Difference between revisions of "19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC"

'''Eric:''' Hello. This is Eric Weinstein. I'm going to be recording a short introduction to this episode because I think it's probably the most important episode of The Portal to date. That said, under normal circumstances, I probably would have either edited this heavily or not released it at all. It starts off quite slow and it gets quite awkward before finding its pace. Now what's going on is that the interview subject is none other than my brother Bret Weinstein. In Bret's case, you probably know him if you know him at all as the heroic professor who stood up against what can only be described—I swear I'm not making this up—as an Maoist insurrection at an American college in the Pacific Northwest, the Evergreen State College. It was a very strange situation because somehow the national media that we would normally have thought would have covered such a story—for example, the media that covered the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Straight_Hall#1969_building_takeover takeover of Straight Hall at Cornell] in the 60s—that media was almost absent completely.  At least, they were absent for a very long time before they entered late in the game. And why is that? Because the story ran counter-narrative—that is, the students at the Evergreen State College who were behaving in a racist fashion were actually students of color, and this was an exactly counter-narrative story. And Bret, who stood up to this racist insurrection, was in fact somebody with a history of standing up against racism. He had, in fact, been a student at the University of Pennsylvania, my Alma mater, an Ivy league school, and had to leave because of death threats when he stood up for women of color who were being abused for the amusement and the sexual amusement of white fraternity students. So Bret was supposed to be familiar to many of you from that, from an old national news story, and he was also the hero of a book called [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/476218.The_Tapir_s_Morning_Bath The Tapir’s Morning Bath].

But somehow, the news media, who chose not to report on the Evergreen story, was not very interested either in figuring out who Bret was, because the stories showed that there was a contradictory problem with the main narrative. In some sense, that's going to be recapitulated in this episode. There is an official narrative about what happened in the scientific episode, and there is a narrative which I think is much closer to the truth, which I happened to be one of a very small number of witnesses to this alternate story. Now the key question is whether to tell the story or not, and you're going to see that both of us have a certain amount of trepidation and energy around the question of whether or not to break a longstanding public silence. When Bret found himself as professor in exile along with his wife, Heather Heying, I had thought that the American biology establishment would realize that one of their own had been thrown overboard as jetsam, and that he would have been invited to many universities to give seminars in biology.  

It took awhile for me to understand that, because he was found at Evergreen State College, the people who taught at highly ranked research universities thought that Bret was something more like a teacher rather than a researcher. In fact, he had been the top student of one of the most important evolutionary theorists in the United States, Richard Alexander at the University of Michigan, as well as a student of Bob Trivers, formerly of Harvard, arguably one of the greatest living evolutionary theorists, I think presently at Rutgers. Bret was somebody who had actually done really interesting work in his thesis, and for some reason, the system found it very disturbing to consider the full implications of his work.  

'''Bret:''' It's a little better. It was known not to be a coding sequence. It wasn't a useful sequence. So what you had is a bunch of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that were just repetitive, and the length of the number of repeats varies. And the number of repeats correlates with basically how many times the cell can divide before it refuses. This being interpreted as a cancer prevention thing made perfect sense. But the reason it struck me like a bolt of lightning was that I was well aware of the existence of tumors and their implication in something entirely different. What they had been implicated in, as far as I was aware, was something called Hayflick limits, which were the tendency of perfectly healthy, happy cells to grow and grow and grow and grow in a Petri dish, until they hit some number of divisions and then to stop without apparent dysfunction. So—

'''Eric:''' So this was the theory of Leonard Hayflick?  

'''Bret:''' Right. So I began to focus on this question and I did something that was the right thing to do, but I did it in a way I will forever regret. I found somebody who was represented in the literature, who I regarded as very well versed. They made sense to me, their papers. Her name was Carol Greider. Carol Greider is now a Nobel Laureate. She was not at the time. She was the co-discoverer of the enzyme telomerase, which is the enzyme that elongates telomeres, when that occurs—

'''Eric:''' With the famous and co-Nobel recipient—she was the student of Elizabeth Blackburn.

'''Bret:''' Elizabeth Blackburn. Exactly. She was her student and they shared the Nobel prize with Szostak. In any case, her work seemed good to me. I called her up, cold, you know, I went into the insect division office and I sat down at the phone. I called her, I said, Carol, you don't know me. I'm a graduate student at Michigan. I'm an evolutionary biologist. I'm racking my brains trying to understand something. Can you tell me, is it possible that mice don't have ultra long telomeres? That it's only laboratory mice that do? And she said, huh, that's really interesting. I'm pretty sure that mice have long telomeres universally. But it is odd that if you order mus spretus instead of mus musculus and you order from European suppliers, the lengths are very different than what you get if you order mus musculus from the Jax club. I said, Whoa.

And she said, yeah, that's really interesting. And then she said, I can't remember if it was the same phone call or if we had a second phone call, but she said she was gonna put her student, her graduate student, Mike Hemann, who I think is now at MIT, on the project. And he was going to do a little work to figure out whether there was anything to this. And Mike did some work. They sourced some different strains of mice that were, they were actually not wild mice. Wild mice would have been the right test, but she couldn't get wild mice for obvious reasons.  

'''Bret:''' Right, exactly. And so she got several different strains of mice that had just been in captivity much less time. She actually got one strain of mice that was treated very differently in captivity. But nevermind. She put her graduate student on it, and he measured their telomere lengths. And I get this excited email. Mike Hemann sends me any email that says effectively, “Whoa! The hypothesis is true, mice have short telomeres!” Right? Now—