The following is a conversation with Michael Minna.
He's a professor at Harvard doing research on infectious disease and immunology.
The most defining characteristic of his approach to science and biology is that of a first
principal's thinker and engineer focused not just on defining the problem, but finding the solution.
In that spirit, we talk about cheap, rapid at home testing, which is a solution to COVID-19
that to me has become one of the most obvious, powerful, and doable solutions
that frankly should have been done months ago and still should be done now.
As we talk about, its accuracy is high for detecting actual contagiousness and hundreds of
millions can be manufactured quickly and relatively cheaply. In general, I love engineering solutions
like these even if government bureaucracies often don't. It respects science and data,
it respects our freedom, it respects our intelligence, and basic common sense.
Quick mention of his sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
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and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the
description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that
I've always been solution oriented, not problem oriented. It saddens me to see that public discourse
disproportionately focuses on the mistakes of those who dare to build solutions rather than
applaud their attempt to do so. Teddy Roosevelt said it well in his The Man in the Arena speech,
over 100 years ago. I should say that both the critic and the creator are important.
But in my humble estimation, there are too many now of the former and not enough of the latter.
So while we spread the derisive words of the critic on social media making it viral,
let's not forget that this world is built on the blood, sweat, and tears of those who dare to create.
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And now here's my conversation with Michael Mina. What is the most beautiful, mysterious,
or surprising idea in the biology of humans or viruses that you ever come across in your work?
Sorry for the overly philosophical question.
Wow. Well, that's a great question. You know, I love the pathogenesis of viruses and
one of the things that I've worked on a lot is trying to understand how viruses interact with
each other. And so pre all this COVID stuff, I was really, really dedicated to understanding
how viruses impact other pathogens. So how if somebody gets an infection with one thing or a
vaccine, does it either benefit or harm you from other things that appear to be unrelated to most
people? And so one system which is highly detrimental to humans, but what I think is just
immensely fascinating is measles. And measles gets into a kid's body. The immune system picks it up
and essentially grabs the virus and does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to take this
virus and bring it into the immune system so that the immune system can learn from it,
can develop an immune response to it. But instead, measles plays a trick. It gets into the immune
system, serves almost as a Trojan horse. And instead of getting eaten by these cells, it just
takes them over and it ends up proliferating in the very cells that were supposed to kill it.
And it just distributes throughout the entire body, gets into the bone marrow, kills off children's
immune memories. And so it essentially, what I've found and what my research has found is that
this one virus was responsible for as much as half of all of the infectious disease deaths in kids
before we started vaccinating against it because it was just wiping out
children's immune memories to all different pathogens, which is, I think, just astounding.
It's just amazing to watch it spread throughout bodies. We've done the studies in monkeys and
you can watch it just destroy and obliterate people's immune memories in the same way that
some parasite might destroy somebody's brain. Is that an evolutionary coincidence or is there
some kind of advantage to this kind of interactivity between pathogens? I think in that sense it's
just coincidence. It's a good way for measles to essentially be able to survive long enough to
replicate in the body. It just replicates in the cells that are meant to destroy it.
So it's utilizing our immune cells for its own replication, but in so doing it's destroying
the memories of all the other immunological memories. But there are other viruses, so a
different system is influenza and flu predisposes to severe bacterial infections.
And that, I think, is another coincidence. But I also think that there are some evolutionary
benefits that bacteria may hijack and piggyback on viral infections. Viruses can,
they just grow so much quicker than bacteria. They replicate faster. And so there's the system
with viruses, with flu and bacteria where the influenza has these proteins that cleave certain
receptors. And the bacteria want to cleave those same receptors. They want to cleave the same
molecules that give entrance to those receptors. So instead the bacteria found out like, hey,
you know, we could just piggyback on these viruses. They'll do it a hundred or a thousand
times faster than we can. And so then they just piggyback on and they let flu cleave all these
sialic acids. And then the bacteria just glom on in the wake of it. So there's all different
interactions between pathogens that are just remarkable.
So does this whole system of viruses that interact with each other and so damn good at
getting inside our bodies, does that fascinate you or terrify you?
I'm very much a scientist. And so it fascinates me much more than it terrifies me. But knowing
enough, I know just how well, you know, we get the wrong virus in our population,
whether it's through some random mutation or whether it's this same COVID-19 virus and it,
you know, these things are tricky. They're able to mutate quickly. They're able to find new hosts
and rearrange in the case of influenza. So what terrifies me is just how easily this particular
pandemic could have been so much worse. This could have been a virus that is much worse than it is.
You know, same thing with H1N1 back in 2009. That terrifies me. If a virus like that was
much more detrimental, you know, that would be, it could be much more devastating. Although it's
hard to say, you know, the human species were, well, I hesitate to say that we're good at
responding to things because there are some aspects that were, this particular virus,
SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 has found a sweet spot where, where it's not quite serious enough on an
individual level that humans just don't, we haven't seen much of a useful response by many humans.
A lot of people even think it's a hoax. And so it's led us down this path of,
it's not quite serious enough to get everyone to respond immediately and with the most urgency,
but it's enough, it's bad enough that, you know, it's caused our economies to shut down and collapse.
And so I think, I know enough about virus biology to be terrified for humans that, you know, it can,
it just takes one virus, just takes the wrong one to just obliterate us or not obliterate us,
but, but really do much more damage than we've seen.
It's fascinating to think that COVID-19 is a result of a virus evolving together with like
Twitter, like figuring out how we can sneak past the defenses of the humans. So it's not bad enough.
And then the misinformation, all that kind of stuff together is operating in such a way that
the virus can spread effectively. I wonder, I mean, obviously a virus is not intelligent, but there's a,
there's a rhyme and a rhythm to the way this whole evolutionary process works and creates these
fascinating things that spread throughout the entire civilization.
Absolutely. It's, yeah, I'm completely fascinated by this idea of social media in particular,
how it replicates, how it grows, you know, I've been, how it, how it actually starts interacting
with the biology of the virus, masks, who's going to get vaccinated, politics, like these seem so
external to virus biology, but it's become so intertwined and, and it's, it's interesting.
And I actually think we could find out that, you know, the virus actually becomes obviously not
intentionally, but, you know, we could find that choosing people, choosing not to wear masks,
choosing, choosing not to counter this virus in a regimented and sort of organized way,
effectively gives the virus more opportunity to escape. We can look at vaccines, you know, we're
about to, we're about to have one of the most aggressive vaccination programs the world has
ever seen, but we are unfortunately doing it right at the peak of viral transmission when
millions and millions of people are still getting infected. And when we do that, that just gives
this virus so many more opportunities. I mean, orders of magnitude, more opportunity to mutate
around our immune system. Now, if we were to vaccinate everyone when there's not a lot of virus,
then there's just not a lot of virus. And so there's not going to be as many, you know,
I don't even know how many zeros are at the end of however many viral particles there are in the
world right now, you know, more than quadrillions, you know, and so if you assume that at any given
time, somebody might have trillions of virus in them and any given individual. So then, you know,
multiply trillions by millions. And, you know, you get a lot of viruses out there. And if you start
applying pressure ecological pressure to this virus that that, you know, when it's not abundant,
kind of the opportunity for a virus to sneak around immunity, especially when all the vaccines
are identical, essentially, it takes is one to mutate and then jumps takes one takes one in
the whole world, you know, and we have to we have to not forget that this particular virus was one.
It was one opportunity and it has spread across the globe and there's no reason that can't happen
tomorrow. I knew, you know, it's scary. I have a million other questions in this direction, but
I'd love to talk about one of the most exciting aspects of your work, which is testing or rapid
testing. You wrote a great article in time on November 17th. This is like a month ago
about rapid testing titled how we can stop the spread of COVID-19 by Christmas. Let's
jot down the fact that this is a month ago. So maybe your timeline would be different,
but let's say in a month. So you've talked about this powerful idea for quite a while
throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. How do we stop the spread of COVID-19 in a month?
Well, we use tests like these. You know, so the only reason the virus continues spreading
is because people spread it to each other. This isn't magic. And so there's a few ways
to stop the virus from spreading to each other. And that is you either can vaccinate everyone
and vaccinating everyone is a way to immunologically prevent the virus from growing inside of somebody
and therefore spreading. We don't know yet actually if this vaccine, if any of these vaccines are
going to prevent onward transmission. So that may or may not serve to be one opportunity. Certainly,
I think it will decrease transmission. But the other idea that we have at our disposal now,
we had it in May, we had it in June, July, August, September, October, November,
and now it's December. We still have it. We still choose not to use it in this country and in much
of the world. And that's rapid testing that is giving, it's empowering people to know
that they are infected and giving them the opportunity to not spread it to their loved ones
and their friends and neighbors and whoever else. We could have done this. We still can.
Today we could start. We have millions of these tests. These tests are simple paper strip tests.
They are inside of this thing is just a little piece of paper. Now, and I can actually open it
up here. There we go. So this, this is how we do it right here. We have this little paper strip test.
This is enough to let you know if you're infectious with somewhere around the order of 99% sensitivity,
99% specificity, you can know if you have infectious virus in you. If we can get these out to everyone's
homes, build these, make 10 million, 20 million, 30 million of them a day. We make more bottles of
Desani water every day. We can make these little paper strip tests. And if we do that and we get
these into people's homes so that they can use them twice a week, then we can know if we're
infectious. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But is it near perfect? Absolutely. And so if we can say,
hey, the transmission of this is for every 100 people that get infected right now,
they go on to infect maybe 130 additional people. And that's exponential growth. 100 becomes 130.
A couple days later, that 130 becomes another 165 people have now been infected.
And go over three weeks and 100 people become 500 people infected. Now, it doesn't take much to
have those 100 people not infect 130 but infect 90. All we have to do is remove say 30, 40% of new
infections from continuing their spread. And then instead of exponential growth, you have exponential
decay. So this doesn't need to be perfect. We don't have to go from 100 to zero. We just have to go
and have those 100 people infect 90. And those 90 people infect 82, whatever it might be. And you
do that for a few weeks and boom, you have now gone instead of 100 to 500, you've gone from 100
to 20. It's not very hard. And so the way to do that is to let people know that they're infectious.
I mean, we're a perfect example right now. This morning, I used these tests to make sure that
I wasn't infectious. Is it perfect? No, but it reduced my odds 99%. I already was at extremely
low odds because I've spent my life quarantining these days. Well, the interesting thing with this
test, with the testing in general, which is why I love what you've been espousing, and it's really
confusing to me that this has not been taken on, is it's one, an actual solution that those available
for a long time. There doesn't seem to have been solutions proposed at a large scale. And a solution
that it seems like a lot of people would be able to get behind. There's some politicization or fear
of other solutions that people have proposed, which is like lockdown. And there's a worry,
you know, especially in the American spirit of freedom, like you can't tell me what to do.
The thing about tests is it empowers you with information, essentially. So it gives you more
information about your role in this pandemic, and then you can do whatever the hell you want.
It's all up to your ethics and so on. And it's obvious that with that information,
people would be able to protect their loved ones and also do their sort of quote unquote duty for
their country, right, is protect the rest of the country. That's exactly right. I mean, it's just,
it's empowerment. But you know, this is a problem. We have not put these into action in large part
because we have a medical industry that doesn't want to see them be used. We have a political and
a regulatory industry that doesn't want to see them be used. That sounds crazy. Why wouldn't they
want them to be used? We have a very paternalistic approach to everything in this country. You
know, despite this country kind of being founded on this individualistic ideal, pull yourself up
from your bootstraps, all that stuff. When it comes to public health, we have a bunch of
ivory tower academics who want data. You know, they want to see perfection. And we have this
issue of letting perfection get in the way of actually doing something at all, you know,
doing something effective. And so we keep comparing these tests, for example, to the
laboratory based PCR test. And sure, this isn't a PCR test, but this doesn't cost $100 and it
doesn't take five days to get back, which means in every single scenario, this is the more effective
test. And we have, unfortunately, a system that's not about public health. We have
entirely eroded any ideals of public health in our country for the biomedical complex,
you know, this medical industrial complex, which overrides everything. And that's why, you know,
I'm just, can I swear on this pot? Yes. I'm just so fucking pissed that these tests don't exist.
Meanwhile, and everyone says, you know, oh, we couldn't make these, you know, that we could never
do it. That would be such a hard, a difficult problem. Meanwhile, the vaccine gets, we have,
at the same time that we could have gotten these stupid little paper strip tests out to every
household. We have developed a brand new vaccine. We've gone through phase one, phase two, phase
three trials. We've scaled up its production. And now we have UPS and FedEx and all the logistics in
the world getting freezers out to where they need to be. We have this immense, we see what,
when it comes to sort of medicine, you know, something you're injecting into somebody,
then all of a sudden people say, oh, yes, we can. But you say, oh, no, that's, that's too
simple a solution, too cheap a solution. No way could we possibly do that. It's this faulty
thinking in our country, which, you know, frankly, is driven by big money, big, you know,
the only time when we actually think that we can do something that's maybe aggressive and
complicated is when there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in it, you know.
I mean, and a difficult note, because this is part of your work from before the COVID,
but it does seem that I saw statistic currently is that 40% would not be taken of America would
not be taken a vaccine. Some number like this. So you also have to acknowledge that all the money
that's been invested, like there doesn't appear to be a solution to deal with like the fear and
distrust that people have. I bet, I don't know if you know this number, but for taking a strip,
like a rapid test like this, I bet you people would say like the percentage of people that
wouldn't take it is in the single digits probably. I completely think so. And, you know, there's a
lot of people who don't want to get a test today. And that's because it gets sent to a lab,
it gets reported, it has all the stuff and we're a country which teaches people from the time
they're babies, you know, to keep their medical data close to them. We have HIPAA, we have all
these, we have immense rules and regulations to ensure the privacy of people's medical data.
And then a pandemic comes around and we just assume that all that the average person is going
to wipe all of that away and say, oh, no, I'm happy giving out not just my own medical data,
but also to tell the authority is everyone who I've spent my time with so that they all get a call
and are pissed at me for giving up their names. You know, so people aren't getting tested and
they're definitely not giving up their contacts when it comes to contact tracing. And so for
so many reasons that approach is failing, not to even mention the delays in testing and things
like that. And so this is a whole different approach, but it's an approach that empowers people
and takes the power a bit away from the people in charge, you know, and that's what's really
grating on, I think, public health officials who say, no, we need the data. So they're effectively
saying, if I can't have the data, I don't want the individuals, I don't want the public to have
their own data either, which is a terrible approach to a pandemic where we can't solve
a public health crisis without actively engaging the public. It just doesn't work. And, you know,
and that's what we're trying to do right now, which is a terrible approach.
So first of all, there's, you have a really nice informed website, rapidtest.org,
with information on this. I still can't believe this is not more popular. It's ridiculous. Okay,
but our one of the FAQs you have is a rapid test too expensive. So can cost be brought down? Like,
I pay, I take a weekly PCR test and I think I pay 160, 170 bucks a week.
No, I mean, it's criminal. Absolutely, we can get costs. This thing right here costs less than a
dollar to make with everything combined plus the swabs, you know, maybe a cost $1.50 could be sold
for, frankly, it could be sold for $3 and still make a profit if they want to sell it for five,
this one here. This is a slightly more complicated one, but you can see it's just got the exact
same paper strip inside. And this is really, it doesn't look like much, but it's kind of the
cream of the crop in terms of these rapid tests. This is the one that the US government bought
and it is doing an amazing job. It has a 99.9% sensitivity and specificity. So it's really,
it's really good. And so essentially the way it works is you just, you use a swab, you put the,
once you, you kind of use a swab in yourself, you put the swab into these little holes here,
you put some buffer on it and you close it and a line will show up if it's positive and a line
won't show up, but it's negative and it takes five, 10 minutes. This whole thing, this can be made
so cheap that the US government was able to buy them, buy 150 million of them from Abbott for
$5 a piece. You know, so anyone who says that these are expensive, we have the proof is right here.
This one at its, you know, was, Abbott did not lose money on this deal. You know, they got $750
million for, for selling 150 million of these at five bucks a piece. All of these tests can do the
same. So anyone who says that these should be, you know, unfortunately what's happening though
is the FDA is only authorizing all of these tests as medical devices. So what happens when you,
if I'm a medical company, if I'm, if I'm a test production company and I want to make this test
and I go through and, and the FDA at the end of my authorization, the FDA says, okay, you know,
you now have a medical device, not a public health tool, but a medical device and that
affords you the ability to charge insurance companies for it. Why would I ever as a, you know,
in our capitalistic economy and, and, and sort of infrastructure, why would I ever not sell this
for $30 when insurance will pay, pay for it or $100? You know, it might only cost me 50 cents to
make, but, but by pushing all of these tests through a medical pathway at the FDA, they,
what, what extrudes out the other side is an expensive medical device that's erroneously
expensive. It doesn't need to be inflated and cost, but the companies say, well, I'd rather make
fewer of them and just sell them all for $30 a piece than make tens of millions of them,
which I could do, and sell them at a, at a dollar marginal profit, you know. And so
it's a problem with our, with our whole medical industry that we see tests only as medical devices
and, you know, what I would like to see is for the government in the same way that they bought
150 million of these from Abbott, they should be buying, you know, all of these tests that they
should be buying 20 million a day and getting them out to people's homes. This virus has cost
trillions of dollars to the American people. It's closed down restaurants and stores and,
you know, obviously the main streets across America have shut, have shuttered. It's killing
people. It's killing our economy. It's killing lifestyles and, and, and lives.
This is an obvious solution. To me, this is exciting. This is like, this is a solution. I
wish, uh, like in April or something like that, uh, to launch like the larger scale
manufacturing deployment of, uh, tests. It doesn't matter what tests they are. It's
obviously the capitalist system would create cheaper and cheaper tests that, that would be
hopefully driving down to $1. So what, what are we talking about in America?
Uh, there's, I don't know, 300 plus, uh, million people. So that means you want to be testing
regularly, right? So how many do you think is possible to manufacture? What would be the
ultimate goal to manufacture per month? Yep. So if we want to slow this virus and actually
stop it from transmitting, achieve what I call herd effects like vaccine herd immunity, uh,
herd effects are when you get that R value below one, uh, through preventing onward transmission.
If we want to do that with these tests, we need about 20 million to 40 million of them every day,
uh, which is not a lot in the United States. In the United States. So we could do it. There's
other ways you can have two people in a household, uh, swab each other, you know, swab
themselves rather, and then mix, you know, put the swabs into the same tube and onto one test
so you can pool. So you can get, uh, a two or three X, uh, gain in efficiency through pooling
in the household. You could do that in schools or offices too, wherever, and just use a swab. You
have a, there's two people, like, I mean, even if it's just standing in line at a public testing
site or something, you know, you could just say, okay, these two are the last people to test or
swab themselves. They go into one, one thing and if it comes back positive, then you just do each
person and, you know, it's rapid. So you can just say to the people, one of you is positive,
let's test you again. Um, so there's ways to get the efficiency gains much better, but let's say
I think that the, that the optimal number right now that matches sort of what we can produce
more or less today if we wanted is 20 million a day. Right now, one company that I don't have
their test here, but one company is already producing 5 million tests themselves and shipping them
overseas. It's an American company based in California called the Nova and they are giving
5 million tests to the UK every day. Not to the, you know, and this is just because there's no,
the federal government hasn't authorized these tests. So without the support of the, the government.
So yeah, so essentially if the government just puts some support behind it, then, uh, then yeah,
you can get 20 million, probably easy. Oh yeah. This, I mean, just here I have three different
companies. These, they all look similar. Well, this one's closed, but these are three different
companies right here. This is a fourth habit. Now this is a fifth. This is a sixth. These two are
a little bit different. Do you mind if in a little bit, would you take some of these or?
Yeah, let's, let's do it. We can, we can, uh, we can absolutely do them. So you have a lot of tests
in front of you. Uh, could you maybe explain some of them? Absolutely. So there's a few
different classes of tests that I just have here. And there's more tests. There's many more
different tests out in the world too. These are, these are one class of tests. These are, uh,
rapid antigen tests that are just the most bare bones, paper strip tests. These, uh, are,
this is the type that I want to see produced in the tens of millions every day. It's so simple.
You know, you don't even need the plastic cartridge. You can just, you can just make,
uh, make the paper strip and you could have a little, a little tube like this that, you know,
you just dunk the paper strip into. You don't actually need the plastic, which I'd actually
prefer because if we start making tens of millions of these, this becomes a lot of waste. So I'd
rather not see this kind of waste be out there. And, uh, there's a few companies. Quidel is making
a test called the quick view, which is just, just this. It's a, uh, they've gotten rid of all the,
all the plastic. And for people who are just listening to this, we're looking at some very
small tests that fit in the palm of your hand and they're basically paper strips fit into different
containers. And that's hence, hence the comment about the plastic containers. These are just
injection molded, I think. And, uh, they're, um, you know, they can build them at high numbers,
but then they have to like place them in there appropriately and all this stuff. So it is a,
it is a bottleneck or some, somewhat of a bottleneck in manufacturing. The actual bottleneck,
which the government I think should use the defense productions act to build up,
is the, uh, there's a nitrocellulose membrane, laminated membrane on this that allows, uh,
the, the material, the, the, the buffer and with the swab mixture to flow across it. So the way
these work, they're called lateral flow tests and you take a swab, you swab the, the front of your
nose, you dunk that swab into some buffer and then you put a couple of drops of that buffer onto
the lateral flow. And just like a paper, if you dip a piece of paper into a cup of water,
though the paper will pull the water up through capillary action. This actually works very similarly
at flows through, through somewhat of capillary action, uh, through this nitrocellulose membrane.
And there's little antibodies on there. These little proteins that are very specific in this case
for antigens or proteins of the virus. So these are antibodies similar to how, to the antibodies
that our body makes, uh, from our immune system, but they're just printed on these, um, lateral
flow tests and they're printed just like a little align. So then you, you slice these all up into
individual ones. And if there's any virus on that buffer, as it flows across the antibodies grab
that virus and it creates a little reaction with some colloids in here that cause it to turn dark.
Just like a pregnancy test, um, one line means negative. It means the control strip worked
and two lines mean positive. It means, uh, you know, but if you get two lines, it just means
you have virus there. You're very, very likely to have virus there. And so, uh, so they're super
simple. This is, it is the exact same technology as pregnancy tests. It's, uh, the technology,
the technology, this particular one from Abbott, this has been used, uh, for other infectious
diseases like malaria and, and actually a number of these companies have made malaria tests that,
that do the exact same thing. So they just co-opted their, the same form factor and, uh, and just
changed the antibody. So it picks up SARS-CoV-2 instead of other infections.
Is it also the Abbott one? Is it also a strip?
Yep. Yeah. This Abbott one here is, uh, there's the, in this case, instead of being put in a
plastic sheath, it's just put in a cardboard thing and literally glued on. I mean, it's,
it looks like nothing. You know, it's just, it looks like a, like, I mean, it's just the simplest
thing you could, you could imagine. The exterior packaging looks very Apple-like. It's nice.
It does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's nice. And it comes in, uh, this is the, this is how they're
packaged, you know, so in the, and they don't have to, you know, this, these are coming in
individual packages against, again, because they're really considered individual medical devices,
but you could package them in, you know, bigger packets and stuff. You, you want to be careful
with humidity. So they all have a little, um, one of those, um, humidity removing things and
oxygen removing things. Um, so that's the, this is one class, these antigen tests.
If we could just pause for a second, if it's okay. And, uh, could you just briefly say what is an
antigen test and what other tests there are out there, like categories of tests? Sure. Just really
quick. So the testing landscape is a little bit complicated, but it's, but I'll break it down.
There's really just three major classes of tests. Uh, we'll start with the first two. The first two
tests are just looking for the virus or looking for antibodies against the virus. So we've heard
about serology tests, um, or maybe some people have heard about it. Those are a different kind
of tests. They're looking to, uh, see, has somebody in the past, does somebody have an immune response
against the virus, which would indicate that they were infected or exposed to it. So we're not talking
about the antibody tests. I'll just leave it at that. Those, uh, they, they actually can look very
similar to this or they can be done, uh, in a laboratory. They, those are usually done from
blood and they're, they're looking for an immune response to the virus. So that's one. Everything
I'm talking about here is looking for the virus itself, not the immune response to the virus.
And so you, there's two ways to look for the virus. You can either look for the genetic
code of the virus, like the RNA, just like the DNA of somebody's human cells, or you can look for
the proteins themselves, the antigens of the pro of the virus. So, uh, I like to differentiate them.
If you were, uh, a, a PCR, uh, test that looks for RNA in, uh, let's say, let's say if we made it
against humans, it would be looking for the DNA inside of our cells that would be actually looking
for our genetic code. Uh, the equivalent to an antigen test is sort of a, a test that like
actually is looking for our eyes or our nose or physical features of our body that would, uh,
delineate. Okay. This is, this is, uh, Michael, for example. And, and so, so you're either looking
for this, a sequence or you're looking for a structure. Uh, the PCR tests that a lot of people
have gotten now and they're done in labs usually are looking for the sequence of the virus,
which is RNA. This test here, uh, by a company called detect. This is one of Jonathan Rothberg's
companies. Um, he's the guy who helped create, uh, modern day sequencing and, uh, all kinds of other
things. So this detect device, that's the name of the company. This is actually a rapid RNA
detection device. So it's almost, it's like a PCR like test and we could even do it here. Uh,
it's really, it's, it's a beautiful test to my opinion. Works exceedingly well. It's going to
be a little bit more expensive. So I think it could confirm, could be used as a confirmatory test
for these. Is there a greater accuracy to it? Um, I, yes, I would say that there is a greater
accuracy. There's also a downfall though of PCR and tests that look for RNA. They can sometimes
detect somebody, uh, who is no longer infectious. So you have the, the RNA test and then you have
these antigen tests. The antigen tests look for structures, but they're generally only going to
turn positive if people have actively replicating virus in them. Uh, and so what happens after an
infection dissipates, you have, you've just gone from having sort of a spike. So if you get infected,
maybe three days later, the virus gets into exponential growth and it can replicate to
trillions of viruses inside the body. Your immune system then kind of tackles it and beats it
down to nothing. But what, what ends up in the wake of that, you just had a battle. You had this
massive battle that just took place inside your upper respiratory tract. And because of that,
you've had trillions and trillions of viruses go to zero essentially, but the RNA is still there.
It's just, it's these remnants in the same way that if you go to a crime scene and blood was,
was, was sort of spread all over the crime scene, you're going to find a lot of DNA. There's tons
of DNA. There's no people anymore. Uh, but there's a lot of DNA there. Same thing happens here.
And so what's happening with PCR testing is when people go and use these exceedingly high
sensitivity PCR tests, people will stay positive for weeks or months after their infection has
subsided, which has caused a lot of problems in my opinion. It's problems that the CDC and the FDA
and doctors don't want to deal with. Um, but I've tried to publish on it. I've tried to,
you know, suggest that this is an issue both to New York times and others. And now it's
unfortunately kind of taken on a life of its own of conspiracy theorists thinking that they call it
a case demic. They say, oh, you know, PCR is detecting people who are no longer, who are false
positive. They're not false positives. They're, they're late positives, no longer transmissible.
I think the way you, uh, like what I saw in rapid tests, uh, that org, I really like the
distinction between diagnostic sensitivity and contagiousness sensitivity. That's, it's so,
that website is so obvious, uh, that it's painful. Cause it's like, yeah, that's what we should be
talking about is how accurately is a test able to detect your contagiousness. And you have
different plots that show that actually there's, you know, um, that antigen tests, the tests we're
looking at today, like rapid tests are actually really good at detecting contagiousness.
Absolutely. It all mixes back with this whole idea that of the medical industrial complex,
you know, in this country and in most countries, we have almost entirely defunded and devalued
public health period. You know, we just, we just have, and, uh, and what that means is that we don't
even, we don't have a language for it. We don't have a lexicon for it. We don't have a regulatory
landscape for it. And so the only window we have to look at a test today is as a medical diagnostic
test. And, uh, and that becomes very problematic when we're trying to tackle a public health
threat and a public health emergency by definition. This is a public health emergency that we're in.
And yet we keep evaluating tests as though the diagnostic benchmark is the gold standard,
where if I'm a physician, I am a physician, so I'll put on that physician hat for a moment.
And if I have a doc, if I have a patient who comes to me and wants to, uh, know if their symptoms are
a result of them having COVID, uh, then I want every shred of evidence that I can get to see,
does this person currently or did they recently have, uh, this infection inside of them? And
so in that sense, the PCR test is the perfect test. It's really sensitive. It will find the RNA if
it's there at all so that I could say, you know, yeah, you have a low amount of RNA left. You
might have been, you said your symptoms started two weeks ago. You probably were infectious
two weeks ago and you have lingering symptoms from it. But that's a, that's a medical diagnosis.
It's kind of like a detective recreating a crime scene. They want to go back there and
create the pieces so that they can, um, assign blame or whatever it might be. But that's not
public health. In public health, we need to only look forward. We don't want to go back and say,
well, was this person, are there symptoms because they had an infection two weeks ago?
In public health, we just want to stop the virus from spreading to the next person. And so that's
where we don't care if somebody was infected two weeks ago. We only care about finding the people
who are infectious today. And unfortunately, our regulatory landscape fails to, uh, apply that
knowledge to evaluate these tests as public health tools. They're only evaluating the tests as
medical tools. And therefore we get all kinds of, um, complaints that say this test, which
detects 99 plus, you know, 99.8% of, of current infectious people, uh,
by the FDA's rubric, they'll say, no, no, that's, it's only 50% sensitive. And that's because when
you go out into the world and you just compare this against PCR positivity, most people who are
PCR positive in the world right now at any given time are post infectious. They're no longer infectious
because you, you might only be infectious for five days, but then you'll remain PCR positive for
three or four or five weeks. And so when you go and just evaluate these tests and you say,
okay, this person's PCR positive, does the rapid antigen test detect that more often than not,
it's no, but that's because those people don't need isolation. You know, they,
they're post infectious. And this is a, it's become much more of a problem
than I think, uh, even the FDA themselves is recognizing because they are unwilling at this
point to, to look at this as a public health problem requiring public health tools.
We'll definitely talk about this a little bit more because the concern I have is that like a
bigger pandemic comes along. What are the lessons we draw from this and how we move forward? Let's
talk about that in a bit, but sort of can we, can we discuss further the lay of the land here of
the different tests before us? Absolutely. So I talked about PCR tests and those are done in the
lab or they're done essentially with a rapid test like this, the detect, and we can even try this
in a moment. It goes into a little heater. So you might have one of these in a household or
one of these in a nursing home or something like that, or in an airport,
um, or you could have one that has a hundred different, um, outlets. This is just to heat
the tube up. These are the rapid tests. They are super simple, no frills. You just swab your nose
and, uh, you put the swab into a buffer and you put the buffer on the test. So we can use these
right now if you want. Yeah. Um, we can try it out. And all the tests we're talking about,
they usually swabbing the nose, like that's the, that's still the main, yeah. There are some saliva
tests coming about and they, these can all work potentially with saliva. They just have to be
recalibrated. Uh, but these, these swabs are really not bad. The, this isn't the, the deep swab that
goes like way back, uh, into your nose or anything. This is just the, uh, just a swab that you do
yourself, like right in the front of your nose. Um, so if you want to do it, do you mind if I,
sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't we start with this one? Cause this is, uh, this is the Abbott's
Binex Now test and it's really, it's pretty simple. This is the, the swab from the Abbott test.
That's correct. That's the swab from the Abbott test. So what I'm going to do to start
is I'm going to take this buffer here, which is, uh, this is just the buffer that goes onto this
test. So this is a brand new one. I just opened this, this test out. Uh, I'm going to just take
six drops of this buffer and put it right onto this test here. Two, three, four, five, six.
Okay. And now you're going to take that swab, open it up. Yep. And now just wipe it around
inside the, into the front of your nose. Do a few circles, uh, on each nostril. That looks good.
This always makes me want to sneeze. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm going to have you do it yourself.
I'm getting emotional. Hold it parallel to the test. So put the test down on the table. Yep.
And then go into that bottom hole. Yep. And push forward so that you can start to see it in the
other hole. There you go. Now turn, if it's, once it hits up against the top, just turn it, uh,
three times, one, two, three, and sort of, yep. And now you just close, so pull off that adhesive
sticker there. And now you just close the whole thing. And, and that's it. That's it. Now what we
will see, uh, is we will see a line form. What's happening now is the, the buffer that you put in
there is, uh, now, uh, moving up onto the paper strip test and it has the material from the swab
in there. And so what we'll see is a line will form. Uh, and that's going to be the control line.
And then we'll also see, uh, the, the, ideally we'll see no line for the actual test line.
And, uh, that's because you should be negative. So one line will be positive and two lines will
be negative. That's very cool. There's this, uh, purple thing creeping up onto the control line.
That's perfect. That's what you want to be seeing. So you want to see that, um,
um, so right now you, you essentially want to see that, that blue line turns pink or purpley
color. There's a blue line that's already there printed. Uh, it should turn sort of a purple
pink color. And ideally there will be no, uh, additional line for the sample.
And if there is, that's the 99 point, whatever percent accuracy on that means I have, I'm contagious.
That would mean that you're likely contagious or you likely have, uh, infectious virus in you.
What we can do because one of the things that, um, that my plan calls for is because sometimes
these tests can get false positive results. It's rare, maybe 1% or in the case of this
by next now this Abbott test 0.1%. So one in a thousand, one in 500, something like that can
be falsely positive. What I recommend is that when somebody is, uh, positive on one of these,
you turn around and you immediately test on a different test. You could either do it on the
same, but for, for as good measure, you want to use a separate test that, uh, is somewhat
orthogonal, meaning that it shouldn't turn falsely positive for the same reason. Uh, this particular
test here, this, uh, detect test, because it is looking for the RNA and not the antigen,
this is an amazingly accurate test and it's sort of a perfect, uh, gold standard or confirmatory
test for any of these antigen tests. So one of the recommendations that I've had, especially if
people start using antigen tests before you get onto a plane, uh, or, you know, as what I call
entrance screening, if somebody's positive, you don't immediately tell them you're positive,
go isolate for 10 days. You tell them, let's confirm on one of these on a detect test that is a,
because it's completely orthogonal, it's looking for the RNA instead of the antigen.
Uh, there's no reason, no biological reason that both of these should be falsely positive.
Uh, so if one's falsely positive and the other one is negative, especially because this one's
more sensitive, uh, then I would trust this as a confirmatory test. If this one's negative, then
the antigen test, you know, would be considered falsely positive.
It does look like there's only a single line. So this is very exciting news.
That's right. Yep. It says wait 15 minutes to see both lines. But in general, if somebody's
really going to be positive, that line starts showing up within a minute or two. Um, so you
want to keep the whole, we'll keep watching it for the whole 15 minutes as it's sitting there. But
I would say you're knowing that you've had PCR tests recently and all that, you know.
The odds are pretty good. The odds are very good.
The packaging, very iPhone-like. I'm digging the sexy packaging. I'm a sucker for good packaging.
Okay. So then there's this, there's this test here, which is, you know, this is another,
you know, it's funny. This, let me just open this up and show you. This is a really nice
test. It's another antigen test. Works the exact same way as this essentially.
But what you can see is it's got like lights in it and a power button and stuff. This is called an
allume test, which is, you know, fine. And it's a really nice test to be honest, but it, um,
um, but it has to pair with an iPhone. And, and so it's good as a, I think that this is going to
become, this is, there's a lot of use for this from a medical perspective, you know, where you
want good reporting. This can, because it pairs with an iPhone, uh, it can immediately send, uh,
send the report to a Department of Health, whereas these paper strip tests that they're just paper,
they don't report anything unless you want to report it. Okay. So I'm going to just pick it,
I'm going to pick it apart. And so you can see is there's like fluorescent readers and little
lasers and LEDs and stuff in there. You're going to actually see the lights going off.
And there's a paper strip test right inside there, but you can see that there's like a
whole circuit board and, and all this stuff. Right. And so this is the kind of thing that,
you know, the FDA is looking for, um, for like home use and, and things like that,
because it's kind of foolproof, like you, you can't go wrong with it. It pairs with an iPhone,
so you need Bluetooth. So it's going to be more limited. It's a great test. Don't get me wrong.
It's as good as any of these. But you know, when you compare this thing with a battery and a
circuit board and all this stuff, it's got its purpose, but you know, it's not a public health
tool. I don't want to see this made in the tens of millions a day and thrown away. Um, this is just
FDA likes that kind of stuff. So FDA loves this stuff, you know, because they can't get it out
of their mind that this is a public health crisis. You know, we need, we need, I mean,
just look at the difference here. Something flashing lights is, is essential. Got batteries,
it's got a Bluetooth thing. It's a great test, but you know, it's, to be honest, it's not any
better than, than this one. And so, you know, I want this one. Um, it's nice and all the form
factor is nice, but, and it's really nice that it goes to Bluetooth, but it goes against the
principle of just 20 million a day. The easy solution. Everybody has it. You can manufacture
in probably, you could have probably scaled this up in a couple of weeks. Oh, absolutely. These
companies, I mean, the rest of the world has these, they can be scaled up. They already exist.
You know, SD biosensors, one company is making tens of millions a day,
not coming to the United States, but going all over Europe and all over Southeast Asia and
Southeast Asia. So they exist. The US is just, you know, we can't get out of our own way.
I wonder what, why somebody, I don't know if you were paying attention, but somebody like an Elon
Musk type character. So he was really into doing some like obvious engineering solution like this.
At home, rapid test seems like a very Elon Musk thing to do.
I don't know if you saw, but I had a little Twitter conversation with Elon Musk.
Does he not like, what is it? Do you know what his thoughts are on rapid testing?
Well, he was using a slightly different one. One of these, but that requires an instrument
called the BD Veritor. And he got a false positive or no, I shouldn't say he didn't
necessarily get a false positive. He got discrepant results. He did this test four times.
He got two positives, two negatives. But then he got a PCR test and it was a very low positive
result. So I think what happened is he just tested himself at the tail end of it. This was
actually right before he was about to send those. It was the day of essentially that he was sending
the astronauts up to the space station the other day. So he was using these rapid tests because
he wanted to make sure that he was good to go in and he got discrepant results. Ultimately,
they were correct. But two were negative, two were positive. But what really happened,
once he got his, he shared his PCR results and they were very low positive. So really what
was happening is my guess is he found himself right at the edge of his positivity of his
infectiousness. And so the test worked out was supposed to work. It probably had he used it
two days earlier. It would have been screaming positive. He wouldn't have gotten discrepant
results. But he found himself right at the edge by the time he used the test. So the PCR
would always pick it up because it will still stay positive then for weeks potentially.
But the rapid antigen test was starting to falter, not in a bad way, but just he probably was
really no longer particularly infectious. And so it was kind of when it gets to be a very low
viral load, it becomes stochastic. It's fascinating this duality. So one, you can think from an
individual perspective. It's unclear when you take four and half are positive, half a negative,
like what are you supposed to do? But from a societal perspective, it seems like if just one
of them is positive, just stay home for a couple of days for a while. So if one year CEO of a
company you're launching astronauts to space, you may not want to rely absolutely on the antigen
test as a thing by which you steer your decisions of like 10,000 plus people companies. But us
individuals just living in the world, if you can, if it comes up positive, then you make decisions
based on that. And then that scales really nicely to an entire society of hundreds of millions of
people. And that's how you get that virus to stop spreading. That's exactly right. You don't have to
catch every single one. And the nice thing is that these will catch the people who are most
infectious. So with Elon Musk, generally that test, we don't have the counterfactual. We don't
have his results from three days earlier when he was probably most infectious. But my guess is the
fact that it was catching two out of the four, even when he was down at a CT value of really,
really very, very low viral load on the PCR test suggests that it was doing its job. And you just
want to, and the nice thing is because these can be produced at such scale, getting one positive
doesn't immediately have to mean 10 days of isolation. That's the CDC's more conservative
stance to say, if you're positive on any test, stay home for 10 days and isolate. But here,
people would just have more tests. So the recommendation should be test daily. If you
turn positive, test daily until you've been negative for 24 or 48 hours and then go back
to work. And the nice thing there is right now, people just aren't testing because they don't
want to take 10 days off. They're not getting paid for it. So they can't take 10 days off.
Do you know what Elon thinks about this idea of rapid testing for everybody? So I understood.
I need to look at that whole Twitter thread. So I understand his perhaps criticism of
he had like a conspiratorial tone for my vague look at it of like, what's going on here with
these tests? But what does he actually think about this very practical to me engineering
solution of just deploying rapid tests to everybody? It seems like that's a way to open
up the economy in April. Well, to be honest, I've been trying to get in touch with them again.
I think take somebody like Elon Musk with the engineering prowess within his ranks to
easily, easily build these at the tens of millions a day. He could build the machines from scratch.
A lot of the companies, they buy the machines from South Korea or Taiwan, I believe. We don't have
to. We can build these machines. They're simple to build. Put somebody like Elon Musk on it.
Take some of his best engineers and say, look, the US needs a solution in two weeks. Build
these machines. Figure it out. He'll do it. He could do it. This is a guy who is literally,
he has started multiple entirely new industries. He has the capital to do it without the US
government if he wanted to. The return on investment for him would be huge. But frankly,
the return on investment in the country would be hundreds of billions of dollars
because it means we could get society open. I know that his first experience with these rapid tests
was confusing, which is how I ended up having this Twitter kind of conversation with him very
briefly. But I think that if he understood a little bit more, and I think he does, I really
love to talk to him about it, because I think he could totally change the course of this pandemic
in the United States single-handedly. He loves grand things. Yeah. I think out of all the
solutions I've seen, this is the obvious engineering solution to at least a pandemic of this scale.
So I love that you say the engineering solution. So this is something I've been really trying to,
I'm an engineer. My previous history was all engineering, and that's really how I think.
I then went into medicine and PhD world. But I think that the world, one of the major
catastrophes or one of the major problems is that we have physicians making the decisions about
public health and a pandemic when really we need engineers. This is an engineering problem.
What I've been trying to do, I actually really want to start a whole new field called public
health engineering. Eventually, I want to try to bring it to MIT and get MIT to want to start a
new department or something. That's a doubly awesome idea. I love this. I love every aspect.
I love everything you're talking about now. A lot of people believe because vaccines started
being deployed currently that we are no longer in need of a solution. We're no longer in need of
slowing the spread of the virus. To me, as I understand, it seems like this is the most
important time to have something like a rapid testing solution. Can you break that apart?
What's the role of rapid testing in the next, what is it, three, four months maybe?
Even more. The vaccine rollout isn't going to be as peachy as everyone is hoping. I hate to be
the Debbie Downer here, but there's a lot of unknowns with this vaccine. You've already
mentioned one, which is there's a lot of people who just don't want to get the vaccine. I hope
that that might change as things move forward and people see their neighbors getting it and
their family getting it and it's safe and all. We don't know how effective the vaccine is going
to be after two or three months. We've only measured it in the first two or three months,
which is a massive problem, which we can go into biologically because there's reasons to,
very good reasons to believe that the efficacy could fall way down after two or three months.
We don't know if it's going to stop transmission. If it doesn't stop transmission,
then herd immunity is much, much more difficult to get because that's all based on
transmission blockade. Frankly, we don't know how easily we're going to be able to roll it out.
Some of the vaccines need really significant cold chains, have very short half lives outside of
that cold chain. We need to organize massive numbers of people to be able to distribute
these. Most hospitals today are saying that they're not equipped to hire the right people to be even
administering enough of these vaccines. Then a lot of the hospitals are frustrated because
they're getting much lower, smaller allocations than they were expecting. I think right now,
like you say, right now is the best time, besides three or four or five or six months ago,
right now is the best time to get these rapid tests out. The country has the capacity to build
them. We're shipping them overseas right now. We just need to flip a switch, get the FDA to
recognize that there's more important things than diagnostic medicine, which is the effectiveness
of the public health program when we're dealing with a pandemic. They need to
authorize these as public health tools, or frankly, the president could. There's a lot of
other ways to get these tests to not have to go through the normal FDA authorization program,
but maybe have the NIH and the CDC give a stamp of approval. If we could, we could get these out
tomorrow. That's where that article came from, how we can stop the spread of this virus by
Christmas. We could. Now it's getting late. We have to keep updating that time frame,
maybe putting Christmas in the title wasn't, I should have said, how we can stop the spread
of this virus in a month. It would be a little bit more timeless, but we could do it. We really
could do it. That's the most frustrating part here is that we're just choosing not to as a country.
We're choosing to bankrupt our society because some people at the FDA and other places just can't
seem to get their head around the fact that this is a public health problem, not a bunch of medical
problems. Is there a way to change that policy-wise? This is a much bigger thing that you're speaking
to, which I love in terms of the MIT engineering approach to public health. Is there a way to
push this? Is this a political thing where some Andrew Yang type characters need to start screaming
about it? Is it more of an Elon Musk thing where people just need to build it and then on Twitter
start talking crap to politicians who are not doing it? What are the ideas here?
I think it's a little both. I think it's political on the one hand, and I've certainly been talking
to Congress a lot, talking to senators. Are they receptive? Oh, yeah. That's the crazy thing.
Everyone but the FDA is receptive. It's astounding. Informally, I advise
the president and the president-elect's teams. I talked to Congress. I talked to senators,
governors, and then all the way down to mayors of towns and things.
Months ago, I held a roundtable discussion with Mayor Garcetti, who's the mayor of LA,
and I brought all the companies who make these things. This was in July or August or something.
I brought all the companies to the table and said, okay, how can we get these out?
Unfortunately, it went nowhere because the FDA won't authorize them as public health tools.
The nice thing is that this is one of the nice and frustrating things. This is one
of the few bipartisan things that I know of. Like you said, it's a real solution. Lockdowns
aren't a solution. They're an emergency bandaid to a catastrophe that's currently happening.
They're not a solution, and they're definitely not a public health solution
if we're taking a more holistic view of public health, which includes people's well-being,
includes their psychological well-being, their financial well-being. Just stopping a virus,
if it means that all those other things get thrown under the bus, is not a public health solution.
It's a myopic or very tunnel-visioned approach to a virus that's spreading.
This is a simple solution with essentially no downfall. There is nothing bad about this.
It's just giving people a result, and it's bipartisan. The most conservative and the most
liberal people, everyone just wants to know their status. Nobody wants to have to wait
in line for four hours to find out their status on Monday a week later on Saturday.
It just doesn't make any sense. It's a useless test at that point, and everyone recognizes that.
So why do you think the mayor of LA, why do you think politicians are going for these,
from my perspective, half-assed lockdowns? I have seen good evidence that a complete
lockdown can work, but communism in theory can work. Theoretically speaking, but it just doesn't,
at least in this country, I think it's just impossible to have a complete lockdown.
And still, politicians are going for these kind of lockdowns that everybody hates,
that's really hurting small businesses. Why are they going for that?
Businesses. Yeah, all businesses. But basically, not just hurting,
they're destroying small businesses, which is going to have potentially...
Very long-lasting consequences. Yeah, I've been reading, as I don't
shout out about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. There's economic effects that take a decade to...
There's going to be long-lasting effects that may be destructive to the very fabric of this nation.
So why are they doing it, and why are they not using the solution? Is there an intuition?
I mean, you've said that FDA has a stranglehold, I guess, on this whole public health problem.
Is that all it is? That's honestly, it's pretty much all it is. The company,
the company. So somebody like Mayor Garcetti or Governor Baker, Cuomo, Newsom, any of these
DeWine, I've talked to a lot of governors in this country at this point,
and of course, the federal government, including the president's own teams,
and the heads of the NIH, the heads of the CDC about this.
The problem is, the tests don't exist in this country at the level that we need them to right
now to make that kind of policy, to make that kind of program. They could, but they don't. And so,
what that means is that when Mayor Garcetti says, okay, what are my actual options today,
despite these sounding like a great idea, he looks around and he says, well, they're not
authorized. They don't exist right now for at-home use. And from his perspective,
he's not about to pick that fight with the FDA. And it turns out nobody is.
Why are people afraid of it? It seems like an easy struggle to fight.
Well, they don't see it as a fight. They think that the FDA is the end-all be-all.
Everyone thinks the FDA is the end-all be-all. And so they just differ, everyone is deferential,
including the heads of all the other government agencies, because that is their role. But what
everyone is failing to see is that the FDA doesn't even have a mandate or a remit
to evaluate these tests as public health tools. So they're just falling in this weird gray zone
where the FDA is saying, look, we evaluate medical products. That's the only thing that I meant,
like Tim Stenzel, head of Invitra Diagnostics at the FDA. He's doing what his job is,
which is to evaluate medical tools. Unfortunately, this is where I think the CDC has really
blundered. They haven't made the right distinction to say, look, okay, the FDA is evaluating these
for doctors to use and all that. But we're the CDC and we're the public health agency of this
country. And we recognize that these tools require a different authorization pathway and a different
use, not prescription. There's a difference in medical devices and public health. And I guess FDA
is not designed for this public health, especially in emergency situations. And they actually
explicitly say that. I mean, when I go and talk to Tim, he's a very reasonable guy.
But when I talk to him, he says, look, we don't, we just do not evaluate a public health tool.
If you're telling me this is a public health tool, great, go and use it. And so I say, okay,
great, we'll go and use it. And then the comment is, but, you know, does it give a result back
to somebody? I say, well, yes, of course it gives a result back to somebody. It's being done in their
home. So then it's defined as a medical tool. Can't use it. So it's stuck in this gray zone,
where we unfortunately, there's this weird definition that any tool, any test that gives
a result back to an individual is defined by CMS, Centers for Medicaid Services, as a medical
device requiring medical authorization. But then you go and ask, it gets crazier, because then you
go and ask Seema Verma, the head of CMS, you know, okay, can these be authorized as public
health tools and not fall under your definition of a medical device? So then the FDA doesn't have
to be the ones authorizing it as a public health tool. And Seema Verma says, oh, we don't have any
jurisdiction over point of care and sort of rapid devices like this. We only have jurisdiction over
lab devices. So it's like nobody has ownership over it, which means that they just keep, they
stay in this purgatory of not being approved. And so this is where I think, frankly, it needs a
president. It needs a presidential order to just unlock them to say, this is more important than
you know, having a prescription. And in fact, I mean, really what's happening now, because there is
this sense that tests are public health tools, even if they're not being defined as such,
the FDA now is pretty much not only are they not authorizing these as public health tools,
what they're doing by authorizing what are effectively public health tools as medical
devices, they're just diluting down the practice of medicine. I mean, his answer right now unfortunately
is, well, I don't know why you want these to be sort of available to everyone without a prescription.
We've already said that a doctor can write a whole prescription for a whole college campus.
It's like, well, if you're going in that direction, then that's no longer medicine.
Having a doctor write a prescription for a college campus for everyone on the campus to have repeat
testing. Now we're just in the territory of eroding medicine and eroding all of the legal
rules and reasons that we have prescriptions in the first place. So it's just everything about it
is just destructive. Instead of just making a simple solution, which is these are okay as
public health tools as long as they meet X and Y metrics, go and CDC can put their stamp of approval
on them. What do you think, sorry if I'm stuck on this, your mention of MIT and public health
engineering, right? I mean, it has a sense of I talked to competition biology folks.
It's always exciting to see computer scientists start entering the space of biology and there's
actually a lot of exciting things that happen because of that, trying to understand the fundamentals
of biology. So from the engineering approach to public health, what kind of problems do you think
can be tackled? What kind of disciplines are involved? Do you have ideas in this space?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I can speak to one of the major activities that I want to do. So what I
normally do in my research lab is develop technologies that can take a drop of somebody's
blood or some saliva and profile for hundreds of thousands of different antibodies against every
single pathogen that somebody could be possibly exposed to. So this is all new technology that
we've been developing more from a bioengineering perspective. But then I use a lot of the mathematics
tools to interpret that. But what I really want to do, for example, to kind of kick off this new
field of what I consider public health engineering is to create, maybe it's a little ambitious,
but create a weather system for viruses. I want us to be able to open up our iPhones,
plug in our zip code, and get a better sense, get a probability of why my kid has a runny nose
today. Is it COVID? Is it a rhinovirus and adenovirus or is it flu? And we can do that.
We can start building the rules of virus spread across the globe, both for pandemic preparedness,
but also for just everyday use in the same way that people used to think that predicting the
weather was going to be impossible. Of course, we know that's not impossible now. Is it always
perfect? No. But does it offer, does it completely change the way that we go about our days?
Absolutely. I envision, for example, right now, we open up our iPhone, we plug in a zip code,
and if it tells us it's going to rain today, we bring an umbrella. So in the future,
it tells us, hey, there's a lot of SARS-CoV-2 in your community. Instead of grabbing your umbrella,
you grab your mask. We don't have to have masks all the time, but if we know the rules of the game
that these viruses play by, we can start preparing for those. And every year, we go into every flu
season blindfolded with our hands tied behind our back, just saying, I hope this isn't a bad flu
season this year. We're in the 21st century. We have the tools at our disposal now to not
have that attitude. This isn't like 1920s. We can just say, hey, this is going to be a bad
flu season this year. Let's act accordingly and with a targeted approach. For example,
we don't just use our umbrellas all day long every single day in case it might rain. We don't
board up our homes every single day in case there's a hurricane. We wait, and if we know
that there's one coming, then we act for a small period of time accordingly. And then we go back
and we've prepared ourselves in these little bursts to not have it ruin our days.
I can't tell you how exciting that vision of the future is. I think that's incredible. And
it seems like it should be within our reach. Just these weather maps of viruses floating
about the earth. And it seems obvious. It's one of those things where right now it seems like
maybe impossible. And then looking back like 20 years from now, we'll wonder why the hell
this hasn't been done way earlier. Though one difference in weather, I don't know if you have
interesting ideas in this space, the difference in weather and viruses is it includes the
collection of the data includes the human body potentially. And that means that there is some,
as with the contact tracing question, there's some concern about privacy. There seems to be this
dance that's really complicated. With Facebook getting a lot of flak for basically misusing
people's data or just whether it's perception or reality, there's certainly a lot of reality too
where they're not good stewards of our private data. So there's this weird place where it's like
obvious that if we collect a lot of data about human beings and maintain privacy and
maintain all basic respect for that data, just like honestly common sense respect for the data,
that we can do a lot of amazing things for the world like a weather map for viruses. Is there a
way forward to gaining trust of people or to do this well? Do you have ideas here? How big is
this problem? I think it's a central problem. There's a couple central problems that need to
be solved. One, how do you get all the samples? That's not actually too difficult. I have a pilot
project going right now with getting samples from across all the United States. Tens of thousands
of samples every week are flowing into my lab and we process them. So it's taking like one of the
basically this biology here in chemistry and converting that into numbers. That's exactly
right. So what we're doing, for example, there's a lot of people who go to the hospital every day,
a lot of people who donate blood, people who donate plasma. So one of the projects that I have,
I'll get to the privacy question in a moment, but this, so what I want to do is the name that I've
given this is a global immunological observatory. There's no reason not to have that. Good name.
I've said, instead of saying, well, how do we possibly get enough people on board to
send in samples all the time? Well, just go to the source. So there's a company in Massachusetts
that makes 80% of all the instruments that are used globally to collect plasma from plasma donors.
So I went to this company, Hemenetics, and said, is there a way you have 80% of the global market
on plasma donations? Can we start getting plasma samples from healthy people that use your machines?
So that hooked me up with this company called Octafarma. And Octafarma is a huge reach
and offices all over the country where they're just collecting people's plasma. They actually pay
people for their plasma, and then that gets distributed to hospitals and all this stuff
is anonymous plasma. So I've just been collecting anonymous samples. And we're processing them,
in this case, for COVID antibodies to watch from January up through December, we're able to
watch how the virus entered into the United States and how it's transmitting every day
across the US. So we're getting those results organized now, and we're going to start
putting them publicly online soon to start making at least a very rough map of COVID.
But that's the type of thinking that I have in terms of like, how do you actually capture huge
numbers of specimens? You can't ask everyone to participate on sort of a, I mean, you maybe could
if you have the right tools, and you can offer individuals something in return like 23andMe does.
You know, that's a great way to get people to give specimens and they get results back. So
with these technologies that I've been building, along with some collaborators at Harvard, we can
come up with tools that people might actually want. So I can offer you your immunological history. I
can say, give me a drop of your blood on a filter paper, mail it in, and I will be able to tell you
every infectious disease you've ever encountered, and maybe even when you encountered it roughly.
I could tell you, do you have COVID antibodies right now? Do you have Lyme disease antibodies
right now? Flu, triple E, and all these different viruses, also peanut allergies, milk allergies,
anything. You know, if your immune system makes a response to it, we can detect that response.
So all of a sudden, we have this very valuable technology that on the one hand gives people
maybe information they might want to know about themselves. But on the other hand,
becomes this amazingly rich source of big data, you know, to enter into this global immunological
observatory sort of mathematical framework to start building these maps, these epidemiological
tools. But you ask about privacy. And absolutely, that's essential to keep in mind, first and foremost.
So privacy can be, you can keep these samples 100% anonymous. They're just, when I get them,
they show up with nothing. They're literally just tubes. I know a date that they were collected
and a zip code that they're collected from or even just sort of a county level ID.
With an IRB and with ethical approval and with the people's consent, we can maybe collect more
data, but that would require consent. But then there's this other approach, which I'm really
excited about, which is certainly going to gain some scrutiny, I think. But we'll have to figure
out where it comes into play. But I've been recognizing that we can take somebody's immunological
profile, and we can make a biological fingerprint out of it. And it's actually stable enough so
that I could take your blood. Let's say I don't know who you are, but you sent me a drop of blood
a year ago, and then you sent me a drop of blood today. I don't know that those two blood spots
are coming from the same person. They're just showing up in my lab. But I can run our technology
over, and it just gives me your immunological history. But your immunological history is so
unique to you, and the way that your body responds to these pathogens is so unique to you,
so unique to you, that I can use that to tether your two samples. I don't know who you are. I
know nothing about you. I only know when those samples came out of a person. But I can say,
oh, these two samples a year apart actually belong to the same person.
Yeah. So there's sufficient information that immunological history to match the samples.
From a privacy perspective, that's really exciting. Does that generally hold for humans?
So you're saying there's enough uniqueness to match?
Yeah, because it's very stochastic, even twins. So this I believe, we haven't published this yet,
we will soon. You have a twin too, right?
I do have a twin. I have an identical twin brother, which makes me interested in this.
He looks very much like me. Oh, is that how that works?
And DNA can't really tell us apart. But this tool is one of the only tools in the world that
could tell twins apart from each other, could still be accurate enough to say this blood,
it's like 99.999% accurate to say that these two blood samples came from the same individual.
And it's because it's a combination, both of your immunological history,
but also how your unique body responds to a pathogen, which is random.
The way that we make antibodies is by and large, it's got an element of randomness to it.
But how the cells, when they make an antibody, they chop up the genetic code to say, okay,
this is the antibody that I'm going to form for this pathogen. And you might form,
if you get a coronavirus, for example, you might form hundreds of different antibodies,
not just one antibody against the spike protein, but hundreds of different antibodies
against all different parts of the virus. So that gives us really rich resolution of information
that when I then do the same thing across hundreds of different pathogens, some of which
you've seen, some of which you haven't, it gives you an exceedingly unique fingerprint that
is sufficiently stable over years and years and years to essentially give you a barcode.
I don't have to know who you are, but I can know that these two specimens came from the same person
somewhere out in the world. So fascinating that there's this trace, your life story in the space
of viruses, in the space of pathogen. Because there's this entire universe of these organisms
that are trying to destroy each other. And then your little trajectory through that space leaves
a trace. And then you can look at that trace. That's fascinating. That data period is just
fascinating. And the vision of making that data universally connected to where you can make
infer things. And just like with the weather is really fascinating. And there's probably
artificial intelligence applications there, start making predictions, start finding patterns.
Exactly. We're doing a lot of that already. And that's how we had this going. I've been
trying to get this funded for years now. And I've spoken to governments, everyone says,
cool idea, not going to do it. Why do we need it? Oh, really? The why do you need it?
The why do you need it? And of course now, I've wrote in 2015 about this,
why this would be useful. And of course, now we're seeing why it would be useful.
Had we had this up and running in 2019, had we had it going, we were getting blood samples from
hospitals and clinics and blood donors from New York City, let's just say. That could have,
we didn't run the first PCR test for coronavirus until probably a month and a half or two months
after the virus started transmitting in New York City.
So it's like with the rain, we didn't start wearing umbrellas or taking out umbrellas.
Exactly. For two months. It's getting wet.
But different than the rain, we couldn't actually see that it was spreading.
Right. And so Andrew Cuomo had no choice but to leave the city open.
There were hints that maybe the virus was spreading in New York City,
but he didn't have any data to back it up, no data. And so it was just week on week and week.
And he didn't have any information to really go by to allow him to have the firepower to say,
we're closing down the city. This is an emergency. We have to stop spread before it starts.
And so they waited until the first PCR tests were coming about. And then the moment they
started running PCR tests, they find out it's everywhere. And so that was a disaster because,
of course, New York City, it was just hit so bad because nobody was, we were blind to it.
We didn't have to be blind to it. And the nice thing about this technology is
we wouldn't have, with the exact same technology we had in 2017,
we could have detected this novel coronavirus spreading in New York City in 2020.
Not because we changed, not because we are actually actively looking for this novel coronavirus,
but because we would see, we would have seen patterns in people's immune responses using AI
or just frankly using our, just the raw data itself. We could have said, hey, it looks like
there's something that looks like known coronavirus is spreading in New York, but
there's gaps. You know, there's, for some reason, people aren't developing an immune response to
this coronavirus that seems to be spreading to these normal things that, you know, and it just
looks, the profile looks different. And we could have seen that and immediately, especially since
we had an idea that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the world, we could have very
quickly and easily seen, hey, clearly we're seeing a spike of something that looks like a known
coronavirus, but people are responding weirdly to it. Our AI algorithms would have picked it up
and just our basic heck, you could have put it in an Excel spreadsheet, we would have seen it.
Yeah, some basic visualization would have shown that. Exactly. We would have seen spikes and
they would have been kind of like off, you know, immune responses that the shape of them just looked
a little bit different, but they would have been growing and we would have seen it and it could
have saved tens of thousands of lives in New York City. So to me, the fascinating question,
everything we've talked about, so both the huge collection of data at scale, just super exciting,
and then the kind of obvious at scale solution to the current virus and future ones is the rapid
testing. Can we talk about the future of viruses that might be threatening the, our very
existence? So do you think like a future natural virus can have an order of magnitude greater
effect on human civilization than anything we've ever seen? So something that either kills all
humans or kills, I don't know, 60, 70% of humans. So something we can't even imagine. Is that something
that you think is possible because it seems to have not have happened yet. So maybe like the
entirety, whoever the programmer is of the simulation that sort of launched the evolution for the
Big Bang seems to not want to destroy us humans. Or maybe that's a natural side effect of the
evolutionary process that humans are useful. But do you think it's possible that the evolutionary
process will produce a virus that will kill all humans? I think it could. I don't think it's
likely. And the reason I don't think it's likely is, well, on the one hand, it hasn't happened yet,
in part because mobility is a recent phenomena. People weren't particularly mobile until fairly
recently. Now, of course, now that we have people flying back and forth across the globe all the
time, the chances of global pandemics has escalated exponentially, of course. And so
on the one hand, that's part of why it hasn't happened yet. We can look at things like Ebola.
Now, Ebola, we haven't generally had major Ebola epidemics in the past, not because Ebola wasn't
transmitting and infecting humans, but because it was largely affecting and infecting humans
in disconnected communities. So you see in rural parts of Africa, for example,
in Western Africa, you might end up having isolated Ebola outbreaks. But there weren't
connections that were fast enough that would allow people to then spread it
into the cities. Of course, we saw back in 2014-15 a massive Ebola outbreak that
wasn't because it was a new strain of Ebola, but it was because there's new inroads and connections
between the communities and people got it to the city. And so we saw it start to spread.
So that should be a little bit foreshadowing of what's to come. And now we have this pandemic.
We had 2009. We have this. There is a benefit, or there is sort of a natural check. And this is
a kind of latke-voltaire predator-prey dynamic kind of systems, ecological systems and mathematics
that if you have something that's so deadly, people will respond maybe with a greater panic,
a greater sense of panic, which alone could destroy humanity. But at the same time, we now
know that we can lock down. We know that that's possible. And so if this was a worse virus that
was actually killing 60% of people who was infecting, we would lock down very quickly.
My biggest fear, though, is let's say that was happening. You need serious lockdowns if you're
going to keep things going. So the only reason we were able to keep things going during our lockdowns
is because it wasn't so bad that we were still able to have people work in the grocery stores,
still people work in the shipping to get the food onto the shelves. So on the one hand,
we could probably figure out how to stop the virus, but can we stop the virus without starving?
And I'm not sure that if this was another acute respiratory virus that say it transmitted the
same way, but say it actually did worse damage to your heart, but it was like a month later
that people started having heart attacks in mass. It's not just one-offs, but really severe.
Well, that could be a serious problem for humanity. So in some ways, I think that
there are lots of ways that we could end up dying at the hand of a virus. I mean,
we're already seeing it. I mean, my fear is still, I think coronaviruses have demonstrated
a keen ability to destroy or to create outbreaks that can potentially be deadly to large numbers
of people. Flu strains, though, are still by and large my concern. So you think the bad one might
come from the flu, the influenza? Yeah, their replication cycle, they're able to genetically
recombine in a way that coronaviruses aren't. They have segmented genomes, which means that
they can just swap out whole parts of their genomes, no problem, repackage them, and then,
boom, you have a whole antigenic shift, not a drift. What that means is that on any occasion,
any day of the year, you can have, boom, a new whole new virus that didn't exist yesterday.
And now with farming and industrial livestock, we're seeing animals and humans come
into contact much more. Just the opportunities for an influenza strain that is unique and deadly
to humans increases all the while transmission and mobility has increased. It's just a matter
of time in my opinion. What about from immunology perspective of the idea of engineering a virus?
So not just the virus leaking from a lab or something, but actually being able to understand
the protein, everything about what makes a virus enough to be able to figure out ways to
maybe target it or untargeted attack by other systems.
It's the birth immunity.
Yeah. Is that something, obviously that's somewhere on the list of concerns,
but is that anywhere close of the top 10 highlights along with nuclear weapons and so on that we
should be worried about? Or is the natural pandemic really the one that's much greater concern?
I would say that the former, that manmade viruses and genetically engineered viruses
should be right up there with the greatest concerns for humanity right now.
We know that the tools for better or worse, the tools for creating a virus are there.
We can do it. I mean, heck, the human species is no longer vaccinated against smallpox.
I didn't get a smallpox vaccine. You didn't get a smallpox vaccine, at least I don't think.
So if somebody wanted to make smallpox and distribute it to the world in some way, it could
be exceedingly deadly and detrimental to humans, and that's not even using your imagination to
create a new virus. That's one that we already have. Unlike the past, when smallpox would
circulate, you had large fractions of the community that was already immune to it,
and so it wouldn't spread or it would spread a little bit slower, but now we have essentially,
in a few years, we'll have a whole global population that is susceptible. Let's look at measles.
We have an entire, I mean, measles. There are some researchers in the world right now, which,
for various reasons, are working on creating a measles strain that evades immunity. It's not
for bioterrorism, at least that's not the expectation. It's for using measles as an
oncolytic virus to kill cancer, and the only way you can really do that is if your immune system
doesn't, you know, if you take a measles virus, and there's, you know, we don't have to go into
the details of why it would work, but it could work. Measles likes to target potentially cancer
cells, but to get your immune system not to kill off the virus, if you're trying to use the virus
to target it, you maybe want to make it blind to the immune system, but now imagine we took some
virus like measles, which has an R0 of 18, transmits extremely quickly, and now we have
essentially, let's say we had a whole human race that is susceptible to measles, and this is a virus
that spreads orders of magnitude easier than this current virus. Imagine if you were to plug something
toxic or detrimental into that virus and release it to the world.
So it's possible to be both accidental and intentional? Absolutely. Yeah, an accident. So
Mark Lipsitch is a good colleague of mine at Harvard. We're both in the, he's the director
of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics from a faculty member. He's spoken very, very
forcefully, and he's very outspoken about the dangers of gain-of-function testing,
where in the lab we are intentionally creating viruses that are exceedingly deadly under the
auspices of trying to learn about them, so that if the idea is that if we kind of accelerate
evolution and make these really deadly viruses in the lab, we can be prepared for if that virus
ever comes about naturally or through unnatural means. The concern though is, okay, that's one
thing, but what if that virus got out on somebody's shoe? Just what if? If the effects of an accident
are potentially catastrophic, is it worth taking the chances just to be prepared a little bit for
something that may or may not ever actually develop? And so it's a serious ethical quandary
we're in. How to both be prepared, but also not cause a catastrophic mistake.
As a small tangent, there's a recent really exciting breakthrough of Alpha2, of AlphaFold2
solving protein folding or achieving state-of-the-art performance on protein folding. And then I thought
proteins have a lot to do with viruses. It seems like being able to use machine learning
to design proteins that achieve certain kinds of functions will naturally allow you to use,
maybe down the line, not yet, but allow you to use machine learning to design
basically viruses, maybe like measles, like for good, which is like to attack cancer cells,
but also for bad. Is that a crazy thought or is this a natural place where this technology
may go? I suppose as all technologies can, which is for good and for bad. Do you think about the
role of machine learning in this? Oh yeah, absolutely. AlphaFold is amazing. It's an amazing
algorithm, series of algorithms. And it does demonstrate, to me, it demonstrates just how
powerful everything in the world has rules. We just don't know the rules. We often don't know
them, but our brain has rules, how it works. Everything is plus and minus. There's nothing
in the world that's really not, at its most basic level, positive, negative. Obviously,
it's all just charge. And that means everything. You can figure it out with enough computational
power and enough. In this case, I mean, machine learning and AI is just one way to learn rules.
It's an empirical way to learn rules, but it's a profoundly powerful way.
And certainly, now that we are getting to a point where we can take a protein and know how it folds,
given its sequence, we can reverse engineer that and we can say, okay, we want a protein to fold
this way. What does the sequence need to be? We haven't done that yet so much, but it's just
the next iteration of all of this. So let's say somebody wants to develop a virus. It's going
to start with somebody wanting to develop a virus to defeat cancer, something good. And so it will
start with a lot of money from the federal government for all the positives that will come out of it.
But we have to be really careful because that will come about. There's no doubt in my mind
that we will develop, we're already doing it. We engineer molecules all the time
for specific uses. Oftentimes, we take them from nature and then tweak them.
But now we can supercharge it. We can accelerate the pace of discovery. To not have it just be
discovery, we have it be true ground up engineering. Let's say you're trying to
make a new molecule to stabilize somebody with some retinal disease. So we come up with some
molecule that can improve the stability of somebody with retinal degeneration.
Just a small tweak to that to say make a virus that causes the human race to become blind.
It sounds really conspiracy theory-ish, but it's not. We're learning so much about biology and
there's always nefarious reasons. Heck, look at how AI and just Google searches, they are every
single day being leveraged by nefarious actors to take advantage of people, to steal money,
to do whatever it might be, eventually probably to create wars or already to create wars.
And I mean, I don't think there's any question at this point behind disinformation campaigns.
And so it's being leveraged. This thing that could be wholly good is always going to be leveraged
for bad. And so how do you balance that as a species? I'm not quite sure.
The hope is, as you mentioned previously, that we were able to also develop defense
mechanisms. And there's something about the human species that seems to keep coming up with
ways to just on the deadline, just at the last moment, figuring out how to avoid destruction.
I think I'm eternally optimistic about the human race not destroying ourselves,
but you could do a lot of things that would be very painful.
Yes. Well, we're doing it already. I mean, we are seeing how our regulation today.
Right. We did this thing. It started as a good thing,
regulation of medical products. But now it is unwillingly and unintentionally
harming us. Our regulatory landscape, which was developed wholly for good in our country,
is getting in the way of us deploying a tool that could stop our economies from having to be
sort of sputteringly closed, that could stop deaths from happening at the rate that they are.
I think we will come to a solution. Of course, now we're going to get the vaccine and it's going
to make people lose track of why we even bother testing, which is a bad idea. But we're already
seeing that we have this amazing capacity to both do damage when we don't intend to do damage
and then also to pull up when we need to pull up and stop complete catastrophe.
We are an interesting species in that way, that's for sure.
So there's a lot of young folks on the grads. They're also young. Listen to this. You've talked
about a lot of fascinating stuff that's like there's ways that things are done and there's
actual solutions and they're not always like intersecting. Do you have advice for undergraduate
students or graduate students or even people in high school now about life, about career,
how they might be able to solve real big problems in the world, how they should live their life
in order to have a chance to solve big problems in the world?
It's hard. I struggle a little bit sometimes to give advice because the advice that I give
from my own personal experience is necessarily distinct from the advice that would make other
people successful. I have unending ambitions to make things better. And I don't see barricades
where other people sometimes see barricades. Now, even just little things like when this virus
started, I'm a medical director at Brigham Women's Hospital and so I oversee or helped oversee
molecular virology diagnostics. So when this virus started, wearing my epidemiology hat and
wearing my sort of viral outbreak hat, I recognized that this is going to be a big virus that was
important at a global level, even if the CDC and WHO weren't ready to admit that it was a pandemic.
It was obvious in January that it was a pandemic. So I started trying to get a test built at the
Brigham, which is one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. The first encounters I had with
the upper administration of the hospital were pretty much, no, why would we do that? That's
silly. Who are you? And I said, well, okay, don't believe me, sure. But I kept pushing on it.
And then eventually I got them to agree. It was really only a couple of weeks before the
Biogen conference happened. We started building the test. I think they started looking abroad and
saying, okay, this is happening. Sure. Maybe he was right. But then I went a step further and I said,
we're not going to have enough tests at the hospital. And so my ambition was to get a better
testing program started. And so I figured what better place to scale up testing than the Broad
Institute? Broad Institute is amazing, very high throughput, high efficiency research institute
that does a lot of genomic sequencing, things like that. So I went to the Broad and I said,
hey, there's this coronavirus that's obviously going to impact our society greatly. Can we
start modifying your high efficiency instruments and robots for coronavirus testing? Everyone in my
orbit in the hospital world just said, that's ridiculous. How could you possibly plan to do
that? It's impossible. And to me, it was like the most dead simple thing to do. But the higher
ups and the people who think about, I think one of the most important things is to recognize
that most people in the world don't see solutions. They just see problems. And it's because it's an
easy thing to do. Thinking of problems and how things will go wrong is really easy because
you're not coming up with a brand new solution. And this to me was just a super simple solution.
Hey, let's get the Broad to help build tests. Every single hospital director told me no,
like it's impossible. My own superiors, the ones I report to in the hospital said, Mike,
you're a new faculty member. Your ideas probably would be right, but you're too naive and young
to know that it's impossible. And obviously now the Broad is the highest throughput laboratory in
the country. And so I think my recommendation to people is as much as possible, get out of the
mode of thinking about things as problems. Sometimes you piss people off. I could probably use a
better filter sometimes to try to be not so upfront with certain things. But it's just so
crucial to always just see, to just bring it, like think about things in new ways that other
people haven't, because usually there's something else out there. And one of the things that has
been most beneficial to me, which is that my education was really broad. It was engineering
and physics. And well, and then I became a Buddhist monk for a while. And so that gave me a different
perspective. But then it was medicine and immunology. And now I've brought all of it together from a
mathematics and biology and medicine perspective and policy and public health. And I think that
I'm not the best in any one of these things. I recognize that there are going to be geniuses
out there who are just worlds better than me at any one of these things that I try to work on.
But my superpower is bringing them all together and just thinking, and that's,
I think, how you can really change the world. I don't know that I'll ever change the world
in the way that I hope. But that's how you can have a chance.
Yeah, that's how you can have a chance, exactly. And I think it's also what,
this to me, this rapid testing program, this is the most dead simple solution in the world.
And this literally could change the world. It could change the world. And it is. There's
countries that are doing it now. The US isn't, but I've been advising many countries on it.
And I would say that some of the early papers that we put out earlier on, a lot of the things
actually are changing. Unless you really look hard, you don't know where you're actually having
an effect. Sometimes it's more overt than other times. In April, I published a paper that was
saying, hey, with the PCR values from these tests, we need to really focus on the CT values,
the actual quantitative values of these lab-based PCR tests. At the time, all the physicians and
laboratory directors told me that was stupid. Why would you do that? They're not accurate enough.
And of course, now it's headline news that Florida, they just mandated reporting out the CT
values of these tests because there's a real utility of them. You can understand public
health from it. You can understand better clinical management. That was a simple solution to a pretty
difficult problem. And it is changing the way that we approach all of the lab testing in this
country is starting to, it's taken a few months, but it's starting to change because of that.
And that was just me saying, hey, this is something we should be focusing on. Got some other people
involved and other people and now people recognize, hey, there's actual value in this number that
comes out of these lab-based PCR tests. So sometimes it does grow fairly quickly.
But I think the real answer, my only answer, I don't know what, I recognize that everyone,
some people are going to be really focused on and have one small but deep skill set. I go
the opposite direction. I try to bring things together. But the biggest thing I think is just
don't see barriers. Just see, there's always a solution to a barrier. If there's a barrier,
that literally means there's a solution to it. That's why it's called a barrier.
And just like you said, most people will just present to you, only be thinking about it and
present to you with barriers. And so it's easy to start thinking that's all there is in this world.
And just think big. I mean, God, there's nothing wrong with thinking big. Elon Musk thought big
and then thinking big builds on itself. You get a billion dollars from one big idea and
then that allows you to make three new big ideas. And there's a hunger for it. If you
think big and you communicate that vision with the world, all the most brilliant and passionate
people will just like, you'll attract them and they'll come to you. And then it makes your life
actually really exciting. The people I've met at Tesla and Neuralink, I mean, there's just like
this fire in their eyes. They just love life. And it's amazing, I think, to be around those people.
I have to ask you about what was the philosophy, the journey that took you to becoming a Buddhist
monk? And what did you learn about life? What did you take away from that experience? How did
you return back to Harvard and the world that's unlike that experience, I imagine?
Yeah, well, I was at Dartmouth at the time. Well, I went to Sri Lanka. I was already pretty
interested in developing countries and under-resourced areas. And I was doing a lot of engineering
work and I went there, but I was also starting to think maybe health was something of interest.
And so I went to Sri Lanka because I had a long interest in Buddhism as well,
just kind of interested in it as a thing. Which aspect of the philosophy attracted you?
I would say that the thing that interested me most was really this idea of kind of a butterfly
effect of what you do now has ripple effects that extend out beyond what you can possibly imagine,
both in your own life and in other people's lives. And in some ways, Buddhism has,
not in some ways, in a pretty deep way. Buddhism has that as part of its underlying
philosophy in terms of rebirth and sort of your actions today propagate to others,
but also propagate to sort of what might happen in your circle of what's called samsara and
rebirth. And I don't know that I subscribe fully to this idea that we are reborn,
which always was a little bit of a debate internally, I suppose when I was a monk.
But it has always been, it was that and then it was also meditation. At the time, I was a fairly
elite rower. I was rowing at the national level and rowing to me was very meditative. It was
just, even if you're in a boat with other people, on the one hand,
it's like the extreme of like a team sport, but it's also the extreme sort of focus and
concentration that's required of it. And so I was always really into just meditative type of
things. I was doing a lot of pottery too, which was also very meditative. And so Buddhism just
kind of really, there are a lot of things about meditating that just appealed. And so I moved
to Sri Lanka planning to only be there for a couple of months. And then I was shadowing
in this medical clinic and there was this physician who was just really, I mean,
it's just kind of a horrible situation. Frankly, this guy was trained decades earlier. He was
an older physician and he was still just practicing like these fairly barbaric approaches to medicine
because he was a rural town and he just didn't have a lot of, he didn't have any updated training,
frankly. And so I just remember this girl came in with like shrapnel in her hand
and his solution was to like air it out. And so he was like, without even numbing her hand,
he was like cutting it open more with this idea that like the more oxygen and stuff,
you know, and it just, I think there was something about all of this. And I was already talking to
these monks at the time. I would be in this clinic in the morning and I'd go and my idea was to
teach English to these monks in the evening. Turned out I'm a really bad English teacher.
So they just taught, they allowed me just to sit with them and meditate and they were teaching
me more about Buddhism than I could have possibly taught them about English or being an American
or something. And so I just slowly, I just couldn't take, I couldn't handle being in that clinic.
So more and more, I just started moving to, spending more and more time at this monastery.
And then after about two months, I was supposed to come back to the States and I decided I didn't
want to. So I moved to this monastery in the mountains primarily because I didn't have the
money to like just keep living. So living in a monastery is free. And so I moved there and
just started meditating more and more. And then months went by and I, it just really gravitated.
I gravitated to the whole notion of it. I mean, it became, it sounds strange,
but meditating almost just like anything that you put your mind to became exciting.
There weren't enough hours in the day to meditate. And I would do it for 18 hours a day,
15 hours a day, just sit there and like, I mean, I hate sleeping anyway, but I wouldn't want to go
to sleep because I felt like I didn't accomplish what I needed to accomplish in meditation that day,
which is so strange because there is no end. But there are these steps that happen during
meditation that are very prescribed in a way. Buddha talked about them and these are ancient
writings, which exist. I mean, the writings are real. They're thousands of years old now.
So whether it was Buddha writing them or whoever, there are lots of different people who have
contributed to these writings over the years. But they're very prescribed and they tell you
what you're going to go through. And I didn't really focus too much on them. I read a little bit
about them, but your mind really does. When you actually start meditating at that level,
like not an hour here and there, but like truly just spending your day is meditating,
it becomes kind of like this other world where it becomes exciting and you're actively working.
You're actively meditating, not just kind of trying to quiet things. That's sort of just the
first stage of trying to get your mind to focus. Most people never get past that first stage,
especially in our culture. Could you briefly summarize what's waiting beyond the stage of
just quieting the mind? It's hard for me to imagine that there's something that could be described
as exciting on there. Yeah, it's an interesting question. So the first thing, the first step
is truly just to be able to close your eyes, focus on your breath, and not have other thoughts
enter into your mind. That alone is just so hard to do. I couldn't do it now if I wanted,
but I could then. But once you get past that stage, you start entering into all these other,
you go through this pretty trippy stage, which is a little bit euphoric,
where you just kind of start not hallucinating. I mean, it wasn't like some crazy thing that
would happen in a movie, but definitely just weird. You start getting into the stage where
you're able to quiet your mind for so long, for hours at a time, that for me, I started
getting really excited about this idea of mindfulness, which is part of Buddhism in
general, but it's part of Theravada Buddhism in particular in this way, which was you start
focusing on your daily activities, whether that's sipping a cup of tea or walking,
or sweeping around. I lived on this mountain side in this cottage thing,
it was built into the rock, and so every morning I would wake up early and sweep around it and
stuff, because that's just what we did. And you start to meditate on all those activities.
And one of the things that was so exciting, which sounds completely ridiculous now, was just
almost learning about your daily activities in ways that you never would have thought about before.
So what's involved with picking up this glass of water? If I said,
okay, I'm just going to pick, I'm going to take a drink of water, to me right now,
it's a single activity. But during meditation, it's not a single activity. It's a whole series
of activities of little engineering feats and feelings, and it's gripping the water,
and it's feeling that the glass is cold, and it's lifting, and it's moving, and dragging,
and dragging, and you start to learn a whole new language of life. And that to me was this really
exhilarating thing that was an exhilarating component of meditation that there was never
enough time. It's kind of like learning a new computer language, like it gets really exciting
when you start coding and all these new things you can do. You learn how to experience life in a
much richer way. And so you never run out of ways to go deeper and deeper and deeper in the way
you experience it, even just the drinking of the glass of water. That's exactly right. And what
becomes kind of exhilarating is you start to be able to predict things that you never, or I don't
even have predictions or a word, but I always think of the matrix where I forget who it was.
Somebody was shooting at Neo, and he leans backwards and he dodges the bullets. In some ways,
when you start breaking every little action that your hands do or that your feet do or that your
body does down into all these little actions that make up one what we normally think of as an action,
all of a sudden, you can start to see things almost in slow motion. I like to think of it very
much like a language. The first time somebody hears a foreign language, it sounds really fast
usually. You don't hear the spaces between words, and it just sounds like a stream of
consciousness. It just sounds like a stream of noises if you've never heard the language before.
And as you learn the language, you hear clear breaks between words, and it starts to gain
context. And all of a sudden, like that, what once sounded very fast slows down, and it has meaning.
That's our whole life. There's this whole language happening that we don't speak generally.
But if you start to speak it, and if you start to learn it, and you start to say,
hey, I'm picking up this glass is actually 18 little movements, then all of a sudden,
it becomes extremely exciting and exhilarating to just breathe. Breathing alone in the rise
and fall of your abdomen or the way the air pushes in and out of your nose becomes almost
interesting. And what's really neat is the world just starts slowing down.
And I'll never forget that feeling. And if there was one euphoric feeling from meditation I want
to gain back, but I don't think I could without really meditating like that again, and I don't
think I will, was this slow motion of the world. It was finding the spaces between all the movements
in the same way that the spaces between all the words happen. And then it almost gives you this
new appreciation for everything. It was really amazing. And so I think it came to an abrupt end,
though, when the tsunami hit. I was there in the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004.
And it was like this dichotomy of being a monk and just meditating in this extraordinary place.
And then the tsunami hits and kills 40,000 people in a few minutes on the coast of this
really small little country in Sri Lanka. And then my whole world of being a monk came crashing down
on when I go to the coast. And that was just a devastating visual site, an emotional site.
But the strangest thing happened, which was that everyone just wanted me to stay as a monk.
People in that culture, the monks largely fled from the coastlines. And so then there I was,
and people wanted me to be a monk. They wanted me to stay on the coast, but be a monk
and not help, not help in the way that I considered helping. They wanted me just to
keep meditating so that they could bring me offerings and have their karmic responsibilities
attended to as well. And so that was really bizarre to me. It was like, how could I possibly just
sit around while all these people, half of everyone's family just died? And so in any case,
I stopped being a monk and I moved to this refugee camp and lived there for another six
months or so and just stayed there, not as a monk, but tried to raise some money from the U.S.
and tried to... I didn't know what I was doing. Frankly, I was 22. And I don't think I appreciated
at the time how much of a role I was having in that community's life. But it's taken me
a lot, many years to process all of this since then. But I would say it's what put me into the
public health world, living in that refugee camp and that difference that happened from being a
monk to being in this devastating environment just really changed my whole view of why I was
existing, I suppose. Well, so there's this richness of life in a single drink of water
that you experience. And then there's this power of nature that's capable to take lives of thousands
of people. So given all that, the absurdity of that, let me ask you, and the fact that you study
things that could kill the entirety of human civilization, what do you think is the meaning
of this all? What do you think is the meaning of life, this whole orchestra with God going on?
Does it have a meaning? And maybe from another perspective, how does one live a meaningful
life if such as possible? Well, you know, from what I've seen, I don't think there's a single
answer to that by any stretch. One of the most interesting things about Buddhism to me is that
the human existence is part of suffering, which is very different from Judeo-Christian existence,
which is that human existence is something very different. There's a richness to it.
In Buddhism, it's just another one of your lives. But it's your opportunity to attain nirvana and
become a monk, for example, and meditate to attain nirvana. Else, you kind of just go back
into the samsara, the cycle of suffering. And so, when I look at, I mean, in some ways,
the notion of life and what the purpose of life is, they're kind of completely distinct,
this sort of Western view of life, which is that this life is the most precious thing in the world
versus this is just another opportunity to try to get out of life. I mean, the whole notion of
nirvana and in Buddhism, it getting out of this sort of cycle of suffering is to vanish. If you
could attain nirvana throughout this life, the idea is that you don't get reborn. And so, when I
look at these two, on the one hand, you have Christian faith and other things that want to go
to heaven and live forever in heaven. Then you have this other whole half of humans who
want nothing more than to get out of the cycle of rebirth and just, poof, not exist anymore.
The cycle of suffering. Yeah. And so, how do you reconcile those two? And I guess-
Do you have both of them in you? Do you basically oscillate back and forth?
I don't think I, I think I just, I look at us in a, I think we're just a bunch of proteins
that we've formed and we've, they work in this really amazing way. And they might work in a
bigger scale. Like there might be some connections that we're not really clear about, but they're
still biological. I believe that they're biological. How do these proteins become conscious? And why
do they want to help civilization by having at home rapid tests at scale? Well, I think I don't
have an answer to that one, but I really do believe that it's just a, you know, this is just an
evolution of consciousness. I don't, I don't personally think is, my feeling is that we're
a bunch of pluses and minuses that have just gotten so complex that they're able to make rich
feelings, rich emotions. And I do believe though, you know, on the one hand, I sometimes wake up
some days, my fiance doesn't always love it, but you know, I kind of think we're all just
bunch of robots with like pretty complicated algorithms that we deal with. And, you know,
in that sense, like, okay, if the world just blew up tomorrow and nothing was live, you know,
nothing existed the day after that. It's just another blip in the universe, you know, but at
the same time, I don't know. So that's kind of probably my most core basic feeling about life
is like, we're just a blip. And we may as well make the most of it while we're here blipping.
It's one hell of a fun blip though. It is. It's an amazing, you know, blink of an eye in time.
Michael, this is, you're one of the most interesting people I've met, one of the most
interesting conversations, important ones. Now I'm going to publish it very soon. I really appreciate
taking the time. I know how busy you are. It's really fun. Thanks for talking to me.
Well, thanks so much. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to this conversation with
Michael Mina. And thank you to our sponsors. Brave, a fast browser that feels like Chrome,
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some words from Teddy Roosevelt. It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how
the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs
to the man who actually is in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort
without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best
knows in the end that triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.