 They found my paper there in Kebyscain where they were, and it's that that made it up the President's mind. He would renounce toxins no matter how they're made, whether they're made by living things or by chemists in factories. And so that put toxins and living biological weapons in the same category, the United States renounced them both. President Nixon also, at that same time, expressed support for the British draft treaty. It was a British treaty, not ours, to prohibit biological weapons to which we added toxins worldwide and some years later that treaty came into force after a considerable negotiation. Boom what's up everyone, welcome to Simulation, I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are on site at the biological laboratories building at Harvard in the beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about everything from beneficial versus hostile uses of biology, banning biological weapons, preventing existential risk, and so much more. We are honored and blessed to be sitting down with Dr. Matthew Messelsen. Hello. Thank you for coming on to the show, really appreciate it. We're very grateful to have you on. Very grateful for Max Tagmark for introducing us and making this conversation happen. For those that don't know Matthew's background, he consulted with Henry Kissinger in assisting Richard Nixon to renounce biological and toxin weapons, ensuring that the ever more powerful science of biology helps rather than harms humankind, winning the 2019 Future of Life award for this work. He also, with his colleagues, proved Watson and Kirk's hypothesis on how DNA replicates solved the Sverdlovsk anthrax mystery and ended the use of ancient orange in Vietnam. He has been at Harvard University for almost 60 years and is a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and you can check out the links below to Matthew's work. All right, Matthew, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions, which is, what is your take on the direction of our world? I think that we are, as a species, approaching what you might call an inflection point. There are a number of things which are going to change the environment in which we think and in which we live. One of them, of course, is the almost certain development of guiding our own future evolution, not today, not tomorrow, but eventually we will be changing our genomes. We will be guiding our own evolution. We will be living not just on this planet, there will be human settlements on other planets starting with Mars. We will be relying not only on our own minds or even on what today are called advanced computers. There will be computers of such great power that they don't merely answer the questions that we pose. They will be posing questions, and they will be perhaps even giving orders. Furthermore, the whole structure of the world economy will change in ways that cannot be foreseen, but at least at present, the extreme inequality of the distribution of wealth drives social unrest, and the ability to see what's happening over the web means that people see this inequality, and climate change will also drive migrations of people. So a large number of things, including those and some others, are going to cause rapid and profound change. By rapid I don't mean tomorrow, but the time span of which I'm thinking is of maybe centuries. It's wrong to think that the human beings are a fixed species. We've been evolving up to this point. We continue to evolve. We are just a snapshot of the makeup of the human race. It will continue to change. Maybe even split up into varieties, maybe even species. So that can happen only, of course, if you have human populations with no communication between them. But if very widely separated bodies in space become populated, travel between them might be so unusual, and I'm not talking about tomorrow. I'm not a wild-eyed science fiction person, but we have, what, 2,000 years of reasonably decent human history that projected not the 2,000 years, given this pace of change since I was born, even biology. It was only about less than 150 years ago that it was discovered that cells come from other cells, and not just from some sort of goo. And in that time, look how far we've come. Through most of it, with very simple instruments, a rather poor microscope, maybe a Bunsen burner. Until now we have, at least today, we would think of extremely sophisticated microscopes and all kinds of other things. But why should the pace of improvement in our ability to probe nature slow down? It won't. We will be able to probe nature and modify nature to a degree that's difficult to think of now, unless you read Isaac Asimov or Clark or one of those science fiction writers. So we need to think about that. And what is it we need to think about? Well, I'd say the thing we need to think about, or one of the things we need to think about is, in all of this change, what is it that we want not to change? And I would say that what we want not to change, and even to enhance, is our humanity. So that leads to the question of what is our humanity? What is it that we most value in being human? Is it the feeling that nearly all human beings have when you're helping someone or being useful to someone, being loved by someone, whether a family member or an organization, which you serve, this generally gives pleasure. If you feel unneeded, uncared for by anybody, by any organization, by any outfit, I don't think there are many people who would find that pleasant. And it's that feeling which has allowed us to cooperate. There's no way in which complete individuals, if we were like the male lions who go off by themselves, except to mate, all of us are entity unto itself. We couldn't build homes. We couldn't do anything together. We couldn't do science, really, because that requires also collaboration. So that's one, another thing is the feeling of awe. I think we value that a lot. While there is curiosity, we value that a lot. Compassion. So I don't think that we've even seriously written down and thought about what is the most essential thing. If we continue to evolve, even in the natural manner, but of course now greatly speeded up by intervention, what is it we want not to change? So how do you decide on that? It seems to me you need not just biologists, you need humanists. What we need to do at a small scale, so here at Harvard, at universities, is try and interest the very best young scientists and the very best young humanists to get together, something which doesn't happen now, to begin thinking about these things. We need the very best young scientists perhaps, now here I'm not a humanist, so I can only talk as a rank amateur, but maybe to read Escalus and Sophocles and Euripides, because those ancient Greek playwrights were asking basically, what is the right relationship between humans? What is the right relationship between the individual and the state? What is a good life? What is virtue? So it's very hard to be more specific about these things, because not much thought has gone into them. But it would be good to begin now, even though it's a fairly long way off, but I'm sure it will happen unless some kind of disaster overwhelms us before that. Sooner or later, bar a real disaster, we will be determining our own evolution. Long time from now, don't get the idea I'm saying that's tomorrow, it's not. And I'm not talking really about the domain of bioethicists, that's different. Bioethics has to do with the immediate consequences, that you might lose your privacy, that you might begin to discriminate between people in an unfair way because of some genetic attribute. Sounds like that. That's important, but it's not bioethics that's needed for the problem I'm addressing. It's needed for other problems. The problem I'm addressing is the long-term future of our species. So now I think the question to which I've given this long-winded answer is what is your concern about human race? Of reoccurring theme that's so well-synthesized, and it seems as though a reoccurring theme of what you stand for is our process of slowing down and thinking and making better choices. Or maybe hurry up and make better choices. Yeah, yeah, awaken faster. Climate change, you'd better hurry up because that is a clicking clock. It's clicked quite a bit. So are many of the other things that you listed. That was very well-synthesized. Let's get into the journey, Matthew. So, born initially in Denver, then grew up in Los Angeles, but you had this really cool upbringing where you had natural sciences present in your home when you're tinkering. I had a big laboratory in the basement, rather in the garage of my family home. And I did a lot of chemistry before I went to college. And that's a reoccurring theme of people that we sit down with is that they had the tools that they needed when they were younger to be able to fill that curiosity. Well, I loved science, and in particular I liked mathematics and physics and chemistry. From an even younger age, I think, my parents told me that when I was two and three, I used to fool around with little lights and wires and batteries. It's hard to know why some people do, in the very same family, a group of siblings. Some would want one thing, some another. But you can see these tendencies in some people, not even the majority, very early. And that in itself, we'd like to understand that better. You have a lot of that is the how things work, curious. And then this led you to doing chemistry at the University of Chicago. Well, I didn't actually. Okay, teach us about this. So, I went to high school in Los Angeles. And during the war, that's the Second World War, I think a lot of kids felt that it was not right to just goof off during the summer, the war on, so on. You should do something more serious, like get a job or take summer courses. I did both. One summer I got a job in a defense factory, and one summer I took extra courses at Hollywood High. And at the end of that summer, I went to the registrar at my high school, Thomas, rather John Marshall High School, and said, I've now got all the academic requirements to be graduated. Could I have my diploma? And she said, no, according to California State Law, you have to have three full years of physical education. Yeah. Well, that really stunned me, because I thought that up till then, that the adults in this world knew better in all regards. And here was this really silly regulation. So I began to ask, well, how can I escape this? The registrar at the high school said, why don't you just take the courses that you like over again? As though it was something like desserts. You have a second helping, but that makes no sense when it comes to taking courses. And so eventually, somebody told me there was a place that would take students who had not finished high school. And this was the University of Chicago. And I thought, oh, good. University I can start studying chemistry and physics and math. And I got there. I was 16. And it turns out that Robert Maynard Hushins had abolished the bachelor's degree in any specialized subject. Instead, it was a great books program. You read the classics. You read the really important books about sociology, about economics, about art, and so on. But there was no course in chemistry, no course in physics for undergraduates. So I didn't get a degree in science from the University of Chicago. I got a degree called Bachelor of Philosophy. Then I left college for a whole year, wandering around Europe. And then I went back to Chicago for one more year. Now I could take specialized courses. But still I didn't have a bachelor's degree in any science subject. Teacher's about what you saw when you went to Europe. I saw a land—well, I went to Paris. I went to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy. Paris wasn't too badly destroyed. But there was, at that time, very little traffic on the streets. There were bullet holes in buildings. But one thing that was very impressive was that there were Americans there, but they were tourists. They were GIs who'd come back after the war to Paris. Most of them, I think, or at least many of them, or more accurately what came across to me was that these were guys who were wondering, okay, we fought this terrific war. What's it all about? What is the future going to be? They came to Paris maybe because of the romance of it, but also with questions on their mind. So you'd sit in cafes and overhear conversations of that kind. So then I wanted to go and see the Soviet Union. Here during the war they were our great allies. And now already by 1949, which is the year I was the first year I was in Europe, they were beginning to be our great enemies. So I was confused. What's the score here? And I always wanted to make up my own mind about things, including that. So I thought the best way in being, I guess just because I'm scientifically inclined, you have to go see, you have to get the data. So I thought in my young way, I got to get over there and see what it's like. So I went to the Soviet Embassy in Paris and they said, oh, you have to be invited by somebody. Well, I didn't know anybody there. So then I went to Budapest. There was a communist youth festival there and Hungary had just become communist. So I went to the Soviet Embassy there and said, can I get a visa to go to Russia? No, you have to be invited by someone. Well, I didn't know. So I never got to the Soviet Union on that trip. But Hungary had just turned communist and a law had been passed to make it a crime to listen to the BBC, the British Broadcasting System. At first, the people I was living with just didn't believe it. But then one of them took me to the library and we looked up the records from their parliament and sure enough, a few weeks before a law had been passed that made it a crime to listen to the BBC, which really turned me off on communism. Even though a lot of the objectives that they announced were worthwhile objectives, but the means by which they were trying to impose these objectives were antithetical to free thinking and science. So this left me in a kind of a wondering situation. What should I do with myself? At first, I thought I'd maybe become a psychiatrist. But a funny kind of psychiatrist, I would treat not individuals but nations. That is, I would try and think about how wars represent a kind of pathology. But I couldn't get very far thinking that way. And I furthermore thought at the end of my life, I'd like to feel that whatever I had done during my life was correct. And in something like psychology, how would you know? Whereas in something like chemistry, which may be much more dull than figuring out how to prevent a war, at least if you work properly, you'd know that what you've done was correct. Like if you got the formula of some molecule, a structure of some molecule, did it properly? That's correct. It's going to last. Anyway, I came back home. I went to Caltech for a year because now I could go to a real technical place. I had to start all over again, though, as a freshman. And I didn't like it because teaching then was remote, by... Sorry, not remote, but it was by rote. Except for the course by Linus Pauling, who I like that course a lot. And so I left Caltech after one year. Went back to the University of Chicago for a year. And then I got a letter from them that said, we don't give the bachelor's degree in physics, but if we did, we'd give one to Matthew Messelson. That got me into the physics department at Berkeley, which I didn't like too much because it was huge. The classes were gigantic. So here I am wandering, bouncing around between Caltech, Chicago, and Berkeley. And finally, I got to know Linus Pauling's children, two of his children, during the time I was at Caltech. And one of them, I think it was his daughter, Linda, had a party at their house, the swimming pool. And I'm in the swimming pool, swimming around. And out comes the world's greatest chemist, Linus Pauling. And he knew me because I had done a little research project for him when I was a freshman there. And he said, what are you going to do next year? I said I was going to go to study with a man named Nicholas Rieszewski at the University of Chicago. And Pauling said, that's a lot of baloney. Come be my graduate student. And I looked up out of the water and I said, OK, I will. So that's how I got to be his student. And from then on, I think my career was pretty set. I did x-ray crystallography for Linus. But it was crystallography to teach me the structure of molecules important for life. Because to do molecular biology, you need to know molecular structure. And then I got interested in the problem of DNA replication. And together with my friend Frank Stahl, we solved how DNA replicates, namely semi-conservatively. It teaches about when you're first doing x-ray crystallography. And then when you're learning about and confirming the DNA replication process, teach us about that time period. Well, there's a long and a short version. But the short version is that I had an idea from something completely different, something, a problem that was posed by a visiting famous French scientist, Jacques Monot, the problem of having nothing to do with DNA structure. But at that time, the proposal of Watson Crick for the replication of DNA was controversial because it had a lot of problems. I won't go into detail. But the big problem was that to separate those two strands, unless you're going to break them, you have to unwind and rotate the entire unreplicated part of the molecule. And if it's a very big molecule, and chromosomes have very big molecules of DNA, the viscous drag of rotating the unreplicated molecule is absolutely prohibitive. You couldn't get that much work done inside the living cell. If you break strands, then you could rotate around the single bonds. It's a little bit complicated, but not very complicated. So there were several different hypotheses. But the basic idea of the two initial strands, each acting as a template for the production of two new sister strands, that's correct. Strands do get broken, though not in the way that it was being thought about in those days, but in a different way. And it occurred to me that we could discriminate these different methods of replication by labeling DNA molecules with a heavy isotope. By growing bacteria, we eventually got to bacteria. At first, we thought we could do this bacteria phase. By me, by we, I mean my friend Frank Stahl and me. We labeled bacteria with a heavy isotope of the element nitrogen. You could buy nitrogen 15, which is a heavier form of nitrogen. It has one more neutron in the nucleus. And then plunge these bacteria that had been growing in a heavy nitrogen medium into a medium that was ordinary nitrogen. And now if you could distinguish molecules of different density in a very subtle way. So we worked for a year or so to develop a method to do that. There had been no method to do that. And we did develop a method for doing that. And then we applied that method to this problem. And we observed in what turned out to be a very beautiful way that after one replication, all the DNA molecules have one old chain and one new one, just like Watson and Crick had predicted. And after two generations, half the DNA molecules would be completely new and half would have one old chain and one new chain, et cetera, et cetera. It was a very, very visual proof. It had another value. Some people didn't believe the structure of DNA was that as proposed by Watson and Crick. I think that was partly because some people felt biology is very complicated. And so the gene must be very complicated. You know, there was too simple to be true. And others felt it was too simple to be wrong. And the fact was that what they had proposed was a model. There was no real evidence that was correct. It fitted the requirements of structural chemistry, but that didn't prove it was right. So I think our experiment by showing these bands on photographs from an ultra centrifuge exactly as predicted by their replication scheme had a big psychological effect. Now, in fact, I think Jim writes in his book, The Double Helix, that it was that that made him feel the relief of knowing that, yeah, of course they were right. That is the structure of DNA. In fact, the real structure that the chains are wound around each other wasn't finally proved until quite a few years later by Crick and Jim Wong. A completely different kind of experiment. So anyway. What a profound time in biology. Yes, and I'll tell you why it was profound. This DNA molecule told us what to do. If you look at the structure of a molecule of a protein or a lipid, it says nothing or almost nothing. If you look at that DNA model, it says, here I am. I have two strands. I'm a gene. I have to replicate. How do I do it? Go out and find out how. Here I am. I have these four different bases. You can put information in this writing of four letters. That writing must tell you what proteins to make, what sequence of amino acids. Go find out how that's done. Here I am. Once in a while, there's a change. It's called mutation. Go figure out how that happens, or here I am. Once in a while, a piece of me gets broken and stuck onto a piece of another DNA molecule. That's called recombination. Go figure out how that happens, or here I am. Once in a while, there's an accident and I'm copied incorrectly, but there's a mechanism for correcting me. Go figure out, in other words, this molecule was dictating what had to be done. And to me, that allows us to define an era. When all the questions that DNA was demanding that you go out and solve, giving orders, really, when those all got their basic answers, I mean, there are a lot of details that we're still studying, but when the basic questions were all in, that's the end of that era. That's the period from about 1953 till, roughly speaking, 1970 or something like that. And now it would be almost wrong to call it molecular biology. Well, you could call it that, but it was a very definite period of time. At that time, visualizing this, edge of knowledge in biology opened up and then all of those questions that you listed that then people could inquire about and continue pushing. And it gave orders, it literally stood there and told you what to do. It's unusual. Yeah, to have that much of an edge be opened up and also for the edge to be the code of life. Yeah, that was the code of life. It was the big boss determining what research should be done. And we were all just the graduate students. It was the professor. Oh, yes. And another aspect of that, tying it all the way to what you mentioned at the very beginning about how now being in control of what was the professor is incredibly, just in just the time span of 70 years, we are now in control of what used to be. Well, we're beginning to be. It's still, I mean, people talk about CRISPR-Cas9. That's very good, but it's not perfect by a long shot. And even when we get, which we do not have, methods of precisely with no accidents changing one DNA sequence to another one, whether it's replacing one gene with another or just replacing one base with another, we cannot do that with perfection yet. But that's easy. That'll be done, no problem. There's a much bigger problem. It's called epistasis. So the problem of off-target effects or even nearby target effects, that'll be solved. But most gene products, both proteins and even RNA, interact with other gene products in amazingly complicated ways. So one protein might bind either permanently or temporarily with some other protein or with a whole mess of other proteins. Now, when you change one gene, if you change it perfectly, exactly the way you want it, which you don't know is all the ways in which the protein coded for by that gene might be working together with other proteins. So if you change this one, you've changed all these interactions. Now, it's gonna be a long time before we understand that. But maybe that's where supercomputers, maybe even quantum computers, will be of real help because that requires taking one huge amount of detailed information and figuring out what it means. So changing our own heredity will require because of this problem of epistasis, which I may be exaggerating or I may be under-emphasizing. Only when that is solved can we safely, of course we'll start doing it safely or not, just like this gentleman in China did with the two little girls from whom he excised the gene that makes you susceptible to the AIDS virus. There's some claims somewhere, and I haven't read the paper yet, that when this is done with mice, the mice get smarter, that they can run mazes better. A lot depends on that in a way because if those two little girls turn out to be desperately ill as a result, that'll put a monkey wrench in the gene modification business for quite a while, not permanently. But if it turns out that they're smarter, the floodgates will be slightly pried open. So a lot depends on individual events, at least over the short term. But over the long term, human beings are going to be guiding their own evolution. The problem is that which human beings, well, only the rich ones, of course, there's a problem there. Of course, it's only part of the general problem of the inequality of the distribution of the wealth which we produce and which nature offers is distributed very unequally. And people are beginning to understand that because they can see. Also, the nature of capitalism, and see now, here I'm a biologist, so don't take any of this too seriously, but the nature of capitalism has changed because if I, well, for example, I'm an owner of a big automobile factory, I have to spend my revenue, the total money is paid to buy steel and rubber, machines, I have to pay a large workforce. So a lot of it goes out to other people, the miners who mine the iron to make the steel, so on. If I invented Facebook, I don't need much stuff for that. I need some offices, I need some computers, I hire a few people, but not multitudes of people. Don't need to extract minerals from the market. But I've got multitudes of people paying me, draining money from a multitude of people into a very few people. Now, that's okay if the very few people spend it, but they don't spend it. They allow it to accumulate, so that we have more and more money that's accumulating and accumulating, now here I'm talking really without much knowledge, but it seems to me that in this sense that capitalism is failing us. It's certainly making better things, still entrepreneurs and all that, but it is not distributing the wealth in a way that will make society coherent and stable. Yeah, the instability that we face with wealth inequality is hazardous and we need a better way of addressing what's happening, you brought up the great, the excellent point of just the sheer scaling ability of software and you also bring up again just how pressing of an issue this is to figure out how to tackle. We talk about this very frequently on the show and we look forward to the new codes that are implemented. What is this new code of a way that incentivizes innovation while simultaneously takes in new markers of well-being into our world? So you being at the edge of genetics and molecular biology has been happening for a while in the Harvard faculty again since 1960, constantly professing as well. There's still so much more to understand about the career in genetics and molecular biology, but I also really want to hit deeper into this point. In 1963, you became a resident consultant for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and then you were viewing the base where we were manufacturing anthrax and you were like, why are we manufacturing anthrax? And that led you into this incredible work with biological weapons and the renouncing them. So please teach us about this. Well, I got to the Arms Control Agency more or less by accident. They wanted to hire six academics just for the summer to think up some new ideas for them. It was a new agency in the State Department Building and I had a friend who had a beautiful house in Georgetown that would be completely empty. And so this seemed very attractive, something to do different from science but only for the summer and also a very nice place to live and explore. So I went down there and they said, okay, you're going to work on the European Theater Nuclear Arms Control, of which I knew absolutely nothing. That's okay because scientists often feel arrogant enough to think that they can always do something useful in any field. But the problem was that an awful lot of other people did know a lot about it, books and papers and so on. So I asked my boss, since I'm a chemist and a biologist, couldn't you let me think about chemical or biological arms control? He said, you do whatever you want, we're all going off to Moscow to negotiate the atmospheric nuclear test ban. So I decided I better go over to the CIA and see what we thought other countries were doing. And at that time the answer was we didn't know very much. We had some suspicions. And then I went over to Fort Dietrich in Maryland where our principal place for research and development of biological weapons was. And a nice man took me around and he was Lee Roy Father Gill, an immunologist, a colonel. And we came to a building seven stories high that had what looked like windows if you were far away from it. But when you get up close, there are phony windows, I guess, so spies could not tell from a distance what was all about. And I asked, what's in there? I can't remember if he took me inside or not. But he said, we have in there a 10,000 gallon fermenter and we make anthrax spores there. And I said, it was a long time ago, so I think I'm remembering it. But the gist of it is right. I said, what do we do that for? He said, well, it'll save us money. It's a lot cheaper than nuclear weapons as a weapon of mass destruction. It's a fairly long taxi ride back from Fort Dietrich in Maryland to the State Department building in Washington and somewhere, I think it was during that taxi, it dawned on me, hey, wait, cheap. We don't want there to be a cheap weapon of mass destruction. For example, what if I invented a hydrogen bomb that cost a nickel? We want war to be so equal. I would like war to be so expensive that nobody could afford it. That'd be great. And of course, as an American, I would like war to be so expensive that only the United States could afford it. That seems maybe a little bit too nationalistic, so it seemed to me that not only was this a dumb thing to do, but that there was a marvelous argument for not doing it on top of which it was my science, I'm a biologist. And I could see because it was just the beginning of genetic engineering. Paul Berg had done some of his experiments and it was clear that we were gonna eventually be able to do all kinds of very subtle things with biology and to let this new science loose on the problem of winning wars, which basically nowadays means not only in the field against soldiers, but also against the civilians back home. It's an awful prospect. So for these two reasons, one, it's a terrible thing to do, very awful in my own science. And second, that the argument against it is absolutely irrefutable. It should be easy to get rid of it, to convince them. And now who could stop it? Only one person, as far as the United States is concerned, the president. He could say, we're gonna renounce it. Okay, so the problem is to get, by now we have Kennedy assassinated the same year that I was in Washington, and then we had Johnson. During this time, I went around trying to convince high officials, for example, I went to McGeorge Bundy, who was president of the Kennedys, and then President Johnson's national security advisor. But he was the dean who had hired me at Harvard, and I knew him pretty well, and told him what I thought. And he agreed completely, this is a lousy thing to be doing. But he said, we're so busy, we don't have time to get rid of it, but I promise you it will never be in the war plans. I've never seen a war plan. So I went around and I talked to the highest officials I could get to know. I went to various people in the Congress, in the House, in the Senate, made close relationships. Wherever I talked, people would say, yeah, that's right. So I created an atmosphere. I had to create some degree of, well, there's an anecdote about President Roosevelt. Someone came to him with a friend of his with a plan and Roosevelt told him, that's a good idea, I agree with it, but now go put pressure on me. In other words, a president might do something on his own, but it's a lot easier if he can be doing something which is likely to be met with general approval. So how do you do that? Well, a friend up here in Cambridge told me, I should go down to the Washington Post and meet the managing editor, Howard Simons, the man by the way who introduced Deep Throat to Woodworth and Carl Bernstein. So that was Howard Simons. When I told him I wanted to get a lot of newspaper coverage of this question, he took out a yellow pad and wrote down the names of maybe 30 science journalists at newspapers. These days newspapers, most newspapers don't any longer have science journalists because they're having to save money. But some do, but in those days lots did and I contacted nearly every one of those people, and I wrote to them and talked to them. That got a lot of press coverage. And then there were television interviews, Mike Wallace's program, so on and so forth. So the Army itself, the Army was in charge of the program, made a number of mistakes in some accidents and things like that. Quakers were boycotting Fort Dietrich. So there was some publicity and in the House and the Senate there was quite a bit. And then at one point, soon after Henry Kissinger became a security advisor to Nixon, Mel Laird, who was the Secretary of Defense, said Henry a letter saying, Dear Henry, I think we should review our policies for chemical and biological weapons because I'm getting a lot of complaint and questioning from Congressman McCarthy and Senator Fulbright. These are the two men I have been working with for several years on this. And the reason they were asking these questions was because we were working together. So everything sort of came together. And the spark plug was the letter from Laird, but it wouldn't have happened if... I don't think it would have happened unless he had felt the questioning coming from the Congress. He himself had been a Congressman. So President Nixon, well, Henry asked him to order a major study of this and the different branches of government came up with their different points of view, defense, separate point of view from the Joint Chiefs, State Department, ACTA, and so on. And in the end, President Nixon went all the way. He renounced chemical and biological weapons, renounced their development, possession, transfer, and the whole bit. And then the question came up of something which is not alive, but made by living things, namely toxins, like toxins made by bacteria, botulinal toxin, or by snakes and so on. And there had been some interest at Fort Dietrich of making these things into weapons. And the question came up, what about those? And so there was a whole independent review of that. I wrote some papers about that for Kissinger. And one of the papers I wrote, I know, made up President Nixon's mind because Kissinger tried to reach me the night that President made that decision. I was out at a friend's house for dinner with my wife. But Henry then called. It's a long story, but anyway, Henry said that they found my paper there in Keebus Gaines where they were. And it's that that made up the President's mind. He would renounce toxins no matter how they're made, whether they're made by living things or by chemists in factories. And so that put toxins and living biological weapons in the same category. The United States renounced them both. President Nixon also, at that same time, expressed support for the British draft treaty. It was a British treaty, not ours, to prohibit biological weapons to which we added toxins worldwide. And some years later, that treaty came into force after a considerable negotiation. It has no inspection. Well, it has inspection provision, but only under very special circumstances, basically without inspection. But a lot of people don't understand how you can have a treaty with no inspection. Of course, having inspection is even better. But to have a treaty with even the remote possibility of inspection can have an effect if the country isn't dead sure of what it wants to do. So imagine a group of people sitting around in a room. Should we have biological weapons? Half of them say no. First of all, we don't need them. It's dangerous, et cetera, et cetera. And half of them say, well, we should do this. And then someone says, look, there's a possibility they're going to come and look. And since we signed a treaty and they find something, it's a political risk we don't want to take. In other words, the debate, if there is a debate, of course, if they're dead set on doing it, you're out of luck. But if there's any kind of debate, and most questions like this, there'll be debate within a government because they have only a certain amount of resources. How are they going to spend them? And usually armed forces don't like biological weapons. They're unpredictable. You don't know how many airplanes to fly to deliver them as bombs. You don't know exactly what effect they'll have on people. They are repugnant to many people using disease as a weapon. So there's a lot going for you if what you want to do is keep biology from being used, or at least disease from being used as a weapon. So really, all I did was to be in the right place at the right time and be the right person. And it was easy. I'd say half of my life in those years and the other half doing research and teaching here, but there were a lot of people to make contact with to get things going in the right direction. And like you said, this is your science, biology, and you wanted it to be used for the betterment of humankind and not for hostile purposes. Yeah, but not just because it was mine, because it had this special prospect. See, even nuclear weapons, they blow you up. They don't change you. Biology has the potential to change humanity. Not by just killing with disease, but far more sophisticated applications would be sure to come if year after year after year, major powers were working on better and better biological weapons. Yes. And it happens surreptitiously and the cost being so low given nickel to produce something like this is just horrid. Now, for people who might be watching us talking like this, I must say don't worry about this too much. You've got a lot of other things to worry about, especially climate change. I'll tell you why you should be too worried. There are lots of things we could be worried about, but we have to use history as some guide. It's more than a decade ago, quite a bit more, that we had the anthrax letter attacks. There hasn't been a single copycat in all these years. Even though it showed it can be done, it works, it killed people. So, in the entire wide world, this hasn't happened again. It's not the main thing that ordinary people need to worry about. There are people in our government whose job it is to think about remedies in case it should ever happen. And there are people in our government who try to keep a close watch on what other people are doing. And there are even people in our government who keep a watch on what we're doing. But this is not something for the man in the street to worry about anymore. I would say, because let's look at history, we know that climate change is happening for sure. We know that there are big political changes happening for sure. And if nothing has happened in the way of even bioterrorism for all these years, it might be in the papers tomorrow morning, but you've got other things that are more important to worry about. We're taking what you did as a template for how to prevent existential threats and just mitigate risk of causing unnecessary suffering and just inspire more global cohesion. We're taking what you did, the Biological Weapons Convention being signed on April 10, 1972, recently celebrated its 47th anniversary. And by ending the use of biological weaponry worldwide, we're able to live in a more prosperous civilization for centuries to come. And so we need to do similar templating for all of the pressing issues that we're facing moving forward. And so it's one of the most critical things, 182 member states with the treaty. And so if we can keep doing that for the treaties to inspire global cohesion, what these pressing challenges that we face, that's one of the best ways moving forward. It's a great template. And just for people to know about people like you, people to know about people like Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, the previous 2017 and 2018 Future of Life Award winners, that you are our role models. You are the leaders that we need to look up to in the past that helped us get to a deeper state of global cohesion. And we need to take some of the attention that's happening in this massive pool of the internet and redirect it towards templates like what you guys did. And Ellen and I, of course, agree essentially with what you said. One of the things I'd like to comment on, one, you can't call it a template. It was a very special situation. To the extent that it's a template, the template would be this, that it would be good to interest more young scientists in the ways in which they could contribute to making the world safer. Safer not just for existence, but for progress. And the other thing is that there never has been any biological warfare, so listeners or viewers shouldn't get the impression that there had been biological warfare. No, but there had been preparations for it. That's what has been stopped. We have a lot of millennial and Gen Z talent of these young people that have access to this infinite abundance of knowledge within this internet through the devices that are so sophisticated and for us to be able to galvanize around these things that prevent hiccups in the future is so, so critical. Why don't we go ahead and, on this way of closing, I just have a couple things that I want you to share about. I think that in 1979 there was a process of solving the Spheredloff's anthrax mystery. Teach us about what that was and how you participate in that. In 1979, the first couple of weeks of May, people died in this Soviet city of Spheredloff's, which is just east of the Ural Mountains, from anthrax. We didn't learn about that really until about a year after it happened. And we learned about that from refugees coming out and from other sources. And so the CIA began to look into it. The Russian government, when queried, said that it was due to an outbreak of anthrax amongst animals, cattle and sheep, and that black market meat had caused gastrointestinal anthrax of those who consumed the contaminated meat. The other possibility, though, was that it was an accident of some sort at a biological facility, military biological facility, which we knew at that time already, was located in the city of Spheredloff's. So the question was, what was it? Was it bad meat or was it an aerosol that is particles in the air released by accident? And so I was asked by the CIA to come down there and work together with a small group who were working on this. I spent about a week living down there. I was fortunate that the man who was running this investigation had two daughters who were away at college, and since there were no hotels near Langley at that time, I lived in his house and was able to talk to him about this problem at breakfast and dinner, of course, only the unclassified parts, as well as working on the classified parts every weekday. So I really got to know about everything about this. And at the end of all of this, the conclusion of our working group was not that it was certain that it was airborne, but that it was probable that it was airborne. We had to draw a conclusion that it was either possible, probable, or confirmed. And the group said it was probable. For a reason that's too technical to go into now, I found myself wondering still what it was that had happened. And so in my opinion, the best thing to do was go there and look, which you could say is very naive, it's a cold war. Out of about 100 people that approximately died. We know the names of 68. And we also couldn't possibly open up the gastrointestinal tract to see if that was the case. From Washington? From Seredlovsk. Who's we? Yeah, this is the question. So that's exactly right. It's just like we need to go to Russia to see what things are like when I was a kid. So I decided I have to get there and look, I have to bring a team of specialists and go investigate. You'd think that's very naive, but I met a very high level Russian in Geneva, a man who sits on their military industrial commission, which make all the basic technical decisions on how to spend money in the defense sector. His name was Kirill Dumaev. And I asked him about this. He said, yes, I will arrange for you to come. And so I went to the CIA and said, look, if I do get an invitation to go, I need a map, because maybe they'll try to take me to the wrong place. Give me a map, actually the map the CIA had at the time was wrong. I would have gone to the wrong place. Anyway, I got a letter back though from this Mr. Dumaev. By that time the Soviet jet had shot down the Korean jet. If any of you remember that, everybody died. And so I got a letter from Mr. Dumaev saying, because of that at this time they couldn't invite me after all. I don't know if they ever would have, really. Then later a friend of mine here at Harvard, the medical school, shared a Nobel Prize with the Russian, the Soviet Minister of Defense, Chasov. And Bernie Lown was the American. And I knew Bernie, so I said, Bernie, when you go to Moscow, ask Chasov if I could go to Sferlovsk. He's the Minister of Health. So he did. And when Bernie came back, he said, Chasov says you can go. So I said to Chasov, the Soviet Minister of Health, saying I'm ready to go. Here's my team, etc., four or five of us. Then I got back at Chasov, saying, well, he had sent someone down there to look, and there was no evidence left. It's all gone. I could go to some other Russian city if I wanted, but not Sferlovsk. I wrote back saying, well, look, scientists always find something good comes out of meeting each other and so on. I'd still like to go to Sferlovsk. I never heard back. But then Boris Yeltsin comes along. Soviet Union goes away. We have the Russian Republic instead. And I read in the, in those days, I used to read a digest put out by the CIA of the Russian press. And there I read that a certain Mr. Yablokov had been ordered by President Yeltsin to look into this epidemic. Well, I knew this Mr. Yablokov. He had visited the United States. And we had talked about this epidemic in Sferlovsk. And I'd expressed to him my interest in finding out about it. So I said an italics to him. I see that you've been asked by Yeltsin, your president, to look into this. I'd like to come help you. And I'd like to go to Sferlovsk. So he writes back and says, all right, you can't do that. It's too long ago. You wouldn't find anything. And then a visiting Russian came here, a man named actually by coincidence, Sferlov, Eugene Sferlov. And he's staying at a friend's house, Alex Rich, a very good molecular biologist, no longer alive. And Alex Rich's wife comes to me at this party for Mr. Sferlovsk and says, Sferlovsk is a very nice guy. He's been with us for about a week. I make his breakfast. I make the bed. He's a very nice guy. But maybe you could invite him to state your house instead for a while. So we did. We made his breakfast. We made his bed. And I told him about Mr. Yablakov. And I wanted to go to Sferlovsk. And he said, I'm a pal of his. I will fix things for you. So a little while later I'd get a letter from Mr. Yablakov. But now it's from Washington. He's accompanying Yeltsin to Washington when Yeltsin made that speech before the Congress. No more lies. And he writes now in Hyatt Regency Hotel Stationery, OK, you can come. So that's a change. But you still need to be invited by somebody. So who do I know in Sferlovsk? This whole thing is a story of accidents. Amazing. So the next accident is, who do I know in Sferlovsk? Well, it turns out that there had been an American physicist working there during the epidemic on the United States National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, exchange doing solid state physics there. And this is a guy named Don Ellis from Northwestern University in Chicago. So I called up Don Ellis, who I knew, and said, Don, I need someone to invite me to Sferlovsk. And you work together with a Russian physicist named Gubanov. Could you ask him to invite me? And Don said, I don't need to. He's visiting me today. I'll just hand him the phone. Gubanov comes on the phone. I tell him I need you to invite me to Sferlovsk. He said, no problem. I've always, me and my wife, we've been interested in that epidemic all these years. I'll get you an invitation. So in a few days, I get a telex from the rector of the local university, a mathematical physicist. And he says, the city is, this was when Americans were very popular, even loved in Russia, a brief time. And the city is yours. So I sent the information what we wanted to do there. There were four of us, et cetera. I brought a pathologist who could look at what we could find left of glass slides and organs in bottles of formaldehyde or alcohol. I brought a veterinary doctor because anthrax is primarily a disease of animals. I brought a Russian woman who had been a nurse at Sferlovsk at that time. She was living in Moscow. I didn't bring her from the United States, but she was part of our group. And my wife, who's an anthropologist to question people who we would interview there. So the main thing we did was to ask people, we had a list of 68 people who died. And the reason we had that is that there was a woman who was a friend of Yeltsin at the time, but now she's elected to their Duma, which is like our Congress. Yeltsin had several letters saying, Dear Boris Nikolayevich, those people whose friends and relatives died of anthrax deserve extra pension money, just like people who died in war, relatives of people who died in war. I need to know the names. I need to know if this was an estate act, this epidemic. And if it was, I need to have the names of those who died because those people could get extra double pension. So that was done. And she was given a list of 68 names from Yeltsin of the people who died and where they were living at the time. So my wife and two Russian professors, women from the local university went door by door, knocked on the doors. And the main thing we asked, we asked a lot of questions. I never took part. We thought it would be better for women to do this, this confrontational perhaps. Was this person likely to be working at night or in the day, or if they weren't working, were they pensioners living at home? So then we can make two maps on the spot satellite photograph of the city. And each person, we wouldn't know for sure where they were likely to be, but we knew with some probability. So at night, all the people who were daytime workers and all the pensioners were likely to be at home sleeping. And in the daytime, the pensioners were still likely to be at home puttering around, I guess. And daytime, they'd be at the place of employment. So we could make two different maps, a day map and a night map. And they were very different. The night map, nearly all these 68 people mapped as big regions, in the southern part of the city. But in the daytime map, nearly all of these 68 points are in a zone, a very narrow zone, going from the place which we knew to be a military biological facility south to the very end of the city, city limit. And then we had the names of five villages where sheep and cattle had died. And all of these points are in a straight line. And then I had meteorological data because the Russians were members of the World Meteorological Organization. And they'd reported a wind direction at the local Sferdlovsk airport every three hours, back before 1979. So we had all this information. There was one day and only one day, April 4, 1979, when the wind was blowing in the same direction all day and that direction was the same as the direction. Now bad meat does not get blown in straight lines. But a cloud does. So that solved it. We published that in Science Magazine. No question, it was airborne. So I like using science to solve this kind of problem. We did the same thing in Vietnam. We did the same thing in the case of what's called the Yellow Rain where it was the West, the United States that was accusing the Soviets of using a toxin weapon in Laos against the Hmong tribespeople. It turned out that the so-called Yellow Rain was the defecation from huge flights of honeybees. It was all a big mistake. There was no toxin warfare. So the scientific things I've done related to arms control. One showed that the Soviets were totally wrong. But in that case, I think some of them knew that they were wrong. In this case, I don't think we knew that our explanation was wrong. We just had done bad science. And the third thing about the Agent Orange was of a different nature. I went to Vietnam with a team at the request of the American Association for the Advancement of Science during the war to create a pilot study of the ecological and medical effects of the herbicide spraying. And that was very interesting. The theme that continues to come up is the solving of the complicated questions with as much evidence as you can find. Evidence is the key word. That's right. Did I send you the paper I wrote about the herbicides? It's called from Charles and Francis Darwin to Richard Nixon, the origin and termination of the use of anti-plant chemical warfare. Look at what's called the Post Script there. Because just before I was there for six weeks, I think six weeks. The last day, General Abrams, who was the commander of US forces in Vietnam after General Westmoreland, asked me to come over to Townsend where his office was. He'd just come back from a gallbladder surgery in Japan so he's kind of laid back. We spent the whole morning talking in the course of it. He said, what do you think of the military utility of the herbicides? We didn't study that. He said, do you want to know what I think? I said, yes, sir. He said, I think there's shit. I said, well, why are we using them? He said, you don't understand anything about this war, young man. I was a young man. He said, that order comes from Washington and I can't do anything about it. If I didn't have the stuff used, those 55-gallon drums would pile up on the docks at Danang and Saigon and I couldn't offload the stuff I need. This was a very vivid memory but I wanted to include it in the thing I've written. At that time, he told me his son, John, who was a captain up in I-Corps, that's the top part, agreed with him exactly about herbicides being useless or counterproductive. So I located, it turns out, General Evans had four boys, four sons. They all became generals. I think three of them even became four-star generals. But John was a four-star general. He'd risen from captain. He owns a little consulting company in Washington. I got him on the phone. I said, is my memory right? Did your dad think this stuff was shit? And did you agree with him? He almost blew up. He said, much worse than that. He was really emphatic. So I know my memory was right and I thank him at the end of my paper I read. So here the damn stuff was actually helping us lose the war. But the people in Washington, I continue an anecdote like this. One day I was up in I-Corps in Quang Ngai Province. That's the fifth one down from the top, 40 provinces. And I'm staying overnight there in a base and each of the provinces had what's called an American senior advisor, sort of the representative of the United States at the local level. And every morning there would be a report from a long-range patrol and there had been the previous night and it was run by a captain and he reports what he'd seen. He and his men were up in the woods and they saw buckets hanging from limbs of trees. A lot of buckets. He said a man climbing up to bring one down and he reported to our little group that as far as they could see it was mud and piss. And he didn't know what it meant. And the province senior advisor, named Hank Cushing, said he knew what it meant because he'd been informed from Saigon. It turns out that, of course, the big problem in the war was finding the enemy because we had superior firepower if we knew where they were. And some genius figured out that these men, of course, must urinate on the ground and the urea in urine is converted by soil bacteria into ammonia gas. And that rises. And ammonia has its three hydrogens and the nitrogen in the middle. And the three hydrogens go back and forth like that and cause a very, very intense adsorption line in the infrared. So with an infrared spectrometer you can detect the tiniest amounts of ammonia in the air. So we invented a thing called the People Sniffer and mounted it on helicopters. And these People Sniffer's flying around Vietnam looking for ammonia gas and when they find it the gunships, the helicopter gunship and they blast that area on the assumption that there's men down there. Of course it could be an elephant because they urinate too. But so what are these buckets? It's because the same brain that's in the skulls of American defense planners, that same kind of a brain is in the skulls of the Vietnamese guys. So they had figured out that what this plane is looking for is ammonia gas and it's made by mixing urine with mud. And so if we hang buckets of urine with mud on the trees the People Sniffer is going to come flying by and we'll blow it out of the sky. And that's why we lost nearly all the People Sniffer's because the same mind that devised this People Sniffer understood it and used it turned it around 180 degrees and the lesson here is that people who are far away from a war may have a very distorted idea of what's going on both politically and in this case militarily and physically. It's the people on the scene who know what's going on and so never forget that. We kept on supporting the war because we had, that is our people in our congress, our president we had a completely distorted idea Henry Kissinger when he made his first trip to Vietnam before President Nixon came into office came back and told us at Harvard at a seminar that he thought that we were losing badly and didn't see much prospect of doing much better. So that was because he didn't go on a tour where they just show you what they want you to see. He stayed I think six weeks and talked to people on low levels and so it's very important we started with the word evidence it's very important to get to the evidence and not just to the talk if it's an important question. And it's critical to get to a state of global cohesion and unity I'm curious as to where do you think that we can go geopolitically to get to that state of cohesion and unity? I don't know. I don't know, I think most physical scientists biological scientists are brought up with this idea but that doesn't guarantee their objectivity but I think that if you took some kind of test you'd find them to be somewhat more objective than people who get elected to public office. That's a problem. People who get elected to public office very often in the past motivated by wanting to serve the country and not by personal ambition. I may be wrong about that but that's my impression. It's too bad if I'm right it'd be too bad. The reason for wanting to run for public office is to serve the country and not just to serve a particular clique in the country to serve the country. So how do you do that? I guess teaching civics in high school or even grammar school is one way because there are certain kids out there who might get inspired by the idea of serving your country as a representative or as a member of the administration or the Congress but we don't teach civics much anymore. I don't have answers to your big questions. I've been worried about a few specific questions in my life but that doesn't mean that you can transfer that to everything else. We love asking the guests the big questions and seeing what their thoughts are. Another big question we like asking is what do you think is a skill that children should know going into the exponential technology age? Try to go to the source of facts, if you can. Talk with people of different views. Try to educate yourself. Try not to be swayed by emotion. Don't believe everything. Don't believe what the majority of people... For example, we've gone through this whole thing about whether President Trump was in collusion with the Russian government and a very famous detective, really, Muller, at the FBI took two years looking at it and the answer is no, he wasn't. But in the meantime, I'm afraid that the Washington Post and the New York Times and many other journalist sources actually acted as though it was a proven thing as though we could end with a lousy journalism, really lousy, and basically why was it? It was because of groupthink and believing what you wanted to be true. I think they went overboard and have ruined their reputation even though these are the newspapers I used to love. I think there are other cases too where groupthink has become and on the other side of the political spectrum as well. We've precipitated out into different subgroups more than I remember of years ago. I don't have a magic formula. Those were all really good points for young people. And two last ones. Matthew, are we in a simulation? You mean is there an alternative universe that is an interesting possibility and only recently have there been sound physical reasons to think there could be multiple universes if that's what you mean? Whether or not it would be possible to communicate between them, as you probably know, if there are multiple universes we don't know at least I have never read of any way in which they can communicate with each other such that we would be a hologram of... It's fascinating. What's happening in cosmology now is absolutely fantastic. We're beginning to understand more and more about what made the Big Bang the way it was. Last question is what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Bach's double violin played by Heifetz and Menuhin. It's very beautiful. Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello played by Pablo Casals or by Yanigro, those works of music. There are lots of things, birds, babies. I don't know, stars. Matthew, thank you so much for coming onto the show, joining us, teaching us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is another thing is that the whole elbows for... I'm serious, because... ...the amount of germs that are spread. Take the influenza epidemic of 1918. It spread with incredible speed, jumping from country to country because people traveled. Even then, well now people travel orders of magnitude more frequently. And if you have something on your hands that's in Singapore, a few hours later it's in New York and a few hours later it's in Chicago. So why not just touch elbows? Well, on an evolutionary question as well, part of the reason that we've built so much in civilizations, because we did it with our hands. I'd never thought about that. That's one of the reasons why we bond with other people. I thought the reason was to show that we don't have a gun. Potentially. Thanks for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Go and talk more about what we talked about with Matthew. We talked to Matthew about so many things regarding genetics, about molecular biology. We talked so much about the Biological Weapons Convention and about mitigating existential risk. Share this with your family, your friends, your co-workers with people online. Check out Matthew's links below as well. Support the organizations, the entrepreneurs, and the artists that you believe in to support simulations so you can keep doing cool things like coming to Cambridge to do interviews. Go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you soon. Peace.