#
Imagine if COVID-19 hit the world a few centuries before it actually did, before we knew what
#
a virus was, or an ACE2 receptor was, or what natural selection was, a time when we couldn't
#
treat any disease because we couldn't understand any disease, a time when people considered
#
themselves lucky to live till 30, a time without ventilators or paracetamols.
#
As it happens, imagining that isn't all that hard because we've seen that picture.
#
The world has been struck by various pandemics in the past, and the accounts are horrific.
#
Chinmay Thumbe mentioned them in his fine book, Age of Pandemics, which I discussed
#
with him in an earlier episode.
#
Writing about the plague in the 6th century, Chinmay wrote, quote, the demographic devastation
#
in the Mediterranean world was stark, with records in multiple languages describing how
#
thousands of people died in a single day, or how, as per one traveller, corpses were
#
caught lying in the fields and along the roadside and cattle wandering untended into the hills.
#
The historian Procopius described how the bodies came so fast that those digging the
#
trenches to bury them could not dig fast enough.
#
What to do with the bodies?
#
They climbed the towers of the fortifications where there were tore of the roofs and just
#
piled in the bodies from there.
#
When plague struck again in the 14th century in what is known as the infamous Black Death,
#
up to 50 million people are estimated to have died.
#
That included 35 to 60% of Europe.
#
The people around you just gone, as if it's a infinity wars.
#
Well, you're listening to this episode in the middle of the second wave in India, and
#
the world has been fighting COVID-19 for a year and still not won.
#
And yet it could have been far worse.
#
Here's the thing, our politicians have failed us, our bureaucrats have failed us, policymakers
#
have failed us, the dysfunctional state stands exposed for what it is, and in so many different
#
ways we have failed each other.
#
But science has not failed us this time.
#
Unlike in pandemics or pastimes, we know what is happening, we know what we do not know
#
about it, and we have made miraculous progress in coming up with the vaccines that we have.
#
As my guest on today's show says, vaccines aren't enough, you need vaccinations.
#
If I may add to that, human knowledge is not enough.
#
There is a lot that is wrong with the world today, but there is also a lot that can give
#
Science can give us hope.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest for today is Anirban Mahapatra, a scientist, science writer, and editor who's
#
just written a wonderful book called COVID-19, Separating Fact from Fiction.
#
I first discovered Anirban on Twitter during this pandemic.
#
He tweets at the handle of at Bhalo Manush and was one of the voices of reason during
#
His book is much needed because it explains a complex subject in simple language from
#
For a lay person like me, it was a perfect way to go deep into the subject without having
#
the sense that I had to work for it.
#
Anirban explains science so well that at moments, I felt like a child again, discovering new
#
and wonderful things in wide-eyed wonder.
#
This episode is actually like two episodes in one.
#
In the first half, we speak of Anirban's journey in the state of modern science and academics
#
and science writing, and so on.
#
In the second half, we speak about COVID-19 itself, what the virus is, what it does, and
#
the different ways in which science is fighting it.
#
I love both halves of this conversation and I hope you do as well.
#
A quick note before we start, the day after I recorded this conversation, my father died
#
He'd been admitted to hospital for other issues a couple of weeks before that and was
#
fading in different ways.
#
He couldn't recognise me when I last met him.
#
He picked up COVID at the hospital and spent a few days in a COVID ICU.
#
We weren't allowed to meet him, obviously, but we were allowed one video call a day.
#
In those calls, he was unable to speak, and we don't even know if he was in his senses.
#
And if he wasn't, that could have been a blessing because he was clearly in a lot of suffering.
#
To be honest, I haven't processed this yet.
#
It leads to bigger questions that no one can have an answer for.
#
As Wittgenstein said, quote, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.
#
For everything else, though, there is science and rationality, and those are what this episode
#
Before we get to this conversation, though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
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#
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Unseen for 15% off at IndianColours.com.
#
Anirban, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Hi, thank you for having me today.
#
Yeah, you know, the last few months, of course, have been very tough for the world, very tough
#
If one is to look for silver linings, I think one of my silver linings is that I discovered
#
I had no idea of anyone called at Bhalo Manoj before, you know, COVID kind of struck.
#
And you obviously very quickly became one of the soundest sources on what's really going
#
on during this period of time.
#
So now, you know, because I hardly know you at all, I just know you from your very scientific,
#
crisp, factual tweets, I want to get to know a little more.
#
So tell me, tell me, you know, a bit about your childhood, where did you grow up?
#
I was my my parents were both physicians.
#
I say were because my father passed away six years ago.
#
And my father came from a very small village at the Bengal-Odessa border.
#
And when we say to our children that we had to walk in the snow or so far to actually
#
In my father's case, he did have to walk from his village to get to his school.
#
And from there, from that remote village where there was no electricity, there was no running
#
He went to medical college.
#
And then from there to he did his post graduation, he did his MD from Chandigarh and then his
#
My mother went to Calcutta Medical College.
#
And she from there, she also went to Ames and they were both doctors there.
#
So I was born at Ames in New Delhi.
#
And after that, my father was in the United, both my parents were in the US for some time.
#
So I went to school there for a little bit and I came back to India.
#
And then my formative years were actually mostly in India.
#
So when I came back to India, I learned to read and write in Bangla, I learned to play
#
cricket at a much later age than a lot of other people.
#
And I went through school and then both my parents were like, okay, so we're doctors.
#
It's basically almost inevitable that you will have to be a physician.
#
But I figured out a little bit later on when I was with my father and sometimes even at
#
night because when he moved back, he moved back to a small tertiary district town and
#
there weren't that many.
#
He was a US trained board certified cardiologist and there weren't that many physicians there
#
And so in the middle of the night, sometimes I would have to go with him with the ECG machine
#
and help him with that.
#
And I realized at that time that I was more into the research side of it.
#
I wasn't going to be a very good clinician, I just did not have that in me.
#
And the other thing I realized is I really loved biology.
#
And one of the things is that if you look into any life form on the planet right now,
#
because it's had four billion years of evolution, there are some remarkable things about it.
#
We just have to keep looking and be curious about it.
#
So I did my bachelor's degree and my master's degree in India and I got a very nice university
#
fellowship to study microbiology at the Ohio State University in the US.
#
And I came over to the US and I remember one of the first courses I took in the US and
#
I absolutely bombed it.
#
And that's because I didn't know how to learn anything.
#
I had gone through the Indian system of basically picking up a lot of facts and trying to crack
#
And so when I was taking this course, this was in the first semester, first quarter of
#
my PhD, and the professors, each professor was coming in and they would just be presenting
#
a few papers of research relevant to their own work.
#
I picked up all the facts in those papers, but when the exam actually came, they didn't
#
They wanted me to synthesize what was in those papers to be able to come up with completely
#
independent and open-ended answers to questions that they had that were tangentially related
#
And I really did poorly in that first exam.
#
But after that, I figured out that this is how I was and this is what I was thinking
#
all along is that I was always sort of a rebellious person who asked like the how and the why.
#
And so then I took like a duck to water after that and I did better after that.
#
I was very fortunate to be able to get into a lab at the time that they were doing really
#
So the lab that I joined at Ohio State University to do my PhD, they had at that time discovered
#
So typically, as most even high school students will be able to tell you, folks who take biology
#
that there are 20 amino acids that are inserted into proteins, and these are coded in the
#
There are a few cases of a 21st amino acid which had been discovered in 1986.
#
When I joined the lab in 2001, the lab I joined, they had two back-to-back, well, they had
#
two science papers demonstrating the genetic encoding of the 22nd amino acid pyrolysis.
#
And this was basically something that went into the textbooks and it was discovered as
#
being equivalent of discovering a new particle in physics.
#
And that sort of appealed to me and that has sort of been my driving interest in science
#
is that it is not static.
#
All along we have been reading these textbooks that everything is as it has been, nothing
#
ever changes in science, the textbooks, the editions get updated and we just memorize
#
But there was a great time to be in that lab.
#
And I joined that lab, I had some very amazing friends that I worked with in that lab, got
#
a really great and challenging project.
#
And the first paper when we were getting it done, it was basically elucidating the process
#
by which that amino acid gets inserted into specific proteins.
#
And we did all the experiments, we knew there was another group working on it as well.
#
And we sent it into science as well because the earlier papers had been in science.
#
And they rejected the paper.
#
They said they give us a very short amount of time, they said the paper is, it looks
#
good but it's basically they send us a standard of form rejection letter.
#
And so we send it around to nature.
#
We're saying we're not going to try anywhere else, we have confidence in our work, we're
#
going to stay up to the high standard of the work that we've done.
#
And fortunately, they asked us to do a little bit more, we did a few additional experiments,
#
but nature published it.
#
And the funny thing is after when nature published that paper, science did a write up on that
#
same paper that we had published.
#
So that was a really great opportunity for me.
#
And that discovery that we made has some real world applications as well.
#
Scientists are using it, using that system as a tool to insert new amino acids with different
#
structure and function as building blocks to increase the functional capability of different
#
And so after that, I had a few more really good papers and then when the time came around
#
to complete my PhD, I was like, okay, I'm going to go the traditional route, I'm going
#
to be a scientist and I had a couple of very nice postdoc interviews done, I was ready
#
to do a postdoc and then all of a sudden I saw this job ad for an assistant managing
#
editor position for a newish scientific journal in the field of chemical biology, which is
#
using the tools of chemistry and biochemistry to solve important problems in biology.
#
And I looked at the job ad and it said, okay, at that time it was like, I would be looking
#
at all the manuscripts that would be coming into the journal, working with the scientific
#
editors and deciding whether those manuscripts should go out to peer review, I would be writing
#
summaries of papers, I would be going to meetings and commissioning work.
#
And then we were also doing podcasts at that time, interviews with authors in the, well,
#
I say we, so what happened is I ultimately did apply for it and I did get the job and
#
I joined there, that's a little over a decade ago.
#
And that was a very thrilling and intellectually rewarding experience for me there as I started
#
on working on a newish journal, a journal that is now fairly well known and established
#
and working with editors who were scientifically amazing and at the top of their individual
#
disciplines but were also very, very kind to this kid who had just come out of a lab
#
and basically heard him out.
#
So I do consider them my mentors.
#
And so at that time I was working with some of my editors were Laura Kiesling who's at
#
MIT and is one of the leaders in chemical biology, Jennifer Doudna was one of the editors
#
I worked with at that time and she won the Nobel Prize last year for her CRISPR-Cas system.
#
She hadn't discovered CRISPR-Cas when I had joined.
#
So I was actually, I know the history of that discovery and how that has moved on for genome
#
editing and the potential that that definitely has.
#
And so when I was working on that one journal, I got involved in launching other journals
#
and the way that came about is like basically my organization said, you have all these ideas
#
and we're looking to expand into new areas of science, tell us about some of these ideas.
#
And my first idea was we are looking at like multidisciplinary areas where we can bring
#
together different scientists from different fields and neuroscience is definitely one
#
And so I, a little over a decade ago now, I helped propose, write up and launch a neuroscience
#
journal that brought in some of the biology and the chemistry.
#
And incidentally, I want to mention this because we're talking about COVID-19, one of the first
#
descriptions or one of the first ideas of the loss of smell after COVID-19 was proposed
#
by a couple of scientists based out of Pakistan who had written this perspective in a journal
#
So I was very, very thrilled by that.
#
And this happened early on, I think around February or March of 2020.
#
And so after that, I haven't looked back.
#
I have been involved in launching other journals as well.
#
I've launched a synthetic biology journal.
#
So synthetic biology is basically using the tools and techniques of engineering to biology
#
and using cells as factories to produce products.
#
So it's the next step of biotechnology.
#
So I would say it's biotechnology 2.0 or 3.0.
#
And so I helped launch that journal.
#
I launched an infectious diseases journal.
#
This was before the pandemic.
#
And then I've moved on to other areas now where the portfolio of journals that I work
#
with include climate change, sustainable chemistry, energy, and material science, physical chemistry,
#
So one of the reasons I left the bench is because I was sort of very, very skilled and
#
I knew a lot about one very specific area of science.
#
And I wanted to become more of a generalist.
#
And I think that happened over time.
#
As you mentioned, most people on Twitter don't know anything, any of this because I kept
#
us very, very low profile and I didn't mix what I did at work with my tweets, which were
#
sometimes just philosophical musings and sometimes my travel and my experiments and failed experiments
#
So there is so much to unpack there and so many strands and thank God I have a notebook.
#
So I'm kind of taking notes of all the things I want to talk about.
#
But the first thing that kind of intrigued me was the love for biology, because I don't
#
come across too many people who say that they love biology as a kid and this is obviously
#
a function of the way that it's taught to us and all of that.
#
And perhaps, you know, your parents being doctors might have helped and all of that.
#
And you know, one of my sort of big complaints about our education system, not just here,
#
but I think kind of everywhere, is that many of the things we are taught, in fact, everything
#
we are taught is potentially full of wonder.
#
Like I think about this most in the context of mathematics, that it's taught in such boring,
#
dull ways and people just turn away from it.
#
But actually, it's like so integral to our lives and explained so much and it's not even
#
And I can see sort of a similar process with biology.
#
And I was sort of intrigued when you said that when you kind of took the first exam
#
in that US because you were in that rote learning kind of frame of mind, it didn't quite work
#
So I'm sort of wondering that, you know, this whole way of thinking, like these days, whenever
#
I learn something new, I just first try to go back to first principles.
#
So in the sense, don't tell me the right way of doing anything.
#
Don't tell me the process by which one does something.
#
I want to go back to first principles, think of it from there.
#
And then I can work a lot of the stuff out and then whatever I subsequently learn is
#
kind of easy to understand.
#
And it also strikes me that when I meet other people with this kind of approach, it strikes
#
me that you can apply it to everything, right?
#
And you've kind of spoken about how, you know, you begin in biology, but then you kind of
#
spread out like this, you spoke about synthetic biology, where you're applying the principles
#
of engineering to biology, which is fascinating to me, and you're bringing this other prism.
#
And it seems to me that there is, you know, a certain kind of person who does this, who'll,
#
you know, look at the first principles of everything, who'll, you know, and therefore
#
for them, it's easy not to get trapped in the conventions of a particular field, but
#
to go beyond and to, you know, apply other prisms, apply other methods, and it kind of
#
broadens their thinking.
#
And it also strikes me that many people, even many accomplished people sort of get trapped
#
by the conventions of their sort of fields.
#
So now that you've taken this interesting journey, whereby the nature of your work,
#
starting journals in all these different fields, you are constantly, one, interacting with
#
all of these people, and two, also sort of expanding your own knowledge and all of that.
#
What sort of your sense of the ecosystem out there?
#
Like are there many thinkers like you, or is it kind of an exception?
#
Do you wish there were more people who took a broader view of the science, and at the
#
same time, a deeper view than, you know, might be the case?
#
Because I certainly see that, you know, in fields that I know a little bit about like
#
economics or whatever, that there will be people who are, you know, extremely accomplished,
#
but they're almost functioning within the bounds of what they have learned in an academic
#
And they're not just looking at the world around them and, you know, applying those
#
principles to everything or taking insight from, you know, other methods.
#
I think there are a lot of people who think like this, and I fervently believe that all
#
children grow up like this, that when they are very young, maybe before they have it
#
beaten out of them in school by teachers who say that this is the way that you have to
#
do something, or do you know more than me, or you have to get good marks in an exam.
#
I think even, and I really enjoy interacting with very young children.
#
They ask some of the best questions.
#
They do not have the same language, so you have to start from what you said, first principles.
#
You cannot assume that they will understand the jargon.
#
They do not take anything for granted, or they won't, I mean, it's a simple question
#
of even asking, looking outside and saying like, where did the moon come from?
#
And we see it so often, but it's not a question, and it's not a question that we should discard,
#
or why does time move in one direction?
#
These are things that, after a certain amount of time, we start to take for granted.
#
But I think all children have that sense of awe and that wonder.
#
I think children take to the basics of mathematics very, very early on, and then somehow, because
#
of the process of which it is taught, and some children are told that they are not good
#
at it, and they have to do it a certain way, that it just gets lost, and it just gets beaten
#
But overall, I think that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book.
#
And for me, that was one of the challenges of writing this book.
#
And writing for the public was, I would say, after having written perspectives and editorials
#
and papers for scientists, it was much harder, because there is no common language.
#
I cannot use the language, the terse, precise way of writing that goes into a paper and
#
assume that the reader will be able to understand it.
#
And so starting from first principle and trying to develop a core set of ideas was, at least
#
for me, one of the driving principles for writing this book.
#
But as people get into their own disciplines, I have also noticed this.
#
This is also true of the various disciplines of biology or chemistry.
#
They do not, there is very little crosstalk.
#
We do see it in some other disciplines.
#
And I think we did see a little bit of it during the pandemic with many people from
#
various disciplines coming together.
#
But even then, that's not always the case.
#
We had, just to give you one very, very relevant example, with these variants, the first variant
#
that came out of the UK was B117.
#
And at that point, when that first variant came out, the virologists are the people who
#
are looking at the viruses and at sort of a virus level and molecular level and at an
#
The epidemiologists are looking at the spread and the trajectory of spread.
#
The virologists were saying, okay, mutations happen all the time.
#
Therefore, we do not think that this mutation is anything different or that it spreads more.
#
You have to show us in an animal model that this is spreading more rapidly.
#
And some virologists that I respect a lot and have actually written textbooks at that
#
point in early January were not believing that this was a more infectious strain or
#
However, epidemiologists who have their own way of looking at data, and they were finding
#
in the UK that this virus was actually now becoming more prevalent than the original
#
strain, the lineage from Wuhan and the other mutant that was there, the B614G mutant, which
#
is predominant at the time.
#
And so that was sort of a different line of research, no less relevant, but it's just
#
because of the individual aspects of disciplines that they were not talking to each other.
#
And I think we'll see more examples of this across all the disciplines, not just biology
#
or physics, but even economics.
#
My former advisor used to say that if you need to build something, if you need a stool,
#
a stool has to have three legs.
#
So for any major discovery, you have to have at least three independent ways of corroborating
#
that idea or thought, especially if it is a paradigm shift.
#
And so what often happens is that when we don't get these different aspects or these
#
different groups working together, we don't see the same outcomes.
#
And what you said about, you know, the virologists here and the epidemiologists there reminds
#
me of, you know, your first chapter where you speak about the parable of the elephant,
#
that you know, that old parable, different blind men touch different parts of an elephant
#
and they see something different.
#
And of course, your point in the chapter was about the virus in general and so many different
#
aspects of this pandemic, but that, you know, seems to be a little there in science also.
#
Now, sort of three conceptual questions, not conceptual, but three questions around, you
#
know, different themes.
#
And the first of them is this, like, when I teach this writing course that I teach, I
#
often get questions about academic writing from people who are doing PhDs or who have
#
done PhDs and all of that.
#
And, you know, because so much of what I talk about, the importance of clarity and writing
#
and all that, almost goes very counter to the kind of conventions that exist.
#
And I point them to this great essay by Agnes Gallard, who by the way, is a force on Twitter.
#
I just love her account.
#
And Gallard had this fine essay, I think about three months ago or four months ago about
#
why academic writing is so turgid.
#
And her point there was that, look, someone's completed a PhD, they are on the sort of tenure
#
What do you need to get tenure?
#
You need to publish specific number of papers in these specific journals and all those journals
#
have their own conventions, their own insider lingo, their own ways of writing.
#
So you're optimizing for that.
#
You're not optimizing for, say, a larger audience to get read more widely and all of that.
#
And then that language seeps into everything else you do, maybe including letters to your
#
family or whatever, though I would hope not, and you stop thinking about it.
#
And I was chatting about this with another friend, Ruben Abraham, recently, who told
#
me about how, you know, this might be true for the social sciences, but in science per
#
se, the papers tend to be very well written, eight to 12 pages, because they're very crisp
#
and they know what they're doing and they go from point A to point B and all of that.
#
And it's kind of more systematic.
#
So he gave me a sort of a counter view to this saying that look, a lot of academic writing
#
is turgid, but there is a lot of joy in just reading a lot of science papers because they
#
So now as someone who started off on that academic path, who wrote a paper, which got,
#
you know, published in Nature and written about by here.
#
So what is your sort of outlook on all of this?
#
Like you have also therefore been an editor, you have received a lot of this turgid writing,
#
you know, is it incredibly commonplace and therefore a problem when you sort of suggest
#
recommendations about, you know, what changes a writer should make or how they should work
#
Do you also talk about the writing or do you just talk about the science?
#
And obviously the science is more important because the content matters, but do you also
#
talk about the writing?
#
Are these journals sort of like, I understand that they will have specialized audiences,
#
but would you also like to at least make them readable by the general public at large?
#
And I'm sort of just kind of thinking aloud because you seem to be the perfect person
#
at the intersection of all of this as both an academic, a writer and editor, a thinker.
#
And you know, how do you look at this space?
#
Yeah, I can definitely provide my own perspective and having worked on a number of a few dozen
#
journals and having launched 10 scientific journals myself, I am regularly reading papers.
#
Sometimes I tweet about them as well.
#
I read papers in energy, material science, microbiology, chemistry, medicine, engineering,
#
And it's not that I understand all of them, but I have developed a sense of getting at
#
And in new fields, what I do is I usually try to do some background reading.
#
And so some of the reviews are written in a different manner than some of the scientific
#
And that's because the review is more a very large perspective of the field as well.
#
But a really good paper will tell you more than what the authors have actually written.
#
It's very terse and turgid, as you say, but you will be able to, from that paper, understand
#
what the background is, what the reason is, why they actually did the work.
#
You will be able to figure out what else has been done and who else is doing that.
#
You will be able to figure out what experiments they did and what those experiments show.
#
And you will be able to figure out what the next steps are and what others are doing.
#
But a scientific paper typically is not read in the same way that something else will be
#
read, where you read the abstract and then you read all the way through.
#
The way that I usually read a scientific paper is I read the abstract, then I look at the
#
figures, then I look at the discussion at the end, then I go back and it's almost like
#
hypertext because if I see something, then I look at a reference, then I'll go down this
#
rabbit hole of maybe even an hour following a certain reference down that way.
#
But you are absolutely right.
#
Titles matter, especially in this age of even of search engines where people are finding
#
a lot of research from titles of articles.
#
The titles really, really matter.
#
The abstract has to be very succinct and has to say what has been done.
#
Lot of journals are now doing what are known as lay summaries, which demonstrate the significance
#
for a broader audience.
#
And I am very much in favor of these.
#
So when I started off as a scientific editor, one of my jobs was to write these two paragraph
#
in this issue summaries for drug discovery and biology papers.
#
And so I was going through them and writing those up.
#
And we even asked a lot of authors to submit that with their submissions as well.
#
There are other journals that do this definitely.
#
I think one of the reasons, there is good science writing and there is bad science writing
#
One of the reasons that science is written in this sort of peculiar way is that it is
#
very important to be accurate as opposed to be definitive in your pronouncements.
#
You have to say what you're saying, but you also have to say these are the limitations.
#
And that doesn't always make for a compelling read.
#
And I think a lot of people who pedal in misinformation, and I've noticed this, they have an easier
#
time because they don't need nuance, right?
#
They don't need to say that this is this particular case under these conditions and this is the
#
setting and this is how much immunity you have.
#
But look at this, immunity is not just the antibodies.
#
You have all these other parts of the cells and you have T cells and these other components.
#
They can just say, well, drink my concoction and you'll never get coronavirus.
#
And those things are the ones that has no nuance and it's sort of seductive in a way
#
in that they're very, I look at these WhatsApp forwards, they're actually, people should
#
be doing research on them because they are very simple in what they are trying to demonstrate.
#
And this is completely the antithesis of what you're saying.
#
But at some point, scientists do have to become science communicators.
#
They have to be able to because scientists are a part of society.
#
The problem is that there really is no incentive for a scientist.
#
The reward structures in science are created in such a way that scientists are always talking
#
They are talking to administrators, they are trying to get grants.
#
So by writing, for example, a popular science book, a scientist is not going to get tenure,
#
is not going to get a promotion.
#
So I think people that do it, do it out of a sense of compulsion and maybe they have
#
a little bit more free time.
#
But you are absolutely right.
#
There is a peculiar and precise way of writing in science that is almost like you have to
#
learn another language.
#
The problem you've expressed is very resonant because the thing is, I'm also fascinated
#
by all the fake news that spreads and one of the things that they get right in terms
#
of craft is that they keep it simple.
#
We explain the world to ourselves by telling stories about it and simpler stories are far
#
You don't have to consider a hundred nuances and all of that and again, I couldn't agree
#
Because in a different context, my friend Ajay Shah, who's a public policy guy and a
#
great economist has also sort of, he keeps lamenting that so many economists are on this
#
sort of academic treadmill where they are pursuing a set of different incentives.
#
And if the incentives were slightly more aligned to say the public good, which comes from communicating
#
your ideas clearly and well, getting them out there, doing research that actually goes
#
in those directions rather than whatever might be fashionable in academics at the moment,
#
perhaps the world would be a better place.
#
Now the thing that I loved about your book is that it's like, I don't want to embarrass
#
you with praise, but I thought it's just outstanding in terms of popular science writing
#
because you simplify everything so much, like not in a way of making it simplistic, but
#
in a way of making it easy to understand in clear language, like a schoolboy with a lot
#
of questions could get a lot of his questions answered through this book without having
#
Now this process of clear writing, I want to ask you a little bit about that.
#
You know, a few weeks ago, Chris Ashok did an episode with me where he spoke about the
#
pyramid of learning, like how do you learn something the best?
#
Like somebody says something to you, you learn it one way, you read something, you learn
#
it at a different depth, but the deepest way of learning is to teach something.
#
And in a sense, trying to write clearly for a mass audience is a form of teaching.
#
And another thing that Orwell had first brought about and I keep talking about in my writing
#
class is a link between clear thinking and clear writing and how it's a two-way link.
#
Like obviously if you're a clear thinker, you're more likely to write clearly.
#
But if you are forcing yourself to write clearly about a subject, then you have to force yourself
#
to think deeply about it because then you cannot take cover in jargon or insider lingo
#
or obfuscatory abstract language.
#
You have to get concrete.
#
You have to explain everything in kind of simple terms, which you've done repeatedly
#
I just noted down so many of your quotes, like proteins being like origami or your chapter
#
on concepts where you've spoken about the importance of shape.
#
You quoted Carl Sagan talking about apple pie, which I'll come to.
#
And all of this is just utterly sort of delightful.
#
And nobody starts off a clear writer, right?
#
It takes a lot of work.
#
I mean, another thing, you know, an aside for my listeners would be that I believe writing
#
is one of those things which you don't need any inherent quality.
#
Everybody can be a great writer.
#
It's just a question of making the effort.
#
It's not like cricket that there's a certain hand-eye coordination that is natural or bowlers
#
need fast twitch muscles or whatever.
#
Everybody can learn to be a great writer period.
#
So and everybody starts off bad, obviously.
#
Tell me about your journey as a writer, you know, thinking about how to make complex subjects
#
easily understandable to a lay audience.
#
And I feel that this must have been so much harder for you because in the environment
#
that you're in, where you're reading turgid paper after turgid paper submitted by academics
#
and my apologies to academics, I don't mean to say they're all like this, but relatively,
#
certainly, what was your journey discovering your kind of writing voice?
#
What were your role models?
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
Well, first of all, thank you so much for the phrase.
#
It is slightly embarrassing, but also I have to tell you this now that you mentioned it.
#
One of the most puzzling, but also in a backhanded way, rewarding messages I got was from my
#
She's an engineer and she sent me a message after she read the book and it was like, wow,
#
Dada, you wrote a science book that's not like a science book at all.
#
And it's sort of a backhanded way of saying like, reminding me of all the horrible textbooks
#
And I was like, okay, she's an engineer, but I really know where she's coming from with
#
But because she's a sister, it cannot be sort of a direct phrase.
#
There has to be like this, this sense of like, how did you even do this?
#
But well, thank you so much for that.
#
I will say that one of the things is that basically I did think a lot about the analogies
#
to use and for me, I am a little bit, I like to think obviously mathematically, but I'm
#
And sometimes breaking down these concepts into visual pieces is very, very helpful.
#
Fortunately, obviously I can't embed a YouTube video into a book, but fortunately, the process
#
of infection is such and the process of how the immune system responds and how disease
#
develops and that whole cycle is such that you can sit down and basically visualize it.
#
And so that took me a while though.
#
As you mentioned, each individual part of that is one sentence in that book might actually
#
be someone's science paper or nature paper or even some major observation that it took
#
But pieced together, if you just break it down, as you mentioned early on into the individual
#
parts of, okay, first of all, starting from how big is the virus?
#
What does it need to do to actually get inside the body?
#
I mean, there are millions of viruses and you starting back and saying, why are there
#
only 220 viruses that infect the human body?
#
I mean, we always say, okay, viruses, they're harming us, but among the vast number of viruses,
#
So there is something special about this virus compared to other viruses.
#
And then taking it to the next step of trying to visualize those processes for me at least
#
As far as the actual writing process itself, you are absolutely right.
#
It was iterative and it was iterative in the sense of also that the data was changing.
#
I went through multiple drafts.
#
This was not a static subject where I could go through a research phase and collect all
#
the papers and then sit down in my room and then go through a writing phase.
#
This was a project where I was doing the research and the writing simultaneously.
#
And so I went through many drafts of writing this.
#
But whenever I was reading a paper apart from annotating it and marking it up, what I was
#
also doing is I would write a summary of that paper.
#
And then after I wrote that summary, I would come back to it asking myself, why would somebody
#
who is not a scientist be interested in this?
#
What would they actually get out of it that would be relevant to the bigger picture of
#
SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19?
#
And often what would happen is that then that summary, which was two paragraphs, would then
#
be condensed into maybe two sentences.
#
And then after that, I would start to expand that because you don't also want to leave
#
them with basically without any particular context or any perspective of what this might
#
So I don't know how successful I was, but that was the process that I had to use.
#
And then integrating it together.
#
I also, as you probably have noticed when I wrote the book, I also had a framework of
#
basically systematically deciding what each of these chapters would be and breaking it
#
And that was very, very helpful to have those specific buckets and so that I didn't go off
#
in a way that I would if I had been doing another form of writing such as poetry or
#
And did those buckets come at the start?
#
Did you sit down at the start and first make the structure and then say, I'll go according
#
to the structure or does it kind of evolve as it goes along?
#
I had a little bit of a sense of what I wanted to write.
#
But when I was first thinking about this project, I did not know the final shape of what this
#
book would actually be.
#
And I have to thank my publishers for putting up with me and for letting me hand in a book
#
that was slightly different or maybe significantly different from the proposal that I wrote.
#
Another crazy thing that kind of strikes me about it is like you correctly said, everything
#
is changing while you're writing, right?
#
So people often speak of journalism as the first draft of history, which has its dangers
#
So while you're writing this book, in a sense, it is not a definitive book of everything
#
that the COVID-19 is about because we are still learning so much about it.
#
We are in a sense, you know, in a fog of war situation where there are so many things that
#
So is that something that kind of worried you or I mean, for the majority of the book,
#
of course, you've looked at basic concepts and first principles and just kind of explained
#
everything from scratch and you've, you know, there's nothing in it that is in a sense going
#
to be falsified, so to say, you know, but it can provide a lay reader, a bedrock of
#
understanding exactly what is going on, which is what is so good about it.
#
But how do you then in the process of writing, is there a point, and this is relevant not
#
just to the knowledge that you're putting in the book, but also in terms of crafting
#
the writing itself, that does there come a point where you say that, listen, I'm not
#
totally happy, but I have to let it go now, because I'm guessing that, you know, complete
#
satisfaction with whatever is there is kind of impossible, right?
#
So what was that like for you?
#
Did you have imposter syndrome?
#
Did you think that, you know, can I do this?
#
So one thing I will say is that it is important to have this sense of epistemic humility that
#
in a pandemic, you cannot know every single aspect of what is going on.
#
And this is why it was a lot of work, but it was helpful to actually have references
#
and notes in the back of the book where I could reference the experts and say this particular
#
sentence or this particular idea, which is prevalent at the time is not an idea that
#
I have come up with, because I think a book, maybe if I write fiction in the future that
#
I will come up with something more imaginative, but a book on public health during a pandemic
#
is not a time for significant independent theories or unsubstantiated ideas.
#
So all of those chapters, I want to stress again that I'm not an expert.
#
I relied on my ability to translate the science and to condense it, but all of those aspects
#
are cited in the back and people can use that as a jumping off point, as you mentioned,
#
after they have a sense of the broader landscape.
#
So I did not want it to be this scientific document or this monograph at all.
#
As far as leaving it at a certain point, yes, there were aspects that obviously I could
#
have pursued further and we don't have the answers to that.
#
One thing you will notice about the book is I've always said, this is what we don't know.
#
And I've used that to the best of my ability to say this information is unknown at this
#
It may take us six months, it may take us years to look into this.
#
And that varied from some very contentious issues such as the lockdown to prior immunity
#
to the extreme heterogeneity of people who are getting very sick to people who are having
#
asymptomatic infections to long COVID or post COVID syndrome, which affects different people
#
And so I left it at that with a sense of being comfortable with saying that I don't know
#
this, nobody knows definitively at this time.
#
It was a good stopping off point in that I knew about the vaccines.
#
So I think I would have felt a little bit bad if the book had been written and it had
#
come out before we had approved vaccines.
#
I also knew about the UK variant and that it was more infectious.
#
I had not foreseen or didn't know about the other variants.
#
And perhaps that can be sort of an additional appendix or a 23rd chapter.
#
But I did know that the variant was coming and that it had been shown that it was more
#
So at that point, I did have that sense of what was going to be happening in the next
#
What this book has absolutely avoided is going into the daily numbers and into the daily
#
curves and I did that for a number of reasons.
#
One is that it reduces the shelf life of a book of this nature.
#
The second aspect of this is that it takes us away from the sense of humility.
#
Because even when I was writing this book, I said during the first wave, there were some
#
countries that had fared well.
#
One of them was Germany and Germany got absolutely devastated during the winter because of some
#
measures that they didn't take, but also because of the variant strains as well.
#
And then I was very careful in not making any precise prognostications about the trajectory
#
of the pandemic in India and what was happening.
#
Because I wasn't riding the wave and I didn't want to ride the wave of saying, well, the
#
cases went down because Indians have immunity and then regretting a few months later, well,
#
I was wrong here, the cases went up.
#
And so I tried to avoid that as much as possible.
#
With all of that said, because I'm in a field where the shelf life of documents and of papers
#
is very short to begin with, this is something that we are all resigned to.
#
I know that when I wrote my thesis, when I write papers, when any one of us writes anything,
#
it is going to get outdated pretty soon.
#
So we try to do our best.
#
The book allowed me an opportunity to, as you pointed out, and thank you for saying
#
that, try to bring in the broader concepts, which I hope will not be obsolete in the near
#
So I'll just inform our listeners at this point that this is actually being recorded
#
on April 13th, 2021, though it is April 12th where Anirvan is.
#
So do consider that the miracle that I am asking my questions on the 13th and he is
#
answering them on the 12th, the miracles of science, perhaps.
#
I'm struck by this phrase that you used, epistemic humility, because I used it in a prior episode
#
and then one of my guests used it in a previous episode, in an episode after that when we
#
were talking about COVID, in fact, the policy responses to it.
#
And someone wrote in to me saying, hey, Amit, you say never use jargon, why have you?
#
But yeah, but in a sense, you know, to not to cut the jargon part of it, you can say
#
it's just about being humble about what you know.
#
And that's kind of what I want to ask you about, because it strikes me that there is,
#
if you're achieving excellence in anything, you know, there is this balance to be struck
#
between having confidence in what you are, what you know, and what you're capable of,
#
and also having the humility to learn more.
#
And you know, an example I often give is, you know, people think Virat Kohli is like
#
a very aggro kind of person, arrogant and full of himself.
#
But to get to the level where he is, he must have spent thousands of hours in the nets
#
focusing on what he's doing wrong.
#
So there is an inbuilt humility in that process.
#
Now in the world of science also, it strikes me that if you're too humble, if you think
#
that I don't know anything, everything could be wrong, it possibly becomes difficult to
#
So you have to have a certain amount of belief in your knowledge and the value of the work
#
you are doing, and so on and so forth.
#
But at the same time, there also has to be a certain amount of humility, like what you
#
pointed out in the clash between or the argument between the virologists and the epidemiologists
#
and you know, there has to be that humility and that openness and you can't just sit back
#
and say that this is my field, who are these other lay people to, you know, comment on
#
it and, you know, make Twitter threads about something that they haven't actually received
#
So given that you are someone who's obviously due to the work, due to being an editor, due
#
to being a science writer, you know, that's inbuilt in you.
#
But when you look at all these people who are submitting papers, people who are working
#
on the cutting edge of science, how does that come in?
#
What is the level of humility you think that we need?
#
You know, is this a trap that people fall into, of not having adequate humility?
#
What's your take on this?
#
I think scientists as a group fill all sorts, you will find people who are absolutely humble
#
and down to earth and will, and these are even Nobel Prize winners, that you can approach
#
them and you can talk to them and they will have coffee with you and they will discuss
#
And scientists in general, the one thing is they do love to talk about their work with
#
I think that is basically the hook to, if you're talking to anyone from someone starting
#
off with their lab or someone who has won the Nobel Prize, if you just ask them what
#
they do and why they do it, they can go on for a really long time.
#
But there are people who are very good at, and at a certain extent, you are absolutely
#
You have to play up the value of your work.
#
And sometimes that is actually exaggerated.
#
The thing is other scientists are, after a while, very good at picking up on those exaggerations.
#
I don't think the public always is, and sometimes the press can even be taken for a ride.
#
So I don't blame the press for this when a scientist said, well, and we see a lot of
#
this in the media as well, when someone says, well, I have now created this molecule in
#
my lab and it works really well against cancer cells and they get taken in by that.
#
But someone in the field would also know that the path to drugs is treacherous.
#
Very few promising drugs actually make it down that path to actually become drugs that
#
become approved and used in humans.
#
And so some people are very, very good about exploiting that and using that to their benefit.
#
So everyone has to do it to a certain extent.
#
Complete humility doesn't get you anywhere.
#
I mean, nobody knows what you're doing.
#
And there has to be a certain amount of excitement also conveyed to the audience, and that has
#
to come across both in the way that scientists speak, but also in the way that they write.
#
Otherwise, it's just a collection of facts.
#
And so they may seem like dry stories, but a lot of the research articles are actually
#
presented in the form of a narrative.
#
It's a different form of a narrative, but it is a narrative.
#
And you mentioned the press, and I'm reminded of this phrase that Michael Crickton coined
#
in honor of his friend Murray Gellman, is Gellman amnesia, which basically means that
#
if you're the specialist in a field and you read something written in a general newspaper
#
on your subject, you realize that is bullshit, that the guy just doesn't get it.
#
But when you read the rest of the newspaper, you take it as gospel because hey, it's in
#
Now, you know, journalists tend to be generalists, and that's more true today than ever.
#
You know, Prem Panikkar in a recent episode with me spoke about how this is one of the
#
things where Indian journalism is just in a horrendous place, that you have cost-cutting,
#
it's always journalists who are let go.
#
And if you have less journalists, you have more generalists, and you know, so your science
#
beat reporter with a few notable exceptions won't necessarily be someone who really gets
#
it and that can actually harm, you know, how the people sort of understand science.
#
So a dual question here, one is that is this a big problem and are there ways around it?
#
And the other question is that what technology has done in the last 20 years is that any
#
specialist can go out there and put, you know, her views out there, you can start a blog,
#
you can start a newsletter, you can make YouTube videos, all the technology is within our reach.
#
So you don't have these gatekeepers anymore.
#
Anyone can communicate.
#
Of course, the gatekeepers fulfill a useful function of being a filter for quality.
#
But you could argue that water finds its own level in any case.
#
So you know, whether you're on YouTube or blogging, ultimately, the quality of your
#
work will determine the kind of credibility that you have.
#
So there is this dual thing where, you know, journalism and I find and I find that this
#
is inevitably true whenever I read journalism about a subject, I know something about I
#
am like WTF is this, you know, and but at the same time, what I am heartened by is that
#
a lot of people who are either specialists or are sort of passionate about a subject
#
are going out, making their own content, all of that.
#
So you know, in the broader context of bringing science to the people of sort of popularizing
#
all of this, what do you think what's the ecosystem like?
#
How is this playing out?
#
This is a very good question.
#
And I think I want to say that despite some of the challenges, many journalists during
#
the pandemic, despite the constraints and the lack of information and knowledge have
#
done a tremendous job and there are some Indian journalists as well who have even in the midst
#
of even when the transparency hasn't been 100%, they have tried to get the best information.
#
And so I do want to applaud them for for what they've done.
#
As you mentioned, we all have our narrow focuses and I can speak to what happens in in science
#
and in science journalism.
#
And I think the first thing that has to happen is that people need to be fine with with paying
#
I mean, that's that's essentially where it starts.
#
Good journalism takes time.
#
It takes money and it takes it's a person's profession.
#
And so we have to be fine with paying for it.
#
And then once we pay for it, we have to be fine with investing in those organizations
#
and in those journalists.
#
I think if newsrooms are getting cut, and if newspapers are worried about about their
#
science pages, then that's going to have an effect despite regardless of everything else.
#
That's definitely going to have an effect.
#
The other thing is that science takes time to get answers.
#
And if sometimes if someone has a deadline that they have to get something out, that
#
is 500 600 words by by 4 p.m. or or or 9 p.m. then it becomes very difficult to get a full
#
story to be able to do that background reading and to get that research done.
#
And so often what happens is that we see results that are presented uncritically without the
#
broader picture, the broader framework of of what actually happened there.
#
So often it is just a rehash of the press release and then a bunch of quotes from different
#
people and it's sort of this drip drip system of of getting news out that doesn't put the
#
picture in a bigger context.
#
I would also say that journalists often strive for balance and balance isn't always necessarily
#
a good thing if we're talking about topics like deforestation or climate change or pollution
#
or air pollution or groundwater being polluted and you bring in all the scientists on one
#
side and then you bring in either the person who's polluting or you bring in all the people
#
who believe or have data that backs up climate change, anthropogenic climate change, and
#
then you bring in industry interests on the other side.
#
And so putting what happens is if you put both sets of quotes together, then it looks
#
like that it's balanced.
#
But I think journalists have to be reporters have to be fine with moving away from that
#
sense of balance with that sense of reporting everything as a as a short piece of something
#
and trying to instead bring it into a framework of putting more context into it.
#
But all of that requires money.
#
Yeah, no, there's that old thing that journalists say that, you know, if you're a journalist
#
and one person tells you it's raining and the other person tells you it isn't raining,
#
your job isn't to report both of them.
#
It is to go to the window and report what you see outside.
#
And you know, but this becomes difficult if you're a generalist and you have to turn in
#
a piece by four o'clock because you don't possibly have the base of knowledge to be
#
able to make those judgments yourself, which is why I think we kind of need more specialists
#
there in speaking of journalists, you know, the outliers who have done a great job really
#
I've loved the work of Zenith Tufekchi, for example, during this pandemic, I think some
#
of her reporting has been outstanding.
#
Before we actually get to your book, a few a couple of more sort of questions about,
#
you know, your personal processes and thinking and all of that.
#
What do you do for knowledge management?
#
Because you're taking in a lot of information, especially for this book, you know, it's written
#
in very simple language, so it doesn't appear to.
#
But it's packed with, you know, information and insight.
#
What do you do for knowledge management?
#
Are there particular apps that you use?
#
And in general, this is surely something that even outside the context of this book, something
#
that you must have kind of faced, you know, maybe in the context of productivity, but
#
even otherwise, you must be reading so much are there some hacks or tips or processes
#
And even though the book has a few hundred references, I read over a thousand papers,
#
even just writing this book, thousand scientific papers.
#
And I would say for a time I was reading all the major stories in Indian Express, Washington
#
Post and the New York Times, particularly during that lockdown phase when there were
#
a lot of reports coming out.
#
And I use Mendeley, which is a reference manager, and so what it has is it has this web plugin
#
where when I go to the website of a publisher, a scientific publisher, and I see that paper,
#
I can click on the PDF and it will immediately download that PDF and put it into the database.
#
And then in the database, it's also a reference manager.
#
It has all the references there.
#
So I can see all of those papers and later I can read those.
#
I read and annotate on my iPad and I like to use the highlighter feature to do that
#
I still sometimes take, for the actual outlines of the chapters, I use notebooks.
#
I like to basically draw mind maps and go through that process for doing that as well.
#
So I would say those are the main ways that I decided or I figured out how to do it.
#
There are some really good accounts on Twitter that are a good source of information in terms
#
of so I did bookmark a certain number of tweets of people as well to get some information.
#
As far as my own Twitter account, I used it as a testing ground for seeing what people
#
were interested in over the course of the year.
#
They didn't know I was writing a book.
#
I hadn't decided at that point either.
#
But how I was framing things, whether that was useful or not, and I did a couple of polls
#
as well through the year that definitely helped me out with that.
#
One thing about the coronavirus pandemic, I'll say, is that almost all scientific publishers
#
made their coronavirus content free and outside of the paywall and that was beneficial for
#
This wasn't only with respect to the scientific publishers.
#
I do subscribe to the New York Times and the Washington Post and Indian Express, but even
#
they made, the US publishers made their coronavirus content free.
#
As this is still ongoing and we're all searching for information, which are the Twitter handles
#
you said that you followed, that you considered the best sources on this as it was unfolding
#
and also at a general level, which are the best sources for understanding popular science?
#
In the context of economics, for example, you have that great blog, Marginal Revolution,
#
which has done such human service in popularizing just the field in general.
#
So let's say someone is interested in science, they want to learn more about it.
#
Like after my friend Ruben Ibrahim told me about, he sent me a bunch of science papers
#
which he's been reading over the last few weeks, which he really likes and I was kind
#
So let's say you're speaking to a lay person like me, I want to kind of know more about
#
what's happening on the cutting edge of science.
#
I want to know who to follow and whose work is interesting and, you know, are there blogs,
#
are there Twitter handles?
#
How does someone like me navigate this complex and messy field?
#
Yeah, it's a good question.
#
I will first answer the first part of that about during the coronavirus pandemic, certain
#
people that I definitely would recommend following.
#
One of them is at Eric Topol.
#
So Dr. Eric Topol, who is at the Scripps Research Institute and he is sort of a renaissance
#
He is a cardiologist by training, but he's been on top of the coronavirus pandemic.
#
His work, his tweets are mainly covering the scientific articles.
#
So some of it may be a little bit technical, but he covers all the major outlets, the nature,
#
its cell, and some of the other journals as well.
#
Whatever comes out, you will probably see some of the main conclusions in his Twitter
#
account, in his Twitter feed.
#
I also follow Angie Rasmussen.
#
She's a professor moving to Saskatchewan in Canada now.
#
She's a fantastic virologist, but she also has a no-nonsense way of presenting concepts
#
in virology in a way that's very digestible to people.
#
Natalie Dean is a professor in Florida, and she's a biostatistician.
#
That is very, very helpful to understand the statistical aspects and the mathematics beyond,
#
for example, the efficacy trials and herd immunity and things like that.
#
Mark Lipsitch is a professor at Harvard Chan, and he is one of the leading epidemiologists
#
who talked about the parameters of the pandemic early on.
#
Carl Bergstrom is at University of Washington, and he's written this book called Calling
#
Bullshit with Jevin West, and that is about misinformation and dealing with misinformation.
#
His Twitter account is a source of a lot of great wisdom regarding misinformation during
#
Adam Kucharski is in the UK, I think at the School of Tropical Medicine, if I'm not mistaken,
#
and he has some really good work.
#
He's written The Rules of Contagion, which is a book written before the pandemic, but
#
it has some of the mathematical aspects of how to deal with pandemics and the parameters
#
There are some other accounts as well, Ed Yong, obviously, Carl Zimmer, Helen Branswell,
#
they are writing some absolutely top-notch work as well.
#
In terms of following the science as it is coming out, I would say there are some really
#
There's a news account for Science Magazine and a news account for Nature.
#
The news articles in Science and Nature are definitely geared towards more of a lay audience
#
as opposed to the peer-reviewed scientific research that gets published there.
#
I also get the Nature newsletter every day.
#
It's a very nice newsletter that has a roundup of all aspects of science in a very accessible
#
manner, including, for example, the search for life on Venus and the search for life
#
on Mars and things like that.
#
So it gives a broader perspective of that.
#
For those who are interested in biology, at a slightly deeper level, there is a magazine
#
called The Scientist and that covers a lot of in-depth articles in science as well.
#
But I think following some Twitter accounts and then getting some newsletters is definitely
#
very helpful in keeping up to date.
#
Yeah, and I'll put links to all of these in the show notes and whichever ones of these
#
I'm familiar with, I agree with completely.
#
In fact, talking about Eric Topol, I produced a show also called Brave New World, which
#
is an interview show hosted by Vasanth Haar.
#
He had been a guest on The Scene and the Unseen a few weeks ago and he does a show called
#
Brave New World and we had Eric Topol as a guest on there.
#
So Vasanth and Eric had a delightful conversation.
#
This was episode four of Brave New World.
#
The title of the episode is Human and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Eric's book
#
Deep Medicine is also quite eye-opening in different ways, isn't it?
#
And this is the thing about Dr. Eric Topol that absolutely amazes me is that he goes
#
from one day talking about wearables for preventing heart disease to the next day having an opinion
#
about en masse and asymptomatic spread of COVID-19.
#
So he has a deep and wide grasp of many aspects in medicine.
#
It's so incredible that it's now that we can have public intellectuals of this sort
#
because technology makes it so possible for them to get their voice out to sort of, you
#
know, build these sort of presences in people's lives using tech.
#
So a couple of questions while we are, you know, before we actually take a break and
#
Who were your influences when it comes to science writing?
#
You know, like when you sort of start thinking about the notion that science needs to be
#
popularized, that it cannot just be academics talking to each other.
#
When you think about writing your own book, is there something that you're looking at
#
as a model and saying, you know, this book nailed it or this is a kind of voice that
#
So what were sort of influences in that sense?
#
And they don't even have to be overt influences where, you know, you take a model from something
#
But which are the science books that you have loved reading as you have grown up or, you
#
know, is there a book that kind of changed the way you think about the world or that
#
caused that moment where, you know, a light bulb goes on in your head and you see things
#
One of my favorite science writers definitely is Carl Sagan.
#
And I've quoted him and I admire him deeply.
#
And his way of connecting and bringing the social passion, the passion for social justice
#
into science and the broader picture is absolutely evident.
#
And people, when they talk about Carl Sagan, they talk about Cosmos.
#
But the Demon Haunted World is a much, much better and deeper book.
#
Cosmos was a companion to a television show that I believe came out in 79 or 80, whereas
#
the Demon Haunted World was much later and contained full length articles.
#
So definitely I like his work.
#
I feel that the physicists do a much better job in general than the biologists in conveying,
#
maybe because their questions are on a much grander scale.
#
So if you think about like Brian Greene or Michio Kaku or Jim Al-Khalili, who wrote what
#
I thought was the best science book last year, which is The World According to Physics, has
#
done a really, really good job with respect to that.
#
So last year I read about 100 books, of which many of them were definitely science books.
#
Michael Benton does a tremendous job in talking about dinosaurs.
#
And I think that's a topic that a lot of people are interested in.
#
So yeah, there are definitely a lot of people who do write well.
#
In general, my observation is that the physicists do a much better job than the biologists.
#
And, you know, you mentioned Sagan and I love this quote from your book where you quote
#
Sagan saying, quote, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent
#
the universe, stop quote, which is such a fantastic quote and which applies to like
#
just so many things, you know, it's beautiful.
#
Now my final question before the break and before we get to both the delightful subject
#
of your book and the difficult subject of COVID-19, which is that through the process
#
of writing this book, how have you changed?
#
How has it changed you as a person, as a writer, as someone who thinks about the world?
#
You know, because writing forces you not just to examine your subject that much more deeply,
#
it also forces you to examine yourself.
#
You know, and especially in these difficult times, I think there's a lot of self-reflection
#
everyone has kind of gone through, which for a writer can become explicit because sometimes
#
they're writing about it, sometimes they're not.
#
Maybe it's not even in the book, maybe it's in sort of the meditative tweets that you
#
might put out once in a while.
#
But through this period, through the last few months when you've written this book,
#
how have you kind of personally changed?
#
How are you different from what you were say, you know, 15 months ago?
#
Yeah, I had never planned to write this book.
#
I never thought that this would be my first book.
#
If I thought that I would be writing something, I had actually thought that I would be writing
#
perhaps fiction or in Bangla or meditative essays about travel or cooking or something
#
But when the pandemic struck, I felt and people were asking me all these questions, I felt
#
that there was because of my experience, I had at least something that I could offer.
#
And so I felt that it was a sense of obligation that I had to write this.
#
It was a very humbling experience, the entire pandemic, but the course of writing.
#
And I will say that I am now more attuned to myself and more, I think I'm fine with
#
saying I don't know and I'm fine with more uncertainty now.
#
I was more certain about certain things at the start of the pandemic.
#
And moving forward, that has changed.
#
I had started with the idea of writing a book that would be mainly a scientific book.
#
But very early on, it became evident that the science alone was not going to determine
#
the outcome of this pandemic.
#
It's not going to determine the outcome of any aspect of the major challenges that humans
#
face today, including climate change or deforestation or antimicrobial resistance.
#
Science is probably one of the easier pieces.
#
I mean, if we look at the scientists who worked hard, they got the vaccines created in time.
#
But that is just a small piece of the larger tapestry of society and all the components
#
that go into this pandemic.
#
And the other realization was that every single source of inequality or of injustice that
#
we had in our society was magnified during the pandemic.
#
We like to say that, okay, we are all in this together.
#
I do not believe that now.
#
Having gone through this, we are not all in it together in the same way.
#
For someone like me who was privileged, and I did get a sense of my own privilege of being
#
able to actually stay at home and write a book during a pandemic.
#
I mean, that's immense privilege.
#
And someone else who is basically having a difficult time making his or her living, that
#
is definitely something that got magnified.
#
And the other pieces of, I mentioned some of these things in the book, is that we tell
#
people to wash their hands.
#
But how can we tell someone who doesn't have clean water how to wash their hands with soap?
#
How can we tell someone who lives in the slums to socially distance?
#
So we have to make our society more equitable.
#
And that was, for me, one of the other observations.
#
And then finally, a lot of the things that I saw that I feared would happen, and they
#
did happen because of this sense of mistrust in science and the society that we have built
#
where experts are often vilified.
#
And this happened to a great extent in the United States, where I currently live.
#
But it happened elsewhere as well, where the science was way ahead of what people were
#
That people were still dying because they were not taking simple measures.
#
I mean, wearing a mask became an ideological issue.
#
That should be a public health matter.
#
And we can go on and on about that.
#
But I think overall, it was a very, very humbling experience for me to see that and to see the
#
I mentioned a couple of examples in the book.
#
One of them is in the part on the impact, where I was talking about a large fraction
#
of the world is not going to get basic immunizations for diseases like measles.
#
And on the other hand, there are privileged people in other parts of the world who are
#
using Zoom and they don't like how they look on Zoom, and they're going for plastic surgery.
#
So just by putting these two facts together, you can see the dichotomy in society.
#
Or even during the lockdown, we had people who traveled for miles and they didn't even
#
They had nothing to eat.
#
And on the other hand, there are people who were surreptitiously getting onto golf courses
#
because they needed to get their 18 holes of golf in during the pandemic.
#
And so yeah, it's just the scale of this was perhaps you don't see that outside of a pandemic,
#
but definitely it brought into sharp relief the divisions that we have in our society.
#
So it started off as a science book.
#
It definitely didn't end that way.
#
And it's definitely changed me as well through the process of writing this.
#
Well, that's so fascinating.
#
And I didn't know that people are getting plastic surgery because of Zoom.
#
You know, I haven't got a haircut in months, as you can see, but thankfully the podcast
#
And that's something I've kind of been reflecting on as well.
#
I've been extraordinarily fortunate during this pandemic to be able to do the things
#
that I do to be able to, you know, I've worked from home for 12, 13 years, so it's not a
#
Just shoot up my laptop, do what I do.
#
But especially in India, these differences are so stark.
#
If you look at what happened to the migrant laborers, you know, they used to be stories
#
during the partition that when trains from Pakistan would come into India or vice versa
#
trains from India would go there, you know, the train would reach the final destination
#
with everyone inside it dead because they had been killed.
#
And I did an episode with Ruben Mascarenes on, you know, who did a lot of work feeding
#
hungry people during the pandemic in Mumbai.
#
And he spoke about how, you know, there were actually trains where they would put a migrant
#
worker on a train and they would feed them in Mumbai.
#
But everywhere else, there's no one feeding them.
#
And three days later, you know, the guy stumbles out on the platform wherever he is in his
#
hometown and just dies, dies of starvation in like the 21st century.
#
So that's just completely nuts.
#
We will, of course, discuss a little bit more about the politics of it after the break.
#
The other thing that I think the pandemic really made stark, especially in an Indian
#
context, is how dysfunctional our state is.
#
The various ways, I mean, the state fundamentally in India, I've always said there is no rule
#
of law for most people.
#
It doesn't do any of the things that it should do properly and does a lot of things that
#
it should not do at all.
#
And we've seen an exacerbation of this.
#
Like it's just coming to stark relief through the last few months, I've written a column
#
on this, which I'll link from the show notes.
#
But it's kind of distressing that, you know, that in a sense, in this terrible tragedy,
#
at least there are some things that we should be able to see more clearly, which should
#
not immediately get normalized as this gets over.
#
And these are these thoughts are too deep.
#
We have to take a break.
#
So we'll take a break and come back in a minute.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com, where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Anirban Mahapatra about his fabulous book on COVID-19.
#
And let's actually now start talking about COVID-19.
#
You know, in your book, I love the sequencing in your book where you have these 22 chapters.
#
Each of them is like a one word thing.
#
You know what it's about.
#
You have to go really systematically through all of the book.
#
Let's kind of begin though with your chapter three, which kind of gets down to the most,
#
you know, at a fundamental level talking about the virus itself or even chapter four, where
#
you talk about how structure is related to function, which is something I randomly say
#
in the case of content, where it is certainly true, the structure of your content determines
#
what your content actually is.
#
And I was fascinated and almost blown away to find that it's like that in biology as
#
well, that shape determines everything, you know, which is I was never taught that in
#
school, not that I was particularly attentive in the biology class.
#
Tell me a little bit more about that.
#
Yeah, I was not taught that at school either.
#
And I mentioned that in the book that it's one of the most fundamental concepts in biology
#
and definitely one of the most mind blowing aspects is, well, all biology is at a certain
#
level, chemistry and all chemistry, if you go down deeper, is physics.
#
And most of physics is mathematics.
#
But at the level of biological molecules, when we have different biological molecules that
#
perform different functions, the shape determines often what the function of that molecule is.
#
And by shape, I mean, the actual structure is not static as well, the structure is changing
#
And one of the examples that I use in the book that might be relevant for someone who's
#
interested in COVID-19 is this example of now the infamous spike, which is on the surface
#
of the coronavirus and juts out and gives the virus this sun-like appearance and how
#
different changes to its actual shape are determining how well it infects cells.
#
So it has a complementary surface to the ACE2 receptor, which has a different function in
#
It's a cellular receptor on certain cells.
#
But what the virus is capable of doing is using that to get its viral package inside
#
Now, one concept in this that I just mentioned is the shape changes over time.
#
What we have seen, okay, so let me step back again.
#
The shape of this is determined by the building blocks.
#
In this case, it's a protein, so the building blocks are the amino acids.
#
As I mentioned earlier, there are typically 20 of these.
#
So if we can think of this as almost like a Lego set, and there are different pieces
#
that are getting put here, that's the same set is used by the virus and it's the same
#
And that is one of the unifying concepts across biology is that proteins, I mean, that's why
#
the blueprint that determines this is called the universal genetic code.
#
Because it's this blueprint of letters.
#
And as I mentioned, this gets transcribed into this intermediate compound and then gets
#
translated into this origami-like three-dimensional structure, which is quite fascinating.
#
But in the case of the coronavirus, what was observed was the spike protein or parts of
#
the spike protein were able to bind or attach because of the complementarity of the shape
#
and some of the chemistry were able to attach reasonably well to the ACE2 receptor, one
#
part of it, which is the cognate part.
#
So the part of the spike protein that was binding is called the receptor binding domain.
#
And it was attaching quite nicely.
#
And doing so at a way that was, we can calculate that in terms of biochemical parameters, it
#
was doing that better than the original SARS, which, as you may recall, was not as infectious.
#
Now, what structural biologists, so this is an entire field of biology called structural
#
And what they do is they create structures of various proteins and other biological molecules
#
and they use that structure to determine what the function is and how that function might
#
Structural biologists were very quick to determine the structure of the spike of SARS-CoV-2,
#
What they had noticed at one part of this protein, which has a little bit over 1,300
#
So you can think about this as a three-dimensional structure of over 1,300 amino acids.
#
And what they noticed is that there was this one part of the cell that was hanging out,
#
But on the other side, there was another piece that was not fitting it or it was attaching
#
to it, but almost not in a perfect complementary manner.
#
Now, what they had predicted at that time is that if the other side was also like an
#
open hand, then there would be a better touching point.
#
Remarkably, that is actually what has been observed for one of the variants.
#
So this is a case where structure and function are absolutely related, where the complementarity
#
of a structure on the receptor and a structure on the virus are so well attuned through the
#
process of evolution that we have a variant now that is more infectious.
#
And what basically blows my mind is that we are looking at differences on the atomic level
#
of something, a virus that we cannot seize, this nanoscale virus that has real-world implications
#
for millions of people, billions of people around the world.
#
So that is definitely one of these cases.
#
The other thing is that the immune responses...
#
So right now, as we are speaking, there's a lot of discussion about the variants and
#
whether the vaccines will work and whether people will get reinfected after they get
#
infected by one of these variants, particularly the one that came from Brazil and the other
#
one that came from South Africa.
#
Those are the two of major concern right now.
#
We don't know much about the one that has come up in Maharashtra and perhaps we will
#
So what antibodies do is they also use this concept of structure by trying to find the
#
piece of the virus that is attaching to the cell and getting there first because they
#
attach better, getting there first and blocking it, actually physically blocking it from attaching
#
And at one level, this is so visual and so beautiful, but this is not something that
#
we are taught in biology in class at all.
#
We basically thought of it as a number of...
#
Biology is taught as a series of facts that we have to memorize.
#
I was so struck by the geometry of this and correct me if I'm oversimplifying, but how
#
it kind of struck me is that it's a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle.
#
Everything has a different kind of shape and what the virus does is that it kind of mutates
#
and mutates and then natural selection will throw up these random variants which fit perfectly
#
and then they fit perfectly and they can replicate and so that kind of becomes much more common
#
and what antibodies do and what a lot of medical ways of fighting this is also at the level
#
If there is a spike that is fighting something, either you sort of create something that fits
#
that spike first or you attack the spike or wherever the spike is fitting, you fit that
#
with something else so the spike has nowhere to go.
#
I hope I'm not being too kind of simplistic, but this is such a sort of...
#
Just thinking about the geometry of it and the way that you made it visual was so kind
#
Let's take a step further back.
#
Tell me a little bit about how we should...
#
Because most lay people just know that, oh, there are germs and there are bacteria and
#
there are viruses and it's like two different categories like Hindu, Muslim and...
#
Where do they come from?
#
I remember at one point, you've spoken in your chapter on the coronavirus on how before
#
there were any living creatures, there was an RNA world.
#
And you've spoken about how viruses are the most successful biological entities.
#
Another interesting sort of TIL for me, there are...
#
You write at one point, quote, even in the human body, there are probably 100 times as
#
many viruses as there are human cells.
#
So what are kind of viruses exactly?
#
How do they interact with the human body?
#
We can do a whole episode on this, but I'll try to keep this absolutely succinct.
#
And they are obligate parasites in that they have functions that are similar to living
#
things once they're inside living things.
#
So they absolutely have to get inside other living...
#
They have to get inside living cells to be able to replicate.
#
And by replicate, I mean that they create new virus particles and that fulfills their
#
prerogative from a perspective of evolution of spreading.
#
And so a virus just wants to spread.
#
And by saying just wants to spread, maybe I'm treating it in a more...
#
Giving it a human-like property, but that's not the case.
#
This is just simply the biological objective of the virus to spread.
#
So outside of a body, a virus is very much like a chemical.
#
It doesn't have that many living attributes.
#
But within cells, it definitely has a lot of the hallmarks of living entities.
#
And viruses may predate life.
#
That's definitely one of the theories.
#
There are other theories, especially that have come in the last few years from a certain
#
class of viruses known as giant viruses, that they may actually be stripped down version,
#
or some of them at least may be stripped down versions of cells.
#
So for every living organism, starting from bacteria all the way up to humans and indefinitely
#
plants, there are viruses that infect them and can parasitize viruses.
#
Not all viruses are harmful.
#
And this is something that is definitely lost on a lot of people.
#
They are involved in biogeochemical cycles, especially in the water, where there are a
#
large number of bacteria.
#
And so viruses that infect bacteria are known as bacteriophages.
#
And they are involved in a lot of the turnover in water.
#
Scientists are now even looking to viruses for therapeutic uses, in particular cases
#
for bacteria that have become resistant to a number of antibiotics by figuring out which
#
And there's some really exciting work that has come up on bacteriophage therapy in the
#
last few years with respect to that.
#
Viruses are a huge class of biological entities.
#
Some of them have RNA as their genetic material.
#
And the coronaviruses are a category of viruses there.
#
And then there are the DNA viruses as well.
#
The RNA viruses are particularly promiscuous.
#
RNA is not a molecule that is used as genetic material in living organisms.
#
Because of certain reasons, DNA is better suited for that.
#
But it still stays on in certain viruses.
#
And they have a very high mutation rate, as people are now finding out with the coronavirus
#
that we're looking at right now and the disease that it's causing.
#
Viruses have been infecting us since life began.
#
And there are traces of viruses in our own genetic code.
#
Certain classes of viruses, which are known as retroviruses, they actually integrate into
#
Now coronaviruses are not retroviruses, so they're slightly different.
#
So we actually have the archaeological remains of viral infections in our own genetic material.
#
And that's more than 8%.
#
So even if we disregard all the viruses that are inside our body, so we are also part virus
#
because of the viral genetic material we have in our genomes.
#
One of my pet peeves actually, to go off on an aside, is the synonymous use of genetic
#
They're slightly different, so I wanted to get that right.
#
This is fascinating because I'm so happy to find out that no longer do I need to describe
#
myself as half Punjabi, half Bengali, I'm actually 46% Punjabi, 46% Bengali and 8% virus
#
Now that you mention it, what's the difference between a virus and a bacteria?
#
A bacteria is a cellular form of life.
#
And so bacteria is living, and it has all the hallmarks of living organisms, whereas
#
a virus outside of cells is not living.
#
A bacteria may cause infection, it may be free living as well.
#
Viruses definitely have to infect to be able to propagate and to create new viruses.
#
And then the other aspect about this is from a public health perspective, antibiotics work
#
against bacteria, but they don't work against viruses.
#
Antivirals are much fewer in number as we are painfully finding out during this coronavirus
#
pandemic, and that's definitely not the case with bacteria.
#
So we have been doing a much better job in controlling bacterial infections by and large
#
as opposed to new emerging viral infections.
#
So you've pointed out, you know, what viruses are and how they kind of, there are so many
#
And you said that a virus needs to enter a cell to replicate, tell me about this process
#
Like let's say a virus figures out a way to enter a cell, which in the case of the coronavirus,
#
which by the way, you, you know, you've described the history in the book about why it's called
#
a coronavirus is that when they first saw it, it sort of was a little bit like the corona
#
So they kind of went with that.
#
So how does, you know, once a virus enters a cell, what is the process there?
#
How, what are the different components of that?
#
So one of the things about the virus actually getting in the cell is it's basically, it's
#
Viruses don't have any way of propelling themselves.
#
A lot of bacteria can do that.
#
So through random means a virus will find a cell and it will find a receptor.
#
And that's why viruses often are in like these teeming large numbers.
#
And as, as we, as we discussed earlier, there are so many different viruses.
#
So we are probably ingesting through the air, as we're speaking now, a number of viruses
#
as well, but they're not causing disease because they have to be able to find the specific
#
receptor that they can recognize to be able to get inside.
#
And that's similarly with when I'm drinking tea or eating anything, there might be plant
#
But over, even among the animal viruses, there are over 1.6 million predicted animal viruses,
#
but only a few are able to infect humans.
#
Once they get inside cells though, their, their immediate job is to create the protein
#
part of the cell, which is a structural part of, of the, of the additional virus particles,
#
but also to replicate their genomes.
#
And in the case of the coronavirus, the genetic material is the RNA.
#
And that serves both as the template.
#
So the beauty for the virus perspective, the beauty from the perspective of the virus is
#
that that can serve both as the blueprint for the creation of these other particles
#
that it will need as building blocks, but it's also the genetic material.
#
So it can make copies of that.
#
So it's making both the structure and the genetic material from this compound.
#
One thing about the virus though is that the, the RNA viruses, they are, because they don't
#
use DNA as their genetic material, they have a different copier enzyme than we do.
#
And this is called the RNA dependent RNA polymerase.
#
And part of that, or that, and that enzyme is often used as a target for drugs because
#
we don't have it in our body.
#
One of the drugs that has been used during this pandemic to stop the coronavirus infections
#
at least early on is remdesivir.
#
And remdesivir, one of the modes of action that it's thought to work is to stop this
#
RNA dependent polymerase, this copier enzyme from making future copies of itself and being
#
able to, being able to replicate.
#
The virus also brings in a couple of other enzymes of its own, and these are turning
#
out to be targets as well.
#
There are, I mentioned there's a, there's a class of enzyme called proteases, and these
#
are basically, they act as cleavers and they cut at very specific sites when the, the entire
#
So basically it's like a large, almost like a large piece of cloth that has to be cut
#
at specific places to make designs.
#
And those are going to be part of the building blocks of the virus.
#
So that's another target right now.
#
And I know Pfizer right now has a drug in phase one of clinical trials to hit those.
#
So one of the ways of drug discovery, as you mentioned, is that the structure determines
#
what the drugs will be and using that structure activity relationship to create drugs for
#
these unique targets that are found within the virus, but not within people.
#
And so, and the reason for that is then there will be less adverse effects.
#
Once the virus particles, once the subunits of the virus and the genetic material are
#
made, then they're assembled within the cell.
#
For this entire process, the cellular machinery has been hijacked.
#
So it's basically our cellular machinery that is making the virus particles for themselves.
#
And it uses a part of the cell as well to be able to get outside as well.
#
And this system is mostly used to get rid of cellular trash.
#
So it uses the trash compaction system.
#
So it uses one system of receptors to get in, then it completely subverts our cellular
#
machinery to make the virus copies of itself.
#
And then it uses the trash compaction system to get out.
#
That's beautiful and I love the phrase trash compaction.
#
Maybe it can be used one day in the context of the IT cell of certain parties.
#
So I kind of want to take a brief digression, not exactly a digression because it's a point
#
you mentioned in your book also, but I think it's worth stressing on for many lay readers.
#
One of the big sort of aha moments of my life, which really made me look at the world differently
#
was when I discovered natural selection.
#
Like Douglas Adams once said, that there's no reason to believe in God because if you
#
just understand natural selection, the awe of what you experience is far beyond anything
#
that any religion can give you.
#
And you yourself here have quoted someone called Theodosius Dobzhansky, who writes,
#
quote, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
#
You're at the risk of getting a little too simple, but just in case there are lay people
#
listening to this who might be wondering that, hey, this is so incredibly complex that you've
#
got a virus getting inside the cell, it's got this mechanism, it's got that mechanism,
#
it's copying itself, RNA is happening, cell also has trash compaction units, it's got
#
And all this humongous complex shit is happening, surely there is God who designed this.
#
And what do you mean when a virus wants to replicate?
#
So I just want to take a brief moment to kind of talk about that, which I will do in my
#
And if I've missed out anything on Mr. Nuance, you can kind of fill in because I think understanding
#
natural selection is just so key to understanding our world and life, which is basically that,
#
look, there are millions of viruses, they don't all fit into cells, but they will all
#
mutate in different ways.
#
And accidentally, some will happen to fit into cells and they'll get into the cells.
#
And out of all the ones that get in accidentally, there will be a few that have the right properties
#
And out of all of those, there will be a few that will have the properties to start another
#
And at the end of all of this, the ones that successfully replicate are the ones who were
#
essentially formed by accident, but once they are, they replicate and then there are more
#
and more of the viruses like that.
#
So it almost seems like, so when you say a virus wants to spread, that wanting is a metaphor.
#
So if anyone hasn't read Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, or a lot of his other
#
work, Daniel Dennett as well, go out and kind of do that because that will explain it much
#
But this whole process is so joyous, that it's iteration, iteration, iteration, everything
#
is accidental, but then something just works and multiplies and you can ascribe directionality
#
to this and say, hey, this was meant to be, or you can ascribe intention to the virus,
#
the virus wants to do this, the virus is a bad guy, and all of that.
#
You know, understanding natural selection is so much the bedrock of this that I thought
#
I should bring in this aside for people who, like I, once wasn't exposed to it, didn't
#
It's just, it's always when I think about it that how everything has emerged from it
#
is so incredibly wonderful.
#
So did I leave out anything essential in my brief description?
#
I think you hit the nail on the head with the importance of evolution by natural selection.
#
As you mentioned, I even included it in the book and had it as part of a chapter on concepts
#
because it is an absolutely essential concept to understanding anything in biology.
#
Your description of it is accurate.
#
I would say one other piece that I would definitely add is that there's always a selection pressure.
#
That's what's basically driving the selection of those changes because otherwise somebody
#
might say, well, what is the designer, what is pushing it towards it becoming more infectious?
#
And it's that selection pressure.
#
And then the other thing is that it's always happening because the world is not static.
#
Situations are changing all the time.
#
And I would say that's the other really, really beautiful thing about it is there is no static
#
environment in the world anywhere.
#
And so what may seem like an organism getting an upper hand briefly over time and over four
#
billion years of evolution, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
#
So I absolutely love it.
#
And everything I try to understand in biology, I definitely try to understand from the perspective
#
of evolution by natural selection.
#
And to those naysayers who doubt it and don't understand what you mentioned, the repetitive
#
or the iterative process of natural selection, people are using it now.
#
And Francis Arnold won a Nobel Prize, and others have been using it as well, for actual
#
benefit to be able to use the process by having this repetitive process and the selective
#
force to make proteins and other macromolecules even better over time.
#
And this is what is known as directed evolution.
#
It's definitely a force in biological engineering to use evolution as a force for creating molecules.
#
So everything doesn't have to be rational.
#
I guess that's my main point, is if you have a large number of molecules and you have this
#
selection pressure and you give nature time, then over time it will find a way to get through.
#
So here's one question which might also seem like a naive question.
#
Now there are all these tons of viruses, and some of them get successful in kind of propagating
#
Now I would think that logically a virus doesn't actually have to harm the host.
#
You know, it's like, which are the successful domestic animals?
#
They are the dogs and cats and the ones that get along with us and perform different kinds
#
of emotional functions for us, which are completely beneficial.
#
If they weren't, they wouldn't be domestic animals.
#
Similarly, you'd imagine that a virus to replicate successfully and to not have medicines targeted
#
at it and all of that would be ones which would cause no harm to the host and they would
#
just chill and the host would just keep spreading them and everybody's happy, it's a positive
#
sum game and so on and so forth.
#
So is it the case that there are many, many viruses and most of them are completely harmless
#
and they spread like that and there are only a few that are accidentally dangerous to hosts
#
and it's not actually necessary for them to go back to the metaphor to harm the host or,
#
you know, so what's going on here?
#
They don't need to harm us.
#
That's an absolutely fantastic question.
#
I'm glad you asked that question and you are absolutely spot on that the essential aspect
#
of the virus is not disease.
#
Disease is important to us from our perspective as someone who has been infected.
#
The reason we care about certain viruses is because they cause disease.
#
I mean, you can think about this coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, if it had gone through humans
#
without causing any disease then perhaps we might have identified it by accident or perhaps
#
not even at all and we only think about the viruses that tend to cause disease and more
#
I wrote about the previous pandemic when I was a managing editor, I wrote an editorial
#
about H1N1 influenza and that pandemic was not taken very seriously because it didn't
#
It spread reasonably well, not as well as SARS-CoV-2, but it spread reasonably well,
#
but it didn't cause disease.
#
Disease is an outcome of a virus spreading well because if you remember the process that
#
we discussed, once the virus actually gets inside the cell, it uses up some of the cell
#
resources and the cell machinery.
#
So if it is very successful in replicating, then it causes harm to the cell and so that
#
is one of the primary outcomes.
#
The secondary outcome is often what we see as disease is not caused by the virus but
#
by our reaction to the virus and often in cases of COVID-19, that second phase of the
#
dysregular or abnormal immune response is what is causing harm in people and that's
#
why some people are receiving dexamethasone as well towards that phase and so if you are
#
not able to mount the appropriate immune response, not a too strong immune response, not too
#
weak an immune response, if it's too strong an immune response, what can happen is then
#
the immune response is actually destroying many of the cells and inside the body as well
#
and that is actually what is happening in a number of cases of COVID-19 where the virus
#
itself is not causing that damage, but it is really a great question that you ask.
#
Early on what microbiologists thought was essentially what you are saying and you will
#
still find some microbiologists who believe that over the course of time a virus will
#
invariably grow weaker in terms of how it causes disease as it gets more attuned to
#
the host and so what happens is with a zoonotic infection because it doesn't have that much
#
of a quote unquote history with us at that early time then it can cause more severe disease
#
but over time it gets milder.
#
However new modeling studies suggest that that may not be the case and the reason for
#
that is actually what is playing out in real time with these variants where it as we just
#
discussed nothing is static in biology so it's not that there is one direction that
#
For the virus the mathematical optimal situation is one where it is not a complete push over
#
but it's also not killing the host before it's able to spread to other people.
#
So it has this sort of range in the middle where it can settle in where it can cause
#
some disease even severe disease in some people but it's creating a lot more of a viral load
#
that it can infect other people.
#
So the short answer is it's not as simple as even microbiologists thought it was maybe
#
Wow and by the way you use the phrase zoonotic for the benefit of my listeners that means
#
a virus that comes from an animal to a human being and we'll discuss that a little more
#
because I want to talk about bats also and murdered minks which makes me very sad.
#
But before we get to that I'm kind of curious about this point you mentioned about the optimal
#
virus right because if you think of it in game theoretic terms and you think of somebody
#
creating viruses and is a great game theorist what do you do and what you don't want to
#
do is create something like Ebola now Ebola is very lethal it kills a large percentage
#
of the people who get it but it doesn't spread that easily it is not a symptomatic spread
#
and you know once you know someone's really ill they can get isolated whereas so you want
#
a virus that spreads a lot equally you want it all you want a certain amount of lethality
#
if it kills nobody it's really like what is a virus even doing so that your evil virus
#
designer is not successful there so it seems that you need a certain sort of level of infectiousness
#
and a certain level of lethality and your ideal virus should be something that is spread
#
by asymptomatic people and even people who don't have severe symptoms who don't realize
#
what's going on and the lethality comes later so you are killing a certain percentage of
#
the people but not too many because then it doesn't spread that well.
#
Is it fair to say that SARS-CoV-2 or you know this COVID-19 virus basically is as close
#
to optimal as possible?
#
There are certain aspects of SARS-CoV-2 that make it also very difficult to deal with compared
#
to a number of other viruses and definitely the way that it's spread it makes it primed
#
for a pandemic because it's a respiratory virus and because with other things like there
#
have been pandemics in the past that have been caused by cholera but cholera has been
#
mainly eradicated from many countries and we can choose to not drink the same type of
#
water we can definitely choose to not eat the same kind of meat or even the same food
#
but we all have to breathe the same air I mean we can filter it to a certain extent
#
but that's one of the reasons the fact that it's a respiratory virus and then a lot of
#
the spread is asymptomatic as you mentioned and a lot of the infectiousness is during
#
that early phase of asymptomatic that silent spread is happening in a number of people
#
who are carriers that make it very difficult to control as well but even among the viruses
#
you you are hit on a really great point but even among the viruses you mentioned Ebola
#
because it kills the people that it infects it has to have a massive viral load it is
#
basically teeming and coming out of every office of the person who is infected and even
#
when the person dies the World Health Organization has been saying you have to be very careful
#
about how you perform the last rites of the of these bodies because often what happens
#
with Ebola is that it is a disease that spread through love through caregivers who want to
#
take care of those who are ill and who want to give the last rites to others because it
#
spreads in such massive numbers on the other hand there are other viruses that cause these
#
type of chronic and latent infections and they don't need those large numbers and they
#
don't need to cause disease immediately and definitely HIV is one of them the virus that
#
causes hepatitis is another one of them and so in most people they can be sort of causing
#
no disease at all and asymptomatic and most people won't even know about it and they can
#
even linger in people for years before they have a type of disease and so in those cases
#
based on what you were saying and just on a rational idea of what would be necessary
#
you can envisage that the number of viruses needed to infect and that do infect is much
#
less than in a case of Ebola which has a very short infectious cycle and very acute infection
#
versus these other chronic infections.
#
Yeah I'm struck by a phrase you just used and it strikes me that then what is common
#
between both humanity and Ebola is that they are diseases that spread through love I love
#
that phrase and I had done an episode a few weeks back with Chinmay Tumbe about the pandemics
#
India has been struck by and that has a lot about cholera as well and it's so fascinating
#
to sort of see that all this has played out before you know at least the bad parts of
#
it has played out before we have never had you know so many vaccines within a year and
#
the kind of science work that is happening is sort of remarkable.
#
So a follow on question from there that assuming that this is kind of close to optimal that
#
it is both infectious and lethal I would have thought that just logically like where is
#
a flaw in my thinking that you know that logically it would like many viruses have done of the
#
past also including I think influenza strains that it would naturally evolve towards becoming
#
more infectious and less lethal because you know that would seem to be the natural consequence
#
it seems kind of counterintuitive that it can become both more infectious and more lethal
#
or even as lethal so what are we seeing right now like here we are actually talking in April
#
and obviously your book is actually remarkably up to date given when it came out that it
#
talks about all the vaccines and the British variant and all that but what we are seeing
#
for example right now in India it would seem just looking at the raw numbers and it's evolving
#
so the whole picture could look different five days from now and I have no way of telling
#
but just from a layman's perspective just looking at sort of the data it seems that
#
cases have gone up massively but the death rate hasn't quite gone up to the same extent
#
is it possible that it is a strain that is more infectious and less lethal which I mean
#
you would kind of expect or you know are there nuances here are there other possibilities
#
that we and obviously I realized that nobody knows right now we are still in a sense in
#
the fog of war but what's your kind of take on that yeah that's definitely one aspect
#
of it is over time what can happen is the virus can become more infectious and less
#
lethal but the other side of it is your immune response so let's say you get vaccinated
#
or you get infected or you have an asymptomatic infection that you don't know about you may
#
have antibodies and you may have T cell responses that when you have that second reinfection
#
it's not as severe anymore so there are these two sets of factors that are determining what
#
that is and maybe in a number of people they didn't know that they were infected the first
#
time and in those cases they are actually having reinfections the point that you made
#
about previous pandemics is actually quite a good one and with H1N1 which happened in
#
1918 and 1919 because that was such a deadly and dominant virus one thing is that every
#
single virus even the ones that that circulate within human populations right now and then
#
cause seasonal influenza apart from the ones that are causing bird flu and are not transmitting
#
very well and they just come every few years with different variants but all of the circulating
#
influenza 8 strains right now are in some manner derived from that H1N1 of 1918 in 1919
#
and there is a theory it isn't very well substantiated that one of the human coronaviruses there
#
are human coronaviruses that cause colds may have caused a pandemic in the 1800s and then
#
it just became very very mild over time what we are seeing now with SARS-CoV-2 it's still
#
too early right now and a large proportion of the world has not even been infected once
#
so we will know this and and that is actually how the pandemic ends the pandemic doesn't
#
end because SARS-CoV-2 gets eradicated it ends because either through vaccination or
#
either through different variants it becomes into a mild disease that we no longer have
#
to worry about anymore yeah exactly and as you also pointed out in your book that you
#
know unlike say the way we eradicated smallpox that is simply not possible with SARS-CoV-2
#
because it is not only humans who have the virus yeah other animals also have it you've
#
written at one point in your book about how 600,000 minks were culled last June in Netherlands
#
by suffocation like how how were they suffocated yeah so the issue here is and this has been
#
observed for no I'm not asking why I'm saying how like you put them in a gas chamber or
#
you take one mink at a time no I have no idea what they did there yeah it's kind of striking
#
let's talk a little bit about the origins like you know earlier you use the phrase zoonotic
#
and zoonosis of course is viruses coming from animals to humans as indeed they do and most
#
of the time they won't even enter our cells and most of the time when they do nothing
#
will really go wrong so we won't even notice it so this is kind of a selection bias that
#
we give viruses a bad name by picking on the ones that actually do serious damage to us
#
what do we know about the origins of the corona virus like in the sense that you know you
#
you've spoken about how you know what we took seriously earlier was the influenza virus
#
which is 1918 and the Hong Kong flu in the late 60s and the mid 50s and whatever so you've
#
had the flu virus around a long time that also uses RNA replication but you've pointed
#
out that there are some differences and no one really took corona viruses seriously perhaps
#
when the first SARS came which you said you know at that point you were active in the
#
profession and you kind of thought about it and wrote about it that's when people started
#
taking it seriously what you know how are corona viruses different from say the influenza
#
virus you know how do they originate what's the whole deal and and how did this particular
#
how does SARS-CoV-2 what are the theories about the origin and how it can reach humans
#
yeah as i mentioned there are a certain number of there are four corona viruses that cause
#
common colds in in humans two of them were discovered a few decades ago and nobody really
#
paid that much attention to corona viruses there was a perspective in science that i
#
mentioned in the book with respect to a scientific meeting where the total number of people attending
#
a meeting on corona viruses could not fill an entire room they were like empty seats
#
there were so many empty seats there were so few people at that time working on corona
#
viruses and this was before SARS basically hit the scene and so corona virology at that
#
time was considered one of the backwaters of virology there weren't that many people
#
working on on this obscure class of viruses and obviously after that what happened is
#
the first SARS pandemic happened in in the the first part of of this century and SARS
#
spread to a number of other countries it was fairly lethal it was much more lethal in general
#
than the current corona virus SARS-CoV-2 but as we were discussing because many of the
#
people or actually most of the people who were spreading the disease most of the people
#
who spread the virus did so after they were showing signs of disease it was much easier
#
to isolate it so there weren't that many silent infections and after a while in in in the
#
summer the disease basically died down it hasn't been eradicated it could pop up at
#
any time but officially there hasn't been an outbreak and then after that middle east
#
respiratory syndrome or MERS first appeared in caramels in the middle east that one also
#
like SARS is thought to have originally originated from bats now bats for some unknown reason
#
and I have some theories in the book as it might pertain to flight and the stresses and
#
strains of flights in bats bats are mammals that that do fly harbor a disproportionate
#
number of coronaviruses that don't cause any severe disease in them and so MERS definitely
#
spread from camels to people it was very deadly but it was not very infectious and so with
#
respect to the current coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 the original reservoir animal is almost certainly
#
a bat now whether it came directly from bats many years ago and then went through the process
#
of mutation to become more infectious is one theory and that may have happened over a few
#
decades where it wasn't causing a very severe infection it wasn't causing very severe disease
#
and then it wasn't infecting very well but it gained some mutations because of the natural
#
selection pressures that we mentioned and then it exploded at one time that is definitely
#
a plausible theory and that is in line with what we're seeing with some of the variants
#
as well that happens quite frequently the other thing about coronaviruses is that two
#
coronaviruses can infect a cell at the same time influenza viruses do this as well but
#
their genetic material is actually broken into pieces so when they enter a cell they
#
can actually mix and match pieces and create a totally new virus coronaviruses is not broken
#
into pieces but it can take parts from other viruses other coronaviruses that infect the
#
same cell so very early on there was this theory that there was an intermediate pangolin
#
host so a pangolin had been infected by a bat coronavirus and so a pangolin and a bat
#
coronavirus entered the same cell they mixed and matched pieces and one of the parts of
#
the current coronavirus is very very similar to a pangolin coronavirus and that's the part
#
that's useful or essential for binding to the receptor that's the receptor binding domain
#
and so that theory has also been put out there and definitely an intermediate animal has
#
precedent in what is thought to have happened with the original SARS with civets being thought
#
to be the original civets thought to be the intermediate animal in that case so which
#
of these two theories is correct is not known at the time formally I know a lot of people
#
like this theory formally we cannot still rule out that there was a viral escape from
#
any lab but viral manipulation or manipulation is does not have to be I mean going by Occam's
#
razor that's not the simplest answer and when we see that we are infected by these viruses
#
and it does happen naturally and there are a large number of coronaviruses in bats and
#
even before this pandemic there were scientists like Vinit Menachery and Ralph Baric who were
#
saying that there are coronaviruses we need to look at and watch out for because they
#
can infect human cells with all of these lines of evidence I don't think at the present we
#
need to entertain the idea that this was created in a lab in Wuhan.
#
Yeah and at some level it doesn't really I mean at a geopolitical level it may matter
#
or whatever but you know at the level of biology it is what it is it's out there and you pointed
#
out that you know there are more than 5,000 known bat coronaviruses which is so incredibly
#
scary any random one can mutate and do something and come to humans and do something far worse
#
and as far as pangolins are concerned I like this is one of my favorite names for a living
#
creature it's like you know a middle eastern martial arts warrior you know you can make
#
a graphic novel on the pangolins fighting for the survival of the species actually pangolins
#
are scaly anteaters and yeah so somehow bats and pangolins partied and this is and earlier
#
you know you mentioned RNA as being much more promiscuous than DNA at which point I thought
#
that in India then DNA would be looked upon as much more sanskari than RNA which is merrily
#
mixing all over the place which is by the way what we indeed used to do in India until
#
you know a while back Tony Joseph's book and his episode with me has much more on it so
#
now what I kind of find interesting about it and where this current outbreak in a sense
#
has come at the right time like I think that if it came 40 years ago we would have no idea
#
what to do with it it could have been you could argue it would be less devastating because
#
global travel was less and therefore it may not have proliferated so fast but there would
#
have been some point in time where global travel would have been you know frequent enough
#
for or big enough for it to spread fast but the science wouldn't have gotten to where
#
it was and this time what you've sort of spoken about is that in January itself we had sort
#
of the genetic sequence of you know SARS-CoV-2 and already people began working on a vaccine
#
as far back as then which is one of the reasons that it's kind of come so far so tell me about
#
what happens to the scientific community what happened to the scientific community last
#
year when this sort of erupted because like you said earlier you wouldn't fill a room
#
with people studying the corona virus and now it's just an existential threat to all
#
of us so everybody is kind of on it so what is the kind of research happening there you
#
know is it a kind of you know a fortuitous moment in time that a lot of other developments
#
have come together at a time where we can actually handle this we sort of can figure
#
out a way ahead tell me what's happening in the science now like you've also pointed
#
out about how you know by the end of 2020 there were like thousands of papers on corona
#
virus just proliferating all over the place so much productive work kind of happening
#
on this which can you know show benefits down the line for future pandemics or even understanding
#
our biology a little better in general so give me a sense of what's been happening in
#
the science since this was discovered yeah some of this was happening you are absolutely
#
right that it was in many ways fortuitous that it happened when it did happen even i
#
would say as opposed to five years ago i wouldn't even go back 40 years i would say even even
#
five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago we have to think about when when hiv first
#
started infecting or when hiv became a major cause of aids in the 80s and was spreading
#
all across the world at that time it took many years for the genomes to be sequenced
#
at that time there was no rt pcr diagnostic test and then if we flash forward from that
#
to even sars which was when i was doing my phd at that time it took months to get the
#
sequence of a genome and now we can get genome sequences very quickly and that has been part
#
of what has been done with this genomic surveillance it is scary that we are finding variants but
#
we are finding variants because we are able to look for variants and we are able to sequence
#
hundreds of thousands of genomes fairly quickly we would not have known about that in the
#
past so so the the science at that level and that's because of of next generation sequencing
#
and the both the cost of that has gone down and the speed and accuracy of that is is just
#
mind-blowing from that respect with respect to vaccines also the platforms that are available
#
now with all the molecular platforms and the rna platform a number of things had to happen
#
to be able to make the rna stable and to be able to deliver that because rn is a fairly
#
unstable molecule and to be able to deliver that and the seminal papers happened just
#
a few years before this mrna vaccine came out for or these two mrna vaccines the Pfizer
#
one and the Moderna one came out last year and were shown to have fantastic efficacy
#
and so again I mentioned the the history of that and that was definitely a perfect storm
#
of that one other aspect of this is we were just talking about the structural biology
#
but the spike protein was the structure of the spike protein was determined very very
#
quickly because there were a couple of labs Jason McClellan being one who had identified
#
the structure of the MERS coronavirus spike protein and he used a very ingenious technique
#
of basically stapling it with two molecules two building blocks which are known as prolines
#
so he used two prolines to be able to stabilize it and and he knew that trick and that trick
#
was utilized in in the design of of three of the vaccines that seem to be working very
#
well the Pfizer the Moderna and and the J and J vaccine so all of these things happened
#
most people are not aware of them and perhaps they don't need to be aware of them but you
#
are you are absolutely right and now that these platforms have been shown to work that
#
we know that we can go through trials in such a rapid manner they will be used for other
#
other viruses and and for other infectious diseases but also the pace by which these
#
booster shots can now be created for any variants of concern is is also quite spectacular and
#
and that's definitely on the scientific front on the non-scientific front just the technology
#
that has advanced over the past few years and has allowed us to work from home and even
#
have this conversation this didn't exist the the Wi-Fi the broadband on none of this
#
existed even 10 years ago at the level that people could work from home in large numbers
#
and then finally I will point out the the information on the internet where people can
#
actually look at cases in their own area and information can sometimes be paralyzing but
#
I always feel that it's better to know than the alternative and then to be ignorant and
#
to be able to see the cases in the area the measures that are being taken in real time
#
this is the first pandemic of that of the flattening the curve so as to speak and all
#
of these things happened at this time it would not have been possible in any previous pandemic
#
yeah it's so stunning and I could agree with you more about you know that even this conversation
#
would not have been possible 10 years ago we may not have known of each other you know
#
you may never have written the book because who knows you know to sort of just be asked
#
by a publisher who's looking at your tweets and saying how this guy knows what he's talking
#
about so it's quite remarkable and it's but it's also a thought that you know as you mentioned
#
earlier that not everybody has this I mean if you just for example you know we take the
#
internet so much for granted the people in Kashmir went so many months without it you
#
know and and for us it's like oxygen we can't imagine life without it at one point in this
#
book you talk about how these viruses that cause respiratory diseases are a problem because
#
you said I think I'm quoting from memory here quote breathing is not optional stop quote
#
and in a similar sense I think for many of us who are now used to it and take it for
#
granted the internet is something like that before I can move on to my next question I
#
also want to sort of you know you mentioned the structure again another line that I was
#
struck by from the book about what the virus does about you know the way it's looking to
#
fit into a cell is that at one point you wrote quote a virus is like a thief going from one
#
house to another with one key trying to see what it can open with it stop quote which
#
is a stunning line like I'm you know I'm going to you know show this to my writing students
#
as an example of show don't tell about how you know just with one visual you make so
#
much so clear and at another point another line of yours that I loved was when you talk
#
about how we can't make out the color of the virus and contrary to the popular depictions
#
of it which is red and all that and you say quote SARS-CoV-2 does not look like a leechy
#
stop quote so all this is you know and the book is full of stuff like this so for anyone
#
who's listening you know just kind of pick up the book you'll read it in one sitting
#
and hopefully you know gift it to all your friends because everyone needs to know this
#
stuff so my next question is about what does this virus do within the body because even
#
that's some some place where our knowledge has been evolving and perhaps a virus has
#
also been evolving but our knowledge has been evolving like it's not just a respiratory
#
thing it's you know it does so many different things it you know the symptoms are can be
#
different they can be respiratory they can be fever they can be gastrointestinal where
#
it like you pointed out it attaches to the you know ACE2 receptors within the within
#
those particular tracts and it causes blood clotting and sometimes a virus doesn't kill
#
you the immune system does with you know what are called cytokine storms which you also
#
described and explained so well in your book give me a picture of what happens you know
#
what are the different things that the virus does within the body and what are those things
#
which you know make it so much more lethal and so much more something we should worry
#
about than some of the previous sort of viruses of this sort yeah so in a lot of asymptomatic
#
people and those who have very very mild infection the extent of the virus spread is basically
#
the nose and the upper respiratory tract and they are still infectious because when they
#
are sneezing when they are breathing those virus particles at least in the early part
#
of the infection they are they are they are coming out from their nose and and their mouth
#
and their throat after a while the virus though it it goes in certain people so that may be
#
the extent of infection in a lot of people who are spreading the disease in other people
#
though then the virus goes down into into the delicate parts of the lungs and then infects
#
there and that's when the disease starts to get more severe and we have people who need
#
oxygen sometimes ventilation as well and from that point once it goes down there and then
#
the immune response starts with the hyperactive immune response and the cytokine storms that's
#
when it becomes almost a battle and then from there the virus can go through the bloodstream
#
and infect other parts of the body as well and this is sort of has been a moving target
#
at first everyone as you mentioned thought it was a respiratory virus but now it's known
#
to infect various other parts of the body as well it's been it's been definitely found
#
even in the nervous system and and even it's thought to be found in parts of the brain
#
and is responsible for this aspect of long covid now which is also referred to as as
#
post covid syndrome in which people are are having mental effects of this in addition
#
to the the loss of smell that's happening there are gi tract disturbances as well in
#
a number of people early on it was thought that it was spread a lot through through fecal
#
matter that does not seem to be the case early on it was thought to be spread a lot through
#
surfaces and surface contamination that now is is thought to be minor and and surface
#
cleaning and decontamination does not have to be as much it is before but basically you
#
are right it can in the first stage it's in the upper part of the respiratory tract then
#
it goes down to the lower part of the respiratory tract and then there is this this hyper immune
#
response stage as well that that happens in in people and because of this because it's
#
such a moving target there is no single drug that is a a magic bullet because in the early
#
part of the stage you what you're trying to do is you're trying to stop viral replication
#
but later on you're actually trying to slow down your immune response you don't want to
#
slow down your immune response at the first part of the infection because then it might
#
get to become more life-threatening as well and then what happens is if you use a lot
#
of the antivirals towards the last part of the last part of the disease then it's it's
#
not as effective anymore either most antivirals work very well in the the early part of the
#
infection you know one of the things that I noticed about the policy response was that
#
the policy response initially consisted mostly of blunt tools you know like lockdown and
#
like whatever and we'll come back to that later and part of that is just state capacity
#
both intellectual capacity and your actual power and all that but you know if you move
#
away from policy to the scientific response one there has been some remarkable science
#
happening in all these are really different vaccines coming out and we'll discuss that
#
in detail as well but as far as the treatment is concerned it seems that what was thrown
#
at the disease to begin with were blunt tools in the sense that there were things that might
#
have worked in the past for you know other viruses or I think remdesivir was tried during
#
ebola and didn't really work even there and there are you know even though everyone in
#
India is talking about shortage of it it's still you know trials haven't really shown
#
that it even works there still seems to be this massive fog people have tried drugs of
#
the past people have thrown all kind of quackery at the problem what's been the reason for
#
that that when science quickly figured out structure and you know genetic code and all
#
of that all of those things and came out with all these incredible vaccines why is it so
#
difficult to treat when it actually gets going and what are the sort of the different methods
#
that have been tried and that haven't worked and here it seems that it is almost like science
#
in the battlefield it's not like you're doing science in a lab you're doing science in a
#
battlefield where every day you know medics are also coping with the pressure of trying
#
to figure a way out this this shit then gets politicized because if Trump says hydroxychloroquine
#
is the answer then everyone you know gets on that bandwagon where is the science on
#
it why is this aspect you know so difficult.
#
And that's one thing that I worry about as well is that when the next pandemic strikes
#
if it is a respiratory virus if we don't have a medicine cabinet of drugs if we don't have
#
a way to develop vaccines very quickly if we don't have pan coronavirus vaccines and
#
pan influenza vaccines in the future then we will be stuck with a similar situation
#
just like this where the tools at the start of the pandemic are very blunt instruments
#
such as the measures that were taken during 1918 and 1919 and even before that with lockdowns
#
and quarantines and school closures and and businesses closures and masks and and things
#
like that they are effective but you are absolutely right they are not very precise tools they
#
are very blunt instruments and part of that is that it takes really a long time to develop
#
drugs longer than to develop vaccines vaccines can use these platforms and they can they
#
can be created in at least what we noticed in this case they can be created in a shorter
#
So all the drugs that we have for this were repurposed from previous diseases and for
#
other other outcomes and and they're used as other treatments and so what we have here
#
is that drugs that were not designed for this particular virus so we know all the structure
#
we know what the function is and now we are at the stage that a number of these drugs
#
are in phase one and some of them are I believe are in phase two as well where they will be
#
So but you can see it's taken over a year and in pandemic terms that is not acceptable
#
as far as I see it so we do need to build up a set of other broadly applicable or blood
#
broadly usable drugs for future pandemics that that target some of these specific targets
#
that we know to be existing for RNA viruses.
#
The problem with that and I've mentioned this elsewhere is is a lot of the incentives and
#
a lot of the economic aspects of creating a drug where it takes a few hundred million
#
dollars to actually get a drug and it takes many years to go through and run the entire
#
gauntlet of trials to get the drugs out there but when there isn't a pandemic there is no
#
demand for that drug so there you cannot price the drug to actually even recoup your costs
#
so I think the description of this that's been used and I like it a lot is that no one
#
really values the fire extinguisher until there's a fire so how are you going to price
#
that fire extinguisher how are you actually going to go through the research and development
#
process to make that and my hope is that now with this pandemic people will see this as
#
a serious threat to to human populations in the future and there will be public investment
#
I think there has to be a certain level of public investment in in many of these drugs
#
for the future and so when the next pandemic invariably hits we will be better prepared
#
to respond with drugs at the outset yeah no that's a great point the incentives problem
#
is massive and it's something that I've also addressed in my past episode that if you think
#
back at a politician say 10 years ago you know if he spends a ton of money preparing
#
for something that does not happen you know there's so many other things he could do with
#
that money there's so much opportunity cost how do you even and politicians have short
#
lifespans in terms of there is always the electoral cycle they're always looking at
#
the next election so spend the money on something that will help them get those votes rather
#
than you know spend on the unseen you know preventing a pandemic because if you if you're
#
too successful you know people will think hey why did he kind of do all that spending
#
and hopefully this pandemic will sort of be like a reality check and push for more of
#
that so it's not so bad the next time around tell me now about the the vaccines because
#
I remember if you know up till a few months ago you had you know scientists and doctors
#
and all of that going on air and saying entirely plausibly that listen there has never been
#
a vaccine for any coronavirus for example though you've pointed out in your book that
#
in animals it has but I think but not in none of the ones that affect humans that scientists
#
have been trying for decades to find a vaccine for HIV and they haven't succeeded we may
#
never have a vaccine and and now we have so many vaccines and they're also different and
#
they're all remarkable and and you know with the mRNA ones it seems like they're kind of
#
you know designed on a computer it's just like miraculous take me a little bit I mean
#
you know share a little bit of the wonder of what has just happened and which I think
#
most normal people just don't get that what a freaking miracle it is almost yeah and they
#
were partly designed on a computer and they worked really well and definitely so I have
#
a friend who works for one of the major vaccine manufacturers for the mRNA vaccine and he
#
and I converse quite a bit on Twitter he he reviewed a certain number of chapters of this
#
book and we were just talking about it the other day that even I don't think anyone expected
#
the those vaccines to work as well as they did if you recall the initial efficacy target
#
was anything above 50 percent efficacy will be approved if it and the the endpoint that
#
they use was because they wanted to lessen the severity of disease and hospitalizations
#
and death was was basically symptomatic COVID-19 and and severe disease but now if you tell
#
anyone you have to take a 50 percent efficacy vaccine nobody will take it everyone is talking
#
about even AstraZeneca which has been remarkably successful in in halting the number of cases
#
in the UK and saying I don't want to take that vaccine because there are now vaccines
#
with with 95 percent efficacy that that have been created and in this case this has happened
#
because the spike protein was relatively a soft target for for the immune system and
#
in terms of the antibodies and the T cell responses that were possible with the case
#
of HIV HIV is so elusive if you think about the variants that we have you can think about
#
HIV as variants times a million or even times a few few million in that you're not actually
#
looking at even one one virus that you can create as a certain set of immune responses
#
to you are you're looking at a whole galaxy of viruses under that HIV umbrella so in this
#
case we were quite lucky in that there was basically essentially one virus and we were
#
also lucky that when the predominant strain changed there was one mutant that became predominant
#
in the middle of of 2020 most people didn't care about it because it wasn't that much
#
more infectious and all the vaccines seem to work against it we definitely got quite
#
lucky although it remains to be seen now like how long that immunity lasts for it could
#
be anywhere from I suspect it would be in the order of at least a year but I think
#
scientists are saying it could be anywhere from eight months to two years yeah and there's
#
a striking quote in your chapter on vaccines where you know right at the end you say quote
#
vaccines don't save lives vaccinations save lives stop quote and this again you know takes
#
a focus away from the science purely to everything else that is happening and you said earlier
#
in this episode that you know the science is the easiest part of many problems to solve
#
you know there's all this other stuff that is happening like we've seen you know in the
#
course of the last year how much things get politicized you know the wearing of mask almost
#
became an ideological issue you know and and all of that and you know once you take a stand you
#
harden down on the stand and then it's you know you've got your own narrative going on and that's
#
all that matters so as a scientist just looking at how the response has been and how you know
#
everything's panned out what are your kind of feelings on what is happening like is it a
#
sense of that look you know science could have progressed much more but fine these are setbacks
#
but at least we are progressing or is it do you sometimes feel like what is even the point when
#
you look at all this nonsense that's happening in the real world all this incredible politics
#
where we now know you know we are in the second wave in india and you've got these large public
#
gatherings you know happening all over the place and in your book of course you've you know in
#
past pandemics and in your book i think you've mentioned a couple of them we know what the large
#
gatherings do you know i think you mentioned cholera and chinmay may have mentioned in his
#
book cholera during the kummela or yes and even during the hajj just so that we don't seem to be
#
picking on one particular community you know so what what does kind of one do about all that that
#
what are your feelings on this it is incredibly frustrating to see this and i saw this play out
#
over the course of of the last year and and and over over time as i've lived in the united states
#
here you have this country which in terms of the scientific output and in terms of scientific and
#
medical advances is definitely one of the countries at the forefront and you see this in terms of the
#
research the guidance even the cdc plan they had a pandemic preparedness plan for just this kind of
#
situation and then on the other hand you see this this subset of people who regardless of what is
#
presented to them live in this post-truth world where ideology dictates what they believe and that
#
has real world and and consequences on on people's lives i mean at at this time 550 000 people have
#
died in this country of a largely preventable disease i'm not saying that that people would
#
not have died but so many people did not have to die in this country and that definitely is
#
is infuriating and and from that perspective i will say yes that it is a failing of of society
#
in general and and and maybe we don't inculcate enough critical thinking or maybe we don't
#
we don't see things from the perspective of the broader holistic view and we're thinking more in
#
terms of our group and our community and our own selfish needs and and our desires and beliefs but
#
that is something that definitely will need to be solved and i think in 2021 one of the big issues
#
of this year is going to be around vaccination inequality definitely plays a part with with
#
some countries having received very few doses of the vaccine and those might be breeding grounds
#
for for future variants as well but even within india you see like this dichotomy right now
#
of people a lot of people mainly urban mainly educated mainly middle class to upper middle class
#
or even rich who want vaccines and are now queuing up and demanding that they receive vaccines
#
and a large number of people who are unaware of what these vaccines might do to prevent severe
#
disease who have somehow who are somehow under this notion that this this pandemic is not really
#
a big deal or wasn't even a big deal they don't see these variants as causing any future disease
#
and are really more scared of the vaccines than they are of the of the disease of the virus and
#
of the variants and so i see this as a communications breakdown to both sets of people
#
i mean the communications have to be different to both groups of people you have to communicate
#
and and have outreach to people to convince them to take the vaccine and in that case it can't be
#
sort of a heavy-handed way of pushing people or or or lathi charging them and forcing them to
#
take vaccines or even financial incentives always tend to backfire because people think
#
that there is something wrong with the vaccine that's why i'm getting paid to get the jab
#
so that's that's the type of outreach that that definitely hasn't happened to that extent and then
#
the other outreach of having a clear and consistent vaccine policy as to when people will be receiving
#
vaccines for those people who actually want them right now and and yeah i mean it's definitely a
#
mess yeah i mean i've heard so many crazy things about vaccine that i like i don't even know how
#
to respond like one person i know said that they might as well put boiled water in the vaccine it
#
doesn't make a difference another person said that the vaccines are causing the second wave
#
a third person said that the reason the second wave is happening is because the money bags behind
#
the vaccines want you to get the vaccine so you have these ridiculous sort of theories
#
going around now another thing i want to kind of explore and and it's something that i've been
#
thinking about is how differently public policy people on the one hand and scientists on the other
#
hand may explore the question of truth and evidence for example you know for a lot of public policy
#
there is no definitive evidence because you can't do a controlled experiment like my friend
#
Shruti Rajgopalan once sort of gave a great analogy she said that imagine that you want to
#
find out whether dropping a coin in water displaces water or not right does the water level go up or
#
down simple enough to do now in a lab obviously you can just take two beakers and put them in a
#
two beakers and put the coin in one of them and you can measure it and everything is controlled
#
but imagine doing it in a swimming pool where you put the coin in the swimming pool and you try to
#
see what's happening and there is no way of getting a meaningful result and there are just so many
#
other factors so many variables that come into play and you don't know counterfactuals either
#
you know now i see this that you know a public policy people may therefore come from an ideological
#
lens and you know and and and it's really interesting how the ideological lens affects how
#
people look at certain measures like lockdowns so people on the right over here because modiji did
#
the lockdown were with the lockdown but in the u.s it was just the opposite where because trump did
#
not want a lockdown they were like you know we don't need a lockdown and all of that now the
#
thing with the lockdown is that you can never actually get evidence evidence on whether it
#
worked or not you simply don't know the counterfactuals forget every country being different from each
#
other every district is different from each other bandra is different from andheri you cannot
#
possibly do a controlled experiment or have any sense or whether something worked or not so in
#
public policy you're handling all these variables in science you're not now what i see is that both
#
of these sort of lenses of looking which are perfectly valid lenses in their specific fields
#
that a public policy person always has to believe that even if the evidence appears to be for him
#
it may not be correlation may not be causation there are so many other factors involved
#
nothing is definite but taking this lens to science becomes a huge problem and vice versa
#
that if science people are always you know that what works what doesn't work we want a clear
#
answer there has to be a clear answer there has to be a way to design a clear answer that wouldn't
#
work now one example of the former kind where you know people within politics or policy take
#
that sort of lens where the truth is kind of up for grabs and it's a narrative that matters
#
that can really affect the response like just a couple of days ago our health minister harsh
#
warden said something about homeopathy must be encouraged and the ministry of ayush and i've
#
written about them in the past even in your book you talk about for example how so many people
#
don't get the importance of double blind randomized controlled trials and it's not just that people
#
think homeopathy works because of the placebo effect they also think it works because and like
#
you've pointed out in your book and i've written about it in columns in the past that many diseases
#
will just revert to the mean that you'll be bad you'll be bad for a while and then you get better
#
and people will ascribe that and give credit to the medicine and all of that and once they believe
#
in a particular medicinal system it almost becomes an ideological thing and then the
#
confirmation bias kicks in and when it appears to work they'll be like why and when it doesn't work
#
they'll be like whatever it could have been worse and all this shit happens so but the fundamental
#
question is about these conflicting mindsets where some people take the mindset to science
#
where they don't realize that there are definite truths out there and all science is a quest to
#
get closer and closer to that you never absolutely know everything and similarly there can be an
#
attitude which is not a science attitude more an engineering attitude perhaps where you know that
#
where people will believe that oh society can be fixed from the top down and we can find the right
#
answer for everything is this something that you've thought about or noticed i have and i think you
#
expressed some of the the limitations of each of these approaches each of these approaches quite
#
succinctly definitely with respect to drugs and the confirmation bias but that applies to anything
#
that we look at retrospectively we can look at previous pandemics and say okay this is we should
#
have prepared for this because something in this pandemic is very similar to this and we can say
#
no this pandemic is absolutely different from every other pandemic because these other additional
#
aspects are different so we will the observer will find out what he or she seeks and can confirm that
#
bias with any type of retrospective analysis with any type of forward-looking analysis with a very
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heterogeneous and large system with so many variables and unknowns basically stochastic
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processes it becomes extremely extremely difficult i think the keys here are to basically before the
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experiment is to set what the objectives are if you're going to institute a lockdown what is the
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objective that you want for that lockdown and you can't change that or shift the goalpost halfway
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through or not make that clear that has to be absolutely transparent for any public policy
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initiative and that has to be known to the public as well to get their buy-in to get their involvement
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in that as well and once they know the threat of the disease what the goals of that public policy
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outcome are and then so in that sense pragmatically if you take an approach and things don't turn out
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as badly as the model then that's good and why it exactly happened is is not necessarily relevant
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i mean there's a parable involving the buddha and it says basically there was someone who had been
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struck with an arrow and and when the person is struck with an arrow he wants that arrow removed
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and he wants to get better so all the processes of of how that happens and why that happens that can
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come at a later date that does not necessarily appeal to me as a as a scientist where i always
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feel uncomfortable with not knowing and i always feel that there are too many uncertainties around
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that and i saw that when when the pandemic curve the epidemic curve went down for india
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and everyone was saying well the pandemic is over and i said well it will take time to figure this
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out to tease out why this happened and we cannot say that it happened because of any one favorite
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reason or any one favorite hypothesis until we figure it out because the exact opposite
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reason can contribute to a resurgence as well and now we've seen a resurgence and there are
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many conflicting reasons as to why it happened it could be any one of them it could be all of them
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but again that will take time so science sometimes takes as you mentioned it takes time to figure out
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answers and in that sort of fog of war we don't have time to tease out what those answers might be
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in that case so what do we do i think there are some models that we can apply now as george box
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said all models are wrong but some models are useful so we have to figure out which model is
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actually useful for the parameter that we want and again i'm as he said all models are wrong
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because a model is inherently based on the parameters of that model and and the the
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the variables and the constraints that you impose upon it and it has to be for something as large
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and and as as drawn out as this it has to be extremely reductionist it can only have a few
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variables otherwise we're going to but in the real world is is very full of of of chaos and of
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instances like the butterfly effect so we don't know what uh what changes early on determine and
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and that's the case even with the the trajectory of a pandemic we don't know what could have stopped
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the pandemic early on when it uh hit the scene in wuhan and were there things that could have been
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done at that time that could have changed the the trajectory of the pandemic so um certain events
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definitely play a part in that and no model can can account for that so i have thought for of that
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and i that's why i give you this this long-winded rambling answer that doesn't matter
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that doesn't really get to answering it properly oh it's a lovely answer and sometimes you know
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just asking the right questions and teasing out the question is more important than finding an
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answer and by the way for the many many many many fashion model friends i have i wish to
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validate your existence and say that hey some of you are useful and so you know getting back to
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what you said about the butterfly effect and chaos seri and sometimes we don't know and
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it strikes me that these words we don't know are actually so important for so many of us to
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internalize we are always so uh desperate to tell stories to ourselves or you know get stories from
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elsewhere which explain everything and everything can't quite be uh explained so in this context
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before i get to my next question i want to read out a great quote by douglas adams uh which i
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love this is douglas adams quote imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking
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this is an interesting world i find myself in an interesting hole i find myself in fits me rather
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neatly doesn't it in fact it fits me staggeringly well must have been made to have me in it now the
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puddle stop quote adams continues this is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky
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and the air heats up and as gradually the puddle gets smaller and smaller is still frantically
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hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right because this world was meant to
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have him in it was built to have him in it so the moment he disappears catches him rather by
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surprise i think this may be something that we need to be on the watch out for and my question
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goes back to you know something we discussed earlier in another context which is humility
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and here it's humility about our species that we tend to believe that we are masters of the
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universe we have sorted everything out i have heard elsewhere that we are basically colonized
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by bacteria bacteria are the masters of the universe in a different context you could say
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that hey viruses were possibly there before and they rule the roast and everything is contingent
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existence is contingent and everything is so fragile and if anything over the last year we
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should have got a greater sense of that and therefore developed more humility and perhaps
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a compassion that comes with more humility and so what and it seems to me that scientists would
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have the closest view of this because you guys are actually you know every day confronting all
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those all these miracles of nature and realizing how small a place you know we play in the universe
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what are your sort of thoughts on this i agree with you completely i am constantly
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uh i'm constantly amazed by how long humans live considering the amount of abuse
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that we we put on our bodies through our entire lives and and how much we disrespect ourselves
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and on all the things that we do i mean the life itself is is is absolutely fascinating um for me
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and what you said definitely resonates with me it strikes a chord and this is where i disagree
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with some other experts like harari who wrote in in homo deuce that there is this this arc of
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progress where humans will will continue to progress but if but as you mentioned a lot of
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it is just like so much uh dependent on random events our species could have been wiped out so
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many times in the past and there are these these pieces of evidence now that you can look at um
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from from a scientific perspective and i think uh tony joseph whose book you mentioned he mentions
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a certain number of them but there are others as well where humanity could have been wiped out at
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any moment in the past as when we were when our ancestors were in africa when they were coming
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out of africa and even more recently during the cold war when we were at the brink of of mutual
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destruction between the superpowers the world could have ended at that point and just the fact
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that it didn't end doesn't mean that it had to be that way as as you so eloquently said using that
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using that puddle analogy yeah you know the eloquence was douglas adams's uh not mine and
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in fact if you think about it you know the law of truly large numbers tells you that the universe
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will end one day it is incredibly inevitable i mean the law of truly large numbers by the way
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is different from the law of large numbers for my listeners the law of truly large numbers says that
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if there are enough iterations of something then no matter how unlikely the you know the
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unlikeliest event is inevitable to take place if there are enough iterations i once wrote a column
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on this in the context of poker where i think the headline of the column was in unlikely is
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inevitable that if you understand the law of truly large numbers you realize that you can't take
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anything for granted there's so much luck in everything so you know i've taken a lot of your
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time and what i had actually planned to do was talk about each chapter of your book one by one
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but now i realized that it'll take another five or six hours because there are such such depths
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through the book so we won't do that so i'll just ask kind of a couple of general questions before
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uh we end and and the first of the general questions is uh this that how will this impact
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our medical sciences done in future going ahead because like is this sort of an inflection point
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for where maybe in terms of focus on how we do things differently or maybe just in terms of how
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a lot of the other science uh like uh you know understanding genetics like even ai in medicine
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which eric topol is written about so much how were we at a turning point anyway and has this
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accelerated the turning point moving ahead what can we expect like one of the things that i keep
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hearing about and i wonder what your much more informed view on that would be is about how one
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day we can stop aging or reverse aging which sounds wonderful to me because you know i was
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happier being young than middle age but i'd rather not be old what are your views on that and in
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general going forward uh you know what's the state medical sciences in and uh you know do you think
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we'll be better prepared for the next pandemic i definitely hope that we are better prepared for
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the next pandemic and i think uh at least with certain aspects people will be more quick to if
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it is a respiratory virus than to wear masks than to and to socially distance we certainly
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understand the parlance we everyone knows a lot more about viruses than they did a year ago
#
and i think that's definitely a positive science is moving at breakneck speed there is a lot more
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funding and realization in the world one of the things that we noticed is that again maybe it's
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a confirmation bias on my part but some of the countries that dealt with the the first wave of
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the virus were ones that were not prepared during the sars epidemic a few years ago so their
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populations were were very quick to wear masks and were more compliant of of some of the measures
#
that were taken whether or not that there's a sort of a causal relationship there i don't know but
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that's just an a very interesting observation with respect to science and aging that's a fantastic
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topic and and one that i've been looking at myself as populations age over time and it's something
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that we can go on about is basically around the 1800s onwards we have added most of the world has
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added about three decades to our lives through basic hygiene through antibiotics and and through
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modern medicine and now and and now so we can see most of us will be able to see our children grow
#
up most of our children will survive into adulthood and and see and see some of our our grandchildren
#
and as well which was not possible for most of humanity during our history i don't think most
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people realize what what an amazing achievement that is to be able to do that within less than
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150 years now the next milestone is is increasing that and making sure that people not only live
#
longer but actually have a very good health span where they are healthy during most of their life
#
and so that was actually been a Faustian bargain in the sense that most of the world does not worry
#
about diseases that cause infant mortality and infectious diseases but on the other hand there
#
are diseases now of progressively older people that are becoming more prevalent like heart disease
#
cancer alzheimer's parkinsonism that are affecting the quality of life so if you live longer obviously
#
at at one point everyone has to die and they have to die of something if you live longer
#
the diseases that you will die of are different than the diseases than you would have died of
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perhaps 150 or 200 years ago what will happen in terms of society and how society responds
#
once the pandemic is over is much much harder to predict on the one hand i am hopeful that people
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will take infectious diseases more seriously there will be more interest in science and in medicine
#
but on the other hand i am also disheartened by the fact that even when certain countries are
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seeing that the pandemic is raging on in other parts of the world where millions of people are
#
infected and thousands of people are dying they are immediately eager to move on and to just say
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that that's not my problem and that sort of lack of foresight is not going to help us when we deal
#
with a number of the major problems that face humanity right now and i say right now because
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they are staring at us in the face in the in the next 10 20 years we are at the tipping point of
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climate change deforestation extinction of species the indiscriminate use of antibiotics is going to
#
cause a resurgence of antibiotic resistant superbugs and all of this is happening right now and and they
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will require a longer-term focus and more investment in science but it depends on i'm an optimistic
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person but it depends on on the day and and what i'm seeing in the world around me i am not convinced
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that people take problems that are not immediate as seriously as they should so these are very
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wise and eloquent words i mean next dude next time we do a podcast we should do a 10-hour episode
#
because there is so much to discuss no i really enjoy talking with you because you're asking
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questions in a way not just the questions but in a way that you're um you're actually half answering
#
them and i really like that there's a story uh by shekli who's a who's a science fiction writer
#
and it's basically a machine that knows the answer to everything um and this this machine
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has been created but the machine cannot solve any problems or provide any answers because um
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to be able to do that the questions have to be formulated in such a way that part of the answer
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is actually known and i felt that like having this discussion with you is just we were just
#
so much on the same wavelength and you and you were we were hitting a lot of the answers thank
#
you so much i'm not done by the way in case you think it's over my final question is to come
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no my observation before my final question is about what you pointed out about you know i asked
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a question about the state of the science after the pandemic and you spoke about the state of
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society after the pandemic and i think that's you know a fantastic subject to think about and it's
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it's like one of the things that i think has happened and it's not a good sign is that the
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relationship between the society and the state has shifted to kind of favor the state over this
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period of time where you know the state is asserting more and more of its control you see
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random rent seeking happening over things like whether people are wearing a mask when sitting
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alone in a car you see more of state control more authoritarianism you know and and one wonders
#
whether you know freedom's taken away never kind of get you know it never gets rolled back it never
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comes back so one has to sort of think about that but here's my last question that you know where we
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are sitting in april we are still kind of you know fog of war and your brilliant book which i hope
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everyone listening to this reads will kind of give us a certain foundation of understanding
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about everything that is happening but beyond that even having read the book there are still
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so many questions i have and questions that people have in general such as uh what exactly
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is happening you know the second wave and it's just going on and on when is it going to end
#
what are the dangers what is long covered will the new will the new normal after everything settles
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down be different from what life was like before and also how should we live which is you know a
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deep question in terms of broader philosophical and ethical this thing but just in this context
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just in the context of covid that you know we now know that a lot of the washing of hands and all
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of that is a little bit of security theater because it doesn't really spread through surfaces
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and you know even the temperature thing you know fever is not necessarily your ubiquitous
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symptom it's not even that common but perhaps it's okay i don't really mind harmless bits of
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um security theater and all of that but if you had to advise people on that broader question that
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look covid is not over covid is not 2020 it's very much 2021 it's still here with us and like you
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said we'll have to live with it forever perhaps and hopefully in much milder forms and with our
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bodies better prepared for it and all of that maybe uh you know whether an annual vaccine like
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the flu vaccine in some places or whatever but in general what would you say there's still a lot of
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confusion about this what advice would you give the non-scientist lay person like me who is just
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wondering that hey you know what is happening and how long and what must we do to you know going
#
forward yeah i would say my first thing to say right now is um don't worry too much there are
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things in in with with uh with aspects of unknown that we have to be able to deal with this uncertainty
#
and we have to be able to deal with this uncertainty over time and worrying does not change
#
what what is beyond our control as individuals and as uh as participants in society
#
we have to think about the things that we can do both in terms of of changing our society
#
and being valuable contributors to our society not just in the public health realm but beyond
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that in what you were what you were saying about ensuring our liberties as well beyond that i would
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say definitely get vaccinated when your opportunity comes the vaccines will provide protection you
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may be worried about how they do against variants but again science takes time the vaccines are here
#
now they offer you some protection if it is not adequate protection then there will be booster
#
shots then you will take the booster shots and so this is an ongoing thing but you cannot like you
#
are mentioning chess it doesn't help to think about the end game all the time just think about
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maybe the next few moves and then we'll work out what the what the end game is the variants are
#
definitely contributing to the pandemic in in various parts of the world and the resurgence
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and based on what has been happening in india we don't have the genomic data to
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say it with certainty but it is it is i would say it's it's it's very very likely that the
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various pandemics are are causing this this or are partly responsible for this this new wave
#
and then people are obviously loosening their measures there's another theory that people may
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be staying more indoors because of the warmer months i don't know how much of these individually
#
contribute to that but i mean the cases are real the disease is real it is serious and long
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covid as we talked about is something that is happening and it is real so protect yourself
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hope for the best get vaccinated the same measures that that that you are using in the past
#
will be the same measures that will work for the variants as well it's not a different virus
#
so conceptually i i had mentioned that you can think of people as virus factories as they're
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they're breathing out viruses in the book so what you can think about with a variant as a very sort
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of simple analogy is that people are still virus factories they're breathing out perhaps more
#
viruses and perhaps fewer viruses need to enter your body to cause that level of disease as before
#
they may there might be more viral load and the infectious dose might be less there could be other
#
factors as well but again to simplify that those are probably a certain number of factors that are
#
involved in in making some of the variants more infectious but if you see that as well you can see
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that the measures that you are taking such as wearing masks and and socially distancing
#
and and limiting activities indoors will continue to be important and then the broader question
#
about life that is a definitely a philosophical one and i think we always have to get back to the
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social aspects of this and the inequalities that that we have been seeing all all around the world
#
and we saw this even with um with hiv and i mentioned this even at the end of the book that
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the pandemic doesn't end when it ends only for us and and my fear and worry is that uh even when
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it has ended for us and we are vaccinated and we're protected that uh covid 19 becomes a disease of
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of the underprivileged of of a disease of poverty disease of certain parts of the world where it
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where it lingers on as a serious disease where while we go on with our business wise words
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again and i must clarify here to my listeners that when anirban is saying limit indoor activity he
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does not mean have all your sex in the park what he what he basically means is that listen we know
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that uh you know uh the the spread of the virus really happens indoors is much less outdoors it
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really happens indoors especially in air-conditioned spaces so be careful of social gatherings and all
#
of that especially especially the current virus with the infectious levels it is at we need to be
#
careful and i'll again double down on uh your wise advisor just you know get vaccinated take
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precautions wear a mask you know i love the way that you know in southeast asia because of their
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past experience with uh you know pandemics and pandemic scares it almost became a cultural thing
#
that if you have any kind of respiratory disease even if it's a flu you wear a mask not to protect
#
yourself but out of concern for your fellow person you know and that's become part of the culture and
#
that's a beautiful thing that is what a mask is it is not meant to protect us as individuals but
#
to sort of uh in a sense uh you know assert our place in society that we have a responsibility
#
for each other as well and wearing a mask is part of that but get vaccinated certainly and one more
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thing if i might add kindly do hop over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up
#
anirban's uh wonderful book uh anirban thank you so much i i really love this conversation so much
#
i learned today thank you so much for your kind words on the book and having this conversation
#
with me it's been a few hours but it's it's like time has flown by and as you mentioned i could have
#
kept speaking with you for a few hours more well you know someday we'll no doubt meet again yeah
#
absolutely hey you know the drill if you enjoyed listening to the episode head on over to your
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nearest online bookstore and pick up anirban maha patra's wonderful book covid 19 separating fact
#
from fiction you can follow anirban on twitter at bhalo manush b-h-a-l-o-m-a-n-u-s-h and you can
#
follow me at amit varma a-m-i-t-v-a-r-m-a you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen
#
at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the
#
unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to
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scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive
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and kicking thank you you
