Welcome to the first episode of Fashionably Late Talks. When I launched Fashionably Late Takes a couple months ago, I didn’t plan on producing a podcast to go along with it. But then I got the opportunity to interview Matt Ridley, a science writer who I have admired for quite some time.
This opportunity grew out of my joining Biosafety Now, a nonprofit organization that advocates for regulating risky pathogen research to reduce the likelihood of lab-generated pandemics.
I also didn’t expect to join a biosafety organization after launching Fashionably Late Takes! But after I published my inaugural visual essay on the troubling possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic began with a lab leak, I connected with the founders of Biosafety Now and then decided to get involved.
I wrote about my decision to become a biosafety advocate in an essay reflecting on Sarah Haider’s ideas about the tension between effective activism and intellectual honesty, so if you’re interested to know more about this choice, please check that out.
So, for this first episode, I interviewed Matt Ridley.
Matt is a leading British science writer who also has a scientific background with a PhD in zoology from Oxford University. He’s known for award winning books including The Red Queen, How Innovation Works, and most relevant to our conversation, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-written with Dr. Alina Chan, a scientific advisor and viral vector engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
His books have sold over a million copies and have been translated into 31 languages. As a journalist, Matt was the science editor at The Economist, and has regularly contributed to publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and The Spectator.
His impressive career has spanned beyond the world of writing, such as when he sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021, where he served on the Science and Technology Select Committee and the Artificial Intelligence Select Committee. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, as well as a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
We talked about the subject of Matt’s book Viral: the search for the origin of Covid-19. Matt described what the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins is, and much of our conversation revolves around the evidence that supports it. For me, the highlight of the conversation came when I had the chance to ask Matt about my own pet theory for one big reason why the search for covid origins went wrong. And at the end, we conclude with a little brainstorming about how we might find definitive proof of where the virus that causes COVID-19 came from.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
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