Liza Dunn: Toxicologist, Emergency Medicine, Pesticides & and GMO's

About this episode

Dr. Liza Dunn, a former Monsanto/Bayer regulatory toxicologist and Vance's old colleague, traces an unusually winding path — theater stagehand to anthropology major to English teacher in Poland to medical school in Dublin, then delivering babies in resource-starved Mombasa hospitals where two or three laboring women shared a single bed — before landing in medical toxicology and eventually agricultural regulatory science, driven by a recurring encounter with childhood malnutrition in Haiti. The conversation ranges across an unusually dense set of subjects held together by one throughline: the gap between scientific/regulatory reality and public perception. Dunn walks through pesticide toxicology (dose-dependent risk, Botox, DDT's genuinely enormous 20th-century public-health benefit despite Rachel Carson's valid bioaccumulation critique, Bt as a natural-turned-genetically-engineered insecticide), the staggering cost of getting a pesticide or pharmaceutical to market ($250M/10 years vs. $8B respectively), and plant-made natural toxins (cyanide in cassava, ergot/LSD lineage, tryptamines in psychedelics) as context for why regulation exists and why it inadvertently entrenches large incumbents by pricing out startups and academic labs. A long historical detour into Soviet agriculture minister Trofim Lysenko's anti-genetics ideology — which contributed to 50 million deaths in the USSR and, when adopted by Mao, another 50 million in China's Great Leap Forward — anchors Dunn and Vance's shared thesis that anti-science ideology, once it captures political power over food systems, is uniquely catastrophic. They extend this into a broader meditation on tribalism (purity rituals as an ingroup/outgroup mechanism common to religions, cults, and modern scientific/political factions alike), credentialism (Harvard's mid-century embrace of lobotomy as a cautionary tale), and the erosion of good-faith disagreement during COVID (the "99-musicians-vs-1" consensus-shaming metaphor, the hydroxychloroquine Surgisphere fraud, the "noble lie" about masks). The back half shifts into healthcare-system critique: electronic medical records as a stealth billing mechanism that destroyed small private practices and turned doctors into "expensive data entry clerks," a Medicare-era residency cap constraining physician supply, and a personal $1,500 ER bill for a doctor's note as a case study in broken incentives. Dunn closes optimistically on mRNA vaccine technology, calling it a penicillin-level medical revolution with potential far beyond COVID (amyloidosis, cancer, sickle cell), while acknowledging that politicization and a lack of good-faith "cooling off" periods for scientific disagreement damaged public trust regardless of the underlying science's merit.

“The dose makes the poison... we are perfectly comfortable putting botulinum toxin, injecting it in our faces for cosmetic purposes. And that's actually the most potent toxin known to mankind... because we've got a regulatory apparatus around it.”

“Trofim Lysenko... did not believe in genetics and basically falsified his findings... 50 million Russians starved because of Lysenko's policies. And then when Mao came to power in China and adopted Lysenko's farm policies, another 50 million people died in the Great Leap Forward.”

“Every single religion... every cult that ever got to some strength, they had purity rituals... it allows you to have an ingroup and an outgroup... people have to make sacrifices in order to have an ingroup and an outgroup.”

Key moments

• ~5-14%: Mombasa hospital stories — women sharing beds while laboring, oxygen shut off during lunch breaks, patients surviving hemorrhage with minimal blood supply — that redirected Dunn from OB-GYN to emergency medicine and eventually toxicology.
• ~18-20%: Toxicology 101 — "the dose makes the poison," illustrated via Botox (a controlled dose of the most potent known toxin) and a case of a 17,000-fold dosing error that caused years-long paralysis.
• ~40-46%: DDT history — Paul Müller's Nobel Prize, averting roughly half a billion insect-borne deaths worldwide, contrasted with Rachel Carson's valid critique of off-target bioaccumulation in Silent Spring, and how Bt (bacterial protein, later engineered directly into crops) reduced reliance on broad-spectrum insecticides.
• ~58-63%: Lysenko/Kulaks/Holodomor history — anti-genetics ideology under Stalin and Mao contributing to roughly 100 million combined deaths, used as the clearest historical case for why anti-science ideology in agriculture is uniquely dangerous.
• ~68-70%: The "99 musicians vs. 1 dissenter" consensus-shaming metaphor and shared skepticism of manufactured scientific unanimity.
• ~74%: Harvard's mid-20th-century embrace of lobotomy (Rose Kennedy, Frances Farmer) as an example of credentialed consensus going catastrophically wrong.
• ~89-95%: Electronic medical record history — sold as a patient-safety tool, became a billing mechanism that bankrupted small practices, consumed extra unpaid documentation hours, and turned doctor-patient interactions into "data entry."
• ~97-100%: Closing note on mRNA vaccine technology's therapeutic potential (amyloidosis, cancer, sickle cell) and reflection on how COVID-era politicization (Surgisphere fraud, "noble lie" on masks) eroded good-faith scientific disagreement.

Notable quotes

“Fifty million Russians starved because of Lysenko's policies. And then when Mao came to power in China and adopted Lysenko's farm policies, another 50 million people died in the Great Leap Forward.”

“You should literally play your music so loud that there's no chance [to hear dissent]... what if that guy brings a good point to this discussion?”

“Where science fell down there was they assume that you don't have any reason for disagreeing... if you were only as smart as they were, you would see the light.”

“The electronic medical record... turned into a big billing document for hospitals... doctors have become a very expensive data entry clerk.”