What’s at Stake

keep us from solving the real problem. A new genetic technology for engineering nature that might prevent malaria but might get out of hand. Computer algorithms that can diagnose diseases, tell companies who to hire, and judges had a sentence, but might also automate or human biases. And we'll ask whether it's time to turn war over to robots. We'll look at the amazing upsides and also ask what could

possibly go wrong. But for this short first episode, I thought i'd better explain who I am and why I'm here. I'm a scientist. I grew up in New York City, a product of the public schools, where I fell in love with math. Not long after I did my PhD in mathematics, I became captivated by genetics. By luck, that was just a few years before biologists began dreaming about reading out the complete human genetic code, all three billion

letters of DNA. I got involved in this crazy idea called the Human gene Project, and became one of the leaders of that international collaboration. As the work neared its end, I helped launch a research institute, the Broad Institute of MT and Harvard, that I still lead today, to apply that same collaborative spirit to help a new generation of remarkable scientists propel the understanding and treatment of human diseases outside the laboratory. I've always cared a lot about how

science affects the world. For eight years, I also co chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for the Obama White House. We got a chance to wrestle with some of the nation's biggest opportunities and problems, from energy to influenza, cybersecurity to aging, and through it all, I've continued to teach introbiology to MIT students, who every year restore my faith in the future. But that future is on the line today in ways it's never been before.

The decisions we make or don't make will affect us all for generations to come. So to kick off Brave New Planet, I wanted to talk with someone who has boundless curiosity and might help us think about what's at stake. I reached out to Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of books like Talking to Strangers and Outliers and the host of the podcast Revisionist History. To my delight, he agreed to join us. Malcolm Gladwell, Welcome to Brave New Planet. Thank you, Eric. I am delighted to be here and

fascinated to learn more about your new podcast. But before we get into it, I wanted to talk a little bit about you. I'm very curious about how your initial ideas about science were formed and why what led you into this world in the first place. You know, looking back growing up in New York as a kid in the nineteen sixties, it was pretty amazing. I was raised by my mom and we didn't have a lot of money, but she figured out everything free and everything cheap that

you could do, dragonist to museums. She let us stay home and watch all the space launches, and then nineteen sixty four sixty five was the World's Fair, the New York City World's Fair, and that was amazing. There was this the Unisphere, the big globe that was the symbol of the World's Fair. It's it's the thing that gets destroyed in Men in Black at the end of the movie, and there was a guy in a jet pack who flew over the unisphere and they told us all we

would be going to work in jetpacks. I still am waiting for my jetpack. But there were all these other things. There was like the ge Carousel of Progress where they were singing There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. And there was Belle Labs premiering the picture phone, and du Pont with its wonderful world of Chemistry, which I think became the better slogan better living through chemistry. And they had this time capsule that we're going to dig up in

five thousand years. And it was also the era of Star Trek, where everybody, all races and genders, we were going to go out together and boldly go and so it was a period of like infinite possibility, amazing optimism

about what you could do in the world. There are obviously lots of tensions bubbling under the surface, but as a seven eight year old kid I wasn't wear any of that yet, and so I think I was formed in this world that thought science was going to be incredibly important to progress and the world was gonna it was just going to become a better and better place. I'm amazed, like in your description of that, how frictionless your access to knowledge as a kid was seems to

have been. I mean, all the stuff's on your doorstep, like the New York's Fairest. I mean, I don't know what subway you're taking, or maybe a couple of buses, but but I mean the point is, like, you don't have to have a lot of money. You're going to lost a dollar for kids to get in. Yeah, now dollar was worth more than but still, you know, my mom dragged us fourteen times to the World's Fair and it was she was amazing. Fourteen times. I love it.

You remember how many times? Oh yeah, So you have this coming out of your childhood, you inherit, this sense of infinite possibility. What happens to that sense as you get older? Is it still there? Well? It's interesting, I mean, where does that sense come from? An infinite possibility? It's it's no accident that the nineteen sixties are like that.

It's after World War Two, where science played a big role in winning the war, radar, early computers, penicillin, of course, atomic bombs, and the US makes this decision after the war that science is going to be a cornerstone of society going forward, that we're going to fund science at universities, and we're gonna train people, and we'll have this virtuous cycle of public knowledge producing technologies and wars and companies. And then of course, nine months after I'm born, Sputnik

goes up. I don't remember it, but I know it was exactly nine months after I was born, and like everything goes into overdrive. Science is central to the survival of the country. We pass laws for science education, we start the space race to get a man on the moon first. So you know, this is the world that shaped that New York City of the nineteen sixties was the sense that science was going to discover what's true, technology was going to figure out what's possible, and society

reaps the benefits. And that assumption, that idea that the scientific method, you know, you figure out what's true by evidence, not authority. It's all about honesty, not advocacy. There was a set of assumptions that underlay that world where this country really bought into the ideas of science, and it paid off amazing dividends. You know, through the rest of the twentieth century. You think about all the things that happened from what had to have been a bit of

a crazy bet. The US didn't invest in science a lot before the war. But afterwards you look at the things that start happening. You get polio vaccines, measles, and

smallpox vaccines and eradicate smallpox. And you get computer technology and the Internet and GPS systems and like Google searches come out of a National Science Foundation grant, and then molecular biology and gene cloning and this Human Genome Project I got very involved in, and onward and onward and onward, and you get these industries that grow up around all these things. So I think it paid off in huge ways.

And what's interesting is it's only accelerated since then in terms of the science, even though there are a lot of tensions, you know from the any of you of the science. You look at the last two decades or so and you start seeing, you know, artificial intelligence, we can translate languages, by computers and spot lung cancers by computers, and people are making self driving cars and quantum computers.

And in biology you have you know, new therapies for cancer, immunotherapies, and this Human Genome project where we spent three billion dollars to read one genome. It now costs a couple hundred bucks to read a genome. There are technologies that let you edit genomes like Crisper, and just keeps going and going, and I think, if anything, it's accelerating in terms of the science and the impact on society. I've just curious, Eric, you've chosen to do this now? Is

there a reason why now? I mean, you could have done this five years ago, You could have done this five years from now. So there's something compelling you at this moment in time. Yeah. Absolutely. It is so glaringly out obvious that we are going to need science to solve a lot of the problems ahead. Climate change. It's in our face right now. It was theoretical to people, but the last three or four years, it's so obvious

we're gonna have to solve that. The pandemic that we're living through right now, it's clear there's no way to solve pandemics without a lot more science than we've brought to bear on it so far. And then I think about things like Alzheimer's. It's going to be costing US a trillion dollars a year as the usages, and we really don't know how to do anything other than support people. So we've got to come up with solutions, and those

solutions that got to come from science. I could go on and on, and so it seemed like a moment when we just had to decide are we going to rally a world together around science. It's Matt Damon's famous line from the movie The Martian when he branded on Mars and he knows nobody's coming back for him soon, and he says, I guess there's only one option. I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

We're gonna have to do that right now. And I think the last several years have made that so apparent. We really have to reconnect between science and society because that connection is going to be so important going forward. Do you think if you were an eight year old today, you would have to describe what your eight year old self today would think if is it the same sense of infinite possibility. I think there's a frustration right now, a sense that we're not doing all we can with this,

and there's a lot of reasons for it. The bright shininess of science would discover the truth and technologies would show us what's possible, and society would reap the benefits. That simple social compact is getting frayed in some ways, and there's a lot of different ways it's getting fred it's not surprising that after sixty years things would would begin to get a little tattered. But you know, if you think about it, science sometimes conflicts with economic interests.

We began to see that companies might start attacking science because they really don't like the answers. I think the first case was when it became clear that cigarettes caused cancer, and tobacco companies decided to pay people to put up smoke screens and question the evidence. And then, of course, climate changes is where we see it most today, where despite massive amounts of evidence, the solutions just deny it.

You know, we've got massive wildfires in California, and we've got wildfires a couple of years ago above the Arctic circle. We got glaciers retreating powerful hurricanes, you know, the last six years, the hottest years in history, and people just say, well, you know, nothing to see here, that's all just a fluke. And I think that that ability to not even have to engage is one tension that we're trying to deal with right now. Is is there a shared assumption that

we have to deal with the evidence. But then there's other things. I think on science's side, sometimes science just seems to overpromise, and sometimes probably does overpromise. There are people who say, wait, wait a second, I thought you were curing cancer. How come cancers not cured yet? I think going overboard on promises and not giving people a sense of the fact that, yeah, science is amazing, but

it takes a while to deliver can backfire. And I think I think there's also people who you just want answers to things and science doesn't have answers for them, and they got to go seek them somewhere. Yeah, is this kind of these kinds of ways what led you to want to do a podcast? Well exactly, you know, I think this compact between science and society is so important. It's getting tattered and we have to do something about it, and that requires drawing more people into hard problems and science.

We can't we can't ignore the fact that the problems are hard. Sometimes these bright shiny futures that we talk about we really get instead dystopian outcomes. Things really can go wrong. The better living through chemistry can turn into toxic waste. The Internet that's supposed to give us all the world's information can bring us disinformation. You know. Social media that's supposed to bring us together can tear us apart.

I know you're you're really interested in these topics yourself, and I think there are times when when there's just been failures of imagination to think about what could possibly go wrong. Whatever the compact was in the nineteen sixties where you kind of left it to the scientists and the politicians to work at all out, We're now going

to need everybody on board. We're gonna need to open this up to more people and recognize that science might have a lot of answers about the science, but we're not going to have all the answers about how it should be applied in the world. And that was really the heart of the podcast. If we really are now all the stewards of a brave new planet, then we got to figure out how to draw everybody in on that and open it up. Would you describe yourself still

as an optimist? Oh, I am a tremendous optimist in spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, because in the end, I really don't see any alternative. So I am a very realistic optimist. I think we're gonna need to fight for truth. It's not a gimme like it might have been a half century ago. I think we are gonna need to bring everybody in to help make decisions about how we should use this. It's not going to be easy. And uh, you know, there's nothing about

the podcast that's advocating specific answers to anything. It's it's really meant to model smart, thoughtful, passionate people struggling with what do we do with our future? And so it's meant to invite people into that because you know, in my most optimistic self, that's how we make it through is we we all work together to struggle through hard problems that have amazing upsides, maybe big downsides, and together

we make it through. And you know, these are things that they're just too big to fit in a tweet. And I'm really interested. I know you are in ideas that are too big to fit in a tweet but will end up, you know, shaping the future in a big way. And so that that was the heart of the podcast. Has there been a moment maybe not doing this podcast, but when you're dealings with others scientists in fields not your own? Is the rare for a moment when you're over your head? Will you say I have

no idea what these guys talking about? Oh? Yeah, oh yeah. Frequently there were occasional times I was really deeply an expert in the subject, but you know, many many other different things. You know, I'm not an expert, and so I think what I had to learn was the right kind of scientific humility to ask dumb questions and say what exactly does that mean? And you can learn a lot from that. Yeah, yeah, I am. I am. That actually is a lovely place to end. I'm in total

agreement with you. I think the key to being an effective journalist, explainer, podcast host, whatever is the willingness to ask really dumb questions. Indeed, thank you so much. This is I cannot tell you how excited I am to listen to this and how delighted I am that you have you of all people, have decided to tackle this subject. It's it is greatly needed. Oh Malcolm, thanks so much for helping us kick off this first episode. Thank you

America and to all of you listeners. Come join us for episode two, where we'll hear President Richard Nixon console a grieving nation about the tragic outcome of America's failed mission to land a man on the Moon. Good evening, my fellow Americans. Fakes has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore and peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Meal Armstrong and Edwin Auburn know that there's no pup for their recovery. Deep Fakes next time on Brave New Planet.

Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston Globe support from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation. Our show is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Dow. Theme song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt

and Enchant. Special thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts at Clarendon Communications, to Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine Levin Allerhand at the Broad, Tamil o'bell and Heather Faine at Pushkin, And to Eli and Edy Brode who made the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet. I'm Eric Lander.