 Los Angeles is now the latest city to be placed under martial law. All residents are required to report to the... What are some of the ethical discussions that go on around so vaccine or drug development, other than who pays for it, maybe? I think the biggest question is one about safety and how to ensure safety, so that... where you are with it, well, it looks like, for some of the reasons we've already been discussing, if you're developing a new medicine or a new vaccine, then a lot of the time you don't really know quite what its effect will be, so that at a molecular level, you can see, well, this molecule will bind on to this particular target on the virus or the bacteria. But just knowing that, it doesn't necessarily tell you what the effect will be on the human body, if it might be poisonous, it might be toxic, and so the classic way of trying to at least screen out most of the things that it might be deadly is to try it on an animal first. There are usually two species of animal, so to actually give progressively higher doses to animals, see what effect it has. And then if it's highly harmful for animals, then you think, well, no, that's probably going to be harmful for human beings as well. One of the trickinesses there is that the animal's immune system doesn't always work the same as the human one, so there's a case a few years ago when there was a drug that had been trialled in Northwick Park where they tried it on, I believe it was chimpanzees beforehand, what they thought had done their work-up work correctly. And it turned out that the disease, that the medicine caused the human immune system to flare up into something that was known as a cytokine storm. So basically the body started fighting itself. One or two of them, they gave to eight people, two of those I think had a placebo. So out of the six who got the active medicine, they were quite severely ill, and a couple of people lost limbs if I remember. Which begs the question, then why do we still need animal models? And then a lot of people would ask you that, and why can't we do everything on a computer? I might have to leave that one to the scientists. My understanding of it is that we just don't know enough about the science in order to model it. That's exactly the point. So first, even the immune system, for all we know about the T cells, the B cells, where they go in the body, the lymph node, et cetera, there is not, well the computer is a no-go, but even on the cell culture, we cannot reconstruct a whole immune system with the thymus, with the bone marrow, all of it. We cannot reconstruct in the lab a whole immune system that would let us know exactly all the effects of what we're injecting, right? This is really, really important. The safety is a really important thing. You've got to check that your vaccine is safe because your vaccine is intended for people who are not ill, you are not taking any risk. For somebody who has, let's say, if it was a cure for that disease, you probably would try anything because you know you're going to die, right? So you'd be fine and then your ethics or your risk-taking is different for a vaccine where you intend to give it to healthy people. Your risk-taking is close to zero. So does the ethics of drug trials change in a post-apocalyptic world compared to the real world? I'd say definitely. I mean, in the main case, we tend to be much more protective of people in the context of research than sometimes we are in the context of treatment or some other context, so that if you think about the sort of, I guess, the risks that, you know, ordinary, apparently sane people sometimes take so that you can go and climb Mount Everest if you want. Quite a lot of people die climbing Mount Everest. I believe it's about one in 66 is your chance of death if you try to climb Mount Everest or you can go, you know, if you've ever seen people gliding on wingsuits where, again, you go up the top of a mountain and then kind of pretend to be a superhero and glide down and then, again, quite often die for no good reason. There's those sorts of risks that we allow people to take in ordinary life. But for a variety of reasons, we tend to make drug trials much safer than that just because maybe for a number of intriguing reasons, partly because of a need for trust in the system or because for so many times in the past, you've seen an exploitation of patients by doctors with people who've actually sort of fooling people into taking part in trials which are much more dangerous than they thought. So throughout the world now, you'll see systems of ethics review before you get to do medical research. You need to say, you know, what we're doing, here's what the protocol is, here's the scientific workup, here's the risk that people will be subjected to. And you have to show clearly that people will be aware of what those risks are, that the Ethics Committee will ask to see all the information around it just because there's such a history maybe going back to what happened with the Nazis in the Second World War. There's a sense when you had the Nuremberg trials afterwards that it was just really important to put down a set of principles that could hold for the whole world about what medical research. Should be like. So there's all that sort of background which makes us much more protective about what happens in medical research than we are in other areas of life. Often because it's difficult to understand what the risks are for ordinary people. You talk about the possibility of a cytokine storm where people have obviously no idea what you're talking about. So there's a little bit of paternalism, the idea of saying, well, we take the risk out of people's hands and what's better for them and a fully qualified committee will tell you if the research is safe enough to be done at all and if it is, then you're able to sign up to it but you have to also fully understand what's going on in the research. I think that there are cases where research Ethics Committees are willing to allow a bit more risk in the context of research. Say if it's cancer trials where often if it's a medication which if it's taking the medication or probably face death, then very often people are really keen to be able to be part of that trial because that's what they perceive as their only hope and at that point general standards of risk are relaxed somewhat but still highly controlled.