A Phage Researcher on COVID Science, Institutional Trust, and the Internet Immune System

James Gurney [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, right. James

Vance Crowe [00:00:08] Gurney, welcome to the podcast.

James Gurney [00:00:11] Hello Vance. How

Vance Crowe [00:00:11] You doing? So, while you have a British accent, you are actually living in Atlanta, Georgia, and you are a PhD that studies something that is all around us, but almost nobody knows anything at all about which are bacteria phages. And you and I have gone on a wild road trip across the southwest. We've been on podcasts together, we've known each other for years. And I was really interested in getting your perspective on what's going on with coronavirus, both from the academic science perspective, but then also just how's it impacting my buddy that I haven't seen in quite a few years. So welcome to the podcast, man.

James Gurney [00:00:48] Thank you. It, it feels a bit full circle now. I think we first met when you came on my podcast, what was it like five years ago now? Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:00:55] That's probably right. The League of Nerds with Miles Power. That

James Gurney [00:00:58] Was it. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:01:00] And that guy Buck,

James Gurney [00:01:01] That guy, that guy. No. Yeah. And I'm, I'm doing right. So, yeah, I'm a Yeah, you've summed up pretty well there. I'm a, I'm a research scientist. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow as a technical title down in Georgia Tech in Atlanta, working on phage therapy research. So I'm gonna explain this like you never heard it before. I know you, we've talked about this before, but, so my, my research basically asks the question of like, can we take a, a virus that infect bacteria and use it as a treatment? And this, this might sound fanciful to some people, but this is like a century old technology now. This was first described in, in 1917. It fell out of favor because we did something much better. We discovered antibiotics basically, you know, 10 years later, I think Flemington in 28 or 29. So that sort of, the need to rely on a sort of complex squiggly biological organism was superseded by the fact we had this chemical, this amazing chemical which just kills bacteria, doesn't kill humans, works really well, was reasonably easy to purify and make a big ma mass amounts of it. Whereas the, the phage was like, well, we have this thing, we're not really sure what it is. It might be a virus, it might be a bacteria, it might be a chemical. Does it work on this? No, it doesn't work on that. Does it work on this? Yes, it works on this bacteria and this sort of, this unusual little biological entity that no one really understood what was going on for, you know, the best part of a yeah. 50 years until we really understood, okay, these are viruses of very specific viruses for very specific hosts of bacteria. Every bacteria probably has one of these viruses. But you can't just take one and say, oh, it's gonna work on all these, all these bacteria.

James Gurney [00:02:35] It's specific to its host.

Vance Crowe [00:02:37] You know, it's an interesting thing because you think about the world as bacteria, viruses, plant life, human life, and maybe you could have some like more nuanced characteristics in there. But when it comes to phage, we never learned about it in school. And it is like a very weird construction. It's got like a tube on the top with this Yeah. Geometric figure on the, on the top of it. And it grabs a little bit of its own DNA and injects it into bacteria, and then makes the bacteria mass produce, yeah. The DNA for the phage, and then it explodes the bacteria and then that phage goes all over the place. And there are way, way, way more phages than anything else in the world. But the thing that was interesting to me is that we're not really quite sure are they alive or not, which is an interesting question.

James Gurney [00:03:26] Well, it's the same many real virus. Like it depends where you can draw the line of where they are, where, where things are alive or not. So I call them biological entities. My, my actual, my boss thinks viruses are alive. And that's not like, oh, he doesn't, he's crazy and thinks virus is alive. It's sort of like his, where he draws that very fine line between this is living material and this is not living material. He is like, well, viruses, they reproduce, they, they reproduce with selection. They, you know, they have their own genetic material. The only thing they can't do is survive without their host. And that's sort of, you know, and they also don't really have metabolism. Well, some of them do have metabolism. So it's, you know, it's, when you start looking at biology at this, at this level, it becomes incredibly clear just how fuzzy our definitions of what is and what isn't alive actually is. Like, I could wake up tomorrow and be like, no, they're dead, and I could wake up the next week and be like, no, maybe they're alive. And it's, there's no clear or fast answer here about what, what biological life actually means. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:04:25] It kinda strikes me as the, as the weird, like the closer you zoom into something, the more that you know it, the less you're convinced that, you know what, something as simple as alive or dead is on or off zero or one. Because as it turns out, not all of the features of our beings around us follow the same rules that we do.

James Gurney [00:04:45] Definitely. Definitely. It's, it's, you know, it's, there's compartments of different things that you, like we, we said, there's these six or seven things you need to be considered alive. And you actually, when you look at it, it's like, well, it's just a smear across like the planet. My favorite other thing to talk about when we, you know, have these discussions is mitochondria. So in America, mitochondria taught is the powerhouse of the cell, which I always find funny when you mention mitochondria to any American, like, oh yeah, the powerhouse of the cell. It's like, it's this weird, like an American Canadian thing. You guys, they don't have that in Europe or the uk. That's not a thing. But so mitochondria are like, are the powerhouse of the cell. They, they make energy for us. And every, pretty much every single you carry cell, like you plants, everything that you can see, there's a mitochondria making energy. These, about 2 billion years ago, were free living bacteria. At some point, another bacteria came and gobbled all these up and they decided to live in symbiosis as opposed to like eating it. And that, that led to like 2 billion years later to having enough energy to make bigger, bigger cells. But the, the, the thing that's mind blowing to me is the fact that this, this was once a free living bacteria alive as anything else on the planet. Like it was alive. It was a living organism that had been alive for 2 billion years through evolutionary history. And then it got eaten and it didn't die. But over 2 billion years since then, it's evolved to be dead. If you take a mitochondria out of a cell, it's dead. It's not a living material can't survive by itself anymore. It's no more alive than a virus. But that's, that's happened through evolution. Ev evolution has selected for something to be dead. It just like, like how like and think

Vance Crowe [00:06:21] Relationship. You think about like what other, what other organism grabs another organism and makes it Yeah. Not just like, work for me as a, as a slave. Yeah. But like actually incorporated in and becomes a part of the way that your own DNA Yeah. Writes out and produces more mitochondria.

James Gurney [00:06:37] Yeah, yeah. And well this is, this is a really cool thing. There's, ah, whose book is it? May, maybe Nick Lane. He talks about how, you know, we, he didn't discover this, it was, he just popularized it. But part of our, part of our genome has bits of the mitochondria, DNA in it. And obviously the mitochondria also has its own genome. It has a little bit of bacterial. DNA still in ev every cell, it has a little circular chromosome. That's how we know it was a bacteria. 'cause it has a little circular chromosome. It has the same 16 s kind of like bacteria, like a very specific gene. But it's, it's, she some of its genes with us, but not all of them. So it like, it looks like at any minute it's really just to pack up and go home. Like take, it's got, it's got its own genome. I'm gonna leave you. I don't need you. You know, it's, there's whole little thing packaged away. So it's, it's, I could, I could talk about this for days, but it's, it's an, an amazing, it's insight of that just how powerful natural selection is to see, okay, let's, let's put this gene here. And that gene stayed here. There's a reason why some of the genes are now chromosome and some of 'em are still in the mitochondria. And it's all, it's all due to natural selection.

Vance Crowe [00:07:41] So as you're studying phage research, what drew you to that? I mean, people never even heard of it.

James Gurney [00:07:47] Yeah, I have wanted to work on phage since I was about seven years old. I think it was, I, I remember the moment I was, I was, my mom picked me up from, from after school. She worked, I was at an after school club and I, I asked her, 'cause she, she's a microbiologist. I asked her, why don't they use viruses to kill bacteria? Like, as you know, this little 7-year-old kid who had no idea what I'm talking about. And she's like, well, they do. It's called, they're called, they're called phage. And then she sort of explained a little bit about me, about phage to me. And she bought me some, some book about animal life, like mechanism, like the mechanisms of animal life. Like, so it was like they took everyday animals and like made them into like machines. And then you could open up, you know, pop up book kind of thing. They open up and then like you'd see inside the animal. And they had at the back was a couple things on viruses, phage, and bacteria. And I just, just fell in love with this idea of like, these things that are the enemies or things that make you sick are out there. There's somewhere in nature. And then, you know, I, I went away to university, you know, then 10, 10 years later, I studied all those things. I studied bacterial communication for my PhD. And eventually I was like, I got to the point where I was like two months away from finishing my PhD and I was on Twitter, you know, PhD shouldn't have loads of time to just hang out on Twitter. And someone had posted a job to work on face therapy research in Montpelier in France on the organism I was working on during my PhD.

James Gurney [00:09:18] I was like, oh, cool. I love phage. I've had these, these ideas. I'll, I'll email the guy and like, add to that point. I was like, I, you know, I hadn't, I hadn't seen very many people working on phage, like, out and about because it was, it's quite, it still is quite a small field. It's only like only a handful of researchers who have the money to work on it. And most people are working on it, are either doing, like I am now a mixture of evolutionary studies and pH therapy and there isn't a huge amount of people doing other things on it.

Vance Crowe [00:09:52] What do you think is possible with phage research? Phage therapy?

James Gurney [00:09:56] Yeah, that's a great question, right? It's stop GA's not the right word, but it's, it's gonna pick up the slack from anti antimicrobial resistance. Like, I'm not one of these people think like phage are the, the solution to everything. We have, the solution to everything is antibiotics. They, they are amazing drugs. They are so good. They work so well and we've kind of squandered them and used them inappropriately. I think we're gonna use phage to basically pick up the, pick up the pieces where we've made mistakes. Phage has limited users. Like there are cases, I know I've met people now, and I'm so fortunate we can talk about this later if you want. I've met people who have been given the phage I work on in a lab and it saved their lives. That's amazing to me. But we should have never got to that position. We should never be in the position where it's like we have to use something experimental because we've been so irresponsible with the, the, the magic bullets we have of antibiotics. And

Vance Crowe [00:10:55] When you're talking about being irresponsible, you're saying we had antibiotics that were grown, essentially started from fungus, where we figured out like, hey, this chemical produced can wipe out all of this bacteria. Yeah. And it can wipe out good bacteria and bad bacteria just knocks it all out. But the problem is, if you keep using that over and over and over again, you're gonna find a few bacteria that they aren't knocked out by that, by that antibacterial property. And so then they start growing. And then you have what people call superbugs Yes. And phage. If you can find the right one, which that's the real difficulty. It has to be hyper targeted to a particular bacteria. But if you can find the right phage that attacks the right bacteria, then antibiotic resistance may not kill us all.

James Gurney [00:11:42] Yeah. Well it's never, it's never gonna kill us. So it's just gonna, it's just gonna be really terrible. Like, like there's, well, there, there's two things, right? Or the, the two things I worry about antimicrobial resistance. The first is like we're seeing now there's a pandemic happening and we know there are secondary bacterial infections from COVID-19. People are getting infected with bacteria that are then taking advantage of the weakened immune system or the terrible immune system stuff that's happening and causing sepsis people. That's how some people are dying right now. They're dying from a bacterial secondary infection due to, due to the COVID-19 virus. So we've always said, I say, we've always said, a lot of people have said for a long time, the the, the risk of antimicrobial resistance will be within the next pandemic happens. If an antimicrobial resistant pathogen bacteria is in the population spreading around, we're gonna have increased mortality due to that. And that's what we're seeing right now. Fortunately, the, the, the bacteria that are, are actually killing people right now, I say fortunately people are dying, but they're not particularly antimicrobial resistant. We're not, we're not seeing an a MR comorbidity happening with COVID-19. But it, again, what we're seeing now will happen again within a hundred years with almost certainty. Unless we change the way we live quite drastically, there will be another worldwide pandemic at some point. So today's problems still be the future problem. The other issue is I have a better chance of dying from an antimicrobial resistant, sorry, an antibiotic resistant bacteria than I do from cancer in my lifetime.

James Gurney [00:13:24] By 2050, more people will die from antimicrobial resistance than currently die or will be, will be dying from cancer. And we think about all the people you know, who've like unfortunately have died of cancer. And then you say, okay, well more people, you know, by 2050 will have probably would've died from an antimicrobial resistance, bacteria infection.

Vance Crowe [00:13:44] And that's a startling thing. And I'm instantly drawn towards finding some way to disagree with you, even though I have no idea what the numbers are. Right. So like my, that's my immediate reaction is, no, that's not right.

James Gurney [00:13:56] No, that's not, well I, well it's, it's very possible. It's not right. That's from a a, a scientific report for called the O'Neill Report. I think it was published six or seven years ago now. It does take some liberties with the modeling and it does take some, you know, I I I think that report is a little overestimated, but it's one of the biggest wide scale reports we have. And in the absence of better, more conclusive evidence, it's, it's worth thinking that this is not with, this is not outside the realm of possibility. It's just, it's, it's a model what we people have developed. But I always like to point this out when I'm giving talks. 'cause again, you know, people look at me and go, oh, that's, that's a big number. And it's like, it doesn't matter today. I know people are dying five miles from me down the road in the hospital because of antimicrobial resistance that's happening today. It's not a, it's not like one of these nebulous things. Oh, in the future we'll have this problem. There are children are elderly, middle-aged people. People with like minor inflections will die because of antimicrobial resistance.

Vance Crowe [00:14:59] So this makes me think of an question that I think is on a lot of people's minds right now, which is we are going to die all of us, unless we find some, some super amazing way to do healthcare that's inconceivable, inconceivable right now. So when we start talking about you are going to die of these things, or this is your likelihood of dying, it can come off as be afraid. So now listen or fund or whatever to my idea, how should we divide the line between those two things? I,

James Gurney [00:15:33] You know, I don't know as exciting as that as response is, I, it's really not my expertise. I, I'm very insular. I work on, you know, I work on what, what I would consider a fairly wide range of things. I work from bacterial communication, infection dynamics up to, you know, understanding policy of viral, using viruses to treat bacteria. There's a fairly wide gamut of things I have to be involved with in, in like when compared to most other scientists. I'm doing a, a wide range of things, but I also dunno, like I'm not, I'm not an economist. I'm not a, you know, I'm, I'm not much of a philosopher. So like I, I I think we should be funding more. Hmm. I say we should be funding more about, but like public education about sciences and stuff. But then I see what people, so far what we've done, you know, we mentioned the podcast earlier, I, I always feel so terrible now. Like, you know, we, miles and I spent four or five years weekly talking to, you know, a couple thousand people and it's all been for really nothing because now we're in a position where the leader of the free world's telling you drink bleach. It feels very weird to have like such a small effect on the, on the planet. So I, you know, my opinion may may be not worth anything. I think we should, I think we should be funding more antimicrobial research stuff.

James Gurney [00:17:05] But I don't, you've caught me in a trap here because I don't like to use fear to sell people things. I, I I, I often see this as like a, a pseudoscience technique. People will use fear to, to, to sell something to someone. You see it all the time in like the anti-vaxxers and the know anti GMO people. Like, they, they try and let, trying to say that that was designed to make you afraid and say, I have the cure, I have the solution. And like, I, I can't all good consciously say, well, I have a cure. It's like, I don't, like that's the whole point of science. We need to work out better ways forward. But yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:17:42] That's been, I think you've just done something really humble that's easy for a guy like me to do because I don't know, I cannot read the papers. And it's not that I'm not an intelligent person, it's that I did not spend the years and years and years it takes to understand deeply what a p value is and how the statistics, so I can kind of look at, at something and take an abstract that's

James Gurney [00:18:04] On P values.

Vance Crowe [00:18:05] Yeah. But I can take an abstract and I can say like, okay, that sounds like a pretty good narrative, but I don't really know. And I'm comfortable saying, I don't know. One of the weirdest things that's happened in the Coronavirus is that every single person involved in this spare, like the 10 people that studied this particular type of epidemic, is actually really vulnerable to the Dunning Kruger effect, where they've read a few things, they have a story in their head, and anybody that assaults it is assaulting your tribe. So people become deeply entrenched and it's like, I don't understand how anybody can be confident because I wake up in the morning, I'm like, Hey, the sun's shining. I bet Coronavirus is pretty much done now. And then I go downstairs and see a few things on Twitter and I'm like, oh man, we're in the thick of it now. Things are only getting worse.

James Gurney [00:18:53] So I, my my small contribution to, to the coronavirus, I, I helped the German YouTube channel that, that makes science videos. I helped fact check their script about the virus. I tend, I tend to be their go-to person for like, bio microbiology stuff. So for for your listeners who don't know, there's a, there's a YouTube channel called Kurtz, it's German for in a nutshell.

Vance Crowe [00:19:17] So people know it is in a nutshell too, here in the US

James Gurney [00:19:19] Yeah, yeah. They make excellent videos about a wide range of topics. They typically try and be as like middle of the road as they can. You know, they try not to take sides about certain things. Obviously. Obviously they, you know, they, they are, they have an opinion, they have an editorial voice, let's say. But for like the biology stuff, like they, they typically come to me for asking, is this, is this correct? And at the beginning of February, I was like, oh, so there's this virus starting in China, it's probably gonna become a pandemic. Do you guys wanna make a video about it at some point? If you do, let me know if I'll line up some experts, because that's the other thing I do for them. I lineup experts and say, you have this topic. I know an expert in that field, you know, for, like, we did one about GMOs and I, I passed 'em to Mary some Somerville, like, you know, here's an independent scientist. She's not, she doesn't work for one of the companies. I she doesn't work for a, like she's an independent researcher. She knows what she's talking about. For the Crispr Cas one, I, I lined them up to talk to a, a malaria geneticist working in UCL. She who was like, they were talking about her work. It's like the, the, the work you're talking about. I know that scientist, I'll send them an email, you know, she can, she can fact check your, your script for you. So I asked, offered to do this for the coronavirus. And they're like, ah, you know, we don't like to be sensationalists who don't like to know make clickbait topics. They don't, they don't wanna be the, the company that's like trying to chase a story. They, they wanna make cool things when they have their time. It's like, we're not gonna do it. It's like, fine, cool. You know, look, I, I, I respect that. And then two weeks later they're like, yeah, about that video like idea. It's like, yeah, okay.

James Gurney [00:20:51] So I, I went to talk to a couple people at my institution. One, like I tried to talk to three people. One of them, not surprisingly, he was too busy. So he works on vaccine development four Coronaviruses, that's his, he was doing this before. He's a world expert on Coronaviruses. His entire lab has basically been given millions of dollars, like trying to the, the, the, the government's like seeded tons of money trying to like, get things, you know, going a bit quicker. Really cool research, really great guy, obviously was busy. So I was like, okay, this video's gonna get seen by about 10 million people. That's the typical size, their audience, their channel has. I was like, that's too many people for me to comfortably be the expert voice. So I tried to go and find some other people and I found, you know, I found talk, some epidemiologist people and sort of you said, same for the thing. I don't trust myself to have 10 million people reliant on the message. And you know, I'm gonna say, so we, we, we fact check the script. We, we went through it multiple, multiple times. I ended up reading probably 95% of the new research that came out on Coronavirus since January. So the end of end of March, I was probably the leading expert on coronavirus, like my just, and just molecular pathology. Not, not like every paper, just anything that talks about how the virus actually makes us sick. So like it's, it's a really, it's a really interesting, I I always feel weird saying interesting when I'm talking about how viruses kill people or I often say, oh, I

Vance Crowe [00:22:26] Mean it is interesting and, and like it's, it's actually probably the most interesting thing in the world right now is how does this thing work and yeah. And how scared should, how much of our life should we switch to be able to respond to the way that it kills people. That ultimately is the most important question in the world right now. Yeah.

James Gurney [00:22:44] So I think we're doing a and on all that topic, I think we're doing a pretty good job and we can get back to that. So yeah, so I like my, my little part of the coronavirus for that side was basically fact checking the script. It got, I think it's got seen by like 23 million people now, which is fantastic. And you know, I, I, again, I said to them, what I, 'cause it takes two, three weeks at a minimum just to make these videos because there's a ton of animating this voiceover. There's script checking and I think this is the quickest they've ever gone from like script idea to video out. And it's a team of 15, 16 people. So you can think like they, they're working 24 hours a day, basically for two weeks to get this out. And I was like, it's gonna, you know, we have to think where are we gonna be in two weeks time? What is the most, what is the best information for people to have in two weeks time? So that's, that's why the video, I think hopefully, you know, the, it, we timed it pretty well. I, you know, you could, if you had some idea of public health policy, you could see that the lockdowns are gonna start coming to effect in America, in the uk I think Italy already had one coming into effect. And so we, you know, Spain as well. So it was, again, it was a, there was a, a conscious decision on our part to say, okay, what is the best information to have in two weeks time for, for people who are gonna basically gonna be starting to being asked to go into lockdown. I think we did a pretty good job there.

Vance Crowe [00:24:04] So as a person that studied the molecular pathway and you've watched how much people know you've watched the news, what is something about the disease that people don't realize in the way that it works?

James Gurney [00:24:16] Ooh, I think, I think a lot of people don't realize that is a, there's a huge component of the immune system is actually what causes the damage. The, the virus has several proteins inside of it that directly interfere with how our immune system communicates with itself. So the immune system is an, is at its heart a communication system. It tells cells, go here, do that. Go here, do that, go here, be that. It's amazing, super complicated. And it's even, you know, again, not, not actually my field immunology is not what I do, but I love it. It's, it's amazing. I have such respect for people who can just sit there and like recite off these like interleukin pathways and work out what's going on. It's amazing stuff. But there's at least a, you know, three or four proteins in Corona like viruses that interfere with the system. That's one of the, like the, the symptom of losing your sense of smell or sense of taste. That is a direct result of one of the non-structural proteins in coronavirus. It interferes with, is it either TNFL for INF alpha INF like interferon gamma. It interferes with a signaling in the immune system and that leads to a loss, loss of taste.

Vance Crowe [00:25:28] Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean I heard that as a rumor, but no, no indication as to why that's true. Yeah.

James Gurney [00:25:33] It's one of, it's one of the proteins. We know there's a protein there that, that interferes with this pathway. It's the same reason when we, when you have the flu, you often lose your appetite. Like that's not, that's not because you feel sick. That's not like, oh I feel groggy so I'm, I don't wanna eat. There is literally something interfering with the, the signaling of your immune system, which downregulates your appetite, part of your brain.

Vance Crowe [00:25:57] Wow. I wonder if we could use that in good times to make it so people don't wanna overheat.

James Gurney [00:26:02] I think you'd, you'd also, the problem is you'd also get a fever, like if you start playing with your, your brain would start making your body cook itself.

Vance Crowe [00:26:10] So as a guy that understands the metabolic pathways and has access to scientists, how have you responded once you found out the disease was out there? What did you do personally? So

James Gurney [00:26:22] In early February I contacted my family and my friends and said, FYI, this is coming. It's gonna be big. Now's the time to prepare for things. Now's the time to get, you know, make sure you have a month's food supply. Make sure you have some water, make sure you know where all your health insurance documents are. Make sure you have your medication lined up. Like my father had a heart attack in a year and a bit ago, so, you know, he's obviously on still on medication. I was like, okay, go to the pharmacy now and ask them for three months of supply of drugs. 'cause you're gonna need it. You know, this is this, this is the things you need to get done right now. And like I had talking to the podcast, like I told, I told both miles, buck this, buck took it to heart and like basically went out and bought like a survivalist kit. Like, you know, he filled up his, his gas tank, he had food for months and miles being miles like, ah, it's fine. So like he didn't do anything. And then like three weeks later when the lockdown was happening, I was like, oh, so how, you know, how are you guys getting on? And yeah, miles was a bit sheep. He was like, I didn't listen to you. And Buck was like, everyone thinks everyone thinks I'm a prophet because I knew it was coming because all his friends think he was insane. 'cause he was going out and doing these things. Like, and what worries me the most about that is that it was obvious, it was super obvious to anyone who was looking that this was happening and people just didn't do anything. And I, I get why like the last time this happened was swine flu. And again the media were like, oh my God, swine flu's gonna kill, so it's gonna be terrible, it's gonna be terrible, it's gonna be terrible.

James Gurney [00:27:56] But the difference was, there were a lot of the actual experts were on the, the news or the radio saying, it's gonna be bad, it's not too bad, you know, it, it should be okay. And there's maybe a few sensational voices saying it's gonna be terrible and stuff. But the majority of experts were saying for swine flu or Meles or sars were saying it's a problem if this happens or it's gonna be a problem if this happens in early February. I knew there's a guy who is an excellent epidemiological Mark Lipic and I, I don't know him personally, but I know multiple people I work with directly have met him and know him personally. And they were like, he's not the sort of person to say be quite mania. He doesn't like to say anything controversial. I don't want that to sound bad on him. But, you know, he was, he's very matic, you know, he's, he's, he's sensible. He's, he's sure himself, all this sort of stuff. And he was on Twitter saying basically this is gonna be a pandemic, this is gonna be terrible. And as soon as I saw that I was like, yeah, screw it. Like he's right. Like this is, this is, we have to, we have to start taking this seriously. And that, that was the biggest difference for me. We had, we had people who are, I would consider sensible experts, incredible experts on the topic saying this is going to be a pandemic. And they were not listened to why, like how, like how, what is the point of having these people, you know, in our world if we're not gonna pay attention to what they're saying.

Vance Crowe [00:29:24] Well, so the flip side of that could be

James Gurney [00:29:26] That

Vance Crowe [00:29:27] If you listen to the people that have the narrative that this is so bad that we should lock everything down, people taking that to heart are shutting down a business that they've been running for 30 years and that 30 years is, I mean, work and blood and sweat and tears and it's, it's all put up on, on the, the reason that we could believe it was the people that didn't use to freak out are freaking out. And so therefore all the work that you've put in, you know, throw it in this dice and see what happens. We may come out in a month or two so I can understand why people didn't want to agree with it.

James Gurney [00:30:08] I get that and I, and I, I should take that to heart more than I normally do. I have, you know, there's two things I would come back with that as saying one and counter to my own point again, like, you know, when we talk about expertise, I was, I was watching, you know, obviously my, my university is still working, we're still having weekly seminars. I was watching a talk yesterday about moss and global warming and sort of ni nitrogen flux and environment in northern East Montana at some point I know nothing about any of that. Like, and I am in the same building department center as these people. So it's not like, oh, we're the same university or we're the same biology department. We share the same center, which is like a group of 10 handpicked academics who all meant to be roughly in the same sort of field. I know nothing about what she was talking about. And it was, it was all great work. I don't wanna like sound like I'm saying it was bad work. I, it's just, it's not my topic expertise. I knew that the, the technique she was using, I knew the statistical analysis she was using. I have no idea of when her, before she told us like how this change and this nitrogen would actually have any sort of impact. Like there are so many layers of expertise required to fully understand what, what these experts are saying. And you know, again, I'm very lucky that I'm expert enough in infectious diseases to see these people are really, are the experts. So, you know, again, I should take that, I should take that more to heart. The other thing I would say is like with, you know, being the filthy socialist I am like if only there was some sort of tax system we paid into where during hard times the government would support us and you know, pay back into the pay back into the community.

James Gurney [00:31:48] So that, that to me would've been best response would've been, okay, well there's a pandemic happening, it's com I was about to say it's completely unexpected. It wasn't, it was, it was guaranteed to happen. That's the other crazy thing, right? This was one of your previous podcasts, black and white Swans fantastic like analogy. This was definitely something we knew was gonna happen. Like we've known for the better part of a hundred years these things happen. We should prepare for them. We have, we have no justification not to have been ready for it. Why, why didn't governments take a more direct role in saying, okay, this is something if we don't support the system now, it will collapse. And that only, that only benefits very few people who have then have the resources and capital to come back and, you know, buy it back up. Like we saw that in 1939, great depression, who makes money in the depressions. They're very, very well wealthy. So, so when,

Vance Crowe [00:32:50] Have you seen the, the video of the two doctors that YouTube took down? Have you seen this?

James Gurney [00:32:56] No, but I I I saw people complaining about it.

Vance Crowe [00:33:00] So this is an interesting thing, right? Yeah. So people are saying listen to the experts, you know, medical and epidemiologists and then there were two guys out in California that said, we are going to take data that are urgent care facilities have provided us because we see patients and we're gonna tell you what we're seeing and how we react to that. And the internet immune system went bananas on them. Yeah. And on the one hand they went from having, I saw it on I think Saturday night at 800,000 people by the time I woke up at 8:00 AM and it had 380,000 and, and and now it's up to 5 million and YouTube took it down. Yeah. When that starts happening, when people say, Hey, there are some ideas that the institutions are not gonna let us hear.

James Gurney [00:33:48] Yeah. You're

Vance Crowe [00:33:49] A guy that studied conspiracy theories for a long time. Does that benefit the scientific community taking that down or, or like how should we think about this?

James Gurney [00:33:58] I don't know. And I've always had this thing, I really hate saying an idea is dangerous. 'cause in reality, no idea ideas are not dangerous. How people use ideas is dangerous. That's the dangerous thing. So it's like, I I, I don't know, I dunno what they said in that video. My, my understanding from, again, from people who I respect who were sort of saying this is the issue with the story is that they were basically, they were sampling a subset of, I basically a bias subset. So they have, they have patients who are definitely sick doing, you know, they're, they're looking at a very small subset of think of like survivor bias. Like if you only, if you only study people who are confirmed sick, you find very different things. Like if you, if you ask how many, like hypothetically, let's say you have two groups of people and you say Group A smokes and group A and group B doesn't smoke. And you ask group A, okay, run up to this, fly the stairs, we'll measure your heart rate group B, same thing. And then you ask how many cigarettes group B group A actually smokes? And they, they, they're typically under report because people like to under report stuff. So you risk to like how much cigarettes will hurt the, the, the, the ability to climb up and down stairs will be lower than it should be. If you then take a group C and give them how many cigarettes they said they said, you say, okay, well that you can then do the control there. So it's again, there there's probably a, some sort of bias in, in, in the sampling they we're using. Again, I'm not actually even too sure what they said. 'cause I, i, I don't wanna sound mean to medical doctors, but they're not specialists in this topic.

James Gurney [00:35:33] Medical doctors are specialists in treatment. They're not specialists in how diseases necessarily spread or how infection actually works and stuff like that. They are, they are specialists in keeping people alive in certain circum circumstances. Not in how the, there are some medical doctors who, you know, I don't wanna tell 'em all, but the majority of 'em are not microbiologists. If I, I've trained doctors in microbiology and some of them are terrible.

Vance Crowe [00:35:58] Yeah. I mean it's an interesting system that we have set up in the west as far as medical doctors getting the purview of like they know all things health. Yeah. But there are a lot of things like nutrition or how do the bones and muscles attach and how does that all work together? Yeah. That they get a small amount of lessons. But the thing that I would say everyone should take away from the two video, the two doctors talking was they spoke with intelligence. They spoke with passion and with telling a story and they had millions of people watch. Part of it was because it was good news that we all want to hear. Yeah. Part of that was like, hey, somebody is telling me the this isn't the black plague, this isn't the most terrible thing ever. But another big part of it was they were like, you can do what you want with this information, we are just going to present it to you. Yeah. And I think the scientific community has done the, is, you know, this is what we know is happening and therefore the world ought to react this way. And that creates a suspicion that people are using data to, to force an, an ideology.

James Gurney [00:37:03] And I think we have to, like, we have to be careful of that, right? Like, one of the things we, I I I personally believe one of the things we need to, to bring us out of this is, is contact tracing. That would be an amazing thing to have. But then the, you know, the, the other side of my brain's like, oh God no. Like I don't want, I don't want them to know my data like that. I don't want that to happen. And then it's like, well, okay, how much, what is the value currently of having that system in place? What is the, the future issues of losing that liberty? Because again, I'm, you know, I, you know, I joked earlier, I'm a, a lefty horrible socialist. I do believe that, that the, the, the Bill of Rights America has is amazing. Like, I'm always so annoyed when Americans throw away their liberties, everything. It's like, no, you have so many, don't do it. Like, what are you doing? It's crazy.

Vance Crowe [00:37:52] 'cause not every place has 'em, even in the western world, right? Like the, the, the freedom of the press and freedom of assembly that does not exist even in it's quote unquote free countries.

James Gurney [00:38:01] Yeah. And again, free freedom's a smear of things, right. But again, IIII fully agree. Like there are that we, we have to, we, we shouldn't rush into like surrender more freedom just because we can right now. And it might help in the short term and it would help in the long term as well. There are, but there are other solutions to it as well. And I, yeah, I am, I agree that we should be cautious about how much we do. But I wanna go back to that thing about, you know, the internet, what did you call it? Internet immune system. Yeah. System. Yeah. Right. It's amazing how, how effective that can be at just shutting down any discussion. I think, I think part of it is there's a very big incentive to, to monetize controversy, right? Like from from right from the top, from like CNN on, you know, news, news. Huge billion dollar corporations to, if I'm a, a Twitter account handler or a YouTube user, if I make controversy, I will get eyes on that thing. And it doesn't matter what the topic is. All, all our media is designed to do is to commercialize controversy. And that's what's happened here. I think that's what's happened with the thing. Like the only reason they got eyeballs on their thing is 'cause they were saying something potentially controversial. If it was, you know, it wasn't controversial, controversial. No, no one would be having, having any say.

James Gurney [00:39:33] And that that's not, that's not a good way to decide public policy. It's not a good way to decide, you know, taxation or anything that's, it's, it's, we have to at some point work out how to get out of this situation that we found ourselves in. And it's not, this isn't like a left or right thing, right? Politics wise. That's, that's, again, it's a false dichotomy. Like I don't understand how we, how we arrived in a place where I do understand, but complicated, right? How it's become so easy to say, okay, well that's a left idea. This is a right idea. That's if you don't agree with us wholesale,

Vance Crowe [00:40:12] You are out,

James Gurney [00:40:13] You're gone. The the guy, the the the guy from the genetics company you talking to the other day again like Kevin

Vance Crowe [00:40:19] McKernan you're talking about.

James Gurney [00:40:20] Yeah, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:40:20] Yeah, yeah.

James Gurney [00:40:21] I sent you a message saying, oh, he's talking bollocks here. And I believe that like, again, but I, I, you know, the other clips I've seen, he said some, he's obviously a, a very intelligent guy. He's obviously done incredibly well. He's, you know, he's not an idiot. But if I was to make this a topic, I would just, oh, the guy's an idiot. He shouldn't you shouldn't listen to anything he says, I think he should be more careful what he says, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't, shouldn't be allowed to say some things he's saying. Right. And you know, he, he talked about how he doesn't like the idea that vaccination is, has no liability. That's because free, you know, he was talking about free market stuff. Again, I'm not an economist. I'm sure he knows more about economic, you know, he's, he's run companies. I've, I've run a lab, but in my, in my position, it's like, no, okay, well the reason we don't do that is because if you didn't, if you didn't have freedom from liability, you'd have no vaccinations being made and people would die. And I think, I think on wholesale, it's probably better that we, we have that system. We, we typically end up in places where we have the, the best of a worst situation, right? Like we, we, like democracy is the best of the worst type of every, every type of way to govern people's terrible. But democracy are the best of them, of the terrible ideas. It's the same with like how we currently legislate vaccinations or how we currently legislate most things. We have to find something that's not the, is the best, worst solution out there.

Vance Crowe [00:41:46] You know, I'm struck, but with the internet immune system is the fact that this is actually a new immune system that has come online that we're Yeah. As human beings barely. It's like a, it's like taking on the mitochondria and, and incorporating it into your own biology. Because on the one hand, the, the pandemic would not have been possible, the shutdown, I don't think, if you didn't have the internet, if you didn't have a way for people to rapidly spread information and to be able to hear from a whole bunch of different points of view to be able to grab news, not just at noon and five and 10, which is when the, the old way was doing it. And there are some pros to it. You don't have the, you know, the, the yellow journalism where that gets us into a battle in Cuba because two newspapers decide they wanna make something happen. But on the other hand, you also then have both the, the proliferation of conspiracy theories,

James Gurney [00:42:42] But

Vance Crowe [00:42:42] Then you also have people that are narrative gates and people that are saying, the only, the only views that we are going to accept or allow in here are the ones that have already been a part of the official gatekeeper network. And there are some ideas that are so dangerous or so wrong that a small group of people are going to knock them out. So I think it's that this immune system has not worked itself out for how to do this cleanly.

James Gurney [00:43:09] Yeah. And I, yeah, I, it's, there's another tenuous link I can make here to phage. So part, part of the, do you know about, you know about crispr Cass Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:43:23] Go ahead though.

James Gurney [00:43:24] Yeah. Crispr cas is the bacterial immune system. So the, the way it was discovered, I should say discovered it was about five or six different groups in like early two thousands show that it existed. It's, it takes little stretches of DNA from viruses or plasmids and it, and it inserts it into the bacterial genome. And then when a new bit of DNA comes into the cell, it literally like scans against it, like control air find to see if it can find a match. If it finds a match, it then binds that and cuts everything up and destroys that incoming DNA. So the, the bacteria is able to like, become resistant to a phage, you know, through an adaptive immune system. It, it literally learns what to become resistant to some very clever people use that as a way to like, okay, you can target the, obviously that you can, if you have that bit of DNA in that, in that enzyme that finds it, you can then target it and then tell it to cut there and now you've got a way to edit specifically down to base pair. That's how CRISPR cas right. Does genome editing. It started from, this is another thing about free market economics, right? It started from like people looking at how a bacteria that makes yoga. Like it had this weird stretch of DNA in it. Like if we hadn't funded that research for like, which would never happen in a free market economy, you would no reason to look at this. But if DDNA we, we wouldn't have CRISPR Cas genome, you know, a billion dollar idea. Like, so again, same thing like the, the internet immune system has been primed to like take ideas, scan and say, yes, this fits or it doesn't fit. Kill it. If it doesn't fit, kill it.

James Gurney [00:44:55] And I think, you know, I'm optimist optimistic, this is something we're gonna move through. Like, we'll, we're gonna get better at it.

Vance Crowe [00:45:06] I don't think so, man. I think, I think, so I have a buddy named Ryan Butner who coined a phrase that I think is a really interesting one. And it's called the internet archipelago, which is where instead of you having one giant universe where everyone is interconnected, and if I want to talk with somebody from Iran before we go to war with them, I just pull up a video chat and we talk it through. That's not actually how things worked out. What works out is that human beings are tribal by their nature. And when you find somebody that shares the same values as you, and a lot of times that's like a synchronization that makes life easier for you, you find a group of people, you know how they think now as long as you think that way, you don't have problems in that group. You get to interact and engage and, and participate with them. But what that means for the internet is anywhere where there are bridges between networks that can't be meted out really well, that you can't find a, then they split off, go find their own islands and then talk about how horrible the other side is and just reinforce a caricature, which means that instead of us having one large continent or one large universe, it's just a, it's just a whole bunch of islands completely separated from themselves.

James Gurney [00:46:20] And so to, to put my conspiracy hat on for a little bit, there was a, a guy came to, gave a se just before, before the, obviously the whole virus stuff happened, we had an actual in-person seminar and he was talking about how these, these nodes of communication have basically have been artificially manipulated. Basically, this is, this hasn't happened. It would happen in some way by random chance, like you would expect, as you said, group A and group B, they don't wanna talk. They separate and then they sort of, they, they argue against the imaginary group A and that reinforces it. He was saying that there's evidence of like network communication of like news information that this be ha has been directly manipulated to, to reinforce that solution even more so pe you know, 'cause someone, someone's gaining from this, right? This is, the system wouldn't exist, the system wouldn't be in the state unless someone was making money off of it, the easiest way to get down the hot rabbit hole. Right? But I, I hope, again, I hope there's a way through this and there's, my, my hope is that, 'cause again, we're, we're, we're, we're democratizing information, but then you get into the question of like, okay, well if that information has to get screened through an immune system of like, oh, what's good information? What's bad information? What's right, what's wrong to say? And then you have the, again, I don't like you have people who are, who are correctly saying some people's opinion like, oh, every opinion's valid. Some people's opinion are that people of color are not human and deserve to die.

James Gurney [00:47:54] Like that is beyond a pore. Right? You can't, like, I don't think we can live in a society where we say that that bit of information has just as much right to freedom of expression as others. And again, that's enshrined in the constitution. The constitution says you have the right to free speech. It doesn't have, you specifically do not have the right to hate speech or violent speech. The government can't, you know, the government can't lock you up for saying, I think the government should be, you know, changed in this way. But they can say, if you, if your speech is directly violent or aggressive or hateful, it can be me, me meted against, I, I'm, I I'm pretty free, free speech advocate. But again, I, I believe, I believe we, we do place limits on it. And we should and we should, we should as a society build protections against people who, who do believe that certain people are not human, for example. Or that to

Vance Crowe [00:48:47] Me seems like an argument that if, if you were doing, if you were having a scientific discussion and somebody pulled in an example from that far away, it would be like, okay, well we're not talking about the death of people based on, you know, their Yeah. Where they came from. What we're talking about is people looked at the same information or even different information and came to certain conclusions. And now there's a, there's a group that's been put in charge of what information is correct or not correct in this case, yes. YouTube has said the World Health Organization or the CDC. Yeah. And I mean, I for one listened very intently when they told me masks didn't work, if they weren't fitted properly. My wife had bought a bunch of masks for a project a long time ago. And so we were like, Hey, let's give all of the masks that we have to the hospital because they are the only ones to use it and know how to properly use it. And it's a lot more beneficial. And so we gave almost all of them away, and I flew on planes without having Yeah. Worn one. And so now they, like, a few days later, they come out and change what they were saying. And now I have to say like, well, you know, I'm glad healthcare professionals have that. They're gonna use it, they're gonna need it a lot more than me. Yeah. But now I, I just went against my own interest because they lied to me.

James Gurney [00:50:06] Yeah. And I think, I think that's incredibly dangerous. Right. And I agree. I I was shocked from the beginning. They were saying masks don't do things like yeah, they do. Like, I, I, I didn't un, I still to this day don't understand outside of them saying there's a scarcity to Mars. So we need, we need medical health professionals to have them. That's to me the rational way to have that conversation. You say, okay, masks help. If you have masks, please get into medical professionals, because those are the nos. Those are the places where the infection will spread or be controlled.

Vance Crowe [00:50:35] Right.

James Gurney [00:50:36] Or death will be mitigated. Not say, oh, they don't work, but give, like, as soon as they said, can you give them to like, well, hang on a second. Like, if they don't work for me, why are they working for them that should, like I, again, I told my parents they were, because the UK still says, don't wear a mask. I told them in February 12th, and you have a mask, wear it.

Vance Crowe [00:50:55] Like, and so

James Gurney [00:50:55] I, I don't care if you feel strange outside. It's the, the, the simple logical argument of like saying if they say they need them for hospital care workers, then they obviously have some effect.

Vance Crowe [00:51:04] So here's my point. Yeah. James, you are a PhD phage researcher. You are like very bright. We have spoken at length with the most, you know, in-depth communications education that you can about science. Yeah. Do you think we should be afraid of a, a dictate from the large companies that the WHO and the CDC are the only medical advice that we should have? Mm. Because of that track record? I mean, do, do you, is there anything they could do that would make them lose that moniker and therefore the guys from California, whether they're right or whether they're wrong, they never lied to us and told us to turn masks over.

James Gurney [00:51:48] Yeah. So this is, yeah. Right. This is a difficult place. 'cause I still believe that if we follow, if you follow the CDC and the W ho's recommendations, as long as those recommendations are based in scientific, you know, literature and stuff, we would have a better outcome for the virus. We would have a better outcome. Personally, that might not be true. And that's public policy is not, is not necessarily decided at personal levels. Right. Like if again, you gave away your mask, if you kept your masks, would you not be better off? Yeah. So, but are you, are you willing to make a, a personal decision or follow the policy? I think, I don't, I don't know if you should just listen. 'cause I didn't listen to the CDC, I didn't listen to the WHO. Why? So I can't sit here and say, yeah, of course you should always listen to them. No, you shouldn't. You should. If you, if you are in my position where you have 15 years of research experience in the field of infectious diseases, I can make some informed decision for my own safety. If I'm talking to my grandparents who are still, you know, in the UK would still going out for walks, like, no, stay inside, you idiot. Like there's, there's different levels of what you can do for different people. But I think, again, this hits on the fact, like your situation in the, in a small village in Minnesota where there's 12 people is very different from like, you don't need to close the, the local post office. You don't need to close the local thing. 'cause probably there's no cases there. If you wanna be sure that no one dies, then you close it.

James Gurney [00:53:22] Right? So I, I couldn't, in all goodness, good faith, they know you should, you should always listen to WHO. You should all listen to CDCI think they have our best interests at heart. They, they, they have no reason not to. 'cause again, the, the ability of, of of societies to trust these sort of institutions gets tested at these points. And we've done nothing the last 10 years. But trying to ero the trust in big institutions and th they need trust to, to, to work effectively. Right? Like if, if, if these institutions aren't trusted Yeah. Then the

Vance Crowe [00:53:59] Only thing they have is force. Right? If you don't trust the big institutions, the only thing thing you have is, is we demand

James Gurney [00:54:05] That you do the C has. Yeah. The CDC has no power. Right. And honestly, like if you, if you actually go and work out what the CDC can do, 'cause they're up the road from me. So we talk to 'em quite often and you know, they, they've come and give like seminars about stuff and like, if there's an outbreak, imagine that crazy, right? There's an outbreak. What can the CDC actually do recommend, that's all they can do. They have no, they have no power to like, like quarantine people or anything. That's, that's not, that they're not a, what's the word they use? Like the, the FDA can like impound things. They can, they have, they have the authority to actually like, restrict things and stop things. Or the FA, you know, the CDC can just sit back and say that ice cream's killing people don't eat it. They can't, they can't go into that store and take the ice cream away. They can just say, that's probably poisonous ice cream. Don't, don't touch it. And everything they do relies on public trust. And much like the, the vaccination thing with like in what was Afghanistan where they found a a o when they, when, what was the name of the seal team? Six or so, whatever they called, they

Vance Crowe [00:55:09] Took down. Yeah, zero, dark 30. Yeah,

James Gurney [00:55:10] Yeah, yeah. That's it. They got there, they found out information because they were hijacking a vaccine like camp. They, like, there was a vaccine camp there was taking information from people and using to vaccinate against, I believe polio. And that pissed me off so much. It was like, oh he fucking insane. Like, why would you jeopardize a, the, the, the Taliban was already killing vaccine workers at, you know, for, for, for a decade. Now why would you jeopardize a vaccine thing, which will, you know, if that gets outta control and polio comes back, hundreds of thousands of people can die. Or you can symbolically go and kill some guy who's been living in a shithole cave for the last 20 years because you, you gave him money in the late eighties. His family were rich who took that away. He became, you know, there's a whole whole weird economic political argument going on there. The level of people he can directly hurt or influence is so much more than this goddamn virus that you are, you are like causing people not to trust the vaccination efforts. I was so pissed off when I found that. 'cause it's like we can eradicate polio. We could, we could get rid of it, you know, fantastic. But if you stop like undermining the trust in these, in these public health policies, which is what that obviously has now done. 'cause it was, it was a cover for the CIA or where whoever was doing it, it was a cover for them. They were literally conspiracy level theory people there saying, now these people are just there to collect information about like Taliban leaders. It, it's insane. And I, I'm annoyed that the WHO and, and CDC didn't have the adult conversation say, no masks will help, but they will help more in these, in these locations.

James Gurney [00:56:51] They will, they will stop people who need them from dying much more than help you. And again, that the effect on masks will help you is actually quite small. Like if, unless you're sick, wearing a mask maybe will reduce your chance of infection by 20%. I wear a mask when I go outside 20%. Great. I had some leftover from doing woodworking stuff like, you know, the covered in saw dust, but the, the N95 mask, I had to fit them great. If I had a box full of ones, I would've still given away to a local hospital. But we, the trust goes both ways, right? They should trust us to, to understand if, if you explain public policy correctly and you are trustworthy, then the population will believe what you say and, you know, be able to take that in. I hope. Take that against, I think that

Vance Crowe [00:57:41] The, one of the really good things that Kevin McKernan said that that really rang true to me is outside of the private system, you don't have the same market forces. So the people that are dawned, you are the communications person. You're the person that's gonna decide how we talk about things and how we're gonna handle it. Like, they don't get wiped out if they aren't good at what they do in, in the corporate world, for the most part, if you're bad at communicating, yeah, it may take a little while for them to seek you out, but they will eventually find you and destroy you. And then a new person comes in and they're much better at communicating.

James Gurney [00:58:20] See, I, I would, I would say even, even in, in academia, like I am, I am coming for people's jobs, right? Like if you are, if you're an assistant professor at a university, be afraid. 'cause I'm gonna, I'm coming to take your job. I, I I think this idea that there's no competition in, in academia or like public policy positions isn't true. There is, we, you know, we're hungry, we're coming, we're coming for you. Right? It's, and if you're bad at communicating, your job is on the line. If I like, if Fauci wasn't doing a good job, there's six other fauci behind them, right? There's six other people who are maybe slightly younger, slightly taller, better looking. I dunno they, you know, but they are, they are there. And they, they will come for the job. They will come and take it. They will say, no, this person's not doing an agriculture. I, I don't, I don't agree with that on principle. Like, again, from my own position, I am, I am gunning for people's jobs. I am, I am working to show that their work is not as good as mine. And I will take their job if I can.

Vance Crowe [00:59:17] Hey, fair point, man.

James Gurney [00:59:18] Yeah. James,

Vance Crowe [00:59:20] This has been a great conversation. I was so glad you stopped by on Kevin's post and I hope we stay in touch. If people wanted to learn more about phage research or stay in touch with you, how would they do that?

James Gurney [00:59:33] They can find me on Twitter is probably the easiest way. It's James R.

Vance Crowe [00:59:39] So if you

James Gurney [00:59:41] Just phage research a Twitter handle called phage papers, which is a, a bot and like collates all the current phage research papers. But there's, you know, there's a hundred great researchers out in the world. I couldn't, I couldn't possibly list them all. Who are doing, who are doing some really interesting work. If you're interested in like phage therapy work, there's people up in Yale probably leaving, leaving the charge on that. A guy called Paul Turner's lab. He has some of the coolest work and actually going into patients and trying to, you know, trying to save lives.

Vance Crowe [01:00:15] Well, cool man. I know it is a whole big field of research that opens up a lot of possibilities and hope for a lot of people. Not necessarily on coronavirus, but on other problems that we face. Hey man, thank you so much for stopping by. It'd

James Gurney [01:00:28] Be my pleasure. My pleasure, man.