have to touch

540
00:23:56,799 --> 00:23:59,599
on the EcoHealth Alliance. This is a very recent thread

541
00:23:59,599 --> 00:24:00,920
from five.

542
00:24:00,839 --> 00:24:03,119
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a bureaucratic shutdown, but it's a really

543
00:24:03,119 --> 00:24:06,599
significant one. The US government banned the EcoHealth Alliance and

544
00:24:06,599 --> 00:24:09,799
its president, Peter Dazac from receiving any federal funding for

545
00:24:09,839 --> 00:24:10,440
five years.

546
00:24:10,880 --> 00:24:14,119
Speaker 1: And these were the people researching bat coronaviruses.

547
00:24:14,440 --> 00:24:17,799
Speaker 3: Yes, and the issue wasn't necessarily that they proved they

548
00:24:17,839 --> 00:24:19,240
created some monster bug.

549
00:24:19,599 --> 00:24:21,880
Speaker 2: It was about the rules. It was about compliance.

550
00:24:22,039 --> 00:24:23,400
Speaker 1: What kind of research were they doing.

551
00:24:23,519 --> 00:24:26,200
Speaker 3: They were involved in what's called gain of function research.

552
00:24:26,599 --> 00:24:30,240
That's where you deliberately make a virus more active or

553
00:24:30,240 --> 00:24:32,680
more transmissible in a lab so you can study.

554
00:24:32,359 --> 00:24:33,079
Speaker 2: How it works.

555
00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:35,759
Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly high risk.

556
00:24:35,920 --> 00:24:38,720
Speaker 3: It is the definition of high risk work. And because

557
00:24:38,759 --> 00:24:43,839
of that, it requires perfect transparency, perfect documentation, perfect reporting.

558
00:24:44,279 --> 00:24:47,839
Investigators found they hadn't properly reported experiments, and that crucial

559
00:24:47,880 --> 00:24:49,799
safety documentation was missing.

560
00:24:49,880 --> 00:24:54,079
Speaker 1: It sounds boring paperwork, but when you're dealing with potential

561
00:24:54,559 --> 00:24:59,039
pandemic causing pathogens, the paperwork is literally the firewall between

562
00:24:59,160 --> 00:25:01,039
safety and a global disaster.

563
00:25:01,400 --> 00:25:04,279
Speaker 2: That is exactly it. The oversight is the safety mechanism.

564
00:25:04,359 --> 00:25:06,759
Speaker 3: So the government stance was, if you can't follow the

565
00:25:06,759 --> 00:25:09,920
basic administrative rules, you lose the privilege of doing the

566
00:25:09,920 --> 00:25:10,960
most dangerous science.

567
00:25:11,279 --> 00:25:14,359
Speaker 1: Okay, wow, we have been through a lot of heavy

568
00:25:14,480 --> 00:25:19,559
dark stuff, bacteria clouds, prisoners with mosquitoes, gene editing gone wrong.

569
00:25:19,880 --> 00:25:21,720
I promised the listeners we would end on something of

570
00:25:21,759 --> 00:25:24,680
a good note, a sign of progress. Yes, let's talk

571
00:25:24,680 --> 00:25:25,400
about the beagles.

572
00:25:25,440 --> 00:25:27,839
Speaker 3: The twenty twenty five beagles shut down. This is a

573
00:25:27,839 --> 00:25:28,519
great story.

574
00:25:28,559 --> 00:25:32,240
Speaker 1: Actually, for decades, the NIH used beagles in their labs

575
00:25:32,279 --> 00:25:36,200
for research, mostly on sepsis and infectious diseases. And for

576
00:25:36,240 --> 00:25:41,279
anyone listening who's asking why beagles, the answer is heartbreaking.

577
00:25:41,440 --> 00:25:44,559
Speaker 2: It's because they're docile. They're forgiving, they're bread not to

578
00:25:44,599 --> 00:25:45,119
fight back.

579
00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:48,440
Speaker 1: It's awful, they're easy to handle and for years, animal

580
00:25:48,519 --> 00:25:51,960
welfare groups were you know, screaming about this. Photos circulated

581
00:25:52,000 --> 00:25:54,920
online of these dogs being deliberately infected, kept in restraints.

582
00:25:55,640 --> 00:25:58,000
Speaker 3: It was ugly, it was very ugly, But the scientific

583
00:25:58,119 --> 00:25:59,200
argument was also shifting.

584
00:25:59,240 --> 00:25:59,599
Speaker 2: And this is the.

585
00:25:59,599 --> 00:26:02,640
Speaker 3: Important It wasn't just about feeling bad for the puppies.

586
00:26:02,720 --> 00:26:03,640
Speaker 1: It was about the data.

587
00:26:03,960 --> 00:26:05,440
Speaker 2: It was about the data.

588
00:26:05,559 --> 00:26:09,279
Speaker 3: Scientists were increasingly realizing that the results from dogs, they

589
00:26:09,359 --> 00:26:12,039
often didn't translate well to humans. A dog's immune system

590
00:26:12,079 --> 00:26:15,079
isn't a human's immune system. So we were hurting these

591
00:26:15,119 --> 00:26:18,559
dogs for data that was often useless or even misleading

592
00:26:18,680 --> 00:26:20,160
when we tried to apply it to people.

593
00:26:20,319 --> 00:26:23,519
Speaker 1: So is bad science and bad ethics the worst combination.

594
00:26:24,119 --> 00:26:27,000
Speaker 3: So in May of twenty twenty five, the NIH quietly

595
00:26:27,039 --> 00:26:29,559
confirmed that they had shut down their last in house

596
00:26:29,599 --> 00:26:30,279
beagle lab.

597
00:26:30,440 --> 00:26:33,200
Speaker 1: And here's the really cool part. What are they using instead?

598
00:26:33,319 --> 00:26:33,720
Speaker 2: AI?

599
00:26:34,200 --> 00:26:35,319
Speaker 1: Artificial intelligence?

600
00:26:35,480 --> 00:26:39,480
Speaker 3: Artificial intelligence modeling. We now have computer simulations that can

601
00:26:39,519 --> 00:26:43,200
predict how a disease moves through a biological system, or

602
00:26:43,200 --> 00:26:45,599
how a drug interacts with cells, and they can do

603
00:26:45,640 --> 00:26:48,319
it better and more accurately than an animal model can.

604
00:26:48,599 --> 00:26:51,240
Speaker 1: This feels like a genuine win win. It's better science

605
00:26:51,559 --> 00:26:54,519
because the simulations are more accurate for humans, and it's

606
00:26:54,559 --> 00:26:58,680
better ethics because we aren't harming man's best friend to

607
00:26:58,759 --> 00:26:59,920
do it it is.

608
00:27:00,160 --> 00:27:02,960
Speaker 3: It's a perfect example of technology finally allowing us to

609
00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:06,480
retire a cruel and outdated practice. It shows that science

610
00:27:06,480 --> 00:27:07,920
can evolve, it can get better.

611
00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:09,000
Speaker 2: We don't have to keep.

612
00:27:08,839 --> 00:27:10,960
Speaker 3: Doing things the way we did them in nineteen fifty

613
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:14,240
or nineteen seventy just because that's how we've always done it.

614
00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:17,519
Speaker 1: So after all of this, what does it all mean.

615
00:27:17,559 --> 00:27:20,160
We've pulled on all these different threads, from the fog

616
00:27:20,160 --> 00:27:23,319
of San Francisco to the digital labs of twenty twenty five.

617
00:27:23,519 --> 00:27:25,559
Speaker 3: I think the common thread, the one that ties all

618
00:27:25,599 --> 00:27:29,359
of these stories together, is that science is incredibly powerful,

619
00:27:29,680 --> 00:27:32,240
but it is not inherently good. It's a tool, and

620
00:27:32,359 --> 00:27:34,720
like any power tool, if you take off the safety guards,

621
00:27:34,799 --> 00:27:37,119
someone's going to get hurt or in these cases, people's

622
00:27:37,119 --> 00:27:38,279
lives are ruined or loss.

623
00:27:38,319 --> 00:27:40,240
Speaker 1: It's about people, isn't it. At the end of the day.

624
00:27:40,480 --> 00:27:42,720
Whether it's the arrogance of the Navy in nineteen fifty,

625
00:27:42,799 --> 00:27:45,559
or the desperation of the gene therapy researchers in ninety nine,

626
00:27:45,920 --> 00:27:49,799
or the massive ego of Hijion Kouei, it's human nature

627
00:27:49,960 --> 00:27:52,680
crashing into scientific capability.

628
00:27:52,200 --> 00:27:55,480
Speaker 3: And it's about consent. That is the bright red line.

629
00:27:55,519 --> 00:27:58,440
You cannot use people as a means to an end.

630
00:27:58,480 --> 00:28:01,200
You cannot treat a city like a Petri dish. You

631
00:28:01,240 --> 00:28:04,039
can't treat a prisoner like a labyrinth, and you can't

632
00:28:04,079 --> 00:28:06,119
treat an embryo like a software program.

633
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:06,839
Speaker 2: You're debugging.

634
00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:09,640
Speaker 3: The moment you stop seeing the subject as a human

635
00:28:09,680 --> 00:28:12,759
being with rights an agency, you've crossed the line.

636
00:28:12,799 --> 00:28:14,960
Speaker 1: Here's the thought I want to leave everyone with. We

637
00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:17,960
look back at Operation Ceespry or the prisoner experiments, and

638
00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:20,680
we think, how could they That's barbaric. We would never

639
00:28:20,720 --> 00:28:23,920
do that now. But history is a moving target.

640
00:28:23,599 --> 00:28:24,240
Speaker 2: It really is.

641
00:28:24,400 --> 00:28:27,279
Speaker 1: So I have to ask, what are we doing today

642
00:28:27,799 --> 00:28:31,279
right now? Maybe with artificial intelligence, maybe with the way

643
00:28:31,319 --> 00:28:34,720
we harvest massive amounts of personal data, maybe with new

644
00:28:34,960 --> 00:28:39,119
neural implants or brain computer interfaces. What are we doing

645
00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:41,519
that people in twenty fifty are going to look back

646
00:28:41,519 --> 00:28:43,680
on and say, I cannot believe they allowed that.

647
00:28:43,680 --> 00:28:46,240
Speaker 3: That is the really uncomfortable question, isn't it. We always

648
00:28:46,240 --> 00:28:48,960
think we're the enlightened ones standing at the end of history,

649
00:28:49,240 --> 00:28:53,200
but we probably have our own massive blind spots, right now.

650
00:28:53,039 --> 00:28:55,079
Speaker 1: We absolutely do, and that's where we want to hear

651
00:28:55,119 --> 00:28:59,440
from you. Where do you draw the line? Is there

652
00:28:59,440 --> 00:29:02,559
ever a I mean a truly desperate one, like a

653
00:29:02,599 --> 00:29:05,799
global plague or an asteroid headed for Earth where the

654
00:29:05,839 --> 00:29:09,279
potential cure or solution justifies the risk to a few

655
00:29:09,279 --> 00:29:13,119
people without their consent, or is consent always one hundred

656
00:29:13,160 --> 00:29:14,559
percent absolute, no matter what.

657
00:29:14,759 --> 00:29:18,240
Speaker 3: It's the ultimate ethical dilemma, the trolley problem, but with

658
00:29:18,319 --> 00:29:20,200
beakers and lab coats exactly.

659
00:29:20,720 --> 00:29:22,720
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think, Drop a comment, send

660
00:29:22,799 --> 00:29:25,200
us a message on social media. We really want to

661
00:29:25,240 --> 00:29:26,160
know where you stand on this.

662
00:29:26,480 --> 00:29:28,240
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us on this one. I know it

663
00:29:28,279 --> 00:29:30,519
was a heavy thread, but it's a really important one.

664
00:29:30,599 --> 00:29:33,200
Speaker 1: It really is. Thanks for listening to thrilling threads.

665
00:29:33,400 --> 00:29:35,359
Speaker 2: Stay curious and stay skeptical.