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  • Canada and Europe

    Canada and Europe
    2026/09/29
    This week we talk about EU membership, trade deals, and association.We also discuss Australia, Ursula von der Leyen, and Brussels.Recommended Book: Being You by Anil SethTranscriptJust off the coast of Newfoundland, there’s a small group of islands that belongs to France. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon are close enough to Canada that, at their nearest point, the two countries are separated by only a few kilometers of water.In September, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met French President Emmanuel Macron on these islands. The two leaders could stand on French territory and talk about a partnership with the European Union, while Canada was visible across the water.A few days earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had made a similar, but possibly more significant proposal. Speaking before the European Parliament, with Carney in the room, she said she wanted to open the door for Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member.”Depending on which headline you read about the statement, this may have sounded like Canada might be joining the EU, joining it partway, or joining an entirely new version of it. Soon after, Australia’s trade minister said his country was “on the same page” as Canada regarding closer ties, and the European Parliament’s president then suggested Australia and New Zealand might follow Canada’s lead.Now, despite all those headlines and interpretations, there’s one problem with all these stated ambitions: the European Union does not have an established category called associate member. No one has agreed on what rights or obligations an associate member country would have, and figuring that out—and getting some kind of resolution passed—would be necessary for anyone, including Canada and Australia, to get closer in that way with the EU.What I’d like to talk about today is why this proposal was made, what it could mean if it eventually becomes more concrete, and whatever happens, what these statements tell us about the way global alliances are changing.—The EU has 27 member countries, but there are already a few different ways to be connected to it.Full member nations help write EU law and send representatives to its institutions. They all participate in the single market, which means goods, services, money, and people can move across member nation borders under shared rules.The single market is distinct from the customs union, which sets common tariffs on goods imported from elsewhere. Both are distinct from the Schengen area, which removes most routine passport checks between participating countries. And nations that use the euro are another group entirely. These arrangements tend to overlap, but they’re not the same thing, and membership in one does not automatically mean membership in all the others.There are also countries outside the EU that participate in some of its systems. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein belong to the European Economic Area and are part of the single market. To do that they have to accept many EU rules, although they don’t vote on those rules as that would require full EU membership. Switzerland has built its own set of bilateral arrangements with the EU. And Britain, after leaving the union, has also negotiated a special trade and cooperation agreement with it.So there are precedents for a country having a deep relationship with the EU without being a member. But there’s no ready-made ‘associate’ slot that Canada can just step into.There’s a legal distinction here, too. The EU treaties say that a European state can apply to become a member, and Canada is not a European state. The treaties separately allow the EU to make association agreements with countries outside the bloc, and it already has many kinds of agreements with external partners. An association agreement, though, does not make that partner a member of the Union.“Associate member” could eventually become a useful name for a new collection of rights and obligations held by nations outside those existing parameters. For now, though, it’s a political invitation and a negotiating idea, not a defined legal status.All that said, Canada isn’t starting from scratch on this. Its trade agreement with the EU, called CETA, has been applied provisionally since 2017. Most of it is already in effect, though ten EU countries still haven’t completed the ratification required for the whole of the agreement to go into force.CETA removes most tariffs and opens some opportunities for companies on each side, but it doesn’t make Canada part of the single market. A Canadian product can be easier to sell in Europe without a Canadian worker gaining a general right to take a job there. That’s part of the distinction between a trade deal and the sort of relationship people sometimes imagine when they hear the phrase “union membership.”Canada also joined Horizon Europe, the EU’s major research funding program, in 2024. It has a security and ...
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    14 分
  • Clean Energy Super PAC

    Clean Energy Super PAC
    2026/09/22
    This week we talk about lobbying, renewables, and the NRA.We also discuss implied threats, midterm elections, and political action committees.Recommended Book: Sunward by William AlexanderTranscriptFor much of the late 20th century and the first few decades of the 21st, one of the most feared interest groups in US politics was the National Rifle Association, the NRA.Its power came from a large and politically engaged membership, a mailing list, a grading system that reduced complicated voting records to a letter, and a reputation for ending political careers over specific votes.Once it attained that reputation, the NRA didn’t have to defeat every politician it disagreed with. Members of Congress only had to believe it could defeat them, and that belief shaped races in which the group spent nothing; politicians went out of their way not to anger the NRA. Money can buy an advertisement or a meeting. What tends to change a vote is the expectation that one choice will be rewarded and another will carry consequences.The NRA’s influence has declined following internal scandals, financial trouble, and the growth of well-funded gun-control groups. But its model remains potent: pick a few visible fights, and allow your reputation to do a lot of the work for you, in the future.In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, alongside a related appeals-court ruling later that year, helped create the modern super PAC: a political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates, so long as it does not coordinate that spending with their campaigns.This did not eliminate the effort and resources required to build influence, but it meant a few wealthy donors, a competent team, and some carefully selected races could establish a reputation in months rather than decades.In 2026, solar, wind, and batteries are projected to account for about 93% of new utility-scale electrical generating capacity added in the United States.That doesn’t mean they provide 93% of the country’s electricity—natural gas remains the largest source in the US—but these technologies are now the overwhelming majority of what the industry is building.Despite that growth, in 2025 Congress passed a law that sharply rolled back federal support for much of the clean-energy industry, and most of the politicians who voted for those rollbacks appeared to suffer no political consequences for doing so.What I’d like to talk about today is the effort to build a feared clean-energy lobby, how it has influenced a series of Republican primaries, and what its early successes do and do not tell us about the role of money in American politics.—The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, was signed into law on July 4, 2025.For wind and solar projects, the new law generally ended production and investment tax credits for facilities placed in service after December 31, 2027, unless construction began within twelve months of the bill’s enactment.That twelve-month window closed in July of 2026, and a subsequent executive order directed the Treasury Department to adopt a stricter definition of when construction actually begins, further clamping down on entities hoping to benefit from those now-defunct credits.Tax credits for electric vehicles and residential efficiency upgrades ended in 2025, while support for clean hydrogen was curtailed. Other technologies, including batteries, nuclear power, and geothermal energy, were treated differently, so it would be misleading to say the law eliminated every federal clean-energy incentive, though it did severely curtail a lot of renewables-oriented industries and construction in the US.Republicans have generally been more supportive of fossil-fuel production and more hostile to federal wind and solar subsidies, while Democrats have generally taken the opposite position. There are important regional exceptions, especially among Republicans whose districts have attracted manufacturing plants, wind farms, and other energy investments. Several Republican lawmakers have even written letters asking party leaders to preserve some of the credits, in part because projects and jobs in their districts depended on them. When the final vote arrived, though, nearly all congressional Republicans voted for the bill.Tom Matzzie, the founder of the retail electricity company CleanChoice Energy, previously worked for Democratic campaigns and served as the Washington director of the progressive organization MoveOn.org, so he was familiar with electoral campaigning as well as the energy industry. In the wake of the passing of the OBBBA, he posed a question to Canary Media, possibly alluding to the success of political interest groups like the NRA when he said, “Are we someone that people can hurt without consequences?”Matzzie recruited Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of the blockchain company Ripple and an investor in clean energy, and Michael Brune, the former executive ...
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    19 分
  • AI Cyber Insurance

    AI Cyber Insurance
    2026/09/15
    This week we talk about AI agents, cyberattacks, and insurance claims.We also discuss OpenAI, Hugging Face, and policy language.Recommended Book: The Stars My Destination by Alfred BesterTranscriptTwo broad categories of cyberattack have become especially visible this year, and only one of them requires a human attacker in the loop to choose the target.In March, hackers linked by the US government to Iranian intelligence broke into the medical-device manufacturer Stryker and remotely wiped tens of thousands of employee devices. The attack disrupted the company for days, affected its first-quarter earnings, and represented a shift from somewhat more subtle espionage toward more overt and deliberate destruction.Elsewhere, the market-research company Klue sat at the center of a breach affecting close to 200 customers. Attackers used an old credential to gain access to keys for customers’ cloud services.These incidents had people with recognizable motives behind them, and that sort of hack has become increasingly rare over the past decade or so: Black Kite counted 7,551 publicly disclosed ransomware victims over its latest twelve-month reporting period, alone, about 25 percent more than the year before.Then, over the course of about five weeks this summer, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed incidents in which their AI models gained access to real computer systems they were not supposed to touch.The incidents were not identical, and describing all of them as escapes wouldn’t capture the important nuance of the situation.Anthropic and Meta said their models reached the internet because a third-party evaluation environment had been misconfigured. The models had been told they were operating inside a simulation, and their internal dialogues indicate they interpreted the real systems they encountered when they left that environment as simulated components of that exercise.OpenAI’s incident, however, was a bit different.Its models were being tested using ExploitGym, a benchmark intended to measure their ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. Internet access was supposed to be blocked, but the models discovered and exploited vulnerabilities in a package-registry service inside OpenAI’s research infrastructure, found a route to the open internet, and, as I related in a previous episode, eventually compromised the production systems of the AI platform Hugging Face.Since that episode, OpenAI has release a more complete postmortem, which they published in August, and which says the activity was primarily driven by an internal research model comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol, though Sol participated in parts of the incident.The agents created an improvised message board inside the package manager, exchanged discoveries, divided up work, and sometimes described themselves as a swarm.At Hugging Face they executed code on dozens of servers, obtained broad access to several clusters, and exposed credentials associated with databases, cloud services, code repositories, and internal communications.Hugging Face reconstructed around 17,600 actions over a campaign lasting about four and a half days, including roughly two and a half days inside its own infrastructure.Notably, these AI agents were not trying to steal money or damage Hugging Face. They inferred that the company might possess the solutions to the benchmark, to the problem they were tasked with solving, and they went looking for them. They were, in effect, cheating on a test, looking for solutions to the problems rather than taking the test, as intended.That doesn’t mean the models had motives in the human sense. People created the evaluation, reduced the normal safeguards, and assigned an offensive task. But no operator selected Hugging Face or directed the individual steps; that was a path the AI decided to take all by itself.Anthropic’s review subsequently found three incidents among more than 141,000 evaluation runs for its own models. In one, a model unable to reach its fictional target scanned around 9,000 real ones, compromised an internet-facing application using an exposed password and SQL injection, then stopped after recognizing that the host was real.Another model published a malicious package to the real Python Package Index because it believed the registry was simulated. Fifteen outside systems downloaded and ran that malicious package before it was removed.Meta then disclosed that one of its models had reached the internet through a misconfiguration at the same evaluation vendor and exploited a vulnerability at an unnamed third party.No significant financial damages have been publicly reported from these events, by attacker or victim. But if there had been damages, who would have paid for them?What I’d like to talk about today is how autonomous AI systems complicate cyber insurance, how insurers have handled equally unfamiliar risks in the past, and why insurance contracts may soon become one of the more ...
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    21 分
  • US Treasury Twist

    US Treasury Twist
    2026/09/08
    This week we talk about money policies, yield curves, and government bonds.We also discuss the Fed, the Treasury Department, and a WWII accord between them.Recommended Book: Paved Paradise by Henry GrabarTranscriptIn April of 1942, a few months after the United States entered World War 2, the US Treasury Department asked the Federal Reserve to help it borrow a truly staggering amount of money, and as cheaply as possible. The Fed agreed, committing itself to holding short-term Treasury bill rates at three-eighths of 1%, while also capping the yield on long-term government bonds at 2.5%.This was a type of yield curve control. Rather than allowing the market to decide how much interest the government would pay, the Fed decided that price and promised to enforce it.That helped finance the war, because the Treasury knew its borrowing costs wouldn’t spiral out of control at a moment when it needed to spend unprecedented sums on ships, planes, weapons, soldiers, and all the other machinery of an ongoing global conflict.The downside was that the Fed lost control of an important monetary policy lever.Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions, so keeping yields below a certain level meant the Fed had to stand ready to buy bonds whenever their prices dropped. It couldn’t decide in advance how many it would buy, or how much money it would create in the process. The market would thus forth decide that, instead.Consequently, the Fed became, in some ways, an extension of the Treasury’s debt-management operation, its inflation-related responsibilities made secondary to the government’s need for cheap financing.That arrangement persisted after the war ended, despite the return of inflation, and President Harry Truman’s administration pushed to maintain it during the Korean War, as well.Fed officials resisted, though, with inflation running at more than 8%, and after a very public, very contentious standoff, on March 4, 1951, the Treasury and the Fed announced that they had reached what became known as the Treasury-Fed Accord.That agreement did not make the Fed independent all at once, but it established the principle underlying the modern relationship between these institutions: the Treasury manages government borrowing, while the Fed sets monetary policy based on inflation and employment, not on how much that policy costs the government.The market, in other words, would once again be allowed to decide the price of long-term US debt.What I’d like to talk about today is what happens when that price goes up, what’s pushing long-term US borrowing costs toward levels we haven’t seen in decades, and why two people appointed by the same president are pulling in opposite directions on this issue.—The Federal Reserve’s primary interest-rate lever is the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate banks charge each other to borrow money. The Fed currently targets a range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent for that rate, and while it has other tools, this is the number people are usually talking about when they say the Fed raised, cut, or held rates.The Fed does not directly set the yield on 10- or 30-year Treasuries, though.Those securities are sold at auction and then traded in a huge secondary market, and their yields reflect a combination of what investors expect inflation to look like, where they think short-term rates will go over the life of the bond, and what’s called the term premium.The term premium is basically extra compensation for uncertainty. If you lock up your money for 30 years instead of rolling over short-term debt, you accept the risk that inflation, growth, government policy, and other variables will change in ways that make your bond less valuable over that thirty year period. The more uncertain the future seems, the more compensation you’re likely to demand.And again, when demand for a bond falls, its price falls and its yield rises. When we say yields are rising, that means borrowers have to offer investors, the people and institutions giving them the money they want to borrow, more money, more interest, to convince them to buy those bonds.That doesn’t only affect the government. The 10-year Treasury serves as something like a reference rate for the entire economy, influencing mortgages, business loans, and the value of long-lived assets.As of September 3 of 2026, the average US 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.71%, up from 6.5% a year earlier. That increase is the result of yield increases in the bond market.Long-term Treasury yields have been climbing for much of 2026, and that climb accelerated over the summer.The 30-year yield reached about 5.31 percent on August 17, its highest level since 2007. A few days earlier, the Treasury sold 30-year bonds at a yield of 5.216%, the highest borrowing cost at one of those auctions since 2001.The 10-year yield briefly hit about 4.81% this past week, its highest level since early 2025, and ended Friday at about 4.78%. The two-year ...
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    20 分
  • Virtual Power Plants

    Virtual Power Plants
    2026/09/01
    This week we talk about peaker plants, blackouts, and at-home battery backups.We also discuss energy resiliency, solar panels, and hydro.Recommended Book: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson BennettTranscriptPeaking power plants, often just called peaker plants, are power plants that are turned on only during periods of high energy demand. That’s in contrast to a baseload power plant, which operates more or less 24/7 to ensure there’s a steady amount of electricity available on the local power grid.The need for peak-load energy varies depending on the time of year and which part of the world you’re looking at. In general, though, energy demand tends to increase in the morning and evening because of temperature fluctuations and lifestyle rhythms.People are at home in the morning and return from work in the evening, at which point they turn on their ACs or heaters, TVs, lights, electric kettles, and video game consoles. That leads to an irregular surge in demand compared with the steady office and factory demand met throughout the day by the baseload power plant.When energy demand peaks, approaching or exceeding what the baseload plant can reliably provide, the peaker plant is spun up and more energy is added to the grid. This helps avoid brownouts and blackouts, situations in which people lose access to power because there isn’t enough to go around.This also helps stabilize energy prices. In most countries, pricing is used to manage scarce energy resources, so as a grid approaches the point where it’s running out of available electricity, prices rise to incentivize less energy use. Peaker plants keep those prices from going sky-high by increasing the supply, preventing demand from pushing prices into absolutely ridiculous territory.Some peaker plants operate for a handful of hours basically every day. This is especially true in places with extreme temperature fluctuations, or in areas where the population or manufacturing activity has increased rapidly and the local infrastructure hasn’t caught up. In those places, the backup plant is used more regularly because the baseload supply hasn’t yet increased to meet that new, consistently higher demand.Peaker plants are often less efficient to run because they aren’t meant to be used all the time. Consequently, if the baseload power plant isn’t capable of providing enough energy for a region on a regular basis, electricity can get much more expensive for everyone, all the time. A power plant intended for occasional use is instead operating constantly, and it wasn’t built to be efficient. It was built to come online quickly and operate only during periods of irregular, excessive need.What I’d like to talk about today is an alternative to peaker plants that was conceived of decades ago, but which has only recently started to be deployed at scale in some areas.—As I mentioned in the intro, a peaker power plant is meant to be turned on irregularly to meet above-average energy needs. Those periodic pops in demand are accounted for, and peaker plants are built specifically to meet them. As a result, these plants are typically more expensive and often more polluting than baseload plants, with many using natural gas or coal to produce extra electricity for the grid.In the late 1990s, researchers proposed that it might someday be possible to link energy-production and storage sites together, creating a more flexible grid system they called a virtual power plant. Further research in the early 2000s expanded on the concept, looking specifically at renewable-energy options and how they might be aggregated into a similar virtual-power-plant setup.The basic idea is to recreate the effect of a peaker plant—adding electricity to the power grid when it’s most needed—by aggregating power-generating or storage assets and tapping them only when necessary.Software manages that aggregation of smaller assets, ensuring the additional energy reaches the grid when it’s needed and at the necessary scale. Managing these assets in this way allows smaller production and storage infrastructure to recreate the impact of a larger peaker plant.A German energy company called RWE launched the first real-world virtual power plant in 2008, linking nine of its hydroelectric plants into a virtual 8.6 MW unit whose output could be managed and deployed remotely. A few years later, in 2011, a Swiss energy company called Kraftwerke did the same with a slew of biogas, solar, and wind-power infrastructure scattered across seven countries.The concept expanded to include demand-side residential energy assets in 2016, when the Australian city of Adelaide enacted a program backed by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. The program deployed 1,000 battery systems to homes and businesses across the city. Those battery systems were hooked up to solar panels, and the software managing the batteries allowed their stored energy to act like a 5 MW peaker plant.Tesla then applied the ...
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    18 分
  • US-Canada Tariffs

    US-Canada Tariffs
    2026/08/25
    This week we talk about borders, trade wars, and belligerence.We also discuss Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and nationalism.Recommended Book: Vulture Capitalism by Grace BlakeleyTranscriptThe US and Canada share the longest international border in the world, totaling more than 5,500 miles, or nearly 8,900 km. The specific details of this border have changed over the decades, but the current delineation was largely in place following the San Juan Islands water arbitration of 1872, which brought a 12-year joint military standoff between the US and Great Britain, known as the Pig War, to an end, and fed into a 1908 legal framework that relied on modern mapping of the entire frontier, which led to the precise cartography of the current international border between the US and Canada.Since then, after some issues with gold rush-era land rights were figured out in Alaska, and some treaties were signed regarding the disarmament of the Great Lakes, things have been pretty calm along this massive border. Trade hasn’t always been the most efficient and free—the early 20th century in particular was pretty fraught in this regard, as Anti-Americanism raged through Canada. That led to a dismissal of a proposed lowering of trade barriers by the Canadian Liberal government in 1911, anti-American sentiment flogged by the Conservatives, who rode their slogan, “No truck or trade with the Yankees,” to a Canadian nationalism-powered victory.After the US entered WWI and the Allies tallied a victory, though, the US and Canada exchanged their first ambassadors, Warren Harding became the first US President to make an official visit the confederated Canada, visiting Vancouver in 1923, and things between these two countries were looking pretty good until 1930, when the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was a protectionist trade act that, among other things, raised tariffs on incoming Canadian goods in order to protect competing American business interests; making the local offerings artificially more competitive than the stuff coming in from Canada, basically.The Canadian government hit back with their own higher tariffs and shifted more of their trade to other Commonwealth nations, which led to a decrease in trade between the US and Canada of about 75%; and this was happening during the Great Depression, which is why that Act was enacted, the US government was hoping to bolster their own economy, but instead of helping, it furthered those economic difficulties, because of that drop in trade and international custom—Smoot-Hawley is generally considered to have been an incredibly bad economic move, and US President Hoover signed it against the advice of senior economists, because it seemed politically expedient, US businesses were clamoring for advantages because they thought it would help them, but instead it worsened the Great Depression, and this Act is now taught as a cautionary example of why protectionist trade policies, while appealing in a nationalist sense, tend to be pretty bad, almost always, economically.US-Canadian relations improved a bit in the WWII-era, and into the early decades of the Cold War. By the late-1960s, the US had become Canada’s largest export market, and that’s why Nixon’s 1971 decision to enact a 10% tariff on all imports, including those from Canada, hit the Canadian economy so hard. Overall US-Canadian relations soured during Nixon’s time in the White House, in part because the Canadian government pivoted toward Europe, rather than kowtowing to the US’ economic demands, and Nixon’s belligerence in the face of that pivot didn’t help matters.When US President Carter stepped into office, however, things improved for a while, and though there were serious bouts of stagflation in both nations through his time in the White House, American investment in Canada increased, and relations continued to be friendly leading into the 1990s, at which point the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA was signed, in 1994. NAFTA created a common market in North America, between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and that meant the $19 trillion or so in trade between the 470 million people or so living in North America by 2014, would be entirely or almost entirely without barriers, no tariffs or very small, focused tariffs.Though imperfect by many measures, NAFTA is generally considered to have been a major success, at least in terms of raw economic productivity in North America. And in 2020, is was replaced by the USMCA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is often called NAFTA 2.0, which is in many ways just a modernization of NAFTA that updates many of the earlier provisions and focuses more on digital trade and intellectual property than its precursor.In July of 2026, however, the US government announced that it would not be renewing the USMCA, after Canada asked the US and Mexico to renew it for another 16 years. The pact remains in effect until it expires in 2036, ...
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    16 分
  • English Hepatitis C Progress

    English Hepatitis C Progress
    2026/08/18
    This week we talk about the liver, viral infections, and the NHS.We also discuss blood scandals, needle usage, and Nobel Prizes.Recommended Book: A World Appears by Michael PollanTranscriptThe term “hepatitis” refers to the inflammation of the liver, which can result from all kinds of things, including environmental toxins, the consumption of alcohol, or autoimmune diseases. It can also result from viral infections, and the most prominent liver-inflaming viruses are called viral hepatitis.There are five types of viral hepatitis, A, B, C, D, and E, and each of these viruses are distinct, not part of the same viral family, they’re just similarly named because they impact the same organ.Hepatitis A and E are primarily spread through contaminated food and water, and generally resolve on their own, untreated, and cause relatively mild symptoms. Hepatitis B and C are spread through blood and other bodily fluids, and can linger in a host’s body for decades before even showing symptoms. Hepatitis D is a parasite of Hepatitis B, and thus only infects people who carry Hepatitis B.Now again, these are all different conditions that just happen to inflame the liver, so impact and treatment also vary quite a lot. As I mentioned, A and E generally present with mild symptoms and tend to go away on their own, while B and C can stick around a long time. There’s a vaccine for B, but no cure; you can treat it, but that treatment involves suppressing it, and keeping it suppressed, forever. Hep C, in contrast, is curable, and has been since 2014 using what are called direct-acting antiviral pills, but these pills, which are taken for 8 to 12 weeks, are expensive—ranging from $22-95k without insurance, though that price is often reduced substantially for those with insurance, down to as low as $5. This category of drug coverage is often rejected by insurance companies, though, in part because they’re so expensive, that expense the result of little competition in this space; few companies make this type of drug, so those that do can charge more or less whatever they like.Some people with Hepatitis C clear it on their own; about 30% of people who contract it, in fact, clear it within a few months, medication-free. Which is good, because our understanding of this virus is relatively new. Up until 1989, Hep C didn’t even have its own name: it was established as its own thing, not Hep A and not Hep B, back in the 1970s, and doctors knew that something that wasn’t those two viruses, that was being spread by transfusions, was causing hepatitis symptoms, but they didn’t know any real specifics, so they just called it “non-A, non-B hepatitis,” and that name stuck for more than a decade.In 1989 the virus was cloned using molecular techniques (as opposed to simply growing the virus, which wasn’t proving fruitful in trying to isolate and identify the thing), and the folks who managed that cloning, and the person who later proved that the genome they cloned, alone, caused the disease, received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their efforts in 2020.By 1991, antibody tests were available for Hep C, and many countries began screening donated blood for this virus, to ensure it wasn’t working its way into their blood supply.And one instance of that screening process, or I suppose, an event that led up to mass screening, and the consequences that followed, are what I’d like to talk about today. The UK’s efforts in trying to eliminate Hep C, and England’s recently announced near-success in that pursuit.—Hepatitis C is an RNA virus with high genetic variability that makes developing a reliable vaccine difficult. And though somewhere between a quarter and a third of all cases clear on their own, those that don’t clear on their own become chronic, lying in wait for twenty to thirty years, slowly accumulating fibrosis—thick scar tissue in the liver—which eventually results in cirrhosis, which means a liver that’s so heavily scarred that the organ is no longer fully functional and the damage is permanent. From there, infected people often experience liver failure or hepatocellular (huh-pah-toe) carcinoma, liver cancer.So this virus is a sleeper, and unless it’s caught by accident somewhere along the way, it slowly causes damage over time until the damage is too severe to reverse. About 80% of people who have it don’t know they have it, and in some parts of the world medical injections are the most common transmitter, but in higher-income areas, it’s usually transmitted by injectable drugs.Pre-2014 treatments for Hep C were pretty horrible, involving a combination antiviral therapy called pegylated interferon plus ribavirin that was injected weekly for six months to a year, and this was terribly tolerated by pretty much everyone, causing anemia, depression, and flu-like symptoms for the duration. It also only cured about 50% of people who received the full treatment, and a lot of people had to stop ...
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    16 分
  • AI-Designed Viruses

    AI-Designed Viruses
    2026/08/11
    This week we talk about Evo 2, bacteriophages, and antibiotics.We also discuss AI models, medical innovations, and the Red Army.Recommended Book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. NormanTranscriptA bacteriophage, sometimes just called a phage, is a type of virus that only infects bacteria. “Phage” means to devour, and that’s what bacteriophages do—they infect and replicate within bacteria that they target, injecting their own genome into that target’s cytoplasm, which are all the materials contained within the bacteria’s cell membrane.Phages are super-abundant, by some measures more abundant than every living organism, including bacteria, on earth, combined. And they’re interesting in that they range from incredibly simple to quite complex, and have at times been used as alternatives to antibiotics, because they attack and feed on bacteria.The use of phages to counter bacterial infections was all but abandoned in the mid-20th century when antibiotics were discovered and commercialized, their production industrialized and the substances themselves proving a lot easier to mass-produce, and a lot more predictable in their utility than phages. Phages were kinda sorta almost understood, but we didn’t really get what they were doing or why, so their application often felt more like folk remedies than real-deal science, despite the actual science underlying the practice.Also, phages were primarily used as antibiotic treatments by the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s military. So throughout the West, which was rapidly scaling its production of antibiotic treatments, the use of bacteriophages was associated with Stalinist communism, and so the Red-scare, the demonization of anything associated with the Soviet Union, was partially responsible for the shelving of this approach and this realm of research, at least for a while.Much of that existing research was also done in the Soviet Union, and the published documents were thus published in Russian or Georgian languages. And because much of the rest of the scientific publishing world was reorienting around English at this time, that meant these published works were often either ignored or unintelligible to the rest of the scientific community.As with much of our microbiota, the invisibly small viruses, bacteria, archaea, and so on that make up the human microbiome, we have a general sense of how bacteriophages interact with some of what makes us, us, but only a general sense. We know that healthy individuals tend to contain a host of bacteriophages that people who have chronic conditions, like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are less likely to have, for instance, and there’s a chance that this lack is associated with those conditions—though each person’s body composition is unique, and this facet of biology is still relatively obscure; we really don’t know for certain what does what, because of how complex these interactions are.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent development in the world of bacteriophages, and why the researchers behind it are both celebrating their accomplishment, and warning about potential dangers associated with the same.—Back in 2025, a nonprofit called the Arc Institute, which has a stated goal of accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases, announced the release of a new language model, a new AI system, called Evo 2.The Evo family of foundation models—a foundation model being a type of AI model that’s been trained on a huge corpus of data, but which is applicable for all sorts of purposes, including serving as the foundation of large-language models like ChatGPT or Claude—this family of foundation models is open-source and trained on raw genetic sequences, something like nine trillion nucleotides-worth of such sequences, making it distinct from other models in this space that have been trained on descriptions of biological systems, using human language.The initial version of Evo was released in early 2024, and the newest version, Evo 2, which is an upgraded version of the Evo 2 model that is more efficient, so it can be run on less powerful hardware, was released in February of 2026.So while many of the AI systems that non-biologists interact with on a regular basis have been trained on human language-based libraries, showing relationships and interactions between the words we use to communicate, these models have been trained on the fundamental building blocks of life; the nucleotides, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, ATCG of DNA, if you remember that from biology class, that are strung together into 64 different possible three-letter combinations. Chains of these nucleotides instruct cells to build proteins out of amino acids, and from that baseline, we get life.We also get non-living things like viruses, which have no cells, metabolism, or independent reproduction, and phages are viruses.And while other AI models have been shown...
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