Richard Rhodes: belief

Transcript context

…We were talking near the beginning about whether it was possible that the bomb could not have been built at all and in the case of the nuclear physics involved here, it seems like it was sufficiently obvious. But one question I have, seeing the history of that science and whether it was plausible or not for some conspiracy to just hold it off, how plausible do you think it is that there's some group of scientists somewhere else who have discovered some other destructive phenomenon or technology that decides that we can't tell anyone about this. One area I think this might be plausible is bioweapons where they discover something and they just shut up about it. Given the study of this history, do you think that's more or less plausible? I don't think it's very likely to take bioweapons as an example. I remember talking to a biologist, one of the early DNA researchers who had been a physicist until DNA came along, and I asked “How'd you switch over to biology?” He said, “Well, it's molecules.” So from his perspective, it wasn't very different. But we were talking about the question of just the one you asked, but about biological agents. He said, nature has had millions of years to work all the combinations on the worst things you can imagine. The odds of anybody in a laboratory coming up with anything worse are really vanishingly small. I took that with great comfort. I went home and slept that night. And I think he's probably right. Evolution has done such a job. We're still digging stuff out. I mean, it's just amazing how much of our technology started out as something in the natural world that we adapted it and simplified it and engineered it so we could make it too. That's still going on in all sorts of ways. I hope that's the case. I was talking to a biologist and he was explaining to me, if you've seen things like AlphaFold, which is this AI program that models that can predict how a protein will fold, you can run billions of different permutations of a protein. And you can find smallpox, but it binds 100 times better with human receptors or something.…

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