Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for March 6, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: grunting noise]

VOICE 1: What are you doing?

VOICE 2: You're a terrorist and a thug Ali.

VOICE 1: Put down your guns both of you.

VOICE 3: Take your best shot!

VOICE 4: Please, put down the gun.

VOICE 1: Put that down.

VOICE 3: Get out of the way Reza.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well it's been a shift in gaming for a while now. Video games with moral dilemmas and tough choices in real world situations intended to evoke empathy and understanding in players. Now the UN agency UNESCO has its own empathy games. At a time when the real world faces wars, humanitarian crises, racism, xenophobia, hate propaganda, proponents say empathy games can create new levels of empathy and understanding. Others are pretty skeptical. We're on that discussion in just a moment. And then, this is no game.

SOUNDCLIP

ROBOT: Please step away from the machine. Your actions are being recorded for your safety.

[Sound: ambient noise]

ROBOT: Seriously, I said step away from the machine

AMT: Well, who needs security guards when you can have mouthy robots. These latest Silicon Valley inventions are patrolling a corporate parking lot. Just another of the disruptive technologies to come out of one little patch of California. But now the place that always has an app for that is moving away from the cloud and the console to the tangible and the tactile. In half an hour, The Current’s Peter Mitton explores disruptors aimed at everything from your groceries to your grandma. And lessons from the vaccine race.

SOUNDCLIP

To a large extent, vaccines have been a victim of their own success. You don't see a child in an iron lung with polio, you don't lose a child to diphtheria, and so complacency can set in.

AMT: Against the backdrop of the hunt for a vaccine to fight the Zika virus. Journalist and doctor Meredith Wadman examined the science and politics behind the creation of the rubella vaccine. Hear her in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Back To Top »

Can video games promote empathy?

Guests: Paul Darvasi, Mary Gordon, Navid Khonsari

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey, I'm glad you made it. It's good to see you.

VOICE 2: I'm here because [unintelligible] asked me to come.

VOICE 1: Well it's a good thing you are, because the [unintelligible] just declared martial law.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well it is 1979, revolution is brewing and you are in the streets of Tehran experiencing it all from the perspective of a young photographer named Reza.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It's going to get as violent as it needs to be.

VOICE 2: No violence, Ali. Do you understand me?

VOICE 1: Look, we won't start any violence. But if they attack us, God help them.

VOICE 3: Listen to Ali.

VOICE 4: What are you doing, Ali?

VOICE 5: Our boss didn't want this, Ali.

VOICE 1: Yeah, and this is not a peaceful movement anymore. Not after what they did to our boss.

VOICE 2: You think we have a chance using violence against this government? That's what they want.

VOICE 1: Huh? What do you want us to do? Just allow them to slaughter us?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 4: Show them that we're stronger, okay? No guns, no tanks, no violence.

VOICE 2: That's right.

VOICE 4: We show them that nothing is mightier than the will of the people.

AMT: Well that is from a video game called 1979 Revolution. It is not your average video game, it's one of a growing number of so-called empathy games. And the point is not just to kill some time and have some fun, but to put you in someone else's shoes in order to gain a real understanding of what it's like to get caught up in a revolution or live life as a trans woman or have a young child with cancer. Empathy or serious games as they are also called, have been growing in popularity. This week they’re getting a major endorsement when UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency releases a new game of its own. Paul Darvasi is a game designer, he's also a high school teacher in Toronto and a PhD candidate at York University, where he studies the intersection of gaming and education. And he's the author of a paper commissioned by UNESCO on how gaming can help with conflict resolution. Paul Darvasi joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hello.

PAUL DARVASI: Hi, how are you?

AMT: I'm well, I'm interested in how you see this. How do these games create empathy?

PAUL DARVASI: I think there's a number of things at play here. First of all, they’re wonderful ways in order to cultivate perspective. Traditional media, like literature or TV or film also give you a perspective in somebody else's life. But the difference with a videogame or a digital game is that you actually enact the actions of your character, the world changes according to your actions in the game. And as a result of that, it has a more profound psychological, emotional, and cognitive resonance, and therefore it has the possibility or the potential to leave a much stronger imprint with the individual.

AMT: And can you give me some examples of that?

PAUL DARVASI: Of course. So there is a wonderful game called Hush. It was developed in USC by a student in 2008, where you play the role of a Rwandan mother who is hiding from a Hutu patrol during the Civil War. And the whole point of the game is simply to pacify your child to sing a lullaby so that it doesn't alert the Hutu patrol to your presence. And the game provokes a lot of anxiety, because outside you could hear screams and people begging for their lives and bursts of machine gunfire. And while this is going on, the player has to play a rhythmical game on the keyboard in order to maintain the lullaby. And the sense of anxiety that's provoked in the game gives you a small window into the very difficult reality that that individual’s living.

AMT: I a game like that fun to play?

PAUL DARVASI: I think on some level it is. I think that there's an engagement in the actual mechanics of keeping up with that rhythm, but it's also thought provoking and really takes you to the reality of that individual.

AMT: Why are we seeing so many more of them emerge now?

PAUL DARVASI: Because unlike the past, where a studio who produced a game had to undertake the cost of distributing the game, printing DVDs, putting them in boxes, getting them on trucks and getting them all over the world, the internet has changed that and it's allowed smaller studios to start producing their own games and putting them up online. And what that's done is allowed more artistic, a greater variety of games, as individuals aren't held to the market, which has a very narrow focus on games that will produce financial results, like first person shooters, which are tried and tested. So what it's done is it's really amplified the game ecology. And as games become more central to our culture, universities are undertaking more game design programs, a huge body of scholarship is growing around games, and as a result of that there's been more experimentation within games, including games that are autobiographical or pursuing social justice issues.

AMT: UNESCO is releasing a game this week, what can you tell us about it?

PAUL DARVASI: So World Rescue focuses on six different sort of hotspots around the world. The, you know, refugee camp in Somalia, a rainforest in Brazil, a situation in Norway where I think it's a paper producer has had a chemical spill into the environment. And in each of those situations, you're brought into certain aspects of the reality of those circumstances, that people who are there, what type of challenges they have to undertake. And as a result of that, you have a fairly, you know, at least an introduction to the ideas at play and how people are affected by their environments in difficult circumstances.

AMT: Is there research that shows playing a game such as that will make someone more empathetic?

PAUL DARVASI: Yeah, there is definitely some research but it's very new. And the problem with researching games, it's very complex, because games tend to be emergent. And that means that often every game play experience is a little bit different. And then you add to that a whole range of player dispositions. You know, everybody is a little bit different emotionally, intellectually, the way that you play the game is different. So there's so many variables involved to really drive home a very sort of concrete, yes, this game will produce empathy is really difficult. But there are some promising, you know, results in psychological research that some games can produce empathy. But the situation is, I believe that a game alone won't guarantee that empathy will come from it, because players often play the game to win. They're not really interested in the story or the text and they're just kind of playing through the mechanics in order to get to the end. So I feel it's very important that if that is a desired outcome in an educational environment or for some other purpose, it's important to contextualize gameplay. There's been studies that have found that by priming players prior to playing a game, by showing a short video an empathy or having them read something about empathy, once they're inside the game they're more likely to feel empathy and to achieve the desired objectives.

AMT: Well Paul Darvasi, stay with us. I'm going to bring someone else into this discussion. Navid Khonsari is the founder of ink Stories. And that's the New York company behind the game we just heard in the introduction 1979 Revolution. Navid Khonsari is in Melbourne, Australia. Hello.

NAVID KHONSARI: Hello, hello, how are you?

AMT: I'm well and we've got another clip that we want to play for you. But first of all, your game 1979 Revolution, why did you even create this?

NAVID KHONSARI: Well I think the Iranian 1979 Revolution was one of the major turning points of the 20th century and we see the impact of that event today. And while it's been covered in films and books, I felt that it just wasn't having the impact and I wanted to create something that was going to be interactive and really put people in the shoes of those who had experienced it. And as a result, maybe break down what we think is unfamiliar about us and realize that through really being in the shoes of another person that we have a lot more in common than we think. And so hopefully create understanding and empathy for one another.

AMT: You lived the revolution didn't you?

NAVID KHONSARI: Yes, I was ten-years-old. And then in 1980, my family decided to move to Canada.

AMT: Well, let's hear one more clip. This is a scene inside Iran's notorious Evin prison.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: ominous villain orchestra]

VOICE 1: You act as if you are so innocent. But your actions have hurt so many people. Do you even know what you are fighting for?

VOICE 2: To get rid of a tyrant.

VOIE 1: That is the difference between us. I fight for our faith. The great prophet Mohammed once said, “You will not enter paradise until you have faith.”

VOICE 2: And, “you will not complete your faith until you love one another.”

AMT: Briefly Naveed, what's going on there?

NAVID KHONSARI: If you had earlier on in the game, when you'd come across a religious spiritual man, he would have asked you to partake in a prayer. And if you'd have done so you would've got that bit of information. So as you're being interrogated in 1980 for your activities in 1979, and the interrogator tries to use your lack of faith as a card against you, if you had actually experienced the prayer part, you were able to give this kind of a response to it. If you hadn’t, you'd have to give a different kind of response, putting the interrogator in a more powerful position throughout the rest of the scene.

AMT: What do you think games such as yours can do that other media cannot do Navid Khonsari?

NAVID KHONSARI: Well, to kind of reiterate what Paul was saying. I think the medium is hands down the most powerful experience that we have out there, greater than films, documentaries, and even literature, by leaving an impact and continue a conversation, because it leaves an impression and allows you to have your own narrative in that experience. You get to own it rather than having it told to you in a one way direction. The impact of that is so great that it can actually have an impact on how we start viewing one another and start having a conversation about what really is taking place in the world. I think we have some very strong forces right now that are trying to kind of bring up borders and really separate races and dehumanizing us. And I think by actually living in the shoes of somebody else, you'll be able to strip that down and realize how, one, how similar we are to one another and that there really is just one race, a human race.

AMT: Paul Darvasi, you have said as well that, you know, we've had literature, we've had cinema, but this is a new form to do what those forms did for other, you know, different centuries.

PAUL DARVASI: Yeah. And I don't think that they're mutually exclusive, right? Because they can co-exist and they will continue to co-exist. But one thing I like to say is that you can put a book and a film in a video game but you can't put a video game in a film or a book, or not in the way that it's played. And I think it speaks to it being a pair of paradigmatic form of the 21st century. Some scholars argue that it is the art form of the 21st century. And because of the stigma that it suffered because of its violent origins, there's still some skepticism about the value of these types of interactions and like any other technology, there are definitely some downsides but there is enormous opportunity for doing good. And the thing with empathy is you can feel empathy but it won't necessarily lead to action. You can feel, you know, very sentimental in the moment but it doesn't mean you're going to go out and change the world. Because it encourages you to act, a video game you're making decisions, you're an active player in the game, I believe there's a greater chance that you will actually go out into the world and make a difference and do something. And again, it's never guaranteed. So as part of our media repertoire, I think it's a very important and timely addition.

AMT: And Navid Khonsari, have you seen that in the reaction to your game?

NAVID KHONSARI: Absolutely. I think when you take a look at the threads that take place while people are playing the games, and initially their knee jerk reaction is to question the validity of the content. For example, that the game might be inaccurate because women aren't wearing hijabs or chadors in the 1970s and then having somebody else in the ecosystem respond and say, well, in 1970s women weren't forced to wear the hijab. It's great to see that conversation take place and it really kind of reflects the impact it's having, that this medium that has such a strong impression is generating conversations that are going on far longer than that the game’s actual title. So as a result, it's incredible to kind of see that. Amongst the Iranian diaspora, amongst non-Iranians, just everyone having a conversation about this moment.

AMT: We have to leave it there, but thank you both for your thoughts on this today.

PAUL DARVASI: Thank you.

NAVID KHONSARI: Thank you.

AMT: That's up of Paul Darvasi, game designer, high school teacher in Toronto and PhD candidate at York University, where he studies the intersection of gaming and education. He's in Ottawa. Navid Khonsari is the founder of Ink Stories, a New York-based company behind 1979 Revolution. We reached him in Melbourne, Australia today. Could it be that videogames are the route to a more tolerant and understanding society? We have an empathy expert standing by with her thoughts. Mary Gordon is the founder and president of Roots of Empathy, which is an international organization that works in classrooms to increase empathy and decrease aggression and bullying. And Mary Gordon is in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

MARY GORDON: Good morning.

AMT: Well what do you think? Can an empathy game create a more empathetic person?

MARY GORDON: I think it can contribute to somebody who was already empathic. But generally speaking, what the games do is they help an individual take a different perspective and maybe take the perspective of whoever is in the video. And the thing about empathy, there are two aspects, there's a cognitive aspect, which is perspective taking, but there's also the affective part of empathy, in order to get to the action piece. And that's our emotions. And really, empathy is developed through what we call limbic resonance, meaning that's the centre of your feelings in your brain. So it's the feeling part of a person, connecting directly face to face experientially with another person. And that's why they say empathy develops in the first relationships in life. And so I think there was, particularly, Paul was sharing with us how perspective can be gained about all kinds of situations, historically and currently, situations. And I think that's a massive contribution to our overall knowledge. But I wouldn't say it's going to make us more empathic, it might make us more knowledgeable.

AMT: Can you just define empathy a little more closely? Because people mix up the words.

MARY GORDON: Sure. Empathy is the ability to understand how another person feels and to be able to feel with them.

AMT: OK. And the argument is that by having someone playing a game that they suddenly are put in the shoes of another person going through some kind of trauma or dilemma that has trauma in it for a moment and takes them out of themselves. Is that fleeting?

MARY GORDON: I think it is fleeting and I think it's fabulous, because it's much like literature. We are impacted by reading, but recently we hosted a session, Cameron Bailey was one of the people involved and Raymond Maher who does research in this area around literature, and we don't have a body of literature that says we are definitely made more empathic by reading. And as Paul was saying there is some indication to that. But I think this is a wonderful thing to be developing and I don't think you have to claim it makes us more empathic. I think it's validity is more in the case that it will make us more knowledgeable of the other. And I think this whole idea of empathy, we need to understand it is developed between people, not between a person and a screen, but between a person and a person.

AMT: And you mentioned childhood, that it really begins as children.

MARY GORDON: Very early childhood. If in the first two years of life a child isn’t treated empathically, it's very difficult for them to develop empathy. I mean, we create sociopaths in the first two years of life. So that initial nurturing relationship, where a child feels felt has huge impact on that child's capacity to have empathy for themselves and others. And I mean, the work we do, children spend a whole year, not just one show, but a whole year studying, finding the humanity in a tiny infant. What are that baby's emotional cues and what's the baby's perspective? What's the baby trying to do? And that of course then, that real experience is brought out to the children to reflect on how they feel, how the others feel. So it's a very good thing that's happening and it's interesting because UNESCO's just asked me to Galway, where they're having a conference in June on rediscovering empathy.

MARY GORDON: This is right in line, I guess, with the release of their games too then? It's in line, but it's the opposite, it's providing, the neuroscientists are coming and I’m coming with a research based program. So it's another aspect. There's never one answer to empathy.

AMT: So would you use an empathic videogame in your work in classrooms?

MARY GORDON: No.

AMT: You absolutely wouldn’t?

MARY GORDON: If I was a history teacher I would, if I have a social studies history I would, if I was a civics teacher I would. But I wouldn't waste their time when you can give them a real experience. And I think that's a lot to do with how we look at children's time. We learn best in relationship.

AMT: I was going to ask you, we live in a world now where a lot of kids in school in Canada are from war zones. They have parents or relatives who went through trauma, if they didn't go through it, who were tortured. A lot of children would have a relative, a parent, a sibling, somebody or themselves who have gone through cancer. Why is it so hard to find empathy? With those issues facing every day lives?

MARY GORDON: Well I think sometimes there's an overload, but if you have a personal experience with someone who has had a health challenge or for example, the Syrian refugee children right across Canada and the UK, we specifically work with these children in the classroom setting. And I can promise you there is nobody in the classroom or who teaches them who doesn't have empathy for what they've experienced.

AMT: OK. Thanks for coming in.

MARY GORDON: Pleasure.

AMT: Mary Gordon, founder and President of Roots of Empathy. In our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us we are @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent.The news is next. And then, on the hunt for the next Uber, Tinder or AirBnB, our project The Disruptors takes us to Silicon Valley with our producer Peter Mitton, looking at ways to disrupt the way we live. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Back To Top »

From 'Uber for kids' to the 2.0 burger: touring Silicon Valley startups

Guests: Peter Mitton

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, science writer Meredith Wadman joins me to talk about the race to develop the rubella vaccine. It's a fascinating, and at times, disturbing story full of interesting characters and intrigue, and it holds important lessons for the world today as the race to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus accelerates. That's in half an hour. But first, a road trip through the valley of disruption.

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

AMT: Well that is of course the theme for our project The Disruptors. We are looking at disruptive ideas from all over the world all season long. And today we are focusing on a particularly fertile valley, a place that is full of disruptive ideas. The Current’s producer Peter Mitton is with me in studio to explain. Hello Peter.

PETER MITTON: Hi Anna Maria.

[Sound: slurping]

AMT: I'm kind of curious [chuckles] because you brought a smoothie into the room. OK. I'm looking at it, avocado kale almond milk smoothie maybe?

PETER MITTON: You have a good eye Anna Maria. That's right. Avocado kale almond milk. And it might not be the most delicious smoothie I've ever had in my life but I've been assured that it's a very disruptive one.

AMT: OK. A smoothie is disruptive Peter?

PETER MITTON: Well it is where I just was, which is Silicon Valley in California.

AMT: OK. And Silicon Valley of course is more about software than smoothies.

PETER MITTON: You'd think. For decades it's been associated with big technology companies, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Google, Apple, all these tech companies have been headquartered in this area just south of San Francisco for decades.

AMT: And now the new players right? Uber, AirBnB.

PETER MITTON: Exactly. Which brings us to smoothies. And some of the other companies that I was checking out in the valley. Because if you think about it, companies like Uber, which brings you a car with the touch of an app or AirBnB, which can get you a room in somebody's house for the night have done a lot more than just disrupt industries like taxis and hotels, they've really disrupted the way we live.

AMT: Yeah, that's right. Because they may be technology companies at their core but they change the way we travel to new cities, they change the way we get around our own cities.

PETER MITTON: And then think of the dating app Tinder.

AMT: OK. Well that's a lifestyle disruptor. But again, what do they have to do with a smoothie?

PETER MITTON: Well for the past year, one of the most buzzed about companies in Silicon Valley has being a juicer.

AMT: A juicer.

PETER MITTON: A totally disruptive juicer. It's called the Juicero, and it's kind of similar to those Keurig coffee machines that take a preloaded pod.

AMT: So they've got a pod, but there's instead of a coffee what's in there?

PETER MITTON: You've got specialized prepackaged bags of fresh fruit and veggies for you to instantly juice at home, thereby disrupting the juicing industry.

AMT: Huh. OK, so how much for a disruptive juicer?

PETER MITTON: Well, it's debut price. And keep in mind this is a Wi-Fi enabled juicer, just over 900 Canadian dollars.

AMT: [laughs] Do people in Silicon Valley like their juice that much or are they just that rich?

PETER MITTON: Well, before the company was launched it had already raised more than 120 million American dollars in funding. It’s regularly at the top of the lists of the companies to watch in Silicon Valley, which suggests that either people there are juice crazy or that the Silicon Valley founders and investors are just desperate right now to hit on the next big idea that will disrupt the way we live and make everybody a few hundred million while they're at it.

AMT: Well, or maybe both huh? With a juicer. OK, so other than the Keurig of juicers, you must have found some other startups Peter?

[Sound: children playing]

PETER MITTON: Well my first stop wasn’t at one of the corporate campuses in Silicon Valley, but at a suburban public school in San Francisco just as class was letting in.

SOUNDCLIP

MARY MCMANAMON: Yeah I work. I'm a single parent and I work and I am able to work from home because I'm a programmer. But, you know, you shouldn't be begging out in the middle of the day to go pick your kid.

PETER MITTON: So this is Mary McManamon, school maybe letting out at three but that's still the middle of her day. And that's always meant having to make an excuse to get up from her desk and pick up her kid from school, which she patiently explained to me is quite a chore.

SOUNDCLIP

MARY MCMANAMON: [laughs] You don't have kids, it's like a third and fourth job getting your kids back and forth from school, and then making sure that you pick them up on time, and then also that you get all your work done, and that your management doesn't really know about this other part of your life. So yeah, it's the bane of every parent's existence. Whether they work or have a partner, backups, extended family, it's just the bane of our existence, so yeah, it's a pretty big deal. You'll find out. [laughs]

AMT: She's on to you Peter. [laughs]

PETER MITTON: [laughs] Yeah, she says I'll find out soon about this bane of her existence. It's definitely a sweet spot for disruption right now. And that's exactly what a new startup in the valley is doing. Some people are calling this company the Uber for kids.

AMT: The Uber for kids but she's not talking about having your kid picked up by a stranger in a strange car after school?

PETER MITTON: Well no, but yes.

SOUNDCLIP

MARY MCMANAMON: So this is Peter.

CHILD: Hi.

MARY MCMANAMON: He's from Canadian radio.

CHILD: OK. Hi.

MARY MCMANAMON: So where do you usually meet your Hop Skip and Drive drivers?

CHILD: Over there.

MARY MCMANAMON: On the corner?

CHILD: No, over there.

PETER MITTON: So that would be Aisling. She's 11-years-old and she's looking for her ride, which is supplied by a company called HopSkipDrive.

AMT: HopSkipDrive. Normally her mom Mary isn't around at this point?

PETER MITTON: That's right. Normally Aisling finds the car by herself after school. The cars have a sort of flag on the side identifying them. And just as we were standing there the car pulled up.

AMT: But how do the kids know it's safe to get in?

PETER MITTON: Well, every morning the kids and their parents get a picture of the driver that they’ll be meeting that day. And there's also a secret word.

SOUNDCLIP

MARY MCMANAMON: Alright, where is the Hop Skip and Drive?

AISLING: Right here.

MARY MCMANAMON: OK.

PETER MITTON: Hi, I'm Peter.

DRIVER: Hi Peter, I'm Autumn. Your password is Zian?

AISLING: Yeah, Zhen.

DRIVER: Zhen?

AISLING: Yeah.

DRIVER: OK. Perfect, so I'm going to confirm that you're in and you want to pop in the car now?

AISLING: Yeah.

DRIVER: Perfect.

MARY MCMANAMON: Alright, Aisling, see you later.

AISLING: OK, bye.

PETER MITTON: See you.

AMT: Now that's a moment I think a lot of parents can't imagine, sending their 11-year-old off with a stranger.

PETER MITTON: And Mary said it took them a while to get used to it. But every time Aisling gets in the car or arrives at her destination, Mary gets a notification on her phone to let her know that everything's gone OK.

AMT: And where is Aisling off to?

PETER MITTON: Today she was off to some after school math and Mandarin tutoring. I rode along.

SOUNDCLIP

DRIVER: How was your day at school?

AISLING: It was good. How was your day?

DRIVER: It was really good, thanks for asking.

AISLING: No problem.

PETER MITTON: So an Uber for kids might be hard for parents to imagine, but Aisling’s been using it for a while and she was totally unfazed.

SOUNDCLIP

AISLING: I really like it. It's really helpful. And especially for my mom because she works a lot. And I like it cause it's really easy.

PETER MITTON: And Aisling says she'd take a HopSkipDrive over an Uber any day.

SOUNDCLIP

AISLING: Because Uber can be kind of sketchy sometimes. [chuckles] I mean, not hating on Uber but, yeah, I don’t know how to explain it, I just, like, this would be better for kids.

PETER MITTON: Clearly.

AISLING: Yeah. [chuckles]

AMT: She's 11 right? She sounds so mature there. Tell me a bit more about how the company makes sure these kids are safe?

PETER MITTON: Sure. I'll let Autumn explain.

SOUNDCLIP

DRIVER: I'm Autumn, [chuckles] I'm Autumn Steele, I work for HopSkipDrive on the administrative platform as well as on the driver platform.

PETER MITTON: And by on the driver platform, you mean you drive?

DRIVER: Yes. [chuckles] I pick up and drop off. I'm monitored, from about an hour before my ride I check in to let the office know that I am available for this ride, and then once i pick up this child I am very closely monitored from the time I pick them up, until the time I drop them off.

PETER MITTON: What do you mean by monitored?

DRIVER: There's a screen that they watch, in Los Angeles in our headquarters to see where I'm going in my ride, and sometimes when you go off the gps they''ll call you and say hey, I don't see you, what's your eta, so you definitely know that they're watching.

PETER MITTON: And it's not just the big board watching them in Los Angeles. These drivers all have thorough background checks and the company only takes drivers who have lots of experience working with kids or who are parents themselves.

AMT: So would Autumn use the service with her own family?

PETER MITTON: I asked her.

SOUNDCLIP

DRIVER: My daughter drives for HopSkipDrive. And my granddaughter uses the service. [chuckles] Yes.

AMT: So that sounds like it's catching on.

PETER MITTON: Yeah. Mary says she uses it a couple of times a week even at 20 dollars per ride. In fact, she says she would use it more but the company can't keep up with demand and supply drivers all the time right now. And even though it's only operated in California at the moment, it raised 10 million American in funding last year. So it's definitely catching on with some families like Mary and Aisling.

SOUNDCLIP

DRIVER: So I hope you enjoyed your ride.

[Sound: car blinker]

AISLING: Thank you.

DRIVER: You're welcome.

AISLING: Bye.

DRIVER: Bye. She pops out on that side. Bye.

AISLING: Have a good day.

DRIVER: You too.

[Sound: car door sound]

PETER MITTON: And just so you know, Autumn stuck around and made sure Aisling got into her tutor's building OK. And then dutifully sent Mary a notification on her phone to let her know that everything had gone OK.

AMT: Hm. Interesting eh. The Uber for kids, that is definitely disruptive Peter. If you're a parent who's comfortable with it it would be interesting to hear from our listeners on this one. Now, what else did you find in Silicon Valley?

PETER MITTON: So the city of Mountain View is probably best known as the home to Google's global headquarters. But if you take a turn down a little side street and pull into the parking lot of a company called Knightscope, this is what you'll hear.

[Music: electronic robot sounds]

PETER MITTON: So that's a sound being made by a robot that looks an awful lot like R2-D2 from Star Wars, the sort of dome headed drone and there are three of these machines just tooling around the parking lot. Stacey Stevens is the company's founder and he explained to me what we were looking at.

SOUNDCLIP

STACEY STEVENS: This is the Knightscope K5, this is our outdoor version of the robot. So we have two different versions, the outdoor and the indoor. But basically, we call it an autonomous data machine, which means it's a security robot, it's a fancy way of saying that.

[Sound: cell phone ringing]

STACEY STEVENS: Oops, apologies.

PETER MITTON: So while Stacy took his call I decided to try to engage with the security robots to see what they had up their sleeves.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: electronic robot]

ROBOT: Good morning. Good day to you. Please step away from the machine, your actions are being recorded for your safety. Seriously, I said step away from the machine. The authorities have been notified of your presence.

PETER MITTON: That's as much as we escalate?

STACEY STEVENS: At this point.

AMT: [chuckles] Please step away from the machine? So you were advancing toward this little robot?

PETER MITTON: Just sort of bothering it a little bit to see what it would do.

AMT: And it tells you just step away. Didn't sound very menacing.

PETER MITTON: And that's kind of the point, Stacey says it's not going to taze anybody at this point. It's more about recording what's going on around a property and then alerting human security guards to any suspicious activity. Although that alone could replace quite a few security guard jobs.

AMT: So are security robots catching on?

PETER MITTON: Well he says that his machines are being used on a number of corporate campuses in the valley including Microsoft's. They're also being used in some shopping mall parking lots in Silicon Valley. And his isn't the only company trying to disrupt the security guard sector with robots. There's even another that's doing it with flying drones. But that said, there is a more warm and fuzzy side to robotics in Silicon Valley right now.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Hello.

THELMA ACKLEY: Hello hello hello, come in.

PETER MITTON: Thank you

THELMA ACKLEY: Come in.

AMT: Is that another Silicon Valley founder you found?

PETER MITTON: Even better. This is Thelma Ackley. And she's been in Silicon Valley for quite a bit longer than any of the startups there today.

SOUNDCLIP

THELMA ACKLEY: I moved here before it was Silicon Valley. [chuckles]

PETER MITTON: Yeah, no kidding, eh?

THELMA ACKLEY: December of ‘59.

PETER MITTON: Oh wow, wow, you've seen some changes.

THELMA ACKLEY: Apricot trees. Our street, the bottom half, was all an orchard. And now it's all houses.

PETER MITTON: So we're at a nursing home here in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. Thelma lives here with a very interesting roommate who had come to meet. But I didn't get to meet him before checking out some of Thelma’s impressive display of hand-painted china plates.

SOUNDCLIP

THELMA ACKLEY: And this is what I do, oh my butterflies.

[Sound: china cabinet clanking]

THELMA ACKLEY: This is my latest, my latest butterflies, and this is a 12 inch plate, and I've painted another one but it's in the kiln right now, it will be fired tonight.

AMT: So she sounds impressive but who's the roommate?

PETER MITTON: Well it turns out that it doesn't really have a name.

SOUNDCLIP

THELMA ACKLEY: I don't know. I haven't, I call it 'it' right now, I think it is rather unique and my family, my grandkids, I have six grandchildren, they're adults, and they really love calling me on it.

PETER MITTON: So it is a robot that lives in the apartment with her. It has a tablet computer as its face and family members sort of Skype in on that tablet. It doesn't just stand in the corner either. It zooms around the apartment day and night.

AMT: Wow that sounds like something I've seen in a movie once.

SOUNDCLIP

THELMA ACKLEY: It's tall and skinny, which I wish, not tall, it's my height, and I'm five feet. So it’s perfect for it to look at me. It's very thin. And it's on a base that has three wheels. And it runs around by itself by the person out there who is moving it with their computer.

AMT: So somebody else is controlling it Peter?

PETER MITTON: Yeah. So Thelma's children and grandchildren can sort of dial into the robot whenever they want. So their face appears on the tablet screen just like a video Skype call and they can look out. So they use it to walk around the apartment, have a visit with Thelma, check on her, see what's going on in the apartment, make sure she's alright. Although I should note that Thelma can turn it off whenever she wants.

AMT: I was going to ask you, OK. [chuckles]

SOUNDCLIP

ROBOT: At gmail.com is connecting.

PETER MITTON: But she had it on then and her grandson Evan dialed in.

SOUNDCLIP

EVAN: Hello?

THELMA ACKLEY: Hi, I didn't get your name.

PETER MITTON: Peter.

THELMA ACKLEY: Peter. Peter is here Evan. This is Peter.

EVAN: Hey Peter, nice to meet you, I'm Evan.

PETER MITTON: Hey, nice to meet you Evan, how’s it going?

EVAN: Good.

PETER MITTON: So just like that, Evan’s face is on the screen, he's looking around and he's moving the robot around the apartment to see what's going on.

AMT: That's remarkable.

PETER MITTON: Yeah. Evan says he really likes having the robot to check on his grandma, or bama as he calls her, whenever he wants.

SOUNDCLIP

EVAN: Well, as you probably noticed since you were a bit late, there's a lot of traffic around here.

PETER MITTON: Absolutely.

EVAN: And it makes it a lot easier than driving down there, I can hop on here and spend time with her, literally. Sometimes I call when there's a close Giants game on, and I'll sit right there next to her, and watch the game with her.

AMT: Oh that's really nice.

PETER MITTON: Yeah. He does admit to there being at least one downside though.

SOUNDCLIP

EVAN: One downside of this is we don't come over there and take a walk with you, right?

THELMA ACKLEY: I know, they used to come and walk with me. I lived by, up near the mountains, but my husband died last year, so I do not like living alone, I do not like eating alone, and after 64 years of cooking, I was pretty darn tired of it. So now i don't have to cook any more. [chuckles] I was a pretty good cook, was I not?

EVAN: You were good, you cooked a really good, a mashed potatoes bama.

PETER MITTON: There's only one real answer to that question.

THELMA ACKLEY: [laughs] Right, especially with me standing here.

PETER MITTON: So can you believe it. Anna Maria, Thelma is 89-years-old.

AMT: She's pretty tech savvy.

PETER MITTON: Absolutely. She uses all the gadgets. And she says the robot is her favourite for keeping in touch.

SOUNDCLIP

THELMA ACKLEY: I like it even better than Skype and Facetime because it's like they're in a body here with me. [laughs]

PETER MITTON: It's a presence?

THELMA ACKLEY: Right.

PETER MITTON: So the robot is made by a company called Ohmni Labs and they say that they're out to disrupt the elder care sector.

AMT: Wow. So from picking up kids after school to looking after grandma in a nursing home, these are definitely lifestyle disruptors Peter.

PETER MITTON: And I want to tell you about one more company and I stopped at in Silicon Valley that's being touted as a major lifestyle disruptor. So this is a company that's raised well over 100 million in funding. Google has attempted to purchase the company for 300 million but they said that they weren't selling. The beauty of this company is that it doesn't have an app, they don't involve software or silicon at all. Instead their product is a little meatier.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: sizzle]

SCIENTIST: So as I said before, one of the really key things about meat is the transitions. So you can see the red colour, you can hear the sizzle that are taking place with the fat leaking, and what you'll see soon is a brown colouration taking place and with that brown colouration and the change of colour of heme from red to brown, is an indication of all aroma compounds being generated.

AMT: OK, it sounds like you're at a burger joint.

PETER MITTON: Yes. Sort of no and yes. I'm at the headquarters of a company called Impossible Foods. This is in Redwood City, California. And they're showing off their supposedly disruptive burger to a gaggle of journalists from all over the world. I was there with people from South Korea, France, Germany, all over the states. There's a lot of interest in their product which looks like a burger, tastes like a burger, smells like a burger, even sounds like a burger, but it's made completely out of vegetable matter.

AMT: So it's a veggie burger?

PETER MITTON: Yeah and no, we're in Silicon Valley.

AMT: [laughs]

PETER MITTON: So nothing's exactly that simple. The idea at Impossible is that beef is delicious but cows are a very inefficient way of making beef. So they've set out to disrupt cows and disrupt beef production as we know it. They say they've deconstructed every element of beef that we love and recreated it with things like potato, protein, and coconut oil, which are more nutritious but have just a fraction of the environmental impact that cattle farming does.

AMT: Yeah, but come on it's still a veggie burger.

PETER MITTON: Yeah, I know what you're saying. After a tour of the lab though and hearing from their scientists, I did kind of find myself drinking their Kool-Aid or maybe I should say drinking the heme.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Could I try the heme?

SCIENTIST: Of course, so take a spoon.

PETER MITTON: I'm just going to smell it

SCIENTIST: Mmhmm.

AMT: What is heme?

PETER MITTON: Heme is sort of their killer app. It's made by fermenting part of the soya plant and it's essentially their version of blood.

AMT: So the veggie burger bleeds?

PETER MITTON: Yeah, that's part of the allure. And on its own heme does taste a lot like blood.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MITTON: Mhm. Yeah, it's almost like a primal reaction to tasting that. It is like a little bit of shot of blood, as you said, like, if you've been punched in the nose or have a bloody gum or something like that, it's very familiar and foreign on the palate at the same time.

SCIENTIST: Yes. So that is what the heme tastes like in its raw form, and one of the key aspects though is what happens upon cooking and that's when all of those aromas get generated upon cooking.

AMT: Oh OK but, because I don't really want to taste blood in my burger. But what about this burger itself then?

PETER MITTON: I did try the final product and I must say I love a good burger. This was pretty delicious. I don't think it would have fooled me in a blind taste test. But they say that as they refine their technique it's getting better and better all the time.

AMT: And what about the texture of it, was it, did it taste like a burger? Like, did it feel like a burger?

PETER MITTON: It did feel, it chewed like a burger, it smelled like a burger.

AMT: [laughs]

PETER MITTON: But there was a certain je ne sais quoi that they're still not quite nailing.

AMT: OK. And you're telling me that this is one of the most anticipated disruptors in Silicon Valley right now?

PETER MITTON: Yeah. Believe it or not, a burger is one of the things that people in Silicon Valley are most excited about right now. And I should say, it's already on the menu of some restaurants in San Francisco, in LA. And I suspect there's going to be a big market for this. They do deliver a very meaty experience but they do away with what some consumers might consider to be the more unpalatable aspects of beef production.

AMT: Mm. What does it say about the mindset in Silicon Valley right now that companies there are focusing on burgers, eldercare and picking up the kids after school?

PETER MITTON: Well I do think it reflects the fact that over the past few years as consumers, we've gotten so used to major disruptions coming from every direction. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that something like Uber or AirBnB would have seemed completely foreign and now lots of us use these apps like second nature. I think venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley sense that we're all more open to disruptive ideas that will change the way we live.

AMT: And maybe they have kids they have to pick up too. But like, let's go back to this because the 900 dollar Wi-Fi enabled juicer. What?

PETER MITTON: Yeah. At the same time, obviously Silicon Valley is its own bubble. It’s hard to imagine the 900 juicer showing up in every kitchen in Peoria, Illinois or Peterborough, Ontario. Although I should say that last fall Juicero did shake up its corporate structure and bring in a new CEO who's vowed to slash the price to 399 dollars.

AMT: Oh well gee, OK. And then the fruit and veggie pods?

PETER MITTON: Those are still 7 dollars a pop.

AMT: OK. I don’t see that disrupting my lifestyle, can I just say. Still Peter, the number involved with all these companies are astonishing.

PETER MITTON: That's right. And of course, I only stopped in at a handful of the more colourful startups there, but there are corporate campuses everywhere in Silicon Valley, miles and miles of them along the highway. And all the money pouring into this area is having a major disruptive effect on the city and their backyard.

AMT: Well that city would be San Francisco right?

PETER MITTON: Exactly. There's so much big money flowing into this area right now, it's making it hard for anyone who doesn't work in tech to live in San Francisco.

AMT: Well in fact, we're going to hear from you on that tomorrow. You have a documentary for us on that very issue.

PETER MITTON: That's right. It's called Disruption City and that's on the show tomorrow.

AMT: OK, well, I'll listen to that. And no smoothies right? Just straight up city talking.

[Sound: slurping]

PETER MITTON: Ah. The smoothie’s done.

AMT: OK. Peter Mitton, thank you.

PETER MITTON: Thanks Anna Maria. Peter Mitton is a producer at The Current. The smoothie was extra. Here's a look ahead at tomorrow's documentary Disruption City. This is part of Peter's conversation with San Francisco city supervisor Aaron Peskin on the future of his city.

SOUNDCLIP

AARON PESKIN: The reality is if San Francisco keeps going in the direction that it's going, it is going to become an extremely wealthy, predominantly Caucasian centre, and it will be one of the, it'll still be a beautiful city, it will still be surrounded by water on three sides and it will still have, you know, beautiful topography. And if the developers don't wipe out the great historic resources and Victorian houses, it will still be architecturally beautiful. But what makes the town so great are the people who are sitting at that next table. She is a poet, he is an artist. So my job, even though it may over time be a losing battle, is to make sure that San Francisco stays true to that vision. But it may be a losing battle.

AMT: That is San Francisco's city supervisor Aaron Peskin. You can hear Peter Mitton's documentary Disruption City tomorrow on The Current. Let us know what you think of what he's just talked about and the disruptors that are coming out of Silicon Valley that he highlighted. You can tweet us, we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on contact. While you're there, you can also see what other disruptors we have been offering up this season, cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: And in our next half hour, another disruptor. We're exploring the surprising history of the race to develop the rubella vaccine. From stolen cells to testing on orphans. That's right, they used to test the vaccines on orphans. And how that history plays into the fight against the Zika virus. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current.

Back To Top »

What rubella vaccine can teach us about fighting Zika virus

Guests: Meredith Wadman

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

The federal government has just released a new vaccine for production in Canada that may eventually eliminate one of our most common childhood diseases, rubella, better known as German measles. It's a disease that affects an estimated 400,000 Canadian children every year.

AMT: In May of 1970, the CBC television program Weekday devoted a full segment to the newest vaccine to hit the market. rubella, or German measles as it is also known, is not a terribly serious disease when it strikes children but for pregnant women, rubella can seriously damage the development of the fetus. From that same program, here is a Canadian woman who contracted rubella in a 1964 outbreak and then found out a few months later that she was pregnant.

SOUNDCLIP

Having been told that the possible chances of any possible defects was only 25 per cent, I didn't feel too much concern about it. And so when she was born, the doctor said that as far he could see she was an almost normal baby. She had a slightly underdeveloped right eye and a slight heart murmur. We took her to a pediatrician and discovered that the heart murmur was a valve that should have closed immediately upon birth and hadn't. About a year, I guess, before we discovered that she was deaf. Didn’t pay attention to anybody. And with three other children and a dog, there’s a lot of activity and she just wasn’t paying any attention to it.

AMT: Canada was not tracking cases at the time. We do know that the 1964 outbreak affected more than 20 million people in the US. And the race to find a disruptor, a vaccine that would put an end to rubella outbreaks, became all the more urgent. As part of our project the disruptors, we're exploring the story behind the development of that vaccine, because of the lessons that are learned behind it, they are seen as key to challenges facing global health today. Meredith Wadman is the author of a new book called The Vaccine Race, it tells the story of the people and the cells behind the rubella vaccine. Meredith Wadman is a reporter with Science. She also has a medical degree from Oxford. And she's a Canadian. She joins me from Washington DC. Hello.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Hi, It's a pleasure to be with you.

AMT: Tell us more about that rubella outbreak. When we say 20,000 babies were affected, what happened to them?

MEREDITH WADMAN: You know, it has not gotten the attention that it, I believe, deserves. These children were born blind, deaf, intellectually disabled, with shrunken heads like we see now in the Zika babies, with multiple different kinds of heart defects and often with a combination of these conditions. And there was no vaccine and it was a really scary time to be a woman of childbearing age.

AMT: And so the woman who we just heard describing how they sort of over time realized there are these problems that their little girl is facing, that was many families would have faced the same thing?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Oh yes, and it was interesting to hear her say she'd been told there was only 25 per cent chance that her fetus would be affected, because honestly, in the first trimester of pregnancy, there were periods where there was a virtually 100 per cent chance that your fetus would be damaged. Rubella is just devastating to fetus, as it invades virtually every fetal organ and fetuses in the first trimester are exquisitely sensitive to its damage.

AMT: How dangerous is the disease for an otherwise healthy person who gets it?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Oh it's not. I mean, kids, well, kids primarily got it back in the day, but also adults could get it. And you might spike a fever, you might have a few swollen lymph nodes, you might have a rash, but up to two thirds of people who were infected didn't even know they had it. They didn't show signs or symptoms. And so pregnant women couldn't even stay away from infected people effectively.

AMT: At this time, a scientist by the name of Leonard Hayflick was doing cell research. What was he doing?

MEREDITH WADMAN: He was based at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, which is this elegant brownstone 1890s building tucked away on the University of Pennsylvania campus. And he was a very determined young, up by the bootstraps, working class Philadelphian who really wanted to make his mark. And what had happened in 1961 was that it had become public knowledge that the monkey kidney cells in which both the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines were developed were subject to infection with silent monkey viruses that could not be detected. In fact, these silent viruses had been known and recognized since the early fifties, but in ‘61 it became known that one of them SV40 it was called, caused lethal tumors in the laboratory hamsters. And the jury was either on whether these tens of millions of polio vaccinated kids, who had received the vaccine since 1955 were going to be subject to damage. And so the hunt was on in Hayflick’s mind for a clean, safe source of cells in which to make vaccines against viruses. Because viruses have to be grown in cells, they don't multiply outside of them. And so Hayflick turned to the cleanest source of cells he could think of. And that was fetal tissue from abortions carried out across the street at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Fetuses are relatively protected in the womb when the mom's not infected with rubella or a handful of other viruses that can get through the placenta. And so this was in his mind, a clean, safe source of cells. And he developed a group of cells from one fetus legally aborted in 1962, that went on to become the, essentially, the mini vaccine factories that to this day produce the rubella vaccine that is the R in Merck's MMR vaccine that's given to toddlers.

AMT: Mm. And so where did he get the actual cells?

MEREDITH WADMAN: After a while, he was not having a terribly productive working relationship with the surgeons at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and he turned, through his boss, who was a famous vaccine pioneer, to a legally available source of cells or fetal material in fact, which was the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. And so in 1962, a woman named Mrs. X, who I have called her that to protect her anonymity, who was married to a not particularly helpful husband who had several small children already underfoot, obtained a legal abortion in Sweden. Without her knowledge or consent that a fetus was taken, dissected at the Karolinska Institute and its lungs were shipped to Leonard Hayflick in Philadelphia. And that is where he derived these clean, safe cells that became widely used in making antiviral vaccines.

AMT: So how were they used specifically to develop the vaccine for rubella?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Hayflick had a colleague equally young and ambitious at the Wistar Institute by the name of Stanley Plotkin. And Stan Plotkin had been doing his pediatric residency in London at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in 1962. And the rubella epidemic came to England one year earlier than it reached North America. So Plotkin, working on the wards, had seen the damage that was happening to these babies and he returned to the Wistar at the end of his residency determined to make a vaccine for rubella. Well, down the hall, Hayflick had just derived these cells called WI38, named after the Wistar Institute, from Mrs. X's fetus. And so Hayflick handed Plotkin some of the cells, and Plotkin then obtained an aborted fetus from a woman in 1964, who chose to abort because she was infected with rubella in early pregnancy. And from her fetus, he captured the virus then he then weakened by growing in through generations in these lab dish cells that Hayflick had provided.

AMT: So he's working on this, he's weakening the virus in order to use it as a vaccine.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Correct.

AMT: And how does he test it?

MEREDITH WADMAN: So he turned to the most obvious source at hand of eligible subjects, shall we say. And I need to preface this by saying that he was not an outlier. This was common practice in the day that doctors and researchers went to institutionalized children. Often they were mentally disabled, in the case of Plotkin, they were orphans at a Catholic orphanage owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He received permission from Archbishop John Joseph Crowell to test his new vaccine on one and two year old toddlers in southwest Philadelphia at the orphanage, which was called the St. Vincent's Home for Children. And that's where he first put the vaccine virus into children and it wasn't weakened enough in the first instance. And many of his test subjects, tiny test subjects did get rubella in the first go round before he went back to the lab and weakened the virus more so that it would immunize people without causing the disease outright.

AMT: We have to go back to the idea that he was using orphans. This is the sixties that they were doing this.

MEREDITH WADMAN: It is, and it grew out of actually a World War II mentality, when the idea was soldiers are getting all these diseases at the front, we need to do everything and pull out the stops, the ends justify the means to get medicines and vaccines to these men who are in the process of trying to save us from Hitler. And that's when this began to happen. But as the war ended, the mentality did not. There was a sense of medical entitlement to institutionalized populations. These also included prisoners, and in one case premature infants in another hospital in Philadelphia. It was virtually everywhere and it was done by the likes of people like Jonas Salk. It was not just bad apples by any means, and it was backed by major medical institutions and the National Institutes of Health who funded many of these trials.

AMT: And you talked about prisons, so the children born of women in prison were also used?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Yes, there was a particular women's prison in New Jersey called Clinton State Farms that was a very sort of liberal, cutting edge institution where the young women inmates were given plenty of freedom and could go out into the community and work as domestics and so on. And the theory goes, although it's a bit apocryphal, that they also took the chance to have trysts with truck drivers on the nearby highway. Whatever the reason, there were about 60 infants born per year at Clinton State Farms and those infants too were tested with polio vaccine, that was in the late 1950s.

AMT: When did that kind of testing end?

MEREDITH WADMAN: In 1966, an anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School named Henry Beecher published a pivotal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that essentially said the emperor has no clothes. He listed 20 studies and said there were many more that abused all kinds of different people without their knowledge or consent. Mostly in fact, virtually always powerless individuals. And within a month of that paper's publication, the National Institutes of Health had put in place a new policy that required informed consent for subjects in research trials, and that required ethics committees that were separate from the researchers to sign off on the construction and how those trials were developed and conducted.

AMT: Well, we talk about the development of this vaccine, there was politics that got in the way. Tell us a little bit about that.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Well, Stan Plotkin was an independent academic scientist working at the Wistar Institute. He was in a sense, David to the Goliaths who were the several drug companies that were also racing to develop a rubella vaccine. Because it became very clear in 1964 that there was going to be a rubella vaccine just as quickly as people could get one made. Because epidemics came around every six or seven years, you could look back at the historical tables and see that. And so now the clock was ticking toward 1970 and the race was on to get a vaccine by then. And Plotkin, in that race, because he was independent, because he did not have a big company behind him and because one particular regulator in the US government was opposed to the use of the fetal cells for vaccine making, essentially was sidelined. And although his vaccine proved in the end to be safer and more effective than the others, it would not end up being approved until 1979 by the US government.

AMT: And in the meantime what was happening with rubella then?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Well, three vaccines were introduced in 1969 in the States, and I believe it was 1970 in Canada, and one of them was withdrawn almost within weeks or months because the side effects it produced were really terrible. The other two went ahead and they were used, and they were certainly effective to a degree, although not as effective as the one that Plotkin introduced in 1979.

AMT: And I guess we should point out, the use of those cells from an aborted fetus, that the use of human cells allowed the ongoing proliferation of these cells, that you could not have done by just growing them in a dish.

MEREDITH WADMAN: The human cells actually were normal and not cancerous, which was a departure in 1962 when Hayflick derived them. Until then, virtually all cells grown in the lab seemed to turn cancerous with time. Hayflick’s human fetal cells did not. Therefore they were not scary to vaccine makers from the point of view of oh, if these cells turn cancerous will people that are vaccinated get cancer? So they were extremely valuable from that point of view. However, part of being not cancerous means that you eventually die. And so these cells would die after about 50 divisions. But when you do the math and when you realize Hayflick created 800 tiny vials of these cells, each with two or three million cells and each cell on average capable of dividing 50 times, you realize that for practical purposes, those cells, the supply of those cells is virtually infinite. Particularly because if you freeze them after, say, 10 divisions and thaw them 10 or 20 or 30 years later, they pick up right where they left off.

AMT: What other vaccines did that work lead to?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Gosh well, it led to an adenovirus vaccine, that's not a household term but it's a real problem in military barracks where people live in close quarters that causes respiratory infections that are really expensive for the military. And so since 1970, every new trainee in a US boot camp has been vaccinated against adenovirus with a vaccine made using these cells. It was also used to develop a much safer, much more effective rabies vaccine which was a big problem in the mid-sixties in the United States.

AMT: The cells are still being used today.

MEREDITH WADMAN: They are, they are on ice or in liquid nitrogen actually at this Merck’s facility northwest of Pennsylvania. And every year, a number of them are thawed and put to work making the rubella vaccine for the upcoming year.

AMT: But they ended up in the subject of a battle over ownership, what happened?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Oh, this is just the most amazing story, you can't make this up. Hayflick was very possessive of the cells, he felt, in fact at one point he described them as quote, “like my children”, unquote. And he had a boss who was larger than life, brilliant virologist named Hilary Koprowski, who ran the Wistar Institute and had transformed it from this essentially dying relic of 19th century American medicine into a crossroads of international research in the 1960s. But Koprowski didn't like fundraising, it was a bane and he was constantly feeling the squeeze of the financial pressures of keeping money coming into his institution. Well, Len Hayflick’s cells, because they were valuable to vaccine companies, presented a nice method of making that money. And Hayflick in 1968, was shown by Plotkin a letter in which Hilary Koprowski was writing to Burroughs Wellcome in London saying hey, we'll provide you these cells along with Plotkin's recipe for making the rubella vaccine, in exchange for, you know, a tidy sum of money. He was opening a negotiation in essence. Well Hayflick was in the process of moving on to a new job at Stanford and when he saw that letter, he had long been treated as sort of a second class citizen by Koprowski, he'd been out the Wistar for ten years and was getting ready to leave and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. He had developed the cells with US government funding and the small print of that contract said, at the end of this contract he will turn these cells back over to the government, title will go to the government. Well, he had been instructed to turn them over as he got ready to leave for Stanford. And when he saw this letter he said over my dead body. And when no one was looking, he went to the basement of the Wistar to the liquid nitrogen freezers, took all the cells, packed them in a portable freezer, and eventually in June, strapped that freezer into the back of a four door family Buick Lesabre, alongside two of his kids and off they sped to California via the Grand Canyon with the cells in tow.

AMT: Wow. So did they end up in a court battle?

MEREDITH WADMAN: They did. In 1975, the NIH investigated Hayflick and in fact even called in the criminal justice system to see if he had in fact committed a crime. And Hayflick in return sued the agency for invasion of privacy and for ownership of the cells. And a long court battle ensued, which was eventually settled out of court, allowing Hayflick to keep, I believe it was six or eight ampoules of the cells, with the rest reverting to the NIH.

AMT: It hurt his career though huh?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Oh it hurt it badly. When the NIH began investigating him, he resigned from Stanford under pressure and was sort of in the wilderness for a number of years, before really, his name being restored as an eminent scientist of aging research. Because these cells were also extremely valuable to aging scientists who wanted to study how normal cells aged in lab dishes. That ended up in effect sort of laying the groundwork for the Nobel Prize that was awarded in 2009 for the discovery of telomeres and telomerase.

AMT: It’s so interesting huh, the ripple effects of one man's idea.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Yes.

AMT: And as he follows through. You mentioned you tracked down, you call her Mrs. X, the woman whose fetus was used to come up with this important cell line.

MEREDITH WADMAN: I did track her down. She was still living in Sweden in 2013 and through my Swedish translator she made it very clear that she didn't want to go back there and tell her story of what happened. She had become aware that her fetus had been taken several months after the abortion, because as Hayflick created these 800 ampoules of WI38 cells, the cells from her fetus's lungs, he realized that US regulators and others would want to be absolutely sure that Mrs. X had a clean bill of health. So a young mannerly Swedish physician and epidemiologist named Margareta [unintelligible] was sent back from the Karolinska Institute to ascertain from Mrs. X’s doctor and nurse that in fact she did have that clean bill of health. And at that point, Mrs. X became aware that her fetus had been taken without her consent. And it was clear in what she told my translator in 2013 that she was really angry about what had happened and she said they did this without my knowledge, that would never be allowed today.

AMT: And of course, there have been billions of dollars made because of the cells of that fetus.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Yes, and particular for Merck, which makes I believe it's 1.5 billion dollars on its MMR vaccine, which contains the rubella vaccine that is to this day made using the cells, makes about that much every year.

AMT: Is it possible to compensate people whose tissue has been used in this way?

MEREDITH WADMAN: It's possible but it's not something that companies or others do voluntarily. Even the very famous Henrietta Lacks family of Rebecca Skloot’s excellent book from 2010 The Immortal of Henrietta Lacks, have not received a penny for, you know, their mother's contribution, unwitting as it was, to an enormously valuable cell line that's used in research ubiquitously.

AMT: So if we look at today, vaccine development is no less political. How does the story of the rubella vaccine in the sixties relate to what we're seeing in the fight against diseases such as the Zika virus?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Zika’s a really good case in point. In February, a year ago, 2016, President Obama asked Congress for 1.9 billion dollars to hasten the development of a Zika vaccine as it became very clear the damage this was doing, particularly in northeastern Brazil but also, really, in the Western Hemisphere. And Congress stalled and delayed and the whole bill got shut down for eight, nine months because Republicans attached a rider defunding Planned Parenthood because it provides some abortions, only about 3 per cent of its work as abortions but nevermind. And none of that can be funded by the US government. But let's not go down that road. The point is it got hung up in politicking and in the nine months that Congress delayed 1,500 babies were born with Zika. And just last month, we learned that the World Health Organization now says it will be 2020 at the earliest before a Zika vaccine that is safe for women of childbearing age is developed and available.

AMT: And why does it take that long? Is it the testing, what is it?

MEREDITH WADMAN: It's a long road to any vaccine, but there's lab work that has to be followed by safety work in animals, that then has to go into a small number of healthy human volunteers. If it passes safety muster in those volunteers and you have to also, you know, wait and give it time once they've received the vaccine to make sure that there's not longer term effects, then you go into a larger group, tens or hundreds of volunteers, to check for effectiveness, is it generating antibodies? And then you go into a larger group still to taste test for safety and effectiveness. So these things do not happen overnight.

AMT: I want to play a piece of tape of Donald Trump, now president of course, speaking back when Congress was holding up the funding for Zika with President Obama.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Well for one thing I would let some of the funds that they're asking for come in. You're very lucky--

REPORTER: You would ask Congress to do that?

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, I would absolutely and I would, and they're fighting for it and hopefully that's going to be approved very soon.

AMT: So that was before he was president, how hopeful are you that politics and science can be separated under his new administration?

MEREDITH WADMAN: Well I hold out hope based on what he said to the Miami Herald there last August. I was really encouraged by that and I think he's a pragmatic man and I think that he is open to important vaccine development. What is needed is a fund that can be called on in emergencies like Zika that is insulated from the day to day politicking on Capitol Hill.

AMT: And meanwhile there is a movement of people against vaccinations. Why do you think that is happening?

MEREDITH WADMAN: I think to a large extent vaccines have been a victim of their own success. We don't see the diseases that they protect against and so complacency can set in. You don't see a child in an iron lung with polio, you don't lose a toddler to diphtheria, you don't see a two-year-old with measles succumb because the virus has invaded his or her lungs and caused pneumonia or the brain and cause encephalitis. So we need to recover these stories from the bad old days in order to resist that complacency. By the way, I'd like to say that the resistance is in a small vocal minority. There are a large number on both sides of the border of people who believe in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and who do vaccinate their children.

AMT: And does that vocal minority affect the development of vaccines now?

MEREDITH WADMAN: I don't think so much the development but the uptake, which is a different matter. You've got to keep vaccination rates above 90 per cent. You know, you are playing with fire in terms of almost inviting viruses into your community if you fall below that level and depending on the disease it needs to be higher. Measles is wildly contagious and so you saw that outbreak in the Chilliwack area of the Fraser Valley in 2014. And I'm sort of distressed to see that the Fraser Health Region vaccination rates fall short of ideal at 62 per cent in August of 2015.

AMT: We've also seen outbreaks of whooping cough in the last several years.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Yes.

AMT: And right now in Canada there are outbreaks of mumps.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Yes, including in the NHL, I noticed the Vancouver Canucks of my hometown. Yeah. Whooping cough is a deadly business. Back at its height in the 1930s, it infected 265,000 Americans every year and killed 7,500 and let me tell you the lion's share of those were small children.

AMT: What do you see as the next big challenge for the people who are developing new vaccines?

MEREDITH WADMAN: I think it's to keep pharmaceutical companies incented to make them because many of the vaccines that are now in most desperate need are really for diseases of poverty that are largely in the global South and that aren't on the radar screen of, you know, companies that are answering to shareholders. And so something like this new fund that's just been launched by Norway and the Gates Foundation and some other donors to speed development of three of these vaccines that are really needed is a really good sign and I hope we end up seeing more of it.

AMT: Meredith Wadman, thank you for your work. It's been really interesting to hear how you've gone back and taken a really good look at this.

MEREDITH WADMAN: Thanks so much Anna Maria, it's been a pleasure being with you.

AMT: Meredith Wadman, reporter with Science, the author of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. We reached her in Washington DC. That's our program for today. Tomorrow on The Current, I will be joined by Khizr Khan. You may remember that name he's the father of a US soldier, a Muslim, who was killed in combat in Iraq. Mr. Khan captured the world's attention last summer with a speech at the Democratic National Convention. He famously asked the then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump if he had ever read the Constitution. We will leave you with a bit of that speech. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: crowd applause]

KHIZR KHAN: Have you ever been to Arlington cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending United States of America. You’ll see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.

[Sound: crowd applause]

KHIZR KHAN: You have sacrificed nothing and noone.

[Sound: crowd applause]

[Music: Extro]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

March 6, 2017 full episode transcript

More Stories Like This