Dr. Liza Dunn | Toxicology, mRNA Vaccines and the Religion of Science

Liza Dunn [00:00:00] These vaccines. These vaccines are the coolest technology out there, and I think that they are going, I think that the mRNA technology has the potential to revolutionize medicine in the same way penicillin. I think it's that, that good. And I don't say that very easily about a lot of different kind of new newfangled things, but this has got real, real potential. I'm Miriam Hoffman, a full-time college student living in Carbondale, Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome

Vance Crowe [00:00:33] Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. We did an interview with Dr. Liza Dunn. Liza and I worked together when I was at Monsanto, and she now works at Bear Crop Sciences. Our conversation was wide ranging. We talked about everything from pesticides used to produce the food that we all eat. We talked about testosterone, psychedelics, and the future of the mRNA vaccines. This was a great conversation and I'm so glad you're here to hear it. But if you've ever been one of those people that wants to watch this live, Liza and I did this and streamed it on YouTube as we were going, and that creates an extra added bit of tension because you never know what's going to happen. So if you'd like to watch these live, click the link below to go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. There's also a little bell right next to it. You can hit that. So anytime we do a live stream or publish a new video, it gives you an alert. So we're gonna go to that interview in just a second. But if you are a listener of the podcast and you enjoy the way that I have conversations with people, you may wanna consider the Legacy Interviews that we offer. Legacy Interviews are where I sit down with you or one of your loved ones and have a conversation about your values, about your family stories, about things that you want to see captured and passed down. So many people have aspirations to write down their family stories or to get grandma and grandpa to talk about what they're doing, but it never seems to happen. Sometimes you need a stranger to come in and facilitate this conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:02:06] So if you're interested in having me interview one of your loved ones to make sure you capture some of these important stories, values, and ideas, then go to our store at store Articulate Ventures to find out if the private interview is right for you. We also are running a connections prompts exercise now that COVID is past, people are coming outta their homes and saying, I wanna reconnect with old people that I haven't been in touch with. Or maybe you wanna reinforce a lot of those relationships with people that you love and care about. So the connections prompts are weekly emails that you'll receive right in your inbox for free, and it is starts with a prompt. I'll write and say, write a person that made a big impression on you as a student, and tell them why they made an impression in what you're doing now. And then underneath the prompt, I'll write out a sample email of a real email that I've sent to someone that I wanna stay connected with. And then at the end, I leave a writer's tip to help you become a better writer so that when the 52 weeks of connections are done, you are an expert at doing this project where you can reach out to people, reinforce those bonds that you have, and rekindle some of those relationships that are so important to you. If you're interested in getting that connections prompt, you can go to vance crow.com/connections to sign up for that or to sign up for other blogs that we do here on the podcast. I am so excited for you to watch this interview with Dr.

Vance Crowe [00:03:38] E Liza Dunn, and I hope you enjoy it. So we'll be back next week with another ag related podcast. Done. Welcome to the podcast.

Liza Dunn [00:03:46] Thank you. Glad to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:03:48] So you're my old colleague from Monsanto. You are a medical doctor, and it's kinda weird that a medical doctor would work at a large seed company, which is now Bear 'cause Bear bought Monsano. How does a doctor end up at at a seed company?

Liza Dunn [00:04:03] Well, it happened the same way that I became a doctor. So when I was 21, I went to Haiti with my family and on a volunteer mission. My dad's a physician and he was doing some medical work, and we were working in an orphanage on a volunteer basis. And I fell in love with a little baby by the name of Fritz and decided that Fritz actually changed my whole life's trajectory. I had been working backstage at the Fox Theater here on concert production and things like that, and thought that that's what I wanted to do. And then I decided, no, I want to go to medical school.

Vance Crowe [00:04:39] Wait, you were in the theater and then you were like, I'm gonna go from theater to medical school?

Liza Dunn [00:04:43] Yeah, I like

Vance Crowe [00:04:44] Most theater people can't go to medical school. I don't think

Liza Dunn [00:04:48] I, I took the scenic route, I took this NIC route. So yeah, no, it, yeah, I worked backstage at the Fox and then after college I was trying to decide what I wanted to do. I went from theater to anthropology and then went and taught English in Poland for a year after I graduated. And then came back and did pre-med part-time for two years, and then went to medical school at the College of Surgeons in, in Dublin, Ireland and lived there. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:05:13] You went to Ireland?

Liza Dunn [00:05:14] Yeah. Was

Vance Crowe [00:05:15] That 'cause you couldn't get into Amer American medical

Liza Dunn [00:05:17] Schools? Well, it was a little tricky because you have to take your MCATs your junior year normally. And so I wasn't able to take my MCATs my junior year, and that was the first college first school I applied to. And they said yes. So I went,

Vance Crowe [00:05:31] I mean, if I were a young person going to medical school in Ireland, it'd probably be a pretty, pretty good gig. It was

Liza Dunn [00:05:35] Awesome. It was a great gig. And so what was great about the medical school in Ireland was that it was, it had a whole big, huge focus on tropical medicine. And they had a program where you could go to, you could go to, it was called the Overseas Elective Scheme. And you could, you, the students all got together and did fundraisers and then with supervision went to developing countries. So I went to Kenya and delivered babies in Kenya for six weeks.

Vance Crowe [00:06:01] I didn't know that. Yeah. Where in Kenya were you?

Liza Dunn [00:06:03] Mombasa and So yeah, that, and it was supervised by a Belgian OB GYN, which was really a fascinating experience. And I learned a tremendous, tremendous amount. So I worked with a Kenyan OB and a Belgian OB who were supervising me and then came back and was actually trying to decide whether,

Vance Crowe [00:06:24] What kind of, what kind of diseases like, so Mombasa, you'd be on the coast, so you probably mosquito diseases, malaria. Yeah,

Liza Dunn [00:06:30] Malaria. You saw a lot of, a lot of other infectious things, a lot of preeclampsia, very, very sick patients. And, and the OB wards were, there were of nothing compared to what we're used to here in, in the west. So you would have two or three women to a bed laboring, and then

Vance Crowe [00:06:51] To a

Liza Dunn [00:06:52] Bed. To a bed.

Vance Crowe [00:06:53] What do you mean,

Liza Dunn [00:06:54] Two women or three women on a bed all in labor together. And they would then, when the one was going to deliver, the other two would sit on the floor and then the delivery would happen, and then you'd wipe off the bed and the other two would jump back on. And then in the recovery ward, you'd have two or three women sort of in, in the same bed as well with their babies.

Vance Crowe [00:07:15] This is like shocking to me. What, I mean, how do you even, how do you even wrap your mind around women sharing? Is this like an old practice that we've just forgotten about or what, what in the, are you talking about?

Liza Dunn [00:07:25] It's, it's a limited resource government hospital that doesn't have very much. So when we would go do C-sections, right? If you, right around lunchtime, the anesthesiologist would have to start paying attention to what was going on with the oxygen, because the oxygen was getting piped up from downstairs. And if they'd go on lunch break, they'd turn the oxygen off. And so, so you, the realities of the hospital were incredible. There was a young woman who came in who delivered, was delivering twins, and she was probably about 17 at, at most. And one, I got there at about seven 30 in the morning, and she had delivered one TWI twin with a head entrapment, and the baby was dead. And so I was, you know, trying to find somebody to help me deliver this baby. Right? And finally, one of the midwives came in and was able to help deliver the baby. And then about an hour and a half, two hours later, I was up in the OR with a Belgian OB and heard that there was a young woman who was hemorrhaging because she had a retained placenta and it turned out to be her. And so she, we went and delivered the placenta in the, in the or, and then she went to the ICU. And what the ICU consisted of was your own bed, that's essentially it.

Liza Dunn [00:08:56] But she had lost a lot of blood and there was no blood to be had in the hospital. And so she got one, one liter of fluid and walked outta the hospital life. Another woman came in on a Friday with an ectopic pregnancy that had ruptured, and she had O negative blood, and once again, there was no blood in the hospital. And the OB was wandering around asking people, what type blood do you have? What type blood do you have? And I have a positive, so we couldn't, I couldn't donate, but on Tuesday, so she went to the, OR with a hemoglobin of one, the normal is, you know, in the 1314 range, the, she went to the OR and they, they wound up taking her back to the ICU and she got a unit of blood on Tuesday and walked outta the hospital life, which is just incredible. Incredible, incredible.

Vance Crowe [00:09:48] When you were thinking about being a doctor, did you know that it would be like this? I mean, the stories that you're describing are what would one, somebody could see one of those things and have that be a permanent scarring, you know, event in their life, and yet you put yourself in the position to see that over and over and over and over and over again.

Liza Dunn [00:10:06] Yeah, no, I, I was really, I really wanted to do, well, maternal medicine is something that's fascinating as me, and I was actually struggling with whether or not to do OB GYN or to do emergency medicine. And then I realized that they actually, the Belgian OB said to me, you should probably do emergency medicine because you can then do relief work. You aren't, you don't have a clinic that you're tied to and patients that it's much easier to get up and go if you do emergency medicine, plus you have a whole skillset. You're not, you're not just delivering babies and doing surgical procedures, but you're doing infections and broken bones and things like that so you could, you've got a broader base from which to operate. So I did emergency medicine, then I felt like a jack of all trades and a master of none, although I love emergency medicine. And so I decided to go to NYU and do, so I did my residency at WashU for four years, and then did a fellowship at NYU in medical toxicology, and then came back to Washington University on the faculty and was there for 10 years. I started the medical toxicology fellowship program and was the section chief for toxicology. And during my toxicology training, I came in contact with Dan Goldstein, who worked at Monsanto. And in 2015, he sent an email to our toxicology group saying he was looking for a possible toxicologist to come work at Monsano. And I kind of hemmed and hawed and thought, oh my gosh, I don't know about working at Monsanto.

Liza Dunn [00:11:40] But then I started reading about golden rice. Well, actually prior to that I had,

Vance Crowe [00:11:46] Let's stop real quick. What, what is toxicology? It's too much of a substance in your body that's not supposed to be there causing problems.

Liza Dunn [00:11:53] Well, yeah. So toxicology is the study of, of poisons and overdoses and things like that. And, you know, little, little doses of things tend not to bother you depending on what it is, but bigger doses tend to be more of a problem. So you can, you think of water as being non-toxic, but you can see I've taken care of patients who drink way too much water and then their brain swells and they can get real sick from that. So water, anything can be toxic. It depends on the dose. And we, I mean, we think about, you know, we think about, you know, relative toxicities as well, you know, we are perfectly comfortable putting botulinum toxin, injecting it in our faces for cosmetic purposes. And that's one of the, it is actually the most potent toxin known to me in kind. And we know that we can do that safely because we've got a regulatory apparatus around it that make sure that we're, you know, not if, if you follow the label, you're not gonna hurt yourself.

Vance Crowe [00:12:50] So I know it's the same term, right, like Botox botulism, but if you like accidentally put that needle in too far, does somebody like instantly die from that, or is it a different type of, of thing?

Liza Dunn [00:13:02] So it's in a concentration that's so low that you're not gonna, you're not gonna hurt them. And now I, we, at the while we were at the Poison center in New York, there was a case where a, a alternative medicine guy who had his own clinic bought research grade botulinum toxin. And so the real potent stuff, and on the label it said, not for human use.

Vance Crowe [00:13:28] Yeah. But a lot of things say that. Right.

Liza Dunn [00:13:31] And he had a Botox party where he made a 17,000 fold dosing error, and he and his girlfriend went to, they, they showed up in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and another couple stayed in Florida. He had a clinic in Florida with a rapidly descending paralysis. And she wound up, they both wound up in the ICU, but she wound up in the ICU with the tracheostomy and a feeding tube from November till May and could only wiggle her big toe. Yeah. So, so once again, the dose makes the poison. Right. So that, that was, and he's in jail now, but, so, or he, I don't know, he may be out, but he was, he went to jail for it. And the other couple that got really, really sick too. So yeah, they've gotta be careful with, I mean, once again, botulism is a, a significant disease and killed lots of people, you know, prior to people understanding how the disease worked, right. And how the, and how that chemical works. But it has really, really actually important medical therapeutic effects too. So not just for beauty. I mean, people use it. That's what it's most famous for, but you know, people with cerebral palsy and lots of muscle spasticity, you can inject botulinum toxin or Botox, and, and it will, it'll relax those muscles so they can move much more smoothly.

Vance Crowe [00:15:01] So that's, I I didn't realize that it was used for anything other than beauty. So cerebral palsy. Yeah,

Liza Dunn [00:15:06] Cerebral palsy, it's useful. And in other diseases with muscle spasticity. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:15:12] So, so tell me about your coming. Dan Goldstein says, Hey, I'm thinking about having you come to Monsanto, this is why you'd wanna do it. What is the use case? Like, what's the case that a seed company would make to, to a doctor about this? Yeah,

Liza Dunn [00:15:26] So, well, it actually came back to Haiti again. So in 2010, I went to Haiti again. So 21 years after the first time around, Fritz was the first baby that I'd ever seen with malnutrition, right? And so he was kind of the motivational factor in changing that. When I went back after the earthquake, a resident, and I organized the relief mission to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. And once again, I was taking care of, you know, pregnant people and, and, and people with infections and kids and broken bones and things like that. But I kept on seeing two things. I kept on seeing malnutrition and insect borne illness. And I thought if you could fix those two problems, you'd actually be a very long way into helping that help. They, they lifting people out of poverty, right? Because food security is, it's the basis of civil

Vance Crowe [00:16:13] Civilization. Yeah. It's so far away from people in the western world that you don't, you don't really even know anyone that's ever really been hungry. Right? Yeah. Like where I was in in Kenya, they were not hungry that at that moment, but you could talk with them about times when they would only have one meal for a month. Exactly. And, and that would be all the food that they would get. And that's like so hard for us to wrap our minds around in the, in the age of acceleration.

Liza Dunn [00:16:37] That's exactly right. And so I started reading about golden rice. Well, so the interesting thing is that, you know, with malnutrition, there are three grasses that feed over 60% of the world's population in their corn, wheat, and rice. And while they're good because they really fill you up, they aren't great in their micronutrient capacity. So one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide in kids is vitamin A efficiency. And it tends to happen a lot in Southeast Asia. And if you could go around, if you had enough doctors or nurses to go around and drop a little drop of vitamin A under these kids' tongues, that would completely prevent it. But you don't, you don't have that kind of workforce or capacity to do that. So I started reading about golden rice. And Golden Rice is genetically modified to make the precursor of vitamin A and was developed in order to address this problem. And genetically modifying different crops could actually help with micro micronutrient deficiencies, help prevent diseases in, in plants and things like that, and actually make the food supply a lot more stable. So I got interested in that. And then also people have this concern about pesticides because there are these allegations that pesticides are associated with autism and A DHD and a variety of other, other things. But pesticides are really critical for public health. And people forget that people, once again in the West, haven't seen the plague, haven't seen typhus, haven't seen diseases of the middle ages for since the 20th century.

Liza Dunn [00:18:09] And the reason why is because you have these unbelievable chemistries that once again, safe, if you use them according to the label, just like Botox, right? According to the label, you really control and prevent diseases that we haven't seen for a hundred years now, or getting into a hundred years now. But, you know, for example, pyrethrum, pyrethrum is a natural insecticide that's made by Chrysanthemums. And people have known for centuries that Chrysanthemums had insecticidal properties, a certain kind of kanth, it's called Center of Oleum. And so, you know, in the military, one of the leading causes of death is actually insect borne illness rather than war wounds. And so for example, in 1812 when Napoleon went and invaded Russia, he went in with over 400,000 men and came out with less than 4,000. And the conventional wisdom is that he invaded Russia too late and the winter caught up with them, right? Well, they were doing an excavation in Lithuania about 15 years ago and came across a mass grave of his soldiers' bodies. And when they exhumed the bodies and examined them, they realized that there had been a huge typhus outbreak in the ranks. And you know, he had invaded Russia in June. So it's, so it's probably actually insect borne illness that was really, really the culprit for that.

Liza Dunn [00:19:40] So at the Donna World War ii, there was a mad dash to find, or, well, there was a shortage of pyrethoids. So people finally figured out that Pyrethrum was a chemistry and then made it a little bit more stable and did a synthetic version. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:19:55] 'cause I believe those chrysanthemums that you're talking about, they, they really only grow in like West Africa or something. Right? So they're very, very rare.

Liza Dunn [00:20:01] So the, you could actually, I think Kenya actually produces them.

Vance Crowe [00:20:05] Okay.

Liza Dunn [00:20:05] Right. And I think, I think I, I'd have to double check this, but I think Kenya actually or Japan had a, a bunch of two I

Vance Crowe [00:20:14] Okay, that's fair. I just remember hearing that. It was like very rare. And if you were gonna try and do the, the pesticide control using chrysanthemums,

Liza Dunn [00:20:23] You needed a big,

Vance Crowe [00:20:24] You needed a lot, you needed lot. And so you were going a lot of chrysanthemums in order to be able to have this molecule that also wasn't shelf stable, couldn't last for super long time. And so then they made a synthetic version of it,

Liza Dunn [00:20:34] A synthetic version, which was a little, it was a little bit more stable and, and, and very much the same kind of chemistry properties and things like that. What it does is it, it blocks or it activates, it turns off the gating mechanism for sodium channels in, in the nerves of insects. And we don't have those same kind of sodium channels, so it doesn't bother us. So anyway, long and short is, there was a, there was a shortage of pyrethroids at the dawn of World War ii and therefore a mad dash to find a chemistry that was going to be very low toxicity for people and animals, but really important for insect control because once again, typhus was a leading cause of death during World War II and

Vance Crowe [00:21:17] Things like that. How is typhus spread?

Liza Dunn [00:21:19] Typhus is spread through lice, through lice, body lice carry typhus, and it's a terrible, horrible,

Vance Crowe [00:21:25] What does it do to you? I mean, this is like, I, you only see it on the Oregon trail, right? My, my only experience with it is

Liza Dunn [00:21:31] High fevers rashes, just really incapacitating and then yeah, in sepsis and, and death, there's a, there are two types of typhus. One is carried by mi mice and it's transmitted from two fleas, and then that's called mirroring typhus. And there's actually an outbreak of mirroring typhus in California right now. And so, and it's because these people are concerned about, you know, the role of pesticides. So, you know, with rodent control, all you need is a, some vitamin D, the same vitamin D that you make in your skin when the sun hits your skin is actually useful in killing rats and mice. So you, for to control typhus, all you need is some synthetic kant dust to kill the fleas and some vitamin D to kill the rats. But people have so, so much worry about the other effects of pesticides that they, they don't understand that banning them. So,

Vance Crowe [00:22:33] Wait, when you say vitamin D kills rodents, what do you mean? Like, they get hit with sunshine, they're like vampires and get wiped out, or you're saying vitamin D as in like, we go around and inject them or they

Liza Dunn [00:22:44] Eat it? No, they, if they eat it, okay, if they eat it, they, they wind up with hypercalcemia. Yeah. And they, and they die.

Vance Crowe [00:22:50] Very interesting. Yeah.

Liza Dunn [00:22:51] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:51] I think of rat poisoning is being like extremely toxic. This is not, are we talking about different things then?

Liza Dunn [00:22:58] We're talking about different things. So in the past there's been, you know, there've been very high toxicity chemistries used for pest control. So for example, example, and it crops for agriculture, they used to use nicotine. And then for ant control and things like that, they would use arsenic and mercurials. And so if kids got into that kind of stuff, they'd get really sick and die, right? Stricken things like that. Very, very toxic things. And so as things have evolved, chemistries have evolved, they've had a much lower toxicity for people and, and animals and have become increasingly more targeted for different species. So, you know, back to the whole pyre raid shortage, a guy by the name of Paul Mueller of Swiss chemist discovered DDT and DDT revolutionized public health. So you could spray it on people and it wouldn't hurt them. Their, their actual, I actually heard a story yesterday that was fascinating. This woman that I had lunch with, her mother was in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan had been devastated and there was a big infestation of, of bugs and, and lice and fleas and all of that stuff. And so when the dd tr t trucks would go by kids and adults would actually come out to run behind the DD truck DDT trucks so they could get delau and things like that.

Liza Dunn [00:24:34] That's how bad that was.

Vance Crowe [00:24:36] I had heard that people had run behind those things, but I didn't recognize that they were doing it. Not because it was like, oh, the sprinkler is here, but rather it's because we have Weiss and we want to, this will help us

Liza Dunn [00:24:47] At least this was, this was this woman's story in Japan. Yeah. Right after the war because they didn't have, they didn't have access to, you know, chemistries and things like that. It was devastated. So that was one of the major ways that they,

Vance Crowe [00:24:59] You're saying something kind of mind blowing here because even though I had heard, hey, DDT got kind of a rough wrap, but maybe not the fair wrap, I've never heard anybody say, well, DDT is actually safe for humans. You can spray it on them and the the pathways that would, you know, kill the insects aren't in the,

Liza Dunn [00:25:16] It's a different thing. Yes, exactly. And so as a matter of fact, DDT is for the reason why we don't have malaria here in the United States or in Europe because there was a swamp training program and then DDT spring and then in, so Paul Mueller actually won a Nobel prize for discovering DDT in 1948. And in 1953, the National Academy of Sciences credited DDT with averting half a billion insect born and deaths worldwide, and a billion insect born illnesses. So it revolutionized public health. But the problem with DDT, just like, just like a broad spectrum antibiotic, it's it, you kill all sorts of things, right? So you kill beneficial bugs as well as pests. Right? So what happened with DDT was really, when it got used in agriculture, agriculture actually really, really was important for food security. For the first time ever, farmers had a very low toxicity chemical that could kill locusts. And I don't know if you're aware of what's going on in East Africa right now with the desert locust outbreak, but the desert locust is the most voracious predator of crops worldwide. A small swarm of them can eat in a day, what will feed 35,000 people for a year. And this swarm has gone from Kenya over Saudi Arabia up into Pakistan and India and has spread all over the place. And it's been very, very devastating. So pesticides are they, they have five crop dusters in Kenya. And so the pesticides are really important for controlling these kinds of outbreaks, otherwise your food supply's gone and instantly, and if you've got people think, oh, well what about, you know, you've got livestock, well what are you gonna feed the livestock, right?

Liza Dunn [00:26:58] So you've got, you've got, your food supply is wiped out at the drop of a hat with this kind of outbreak. So for the first time ever, farmers had a way of controlling locusts and other things like fall armyworm and big huge pests. And so DDT revolutionized food security as well. But Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring and launched the environmental movement very rightly pointed out that it had lots of off target effects and was harming beneficial insects and harming birds of prey that would eat those beneficial insects and things like that. And so she wrote Silent Spring

Vance Crowe [00:27:38] And her case was that you'd have these insects that were exposed to this disease, the birds were eating them, and then as, as it moved up the food chain, so maybe the fish were eating them and then they were eating so many that they were bio accumulating so that by the time the dose got to the birds, because the birds, the eagles, birds of prey weren't eating insects, they were eating fish, but those fish were eating the insects. And by the time you had concentrated it, then it was having deleterious effects, effects on their, on their eggs and things like that.

Liza Dunn [00:28:06] A variety of things like that. And a variety of sort of allegations came out of that, along those lines. So, but Rachel Carson did recognize how important food security was, and she made a recommendation in Silent Spring, she realized that farmers needed something. And so she recommended that farmers use a totally natural chemical made by a bacterium called Bacillus th genus or bt and sprayed that on their crops because it was much more specific for crop pests. It didn't tend to bother pollinators and, and other things, and it didn't bioaccumulate or anything. So to this day, organic farmers spray those that, that chemistry on their crops where companies like Monsanto and Syngenta and other companies got so smart was they discovered the gene in the bacteria that makes that chemical, that protein and put it in the plant.

Vance Crowe [00:28:57] Yeah. We had Dr. Fred Perla on and we talked to all about that. That's one of the early, early episodes. And BT is one of those things that once people hear that the organic farmers use it, they're like, oh, okay, that's fine. Right? Like it's, it's like, it's, it's one of those things that's so ubiquitously used that once they figured out, wait a second, if we can take it from being the powder form that we go put on crops and we instead have the

Liza Dunn [00:29:23] Plant

Vance Crowe [00:29:23] Produce it itself, so that that way when a, when a when the THPs bite into the leaf, then when they do that, it perforates their stomach, the insect dies and you don't have anywhere near the, the, the need to go out and keep spraying over and over again. You

Liza Dunn [00:29:39] Don't need DDT.

Vance Crowe [00:29:39] Yeah. Oh, or DODD. Okay. I didn't even consider that it would wipe out the need for DDT.

Liza Dunn [00:29:44] Yeah. So that's what's so cool about it, is it really, really decreases your need for insecticides, which is totally cool. The other thing about bt and, and a lot of these chemistries just in general, is it they are, they are based on nature. Even the synthetic ones have, have, are a lot of the ideas about developing them come from nature. So if, if you think about it, BT is a protein that's made by a bacterium. Well, antibiotics are often proteins that are made by are not necessarily proteins, but chemistries that are made by, by bacteria. So for example, I think it's streptomycin, I'm trying to remember which one Oh no, ivermectin actually was

Vance Crowe [00:30:31] Discovered. Ooh, you're gonna get us in trouble on YouTube. Ivermectin is a dirty word. It is.

Liza Dunn [00:30:34] So ivermectin comes from a family of ivermectin that's that's produced by a bacterium that was found on a golf course in Japan. So, so, so organisms, plants, plants, bacteria, things like that, they make their own chemicals to defend themselves from other organisms. So remember, plants can't run away from you. So they actually make their own pesticides. So for example, pyrethrum is made by CMS to protect themselves from insects, but they make other,

Vance Crowe [00:31:09] Yeah. The one that surprises most people is like nicotine and caffeine are both, they're both insecticides that the plant makes in order to be able to protect itself. It just so happens that those have a stimulating effect on us. Like Right. And if you, you know, smoke 'em, then you get to, you get to feel, you know, a little bit happy, a little bit alert, but you don't want to take on too much. I mean, nicotine is lethal to people. Oh

Liza Dunn [00:31:30] Yeah. At

Vance Crowe [00:31:30] Relatively small doses. At

Liza Dunn [00:31:32] Small doses, yeah. Just it, it's a, yeah, you can get into big trouble if a kid eats a cigarette, they get in big trouble, big trouble. They get very sick. But so, but the other thing that people don't know is that some plants produce cyanide like compounds.

Vance Crowe [00:31:45] Yeah. Cherry pits, right?

Liza Dunn [00:31:47] Cherry pits and things like that. And if you think about it, plants want their babies to survive and that pit is around their seed. And so the more the plant stress, the more protection it will make around its itself or its baby. So a cassava is another thing. Cassava produces something called urin, which is also a cyanide like compound in its skin. And it prevents, it protects it from rodents. Right? And if people don't pro prepare casava correctly, they can get terrible neurologic illness. They can get something called con zo where they get a, they get paralyzed from the waist down and it's spastic paraparesis. This

Vance Crowe [00:32:28] Makes so much sense. So when I was in the Peace Corps, it was possible that some people would move into regions where there was cassava where I was, it wasn't that big of a deal, but, and they would say, you're not allowed to prepare it for, for yourself. Yeah. You have to have somebody else prepare it for you because they know how and you don't, is it as simple as just peeling it or boiling it enough

Liza Dunn [00:32:45] Or No, they have to peel it and they need, they need to activate the enzyme by, by crushing it. And then they need to boil it and it, they, it's a whole big huge deal. And if, if they get it improperly prepared, you get a devastating neurologic outcome and sometimes death and sometimes cyanide poisoning even if you, if you prepare it wrong. So there are a variety of different things, but people are unaware that plants make these pesticides to protect themselves. And 99% of the pesticides we eat are che chemicals that plants may protect themselves. And they're finding found in much higher doses or much higher concentrations in the plant itself than any synthetic pesticide residue that you would find that, that people create to protect, you know, their crops and things like that. So yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:33:41] So you came to Monsanto thinking, I'm gonna get a chance to work on food security and, and then came there and now you're reading reports or working with the government, or what do you do? So

Liza Dunn [00:33:52] I do a little bit of a, I'm on the re in the regulatory scientific affairs team. And so I do some regulatory work. I do some product safety work, and then I do a lot of outreach to help people understand what the benefits and safety of modern agriculture is. I think that most people have this notion that farmers, you know, most, I think physicians often have this idea that farmers are really not sure of what they're doing and they, they, they are making sort of these big pronouncements for how farming should be done. And I think that what they don't understand is that farmers are real professionals that have an unbelievable wealth of experience at feeding the world's population never before in the history of mankind, has 2% of the, of the US population been able to feed all of the rest of us and then export 23% of what we make. That that is, that is an achievement that is has never happened before. Right. And when I'm hearing physicians and public health people make the claim that modern agriculture is the reason why we have autism or obesity or diabetes or all of these non-communicable disease, heart disease, cancer, that kind of stuff. I, I think that it's, I think they, the people who are calling for big changes are largely, meanwhile they think that they know what they're talking about, but they don't.

Liza Dunn [00:35:27] It would be like having, so the Lancet publishes all of this stuff about, you know, the great food transformation and how we should ban pesticides and we should, we don't like GMOs and we should go do agroecology and all of this stuff. I, I can't imagine how a group of physicians would react if farmers went to the Farmer's Almanac for example, and said, well, you know, anti-hypertensive medicines have side effects and so we think anti-hypertensive medicines because they don't make us feel good, should, should be banned. Well, that's not,

Vance Crowe [00:36:05] I mean, I think that one of the reasons, and this, it, it was hard for me to see when I was inside of the corporation, like when I was working for Monsanto, the motivations of the people on the outside, because I would look at them and be like, you know what, what you're doing appears to be evil, right? If you're, if you're telling everyone don't use genetically engineered crops or these pesticides that are produced aren't safe. When all of the evidence says that I, I like, I really had a very firm idea that they were evil. I'm coming to the conclusion that I think many of our problems in the country right now is a massive lack of meaning. And I think that people are trying to find causes bigger than themselves that they're able to latch onto. And in any type of group that you're going to join, if, if, if, if the, if the group is going to have any sort of longevity, you have to give things up. Every single religion you would look at that has staying power. Every cult that ever, you know, got to some strength, they had purity rituals. That's exactly right. And those purity rituals, whether or not the rest of the world understands why they're doing it, or even if their reasoning isn't correct, it's that it allows you to have an ingroup and an outgroup. And I just, I think this is probably, this would be happening in any time in history no matter what. Even though all of the good that's coming with it, it's because people have to make sacrifices in order to have an ingroup and an outgroup.

Liza Dunn [00:37:30] That's exactly right. I think that that's exactly right. The problem with this though is that if you think about it, agriculture is the foundation of civilization. So when some guy or girl 10,000 years ago planted a thatch of wheat in the Mesopotamian River basin, they liberated people from a hunting gathering, scraping by society to being able to build cities and libraries and things that you and I can sit here and have this conversation 'cause we're fed, right? And the scientific, so we have 10,000 years of organic farming under our belts experience and 50 years of food security in the West. And that is because of scientific advances that are so significant in agriculture. But people aren't aware of those scientific advances in agriculture. But

Vance Crowe [00:38:21] I think it is actually more nuanced than this. And I, like, I would point to the evidence of pigs,

Liza Dunn [00:38:27] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:38:27] So people don't realize that pork is the largest consumed meat in the world. 36, I think percent of all the meat eaten in the uni in the world is pork. But two out of the major three religions don't, don't, don't eat, have, don't eat pork at all. Right? You're right. And you could look at them and you could say, look how much easier it would've been if you would've had pork this whole time. You could have had meat, you could have, you know, gotten all rid of all kinds of diseases that come with, you know, the avian, you know, the chicken production. And yet they didn't because, but I think it was a factor around this sacrifice puts us in an in-group versus an outgroup. And that in-group allows us to be much stronger than we would be if we didn't have these, these food purity concepts.

Liza Dunn [00:39:18] Exactly. Which brings me to tro leko.

Vance Crowe [00:39:22] Okay.

Liza Dunn [00:39:23] Okay. So do you know who tro

Vance Crowe [00:39:24] Leko is? No, no idea. Okay.

Liza Dunn [00:39:25] So Tro Lasko was the agriculture minister under Joseph Stalin.

Vance Crowe [00:39:31] Ooh, whoa. Okay. So

Liza Dunn [00:39:33] Yeah, so he was very interesting. So just, let's just sort of back up very, very briefly. So in 1905, there was a dress rehearsal for the Russian Revolution. There was an uprising and it was brutally put down, but the Prime Minister at the time, Peter Opin was wondering what was causing this, what what what was causing all this unrest and realized that something needed to be done. And the, it had been a largely peasant uprising. And they were very upset about the fact that they were essentially doing slave labor. People who held land, they had to work on the land, they couldn't keep their own food. They had to, you know, deliver it to other people. Peter Solarin did a land grant program, very much like land grant programs here, whereby you would, they were able to get a little plot of land and as long as they took classes and learned how to farm that land productively, they could, the, the loan would be forgiven and they could have that. So at the dawn of the Russian, so that's 1906, so 12 years later at the dawn of Russian, the Russian Revolution, that group of people who became known as the Kulaks were feeding up to 50% of the Russian population in a 12 year period.

Vance Crowe [00:40:50] Yeah. They were good at it, they were really good

Liza Dunn [00:40:51] At it, they were really good at it,

Vance Crowe [00:40:52] And they were able to sell their crops and

Liza Dunn [00:40:54] They were able to sell their crops. And so they made money. And so they were perceived by the Bolsheviks as being, you know, bourgeoisie. And they were massacred, they were massacred, they were sent off to the gulag. The, the, the name of the massacre was called the Holo demure. So it was largely happened in the Ukraine and then huge food shortages and things like that. So that was under Lenin. And the program that they had for Kku lax Stalin then comes in, in the early 1920s when Lenin dies and installs a person by the name of Tro Cinco as his minister of agriculture and tro cinco did not believe in genetics and basically falsified his findings and said that he could grow wheat under really, really extraordinary circumstances and take it out full screen. And then he wound up, he wound up promoting this idea that was totally non-scientific, no science to base it. And took on Nikolai Vlav, who was the premier plant scientist of his time, who he sent to the Gulag and VLA ov who came up with the idea of a seed bank. And genetics died in the gulag 50 million Russians starved because of Le KO's policies. And then when Mao came to power in China and adopted KO's farm policies and other 50 million people died in the great leap forward.

Liza Dunn [00:42:28] So anti-science even coming from very high people, especially if it affects agriculture, has an outsized impact on food security. And food security is a, a really important thing to be careful with.

Vance Crowe [00:42:46] I mean, I, I completely see what you're saying. And, and I remember the first time I ever heard about the Kolax and that, like, that really woke me up. In fact, I was probably two years into working at Monsanto, I had heard the story of the Kolax and the, the parallel that I drew was people that are saying GMOs are poison or organic farming is safe, and the other ones aren't, are putting us in a really bad spot, particularly the corporations that are selling into this system. Because what they're doing is they're taking money and making it off of this fear that people have of like, Hey, maybe our food is poisoned or it's not safe. And then what are you gonna do if that fear really starts on fire? That's right. If you have somebody come to power that says, this is the only way we're going to do it. And I still, I still feel like that's a grave danger in our, in our society. I also think the, the idea that science is, oh, I, I believe we run a very real risk of saying we should, we should have all of our decisions based on science and we start moving towards a scientism, you know, a sort of religious movement, correct. That says that science can tell us more than just what is true or is not true. But it also should tell us what we ought to do about it. I think the, you know, they call it hues guillotine, right? Where it's saying this is what the science says is safe, and so therefore we can use that to determine what we ought to do on some large scale. So I'm always like this, this tension I didn't used to have.

Vance Crowe [00:44:21] And now I do because I'm, I I think we're watching what happens when science gets turned into a religion and people start fighting over ideology when they, when one side perceives we're fighting over truth. But that's every religious fight.

Liza Dunn [00:44:36] That's right. And I think that that scientific ideas, scientific discussions most, most recently have been demonstrated to be certain ideologies. If you were on one side or the other, instead of having a reasonable di scientific discussion between the people who are defending the use of one thing versus another in, in COVID for example, or people having a reasonable discussion. They, they got railroaded into one of the other sides and a whole lot of mistrust built up around those sides. And you, depending on where you stood on hydroxychloroquine versus vaccination versus, you know, ivermectin ivermectin, you're, instead of having a reasonable discussion where people come to a consensus together and build trust, you got automatically labeled as a fascist or a communist. So, so it, it, it's, it's really, I think for the public to watch this debacle happen at the scientific level is, is really disconcerting and they don't know who to believe anymore. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:45:42] A hundred percent. You know, I remember it was a couple of years ago, I don't know if it was the Daily Show or if it was like one of these late night shows and they did this demonstration where they said, here are 99 people in a band and one that is not in the band he's playing off in his own. And because these 99 are so loud and they play so well together, this represents the consensus on climate change. And so you're either with the 99 band players or you're this one person over here and that like this, it really made me angry. Yeah.

Liza Dunn [00:46:17] And

Vance Crowe [00:46:17] It really made me be like, you know what? I don't wanna be on your team if the way that you're going to win this argument is by saying, look at all the people that agree with us and whatever this one person's point is, they're not only are we, we not going to listen to it, but you should drown them out. You should literally play your music so loud that there's no chance. Because it's like, what if that guy brings a good point to this discussion? What if in his disagree ability, like he brings something up that nobody considered without that guy bad things can happen.

Liza Dunn [00:46:49] So one of the things that I think you see with the 99 is you get into a lot of credentialism, you know, from Ivy League schools and things like that. I like to point out that Harvard, it's a great school led the charge though with their for lobotomy in the fifties.

Vance Crowe [00:47:08] Did they really?

Liza Dunn [00:47:09] Yes, they did. So, so yeah, there was the dream team saying, this is the way Walter Freeman, Harvey Cushing, all these people

Vance Crowe [00:47:16] Saying

Liza Dunn [00:47:17] That this is the absolute way to manage, you know, psychiatric illness. And that's why, you know, Rose Kennedy got lobotomized and devastated Francis Farmer, who is a Hollywood starlet got lobotomized wrecked. Yeah. So, so very well-heeled, credentialed people often make large recommendations, sweeping recommendations that are then taken to be the gospel truth because of their credentials. And in the, in retrospect it, you're like, whoa. So

Vance Crowe [00:47:52] It's a weird thing, right? Like I don't really understand why people started moving towards the, we should only have one side of the discussion. The other side is completely wrong. And I have to wonder is, is this like the natural state of human beings and that, and that like the concept of free speech being like a social technology that we discovered, but it would entirely be possible that we could, we could lose that, that social technology.

Liza Dunn [00:48:19] Yeah. That, that to me is terrifying. I think that it's really important for people to be able to say what they think and, and you can, you may disagree a hundred percent with it, but there, there has to be room for a discussion because otherwise you can't come to a reasonable conclusion without hearing both sides of the story. And regardless of, you know, what you think is morally correct, you may have a completely different moral background, but that doesn't mean that the other person doesn't have the right to say or explain what he or she is thinking.

Vance Crowe [00:48:56] Yeah. And there's like, in with corporations, there's like a weird tension because on the one hand you're like, hey, a corporation is a, is a group of people. So if you take a political position on something corporation, you are inherently biasing towards some percentage of your employees and not others. But then on the other hand, you don't want to make it so corporations can't put in their, their position on something because somebody like Fred Perla who invented or helped be, be a part of the team to invent BT cotton, you know, which saved all sorts of of lives and and limited the amount of pesticides. So I don't know how you balance these two things because to me it seems like I really don't want the power of corporations to be able to have their voice so outweigh other people. But at the other hand, they have to be a part of the conversation because if you limit them out of it, then the only people that are talking are the activists or the end line consumers or something.

Liza Dunn [00:49:52] Yep. And I think it's a, that's a really difficult balance for corporations to walk 'cause they're always accused of one thing or the other, right. Having conflicts of interest in a whole variety of things. So I think that it's important though for corporations to do what they do best, which is make a product that people want as long and, and the regulatory apparatus around them are supposed to keep them in that lane with in terms of safety and, and things like that. So we have built in ways for corporations to be, to behave. Now, now I'm not gonna say that all corporations have always, you know, behaved honorably. Obviously not. But it, but I think that we do have, at the moment, we've got one of the best regulatory systems in the world and the safest food supply in the world. And you know, and it's because of that balance that people have tried to keep over the past couple of day decades. I'm afraid that that's at risk of going away. And then you get corporations actually having to sort of, you know, take a moral tone as opposed to have a regulatory, have the corporation do what its job is to, to do, make a product that people want a regulatory apparatus that governs that to make sure that, that those products are safe. And then the consumer, it's the best of both worlds. The consumer gets the best product out there and, and, and people have, there's a safety mechanism built into what we've got now is we've got, you know, regulation by litigation and re regulation.

Liza Dunn [00:51:27] So you've got somebody who says, I I've got this one paper that shows that this might be a problem and that gets in front of a jury and then everybody is, that gets kind of misinformation can get spread everywhere or regulation by legislation where somebody comes to a legislator and says, I've read this paper, it concerns me. And then, you know, you've got a huge imbalance between what is important and, and the regulatory apparatus that's designed by thousands of science scientists looking at thousands of papers to make sure the products on the market are safe.

Vance Crowe [00:52:03] When I was working for Monsano and there would be activists that would show up, right? So I would sometimes get, not really yelled at, but definitely like some high tension, you know, you're representing, you know, this to awful corporation. One of the things that I would always point out to them is, as an activist, you really ought to be careful because in some ways what you're doing by hammering on the table saying though we need more regulation to protect us from these evil corporations, you are actually helping the largest of corporations to dominate. Because the corporations will say, oh, do you want us to take on another maybe two, three years of regulation, just add on a million dollars a year? That's fine because all you're doing is making a moat that gets larger and larger. So if you wanna have a startup, you have to have $13 million just to get in the door for the regulations. And so you can't, and so anytime you get a new technology, the only thing you can do is sell it to the people that have already figured out the regulatory apparatus.

Liza Dunn [00:53:02] That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So yeah, so small business owners have a really hard time or academics have a very hard time, you know, making that leap. So you've got very interesting products that are stuck on a shelf in a lab because universities are, are not equipped to, to take on that regulatory mechanism, you know, so for the pesticide it costs about 200 a quarter of a billion dollars and 10 years of, of research on safety and safety testing. Quarter

Vance Crowe [00:53:31] Of a billion just on safety research. Yeah.

Liza Dunn [00:53:32] Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:53:33] To

Liza Dunn [00:53:33] Get, to get to, to get to the market, to put together the whole dossier for it to be approved to get on the market. So an incredible amount of testing goes into every pesticide that's been on the market. And in fact, that's why you tend to find not not such a huge pipeline of pesticides. Most pesticides are, you know, 20, 30, 40 years old. And because it, because of the amount of safety studies that you have to do to get it on the market. Same thing with pharmaceuticals. I mean, I think pharmaceutical testing, it's closer to $8 billion to get on the market. So, and they, they all are undergoing testing that is called good laboratory practice or GLP studies where they do a battery of safety studies that are designed by the regulatory agencies that are monitored by the regulatory to agencies. They can go into your lab and make sure you're following all the rules if you have an adverse effect that is reportable by law to the regulatory agency. So a mouse dies that gets reported to the EPA here, a mouse gets wobbly that gets reported to the EPA, somebody drinks your pesticide after it's on the market, that gets reported to the EPA. So it's, it's, it's a very, very, the reason why it's so strict is because you wanna make sure that what your studies show are reproducible over and over and over and over again. And if academic labs aren't set up to do that, they're set up to explore new ideas and exciting ideas for treating diseases or things like that. And, but they're, they don't have that kind of capital to invest in the regulations that they actually are demanding.

Liza Dunn [00:55:11] Which is reasonable. It's reasonable to make sure that there solid regulations around a product.

Vance Crowe [00:55:17] I mean, it's a weird thing because you wanna find a way to be able to let the disruptors in and you, but like you also don't, I, you know, it's very easy to undervalue the fact that we have safe food. I was living in Kenya when they had an aflo Toin scare.

Liza Dunn [00:55:34] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:55:35] And this is before we had ready access to the internet. So you could go to, you know, the post office and for $10 a minute or something insane, you could go get a page of news or whatever. So I remember being there and like having the Peace Corps volunteers pool our money together to buy some internet time to be able to look up like how scared should we be Yeah. Of aflo toin and, and like that was the first time in my life that I was ever looking at food and being like, it's just a couple of micrograms will kill you. You'll be dead. I, I've since come to find out it's a little bit more complicated than that, but I remember being like, absolutely terrified. And like, if you've never had that experience, you don't know, would I rather be hungry or would I rather roll the dice? And eventually you roll the dice and it's scary.

Liza Dunn [00:56:21] It is scary. And so once again, that actually brings us right back to pesticides, right? So fungal infections of crops are hugely important. So fungal infections in people aren't, don't tend to be that bad unless you're immunosuppressed, right? But in crops that they, they many fungi, which are carried by insects, and when insects eat the crop, they introduce these fungal infections from spores on their coats. They secrete carcinogenic mi mycotoxins. So you, so aflatoxin is one of the big things that's regulated. So you actually need either insecticides or fungicides to prevent that because it's not just one person being exposed, it's a huge swath of the population being exposed. So the, that's why these things are really, really important. One of the fungal infections and crops that I really like to talk about are, is Clavis eps, purpura, ergot, which caused outbreaks, massive outbreaks of St. Anthony's fire in the Middle Ages, which was a disease where people's vessels, blood vessels would constrict and their hands and feet and noses would fall off in a whole variety of things. They'd have convulsions and hallucinations and all this stuff. It really, really horrible disease. Well, they figured out that ergot and Rye was responsible for that. And it would get, it would get grow in certain circumstances, but it would get into the food supply and you'd have these big outbreaks. Ergon also turns out to be very useful for preventing postpartum hemorrhage. And was, they discovered that a medicine called methyl methyl orgon from that.

Liza Dunn [00:57:56] And it turns out to be natural. LSD and that's where Albert Hoffman, he was looking at ergot when he discovered LSD. So LSD is a synthetic version of it, but IBC acid is the natural version. So if you prefer to have LSD residues in your cereal, then, you know.

Vance Crowe [00:58:19] So let's talk about this's funny. 'cause now we have a toxicologist here. It seems to me that psychotropics like LSD and shrooms and the, the like really gaining public excite Yeah. Excitement or traction or whatever you wanna call that. As a toxicologist, what do you think? Is this a dangerous game people are playing here?

Liza Dunn [00:58:40] So I think it's actually kind of interesting. And the reason why I think it's interesting is because what those chemistries do, they're called tryptamines and tryptamines are, it's very similarly shaped, structured as serotonin. So serotonin. And when you think about, when you think about major depressive disorder and things like that, s you're, the thought is that you're not have enough serotonin floating around. And so if you enhance the amount of serotonin floating around, serotonin, reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, things like that, that actually improves mood. So they did a study and, and, and several na natural products produce tryptamine. So ayahuasca, which is you find in South America, which is a combination of a vine and Aleve, it has two kind of antidepressant like chemist chemistries in there that people will trip for three days in, in South America. But then they come back and they, after having refractory depression have said that this has just revolutionized their lives. They've got, you know, magic mushrooms. Johns Hopkins did a study in terminally ill cancer patients and gave them magic mushrooms. And the people who were in the group that got them said that they, it really relieved major depression. They weren't terrified of dying anymore. A whole variety of things.

Liza Dunn [01:00:11] So it's, it's, they are promising and, and biochemically it makes sense as to why they would work.

Vance Crowe [01:00:18] It's, it's interesting because, you know, we talk about things like nicotine being in things like tobacco or caffeine being in coffee beans and those being just, it just so happens that these have this stimulating effect, but nobody sits there and thinks, oh, this is like the human plant connection. And yet people do with things like ayahuasca or, or magic mushrooms. Like they genuinely believe that, that there's some sort of, you know, circular path. What is your take on this? Is this something that just happens to be a, a mistake of nature? Or is there some sort of feedback loop that made these better and better and better?

Liza Dunn [01:00:58] You know, that's a, that's a really good question. And it probably goes, you know, back to sort of indigenous medicine kind of stuff where, where, you know, the medicine man would have a, a solution to something. And it's funny for, I I, I want to make a caveat out of this because there's a lot of alternative medicine kind of bunk out there where people are capitalizing on other people's, you know, diseases. But a lot of medicine comes from plants and a lot of people over centuries developed, you know, traditional medicine, medicinal products to, to help with diseases. So for example, there's a, there's a, Walter Walter, what was his last name? Melody, and I can't remember his last name. They, they were plant, plant specialists and they went down to South America and they were with a tribe. And the, the, the women were, and men were separated and the men were saying, you know, for postpartum hemorrhage, this is a really good plant and this is how you prepare it. And the women are sitting outside of the tent and going, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how you prepare it. They don't know what they're talking about. But what it turned out was that there was an actual fungus growing on the plant that was a commensal with the plant that had ergot like properties. And so it caused vasoconstriction to the uterus. So the, so the, a lot of medicinal chemistry comes from that kind of thing.

Vance Crowe [01:02:28] Meaning like, people trying things out, not really knowing. I mean, that's the, that is the thing that's like the wildest to really think about. Like you have all these plants out there, you know, you're in the desert and there's virtually no plants. How is it that you figure out that the juice of that cactus boiled in just the right way under these speci specific conditions, make this thing happen? I mean, it must have been absurd amounts of trial error down, right?

Liza Dunn [01:02:53] Yeah. Yeah. So, and then they're also absurd amounts of absolutely no benefit, but that get sold and packaged as this will fix the common cold. Or this will, you know, cure COVID or whatever. They've got all sorts of, you know, alternative medicine products out there that are snake oil. So snake oil salesmen are still there. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:03:12] I mean, and, and have been since the dawn of time, because you don't really know. Another big movement that's going on, I'd be interested to hear a toxicologist opinion on is, I know several men that are now taking doses of testosterone. And so, you know, if you think about life being broken into the pre reproductive, the reproductive, and then the post reproductive phase, it seems like taking t allows you to push out the, the amount of time that you can spend in that reproductive phase. Are there downsides to guys that want to get bulked up taking testosterone? Or is this like a magical cure?

Liza Dunn [01:03:50] Anabolic steroids, you gotta be careful with just in general too much of anything.

Vance Crowe [01:03:54] Is that the same thing, testosterone and anabolic steroids? It's,

Liza Dunn [01:03:56] It's a steroid. Yeah, it's an anabolic steroid.

Vance Crowe [01:03:58] So I don't, so give, give this to me, you know, from the beginning. 'cause this is, I'm lost here. Yeah,

Liza Dunn [01:04:03] So, so steroid hormones are, are, a group of them are like sex steroids, sex hormones, and depending on the relative concentration of one versus the other, or they're more than one, but you will have more masculine features or more feminine features. They're banned, they've been traditionally banned in sports because they can enhance, you know, strength and endurance and things like that. But it's not just that, it's not just that, that that's the problem. You can have things like something called hepatic paleos where your liver becomes the blood vessels in your liver becomes sort of dilated and you get a big sort of pocket of blood that can, if it ruptures, you can have fatal hemorrhage. There, there are a whole variety of, of things that can really be problematic from a health perspective if you're taking too much, you know, people tend to think, oh, if I take a little bit, then a lot should be much, much better. So I now, there are some reasons to take steroids. And so I think that if you are under supervision of a physician who specializes in, you know, endocrine kind of things, then I think that you're probably okay to do that. But if you're just doing it, if, if you think you're buying it from somebody, for example, I, I've got a great story. If you think you're buying it for, from some random person and that you're getting, even getting testosterone, you might, you don't know what you're getting. For example, I had a patient that came into the ER with a blood sugar of 12.

Liza Dunn [01:05:36] His wife found him comatose. And

Vance Crowe [01:05:40] Is that a lot or a little?

Liza Dunn [01:05:41] That's a, that's very low. Okay, that's very low. You wanna be above, above 60, right? So that's, that's life threatening. He, he, he would've died if his wife didn't find him. And he had bought what he thought was veterinary grade oxandrolone, which is a testosterone like compound, right? So he could get bulked up. And what it turned out was he bought pure, what we call gide, which is an anti-diabetic agent that makes your blood sugar go pH

Vance Crowe [01:06:15] Right.

Liza Dunn [01:06:16] And it was pure, I mean, there was not a drop of oxandrolone in there. So buying this stuff, you never know what you're getting, right? So if you, if you're getting a prescription from a physician who is supervising, you know, you know, numbers and things like that, and that, that's probably a much more reliable way to go than it is to just buy it at the gym.

Vance Crowe [01:06:38] It seems to me like there are a lot of people going to doctors for this. And you look at say somebody like Jeff Bezos or you know, any movie star or like, I think there are just a lot of people out there doing this to extend life. Is it, do you think, in a way like a fountain of youth? Do you, do you, you don't get away with it, I don't think. No,

Liza Dunn [01:06:57] We're all dead in the long run. So I mean, it's the same. I think we, we, everybody's looking for a fountain of youth. That's why Botox is so popular. That's why, you know, these steroids are so popular and things like that. If you eat just this it's, or drink just that. And, you know, so there's always a people wanting a prescription for how to live longer. Well, I think it's a miracle that we've, since the 20th century, it had a 30 year increase in life expectancy with five very basic public health interventions. So water sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, food security, and vector control that bought us 30 years, increased life expectancy in, in, in 19 hundreds. Life expectancy was 45 years old. So now we're keeping, trying to push the edge and everybody's like, oh, you know, there's an epidemic of all these chronic diseases, heart disease, cancer, and this, that, and the other. Well, that's because you survived past the ripe old age of 25 because of one of those five interventions.

Vance Crowe [01:07:56] Wow. That is actually a really interesting way to do that. It's almost like controlling for inflation in some sort of a calculation. Like how is it that you make people not freak out about, you know, heart disease or these other diseases of age when you're saying, Hey, you already got your 30 extra years. Exactly. And you're gonna go out somehow.

Liza Dunn [01:08:14] That's exactly right. But they, I'm watching the systematic dismantling of it, right? So everybody's focused on their microbiome, so they're drinking raw water. Well that's how you get cholera, right? Or they wanna get rid of pasteurization. Well, that's how you get e coli infections in listeria. They wanna get rid of, you know, vaccines. Well, that's how you get, you know, measles in COD and you know, all sorts of things like that. They're talking about, you know, getting rid of pesticides. Well, that's how malaria makes a comeback. Typhus makes a comeback, the plague makes a comeback. You know, you really have to think about these things. Food security, everybody here takes for granted. But like we said in Kenya, it's a, it's a real, real big deal. So, you know, I I it's a, it's, it's a, yes. I think that it's nice to be able to, you know, have products that help us look a little bit better, feel more confident or whatever. But those aren't gonna, those have side effects too. But those aren't gonna do anything like the basics that we did in the 20th century do.

Vance Crowe [01:09:21] So you were a medical doctor, you were practicing all the time, and then you told me before the show got started, like the, the electronic medical records made it so I had no interest in in moving forward. That's

Liza Dunn [01:09:36] Exactly,

Vance Crowe [01:09:36] Talk a little bit about that. I don't think people have any idea how much the electronic medical records have. Yeah. Have messed with medicine. Oh

Liza Dunn [01:09:42] My gosh. Yeah, they've been terrible. So they were sold to me. Well, first of all, to preface this, I had never imagined myself not practicing medicine. I loved taking care of patients. I loved what the, the doctors that I worked with, I loved just the brain power that was there. I learned so much from them, and I, it was a real privilege to be a doctor, real privilege. That said, I watched, I've watched an, a bureaucratic apparatus buildup that has gotten in the way and capitalized on the doctor patient nurse interaction. And it's, it's become increasingly impossible to deliver quality care in a, in a, an enormously wealthy country because of all of the things that surround being a doctor. And one of the major things is the electronic medical record. So the electronic medical record was sold as, this is gonna be a great way for doctors to be able to communicate with each other. You won't have to be trying to find paper records. It's important for patient safety. So you get, you know, if you have an unconscious patient, you can easily look up at their record and find out what this is or you know, what's been going on with them and help your differential diagnosis. It's also good because doctors have lousy handwriting and so they'll be able to print up prescriptions and you won't make pharmaceutical mistakes that way. What it actually turned into is a big billing document for hospitals. So it, the doctors, infectious disease doctors at the moment are now spending 24 extra hours per week documenting in order to it to be able to get paid.

Liza Dunn [01:11:27] It also made it so that individual practices could not afford to stay as individual practices. So the high tech act, which I think happened in 2010, where it was mandated that everybody go move to electronic me electronic medical records. So private practices where you could do pro bono work, you could see your patient and you know, and, and if the patient couldn't afford it, he, you could let them walk out the door. Well, they couldn't maintain all the bureaucracy and, and, and out of the box, the electronic medical record cost at least $50,000. And then you had to do security updates and, you know, comply with hipaa. And not only that, you had your whole back office that you had to, which is a separate thing. The back office that you're paying for is trying to negotiate with insurance companies to pay for what you think the patient needs. So the red tape just got to be extraordinary. And so I know a doctor who started an electronic medical records in his office, and he took home $48,000 one year. So if you are a medical, just out of a medical school, residents now at the moment have about 250, $300,000 worth of debt to medical school. And they're doing an apprenticeship during their residency, so they're not able to really make a big dent in those loans. So here they are finishing at around 35, 40 years old with this huge set of loans, and then they've got this huge bureaucratic apparatus, so they don't have $50,000 to drop on a, on a electronic medical record.

Liza Dunn [01:13:08] And then all of the money it takes to make sure that the security and patient privacy and all that stuff is kept up. So they become employees of the hospital, and the hospital takes over all of that, and then the hospital is telling them what they can and cannot do. And the hospital has become this, once again, this, I mean, you've seen how big the hospitals are around here. They've gone from sort of OneStop,

Vance Crowe [01:13:31] They're a major driver of, of the city's economy in a way that is like bizarre, right? Like it's, it's, it's not just like, oh, we have a hospital complex and, and therefore we have a few doctors that live in this area. No, they build these hospitals to be huge because they want to put 'em all under one house and then we'll pay, you know, per, per license for these electronic medical records. And like, one of my favorite, so I have these things, I call 'em cashier questions, which are like, what's something that you can ask a person based on their everyday life? And whenever I'm in a doctor's office, I always ask the nurses, what do you think your electronic medical records thing? Like, how do you like that? And without fail, they'll talk about like, I have arthritis now because of the number of clicks that I have to do. They're talking about like 10,000 clicks a week that you're doing on your mouse. They talk about like the way that things became so siphoned down to just like certain words, certain descriptions of the way a diagnosis would be, or what the treatment would be that it, that it's become like, like a mad lib for medical treatment instead of using it as an art.

Liza Dunn [01:14:37] That's exactly right. They, the, the art of medicine is completely lost by that. So the, the, the, what it's become is, so when I was an intern, three pieces of paper would go up from the ER with a patient, the doctor's note, the nurse's note, and the cover sheet. When I got back to, for, as an attending for my fellowship, 56 pa 56 pages of notes went up and you couldn't figure out what happened in the er. You could not find it was, it was, you know, this lab was ordered and, and it was over and over and over and over again. Or, you know, a nurse would have to document normal exams every hour instead of do the exam and tell the doctor if there, there was something that changed. And so you lose really valuable information buried in this avalanche of paper, which it technically was supposed to save, right? So in terms of environmental impact, it's incredible. But the, the, the, the amount of documentation that has nothing to do with patient care. I, I think people in the AI world think that you, that the art of medicine is not valuable, but what one of the things that you're trained in. For example, I had a patient, a kid, my very last patient was a kid who had, was I was called to see for a brown recluse spider bite, which can look like a little necrotic area and can cause problems and kids and things like that. And the kid was really uncomfortable and I put my hand on his shoulder and he just started wailing and it just agony intense pain.

Liza Dunn [01:16:13] Brown recluse spider bites are very uncomfortable, but they do not do that. And it's only because I have seen multiple patients with brown recluse spider bites and I was like, that kid needs imaging right now because I think he's got necrotizing fascia fasciitis, which is an a limb threatening thing or death, right? If you miss that. And it's just because I touched his shoulder and I was right, he and he had to go to the OR and get the antibiotics and, and get it debrided and stuff like that. So and so he could have, he, a computer is not gonna be able to do that. And it's not because I've got some special wizardry, it's because I've seen this so many times before and that's what's so important. That's, that's what people are losing sight of when it comes to medical care. They think it's all should be protocolized. But different people have different problems and

Vance Crowe [01:17:10] Well, and I had a doctor, I went in and, you know, he was looking at like a, like a skin thing that I had and I, he looked at me for like, just a couple of seconds, kind of looked at it. And then the rest of the time, instead of looking and talking at me, he's sitting there going through, he's got an iPad and he's apologizing the whole time he's doing it. But we have no interaction. Right. And I think like how much of medicine in particular, like I'm an outgoing person. I'm not embarrassed. I've, I've had enough medical problems that I can, I can get naked in front of a doctor. Yeah, it's no problem. But there are a lot of people that can't. No.

Liza Dunn [01:17:41] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:17:41] And if you don't have that eye contact time Nope.

Liza Dunn [01:17:45] With

Vance Crowe [01:17:45] A doctor to where you're like, Hey, this person's listening to me, they understand me, then when the time comes for you to bring something up with them, you're

Liza Dunn [01:17:53] Not going to,

Vance Crowe [01:17:53] Yeah. And, and you might walk outta there being like, that doctor's a jerk. He doesn't care about me. You know, they don't, so I'm gonna go to this alternative practitioner exactly. Where they're not doing electronic medical records so they can sit there and give you 30, 45 minutes an hour of time and they, they

Liza Dunn [01:18:10] Get to give you all of that and they get paid for it.

Vance Crowe [01:18:12] Right?

Liza Dunn [01:18:12] So the, the doctors got seven minutes per patient and, and people are like, they, they did this thing, they had something called the Press Ganey score where patients got to rank you on whether or not they liked you and your reimbursement was associated with that. Well, when you are trying to fulfill all these different things, especially if you have a bunch of really sick people all at once, right? You're never gonna be able to live up to that kind of score. And so now you've got the kind of worst of all worlds. So you've got a doctor who is doing not, who's basically doing data entry, has become a data data entry clerk and a very expensive data entry clerk and a very expensive data entry clerk who is in a huge amount of debt and cannot afford to lose their jobs. So they are, they are, they're chained to, to these big hospital systems. Now

Vance Crowe [01:19:05] I will say though that the doctors did their own part in slitting their own throats here. Because one of the things people don't realize is there are more applicants that are qualified to get into medical school by far Yep.

Liza Dunn [01:19:17] Than

Vance Crowe [01:19:17] We let into medical school. You could start new medical schools, although the licensing that you wanna do, the, the people that determine whether you have the blessing to be an MD don't want that. So they're trying to control the supply.

Liza Dunn [01:19:30] So I would tell you though, that even though they're trying to control the supply at that end, the Clinton's made a deal in 1997 where they capped the number of residencies. So, so residencies are paid for by Medicare. So taxpayer dollars for the hospitals get paid $150,000 on average per resident. And they give the resident about $50,000 a year on average. Medicare decided that there were gonna be too many doctors. And so there, the, so you do have a supply of medical students who can't get a job as a resident because of that, because of that interact that, that regulatory thing that happened. So, so if you, so if having started a fellowship, I had to find the funding for that fellowship, right? And so you, you get a cap, you can't keep on having more and more and more residents because they won't pay the hospital for those residents.

Vance Crowe [01:20:33] So part of a residency is you finish all of your medical school and then you go do a residency, which is essentially an apprenticeship, right? Yeah. Yep. And then so you're saying the government said we have a limit on the number of apprenticeships that we're gonna pay for. Then why doesn't the private sector pop in to, to solve this?

Liza Dunn [01:20:49] Because I, I think that, that's a good question. I think that it's really actually that the, the hospitals kind of have a corner in the market. You have to, you have to, in order to get a f or to get a board certified, you have to go through a certain kind of residency. There are, there are some emergency medicine programs that are run by venture capital, you know, people and stuff like that. But the, that is a different dynamic because the bottom line is what matters, right? As opposed to learning how to take care of patients. So a lot of residents wanna be in an academic program where they're actually learning how to take care of patients the best way possible. Now I'll argue that now that they're spending all their time with their backs turned to patients and typing into the computer. So you know, that, that, that that's gone away. That, that you're, you're actually impacting resident learning as well. But there are, there are enough medical, I think there are, if you were able to let these medical students into these residencies, residencies are fairly competitive, some of them. And so if you were able to open it up, so more medical students who have finished medical school, there's whole organizations for those kinds of medical students that are not able to get a job.

Vance Crowe [01:22:10] It's a, it's a weird thing, right? Like we have the potential to have so much good medical care and yet we've really integrated the making of money and government and supply and demand. Like it is a very, very complicated thing. Do you foresee the American medical system staying at the top of the, of the world? Oh, no. No.

Liza Dunn [01:22:32] Absolutely not. No. Uhuh, I think, and I don't think it's been at the top of the world, it's

Vance Crowe [01:22:37] Oh, for a long time. Tell me more about that.

Liza Dunn [01:22:39] I think that, I think that it's got potential if you, if if, I mean, if you make a lot of money and you can afford, I I, I'm not even gonna ratchet that back a little bit. If I were to get sick anywhere, there are two places that I would go. One of them is Ireland and one of them is, is France. France has the best medical system in the world, and it's, and Ireland's got the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world. It's, it's, they're just stellar medical systems that, and it's stellar teaching and very, very affordable. But the problem is the population in those two countries are, is much smaller than the population of the United States. So when you talk about, when we talk about comparing medical systems, you often hear about, you know, Scandinavia or France or things like that as opposed to, you know, with, you know, a couple million people. France I guess has, I don't know how many people are live in France, 80 million or something like that. But that's a vastly different than 330 million, right? So I think if you were to compare the United States to the eus outcome, you would get something that was a little bit more on par. But I think that although the United States has great research and has a, a lot of innovation that other countries don't necessarily have, I think that the medical training has really gone downhill. For example, they've taken pharmacology and taken it from a year and have squashed it down into six weeks. And the notion is that when you're rotating on the wards in your different specialties, you'll learn the pharmacology from the attendings that are teaching that.

Liza Dunn [01:24:20] Well, that's, if you don't rotate on a cardiology floor, you're not gonna know anything about Cardi cardiac pharmacology. So other than the little six weeks you've got there, and, and as that gets perpetuated, your attendings as they get out are not gonna know anything about that pharmacology either. So you're not gonna be learning this stuff. So they've really, they've really taken some of the rigor out of medical school. And I think it's, I think it's gonna impact patients in the long run. And we have a tidal wave of baby boomers coming. It's 76 million people. And they, and the, the medical system in this country is, is this is not sustainable. I don't know how else to describe it.

Vance Crowe [01:25:05] And so how does it play out? Do you get to three mothers to a bed where one has to get on the floor? When I

Liza Dunn [01:25:11] Hope not. I hope not. I really don't. You know, that's a, that's a catastrophe. That's a catastrophe. I, I, I just, I think that it's, it is I think the most complicated mess that's out there for, you know, there's, there's been a relatively steady supply of doctors and there's been an exorbitant increase in the number of administrators. And with every, everybody keeps on thinking that the government's gonna do something better. Every government intervention has made, made medicine exorbitantly more expensive. And, and so I don't necessarily think that, you know, a one payer system, and I think doc, a lot of doctors would disagree with this, but doctors aren't, doctors don't understand how, how some of this, the, the financing of all this works and that, that for hospitals, it's a business. And so those, those are conflicting.

Vance Crowe [01:26:09] Well, I have a, a buddy, you know the YouTuber? Chubby? Chubby imu.

Liza Dunn [01:26:13] Oh yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:26:14] So he's a medical doctor and he talks about you in Chinese culture. They have a very strong sense that medicine is represented by the tree, and money is, is represented by iron. And those two don't mix because iron always cuts the tree down. And that this is a very, like, you, you need to be very, very careful about making medicine into a moneymaking enterprise because it will always destroy the medicine. It's, it's stronger in that way. And medicine takes a long time to grow. And I think like that's a, a, you know, a very interesting metaphor. And I, I also studied under a Chinese professor when I was in graduate school, and he talked about out in the countryside, the way that doctors work, they weren't referred to as doctors in the same way that we do with this western concept. It was basically you paid them unless you were sick. And if you got sick, then you didn't pay the doctor. Oh,

Liza Dunn [01:27:05] That's

Vance Crowe [01:27:05] Fascinating. So they only got paid when everybody was healthy. And so you were on this health model and then at end of care the doctor wasn't making more money as he kept grandma alive for too long. He would help along the process and keep her healthy when he could. And so I think that like, these are very easy to say in theory. I don't know how you apply it to a modern economy of 330 million people, but it does seem to me that we've somehow gotten pretty far off the tracks and we're gonna pay for it to the extent that we might actually lose the social tech, social technology of, of medicine.

Liza Dunn [01:27:38] Yeah. Yeah. And it, it, and it's worrisome. I mean, I think it starts all the way out with the, at the beginning with education. It, it's, you know, the college is extraordinarily expensive. It increases at what, 8% per year, the tuition. And then you've got medical school on top of it, and then you, and then you've got somebody who's very heavily in debt trying to, trying to then spend the next three or four years of their lives making enough money to get by. And then they, that cycle starts over again. 'cause they have kids and they wanna put their kids through school and stuff like that. So it it, so it starts with a educational process and then ends with this, you know, a whole bunch of interested parties capitalizing on, so for example, to be board certified, it used to be that you would take an, take an exam and then you would keep up with your CME. Now you've gotta take an exam or, and some in some boards take an exam every 10 years that costs, you know, $2,500. You have to do pay the board, you know, yearly for many exams and, and extra for CME, you have to, you know, give them, pay them more and more and more money. Then you like merit badges. So A-C-L-S-B-L-S pals, all of the resuscitation things, right? So A-A-T-L-S you do every, every four years and that's $500 A-A-C-L-S for the cardiac life support you do every two years. That's about $500. And then you have to do basic life support. If I'm doing CPR in the ER every day, I, I, I need to be trained again, right?

Liza Dunn [01:29:14] So, so it's a ti ti and they all, they're all making money off this, and if you don't fulfill these requirements, the hospital won't let you practice. And so, so I mean, the American Board of Internal Medicine is being sued right now because they've had, you know, a huge amount of money come into them that they, that off the backs of doctors and they've, you know, they apparently had, I don't know, they've had a, a nice fancy condo that they've got cars that they drive around, they've got, you know, nice vacations that the board gets to go on and stuff like that. So, so doctors have been so busy working and trying to get things done that they've kept their heads down. And this has just happened around them. Now the, now they're the most expensive people in the hospitals. And so what they're doing is the hospitals are hiring nurse, nurse practitioners with nowhere near the same kind of requirements for maintaining certification instead of doctors. So it's, it's a and and the nurse practitioners are lobbying to have independent practice, and I can understand why there's a shortage of doctors, but they also don't have the same qualifications as doctors and they wanna do it independently. They don't wanna, they don't wanna be supervised by doctors. And so there's a whole sort of tribe, they're tribes there, they're people who are like, that's maybe not such a good idea. And they're the, the doctors that say that. People are like, how dare you say that? Well, you know, it seems to me

Vance Crowe [01:30:44] Like the, it is such a complicated problem

Liza Dunn [01:30:47] That

Vance Crowe [01:30:48] By the time any person actually understood the problem, it would be far too long. Yeah. You know, like wherever you started, it's gonna take you years. I ima like, I, I have and there's not gonna be any quick easy solutions. But the, so to me, yeah, there's, I'm a big fan of the, of the move towards the concierge type medicine, right? Where you pay a doctor every month and it's closer to that Chinese way of doing it. And I think it's the same thing for physical therapy. I think it's the same thing for a dentist, right? Like find a place where you're paying them just to be there and then when you need help, you know, they aren't over text, they can see you. That's

Liza Dunn [01:31:26] Exactly right. But that doesn't take away the thing that you, that's the sort of elephant in the room. If you go to, if you get sick and you go to the hospital, you are in a huge, huge amount of debt. So you need insurance for that. So that, so that, that, that doesn't, I think it's much better for the patients for, to have that model. But in terms of, in terms of the doctor patient relationship, but it doesn't fix the hospital problem. It doesn't fix the testing problem and things like that. So for example, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:31:53] We hadn't even talked about insurance. I mean, insurance is insane. Right? Right. Like it's, it's, you know, I could get catastrophic care and then get there and then be like, ah, that's not really a catastrophe. So that's not really covered.

Liza Dunn [01:32:04] That's exactly right. So I went, I took my son to the hospital for a migraine, and I knew it was a migraine. I needed a doctor's note. And the only reason why I took him to the hospital was because it was 11 o'clock at night and his high school entrance exam was the next morning the bill. I, I, I got no medicine. I knew the doctor. And this is so, it's not the doctor's fault. I knew everybody at the hospital. Right. I need a doctor's note. I couldn't write it. The pediatrician hasn't seen him. They won't write it. You know, urgent care is closed, $1,500 for a doctor's note, 500 of which the insurance company paid close, almost, almost a thousand dollars out of pocket for an ER visit that got no intervention. So, so, and, and I wouldn't have taken him to the ER if it, if he hadn't had that exam the next morning if he hadn't had an exam the next morning. So if it's, if it, I I am, I am lucky because I can afford that. But if it's that, if that's something that I stress out about, I imagine that ordinary everyday people who, who don't have, you know, the cushion, that that's devastating for them. It's devastating for them that that, that that cost is untenable.

Vance Crowe [01:33:25] Yeah. And anything that's gonna keep people in jobs, they don't want to be in that. But because their healthcare is tied to, it only stops innovation, right? Yes. It stops all of the new ideas that people could have. It continues to separate people from the, from the haves, from the have nots. Yep. Because if you can enslave people because they had to take their son in to get, it's, it's a crazy thing. Well,

Liza Dunn [01:33:48] Let's end

Vance Crowe [01:33:48] On a, on a more positive note. Sure. Talk about something you've been excited about, something that you've, you've seen on the horizon that you're like, this is a good thing and more people should know about this.

Liza Dunn [01:34:00] Oh, at the end of COVID is on the horizon in terms of these vaccines. These vaccines are the coolest technology out there. And I think that they are going, I think that the mRNA technology has the potential to revolutionize medicine in the same way penicillin did. I think it's that, that good. And I don't say that very easily about a lot of different kind of new newfangled things, but this has got real, real potential. There was a report the other day that came out that they, in, they were able to give an injection of a similar kind of mRNA. It wasn't for COVID, but it was to, this man had something called amyloidosis, which is a lethal problem. And it, he inherited it and you, they were able to reverse it with this technology because the mRNA can seek out that abnormal protein and, and make sure it doesn't get made is essentially what it is. The protein builds up in cells and that because it builds up in cells, you wind up having cell death, and if you get enough cell death, you wind up having a huge, huge problem. So I think, I think it's got potential to revolutionize treatment of cancer. You know, it's, it's helped people in early trials with sickle cell anemia. I think it's got really,

Vance Crowe [01:35:21] So you work in the regulatory world, the speed with which this thing got, you know, in put together really fast, right? Yes.

Liza Dunn [01:35:31] How

Vance Crowe [01:35:31] Do you feel about that? So

Liza Dunn [01:35:32] Yeah, there's a lot of mythology about that. So when they, so normally with vaccines, you have to have an, you have to have enough people to participate in this study and enough people with the disease to participate in this study. So the shortest vaccine time ever, I believe was months. Right. And people, I think it took four years, right? And that's just because you don't see a lot of mumps. COVI was so widespread that you were able to recruit 70,000 people within a couple of months to do that. So this, I would actually argue that despite the speed of it, that you, this is the most robust vaccine study, the Pfizer and Moderna and, and the ongoing other ones too. But Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the most robust vaccine studies out there. And they are, they're just, you had enough people, you had very marked decrease in significant illness, very marked decrease in ICU stays. And it's, it's so the speed doesn't bother me. I think that, you know, there were some questions about operation warp speed, and once again, a lot of that got politicized because of, you know, the Trump administration promoting it. But I think that even skeptics have started to come around and say, wow, no, this is actually really, really important science.

Vance Crowe [01:37:02] When I look out in the world and I'm in a group of very intelligent people and they're in, in ag and they started chipping around articles about, you know, sterility that happened with other mRNA in, in animals and people being like, how is it that if you can't say for certain that this doesn't happen, that you would start pushing people as though this, you know, should be mandatory or so that, that people should have to do this to be able to participate. And I watched the scientific community push, like, see this and start pushing back and they treated those people like, they're dumb.

Liza Dunn [01:37:36] They're not dumb,

Vance Crowe [01:37:37] They're not dumb, they're not dumb. And I think it's a huge mistake to be doing this and to even roll your eyes that that's somebody doesn't want the vaccine fuck off. Yeah. Like, if they don't want that vaccine, they don't have to take it.

Liza Dunn [01:37:49] I, I, I think that there is, that is another issue that once again, people, people have gotten, they've, that, that's gotten so politicized and people roll their eyes and people say, you know, so where science fell down there was they, they assume that you don't have any reason for disagreeing. They, they, they, and, and they think that your reasons are, are, are not legitimate. And if you were only as smart as they were, you would see the light as opposed to understand. What happened was, once again, there were discussions in the scientific community about product safety, right? Just like there are discussions in between the pipeline people and the regulatory people in companies about product safety. This was the first time those discussions were public. And so they raised doubt in the general population's mind because they wanted to make sure that there wasn't a question about sterility. And the sterility thing, doesn't it, it there've been plenty of women who've had babies who've been pregnant and gotten the vaccine and had, and babies and no miscarriages and things like that. So this, but the sterility thing is something that people worried about. And, and, and instead of going, I understand that you're worried about that, there's just like, you're, you're dumb. And I, if you could,

Vance Crowe [01:39:17] Well, and I had, I mean, Kevin Fulta, good friend of mine, God bless him, I love him. But he sat on my podcast and said, well, there was the noble lie about the masks. And he said, you,

Liza Dunn [01:39:27] That's

Vance Crowe [01:39:27] Hey, that, that, you know, we needed those masks and people had 'em and we wanted them. And science said that this is the noble lie, man, people will never trust you again

Liza Dunn [01:39:37] Based on that. That's exactly right. And the other thing that happened was that ba the hydroxychloroquine discussion got completely polarized. Polarized to the point where the Lancet published a fraudulent article written by a, a group called Sur Ophere. And the people that made up Sur Ophere were a, a, were a, I think he was a cardiologist, a science fiction writer, and somebody who is involved in, I guess, alternative lifestyle. I, I think she was a, a adult film, some, I don't know, something like,

Vance Crowe [01:40:14] But

Liza Dunn [01:40:15] But not exactly, you know, your scientific types. And they said that they had found 96,000 people who had been all, all around the world that had been, you know, had trials with hydroxychloroquine or a control arm. And then when people said, and they rushed to publish this because, you know, I think that, that they were politicized and it turned out to be fraudulent, and then they had to retract the article. Well, you know, that's a top tier medical journal. And so when people see top tier medical journals publishing fraudulent articles and then defending them, very much like the same journal published, the, the, it started the anti-vax movement, the Lancet published Andrew Wakefield's AR article and essentially stood by it for 12 years. And that gave us the anti-vaccine movement. So, you know, it, it,

Vance Crowe [01:41:11] It's, I think that it's, so, I think in a world where it used to be that the speed with which we could have disagreements allowed things to ane and to change people's minds over time you

Liza Dunn [01:41:25] Had it cooling off period. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:41:26] And now you, now it's so fast and it's so hot and it's so public that people end up supporting the, the movement as opposed to the idea. So as we're finishing with this, give me the, the, the what, what's on the horizon with mRNA? Like, why, why are you so excited about this? You know,

Liza Dunn [01:41:48] I really think that it has unbelievable therapeutic potential to, for example, to very specifically target abnormal proteins in different kinds of cancers that you can, you can tailor it to and you can kill cancer that way. And, and without huge toxic doses of chemotherapeutic drugs. Now I, I don't know what research is on the horizon that way, but this is just the, the, the, the technology has the potential to do that. And I think it's mind blowing and I think it's just unbelievable, unbelievable technology. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:42:23] That kind of passion is what will get people to pay attention instead of the arguing that people should be doing it. So I'm glad you're out there and yeah, maybe the next time you come on, we'll, we'll talk about where mRNA has gotten there. Yeah. Liza, we should have done this a long time ago. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If people wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about your feelings on pesticides or just kinda chat with you in general, how would they do that?

Liza Dunn [01:42:46] They can do at Dr. Liza MD For, on Twitter, I have a LinkedIn page that I don't use that often. I don't check that often. But yeah, it's, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:42:56] Well, Liza, you have always been a very good friend of mine. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been

Liza Dunn [01:43:01] Fun. It was great.