Biotechnology

hot spot. It's pretty basic stuff, and it's relatable to us. But when you dig deeper into the biotech field, it becomes clear that the risks it poses are maybe the most immediate of all the existential risks. The pathogens the field studies in the hopes of creating vaccines that can save lives pose a pretty severe threat as they are not too long ago. Wild viruses like small pox and influenza killed a lot of people, as we'll see in this episode, and bugs like that can still kill a

lot of people, and that's threat enough. But the existential threat from biotech comes from the type of research that began to proliferate in the early twenty one century. When high containment labs begin to mushroom around the world, and a type of research called gain of function really took off. No longer were researchers dealing with wild viruses and bacteria. They were forcing evolution in them by speeding up mutations and altering them genetically to be deadlier and more contagious.

This kind of research is extremely dangerous. If a genetically altered bug escapes from a lab, it could kill a potentially staggering amount of people before it is contained. If it is contained, but if done right, the risks from these experiments can be minimized. The trouble is they're frequently not done right. As you'll see, the biotech field has a shocking track record of accidents and a willingness to

take huge, possibly unnecessary risks. And what's most unsettling is that there is precious little oversight on the risky experiments being carried out around the world. Even seemingly innocuous experiments have the potential to produce catastrophic results. And I can show you now if you'll follow me to Canberra, the

capital of Australia. We're back in two thousand. A pair of researchers named Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw are unpleasantly surprised with the results of an experiment they've just conducted. Australia has a significant mouse problem. Mice were probably introduced to the country as stowaways among the ships of the British settlers in the eighteenth century, and when they arrived, they began to spread and grow to unusually large numbers.

Especial slee in the southeast, where Australia grows its grain. During what the country calls its mouse plagues, farms are overrun with mice that streamed from seemingly everywhere. The ground ripples with them. The mice are so abundant and aggressive that they can chew through the tires of farm equipment, and they attack pigs and poultry. On mouse plague caused nearly one hundred million dollars worth of damage to crops

and farms. What Ramshaw and Jackson were looking for was a way to sterilize female mice by training their immune systems to attack their own eggs. To do that, the two biologists created a vaccine that contained a gene which codes for the production of something called inter luken four, which is a naturally occurring protein i L four stimulates mammals to produce antibodies to deliver the genes to the

mice's DNA. The researchers used a virus because of a virus's unique ability to insert its own genetic information into a cell's DNA and hijack a cells normal processes. They make ideal vehicles to deliver the main ingredient in a vaccine. The virus adds it into the cells genetic code along with its own genetic material. The cell produces whatever it finds in its genetic code, whether it was added there by a virus or by a human. It's pretty impressive

researchers hijack a virus's ability to hijack a cell. Jackson and Ramshaw chose the virus that causes mousepox ectromelia as the vehicle for their vaccine. Normally, mousepox would kill a lot of the mice that were exposed to it in the study, but the researchers were using mice that had been previously vaccinated against mousepox, along with other mice that

had been genetically altered to be totally immune to the disease. Few, if any, of the mice used in the study works to die from exposure to the mousepox, but within nine days of receiving the vaccine, every single mouse in the study was dead. The mousepox had a one hundred percent mortality rate. It killed every mouse that had been exposed to it. The researchers found that the i L for gene had indeed increased anybody production in the mice as intended,

but the increased inner lucan had another unanticipated effect. It also suppressed the mice's cell mediated response, a function of the immune system which wards off infections by viruses. By adding the i L four gene to the mouse pox virus, the surge of inter luken told the mice's immune system to lay down its arms, which paved the way for total annihilation by the mousepox virus, even among mice that had been genetically designed to be immune to the disease.

Jackson and Ramshaw had x dently created a perfect killer of mice. Mousepox bears a resemblance to smallpox and humans. The two viruses are distantly related, and it was not lost on Ramshaw and Jackson what would happen if their technique was used with smallpox instead of mousepox. Jackson told new scientists, it would be safe to assume that if some idiot did put human ill four into human smallpox, they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically. Something like that would

be monumentally bad. Smallpox is caused by the very ola virus. It's an ancient virus that has plagued humans for possibly as long as ten thousand years, and it's believed to have made the jump from either camels or gerbils, or possibly some extinct animal we don't know about, over to humans and spread along trade routes that crossed the Middle East to Asia and then eventually west over to Europe.

Our earliest defend native evidence of smallpox dates back at least three thousand years, found on mummies of people who lived millennia ago, including the Egyptian pharaoh Ramsey's the fifth Ramsey's appears to bear the sign of the virus, the pox marks that are left behind when the pustules that cover the body scab and fall off. Those pustules come

at the final stage of a very difficult disease. Within a couple of days of being exposed to smallpox for the first time, you will be leveled by a fever and flu like symptoms that incapacitate you for days. Sores develop in your mouth and they fill with fluid, and just as you overcome the fever and begin to feel better, the mouth sores erupt, which releases the virus filled fluid into the rest of your body, where it reappears as those pustules masses of tiny bumps that cover the skin

and concentrate around your extremities. The uestull scab over and eventually they fall off, and when the last one falls, you are no longer contagious. If you survived the disease that is, smallpox kills by overwhelming your immune system with the protein that counteracts anybodies that would normally prevent infected cells from replicating the virus. To catch smallpox, it takes close contact with a person who is actively suffering from it, which meant that people who cared for the ill were

usually the ones who came down with it. Once a person comes down with smallpox and survives, they are conferred a lifelong immunity to the disease, and even though they may still carry the virus, they aren't contagious to others. Even people who have never had smallpox before. By the Middle Ages, smallpox had settled into Europe, becoming endemic, which means it settled into the human population kind of made

itself comfortable. It went into hiding and made the rounds when new comers who had never been exposed to the virus entered the towns of people who are already immune to it. So in Europe smallpox became mostly a disease of children and immigrants. The local adults had all either died from it or survived it and become immune. Once it became endemic, the mortality rate for smallpox hovered around It killed about three out of every ten people who

came in contact with it. But in the fifteenth century, Europe began to spill over its banks, and it brought the disease to places that had never encountered it before. West Africa was first visited by slave traders from Portugal and Spain, who brought pandemics with them. Many of the villages that were rated had never been exposed to the disease,

and so it spread quickly. The people suffering those outbreaks were stolen from their homes and they were taken to holding camps along the coast, where the disease spread even more quickly. Those people were forced onto ships while they were actively ill, making the horrific experience of being enslaved even more brutal. Each time a ship set sail from Africa to the America's over stuffed with people ill from smallpox, it was like tossing a lit match onto a powder cake.

At first, the ships were too slow to make it to the New World before the smallpox burned itself out. The human cargo aboard were either no longer contagious what We're dead from it by the time they made land. But as ocean going technology improved, those ships got faster, and eventually one of those matches stayed lit and it set off the powder keg of the America's It is difficult to overstate the effect that European disease had on

North and South America. Not just smallpox, but a number of contagious disease began to rage at once, forming overlapping epidemics called sindemics. The Native Americans had never been exposed to these kinds of pathogens, and so they had no natural defenses against them, which allowed the diseases to spread at unimaginable rates. And kill untold numbers of people. It appears to have all started in what is now Mexico City. The Aztecs suffered losses of up to half of their

population when the Spanish brought smallpox. A short An African slave whose name is lost to history, was suffering from smallpox when he landed with an expedition led by the conquistador Panfello de Navarrees. In writing five years after the outbreak began, a Spanish fire who traveled to Mexico wrote of the devastation the diet inhapes like bed box. Many all theirs died of a starvation, because I said, we're

all taken secret of more. And they could not care for each other, nor was there anyone to give them bread or anything else. In many places it happened that everyone in the house died, and as it was impossible to vary the great number of dead, they pulled down their houses over them in order to check the stinch that rushed from the dead bodies, so that their homes became their tombs. The disease spread like wildfire into the

interior of the American continent. In the America's smallpox found what's called Virgin Territory a population that had no immunity, so everyone who came in contact with it fell ill. This left no one to care for people suffering from the disease, which increased the mortality right even further. As the sick fled their dead villages to look for helping others nearby, they brought the infection with them, and the

cycle of disease began again and again. This happened over and over for centuries, leaving the Great Native American cultures in rubble. Explorers who came in later waves found destroyed, abandoned settlements filled with the dead. In places the virus appeared, the population fell by half two thirds. In some places, nine out of every ten members of the Native American groups in contact with the Massachusetts Bay settlers died from

sixteen seventeen to sixteen nineteen. The English Puritans, who arrived the following year took it that God had cleared the land for them. During the sixteen thirties, half of the Iroquois Confederation and the Huron around the Great Lakes died half in a decade. A single seventeen thirty eight outbreak killed half of the Cherokee tribe in the Carolinas and george Ja. In real numbers, these epidemics killed hundreds of

thousands to millions of people at a time. Imagine a disease that can kill off of the people in your town. It's no wonder, then, that smallpox is considered one of the deadliest viruses in the history of humanity. It is credited with killing half a billion people in the twentieth century alone, the first eight tenths of the twentieth century,

I should say. Back in nineteen sixty six, the World Health Organization of the u N led a global vaccination campaign and by it declared smallpox eradicated from planet Earth. This is a pretty big deal. Along with a cattle disease called render pest that's related to the virus that causes measles and humans, smallpox is the only contagious disease humanity has ever managed to eradicate. Right now, there is no living person earth who has a case of smallpox.

But that's not to say that the very ola virus isn't still alive and well after the eradication campaign, the u N persuaded the global scientific community to give up its stocks of smallpox, and they were almost entirely successful, save for two nations which just happened to be the two most powerful on the planet, the nuclear superpowers the Soviet Union in the United States. Those two nations decided that it would be better for them to keep their

stocks rather than destroy them. Ostensibly this was for scientific research, but both nations have been known to run illegal biological warfare programs, and the idea of them maintaining stocks of smallpox made the rest of the world uneasy. But this being the height of the Cold War, no other nation was in much of a position to argue, so all smallpox samples on Earth would be stored under secure conditions

in two occasions. In Russia, they are stored at the State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia. In the US, they are held at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Those two stockpiles still

exist today. On a number of occasions, the U n again called for those stockpiles to be destroyed in two thousand seven and most recently in two thousand eleven, and it also tried to create a global agreement that once those final stocks were destroyed, any nation caught with smallpox could be charged with the crime against humanity. Unfortunately, in all cases, the un failed and the smallpox stocks remained intact. Contagious disease researchers are divided on the wisdom of keeping

these stocks. The US and Russia continue to argue that we need to study Bariola so we can understand how the virus coevolved with our immune system. Hopefully we can use that knowledge to cure and prevent other diseases. The logic goes that if nature made smallpox from say, camel pox, it could create another pox on humanity. Studying smallpox could

help us prepare for that. To plenty of other researchers, though, eradicating the very ola virus from the wild only to keep hundreds of samples of it in laboratories is madness. But regardless of where contagious disease researchers fall on the matter, most dismissed the idea of a small pox epidemic as being a genuine threat to humanity. It could be utterly catastrophic for any community where the virus showed up, true,

and that is bad enough. But because smallpox requires close contact for transmission, it would be relatively easy to contain an outbreak and cut off the possibility of a pandemic. It almost certainly does not pose an existential threat to humanity. One that does, the one that keeps researchers awake at night, is the flu. Influenza is a common virus among humans. It also infects a lot of other animals too, like pigs, birds, seals, bats, horses, rodents,

among others. The different types of flu are described and classified based on the two types of proteins found on the viruses outer envelope he magluten in and neuraminides. It's called the h X n Y naming convention, so you end up with flu names like H five and two. The flu typically has one of two traits when it comes to infecting us. It's either extremely deadly or it's extremely contagious. But once in a while, those two traits co evolved within a single virus, and the results can

be catastrophic. November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, was a chilly, drizzly day in Compiegne, a town in the north of France, where representatives of the Allied Nations met with the leaders of Germany to sign the armistice that ended the First World War from nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen, what was then called the Great War, claimed the lives of more

than eighteen million people, soldiers and civilians. But as the armistice was being signed, another even deadlier killer than warfare was making short work of human lives around the globe. Type A H one and one influenza, the Spanish flu. In the span of just four months from September through December eighteen, fifty million people perhaps more died around the

world from this new and deadly strain of flu. It killed like a bird flu and spread like a seasonal flu, and those two qualities combined made it an extraordinarily dangerous virus. As much as one third of the entire population of the world was infected by it that season. It took its heaviest toll on the young people under twenty five, whose immune systems had never been exposed to an H

one and one strain before. Many young people who had been the picture of health just days before died suffocating on a bloody froth that they were too weak to cough from their airways. In some cases, people died within hours of their symptoms first appearing, then just as fast as it began. The epidemic ended by the summer of nineteen the flu had burned itself through the global population,

and it disappeared. It almost certainly evolved into a new strain of flu that was far less deadly, and for all intents and purposes, the Spanish flu that had been such a killer of people went extinct. Where the Spanish flu came from remains a mystery. Initially, it was thought to have originated in Spain, hence the name. Other research that came later implicated China. China and Southeast Asia are commonly the source of bird flues the type that includes

the Spanish flu. But one theory traces the eighteen flu back to Haskell County, Missouri, to one of the area's plentiful chicken farms, where it disappeared to is equally mysterious. For decades, researchers pined for a sample of the eighteen strain to study in search of answers to questions about it. The Spanish flu was the one that got away, a vicious killer that the epidemiological and medical communities were helpless to defend against, leaving no trace of itself aside from

the dead in its wake. And then in nine microbiologist Johann Holton recovered a sample of the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu from where it was entombed in the Alaskan tundra. The tiny town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, had just eighty residents when the Spanish flu came to town in nineteen eighteen, mostly Native and up at Eskimos. In just a couple of months, seventy two of the eighty died. A group of gold miners were hired by the survivors to come dig a mass grave for the bodies and enter them

in the perma frost. They lay undisturbed until nineteen fifty one. That year, Johan Holton arrived and asked the tribe's permission to break the grave open. In their frozen tomb, the victims were preserved mummified in a way, and Holton reasoned that the flu virus that killed them maybe as well. Through a slow process. In nineteen fifty one and then again in Holton opened the grave twice. He built a fire to thaw the permafrost below, Then he excavated the

thawed soil. When he reached frozen ground again, he built another fire. Finally, on his second attempt, in he managed to call a living sample of the H one and one virus from the lung tissue of one of its preserved victims. In a few years, researchers cobbled together the genome of the virus. They synthesized it, and inserted the genetic material into a living cell. The Spanish flu lived

once more. That researcher thought that was a useful line of inquiry, and there were other researchers who vehemently disagreed and thought it was a um an extraordinarily reckless thing to do. That is Beth Willis. She founded an organization that agitated for increased transparency from the government's biological labs in Frederick, Maryland, her community. The biotech field is not like other fields that pose existential risks. Like other fields, the research is dual use. It can be used to

help or harm humanity. But unlike research in other fields like AI, which has yet to become clear to most people that it poses an existential risk, working with deadly pathogens is understood as dangerous work by people inside the biotech field and out. There's no ambiguity. But despite the inherent danger of working with deadly pathogens. The field has shown that it's willing to take potentially catastrophic risks in the name of research, and it's frequently divided over what

risks are acceptable and which are not. One area that divides the field is gain of function research. Wherever the Spanish flu came from, it almost certainly evolved from an avian variety of flu that mixed with one more common to humans through a process called reassortment. That's the ability of viruses to swap genetic material with other viruses that are also living in the same host. What comes out can be a virus that is a genetic failure, which may be unable to survive or copy itself, or it

could produce a deadly inefficient killer of humans. It's a genetic crap shoot. When a virus mutates or adapts in some way that makes it more efficient at infecting hosts, it is said to have gained function. Studying these mutations, how they take place, what mutations lead to which characteristics.

That's gain of function research. By studying how influenza evolves, epidemiologists can get better at predicting what flu viruses have pandemic potential before they reach that level of deadliness, and there are two ways to do this. The most common method is to capture wild flu viruses in store them in a state of suspended animation, which usually involves freezing them.

Later on, when new viruses are caught that have evolved from that same genetic line, researchers can compare the genomes of the older strain to the current strain and see how the virus has mutated. This is slow and laborious work and frustrating lee it relies on the rate of nature for evolutionary changes to take place, so some researchers are increasingly using another method where they hasten evolution and they forced the mutation of new and novel flu strains

to study gain a function. Research itself is uh effort by researchers to increase the virulence or the infectiousness of a panthogen and potentially to decrease its ability to respond to countermeasures to treatment. That second, riskier method has become

a hot button issue in microbiology lately. In two thousand eleven, two separate research groups working independently, one Dutch and one American, stunned the world when they announced that each had forced the mutation of an extremely deadly strain of flu, the H five and one avian flu, and created an entirely new version that is easily transmitted from mammal to mammal. In nature, the H five N one virus mainly infects birds.

It has rarely made the jump to humans, and even then only to those who have spent prolonged periods in close contact with sick birds, like poultry workers when it has made the jump. Though the virus has been astoundingly lethal, H five and one has a mortality rate among humans of between sixty eight. The only upside to H five and one is that it doesn't easily spread among people.

In the late nine nineties, the world held its breath when several hundred cases of H five and one avian flu broke out among poultry workers in Asia, but the global avian flu pandemic never came, and aside from the obvious that the virus just simply lack the ability to transmit from person to person, researchers couldn't exactly say why the pandemic never happened, So microbiologists began to look for answers by forcing a gain of function in H five and one. One of the two groups that did this

was from the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They forced multiple mutations within the virus, speeding up its evolution, and then inserted the mutated virus into the noses of ferrets. Ferrets are commonly seen as one of the best animals to model humans. Then they transferred nasal fluid from those

infected ferrets to the noses of other ferrets. That second group of ferrets became sick as expected, but alarmingly, the second group passed the virus along to others without the aid of researchers through sneezes and costs, just like humans would. That really alarmed the virology community. I would say that at least four to one people are against doing that kind of research. This is Dr Lynn Clots. He's a senior Science Fellow for Biosecurity at the Center for Arms

Control and Non Proliferation. Those two labs had brought to life a novel lab created strain of one of the deadliest flus known on Earth and given it the entirely new ability to pass easily from person to person, and now it's sat in their freezers. When the labs announced

their experiments, outrage erupted. In reaction, the field of microbiology issued a two year long ban on high risk experiments with flu viruses, and the fault line developed between scientists who believed that force mutation gain of function research was needed and necessary to stave off potential pandemics and those who considered the research unjustifiably risky. The people who carried out these experiments were cowboys, in the words of one microbiologist.

There was also the issue of censorship. Both of the experiments were expected to be published, which would provide, in the opinion of some researchers, essentially a how to guide to creating the experimental extraordinarily deadly virus. So there were calls for the two major English language scientific journals, Science and Nature not to publish the studies, and those calls

were heated for a time. But scientists tend to bristle at the idea of science being censored, and understandably so, findings are meant to be shared among everyone in order

to advance human understanding. That's how science works. The trouble is, once it's out there, the information can be accessed by anyone, including people who would use it to inflict harm, and in the case of the detailed description of exactly how to transform H five and one virus into one that is easily transmitted among mammals, that harm could be profound. The experiments were the very definition of dual use research.

But repressed knowledge has a way of getting out, regardless of our greatest efforts, a point that was proven shortly after the moratorium ended when a team of microbiologists in China announced they had successfully crossed the hive and one virus with the less deadly but easily transmitted H one and one virus, creating a genetically altered superbug of their own.

If any of the virus is created by the Chinese, American or Dutch groups were introduced into the general population, the effects would be monumentally bad, potentially on the order of an extinction level event for humanity, and so with the aim of preventing just such a catastrophe, the field of biosecurity has emerged to consider how something like that could happen. There is the obvious, the ever looming specter

of terrorism. A radicalized lab employee or one who is desperate for money, a disgruntled researcher or someone looking to prove their abilities. Any of these people could make an excellent candidate for the release of what are called potential pandemic pathogens, which are exactly what they sound like. Some biosecurity experts are also concerned that some of the smallpox

in the Soviet Union stockpiles was lost after the country dissolved. Really, though, a bio terrorists doesn't need to have access to a lab that stockpiles pathogens. The main concern over publishing that H five and one how to Guide the journal Science eventually published it in full, was that the information would fall into the hands of someone well versed in microbiology with enough resources and few enough scruples to create the virus outside of any formal lab or oversight and then

release it. That idea is rather unsettling, but many microbiologists considered it barely more than an urban legend, something the media ran with to scare the public into watching the news. That is until two thousand and sixteen, when scientists from the University of Alberta announced that they had created the virus that as his horse pox from scratch, using only snippets of genetic material called oglio nucleotides that they ordered

retail over the internet. It costs the team a hundred thousand dollars and took six months to create a living, infectious virus. The University of Alberta experiment showed that it was now possible for a d I Y biologist to create viruses in bacteria through the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Rather than attempting expensive and time consuming experiments to force mutations in a virus over and over and hope that it evolves in a way that you wanted to, synthetic biology allows researchers to create exactly the kind of organism they're looking for by designing and building it denovo, which essentially means in Latin from scratch. Synthetic biology emerged from genetic engineering, which revolutionized the world by creating the ability

to cut and splice genes between organisms. Synthetic biology combines genetic engineering with the goal of streamlining life into a more predictable, reliable, efficient version of what's found in nature. What synthetic biology does actually is make literal use of the building blocks of life. Eventually, synthetic biology aims to create a database of genomic codes that, when inserted into

an organism will produce a predictable trait. So this snippet is a gene that codes for proteins that creates bioluminescence, and when you insert it into E. Col I, it will make the bacterium glow like a firefly, which is pretty neat. The common analogy is lego bricks. The synthetic biology community calls their genetic snippets bio bricks, but instead of plastic blocks, synthetic biologists use genes snapped together, as it were, to radically alter existing species, or to even

create entirely new ones that have never existed before. Synthetic biology will eventually democratize biotechnology, making it easier for people to enter the field, and this effort is already underway. M I T maintains a database of bio bricks that anyone can access. Find the gene that produces the trade you're looking for, copy the genomic code of that gene, and paste it into the order form of an online

genetic synthesis lab. They will produce those snippets of DNA or glio nucleotides from simple sugars, which you can then insert into a host organism, transforming it into a creation utterly outside of nature. This ability to create organisms from scratch at home basically could be very beneficial for humanity, but it also poses huge new risks that have yet

to be explored. Still, the idea of something like a rogue biologist creating a lethal virus DiNovo and releasing it under the human population occupies a very small place among the worries of people in the bio security field. An accidental release, they say, is much more likely. Imagine that you're working in a bio safety level for research lab that's the highest level containment facilitians, and you don't notice that the space suit you're wearing in the lab has

a small terr in it. While you're working with a genetically altered virus. You don't notice that it comes in contact with the bare skin of your hand. After leaving the lab, you take off your suit and you scratch an itch around your nostril with your infected hand, and the virus makes its toy into your body. You are now infected. This particular virus has been altered to have a short incubation period, the time between when you're infected

and when you can infect other people. Inside your lung tissue, the virus has entered a respiratory cell and injected its own genetic material. The cell begins to replicate the virus. In the matter of a second, a million or more copies of the virus are produced. They rupture the hijack cell and spread out, infecting other nearby respiratory cells, where the process begins again. Now you're contagious. With each breath you expel respiratory aerosols water vapor laced with the virus

from your body into the air where others breathe. Your saliva and your nasal fluid are both infectious, but with this particular virus. The time between when you become infectious and the padrome, the time when you first begin to feel symptoms, is more than twenty four hours, And during that time you live your life. You take the subway to work and back. You hold onto poles in the train cars. You chat and laugh with your coworkers. You

spend time with friends in a crowded bar. All the while you shake hands, give hugs, touch door handles, breathe, laugh, You spread the virus to other people. By the time the first signs of illness appear, you have infected five of the people you've come in contact with. Each of those people spread out and infect an average of three

more people, and so on and so on. Some of those infected people have business overseas in Europe, South America, Asia, they leave the country, they cough in airplanes, they shake hands too, they drink from cups that get cleared away. They spread the virus to other people around the world. Each of the infected people creates a new branch in an ever expanding chain of infection that epidemiologists have a

very short time to contain. If that genetically altered virus is easily spread, the epidemiologists may fail a pandemic magnite, and if that virus is also highly virulent with a high mortality rate, the pandemic could be an existential threat. What makes this worst case scenario so unnerving is the biotech field's real life track record of accidental releases. In addition to a willingness to take huge risks in its research,

the field is also dangerously accident prone. That very situation I've just described happened in two thousand four when a worker handling the coronavirus at a c DC lab in Beijing became infective with Stars, a deadly and contagious respiratory illness. Although the virus killed only one person, it managed to make it all the way to Hong Kong and Canada before it was contained. The two thousand four Stars outbreak resulted from an incorrectly inactivated virus in a biosafety level

three or four lab. The suits that workers have to wear and the safety equipment they have to use is cumbersome to say the least, but those protocols are necessary for handling the deadliest pathogens, both to prevent the people working with those pathogens from getting infected and to prevent

the pathogens from escaping the lab. So to get around those highest level safety protocols, labs sometimes kill the path legions they're working with, say by exposing them to dry heat or changing their pH but the virus or bacterium itself remains intact, so since it's now dead, it can be rendered non infectious and studied in a lower level containment lab, where safety requirements are much less stringent, making the pathogen easier to work with. The problem is inactivation

isn't always effective. Some viruses simply don't die, and the process is prone to human error. Accidental releases of incorrectly inactivated viruses is disturbingly common. In fact, labs that work with potential pandemic pathogens have a breathtakingly bad record of accidental releases of all kinds. Just to pick a few, in the flu season featured a strain of H one and one that was almost genetically identical to a strain that had last made the rounds about three decades earlier.

In evolutionary terms for a virus, three decades is an epoch to us, any strain related to one from NIF should have mutated so many times that it was no longer even remotely possible it could be genetically identical to the previous one. For years, scientists puzzled over this surprise reappearance, considering and discarding theories, until they finally came to an

unsettling conclusion. The only reasonable way such a thing could have happened as if the virus had entered some form of suspended animation and then made its way back into nature, and the most reasonable explanation for that was that it had been frozen and kept in a lab and then released. Researchers eventually settled on the theory that the strain had probably been released in a vaccine that wasn't inactivated properly. The result created a pandemic. Fortunately it was not a

particularly deadly one. Exactly what lab the virus came from has never been fully proven. The next year, a photographer working at the University of Birmingham Medical School in the UK caught smallpox and her mother, who cared for her, died. She had contracted it from a lab one floor below. The smallpox had traveled through the air duct into her office.

And in nine in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, sixty four people died of anthrax infections after an air filter was removed and not immediately replaced in a lab that was working on illegal weaponized anthrax bacteria, which was carried

into a village down wind. It was ex it's like these that led to the creation of those high biosafety level labs and the use of space suits when conducting research with the deadliest pathogens, which makes sense in the U s Department of Agriculture created a list of the deadliest pathogens, which the U S d A calls biological and select agents, and the Centers for Disease Control took responsibility for monitoring the labs that work with them. But it wasn't until two thousand one that bs L three

and bs L four labs really began to spread. There weren't very many of them until two thousand and one and after the anthrax letters, which came from Frederick, where I live, which is how I got engaged in this issue. After that time we went from just a few labs to a large number, a very large number of labs. It mushroomed tremendously UM with the assumption that um, we had to do a lot of research because of the threat of bioterrorism. But of course the only incidents we've

ever experience came from one of our own labs. In two thousand one, just a week after the September eleventh attacks, members of Congress and the media began receiving strange letters with a white powder. Inside the powder was spores of Bacillus and thracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. It had been weaponized to make it more easily inhaled and therefore infectious. Twenty two people were infected by the spores, and five of them died. In in America already gripped by panic.

The anthrax letters had a profound impact on the country's psyche, and it turns out that the source of the anthrax was actually a a lab at for Dietrich a scientists there who really was somewhat mentally unstable, and I think people should have known it. Uh, he was responsible for spreading that anthrax. I think that just scared the hell

out of everybody. The problem is that even with the creation of BSL three and four labs, with their astounding array of precautionary equipment and procedures, the twenty one century has still seen a lot of high profile accidents from these labs. Between two thousand four and two, there were six hundred and thirty nine reported accidental releases of pathogens found on the U s d A's list of Biological

select agents and toxins. Bacteria and viruses like the Ebola virus and the bacteria that causes the plague the virus that causes stars are all on the list. Those six hundred and thirty nine accidents represent just the ones that were reported, and only then among those publicly funded labs that are required to report such accidents. Labs that don't receive public funding like those run by corporations or private groups,

don't have to report accidents like that at all. Back in two thousand fourteen, a National Institutes of Health lab in Bethesda, Maryland, discovered six fials of live Bariola, the smallpox virus, in an unsecured freezer. The vials were labeled Bariola and have been stored in the nineteen fifties in a lab that had gone unused since the nineteen seventies.

The f d A, which had taken custody of the lab from the NAH way back in, had lost track of the stocks with smallpox and failed to destroy the Bariola or submitted to the CDC as part of that eradication campaign. It had just sat forgotten in the freezer. Also in two thousand fourteen, a c DC workers ship live strains of the bacteria that causes typhoid fever to another lab in a reused box that wasn't marked for

hazardous material. Not to mention, the box was broken open in the corner and it was sent using regular ups delivery. Some specimens broke during shipping, although the Typhus vile remained intact and sealed again. These are just a few randomly selected examples, like those ships that carried smallpox between Africa and the America's. Each accident involving potential pandemic pathogens is like tossing a lit match on a powder keg. Each one has a chance for an outbreak to take hold.

The problem is as more BSL three and four labs come online, more of this risky research is being conducted. More labs conducting more of this risky research compounds the probability of an accidental release of a pathogen that can

cause a catastrophic pandemic. Even worse, BSL three and four labs have mushroomed to a point where no one, not the U. S. Government, not the Centers for Disease Control, not the National Institutes of Health, not the World Health Organization, no one can definitively say how many high containment labs are operating around the world. In the US, even there's no certainty about how many there are, it has become something of a status symbol among nations, universities, and corporations

to operate high level containment labs. So some people in the biotech and bio security fields have called for an end to gain a function research of any kind. The trouble is there's no regulatory framework overseeing high containment labs. In the US. The National the Institutes for Health is the agency that provides funding for this type of work, and they have adopted guidelines for best practices and safety, but there's no penalty for labs that don't follow those guidelines.

The most potent weapon the NIH has to curtail reckless experiments is to deny funding for further research, and this only applies to labs that receive public funding. Privately funded labs, like again those found inside corporations, as well as labs overseas, operate utterly outside of any jurisdiction. But even if American labs had a flawless safety record, which they definitely do not, other countries across the rest of the world operate with

a patchwork of regulations, if any at all. There is no global oversight of research with deadly pathogens, and there's really no one to say what constitutes a reckless experiment anyway, Aside from the institution the researcher is affiliated with. There's no one empowered to decide which experiments are simply too risky to carry out, and in most cases, the institutions that can make that decision air on the side of their researchers, since highly visible work that gets lots of

press brings their institutions prestige. What's probably most disturbing is the tendency to downplay or even totally fail to report lab accidents. A culture of silence and opaqueness pervades the bio labs in the US. For all of the existential risk involved, there is almost no public scrutiny of the field of biotechnology. If science is never to be censored, doesn't that also require it to be fully transparent. There

are ways to make the system in place safer. Some microbiology to argue that the same results can be found by using non infectious proteins to study the functions of viruses, that those live altered viruses that some labs are creating are not only reckless but also totally unnecessary. Others say that researchers could be required to add genetic traits to their altered specimens that make them reliant on conditions in the lab to survive, so that they cannot spread in nature,

kind of like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Perhaps they could engineer a kill switch like a self destruct mechanism that is triggered once the cell divides a prescribed number of times. In other areas, labs that synthesize DNA and RNA could be required to compare the sequences of orders that come in against the database of known pathogens and report any of those orders that set off alarms to authorities,

and propose souls. For research that has dual use imposes a low probability, high consequence threat to the public could undergo review and approval based on its relative benefit to science as part of funding requests, and labs both public and private in the US and abroad could be put under an international regulatory body that both respects and understand science, but also equally value safety for humankind. There are holes in these safeguards, yes, but even this handful of ideas

are still vastly better than what's currently in place. When you combine the increasing number of labs around the world carrying out research on potential pandemic pathogens with the history of accidental releases in human error in the biotech field, it is extraordinarily difficult not to conclude that the potential for an existential threat posed by the release of a deadly pathogen is real. This is not a far off

field of existential risk. It surrounds us right now. Dr Lynn Clots, who you met earlier, calculated the probability of a lab acquired infection that followed that worst case scenario I described based on the current track record of accidental releases over the course of a ten year period. Considering ten labs with an average safety record, Dr Clots calculated that there is a twenty seven percent chance of an undetected lab acquired infection creating a global pandemic in the

next decade. That's better than a one in four chance of an existential catastrophe. And that's just considering ten labs. No one knows how many labs there actually are. Risk is product of two things, the likelihood of something happening times consequence. The likelihood of something happening is small, very small per lab per year, but you do things in enough labs for enough years, it gets bigger. Uh. And the consequences, potential consequences are huge in the worst case scenario,

perhaps killing a large percentage of the world's population. And we just don't know. So I just don't think it's worth taking the chance on the next episode of the End of the World with Josh Clark. Particle physics works at the leading edge of human knowledge, at the leading

edge of theory. That's the whole point of it. Particle physics is where science touches the fabric of the universe, and it puts us in a dilemma to know if the experiments that we're running inside of particle colliders are safe. We have to run the experiments in the first place, but hoping for the best is not a good strategy for an existential risk that could theoretically end the universe as we know it. M