[Music]
so thank you all for inviting me to come
and speak to you I want to talk to you a
little bit about some of the molecular
biology work that's going on in my lab
at the University of South Carolina but
I'm going to talk a little bit about the
philosophical implications of how
pandemics do more than just harm
individuals they actually harm the
social trust that exists between
individuals and a proper pandemic
preparedness plan has to have in place
widgets that can deal with the virus but
also Information Management schemes so
that we can prevent the social harm that
happens to societies by the loss of
trust that naturally occurs between
people when a virus is creeping through
and harming people and you don't know
what is happening so you're going to see
that the this is a t through some
molecular biology work but I want you to
notice ways that information management
and blockchain kind of Technologies can
make our societies more robust to Future
pandemics so early on um I and several
other people noticed that the SARS cove2
virus had some really weird
characteristics if you do an alignment
of this virus against its most recent
common ancestors you find out that it
has a lot of mutations that are what are
called non-synonymous mutations that
cluster in the receptor binding domain
uh it looks very engineered it's a
circumstantial evidence but it looks
like it had help uh if it didn't have
help it's a remarkable coincidence
nonetheless we made a bunch of PCR
primers uh regardless of where it came
from we made PCR primers and started
developing a test in our laboratory just
so that we could figure out who had it
and who didn't and maybe keep the
University of South Carolina functioning
properly uh we made this kind of a a PCR
test with our own primers and protocols
and proved that the PCR really will
detect um the virus and it'll detect it
down to single molecules in the well
this PCR essay does not have a false
positive problem you can cycle forever
and not on a on a negative sample and it
will never fire um but it can accurately
determine how much viruses in any sample
we then kind of accidentally discovered
that raw saliva works better than the
nasal swabs we discovered this for a
funny reason during the pandemic
lockdowns we ran out of nasal swabs and
ran out of RNA purification reagents so
we just tried it on Raw saliva and it
turned out that it worked fine it worked
even better than than the standard uh
procedures and it's kind of funny given
all the gatekeeping that has gone on
about nasal swabs and the type of swabs
that you have to use and all that sort
of stuff you don't even need any of that
stuff uh I tracked the virus uh as it
went through lots of individuals
students at the University of South
Carolina and families um and and I could
prove to myself that the virus was real
and that the PCR protocol was actually
predicting illness this is a family here
where some of the people got it and some
of them didn't and the the PCR signal um
predicted perfectly who was going to get
sick and who never did this family on
the right that's me and the blue curve
is me whenever I brought it home and
gave it to my wife and two daughters and
then they got sick later so I had access
to validating ver veriable information
that the PCR results were tracking with
symptomology most people didn't have
access to this kind of verifying
information and after a while they kind
of became suspicious of hey is this
thing really telling me the truth or not
and they didn't know anybody like me
that they could ask to see is this is
real or
not another kind of interesting
phenomenon about this virus which
probably will see this again is the
asymptomatic super spreader phenomenon
now you may have heard about this I know
it's
this guy here was the brother of one of
my students that was working in the lab
and it we were testing everybody every
day as we were developing this test and
and we were using all of our friends and
family members as negative controls this
guy blew a positive and he had more more
virus in his saliva than there are
people in China but he had zero symptoms
and on day three he went on a s mile run
and clocked his normal time but this guy
could infect the whole world if he tried
and he would never have known about it
so this phenomenon is actually real
there are silent super spreaders that
walking Among Us and and reasonable
people grew suspicious about hey maybe
this PCR is like bogus maybe this is
lying to us or something like that
because I it's not really working when
we're trying to just quarantine People
based on being sick and again future
pandemics need to respond to this kind
of situation in a way that preserves
social trust we need to plan on this as
being a real thing and I think that the
information blockchain might be one
solution to this
problem here's here's a result of a
whole bunch of positives that we I'm
showing you from just one month of
testing we did like 300,000 people uh
300,000 tests over two-year period And
this is one month of positives and I
want you to notice the distribution of
CT values in PCR space um it's minus the
log of the CT value is kind of related
to two to the log of of of how much
starting material there is so these very
low CT values down here at 10 they have
a lot of virus and these higher CT
values around 30 or 32 they have a small
amount of virus those people at the
bottom in that Circle have a billion
times more it's a log scale they got a
billion times more virus than the
average those are our super spreaders
and that's probably what happened in the
Wuhan Market someone was infected and
didn't know it because they were an
asymptomatic super spreader but they had
enough virus that they could infect
everybody that was shopping that day or
that week
this happens um it's a very sneaky virus
um and it causes mistrust to develop
because people are getting sick and you
don't know who they were exposed to you
know are they somehow um you know
worshiping the wrong God or are they in
the wrong political party are they
guilty of wrong think and then the the
natural human brains tendency to turn on
each other takes over and it fractures
social trust and Society begins to
deteriorate this is what this really
really happened uh during the pandemic
and we're still dealing dealing with the
consequences of it
now okay a few words about the MRNA
vaccine the MRNA vaccines came on the
scene uh they were deployed under an
emergency situation we didn't have time
for public trust to develop organically
okay it just we had to go For Broke um
because it was a dire
situation initially it was reported that
these vaccines were 90 something percent
effective at preventing infection that
only lasted for about a month and then
they became very ineffective at
preventing transmission they do have
what appears to be durable protection
from Death about 80% of the time it does
reduce the probability of
dying this is still hotly debated
because people don't trust the
information that they're getting from
various sources we need ways of having
raw data being uploaded to some sort of
of an information blockchain so that
people can see how the data is
accumulating and not be suspicious of
who other is gathering the data so that
they can come to their own decision
about whether this is real or not anyway
um there's a lot of side effects uh that
are unexplained and they tend to be
flippantly dismissed and this causes
more
distrust I use a lot of sequencing
technology in my lab we're Gene joogs
we're cancer Gene joogs we sequence
things all the time and we can discover
mutations or DNA sequences that we
didn't know we were looking for before I
did this on vials at a vaccine okay this
is basically an internet dare that
somebody put me up to somebody else had
done this and I said this is crazy so I
did it myself and lo and behold I
discovered a bunch of DNA pieces uh in
the MRNA vaccines I thought wow this
might be the explanation for some of
these side effects that people are
seeing we should check into this and see
if these little bits of DNA are getting
into the Human Genome of vaccinated
people the public deserves to know what
they're taking if it's a vaccine or
anything else the public deserves to
know what's in it and molecular biology
tools can do this for
you this is kind of the sequencing
result of uh that came out of my lab
using a um a a modern very cheap uh
Deployable sequencing platform I'll tell
you about it later if you ask me about
it uh this this technology you can use
it in the field if you want to you could
sequence something in the jungle on your
laptop uh it really does work anyway
these these little pieces here are all
the little pieces of DNA that we
discovered in a vaccine there's a lot of
them um and using this technology you
don't have to know what you're looking
for and you can see what's in your
saliva what's in your vaccine what's in
your food what's in your environment all
these things can be answered by
sequencing but public trust can only be
generated by making this data on some
sort of a public Ledger and and it' be
collected by multiple sources and
everybody can just inspect it to see
what's there think of this kind of data
as a form of a contract you know or or
some sort of a blockchain of currency
that you might want to generate public
confidence
in so we are doing some studies now
where we're monitoring The genome
Integrity of vaccinated people just to
see if this stuff is ever getting in
there I made some PCR primers against
the the DNA sequence that I found this
is what real-time PCR looks like in case
you want to know the cycle number here
at the bottom is how many cycles of the
machine does it take before you start
seeing product and the more Target was
in the well to begin with the fewer
Cycles it takes before you start seeing
stuff and the less product is there the
more Cycles it takes so that's why it's
backwards and it's a log scale but we
can quantify down to the molecule number
we can literally count molecules in any
sample with this with this kind of
technology and it doesn't suffer from a
false positive uh from too many cycles
um it's it's
reliable so we did an experiment can the
little pieces of DNA that are in the
vaccine um ever get into the human
genome and modify it I know it's this
was theoretically possible and I said
this publicly about a year ago well we
did an experiment to prove it we took
some normal human colon organoids these
are normal cells and we vaccinated them
in the lab by just putting the vaccine
in the media and let it incubate for a
little while and then washed them and
then grew them and washed them over a
month and kept washing them and
passaging them and then we did the PCR
on the genomic DNA and lo and behold
there's stuff there and it's the exact
same frequency that I predicted about a
year ago about 1 in a th000 to one in
and 10,000 cells have taken up different
pieces of this vaccine and it's a
permanent fixture of their genomes now
okay this is not surprising based on
molecular biology first principles we've
been doing this for years in the
laboratory this proves that it happens
with this contaminating DNA which is why
I was so weirded out about this stuff
when I first discovered
it we've been looking at a bunch of
tumors from cancers that have shown up
uh since the vaccine rolled out and
we've just looked at like 50 tumors so
far uh that were not really selected for
anything other than the fact that they
developed in the last three years and
we've got a couple of them that appear
to be positive for bits of this DNA now
we don't know if this is a driver event
or if it's a passenger event and we're
doing more investigations to try to
figure out where it landed and if it has
anything to do with the tumor or not but
it does happen so this is what we need
to the public needs um a careful
accounting of this so that their
confidence uh can be or lack thereof can
be appropriate and Based on data not
based on marketing or anything like
that so a final couple of words about
another kind of genome modification it's
called DNA methylation so your genome
has methylation methyl groups added to
cytosine residues at cpg Losi in your
genome and and and these modifications
are part of a developmental program
that's been going on since you were
first conceived and continues until you
die where you slowly change the
methylation landscape of stem cell genes
and eventually those stem cell genes
begin to be silenced and you lose stem
cells as you grow older it's if aging is
just a natural extension of the
developmental process that goes on in
utero and you eventually just run out of
stem cells and you die we can tell how
old you are by looking at the methyl
groups on lots of Loi in your
genome we've known for a little while
now that when your DNA methylation age
is disconnected from your physical age
especially if your DNA age is too old
you're at high risk for all cause
mortality this is really a thing um and
there's a lot of interest in in finding
out what kind of things or interventions
can I do that will make me younger right
that will delay aging and we can have
surrogate markers for this with this DNA
methylation aging the same sequencing
platform that I was telling you about
earlier will measure methylation on the
fly at the same time we're figuring out
sequence alterations so you know
sequence analysis of normal blood cells
uh can agnostically monitor for sequence
changes and methylation changes and
figure out if some sort of an
intervention has altered the methylation
age all right so I did this on a sample
that was just available to me this is me
um pre and postvaccination and there are
spots in the genome that the methylation
age changed this is a real thing this is
one sample so it's scientifically
meaningless right now but it's to prove
that this is something that is worth
doing in my view to monitor what happens
to people pre and postco and pre and
post methylation to see are these
interventions helping our methyl age or
are they harming our methyl
age once you know what you're looking
for it's very cheap and easy to do it a
final thoughts pandemics stress test the
trust that people have in each other low
trust societies Fair worse than high
trust societies molecular biology tools
can measure these things but molecular
biology tools can best increase public
trust and future pandemic preparedness
if we make the information available to
the public so so that anyone can see it
um we should do this now and I'll stop
there thank you for your
attention thank you so much Philip for
one