There's a vaccine for the plague and it works on ferrets. You can't run around Wyoming, Utah, all the western states vaccinating every ferret. It's just crazy. So are we going to do that with us, with non ferrets? I mean, yeah, we will eventually do that, but I'm not sure we'll do it with vaccines.
Malcolm talks with his old friend, the brilliant science writer Michael Specter, about the future of life on Earth. Michael's response to the Covid-19 pandemic was to create a new audiobook on how the mRNA vaccines have sparked a biotechnology revolution: Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life. He and Malcolm talk about how this scientific revolution is bigger than many that came before it, about the promise of heritable vaccines for endangered species, and about how a smallpox infection could genuinely have wiped out New York in 1947. Also, we share a portion of Higher Animals' first, thrilling chapter. To purchase your own, complete copy of Michael Specter's Higher Animals, visit Pushkin.fm.
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