The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Transcript of Episode 1: Razib Khan

Grant: Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Bioinformatics CRO podcast. I’m your host Grant Belgard and joining me today is Razib Khan. Razib would you like to introduce yourself? 

Razib: Yeah sure Grant. I am the director of science at the Insitome Institute. I run a few blogs. I do a lot of random things. I run a blog called Gene Expression I run a blog called Brown Pundits.  I run a podcast for the Insitome Institute called The Insight so just check on Stitcher, iTunes, whatever. And I also run a podcast called Brown Pundits and that’s just like a fun project on the side. I have a Twitter, Razib Khan. That’s basically it. I do some other things. I do some consulting. You know, Grant and I have a conflict of interest, maybe we should just disclose: I did some work for Grant in the past. And yeah so I have my fingers in a lot of different things. 

Grant: Yeah I love your blogs. I highly recommend your blogs. I’ve kept up with them for a long time and a lot of other people have as well. So, what made Razib Razib? 

Razib: So yeah, a combination of genes and environment. If I want to think like a behavior geneticist. I do have a pedigree, I have three siblings. And I can tell you that there’s much more concordance between my youngest brother and myself. We didn’t really grow up together because I’m way older than him so that does suggest that there’s a strong heritable component of some of my tendencies. But in terms of growing up, I grew up in Eastern Oregon. So I think that gives me a very different perspective than a lot of people that I’ve met in academia who grew up in, say, upper middle-class suburbs. 

Razib: I grew up in “cowboy country”. There were literal cowboys at my high school in terms of that’s what they did after school as their job. So I have kind of a different cultural perspective. I consider myself a northwesterner, but I’ve lived in urban areas in my adult life. So, you know, I’ve seen the start-up scene in the Bay Area, I’ve lived in Austin. So what made me me is kind of like having this life background, I think, where I lived in rural areas, my dad was a college professor, and I lived in urban areas and I saw the global economy and I see the global economy. My family’s from Bangladesh but obviously I’m an American. 

Razib: In terms of my intellectual interests, I started biochemistry as an undergraduate because my family’s Asian American and if you’re going to do biology it has to be biochemistry or biomed but they don’t really understand it. But I was always attracted to genetics. I actually did a fair amount of molecular genetics as electives for the biochemistry which as you know biochemistry was in the chemistry department; it wasn’t in the biology department. 

Grant: A respectable degree.

Razib: Basically what we always say is we had to take physical chemistry, which is like. You know, at my university physical chemistry was a very difficult course so it was like we took physical chemistry. We are legit chemists okay? 

Razib: So that’s where I started but eventually, I faded back towards genetics and genomics. I’m not really good with my hands in terms of pipetting and stuff like that, so benchwork was never my thing. I worked in IT for a while and then eventually I went to grad school at UC Davis. I did not finish. I am still everything but a dissertation. And I worked in evolutionary genomics mostly with mammals and I do a lot of work with humans. I’ve worked for personal genomics companies. 

Razib: I have a lot of interest in history that gives me a unique skill set in being able to do the data science, you know, doing some algorithm writing as well as knowing basically what outputs or intelligible to the end-user, which can be kind of difficult if you’re a technical science person. Anyone who has ever seen an error output on a computer understands that that can be a problem with the technical person because error output does not tell a normal person anything except it scares them. So that is a skill being able to figure out what the consumer needs definitely that I think I bring to the table.

Grant: And where do you think you’re heading in the future? I mean obviously you have very broad-based interests and you found your way to science communication platforms and is that something you’re planning on doubling down on?

Razib: Yeah I don’t know, I mean it depends on, and I’m using a start up word here, what your bandwidth is. Right? I still do write for various publications when I get the chance. I don’t do it really for the money. There’s not that much money in it but who else is going to speak about what I speak about? If there is another Razib Khan I’ll give them my notes and I’ll just move on, because you know I’ve got three kids. I’m a busy guy–you know what I’m saying? 

Razib: I do it partly because you know who else is going to do that? But the Insitome Institute purview is to do science communication. And that’s what Spencer Wells and I do, my boss who is the director, we do the Insitome podcast. And so yeah there’s still a lot of science communication to be done and that I do expect to be doing, but I also do work in consumer genomics as you know. I do a fair amount of contracting and consulting with people and I do have some experience in that space that I would like to provide. I am trying to actually finish some papers, which I don’t know if I should talk about, but I’ll just put it out there. I am trying to finish some papers on some topics that nobody else seems to be really interested in and get that out there. So I’m trying to do a bunch of different things, so I’m not in a situation where I  have a straightforward “what am I going to do with my next 20 years”. The past 20 years have been pretty surprising to me. I mean who knew what genomics-based data science was 20 years ago? It wasn’t a thing. So what’s going to be a thing 20 years from now? And I think a lot of people feel this way. So my goal is to be nimble and you know just go with the punches and try to survive in this world because it’s pretty tough right now. 

Grant: You’ll find your way. So speaking of consumer genomics companies, what’s your take on what’s been happening in that space in the last couple of years, and where do you think things are heading?

Razib: I did a podcast with Libby Copland, Lost Families, and we talked a little about the Insitome in April, if listeners want to look that up type Libby Copeland, she has a book out, Lost Families. She asked me that and we had a discussion a little back-and-forth because she’s done all of this research in consumer genomics. 

Razib: I have friends who work in 23 and Me, friends who work in industry, my boss founded the  Genographic Project . I actually have consulted for Linda Avey, the founder of 23 and Me. I consider her a friend. She is a really good person by the way. I’m just gonna put that out there. I have nothing bad to say about her. So, I’ve had a lot of discussions. 

Razib: It seems like there’s a leveling off of growth in that field. And some people say oh it’s because of privacy concerns. Other people say it’s kind of market-saturated for the initial wave of consumers. I suspect it’s both.  I do think the privacy concerns are starting to spook a lot of people. But who they are speaking is the next marginal consumer. So the initial consumers that were going to get it, they were going to get it no matter what. You could say, “oh we are going to use your DNA and we are actually going to release it out to the cloud in a tarball and everyone can access it.” And there’s just a core group of people that don’t care. They are still going to do it. So those people are insensitive to that. As you get further and further out through word-of-mouth because these are Christmas gifts, you know things people talk about over Thanksgiving in terms of their results a lot of awkward results sometimes.

Grant: I will just interject here that Grace, who is helping us out with this podcast, got as a Christmas gift from me: an Insitome ancestry kit. 

Razib:  Okay okay, so you know eat your own dog food. I’ve been on all of the platforms. So there’s ups and downs to all of them and it’s an interpretation service so they are all interpretation services. The killer app of the last decade that just went by was Genealogy and Ancestry to a great extent. 

Razib: The medical aspect has not really become unlocked yet. I do think it will be. So right now we have about 10% of Americans on these platforms okay? 30 million people. Probably a little bit more than 30 now. But it’s really leveled off so that’s about 10% of Americans. I don’t believe by 2030 we are going to be any lower than 75%. Okay? I think a lot of kids will be genotyped, you know low coverage and various coverage sequencing. Grant you work in the medical genetics phase, medical genomics, you know the gain that can be had by detecting novel variants, you know variants of unknown significance in young children if they have an idiopathic condition. And these are not most children but there’s enough with them that a lot of hospitals are already doing this with “mystery conditions” for newborns because newborns cannot give you any feedback about what’s going on with them. So these are the niche cases. They’re little segments but the segments keep on expanding. 

Razib: So those of us who remember the Internet in the 1990s, which Grace probably does not remember, but it was super exciting for a lot of us. And we had no idea what people were going to do with it. We had fantasies. I will tell you Grant, I think I’m a little older than you. I remember getting a gopher, which is like a pre-web thing, and it was a text interface. I remember reading about Ethiopia on the CIA gopher page for Ethiopia. And I was super excited because I could read about Ethiopia without opening an encyclopedia or going to the library. That’s what I thought the Internet was. That’s what the Internet was in 1993. And now the Internet is a lot different. The Internet is podcasts, Twitter, a lot of stuff that is good and also considerably bad stuff, but different than I was expecting. But this is you know 25 years since I got on the Internet and I couldn’t have guessed what we see around. Like some things I could’ve guessed but like a lot of it is super surprising to me. 

Razib: So think in genomics 2010 is the same as 1995. Like that’s when 23 and Me really came out with a big marketing push and people started talking about personal genomics. It was pretty low boil I think for the first five years. And then it really jumped up right before 2019. A lot of this is marketing spend. If you look at Ancestry‘s marketing spend, as it increased there was a linear response with purchasing. I know through the grapevine that the former CEO of ancestry–he kind of admitted this–basically they did not expect that there was going to be a linear response to their marketing spend. I think it was a little bit more than linear because word-of-mouth triggered and kicked in at some point. And so it just became one of those gifts like $100 price point $99 $79.

Grant: Black Friday sales.

Razib: Yeah and so it just became a thing and like YouTube unboxings of Ancestry kits became a thing. So it’s become part of our culture but it hasn’t become ubiquitous. And so I think that’s the next step. I think medical is going to help make it ubiquitous. The problem with medical and consumer is you don’t want to buy a kit that tells your mom that she’s going to develop breast cancer by the time she’s 60. Telling people that they have a health risk is not a feel good gift. So they need to figure that out. I’m not a marketing person. It’s not my job. I think probably some sort of distribution deals with hospitals is the way to go. I think that’s the future. 

Razib: And also I wouldn’t be surprised if some European country with socialist or semi socialist medicine it’s just like “You know instead of building our own genomics service for our citizens and let’s just contract with Ancestry or 23 and Me and have them build something for us”, turn the key, and then maybe the data is stored in those countries with some bureaucrat somewhere. I know for example Estonia is trying to do things to provide genetic kits and services to its people just as part of its national health. Because I know a scientist who is on the Government board and at a conference he came up to me and started asking questions about it. Because they’re like “We are serious. We are a small country and we can scale it.” And they have really really good distribution and fluency with information technology. That is what it is. Genomics is information technology.

Grant: So speaking of data protection and distribution where do you think those Genomes will be housed? I know there are ideas about this and many of them are in conflict with one another. 

Razib: Yeah. Well I think it depends on the country. In China they’re going to be housed where the government wants them to be housed and the government is going to know everything about your genome. Like they’re already sampling males because they want to get genetic profiles of potential criminals because 90% of violent crimes are committed by men. So that’s why they’re targeting males. So in China it’s going to be like that. 

Razib: In Europe they have the GDPR, which is like the data protection law. That’s what genetic data is under. And different countries have ways of enforcing this. Like in France genetic testing of the sort that we do in the United States for consumers is banned. Like they have to ship it to Belgium, drive to Belgium, and pick it up if they’re a French genealogy fanatic. There are some. Germans have a fraught relationship with genetic science, So if it’s anything relating to human genetics, they are really terrified of it. So that’s not really a good market. Other European countries like Scandinavia are much more open and much more enthusiastic. 

Razib: So how do they deal with privacy? One idea that Spencer and I have been kicking around is some sort of encryption key where you’re the only one that can unlock it, which is the kind of thing that is relatively common. And now with block chain and all of these crypto companies we could just cryptify your genome. So you are the only one who is able to unlock it that way. Of course the problem is if you lose the key, it’s gone. But then sequencing is pretty cheap too. So you could just do it again, so that’s one solution. 

Razib: The issue with genomics is, aside from somatic mutations, your sequence does not change. Your germ line mostly doesn’t change, there’s a few mutations over time whatever. Anyways so if someone has it, it’s there, they have it forever. So my genotype and a GCF Of my whole genome sequence is actually publicly searchable, if anyone wants to search Razib Khan genotype, you can find them. I’m not scared personally because I’m not an important enough person, where someone would design a bio weapon to come after me. I mean it would be way cheaper to hire a hitman.

Grant: Did you already buy life insurance?

Razib: I do have life insurance. So you know but if I was the head of state somewhere there would be a concern. Maybe. Maybe. Bioweapons are expensive and not very effective. I’m not super worried about that. There will be a point where sequencing is so cheap and so many people have done it in so many different places, that I do wonder if privacy concerns will just disappear. You know we share a lot on social media about ourselves and nobody seems super stressed about it even though if you had talked to people like a couple of decades ago they would be like “that’s creepy.” I wonder if people will be more chill about it in the future. One of the weak points is hospitals. They are not very good about data protection. Like there have been traditionally problems with a lot of hospitals. And they usually just pay a fine and they’re like whatever. The issue is if you do your genome and they release it by mistake…

Grant: Once and done. 

Razib: Yeah it’s out there. It’s out in the wild. And so I don’t really know the long-term prospects for privacy. I think in the short term privacy is feasible if you care. I don’t care, but if you care, there are services you can go to that are very bespoke, where you can be sure and trust that they are deleting your data and stuff like that, but that’s not going to be the thousand dollars genome or $300 genome. That’s going to be people that will charge you a premium because they are going to validate everything in a way that you know that they are deleting everything. They are sending you a physical copy. There are things you can do like that. I think in the short term, we don’t know for sure, but I strongly suspect that a lot of consumers are going to be okay with a lot less privacy than you would think.

Grant: Yeah it seems to be. I am on 23 and Me under a pseudonym. I paid cash for a prepaid card. I had the kit shipped to another state and address that was completely unconnected to me and through a series of coordinated happenings, I got the kit in my own hands, but of course these things can be triangulated through family members and what not, so it’s not foolproof. 

Razib: Yeah I think if you are a white American, it is highly likely that you are easy to identify. Like it’s 95% likely now just because there’s enough people in there. Like if you’re adopted and you don’t want to know who your relatives are, do not do this because you’ll automatically get a match. And maybe you’ll delete it from your mind, but that’s going to give you information automatically. So when you have 10% penetration that’s penetration for almost all the pedigrees for Americans. There’s still some gaps for black Americans although that’s closing and other groups. But really the way the statistics of this works is you don’t really need to sample that much to get all the pedigrees.

Grant: Right. Interesting. So based on the mumbling so you hear what things do you expect to transpire in the coming years that you think relatively few people are expecting.

Razib: I don’t know. It’s difficult because I don’t talk to normal people about genetics so anyone I know, they know everything because I talk about it like yeah this is going to happen. So for example I talked to my friend Rob Henderson and he’s a prominent person. He’s a writer he happens to be from kind of a lower class background and he went to Yale. He didn’t know who his biological father was. He’s getting his PhD in social psychology I think at Oxford. He’s a smart guy. He was shocked when I told him “don’t do a DNA test if you don’t want to know who your dad’s family is because you’ll automatically know.” And he was like “really?” And I was like “yeah if your dad is a generic white American it’s in there. You’ll automatically know.” If you’re ambivalent, which he was, you shouldn’t do that. 

Razib: I think I told Grant the story I don’t know if I did, it’s a really weird story. One of my friends had heard that his dad had had an affair and he had a half-sister. And he was like “Should I use one of these tests to find his half siblings. What are the chances?” And I was like “You’re going to find something, not necessarily the half sibling but you could figure things out of who’s related to who and all the stuff.” He did get a match of someone who looked like a half sibling, but it turned out it wasn’t a half sibling it was his stepdad sister. So he found out that his stepdad is his biological dad. He said he’s not gonna tell his mom, and he’s not gonna tell his stepdad, who he hates. And so these are the things that are going to come out. And I don’t even know that his stepdad knows because I think his mom probably, you know. His mom might not even know about his parentage. But my friend’s problem is he saw the match with his stuff and so she probably saw the match with him. So don’t open some things that you don’t know how to deal with. It’s like a Jack-in-the-Box coming at you. Don’t be surprised. 

Razib: And sometimes it’s funny and silly works like I had a friend and she’s like classic southern California blonde and her husband who is 100% Irish American but she’s like “I think he’s part black because of his features“ OK I was like “well you know you guys should just do the test” because you know they wanted to have kids. It turns out they both were hemachromatosis carriers or something, but it’s not a big deal. It’s whatever. But here’s the funny thing: he turned out to be 100% Irish, and she was 2% African. And so we figured out that there is a blank spot and her mom’s genealogy from the early 19th century. This is not a shocking thing. It’s just a big laugh, that she was looking for black ancestry and her husband, and it turned out that she herself had had an ancestor who passed from black to white in the early 19th century, which is not super over the top. And so that’s silly. That doesn’t affect a lot of people. 

Razib: But with the genealogy thing you might think it’s silly, but for a lot of people it shakes them in weird ways. I didn’t find anything super shocking. I found some surprising things, but nothing that was super shocking, so I can’t relate to that personally. And honestly who really cares who your ancestors were. That’s just my personal opinion about me, but to a lot of people it’s a much deeper thing. And there’s all these stories that go along with it. 

Razib: I consult on Skip Gates’ show. I didn’t mention that at the beginning, but I consult on his DNA show on PBS. And so George RR Martin he has a thing where his paternal grandfather is Italian and he’s from Jersey and he’s got this Italian background, but actually it turns out that his paternal grandfather was not his biological paternal grandfather. His paternal grandmother was a secretary for a Jewish guy and that’s his biological grandfather. So when he found that out through the genetic testing, that he’s 25% Jewish not 25% Italian. Now I’m only bringing this up because— I didn’t watch the episode and I don’t know how he reacted but— he always had this schtick that he would talk about how he was like Martino or something and he’s Italian and he’s from Jersey. And he can kind of keep the story because that’s how you’re raised but his understanding of being Italian… I don’t know if he wants to bring up the fact that “Well I’m also part Jewish” you know, there’s a lot of things like that that change family stories and that’s not super significant. 

Razib: The disease stuff can be super significant. I’ve had to talk to friends about stuff they found that was surprising, which was sobering because the disease stuff is never “it turns out I am superman and I have super powers.” There’s no gain of function mutations that give you a secret invisibility power that you didn’t know about. So it’s never positive really. I mean for some people it’s positive where they didn’t have the risk for something that was autosomal dominant but really mostly it’s a bad thing. 

Grant: And of course something like that wouldn’t be shocking right? You kind of just do a punnett square or something and you know.

Razib: Yeah, so for other people I have found out things that a lot of people don’t connect you into so I’m not always aware of things that are or aren’t genetic. So I’ll give you a concrete example of this. A friend of mine is at high risk for cataracts. Very high risk to go blind early in the probably have to do surgery and hopefully they’ll have a correction. But his family is from India And one of his parents went blind, but that’s just very common in India because of my infections and stuff. And so that’s what he assumed it was. Because that parent had an eye infection of some sort and so the doctor said “oh it’s probably because you have the eye infection and that’s causing the blindness” and all the stuff. And so that’s when my friend knew. And I mean he’s a college educated person he has a science degree and so he just assumed that that was what it was, but they got his parents tested. And they both have some sort of autosomal dominant trait where you have a 50% chance of getting cataracts by the time you’re 50. And he’s 37 now. So you know, it’s just something that’s on his mind. He has a 90% chance of getting cataracts by the time he’s 65. And I haven’t kept up with the surgeries that he might have to do to not go totally blind. But that was an awkward conversation because when he got the testing I was like “oh there’s only a small probability that there’s going to be anything that’s going to be a problem”, which is true. Your prior is that you’re not going to discover anything new, but there’s going to be a minority of people who are going to discover the new thing. And it’s not going to be a little new thing. 

Razib: If it’s a disease thing, it’s going to be a big thing if it’s going to add value. Because knowing you have a 1.5 greater odds of developing type 2 diabetes is not that big a deal. That’s not really actionable, and that’s not gonna change you very much. But knowing that you have 25 times the odds of getting cataracts by the time you’re 20 or by the time you’re 50 is a big deal. And I felt kind of crappy because I told him honestly “Don’t worry bro you’re not going to find anything. You don’t know anything from your family background“. That’s literally what I said. But there are things like this that happen. And I think this sort of stuff is going to affect our lives in the next decade. And how that’s going to affect consumer purchasing decisions, I don’t know. That’s just an awkward sell. But the kits and the tests are going to get from the people that are deploying them to the people that are going to use them, and that’s going to go back to the doctors. It’s got to go back to the healthcare system. That needs to happen so that people can make better decisions with their lives. Now I kind of sound like an infomercial here, but that’s what it is. It needs to be informational to people about why you want to do this. Some people want to put it off as long as possible, and that’s a choice. 

Razib: In some countries they’re not going to give you the choice. I’m 90% sure that in Britain they’re not going to give you the choice. Because the healthcare system is soup to nuts. They take care of you top to bottom so they are invested in you. They can make the decision for you. And they’re going to nudge you. And they’re already nudging people. And they really want to nudge you hard. So if they find out that you have certain risks or dispositions, they don’t want you to make life decisions that get you really ill because then they’re on the hook for it. 

Grant: And certain HMOs might be the same way.

Razib: Yeah. The issue with HMOs in the United States is they are very sensitive and vulnerable to bad public relations. When you have a government monopoly, they are much less sensitive to bad public relations. As long as the government doesn’t cut their funding, they are fine. That’s the downside of a monopoly. That’s the downside of socialized medicine run by the government. There is no way you have leverage against it aside from through the government itself. The upside is that they can make some unilateral decisions. I do think a lot of innovation might actually happen in Europe because it’s a monopoly and people are scared in the United States. People are scared across the whole world of genetic science partly because of GATACA and the Nazis and all that stuff. Now, use correctly it can make your life better. 

Razib: And so how do you get people over the hump? Well in a system where the government has socialized the cost we as the individual don’t have the final choice on everything. And I think that might allow certain innovation to happen and then it eventually will come back to the United States as people see “oh they’re not using it to round up the genetically unfit“. And if they are using it to round up the genetically unfit then we’re not going to do that. So I’m just saying that we are going to see some experimentation across the whole world with this sort of science and with this sort of technology and we’re going to see what works and what doesn’t and how things work differently.

Grant: Yeah it’ll be interesting to see what happens in China in this space.

Razib: That’s a word for it. Interesting yeah.

Grant: So where do you think science is going and the ways that we do science will change over the next 1 to 2 decades? Tech and all the knock on social effects of tech are kind of revolutionizing everything. What do think this impact and the broader political impact will be in science and in the context of science? 

Razib: I mean it’s weird. Science has had multiple phases. Science and technology have had multiple phases of enthusiasm. Sputnik era: enthusiasm. 1970s: Environmentalist movement etc. etc. and then I think like in the 80s and then into the early Internet era–I mean not to be the old guy but I remembered 1995 to 2000–oh my god we were so optimistic about the Internet. We didn’t realize at the time. 

Grant: Democratize the world right?

Razib: Yeah it’s like “oh I can talk to somebody in Ecuador.” I specifically remember having a chat with someone in Ecuador, and I told my friends the next day “I talked to somebody in Ecuador” it was so amazing. And now it turns out that I didn’t anticipate how toxic Twitter would be, how social media would be used to destroy people. All of these things you can go back and read about it, people did not anticipate that. We didn’t understand the human capacity for depravity. And I’m using that in a very broad broad sense. Like Facebook has been used to coordinate ethnic cleansing in some countries. Like we didn’t anticipate that. We thought it would bring people together, and today I think that a lot of people when they’re not on the web. When they’re not on the Internet, they are happier. Like being disconnected is a thing when I get an email it’s a “now what?” sort of situation. Whereas 25 years ago or even 20 years ago I was like “who emailed me!?”

Grant: “You’ve got mail”

Razib: Yeah it was exciting. Like “oh my girlfriends emailing me”. Like I remember that was a big thing “oh well she emailed me today”. Even though we saw each other every day. So that was like an exciting thing and now today I just don’t want to be bothered. I get a lot of requests because I am a “public person” and so I get a lot of direct messages and sometimes I try to respond. I can’t respond. All these questions and I just can’t deal with it. And it’s made the whole world accessible to me but now I’m accessible to the whole world. And that’s a downside of information technology that we couldn’t anticipate. 

Razib: So what about genetics? I don’t think that we know all of the consequences of knowing all of your relatives. We’ve talked for decades and genetic science about how this is going to affect dating. So I have never done anything like Internet dating. I’ve been non-single since the year 2003. So this is all abstract for me, but I could see there being a situation, where it’s like in the Jewish community where everyone know is a Tay Sachs carrier. You don’t wanna marry somebody with that. Well it’s just like automatically with your dating profiles you might do an intersection with carriers so that you know. A lot of people if you’re just on Tinder you’re not thinking that far into the future but if you’re a match.com you might be. So depending on your level of seriousness you might want to exchange the information ahead of time. 

Grant: It’s more efficient unless you want to go through IVF. 

Razib: Yeah you just could get it out of the way. Some people don’t care but if you want to anticipate having to do a pre-implantation diagnosis which some people might have to do. Maybe just get that out-of-the-way. I don’t have it be a surprise. And they’re all sorts of weird things like some people have bad credit I mean do you ask people immediately? Probably not. The questions about people that you don’t ask immediately and there’s other things that you do. I don’t know if the genetic thing is going to be one that you were asking mediately. 

Razib: The issue with genetics that I tell people is genetics is also something that you see on someone’s face. So you see me and you automatically know kind of where my ancestors are from. My risk of being a cystic fibrosis carrier is is quite well. You just know that as a prior. It’s not like genetics is a total mystery to people. It’s like you kind of know how much money someone makes by the car they drive the way they’re dressed. There’s always information you can get from people and it’s how much you want to put out there. 

Razib: The thing with genetics though is you could fake a sequence, but your genes are your genes. I’m just being honest about it and at some point we’re probably going to have to do some validation services, where you provide the SSL of the sequence. Because what if someone sends you a fake sequence? Because they don’t want to tell you that they have some autosomal dominant trait. It’s common and dating services. What if you carry the dominant for Huntington’s. Even if people are interested in a serious relationship they just don’t want to deal with it. Because that’s kind of heavy. 

Razib: I know people–well I don’t know them personally–but I know a woman whose sister has Huntington’s. And her nephew won’t get tested because he has a 50% chance of being a carrier. You know, she tells him that he should be super serious about protection then. Because she basically said he’s not the most responsible kid. Well, what if that’s on dating profiles? What if you can check it? It’s just like when you, when you blackball people for employment because their credit rating is bad. That’s kind of unfair in a way.

Razib: So is it unfair to not want to date somebody seriously that has Huntington’s? Cause they’re going to develop Huntington’s if they carry the autosomal dominant. Right? So, I mean, these are social questions that we don’t have to confront today because most people haven’t gotten sequenced. And Huntington’s as, as you guys know, it’s a repeat. And so I’m not sure if it’s going to be on a genotype array, like you’d have to do some sort of tagging. So it’s not even trivial to just have it with your 23 and Me. Even if they could provide it, it has to be like whole genome sequencing. So the technology is a little bit in the future, but it’s going to be something we confront.

Razib: Like if you are a person that has an autosomal dominant disease, that’s going to present later in life. That’s pretty, that’s pretty heavy. That’s pretty heavy. And this is why a DNA test for Huntington’s disease is not a feel-good consumer product. Like this is a problem. 

Grant: Yeah. So where do you think academic science is headed?

Razib: So basically COVID-19 has accelerated certain things and the financial crisis in academia that was going to happen because of demographics because Zoomers are a much smaller generation than millennials. What was going to happen is happening now.  

Razib: There are some departments that are laying off. Mostly not in science. STEM is not predominantly dependent on tuition money or liberal arts colleges are when universities get NIH and NSF.  So academic science is special in certain ways where there are certain types of innovation, certain creativity that occurs there that is really difficult to happen, or really does not happen in industry because industry is more siloed.  Just the way sociology works, right? You don’t get the cross-fertilization in the seminars just doesn’t happen. So there’s a reason academic science is there. 

Razib: I do think academic science is getting too politicized.  What’s the next consequence?  One consequence is when people are looking for what to allocate resources to. The national science foundation, NSF funds, non practical things. That’s its goal.  It will have practical implications, a lot of the time, way down the line, but NSF is where you go if you’re an ecology lab and you’re not going to get funded by the NIH, which you’re not. I mean, there’s different ways, you know? So I think that will be cut. 

Razib: I think, I think trust in academia and faith in academia is declining. That means public academia, public academics will have problems because if you’re in a red state, when they go to allocate budgets, they’re going to cut.

Razib: Now. I know universities get a lot of funding from various sources. I don’t really know how comfortable a lot of academic scientists are going to be with public private partnerships, but that’s probably going to be a thing just to survive. There’s some universities, agricultural universities, where I went to UC Davis. They were actually very happy with that. And that’s part of the tradition. Monsanto, or whatever the company is called now, has a lot of projects there. But a lot of academic scientists and universities are not happy with this.

Grant: Hopefully Nassim Taleb is not listening to this podcast. 

Razib: Well, if he is, he’ll say we’re morons and idiots. But Berkeley for example is very, very anti Monsanto. Anti-public private. I’ve had friends, who were discouraged from ever looking into that because it would be seen badly kinda by their department, but I think they need to look at that because the funding is going to be an issue. There’s also overproduction of scientists.  They’re not all going to land in academic spots. There’s going to be a reduction in R2 universities, research 2 universities, liberal arts colleges that absorb some people. That means everyone’s going to be competing for the same few spots. They’re already having, you know, a thousand applicants for one job, so it kind of seems a bit like a hellscape.

Razib: A lot of people are going to be really stressed and anxious. You know, in a way academics are actually quite privileged.  When I was a grad student at UC Davis, I got the best health insurance I ever had by the way, because the UC system is part of Cal, the California buying system. And so they buy gold plated insurance for everybody, at least for graduate students and above. And so, there’s a lot of good perks that come with it, even though people complain, and that’s not a law of the universe. It’s the way our American society works today to give people the leisure to study things that they love and that they’re passionate about. 

Razib: Like I talked to some people on the Senate staff who were prominent Republicans, I’m not gonna name who, but you’d recognize the name. And they were like, “yeah, we can’t defund the universities cause they would say that we were like primitive barbarians, but the first chance we really get without the media saying that, we will do it.”  

Grant: Well, I mean, it’s been quite interesting, as you mentioned, the broad based support has fallen apart in relatively recent times and in just recent years. And this politicization is nothing new in the humanities and so on. It is newer in terms of the kind of openness of the contempt and things like this in the sciences.

Razib:  The whole atmosphere is very, very hot-housed and hot houses, uh, they eventually burn out and so it will. You know, what cannot be sustained won’t be. And I feel like that’s going to be the issue in academia, which might be good for industry.  More people with abilities and skills and talent will go into the private sector, but we’re going to be losing something. We’re going to be losing some really curious creative people who might’ve gone in some impractical directions that would give us some real innovation. 

Grant: Do you think there’ll be a decoupling between traditional universities and funded research? 

Razib: I think there will be more, there’ll be more or diversity of think tank research institutes. And also I think we seriously need to consider the European technical university. Technical universities exist to further technical knowledge. Period. Right? And that’s fine. People would fund that. I mean, you can be a communist who cares. If you’re working in solid state physics, and you’re building a better microchip, nobody cares. That’s your business what your politics are. 

Grant: So I want to make sure we have some, some time to talk about the elephant in the room before we wrap up: COVID.  What the hell happened? How did we end up here? And where do you think things are going? 

Razib: Yeah. I wrote an article in City Journal in April where I simply said it was elite. So people can Google “Razib Khan City Journal.” But basically I said the elite systematic failure. I should have probably emphasized Trump more if I was going to be totally honest, but I didn’t probably because everything when it becomes about Trump, it goes crazy.  So I didn’t say much about Trump in the piece. So my thesis is the American society as a whole is obsessed with symbolic, you know, like, postmodernist stuff where it’s about the word you use and the representation and the symbol. And that is actually what Trump is good at. He’s good at these nicknames, but what will we really need to lead us right now as an engineer? Like some of them I can do the cost versus benefit that can do the math. That’s not our political elite right now. In fact, our political elite right now is mostly lawyers. They’re mostly talkers. 

Razib: So as listeners know, you can’t debate COVID away. You can’t beat them by out-arguing them, by redefining them. Trump has kind of tried to do that a couple of times. Even into the middle of February, you were crazy. Like all the cool kids, all the blue checks on Twitter said you were crazy. If you expressed worry–and I’m not talking about Q Anon and Maga Twitter, I’m talking about Vox and you know, like, Huffington post people–and they were saying like, “Oh, these Silicon Valley guys are just weird, and it’s only like anti-Chinese racism.”

Razib: And so they were more preoccupied about whether we were racist against Chinese people, than whether there was a pandemic happening. Right? COVID doesn’t care about our categorizations. It doesn’t care about our borders. It’s just a force of nature.  It’s like a typhoon, it’s like a tornado. It’s like an earthquake. 

Razib: We shouldn’t be fighting COVID because it’s impacting poor people or people of color. We should be fighting COVID because people are dying. Period. Right? It doesn’t matter–like in my opinion–it doesn’t matter what their race or what their class, what country they’re in, how old they are. One of the elephants in the room of COVID is it really affects old people in nursing homes.

Razib: Um, No offense to Americans or Europeans because there was an article about Belgium.  It’s kind of shocking to me when I think about it, what we do with old people, by packing them into nursing homes and visiting them every now and then. 

Grant: Out of sight, out of mind.

Razib: The mortality rates in some of these nursing nursing homes in New Jersey or in Europe is terrifying. Like large numbers of people are dying. They’re dying miserably. They’re dying horribly. This is why some of us were alarmists. And the fact that we’re not talking more about this says a lot about us as a society and our values. Yeah. It seems to me there’s been very, very little mourning in Paris. They just pushed it out of sight. Out of mind. 

Razib: One of the complaints that I have about the media is they emphasize young attractive… like I believe that every single young, attractive white woman who has died from COVID has been profiled in the media. Okay? I think that the media wants you to think that it could be anybody and it could be, especially these precious people.

Grant: Well, what I found really interesting about the coverage too, is the age range that they look at for that. Right?  I mean, certainly the mortality rate is through the roof if you’re 80 years old and so on. And, in our County, for example, every day, when you have new deaths in that age range, they just list the ages and that’s it. But what’s fascinating to me is that’s also the case for the 55 year-olds, the 60 year-olds, you know, the, the 40 year-olds will get a writeup in the paper. The 20 something year old, certainly will get to write it up. But even the 55 year-olds will get a write up. 

Razib: Yeah. If you’re an old gen X, no. You’ve got to be a young gen X. Now you have to be a millennial. Actually, you just have to be a millennial. If you’re a millennial, you’ll get a write up. It’s generational discrimination. If you’re generation X, no.  If you’re a boomer, no. If you’re silent. Hell no. 

Razib: The thing with the nursing homes is I’ve only read a couple of things because it’s painful to read. We have a sociological problem that I knew intellectually in an abstract way, where the way we in “developed societies” treat our old people is that we rationalize them, just like we rationalize everything in the economy. And so you take your parents, you put them in a nursing home, and they’re taken care of by people who get paid money. What could go wrong? So in normal day to day, that’s fine. You know, even though there are abuses, we all know about it. I’m just saying like, they will take care of them for money, but now there’s a pandemic that they can catch as well from these old people who are miserable, who need extra care and attention.

Razib: What I read sounds like, hell. This is not the way that you would treat your own. Cause you want these people to treat your parents like they would treat their own parents, but they’re never going to. They’re not blood. That’s not how it is. It’s like, we’ve rationalized it. We don’t want to think about it.

Razib: And so the things that I read in the nursing homes, I’m like, “Oh, this makes sense, in a way, because these are people who are probably being paid minimum wage to take care of old people.  and you know, a lot of it’s been really uncomfortable. There’s some gross things and now they’re really sick and they can be contagious to you.”

Grant: You know, what’s been fascinating to me too, is these, these horrific cases, where several bodies were found days after death and it had never been reported and so on, aren’t just happening in, you know, nursing homes in New Jersey, but even in places like Spain, in cultures where that’s not…

Razib: Traditional yeah, but it’s becoming more traditional. And old people, a lot of them, want their freedom. They want to live alone. Sometimes it’s difficult to get them to give up their houses. And I know this personally through my extended family. And that can be a problem. So we have freedom and we have this great economy that provides services to give us this freedom, but I think the problem is we also see the flip side of freedom, where, when push comes to shove, when nature red in tooth and claw comes at us, all of a sudden, you understand why people live in these extended family units, where people can distribute labor and, and things like that. Where it’s not just about the money, but it’s about just the community. And it’s about helping your, you know, relative helping your friend, these sorts of things. I feel like we’ve lost a lot of that. Not everybody. Not every community and not every person, but I know a lot of people who are very alone right now. 

Razib: Quarantine has not been that difficult for me because I’m with my wife and I’m with my kids. I am with my family really as we understand it in the United States, but there are friends that I have who are single, whose lives were socializing with their crew. Sometimes they have to create pods, but it’s whatever. I’m just saying. Those people underwent. Are undergoing or underwent something very different in quarantine than I did. And that’s because of the way we live and arrange our society where people can live alone and have all their conveniences and not be bumped by their parents or roommates or their siblings and all these other things. But the flip side of that is when the water recedes, just you. That’s it. 

Razib: So, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what to say because I didn’t think we were this society. I didn’t think Europe was that society. Like I read the article in the New York Times about Belgium. The government was quite clearly giving the, go ahead, not explicitly, but through some channels for emergency, that paramedics should not pick up COVID-positive people that were dying in nursing homes in Belgium for a while. Because they wanted to keep the hospitals free for people or more valuable actuarially. They were making the calculation.

Razib: I think that it’s been a good opportunity in some ways for genetic scientists. Some companies have gotten on board with COVID testing and sequencing and doing all sorts of things and there’s been some good research that’s come out of it, but it’s been a horrible indictment about the sociology and political science of this country. Not the science, the science has been okay. I think science has done what it can do. And the primary problem is we had a state capacity issue where–I think, you know, Grant–most people “in-the-know” were starting to get seriously terrified by the middle of February. And then when Iran hit around 20th, I remember screaming at what Donald Trump was doing, going to India right now, when he needed to just like start really turning the ship around February 20th. As it is, it was closer to March 15th. Those three weeks were when New York became what it became. That’s when New York was seated. I think we could have dodged New York. I think we got to dodged that, that horrible thing that happened in New York, New Jersey and to some extent, in Connecticut, if Trump had started on February 20th. I think if he had started on February 1st, I think,  honestly we are society is, I think the resistance would have said he was being insane.

Razib: They would have eventually come around. But I think for a long time that he would have been attacked because he shut down the economy and did this and this, and you know, it’s only some dumb Silicon Valley bros and paranoid people and a couple of epidemiologists. So I think that would be too early.

Razib: Ideally he would have started that early, but it wouldn’t be feasible. But I think by February 14th, I think enough people were sure that he could have done something and he didn’t. But you know what? Cuomo didn’t do anything either, did he? DeBlasio didn’t either. So it’s not just a Republican thing. This is not a left-right thing.

Razib: Actually, there’s a lot of blood on a lot of people’s hands in our society, in our elites. And, I don’t think that they will be held accountable. They weren’t held accountable in 2008.  when the financial crisis happened, when a lot of people made a lot of money and the government as a whole bailed out the system, you know?

Grant: And people are upset and, honestly, it seems like a lot of the anger is directed at the measures as opposed to people mourning the deaths from the virus or people being upset with the incompetence, with which it’s often been handled. 

Razib: Yeah I mean, so I think part of the issue is there’s been weird enforcement and weird fixations, and some of it is ideological. So like Florida people on beaches: bad.  Black lives matter protesters: Good.  That was pretty obvious.  Also remember that party of the Ozarks, that was the first big thing that the media caught, and it’s obviously like, let’s just come out and say it: like rednecks and the Ozarks, these are bad people. They’re doing something bad. Well, it turned out there wasn’t that much transmission at all, from what I know because it was outside. If it’s outside, it’s probably not that bad. BLM, those protests, are probably not that bad.  So the outside stuff: not bad.  Inside stuff: bad.

Razib: Right. So when I hear Biden saying, “we should have masks outside”, I’m like, “eh, you know, mandatory mass outside is probably overkill.” I mean, you don’t want to do so much that people don’t believe you. I think that there is a problem with some credibility there, that people need to be more measured. They also need to talk about the fact that we’re working with the best science we have, and that might change. And we apologize if we lead you wrong. Cause they did. They have, and we will.  

Razib: There needs to be more humility, less screaming.  Also some people are just using it to kind of be self-righteous pricks, you know? That’s not getting us anywhere. Like you need to, you need to persuade people with the facts and also, like, show empathy. You’re trying to persuade someone. Not because you want to be right, but because you want them to live. Sometimes I hear some people talking or I see things written and I feel like you’re kind of just showing off about how you’re right and they’re wrong, instead of actually writing in a way that indicates to me that you actually care that these people survive.

Razib: And some of the stuff that I’ve heard people just in my social circle or the media say about people dying in red States, they’re almost, like, happy that these people are being insane. And I’m like a lot of them are economically the same type of people that are like Latino field workers and Riverside. I mean, they’re working in agriculture or in rural areas. And, this seems really inappropriate to me. Like you’re missing the forest for the trees and what’s important. We have a pandemic in this country. It’s about people dying and it’s not about who’s dying.

Razib: You know on the other side, like I have heard things about when it was happening in New York and New Jersey where people were just like, “wow, it’s a blue state problem.” And the fact that we are hearing things like this, that people even say this out loud shows you the problem we’re in, in this country. Like if you’re saying it’s a blue state problem, it’s a red state problem. You know what Obama would have said in 2004 is “There is no red America or blue America,” but I guess that’s very 2004. Like it’s done. That’s all. 

Razib: Or I don’t know, I’m being very pessimistic here, but I don’t,  I don’t see a unifying vision right now.  I don’t see a society that can stitch itself back together.  Sometimes these sorts of external shocks can bring people together, and I feel people were brought together for kind of like a month or two. And then it just all kind of unwound in May. And a lot of it was just economic pressure, which a lot of people have been under. And that’s difficult. I mean, there’s just a lot of difficult conversations that I feel like people are not having compassionately. And I think that’s been the ultimate problem.  When people are acting out in a crazy way, sometimes there’s a reason, you know? 

Razib: I have friends who are academics. And I’m like, “you have like a tenured job at an R1 university. Your salary is going to keep getting paid indefinitely.” I mean, yeah, the university could lay you off, but that’s very unlikely with the type of job you have. Okay. You can do social distancing. You can stay inside.  There’s a lot of people who are living paycheck to paycheck and they’re not in that situation. And this is why they’re not being as rational as you, not just because they’re stupid. I mean, they’re probably not as intelligent, whatever, but really they have no options. They’re desperate. 

Razib: There’s that survey that showed that like 30% of young adults have thought about suicide in the last six months. And obviously it increased. I think some of it is hysteria and scaremongering because young adults are not at risk of dying of COVID, but some of it is also like they don’t have a job. Where are they going to get a job? What is the future of this country? There’s a lot of hopelessness, you know, and instead of us stepping up or at least stepping up to COVID-19, we’ve kind of fallen down on the job.

Razib: That’s how I’m feeling right now at the end of the summer of 2020. Maybe something will change and turn around and I’ll be smiling and I’ll be happy. But I stopped–you know Grant, we’ve talked about this–I stopped paying close attention to coverage in June, just because. It didn’t seem like we had what it took to really attack it. And so I will continue doing my quarantine as best as I can. And that’s it. I’m not, like, there’s only so many people I can talk to, only so many people I can convince. We convinced our family and friends that we could go to quarantine early. That took a lot of work in March. That’s done. And as far as the rest of society. I’m not one of those people that’s like, “Oh, you don’t wear a mask. You should die.” Okay. I want to convince people that aren’t doing it, why they should. Okay. But I’m also going to express my alarm. I mean, I have friends who are just like, you shouldn’t be alarmed like this isn’t that bad. And you know, it’s just like, when I read about the way people die, it’s bad.  

Razib: The only hope is–this is the positive spin I will put on it. I just actually had another podcast today that I recorded with someone about COVID-19– I do think that herd immunity is probably a little lower than 50% for various reasons. So it will end even if we don’t get a vaccine, and we’ll pick up the pieces and figure out what this means for us. Because I think after it ends, I feel like people can take a breath and kind of take stock. And I don’t know if they’re going to be happy with what they conclude about our society. I don’t think that we’ve fully processed it because it’s not over, we’re still in it. You know, we’re still like waking up every day, checking the news, checking in with our family and our friends. More and more, more and more of my friends have gotten COVID-19. Not that many, but some of them have tested positive and they have the symptoms, and it’s going through my network right now. But,  I don’t know. I’m just kind of on a pause right now. And I feel like our society is on a pause, but COVID-19 is not on a pause. It looks like it’s slowly winding through and we might be incompetent enough that herd immunity is what protects us. So yeah, on a down note, that’s my COVID talk.

Razib: [laughing] I don’t know. I shouldn’t laugh. I mean, it’s just like, what do I do? This is a nervous laugh. 

Grant: Yeah. If I were forced to prognosticate about it…

Razib: Dark times, man.

Grant: I think there’s a good chance. We’re going to hit some kind of a, I don’t know about a real herd immunity, but at least an effective herd immunity, transient herd immunity, under conditions of social distancing before we get to a vaccine.

Razib: Well, so I don’t know. I think this will change. I think coronavirus will change some things.  I don’t know if I’m ever going to shake hands again. It was always one of those things where I kind of did it because of social pressure. I just didn’t really want to touch someone’s hand. I don’t know where they are, what they’ve been doing. And also like in business, when you shake someone’s hand, I’m always thinking, “okay, how many hands has this person shook today? I’m not just shaking your hand, dude.”  I mean, I’m gen X, I went through the HIV training and that took. Okay? I extrapolated. So I’m not going to shake hands. There was some stuff out today about how teens are not having sex and not like interested in it. You know, I think this is going to affect a lot of people with personal contact until we have a vaccine.

Razib: But even after a vaccine, like this is the first big infectious disease that we’ve had, that has hit our public consciousness this way and had this impact since the 1918 flu. I know the 1957 flu was as bad as this in terms of mortality, but our culture was not impacted in the same way.  

Grant: No one talked about it and it’s very strange.

Razib: There are some newspaper reports about it. People died, but the economy did not get hit that badly. 

Grant: It didn’t imprint on people’s consciousness. Right? Sure. It was in the papers and people working in hospitals obviously noticed. People knew some folks who died and so on, but it wasn’t super new. It wasn’t really remarkable at the time. 

Razib: The world is different. And our economy, the downswing was as big as the great depression in some ways. I mean, it’s obviously structurally different, but you know, I mean, okay, like this is worse than 2008. It is worse than anything since World War II, you know? Great leap forward was really bad. There are bad things that happened after WWII locally. But this is I think the biggest global event since WWII.

Razib: So how can it not affect us psychologically? How could it not change us in terms of how we see. Like when I, when I see movies or TV shows where people are in bars, I get the heebie-jeebies.  I think that will eventually fade, but it’s gonna take a long time. And I think there’s going to be a lot of people on the margin who are already germophobic. We’re just going to say, “you know what? I lived through 2020. I don’t want to take the risk. I don’t want to take the risk. I will drink at home.” Or if you’re going to invite me to drink, it’s got to be a patio place.  

Grant: Well and the virus probably isn’t going to disappear. Right?

Razib: It could be endemic.

Grant: We may get control of it, but it’ll still probably crop up here and there.

Razib: It’ll be endemic. Yeah. So that’s what we’re talking about. I mean, that’s what we’re seeing in places like New Zealand that controlled it. Like it just creeps back in. So until it evolves and gets us really.  I think it’s going to be here to stay. Now that does mean work demand for services of biological scientists. So, you know, undertakers did really well during the black death. I’m assuming. I mean there’s work for people even in a time of COVID-19. In a way I feel like the economic and even the mortality impact is going to be dwarfed by the cultural, social, social impact. 

Razib: We have small children, Grant, and they just kind of accept coronavirus. My three-year-old will yell coronavirus at people if they walk too close to him when he’s in the front yard.  My three year old is also really morbid. He thinks all old people die of coronavirus. Someone recently died that we know, and he’s like, “did he die of coronavirus?” And we’re just like, “dude, there’s other diseases” But he doesn’t know any other diseases. All he knows is about coronavirus, people talking about coronavirus. And I don’t know how my kids get the news. My son has kind of Browner skin and he’s scared of the police, you know? Not even joking. He’s just telling me he should be scared of the police. I’m like, don’t worry about it.

Razib: It’s just like, you don’t know how kids find out these sorts of things. As adults, we’re trying to pay the bills and not get sick. And you got these little kids running around, all these little kids and like, what are they thinking? You know?  It’s just really weird for them because I have a sister who has a newborn or infant.  We don’t know if she’s scared of strangers or he’s scared of strangers. He’s never seen a stranger! So he’s seen doctors, seen parents and seen grandparents. That’s it. Those are the only people that that three month old child has ever seen up close. Right. So, I think we need to think of the social impacts. It is the big thing about COVID-19. Cause I think we know what CFR is, you know, 1%, I don’t know, something like that.

Grant: And actually, so, you know, you mentioned one positive thing about the herd immunity threshold, possibly being lower than anticipated. I’m not sure, but we’ll see and time will tell, but, the CFR does seem to be going down. So the mortality in hospitals, the unadjusted apparent mortality is down dramatically. 

Razib: And also the people who are getting it are the less. Unfortunately, the more vulnerable people probably got hit first.

Grant: Even adjusting for the various risk demographics and so on, mortality in the hospital is still down substantially from the beginning of the pandemic and it looks like it’s down about 40%. Treatments like Remdesivir and all these things, right? I mean, seem to be making a difference and maybe people are getting initial viral loads that are a bit lower. Cause they’re  keeping better distance, wearing masks.  You know, if you were sitting right next to someone at a bar in New York City before they really realized what was happening, you probably would’ve gotten a higher initial exposure. 

Razib: So I think, you know, my discussion on COVID-19 has been very pessimistic. I think from the purely biomedical perspective, I’m cautiously optimistic. I do think we, as in the world, are putting a lot of resources into vaccine work, and I understand vaccines are difficult to develop. They’re not trivial. They’re often not very effective. So I don’t want to oversell this, but everyone’s focusing on this. I would not be surprised if we have a good vaccine in two years, perhaps a year. I have heard that China and Russia are already vaccinating people in government and their army. So, We’ll know how those trials work, you know what I’m saying? They can take a few risks that we couldn’t in the United States. So I think treatment’s going to get better.  So I think the mortality will drop. So from a purely biomedical perspective, we will make it through this, just like we did with the ’57 flu or the milder ’67 flu or the ’68 flu. 

Razib: So that’s doable. I think what COVID-19 though has shown is, what is the measure of a society? If I had to bet if we had like Mitt Romney, I think we would be doing considerably better. Okay. I just like slopping out another Republican. I think Trump to be Frank is. Tactical genius, but he has zero strategic division. And so he’s been going from thing to thing. So yeah, like, I mean, I think that’s a problem, but I think we still would have had a problem with compliance with localities doing their own thing. And so, I think that it’s a little disturbing because.

Grant:  It’s like there would have been a lot of impatience. 

Razib: Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And in China, they’re not going to have impatience because the government will just like put you in prison. So there are issues like that. I do think the positive lesson would be like South Korea. Okay. I mean, South Korea, they say, “Oh, there’s been an outbreak.” But  if you look at the numbers compared to the United States, even adjusting for population, it’s nothing. If we had South Korea’s problems, we would be so happy. They have a test and trace capability in part because of previous scares. 

Razib: So, you know, we are in this biotech space and I do wonder.  Just things get more efficient as the demand increases, the prices go down, it gets better and better. We have great information technology. Why can’t we have spit kits? For everybody in the world, literally for everybody in the world. Yeah, it would be an expense that we have to take every year or so to produce new spit kits and all these things. But, it’ll prevent what we have just gone through as a world. This massive loss of GDP productivity, psychological trauma. Frankly, I don’t know if I should say the word trauma, but I think a lot of people have been traumatized. There have been suicides in third world countries. I mean, Americans are broke, but we’re not broke, broke ever. Even when we’re broke, you know… There’ve been suicides in India. People have starved in India. Okay. So, the outcomes can be quite deleterious. 

Razib: And so if we just invest more in the technology to do what we need to do. What we need to do is test, trace and contain. That seems to be the magic quote solution. If we ever deal with something that’s very similar. Whereas something like SARS, it’s R0 was lower, I think. And the issue with SARS is it wasn’t as asymptomatic. You got it, you got it. You go to the hospital, you didn’t spread it to other people. The problem with COVID is it hit this sweet spot of 50% asymptomatic spreading it. And these are the people that are spreading it all over the place. And they don’t know. So if you had good testing. So if there’s a local outbreak, just tell everyone to test. Mail everyone a kit, just have it there.  

Razib: Why can’t we do it? You know, we have all of these like other things. We have cruise liners. We have these huge industries that are just for consumption. Why can’t we have this one thing to protect us against this tail risk, which is inevitable. There’s going to be another infectious disease outbreak in the next generation or two. So have the facility. Obviously it is going to have to be a different test, but a lot of the other things can be put in place. Look at South Korea. They didn’t have a test for COVID-19. They had to create one, but they have the whole framework set up. And so, if we’re still going to have a World Health Organization, I think that is really marching orders. 

Grant: Are you optimistic? The U S will do that?

Razib: If you can’t say anything. Nice. Don’t say anything at all. Look, I want to be optimistic. I’m optimistic about being optimistic someday. I don’t know. 

Grant: Good stuff. Alright. 

Razib: I think we’re good.  So I guess I would say though, even if I have a lot of pessimism and concern about what’s happening in this country. I am still excited about the world and excited about science and excited about discoveries. Yeah. 

Grant: Yeah. Thanks. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a really fun conversation.