YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Mina

lines on the record: 159
first: 2020-12-19
most recent: 2020-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think I don't have an answer to that one, but I really do believe that it's just. Know, this is just an evolution of. Consciousness, I don't personally think my feeling is that we're a bunch of pluses and minuses that have just gotten so complex that they're able to make rich feelings, rich emotions. And I do believe, though, on the one hand, I sometimes wake up some days. My fiance doesn't always love it, but I kind of think we're all just as much of robots with pretty complicated algorithms that we deal with. And, you know, in that sense, like, okay, if the world just blew up tomorrow nothing was existed the day after that, it's just another blip in the universe, you know. But at the same time, I don't know. So that's kind of probably my most core basic feeling about life is like we're just a blip.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back and forth. I don't think I just look at us in a, I think we're just a bunch of proteins. We form and they work in this really amazing way, and they might work in a bigger scale. There might be some. Connections that we're not really clear about, but they're still biological. I believe that there are biological connections.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I look at, I mean, in some ways, the notion of life and what the purpose of life is, you know, they're kind of completely distinct, this sort of Western view of life, which is that this life is the most precious thing in the world versus this is just another opportunity to try to get out of life. I mean, the whole notion of nirvana and in Buddhism, getting out of this sort of cycle of suffering is to vanish. If you could attain nirvana throughout this life, the idea is that you don't get reborn. And so when I look at these two, you know, on the one hand, you have Christian faith and other things that want to go to heaven and live forever in heaven. Then you have this other whole half of humans who want nothing more than to get out of the cycle of rebirth and just poof, you know, not exist anymore.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, from what I've seen, I don't think there's a single answer to that by any stretch. One of the most interesting things about Buddhism to me is that the human existence is part of suffering. Which is very different from. Judeo-Christian existence, which is that human existence is Something to be is a very different. It's something to, there's a richness to it. In Buddhism, it's just another one of your lives. But it's your opportunity to attain nirvana and become a monk, for example, and meditate to attain nirvana. Else you kind of just go back into the samsara, the cycle of suffering. And so, you know,”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think I appreciate it at the time how much of a role I was having in that community's life. But it's taken me many years to process all of this since then. But I would say it's what put me into the public health world, living in that refugee camp and that difference that happened from being a monk to being in this devastating environment just really changed my whole view of what sort of why I was existing, I suppose.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The monks largely fled from the coastlines of those, you know, and um, and so then there I was, and people wanted me to be a monk. They wanted me to stay on the coast, but be a monk and not help, like not help in the way that I considered helping. They wanted me just to keep meditating so that they could bring me Donna offerings and have their sort of karmic responsibilities attended to as well. That was really bizarre to me. It was like, how could I possibly just sit around while all these people, half of everyone's family just died? And so in any case, I stopped being a monk and I moved to this refugee camp and lived there for another six months or so and just Stayed there, not as a monk But tried to raise some money from the US and tried to, I didn't know what I was doing. Frankly, I was 22.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My whole world of being a monk came crashing down. When I go to the coast and I mean, that was just a devastating. Visual sight, an emotional sight, but the strangest thing happened, which was that everyone just wanted me to stay as a monk. You know, people in their culture, they wanted to”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'll never forget that feeling. And if there was one euphoric feeling from meditation, I want to gain back, but I don't think I could without really meditating like that again. And I don't think I will was this like slow motion of the world. It was. Finding the spaces between all the movements in the same way that the spaces between all the words happen. And then it almost gives you this new appreciation for everything. It was really amazing. And so I think it came to an abrupt end, though, when the tsunami hit. I was there in the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004. And it was like this dichotomy of being a monk and just meditating in this extraordinary place. And then the tsunami hits and kills 40,000 people in a few minutes on the coast of this really small little country in Sri Lanka. And, you know, then I...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hear clear breaks between words, and it starts to gain context. And all of a sudden, like that, what once sounded very fast slows down and it has meaning. That's our whole life. There's this whole language happening that we don't speak generally. But if you start to speak it, and if you start to learn it and you start to say, hey, I'm picking up this glass is actually 18 little movements. All of a sudden, it becomes extremely exciting and exhilarating to just breathe, breathing alone in the rise and fall of your abdomen or the way the air pushes in and out of your nose becomes almost interesting. And what's really neat is the world just starts slowing down.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even have predictions right word, but I always think of the matrix, you know, where I forget who it was. Somebody was shooting at Neo and he leans backwards and he dodges the bullets. You know, in some ways, when you start breaking every little action that your hands do or that your feet do or that your body does down into all these little actions that make up one what we normally think of as an action, all of a sudden you can start to see things almost in slow motion. I like to think of it very much like language. The first time somebody hears a foreign language, it sounds really fast usually. You don't hear the spaces between words. And it just sounds like just like a stream of conscious and it just sounds like a stream of noises if you've never heard the language before. And as you learn the language”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that to me was like this really exhilarating thing that it was an exhilarating component of meditation that there was never enough time. It's kind of like learning a new computer language. Like it gets really exciting when you start coding and all these new things you can do.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you start to meditate on all those activities. And one of the things that was so exciting, which sounds completely ridiculous now, was just Almost learning about your daily activities in ways that you never would have thought about before. So what's involved with picking up this glass of water? If I said, okay, I'm just going to pick, I'm going to take a drink of water, to me right now, it's a single activity. During meditation, it's not a single activity. It's a whole series of activities of like little engineering feats. And feelings, and it's gripping the water, and it's feeling that the glass is cold and it's lifting and it's moving and dragging and dragging. And you start to learn a whole new language of life.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a little bit euphoric, where you just kind of start not hallucinating. I mean, it wasn't like some crazy thing that would happen in a movie, but definitely just weird, you start getting to the stage where you're able to quiet your mind for so long, for hours at a time that for me, I started getting really excited about this idea of mindfulness, which is part of Buddhism in general, but it's part of Thurvada and Buddhism in particular for this in this way, which was you take, you start focusing on your daily activities, whether that's sipping a cup of tea or walking or sweeping around. I lived on this mountain side in this cottage thing, has built into the rock and so every morning I would wake up early and sweep around it and stuff because that's just what we did.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Yeah, it's an interesting question. So I would say. So, the first thing, the first step is truly just to be able to close your eyes, focus on your breath, and not have other thoughts enter into your mind. That alone is just so hard to do. Like, I couldn't do it now if I wanted. But I could then. And But once you get past that stage, you start entering into all these other, you go through, I went through this pretty trippy stage.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're very prescribed and they tell you what you're going to go through. And I didn't really focus too much on them. I read a little bit about them, but your mind really does. When you actually start meditating at that level, like not an hour here and there, but like truly just spending your days meditating, it becomes kind of like this other world where it becomes exciting and you're actively working. You're actively meditating, not just kind of trying to quiet things. That's sort of just the first stage of trying to get your mind to focus. Most people never get past that first stage, especially in our culture.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would do it for 18 hours a day, 15 hours a day, just sit there. And like, I mean, I hate sleeping anyway. But I wouldn't want to go to sleep because I felt like I didn't accomplish what I needed to accomplish in meditation that day, which is strange because there is no end, you know, but it was always, but there are these. There are these steps that happen during meditation that are very prescribed in a way. Buddha talked about them, you know, and these are ancient writings which exist. I mean, the writings are real. They're thousands of years old now. So whether it was Buddha writing them or whoever, you know, There are lots of different people who have contributed to these writings over the years”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I just slowly, I just couldn't take, I couldn't handle being in that clinic. So more and more, I just started moving to spending more and more time at this monastery. And then after about two months, I was supposed to come back to the States and I decided I didn't want to. So I moved to this monastery in the mountains, primarily because I didn't have the money to just keep living. So I was living in a monastery is free. Yeah. And so I moved there and just started meditating more and more. And then months went by. And I. It just really gravitated. I gravitated to the whole notion of it. I mean, it became It sounds strange, but meditating almost just like anything that you've put your mind to. Became exciting. You know, it became like there weren't enough hours in the day to meditate.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't have any updated training, frankly. And so I just remember this girl came in with shrapnel in her hand. And his solution was to air it out. And so he was like, without even numbing her hand, he was like cutting it open more with this idea that the more oxygen and stuff. And it just, I think there was something about all of this. And I was already talking to these monks at the time. I would be in this clinic in the morning and I'd go. And my idea was to teach English to these monks in the evening. Turned out I'm a really bad English teacher. So they just allowed me just to sit with them and meditate. And they were teaching me more about Buddhism than I could have possibly taught them about English or being an American or something.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The extreme sort of focus and concentration that requires that's required of it. And so I was always really into just meditative type of things, is doing a lot of pottery too, which was also very meditative. And so Buddhism just kind of really, really, there are a lot of things about meditating that just appealed. And so I moved to Sri Lanka planning to only be there for a couple of months. But then I was shadowing in this medical clinic and there was this physician who was just really, I mean, it's just kind of a horrible situation, frankly. This guy was trained decades earlier. He was an older physician. And he was still just practicing like these fairly barbaric approaches to medicine because he had, you know, as a rural town and he just didn't have a lot of...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it has always been, it was that, and then it was also meditation. At the time, I was a fairly elite rower. I was rowing at the national level and rowing to me was very meditative. It was just even if you're in a boat with other people, I mean, on the one hand, it's like the extreme of like a team sport, but it's also.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the thing that interested me most was really this idea of kind of a butterfly effect of what you do now. Has ripple effects that extend out beyond what you can possibly imagine, both in your own life and in other people's lives. And in some ways, Buddhism has, not in some ways, in a pretty deep way, Buddhism has that as part of Underlying philosophy in terms of rebirth and sort of your actions today propagate to others, but also propagate to sort of what might happen in your circle of what's called samsara and rebirth. And I don't know that I subscribe fully to this idea that we are reborn, which always was a little bit of a debate internally, I suppose, when I was a monk.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was at Dartmouth at the time. Well, I went to Sri Lanka. I was already pretty interested in developing countries and sort of under-resourced areas. And I was doing a lot of engineering work, and I went there, but I was also starting to think maybe health was something of interest. And so I went to Sri Lanka because I had a long interest in Buddhism as well, just kind of interested in it as a thing.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just think big. I mean, God, you know, there's nothing wrong with thinking big. Elon Musk thought big. And, you know, and then thinking big builds on itself, you get a billion dollars from one big idea, and then that allows you to make three new big ideas.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the real answer, my only answer, I don't know what I recognize that everyone, some people are going to be really focused on and have one small but deep skill set. I go the opposite direction. I try to bring things together. But the biggest thing I think is just don't see barriers. There's always a solution to a barrier. If there's a barrier that literally means there's a solution to it, that's why it's called a barrier.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that was a simple solution to a pretty difficult problem. And it is changing the way that we approach all of the lab testing in this country is starting to, it's taken a few months, but it's starting to change because of that. And, you know, that was just me saying, hey, this is something we should be focusing on. Got some other people involved and other people. And now people recognize, hey, there's actual value in this number that comes out of these lab-based PCR tests. So sometimes it does grow fairly quickly.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could change the world. And it is. There's countries that are doing it now. The US isn't, but I've been advising many countries on it. And I would say that, you know, some of the early papers that we put out earlier on, a lot of the things actually are changing. You don't always, unless you really look hard, you don't know where you're actually having an effect. Sometimes it's more overt than other times. In April, I published a paper that was saying, hey, with the PCR values from these tests, we need to really focus on the CT values, the actual quantitative values of these lab-based PCR tests. At the time, all the physicians and laboratory directors told me that was stupid. You know, why would you do that? They're not accurate enough. And of course, now it's headline news that, you know, Florida, they just mandated reporting out the CT values of these tests because there's a real utility of them. You can understand public health from it. You can understand better clinical management.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's how you can have a chance, exactly. And I think it's also what, you know, this, to me, this rapid testing program, like this is the most dead simple solution in the world.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing them all together, you know, and just thinking, and that's, I think, how you can really change the world. I don't know that I'll ever change the world in the way that I hope.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think my recommendation to people is as much as possible, get out of the mode of thinking about things as problems. Sometimes you piss people off. Could probably use a better filter sometimes to try to be not so upfront with certain things, but it's just so crucial to always just see, to just bring like think about things in new ways that other people have. Because usually there's something else out there. And one of the things that has been most beneficial to me, which is that my education was really broad. It was engineering and physics. And, well, then I became a Buddhist monk for a while. And so that gave me a different perspective. But then it was medicine and immunology. And now I've brought all of it together from a mathematics and biology and medicine perspective and policy and public health. And I think that, you know, I'm not the best in any one of these things. I recognize that there are going to be geniuses out there who are just worlds better than me at any one of these things that I try to work on. But my superpower is...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the higher ups and the people who think about, you know, I think one of the most important things is to recognize that most people in the world don't see solutions. They just see problems. And it's because it's an easy thing to do. Thinking of problems and how things will go wrong is really easy. You're not coming up with a brand new solution. And this to me was just a super simple solution. Hey, let's get the broad to help build tests every single hospital director told me no, like it's impossible. My own superior is the ones I report to in the hospital said, you know, Mike, you know, you're a new faculty member. Your ideas probably would be right, but you're too naive and young to know that it's impossible. Obviously, now the broad is the highest throughput laboratory in the country.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I kept pushing on it. And then eventually I got them to agree. It was really only a couple of weeks before the Biogen conference happened. We started building the test. I think they started looking abroad and seeing, okay, this is happening, sure. Maybe he was right. But then I went a step further and I said, we're not going to have enough tests at the hospital. And so my ambition was to get a better testing program started. So I went to the broad and I said, Hey, you know, there's this coronavirus that's obviously going to impact our society greatly. Can we start modifying your high efficiency instruments and robots for coronavirus testing? Everyone in my orbit in the hospital world just said that's ridiculous. How could you possibly plan to do that? It's impossible. And to me, it was like the most dead simple thing to do.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when this virus started wearing my epidemiology hat and wearing my sort of viral outbreak hat, I recognized that this is going to be a big virus that was important on a global level, even if the CDC and WHO weren't ready to admit that it was a pandemic. It was obvious in January that it was a pandemic. So I started trying to get a test built at the Brigham, which is one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. You know, the first encounters I had with the upper administration of the hospital were pretty much no. Why would we do that? That's silly. Who are you? And I said, well. Don't believe me, sure.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. I struggle a little bit sometimes to give advice because the advice that I give from my own personal experience is necessarily distinct from the advice that would make other people successful. I have Unending ambitions to make things better, I suppose. And I don't see barricades where other people sometimes see barricades. Now, even just little things like when this virus started, I'm a medical director at Brighma Women's Hospital. And so I oversee or help to oversee molecular virology diagnostics.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we need to pull up and stop complete catastrophe. And so we are an interesting species in that way, that's for sure.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, while we're doing it already, you know, just, I mean, we are seeing how our regulation today. Did this thing, it started as a good thing, regulation of medical products, but now it is unwillingly and unintentionally harming us. Our regulatory landscape, which was developed wholly for good in our country, is getting in the way of us, deploying a tool that could stop our economies from having to be sort of sputteringly closed that could stop deaths from happening at the rate that they are. And it's, you know, I think we will come to a solution. Of course, now we're going to get the vaccine and it's going to make people lose track of like why we even bother testing, which is a bad idea. But we're already seeing that we have this amazing capacity to bolt do damage when we don't intend to do damage. And then also to pull up.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it sounds really conspiracy theory ish, but it's not, we're learning so much about biology, and there's always nefarious reasons. I mean, heck, look at how AI and just Google searches. Those can be, you know, they are every single day being leveraged by nefarious actors to take advantage of people, to steal money, to do whatever it might be. Eventually, probably to create wars, or already to create wars. And I mean, I don't think there's any question at this point behind disinformation campaigns. And so it's being leveraged, this thing that could be wholly good is always going to be leveraged for bad. And so how do you balance that as a species? I'm not quite sure.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have to be really careful because that will come about. There's no doubt in my mind that we will develop. We're already doing it. We engineer molecules all the time for specific uses. Oftentimes we take them from nature and then tweak them. But now we can supercharge it. We can accelerate the pace of discovery to not have it just be discovery. We have it be true ground up engineering. Let's say you're trying to make a new molecule to stabilize somebody with some retinal disease. So we come up with some molecule that can improve the stability of somebody with retinal degeneration. You know, just a small tweak to that to say make a virus that causes the human race to become blind”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given its sequence, we can reverse engineer then. We can say, okay, we want a protein to fold this way, what is the sequence need to be? We haven't done that yet, so much, but it's just the next iteration of all of this. So let's say somebody wants to develop a virus, it's going to start with somebody wanting to develop a virus to defeat cancer, something good. You know, and so it will start with a lot of money from the federal government for all the positives that will come out of it.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean. Alpha fold is amazing. It's an amazing algorithm. Series of algorithms. And it does demonstrate. To me, it demonstrates just how powerful, you know, everything in the world has rules. We just don't know the rules. We often don't know them. But our brain has rules, how it works. Everything is plus and minus. There's nothing in the world that's really not at its most basic level positive, negative. Obviously, it's all just charge. And that means everything, you can figure it out with enough computational power and enough. In this case, I mean, machine learning and AI is just one way to learn rules. It's an empirical way to learn rules, but it's a profoundly powerful way. And certainly now that we are getting to a point where we can take a protein and know how it folds.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it worth taking the chances just to be prepared a little bit for something that may or may not ever actually develop? And so it's a serious ethical quandary we're in, how to both be prepared but also not Cosic catastrophic mistake”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah, an accident. So, Mark Lipsich is a good colleague of mine at Harvard. We're both in the, he's the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. I'm a faculty member. He's spoken very, very forcefully, and he's very outspoken about the dangers of gain of function testing, where in the lab we are intentionally creating viruses that are exceedingly deadly under the auspices of trying to learn about them so that if the idea is that if we kind of accelerate evolution and make these really deadly viruses in the lab, we can be prepared for if that virus ever comes about naturally or through a natural means. The concern, though, is okay, that's one thing, but what if that virus got out on somebody's shoe? Just what if? If the effects of an accident are potential catastrophic,”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to get your immune system not to kill off the virus if you're trying to use the virus to target it, you maybe want to make it blind to the immune system. But now imagine we took some virus like measles, which has an R0 of 18, transmits extremely quickly, and now we have essentially, let's say we had a whole human race that is susceptible to measles. And this is a virus that spreads. Orders of magnitude easier than this current virus. Imagine if you were to plug something toxic or detrimental into that virus and release it to the world.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it wouldn't spread or it would spread a little bit slower. But now we have essentially in a few years we'll have a whole global population that is susceptible Let's look at measles. We have an entire, I mean, measles. There are some researchers in the world right now, which for various reasons are working on creating a measle strain that evades immunity. It's not for bioterrorism, at least that's not the expectation. It's for using measles as an oncolytic virus to kill cancer. And the only way you can really do that is if your immune system doesn't, you know, if you take a measles virus and we don't have to go into the details of why it would work, but it could work. Measles likes to target potentially cancerous cells.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the former, that man-made viruses and genetically engineered viruses should be right up there with the greatest concerns for humanity right now. You know, we know that the tools, for better or worse, the tools for creating a virus are there. We can do it. I mean, heck, you know, the human species is no longer vaccinated against smallpox. I didn't get a smallpox vaccine. You didn't get a smallpox vaccine. At least I don't think. So, if somebody wanted to make smallpox and distribute it to the world in some way, it could be Exceedingly deadly and detrimental to humans, and that's not even. That's not even sort of using your imagination to create a new virus. That's one that we already have. Unlike the past, when smallpox would circulate, you had large fractions of the community that was already immune to it.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their replication cycle, they were able to genetically recombine in a way that coronaviruses aren't. They have segmented genomes, which means that they can just swap out whole parts of their genomes, no problem, repackage them, and then boom, you have a whole antigenic shift, not a drift. What that means is that on any occasion, any day of the year, you can have boom, a new virus that didn't exist yesterday. And now with farming and industrial livestock, we're seeing animals and humans come into contact much more. Just the opportunities for an influenza strain that is unique and deadly to humans increases all the while transmission and mobility has increased. Just a matter of time, in my opinion”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People start having heart attacks. You know, it's like not just one offs, but really severe. Well, that could be a serious problem for humanity So, in some ways, I think that there are lots of ways that we could end up dying at the hand of a virus. I mean, we're already seeing it. My fear is still, I think coronaviruses have demonstrated a keen ability to destroy or to create outbreaks that can potentially be deadly to large numbers of people. Flu strains, though, are still... By and large, my concern.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know that that's possible. And so if this was a worse virus that was actually killing 60% of people was infecting, we would lock down very quickly. My biggest fear, though, is let's say that was happening. Need serious lockdowns if you're going to keep things going. So, the only reason we were able to keep things going during our lockdowns is because it wasn't so bad that we were still able to have people work in the grocery stores, still have people work in the shipping to get the food onto the shelves. So on the one hand, we could probably figure out how to stop the virus. But can we stop the virus without starving? And I'm not sure that if this was another acute respiratory virus, that say had a slightly, say it transmitted the same way, but say it actually did worse damage to your heart. But it was like a month later.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it was a new strain of Ebola, but it was because there's new inroads and connections between the communities and people got it to the city. And so we sought to spread. So that should be a little bit foreshadowing of what's to come. And then we have this pandemic. We had 2009. We have this. There is a benefit or there is sort of a natural check. And this is kind of Latkov Voltaire predator prey dynamic kind of systems, ecological systems and mathematics that if you have something that's so deadly, people will respond more maybe with a greater panic, a greater sense of panic, which alone could destroy humanity. But at the same time, we now know that we can lock down.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chances of global pandemics has escalated exponentially, of course. And so on the one hand, that's part of why it hasn't happened yet. We can look at things like Ebola. Now, Ebola, we haven't generally had Ebola epidemics in the past, not because Ebola wasn't transmitting and infecting humans, but because it was largely affecting and infecting humans in disconnected communities. So you see out in rural parts of Africa, for example, in Western Africa, you might end up having isolated Ebola outbreaks, but there weren't connections that were fast enough that would allow people to then spread it into the cities. Of course, we saw back in 2014, 2015, a massive Ebola outbreak that wasn't”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it could. I don't think it's likely. And the reason I don't think it's likely on the one hand, it hasn't happened yet. In part because mobility is a recent phenomenon. People weren't particularly mobile until fairly recently. Now, of course, now that we have people flying back and forth across the globe all the time.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source