"the following is a conversation with michael minna he's a professor at harvard doing research on infectious disease and immunology the most defining characteristic of his approach to science and biolo..."

"mysterious or surprising idea in the biology of humans or viruses that you've ever come across in your work sorry for the overly philosophical question wow well that's a great question you know i love..."

"viruses that interact with each other and so damn good at getting inside our bodies does that fascinate you or terrify you i'm very much a scientist and so uh it fascinates me much more than it terrif..."

"know we're about to we're about to have one of the most aggressive vaccination programs the world has ever seen but we are unfortunately doing it right at the peak of viral transmission when millions ..."

"about one of the most exciting aspects of your work which is uh testing or rapid testing you wrote a great article in time on november 17th this is like a month ago about rapid testing titled how we c..."

"front of you uh could you maybe explain some of them absolutely so there's a few different classes of tests that i just have here and there's more tests there's many more different tests out in the wo..."

"it all mixes back with this whole idea that of the medical industrial complex you know in this country and in most countries we have almost entirely defunded and devalued public health period you know..."

"further delay of the land here of the different tests before us absolutely so i talked about pcr tests and those are done in the lab or they're done essentially with with a rapid test like this the de..."

"why somebody i don't know if you were paying attention but somebody like an elon musk type character so he was really into doing some like obvious engineering solution like this uh at home rapid test ..."

"believe because vaccines started being deployed currently that you know we are no longer in need of a solution we're no longer in need of slowing the spread of the virus to me as i understand it seems..."

"is there a way to change that policy wise so this is this is a much bigger thing that you're speaking to which i i love in terms of the uh mit uh engineering approach to public health is there a way t..."

"sorry if i'm stuck on this yeah your mention of mit and uh public health engineering right i mean it has a sense of i talked to computational biology folks it's always exciting to see computer scienti..."

"the future of viruses that might be threatening the uh our very existence sure so do you think like a future natural virus can um have an order of magnitude greater effect on human civilization than a..."

"what about from immunology perspective of the idea of engineering a virus so not just the virus leaking from a lab or something but actually being able to understand the protein like the everything ab..."

"really exciting breakthrough of alpha 2 of alpha fold 2 solving protein folding or achieving state-of-the-art performance on protein folding and then i thought proteins have a lot to do with viruses i..."

"so there's a lot of young folks undergrads grads uh they're also young uh listen to this so is there you've talked about a lot of fascinating stuff that's like there's ways that things are done and th..."

"i have to ask you about what was the philosophy the journey that took you to becoming a buddhist monk and what uh what were what did you learn about life what did you take away from that experience ho..."

"could you briefly summarize what's waiting beyond the stage of just quieting the mind is yeah it's hard for me to imagine that there's something that can be described as exciting on there yeah it's it..."

"so there's this richness of life in a in a single drink of water that you experience and then there's this power of nature that's it capable to take lives of thousands of people so given all that the ..."

"yeah and so how do you reconcile those two and i guess do you have both of them in you do you basically oscillate back and forth i don't think i i think i just i look at us in a i think we're just a b..."

"[Laughter] but it's one hell of a fun blip though it is it's it's an it's an amazing uh uh you know blink of a of a of an eye in time michael this is you're one of the most interesting people i've met..."