The laboratory accident that saved 500 million lives

What made penicillin the most important scientific discovery in medicine of the 20th century

was not the discovery itself. It was implementation. And I think this is a lesson that is sometimes lost for fans of progress and also for people

in government. Invention matters, but implementation matters more. I'm Derek Thompson. I'm a journalist, and I'm the co-author of the book Abundance with Ezra Klein

The Lesson of Penicillin So one of my favorite stories from this book is the story of penicillin

Penicillin was famously discovered in 1928 by the Scottish scientist Fleming. And it was discovered famously by accident

Fleming was returning to his lab after a vacation and he had been researching bacteria

and saw that in this little petri dish where he was holding the bacteria

something seemed to have flown in through the window and landed in that dish and liquidated

the colony. And when he went under the microscope to figure out exactly what had done it, he

discovered that it was a mold from the genus Penicillium. And so he named the product itself

Penicillin. It's a really, really famous story in scientific history because it does kind of seem

like maybe the most important drug of the 20th century. I mean, the most important antibacterial

of the 20th century blew in through this guy's window and landed on a Petri dish in his lab

like truly the breath of God. But let's say you took the story of penicillin

13 years forward in the early 1940s and you stop the clock and say 1942

Only five human beings in the history of this medicine had ever been tried with penicillin

and two or three of them had died. So if you had stopped the clock in 1942, you would say

this clearly isn't a medicine that's going to do anything for anyone. It's just hit a dead end

And the problem was that the scientists who were working on penicillin couldn't grow it in sufficient batches to test it in people

And so they went from the UK, which was submerged in war in World War II, to the US

And they got really, really lucky. Because just as they took penicillin to the US

the U.S. had started this program called OSRD, the Office of Scientific Research and Development

which was launched by FDR to coordinate all technological and scientific innovation during the war So the Manhattan Project which built the nuclear bombs spun out of this And one of the most important achievements of the OSRD was that they found a way

to grow penicillin at scale, to test it at scale. And three years after scientists took penicillin

to the U.S., we had grown it to the extent that the death rate from bacterial illness among American

and British soldiers declined by a factor of 18. The lesson here is that what made penicillin the

most important scientific discovery in medicine of the 20th century was not the discovery itself

It was implementation. And I think this is a lesson that is sometimes lost for fans of progress and

also for people in government. Invention matters, but implementation matters more. Invention is how you take an idea from zero to one. Implementation is how you take an idea

from one to one billion. That's the story of penicillin. It's a story of scaling

And when I look at American history in the last 70 years, I'm worried that we've somewhat fallen

out of the habit of implementation, right? An American invented the elevator, and somehow we

can't build apartment buildings. Americans invented nuclear power, but we basically stopped

building nuclear power plants after the 1970s. Americans invented the solar cell, but we let the

frontier of solar development escape to Germany and Japan and now China. An American invented

or Americans invented the transistor. But if you look at where the most advanced semiconductors are

being built in the world, the vast majority of them are being assembled in Taiwan, not America

So over and over again, I'm worried that while America clearly wins all the Nobel Prizes

if there were a Nobel Prize for implementing what we invent, we would not be so dominant

Now, here's where I think there's actually a success story that's been wildly underrated

It's Operation Warp Speed, which is the program under Donald Trump that in 2020 accelerated

the development of mRNA vaccines that saved millions of American lives and maybe tens of

millions of lives around the world. Operation Warp Speed is a very very very strange reputation right now Republicans don like to brag about it because they somewhat negatively polarized themselves against vaccines and in particular mRNA vaccines And in particular particular the way that mRNA vaccines as a medicine got enmeshed with

vaccine mandates. And so their objections to the mandates became conflated with objections to the underlying therapy

But then on the Democratic side, I think what you see is that a lot of people don't talk

about Operation Warp Speed because they don't want to give a lot of credit to a program that

was initiated under Donald Trump. But Operation Warp Speed was a marvel. We did with mRNA vaccines

in 2020 what the World War II machine did for penicillin in the 1940s. We took the germ of an

idea, a little synthetic mRNA recipe that at first existed only in a lab, and we blew it out so that

it could be implemented at scale, delivered to billions of people around the world

And Operation Warp Speed did this in a really canny way. There was push funding, so direct subsidies for pharmaceutical companies, but there was

also what's called pull funding. We told some of these companies that we would guarantee a billion-dollar payment for these

vaccine discoveries or these vaccine products, even if another company had beaten them to market

and in this way encouraged many, many, many different companies to try their best to pour

money into the investment for developing vaccines for COVID. Then once the vaccines were created

the government created this sort of glide path that allowed them to go from being in a lab to

being injected into people's arms. We made it easier, for example, for the vaccines to be

transported in special glass vials that were built by Corning. So we contracted with glass companies

in order to help companies like Moderna transport these vaccines across the country

And then finally, and very importantly, having bought all the vaccines, the federal government could have charged Americans whatever they wanted

and they charged Americans the price of zero dollars and zero cents. So we had this extraordinary all-of-government achievement with Operation Warp Speed

And what is its legacy? We've basically forgotten about it. It's like, what if we landed a man on the moon and then never talked about the Apollo program

That's how I feel about Operation Warp Speed. I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for everything

I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for cancer drugs, if we can. An Operation Warp Speed for addiction pills

An Operation Warp Speed for inflammation. An Operation Warp Speed for cardiovascular medicine An Operation Warp Speed for dementia for obesity for clean cement cement that we manufacture that doesn just cook the planet In fact if cement were its own country sort of a

weird thing to think about, it would be the seventh largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world

But it's necessary. It's necessary to build things. So how do we build cement without releasing tons

of carbon dioxide in the process. That's a project where I would love to see an all-of-government

effort to accelerate the development of. When you look at what's happening right now, for example

in artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is a larval technology, right? Anybody is lying

to you if they say they know exactly how it's going to work out. On the positive side, if it's

going to accelerate drug discovery. On the negative side, if it's going to lead to a world of utter

chaos. But one thing we seem to know for sure is that artificial intelligence is unbelievably

energy thirsty. It takes a ton of electricity to train these models, to outfit the data centers

where the models live in Silicon. And if the federal government is going to play a major role

I think, in making sure the data centers that house AI are built in America rather than built

say, in the Middle East, we really need to find a way to not only allow energy to be built

efficiently, but also, I think, make it easier to build clean energy in this country. Because in the

absence of clean energy, you're just going to burn more fossil fuels and accelerate climate change

So where are the Operation Warp speeds for accelerating enhanced geothermal, for accelerating modular nuclear power, or even fusion power? Where are the Operation Warp speeds

for everything, considering how fantastically successful the first Operation Warp Speed was

It's really bizarre that we, like, receive this lesson, that in all of government focus and

implementation can do extraordinary things, break the land speed record for the fastest vaccine

ever created, and we're basically just doing nothing with that lesson. right this book says no we need to take the lesson of OWS very seriously and look at other places

like medicines or clean cement or carbon removal where these kind of mechanisms can really serve

to take technologies that might now live in the 2040s and pull them closer to the 2020s

want to support the channel join the big think members community where you get access to videos

early ad free