Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset | Lex Fridman Podcast #146

Michael Mina is an immunologist, epidemiologist, and physician at Harvard. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Brave: https://brave.com/lex - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpo

the following is a conversation with michael minna he’s a professor at harvard doing research on infectious disease and immunology the most defining characteristic of his approach to science and biology is that of a first principles thinker and engineer focused not just on defining the problem but finding the solution in that spirit we talk about cheap rabbit at home testing which is a solution to covet 19 that to me has become one of the most obvious powerful and doable solutions that frankly should have been done months ago and still should be done now as we talk about its accuracy is high for detecting actual contagiousness and hundreds of millions can be manufactured quickly and relatively cheaply in general i love engineering solutions like these even if government bureaucracies often don’t it respects science and data it respects our freedom it respects our intelligence and basic common sense quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode thank you to brave a fast browser that feels like chrome but has more privacy preserving features athletic greens the all-in-one drink that i start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases expressvpn the vpn i’ve used for many years to protect my privacy and the internet and cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i’ve always been solution oriented not problem oriented it saddens me to see that public discourse disproportionately focuses on the mistakes of those who dared to build solutions rather than applaud their attempt to do so teddy roosevelt said it well in his the man in the arena speech over 100 years ago i should say that both the critic and the creator are important but in my humble estimation there are too many now of the former and not enough of the latter so while we spread the derisive words of the critic on social media making it viral let’s not forget that this world is built on the blood sweat and tears of those who dare to create if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review with five stars not a podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here’s my conversation with michael minna what is the most beautiful mysterious or surprising idea in the biology of humans or viruses that you’ve ever come across in your work sorry for the overly philosophical question wow well that’s a great question you know i love the pathogenesis of viruses and one of the things that i’ve worked on a lot is trying to understand how viruses interact with each other and so pre all this covered stuff it was uh i was really really dedicated to understanding uh how uh how viruses impact uh other pathogens so how if somebody gets an infection with one thing or a vaccine does it either benefit or harm you from other things that appear to be unrelated to in the to most people and so one one system which is highly detrimental to humans but what i think is just immensely fascinating is measles and measles gets into a kid’s body the immune system picks it up and essentially grabs the virus and does exactly what it’s supposed to do which is to take this virus and bring it into the immune system so the immune system can learn from it can develop an immune response to it but instead measles plays a trick it gets into the immune system serves almost as a trojan horse and instead of getting eaten by these by these cells it just takes them over and it ends up proliferating in the very cells that were supposed to kill it and it just distributes throughout the entire body gets into the bone marrow kills off children’s immune memories and so it essentially what i’ve found and what my research has found is that this one virus was responsible for as much as half of all the infectious disease deaths in kids before we started vaccinating against it because it was just wiping out children’s immune memories to all different pathogens which is you know i think um just astounding it’s just amazing to watch it spread throughout bodies we’ve done the studies in monkeys and and you can watch it just destroy and obliterate people’s immune memories in the same way that you know some parasite might destroy somebody’s brain and it’s is that a evolutionary just coincidence or is there some kind of advantage to this kind of interactivity between pathogen well i think in that sense it’s just coincidence uh it probably is a it’s a good way for measles to uh it’s a good way for measles to essentially be able to survive uh long enough to replicate in the body it just replicates in the cells that are meant to destroy it so it’s uh it’s utilizing our immune cells for its own replication uh but in so doing it’s destroying the memories of all the other the other immunological memories so but there are other viruses so a different system is influenza and uh flu predisposes to severe bacterial infections and that i think is another coincidence but i but i also think that there are that there are some evolutionary benefits that bacteria may hijack and sort of piggyback on viral infections viruses can they just grow so much quicker than bacteria they replicate faster and so there’s the system with viruses with flu and and bacteria where the influenza has these proteins that cleave certain receptors and the bacteria want to cleave those same receptors i want to cleave the same molecules that gave entrance to those receptors so instead the bacteria found out like hey you know we could just piggyback on these viruses they’ll do it a hundred or a thousand times faster than we can and so then they just piggy back on and they let flu cleave all these cyalic acids and then the bacteria just glom on and in the wake of it so there’s all different interactions between pathogens that are just remarkable so does this whole system of viruses that interact with each other and so damn good at getting inside our bodies does that fascinate you or terrify you i’m very much a scientist and so uh it fascinates me much more than it terrifies me but knowing enough i know just how well you know we get the wrong virus um in our population whether it’s through some random mutation or whether it’s this same covid19 virus and it you know these things are tricky they’re able to mutate quickly they’re able to find new hosts and rearrange in the case of influenza so what terrifies me is just how easily this particular pandemic could have been so much worse this could have been a virus that is uh much worse than it is you know same thing with h1n1 back in 2009 uh that terrifies me if a virus like that was much more detrimental uh you know that would be it could be much more devastating although it’s hard to say you know the the human species were well i i hesitate to say that we’re good at responding to things because there are some aspects that were this particular virus stars cove too and covet 19 has found a sweet spot where where it’s not quite serious enough on an individual level that humans just don’t we haven’t seen much of a useful response by many humans like a lot of people even think it’s a hoax and so it’s led us down this path of uh it’s not quite serious enough to get everyone to respond immediately and with the most urgency but it’s enough it’s bad enough that you know it’s caused our economies to shut down and collapse and so um i think i know enough about virus biology to be terrified for humans that you know it can it just takes one virus just takes th