Kyle Harper: evaluation

Transcript context

…And then what is the reason that you have these 1,000-year cycles basically? Why is it not 500 years? Why is it not 10 years? Why is it not… What causes it to go dormant? What causes this to reemerge? You need to ask me in five years because we've learned so much and now this is like the thing that would fall in the category of almost a new question now that we can ask. Now that we have the Neolithic lineages and the Bronze Age lineages, we're starting to piece together this fuller history. But we still don't even totally understand the boundaries of when the plague is really sort of not circulating in human populations, and what are the factors that cause it to be so explosive. Like, is it evolution of the bacterium? Is there something about the genetics of the lineages that escape from the animal reservoirs that are especially transmissible? Is it human ecology, like, that we put rodents like black rats in the right place to get the disease? Is there something about the climate stress that renders the population…? We don't have a great understanding of like why the plague comes and goes. That's scary. Connecting it to your other question about these superbugs, what's interesting in the very big picture about the plague to me is the history of infectious disease is like, on the one hand, there's a real core of it that's just basic principles of ecology and evolution. We do certain things in the environment that creates the conditions that pathogens can evolve and take advantage of. But on top of that, evolution is just creative and weird and contingent and unpredictable. It's those little, contingent facts that can end up having these really huge effects. In the case of the plague, if you were really knowledgeable about the basics of ecology and evolution of disease, you would never be like, "I think that every now and then a rodent disease from Central Asia is gonna wipe out half of the continent". Like, that shouldn't... that's not predictable. That shouldn't be happening. That one's kind of an outlier, but infectious disease is always kind of like that. Tuberculosis has probably killed more people maybe than any other infectious disease. It's like this horrible disease. We don't really understand it. Now we really don't understand where it came from because it doesn't look like it has an animal host before it has humans. It's just a weird disease. It's just a bacterial pathogen that, in the huge world of bacteria, this one is very good at hiding. It gets in your chest and it just lurks. Then it'll just waste you away, particularly if you're poor and you're stressed. There are some core principles there, but then it's just something weird about it. It's just this terrible luck that makes it what it is. To me, there's going to be another pandemic, maybe bird flu, maybe something else. But it's the real outliers and the weird ones that we should maybe worry about a little bit more than we do. If you want to go to zombies, I'll go there. You don't have to twist my arm too hard. else. But it's the real outliers and the weird ones that we should maybe worry about a little bit more than we do. If you want to go to zombies, I'll go there. You don't have to twist my arm too hard. But like prion diseases or fungal diseases where we don't have nearly the same infrastructure and level of knowledge, biomedical research as we do for bacterial and viral diseases, if we create the incentive, evolution is gonna find some weird ways to exploit it. It's not just transmissibility and virulence. Those are like two really basic parameters. When you look at even COVID-19, part of what made it insidious is it just has just the right parameters to be latent for just long enough. The first COVID, SARS-CoV-1, 2003, slightly more virulent, and in fact, it was just more virulent enough that it made you sick pretty quick. Just that little difference was enough to contain it because you could figure out who was sick. COVID-19 was impossible to contain because it took several days before you really presented with clinical illness. It's just that little quirk that made it totally impossible to control through non-pharmaceutical interventions early on. Follow that train of thought... if pathogens are going to find ways to take advantage, and there may be pathogens that push the limits on latency, it can be very hard to control. One of the takeaways or the big evolutionary history of our pathogens is evolution is very weird, very contingent, very creative at exploiting whatever weakness we give it. It's because there are billions and billions and billions of microbes in this room. I don't know how many tens to hundreds millions of species of microbes are in this room. Most of them are not even remotely pre-evolved to be pathogenic, but lots are and they're constantly seeing if you managed to lock that door. They're just looking for a way to break in.…

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