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Jamie Metzl

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2021-12-08

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2021-12-08

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1. “Know you don't mean, and it doesn't mean that we don't stand for something. Like, I certainly am a strong proponent of vaccines and masks and all of those things. But if we don't hear other people, if we don't let them hear their voice in the conversation, if it's just saying, well, you may think this and here's why it's wrong. The argument may be right. It'll just never break through.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “But he sent me a link to the CDC QA page on the CDC website. And it wasn't that. It was people who were, I mean, it was written by people like me who were convinced in the benefit of these vaccines. So the questions were framed, they were kind of like, they weren't really the framing of the people with the concerns. They were framing of people who were just kind of imagining something else. I mean, you always talk about kind of humility and active listening”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “But on this issue, I'm just having regular updates, Daniel is great. And so I said to him, I said, why don't we have an honest process to get the people who are raising concerns about the vaccines in their own words to raise what are their concerns? And then let's do our best job of saying, well, here are these concerns. And then here is our evidence making a counterclaim and here are links to if you want to look at the studies upon which these claims are made, here they are. And Daniel, who's incredibly busy, I mean, he reads every, I mean, it seems every paper that comes out every week. And it's unbelievable.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I totally agree. And I think that humility, it's a constant theme of your podcast, and I love that. And so after the conversation, debate, whatever it was, between Sanjay and Joe, I reached out on Twitter to someone I've never met in person, but I'm in touch privately to a guy named Daniel Griffin, who's a professor at Columbia Medical School and just so smart. He gives regular updates on COVID-19 on a thing called Twiv this week in Virology. I'm a critic of Twiv for its coverage of pandemic origins.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Well, if the white people want us to have it first, there must be something wrong with it. They must be doing some ex. And so we have to listen to each other. Like I would never. I have disrespect for everybody. And if somebody is cautious about the vaccine for themselves or for their children, we have to listen to them. At the same time, Public health is about creating public health. And there's no doubt. I think Joe was absolutely right that older people, obese people are at greater risk for being harmed or killed by COVID-19 than young healthy people. by everybody getting vaccinated, we reduce the risk to everybody else. And so I feel like like. And then there's the community argument. And I absolutely think.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Afraid of the vaccine, there are a lot of people who don't trust the scientific establishment. And lots of them have good reason. I mean, it's not just people think of like Trump Republicans. There are lots of people in the African community who've had a historical, terrible experience with the Tuskegee and all sorts of things. So they don't trust the messages that were being delivered. I live in New York City. And we had a piece in the New York Times where in the earliest days of the vaccines, there was this big movement, let's make sure that the poorest people in the city have first access to the vaccines because they're the ones, they have higher density in their homes, they're relying on public transport. So there's this whole liberal effort. And then in the black community in New York, according to the New York Times, there was very low acceptance of the vaccines. And they interviewed people in that article and they said.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Or our hospitals are now full of people who weren't vaccinated, and in many ways our emergency rooms are full of unvaccinated people here in the United States. So I think what Sanjay could have done, but there was a conflict between wanting to kind of win the debate and wanting to take the temperature down. What he could have done is to say, well, here's an anecdote I have a counter anecdote, and we can go on all day. But here's what the statistics show. And I think that was the thing. So I think it's a healthy conversation. We can't, I mean, there are a lot of people who are.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “So I know Exactly. Where exactly? So the basic thing, and coming back to Sanjay and Joe's conversation, was that Sanjay was trying to use statistical evidence and Joe was using anecdotal evidence. And so I think that for Sanjay, and there are all kinds of things where there are debates where often the person who's better at debating wins the debate regardless of the topic. So I think what Sanjay could have done. And Sanjay's such a smart guy is to say, why, well, that's an anecdote. Here's another anecdote. And there are lots of different anecdotes. And there certainly are people who have taken the vaccine and have had problems that could reasonably be traced to the vaccines. And there certainly are lots of people, I would argue, more people who've not had the vaccine, but who've gotten COVID and have either died.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Anecdote. Here's another anecdote of like when Francis Collins was with you and he talked about the world wrestling guy who was like 6'6 and a big muscly guy. And then he got COVID and he was anti-vaxxed and then he got COVID and almost died. And he said, I'm going to.”

   2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “They had two different categories of arguments. So Sanjay, what he was trying to do, which I totally respect, was saying there's so much animosity between these differences. Let's lower the temperature. Let's model that we can have a respectful dialogue with each other where we can actually listen. And Sanjay, again, I've known him for many years. He's a very empathic, humble, just a all-around wonderful human being. And I really love him. And so he was making cases that were based on kind of averages, studies, and things like that. And Joe was saying, well, I know a guy whose sister's cousin had this experience. And I'm sure that it's all true in the sense that we have millions of people who are getting vaccinated and different things. And what Sanjay should have said was I know that's.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So, I know I'm going to get myself into trouble here because Sanjay is a very close friend. Joe, my personal interaction with him has been our two interviews, but it's like my interview with now. Sit down with somebody for four hours. It's a lot and great. And then private communication. So I am personally more sympathetic to the arguments that Sanjay was making or trying to make. I believe that the threat of the virus is greater than the threat of the vaccine. That doesn't mean that we can guarantee 100% safety for the vaccine, but these are really well tolerated vaccines. Having said all of that, I felt that Joe Rogan won the debate. I mean, it was, and the reason that I felt that he won the debate was they were kind of”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “The end of that whole conversation, Joe said, Well, I'm just a comedian. What do I know? And I just felt that, yes, Joe Rogan is a comedian. I wouldn't say just a comedian among other things. But I also felt that he had a responsibility for just saying whatever he believed, even if he believed or believes, as I think is the case, that Ivermectin should be studied more, which I certainly agree, and that healthy people shouldn't get vaccinated, healthy young people, which I don't agree. I just felt at the end of that conversation to say, well, I'm just a comedian. What do I know? I feel like it didn't fully integrate the power that a person like Joe Rogan has to set the agenda.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “For sure, I think we all do about just distilling and communicating in ways that people can hear. Like a lot of us say things and people just can't hear them. Either because of the way we're saying them or where they are. And like I said before, I'm a big fan of Joe Rogan. I've been on his show twice and whatever, but when Francis Collins was in his conversation with you, he said, which I think makes sense, is that when somebody has that kind of platform and people rightly or wrongly who follow them and look to them for guidance, I do think that there is some responsibility for people in those roles to make whatever judgment that they make and to share that. And as I mentioned to you when we are off mic, Sanjay Gupta is a very close friend of mine. We've been friends for many years and I fully supported Sanjay's instinct to go on the Joe Rogan show. I thought it was great.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “To self serving, but like in the analysis, but he captured that into those things about it's like the whatever, the outbreak of chewy goodness near the Hershey factory. I wonder where that came from.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Where they have this largest collection of these bat coronaviruses in the world and they're doing all these very aggressive research projects to make them more aggressive. And then you have the outbreak of a virus that's primed for human-to-human transmission. It was just logic was my first step. And I kept gathering the information. But John Stewart distilled that in a way that just everybody got. And I think that I loved it. And I just think that there's a way of reaching people. It's the reason why I write science fiction in addition to thinking and writing about the science is that we kind of have to reach people where they are. And I just thought it was just there was a lot of depth, I thought, and maybe that's.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “So, for me, in the earliest, I remember those early days when the pandemic started. I was just sitting down, it was late January, early February 2020, and I just was laying out all of the evidence just that I could collect trying to say make sense of where does this come from. And it just, it was just logic. I mean, it was all of the things that John Stewart said, which in some overly wordy form were all at that time on my website. Like, what are the odds of having this outbreak of...”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I loved it. And so not to be overly self-referential, but it's hard not to be overly self-referential when you're doing however long we are, five hour interview about yourself, which reminds like when you had Brett Weinstein on, he said, I have no ego. But these 57 people have screwed me over and I deserve credit. It's hard. Yeah, no, so I am a person I will confess. It's enjoyable. Some people feel different. I kind of like talking about all this stuff and talking, period.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And so as we apply these godlike powers that we've now assumed for ourselves, we better be pretty careful because it's so easy to make mistakes, particularly mistakes that are guided by our best intentions.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Should have it. I mean, it's very healthy. And I think that's what I was saying before that's the danger of all of this selection is that we make selections just based on social norms that are so deeply internal that they feel like they're eternal truths. And so we talked about selecting for IQ. What about selecting for a kind heart? Like there are lots of you talked about Hitler and Mein Kampfler has certainly had a high IQ, my guess is higher than average IQ. If we just select, I mean, that's why I was saying before, diversity is baked into our biology. But the key lesson, and I've said this many times before, the key lesson of this moment in our history is that after nearly four billion years of evolution, our one species suddenly has the unique and increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Yeah, but it's, you know, that's like the thing. It's like whenever you hear these words, like humans, what will they think of next? But I do think that, and I write about this in Hacking Darwin, that as people come to believe that making children through the application of science is safer and more beneficial than having children through sex will start to see a shift over time toward reproduction through science. We'll still have sex for all the same great reasons that we do it now. It's just reproduction less and less through the act of sex.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “There's just so many different kinds of people. I just saw this on television, but there are people who put on those big bunny outfits and go and have sex with their people. I mean, they're just like an unlimited number of different kinds of people.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I don't think we'll stop having sex because it's so enjoyable. But we may significantly stop having sex for reproduction. Even today, most human sex is not for making babies. It's for other things, whether it's pleasure or love or pair bonding or whatever.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “do more work and again and again and again it's about ethics and values because we're at an age and this has become a cliche of exponential technological change and so the rate of change is faster going forward than it has been in the past so in our minds we underappreciate how quickly things are changing and will change. And if we're not careful if we don't know who we are and what our values are, we're going to get lost. And we don't have to know technology. We have to know who we are. Our values are hard-won over thousands of years, no matter how new the technology is, we shouldn't and can't jettison our values because that is our primary navigational tool.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Just bring people into the conversation with the tools to be able to engage, but also into the decision making process. And that's a real shift. And there are countries that are doing it better than others. I mean, Denmark is obviously a much smaller country than the United States, but they have a really well-developed infrastructure for public engagement around really complicated scientific issues. And I just think that we have to like it's great that we have Twitter and all these other things, but we need structured conversations where we can really bring people together and listen to each other, which feels like it's harder than ever. But even now in this process where all these people are shouting at each other, at least there are a bunch of people who are in the conversation. So we have a foundation, but we just really need to do.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “But those conversations are just so essential. Like we have to be talking about ethics. And then that raises the question of who is the we. And coming back to your conversation about science communication, maybe there was a time earlier when these conversations needed to were held among a small number of experts who made decisions on behalf of everybody else. But what we're talking about here is really the future of our species. And I think that conversation is too important to be left just to experts and government officials. So I mentioned that I'm a member. We just ended our work after two years of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing. And my big push in that process was to have education, engagement, and empowerment of the broad public to bring not”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Well, it's not location, it's selection. It's like there are selections that are made about who gets to a certain place. And when like it's like Harvard Admissions is a filter. So we're going to have to decide what are the values that we want to realize through this process because diversity has just baked into our biology. We're the first species ever that has the opportunity to make choices about things that were otherwise baked into our biology. And there's a real danger that if we make bad choices, even with good intentions, it could even drive us toward extinction and certainly undermine our humanity. And that's why I always say, and like I said, I'm deeply involved with WHO and other things, that these aren't conversations about science. They're conversation. Science brings us to the conversation, but the conversation is about values in ethics.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Came here as refugees after the war, most of that side of the family was killed. So I get what it means to be on the other, and me, you said you're reading Mein Kumpf, on the other side of the story when someone said, well, here's what's good and you're not good. And therefore, so I totally get that. Having said that, I do believe that we're moving toward a new way of procreating. And we're going to have to decide what are the values that we would like to realize through that process. Is it randomness, which is what we currently have now, which is not totally random because we have a sort of mating through colleges and other things?”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Who was born, and we had some predictive model to predict IQ, and we had decided as a society that IQ was going to be what we were going to select for. We were going to put the highest IQ people in these different roles. I guarantee you the people in those roles would not be the people who are legacy admissions to Harvard. They would very likely be people who are born in slums, people who are born with no opportunity or in refugee camps who are just wasting away because we've thrown them away. And so it's an easy, like it's the idea of just being able to look under the hood of our humanity is really scary for everybody. And it should be. I mean, I'm also an Ashkenazi Jew. My father was born in Austria. My father and grandparents.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Including things like IQ, but even disease resistance. I mean, this is well known, but if you people who are recessive carrier of sickle cell disease have increased resistance to malaria, which is the biggest reason why that trait hasn't just disappeared, given how deadly sickle cell disease is, biology is incredibly complex. We understand such a tiny percentage of it that we need to have, in your words, just a level of humility. There are huge equity issues, as you've articulated. Let's just say that it is the case that in our society, IQ and IQ-like traits are highly rewarded. There is an equity issue, but it works in both ways because my guess is let's just say that we had a society where we were doing genome sequencing of everybody.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “You had if you spoke T-Rex and you spoke to the dinosaurs and said, hey, you can select your kids, what criteria do you want? And they say, oh, yeah, yeah, sharp teeth, cruel fangs, roar, whatever it is that makes you a great T-Rex. But the answer from an evolutionary perspective, from an earth perspective, was, oh, it's much better to be like a cockroach or an alligator or some little nothing or a little shrew because the dinosaurs are going to get wiped out when the asteroid hits. And so there's no better or worse in evolution. There's just better or worse suited for a given environment. And when that environment changes, the best suited person from the old system could be the worst suited person for the new one. So if we start selecting for the things that we value the most”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “If you see some shapes, how can you position them and things like that? And so IQ, I mean, it really hit its stride in certainly in the Second World War when we were just, our governments were processing a lot of people and trying to figure out who to put in what jobs. That's the starting point. Let me start first with the negatives that our societies, that when we talk about diversity in Darwinian terms, it's not like diversity from Darwinian terms. Oh, wouldn't it be nice if we have some moths of different colors because it'll be really fun to have different colored moths, diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species and of every species. And it's impossible to predict what diversity is going to be rewarded. And I've said this before, if you went down.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “But that thing is correlates to a lot of things which are rewarded in our society. So every study of IQ has shown that people with higher IQs, they make more money, they live longer, they have more stable relationships. And that could be something in the testing. But as Sam Harris has talked about a lot, you could line up all of these kind of IQ and IQ-like tests correlate with each other. So the people who score high on one score high on all of them and people think that IQ tests are like a thing like the Earl of Dorchester is coming for dinner. Does he have two forks or three forks or something like that? It's not that. A lot of them are things that I think a lot of us would recognize are relevant, just like how much stuff can you memorize?”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “It's a great question and just stepping into the IQ, we'll call it a quagmire for now. It raises a lot of big issues which are complicated. Maybe you've listened to Sam Harris's interview with Charles Murray, and then that spawned kind of a whole industry of. Of debate. So, first, just the background of IQ and it's from the early 20th century, and there was the idea that we can measure people's general intelligence. And there are so many different kinds of intelligence. This was measuring a specific thing. So my feeling is that IQ doesn't is not a perfect measure of intelligence, but it's a perfect measure of IQ. Like it's measuring what it's measuring.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Start with the bad news is that the world's first CRISPR babies have been born. And so we need to pull my book out of production because you can't have a book on the future of human genetic engineering and have it not mention the first CRISPR babies that have been born. But the good news is in the book I had predicted that it's going to happen and it's going to happen in China and here's why. And all we need to do is add a few more sentences. And now that was the hardback. And then I updated it more in the paperback saying, and it happened, and it was announced on this dip.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Exactly. And then, so that's why, and people would say, well, that, I mean, I wrote about that. Years ago, especially with Genesis Code, I wrote about that. And as a sci-fi, and I had actually testified before Congress, but now 15 years ago saying, here's what the future looks like. But even I, and in my first edition of Hacking Darwin, when it was already in production. And then in November 2018, this scientist, He Jong Kuei, announced in Hong Kong that the world's first two and later three CRISPR babies had been born, which he had genetically altered in a misguided, in my view, and dangerous view. Dangerous goal of making it so they would have increased resistance to HIV. And so I called my publisher and I said, I've got good news and bad news.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “It's just one of our tools for genome editing, and things are getting better and better, then you can go in and change, let's say, again, it starts simple. A small number of genes, let's say you've selected from among the one of 10 or the one of 10,000. But there are a number of changes that you would like to make to achieve some kind of outcome. And biology is incredibly complex, and it's not that one gene does one thing. One gene does probably a lot of things simultaneously, which is why the decision about changing one gene, if it's causing deathly harm, is easier than when we think about the complexity of biology.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Yeah, well, no, no, there are, but the choice is not do you want a kid who does or doesn't have, let's call it Tay Sacks. It's a whole range of possibilities, including very intimate traits like height, IQ, personality style. It doesn't mean you can predict everything, but it means that we'll be increasing predictability. So if you're choosing from 10,000 eggs, fertilized eggs, early stage embryos, that's a lot of choice. And on top of that, then we have the new technology of human genome editing. Many people have heard of CRISPR, but what I say is if you think of human genome editing as a pie, human genome engineering as a genome editing is a slice, and CRISPR is just a sliver of that slice.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Then you have an automated process for what I mentioned before in pre-implantation genetic testing. You grow them all for five days, you extract a few cells from each, you test them, and that's why I had a piece in the New York Times a couple of years ago imagining what it would be like to go to a fertility clinic in the year 2050. And the choice is not humans.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Egg cells. Then, because we have this massive overabundance of male sperm, then you could fertilize, let's call it 10,000 of the mother's egg. So you have 10,000 eggs which are fertilized.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Blueprint is in that one cell, and that cell can be anything. But then it starts to, our cells start to specialize, and that's why we have skin cells and blood cells and all the different types of things. So with the Yamanaka process, we can induce an adult cell to become a stem cell. So the relevance to this story is what you can do, and it works now in animal models. And as far as I know, it hasn't yet been done in humans, but it works pretty well in animal models. You take any adult cell, but skin cells are probably the easiest. You induce this skin cell into a stem cell. And if you just take a little skin graph, it would have millions of cells. So you induce those skin cells into stem cells. Then you induce those stem cells into egg precursor cells. Then you induce those egg precursor cells into”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Traits are definable and influenced by genetics. We're going to have greater and greater predictability within a range. And so selecting those embryos will be informed by that kind of knowledge. And that's why in Hacking Darwin, I talk about embryo selection as being a key driver of the future of human evolution. Then on top of that, there is in 2012, Shenya Yamanaka, a Japanese, amazing Japanese scientist, won the Nobel Prize for developing a process for creating what are called induced pluripotent stem cells, IPS cells. And what IPS cells are is you can induce an adult cell to go back in evolutionary time and become a stem cell. And a stem cell is like when we're a fertilized egg, like our entire”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Correct. Never perfectly, perhaps, but more and more, always more and more. And so with that information, we aren't going to just be in the even now. We aren't going to just be selecting based on which of these 10 early stage embryos is carrying a deadly genetic disorder, but we'll be able to know everything that can be partly or entirely predicted by genetics. And there's a lot of our humanity that fits into that category. And certainly simple traits like height and eye color and things like that. I mean, height is not at all simple, but if you have good nutrition, it's entirely or mostly genetic. But even personality traits and personality styles are a lot of things that we see just as the experience, the beauty of life that are partly have a genetic foundation. And so whatever part of these”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “A single gene mutation disorders, things that could be deadly or life ruining. And so people use it to determine which of those 10 early stage embryos to implant in a mother. As we shift towards a much greater understanding of genetics, and that is part of just the broader genetics revolution, but within that in our transition from personalized to precision healthcare, more and more of us are going to have our whole genome sequenced because it's going to be the foundation of getting personalized healthcare. We're going to have already millions, but very soon billions of people who've had their whole genome sequenced. And then we'll have big databases of people's genetic genotypic information and life or phenotypic information. And using, coming into your area, our tools of machine learning and data analytics.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “On top of that, there's somewhat newer but still now older technology called pre-implantation genetic testing. And so as everyone knows from high school biology, you have the fertilized egg, and then it goes one cell to two cells to four to eight and whatever. And after around five days in this PGT process, a few cells are extracted. So let's say you have 10 fertilized eggs, early stage embryos. A few cells are extracted from each, and those cells, if they would, the ones that are extracted, would end up becoming the placenta. But every one of our cells has other than a few, has our full genome. And so then you sequence those cells. And with pre-implantation genetic testing now, what you can do is you can screen out deadly”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “The big picture implications of the future of human reproduction. We are already participating in a revolutionary transformation, not just because of the diagnostics that we have, things like ultrasound, but because now an increasing number of us are being born through in vitro fertilization, which means the eggs are extracted from the mother. They're fertilized by the father's sperm in vitro in a lab, and then re-implant.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And so, but in this invisible cities, there's a little string that goes toward that alternate life. And then the city becomes this weaving of all the strings of people's real lives and the alternate lives that they could have taken had they made any other different steps. So that part, it's like a deep philosophical question. It's not just for us. It's for all of me. It's baked into evolutionary biology. It's just what are the different strategies for different species to achieve fitness. And there's some of the different corals or other fish where they just kind of release the eggs into the water. There's all different kinds of ways. And then you're right in my book, Hacking Darwin. And it's the full titles Hacking Darwin, Genetic Engineering, and the Future of Humanity. I kind of go deep into exploring.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “All of them represent a different future. And there's a wonderful book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. And he even talks about a city as something like this where everybody, you have your life. But then you have all these alternate lives. And every time you make any decision.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Great question. So, first on the sperm, there can be up to about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation. So as I mentioned in hacking Darwin, male sperm, it's kind of a dime a dozen with all the guys in all the world just doing whatever they do with it. And it's an open question how competitive. I mean, there is an element of luck and there is an element of competition. And it's an open question how much that competition impacts the outcome or whether it's just luck. But my guess is there's some combination of fitness and luck. But you're absolutely right that all of those other sperm cells in the ejaculation, if that's how the union of sperm and egg is happening.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “All I'm saying as a person sitting with you, to people who would be open-minded in experimenting of, as I've read about, to reality, what I would say is Lex Friedman is handsome.”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “You mentioned earlier about your asking tough questions and people pushing you to ask tough questions. Is it okay if I so you said have done this as I've read about?”

    2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source