Charles Piller
speaker
984 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 17 Apr
Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And what I do exclusively is write investigative articles that ask deep questions about the reliability of certain kinds of scientific studies and the veracity of them. And so it's very important for science to also self-police. You can't have science be just accepting everything and not questioning anything. Science is all about questioning. Thank you.
And what I do is I take that to the next level. I dig deep and try to understand whether there are aspects of scientific research that require a second look for everyone's benefit.
Yeah. I mean, I think, um, look, this is science magazine. It's the bedrock of scientific research in many ways, a bedrock. And it's very respected by scientists all over the world. And so that gives it a degree of credibility in the scientific community that is very important. Now, by the same token, how that credibility is supported is to also be skeptical and question.
And that's something that the journalism part of Science Magazine does, and I think does quite well. But also the scholarly part of the journal does some good questioning as well. There are viewpoint pieces and opinion pieces that push people to think more deeply about certain subjects and also are willing to challenge authority when it seems beneficial.
Yeah, well, science comes out weekly. My articles are... not by any stretch of the imagination in every issue, because what I do usually takes months for every article to do the deep research and reporting and often data analysis that might be required to mount a really credible case. And whether you're talking about Alzheimer's research, or I did a story a few years back on nutrition research,
And whether you're talking about the kinds of deep questions that people have or just wanting to understand the subject well enough to write about it in an authoritative way takes time. I'm a very fortunate journalist. Most journalists are on tight deadlines and do not have the luxury of having that time. But it's time that's required for certain kinds of stories.
And like I say, I'm fortunate, but also it's a way in which The editors of the magazine, they understand if they want to contribute in this way, they have to be willing to allow me to take the time to do it. And so I'm very grateful to them for that and for their leadership in that respect.
That's right, yeah.
Well, so that was something I, many years ago, worked for a small newspaper that was published by the University of California, and I became interested in biological sciences. And I became interested also in this phenomenon of how genetic engineering was used in our culture and in the scientific community. Because I think it's an important, amazing, powerful tool
and one that, like any tool, can be used for good or ill in society. And one of the really interesting things to me was this big question that goes with the question of how you use genetic engineering in warfare. Because at the time I was writing this book, a long time ago, there was a considerable amount of concern about it. There still is.
But that was kind of in at the ground floor level, you might say, when those concerns were just building on the possibility of biological warfare being affected by genetic manipulation in a way that might produce perhaps more harmful weapons.
At the time, the United States had what they called a biological defense program, which was a robust, large program to examine whether they could develop remedies for problems for imagined biological weapons that had been the product of genetic engineering by the country's adversaries.
And of course, this is a very challenging realm of research, very dangerous realm of research because of the hazards associated with the possible biological weapons organisms. And so what was really interesting to me was this nuance in the picture. In other words, the difference between offensive research and defensive research in biological weapons studies is really one of intent.
In other words, the processes of examining these organisms, exploring them, building defensive responses to them, understanding how they might be used, Offensive and defensive programs need to do the same kinds of things. And it's only the intent of the researchers that determines where things are at.
And so for me, as an investigative reporter, I wanted to know all I could know about how that worked. And a lot of how I did that book was to both explore the history of that realm, but also to file a number of Freedom of Information Act requests of the federal government
in order to learn about the Biological Weapons Defense Program and to learn the degree to which it was involving what they called dual-use experiments, dual-use studies. And that means that they were equally applicable to offense and defense. It's just, again, a matter of the intent of the researchers. And to me, that was critical to help inform the public about the potential dangers involved.
of the use of genetic engineering in that realm. I think that's really what the goal of the book was. And for me, because it was a pretty technical subject, I felt strongly that I needed to get a collaborator who was himself an expert in this realm, someone who understood the new genetic technologies intimately from his own work.
And I was fortunate to get a great scientist, a guy by the name of Keith Yamamoto, to work on the book as a co-author. So that was my first book and one that I felt broke some new ground in helping people understand that subject. And a lot of things have happened since then. It's still very much a subject of concern in defense circles.
But I think, again, I kind of set some groundwork so that people can understand it better.
That was in 1988. 1988.
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