Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

The year end lists have begun; the year's top news stories, the year's top films, the word of the year, the person of the year, the list of the year, but one of these year enders really caught our attention.

Derek Thompson: I am Derek Thompson. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Derek authored The Atlantic's inaugural 10 Breakthroughs of the Year list, which highlights some of 2022's biggest science breakthroughs, and I wanted to know what breakthrough Derek himself found most engaging.

Derek Thompson: Oof, what a great question. The most interesting and engaging to me as a writer, as a journalist is probably this extraordinary eruption in generative AI products. These are products like ChatGPT, this technology that has totally taken over Twitter in the last 72 hours. They are large language models that you can ask, prompt with questions and they can do all sorts of things. They can summarize papers, they can spit out bespoke Wikipedia-style articles. If you ask something like, "What is existential philosophy? What's an mRNA vaccine?"

You can prompt it to write song lyrics. You can ask it to begin to write essays in the style of well-known writers. I don't necessarily think of this as replacing my job, I think of it as an amazing technology that I can use in order to stimulate myself through those many little micro questions that arise in the process of writing a long essay. I think these things are, frankly, quite magical and I'm so excited to see how they continue to evolve.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, that's raised my professorial antenna a little bit. Do I now have to worry that AI is writing papers for my students?

Derek Thompson: I think what's really interesting is that some people look at this technology and they think, "How is this going to make obsolete the student essay?" A perfectly good question, but for every question people are asking these technologies, I think it's always worth asking the opposite question. Like for example, if you are a professor, "How could I use this to automate building a curriculum?"

Let's say that you're teaching a class on the history of the Mongolian Empire, typically, you'd have to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how to break down how you're going to teach the Mongolian Empire, which parts. You can ask this technology, "Please design me a curriculum for a group of 21-year-olds on the history of the Mongolian Empire," and it will do that for you.

Now, I'm not saying it's going to do an A+ job, but even if it does a C+ or B- job, that's an amazing piece of raw material that you can now work with and turn into an A+ curriculum. I think the way that this technology might help us to brainstorm with the second disembodied brain is just really, really fun to think about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It is fun to think about. We're going to play with that idea. I have anxiety and attraction to that all at the same time. Can you talk to me also about the James Webb Telescope?

Derek Thompson: Oh, yes, this is really cool. The James Webb Telescope is basically the most sophisticated telescope that humankind has ever built. In July, NASA came out with its first set of images from the James Webb Telescope. You might have seen these if you were online or if you had access to a newspaper, magazine, it showed off these beautiful nebula that sometimes resembled neon soap bubbles, sometimes they resembled [unintelligible 00:03:42] red mountaintops, just beautiful, beautiful images.

These images aren't just beautiful, I think they're also important. These are the oldest images we have of the universe, which means that these are snapshots of the earliest moment in time that we have ever seen. I'm very interested to imagine how cosmologists flipping through these 13 billion-year-old images might develop new theories of how all of this began, how time and space and matter actually began. What were the conditions of existence of just around the moment of the Big Bang. These the first breadcrumbs that we have to figure out this proto-cosmology. Again, these snapshots are are not just beautiful, they are a time machine that allows us to see the first moments of existence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That I adore. Now, as the younger sibling of someone who has MS, can you talk to me about some of the breakthroughs this year around MS?

Derek Thompson: Absolutely. MS afflicts about a million Americans, maybe a little bit more than a million Americans. It is a disease that has bedeviled scientists for a long time. This year a team of scientists had a really interesting discovery. They provided very strong evidence that a virus called Epstein-Barr virus might be the leading cause of multiple sclerosis. Now, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people in the US get EBV, Epstein-Barr virus, but a small fraction of them developed multiple sclerosis, MS.

What might be happening with EBV, Epstein-Barr virus, is very similar to what we understand to be long COVID. Lots of people understand that obviously hundreds of millions of Americans got COVID and a minority of them got long COVID, a long virus. It might be the case that many diseases that we only are beginning to understand are essentially long viruses, but we don't know what virus it is that is causing those diseases.

Again, this is a discovery. This is just the first inning of all the breakthroughs that hopefully we have around MS, but if we further understand that EBV, the Epstein-Barr virus, is one of, if not the single most important cause of multiple sclerosis, it could send a bunch of scientists to try to create a vaccine against EBV, and that vaccine might just dramatically reduce the prevalence of multiple sclerosis in future generations or help people with multiple sclerosis today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about the ways that the pandemic led scientists to these thoughts, to this framework for even thinking about it, it's tens of millions of people worldwide lost to COVID-19, to this pandemic. I always hesitate to think of it as a bright side, but nonetheless, human creativity does engage, even in some of our harshest and most painful moments. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that the pandemic also sparked these other kinds of scientific breakthroughs, these firsts that could be truly beneficial in our future?

Derek Thompson: It's an unfortunate but also unavoidable fact of human history that crises can stimulate innovation. There were extraordinary breakthroughs in not only hardware technology, but also in antibiotic technology during World War I and World War II. No one wants tens of millions of people to die, but sometimes our reaction to horrific events can stimulate some discoveries. That clearly was the case with COVID and the pandemic. It was an amazing time for bringing forward mRNA technology, and mRNA technology is having some other really interesting implications.

For example, we just this year found that mRNA technology was used in conceiving of a new potential malaria vaccine. There was also a new mRNA platform that was used to create a all-flu vaccine. The flu influenza has 20 lineages, and within those lineages, there's a bunch of different strains, and every year we tend to have to create a new vaccine in order to protect against that seasonal strain. What if we could develop a vaccine that protected against all the lineages and all the strains of influenza?

It is possible that this is the year that we got closest to doing that, that we got these in this mRNA tech vaccine that in at least some animals seems to provide a really strong immune response against all known types of flu. From COVID to malaria to influenza, we're seeing this blooming of mRNA science that is really exciting, even if in the exact same breath, we should point out, that it was tragedy that helped to accelerate this science.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're connecting these pieces, one of the themes to your list this year is this idea of twin ideas, these inventions that come in pairs. Tell me about some more of the technologies that are following this twin idea principle.

Derek Thompson: I'm very interested in the fact that throughout the history of science and technology, sometimes we tell ourselves that it's these single heroic inventors that pull forward progress, but when you really look closely, lots of the most important concepts and products in history were simultaneously invented by many different people.

For example, the telegraph was invented not only by Samuel Morse, Morse Code, but also by Charles Wheatstone in the exact same year, 1837. If it wasn't Morse code, it might have been Wheatstone code.

You look at the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell is the most famous inventor of the telephone, but as some people know, Elisha Gray filed a patent for a telephone-like product on the exact same day as Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. This is a really interesting theme of history and it's also a theme of 2022. We didn't just get one of these incredible generative AI apps like ChatGPT, we got a dozen of them. We didn't just get one incredible breakthrough in cancer therapies, we got several.

At the moment, there's not just one really interesting obesity therapy that's coming online, there are several. We just talked about how there's this explosion in mRNA vaccine technology. That's also a bit of simultaneous invention. I think it's an interesting fact of history that it's so rare that individual inventors move forward the frontier. No, it tends to be groups of people coming to extraordinary conclusions at the same time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's part of the just breathtaking reality of the COVID vaccine, was the way that as much as COVID threw up these barriers, it also dropped these barriers in the context of science really leading to co-working that had not happened before.

Derek Thompson: That's right. It's clear that science has become more collaborative. One story that I think you can tell is that the history of science has moved from individuals to teams, to teams of teams. when you think about something like the history of genetics, well, it took one guy, Gregor Mendel, a monk looking in his backyard and playing around with peas to figure out some stuff about dominant recessive traits. That's part of the beginning of genetics as a field.

Then when you think about the project of maybe figuring out the double helix, that's Watson and Crick. That's a team at Cambridge University, but what does it take to do something like the human genome project? What does it take to do something like understand the complex origins of a polygenic disease like schizophrenia? Well, it takes thousands of people all around the world working with Harvard and the Broad Institute and a bunch of other places figuring out something very, very complex. Science is becoming very much a team sport where it used to be more of an individual sport. That really is also a theme of this year's breakthrough list.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you were giving us this generative writing AI, we started digging into some of the questions of ethics, but push up for me a little bit more on that. It's one thing to talk about scientific breakthroughs that seem to have at least generally a clear, ethical, straightforward perspective, which is, "Let's cure disease. Let's end suffering and pain." There is another question, though, about AI, and I mean a little bit less here like, is Siri going to take over the world, and a little bit more of maybe the ways it's raising questions for us about what constitutes sentience or creativity or original work?

Derek Thompson: You're asking two great questions in there. One is, how can we trust that we can use science and technology to make the world better rather than not worse? The answer is that almost every technology is a tool and almost every tool is mercenary. It is up to people to decide whether you use it to improve people's lives or to disempower and create pain.

The second question that you ask, which I think about a lot, is what are some of the philosophical implications of something like AI? I think this is such a rich area. We talk sometimes, for example, about how we are building our minds into AI. AI is a reflection of the human mind. Well, that's us shaping technology, but what about technology shaping us? The way that we interact with the world is downstream of the technologies that we've built. Cars have changed the way we live. Computers have changed the way we work. Our iPhones and social media have changed the way that we think and the ideologies that we hold too. Great.

It's almost mind-bending to think how much could change if we build tools that are essentially disembodied second brains that we're constantly talking to in the form of AI. We'll learn over time how to talk to these things, how to become fluent in their alien tongue, and that might change the way that we think about ourselves, about our capacity for creativity, and about the world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Another final question. As we look at the globe, and we've been talking about these twin ideas and collaborative technological and scientific endeavors, how collaborative are they from a global perspective? Is this technological breakthrough occurring primarily in the west, in the US, in European nations? What's going on in the so-called global south?

Derek Thompson: It's a great question. I think that there's two stories or two big buckets in the story of progress. There is invention and there's also implementation. It's not enough to just invent something that is potentially wonderful for the world, you also have to implement it. I pay very close attention to, and have written other articles that pay closer attention than this one, the story of how are we implementing these breakthroughs in the global south?

We are coming up with new treatments for and medicines for some of the diseases like malaria that kill hundreds of thousands of people in Asia and Africa, even though they don't kill thousands of people in the US or Europe. It's really important, I think, to have this focus on-- Yes, it's wonderful to have these labs in Cambridge and Yale that have all these breakthrough medicines and drugs, but it really doesn't matter for the world if they aren't reaching most of the world.

There's another article that actually I wrote for The Atlantic that's coming out next week, piece for the magazine that is called The Eureka Theory of Progress is Wrong. What I mean by that is the idea that it's not eureka moments alone that move forward history, it's the deployment of those eurekas that move forward history. If you invent a vaccine in Cambridge and you inoculate one person in London, well, you have left eight billion people in the world unvaccinated. That's not progress, that's a prototype.

The story of progress is how we move ideas from the one to the eight billion. You're absolutely right that that is a huge story that goes untold in today's piece but is very much the subject of next week's article.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're going to take a very quick pause, but don't go anywhere, we'll be right back. Derek, as you're talking about what we're looking forward into, tell me about the abundance agenda and this notion of pursuing innovation in all these different spaces.

Derek Thompson: It's never enough to just invent something new. If you can't build that new thing, then people can't benefit from it. I think a theme of the 21st century in America is that we have chosen scarcity when we could have chosen abundance. The US did not build enough houses in the 2010s, and as a result, we have a housing crisis in the 2020s. The US made various decisions to reduce the number of doctors in America, and as a result, we have a doctor shortage and the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

The US wants to decarbonize the grid. We want to build solar and wind and nuclear. We've invented solar, wind, and nuclear technology, but we aren't building enough and have not built enough fast enough to move away from oil and gas. I proposed earlier this year an abundance agenda, a new way of thinking about progress in America that says, "What do we need more of to make people's lives better, and how do we create policies and rules and incentives to create more of those good things?" That is what I call the abundance agenda.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering about a certain politics required for that. Perhaps, it's connected to the idea of the moonshot or, in this case, the earth shot that we need to save the planet from global climate change, but I'm wondering about the ways that we tend to think of science, technology, and innovation as separate from politics, but that in order to create an agenda of any kind, particularly an abundance agenda, as you were talking about housing, it really brought it to the fore for me, there's a politics associated with that.

Derek Thompson: There is absolutely a politics associated with it. You couldn't be more right. I think about a policy like Operation Warp Speed, which has been interestingly orphaned by both the left and the right. I think the left doesn't talk about it a lot because it's a Trump policy and the right doesn't talk about it very much because it created vaccines and half of self-identified Republicans who are middle-aged seem to not want to take a COVID vaccine.

Look at what this policy did, it invested in science and technology, it invested in platforms like the mRNA vaccines, and it also turned the obstacle course of a vaccine's typical 10-year development into a glide path such that we could build out these things in less than a year. I would love America to think, "What if we had Operation Warp Speeds for other crises?" Now, sometimes America doesn't act like we're in a moment of crisis, but I think we live in a world where crises abound. We just need to choose to recognize them as such.

Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans every single year. Isn't that a crisis? Why can't we have an Operation Warp Speed for heart disease? Cancer is obviously, a killer of hundreds of thousands of people every single year. Is that a crisis? I'd say it is. Where's Operation Warp speed for cancer? We want to decarbonize the grid. We want to save the world from climate change. Is that not a crisis? Where's Operation Warp speed for clean energy infrastructure technology?

I think that there's an impoverished way that we think about progress, where we wait until there's something new and scary and then we declare it a crisis and then we lose our minds a bit and sometimes come together and do something like an Operation Warp Speed. The truth is that no, crises abound and we should treat them as such.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sometimes as we're thinking about our storytelling, it helps not only to have things but also people. Is there a researcher, a scientist, maybe it's actually an artist or an activist who for you really embodies what an abundance agenda looks like when we actually adopt it?

Derek Thompson: It's a wonderful question. Here's an example from somewhere that you might not be specifically asking, but I think about the long story of the smallpox vaccine. The first vaccine ever created by humankind and smallpox was the first disease eradicated by humankind. Many people who know the story of smallpox know the story of Edward Jenner. This is the British physician who in 1796 inoculated a young boy and arguably created the vaccine. In fact, came up with the name vaccine because it came from the root for cow. It was a cowpox blister that inoculated that first young boy.

Lots of people know about the invention of the vaccine, but few know about this man named D.A. Henderson. D.A. Henderson was a public health official working under the World Health Organization who led the effort that actually eradicated smallpox from Asia and Africa and took it out of the world. Who's the most important person in the history of smallpox? Some people say Edward Jenner, but look, D.A. Henderson is the abundance hero. He took this idea, he took this product that was widely available in America and Europe, which was the smallpox vaccine, and he made it abundant throughout the world, thereby actually eradicating the first disease in history. That's a real hero of abundance.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Derek Thompson, who led The Atlantic's list of the 10 biggest science breakthroughs of 2022. Thank you so much for taking the time with us.

Derek Thompson: My pleasure.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.