Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with David Relman, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford University.

He's concerned about well-intentioned

laboratory research that creates pathogens with pandemic potential, and he even wonders if the

world is dealing with the consequences of such research today. Let's listen. David Relman,

thank you so much for joining me today.

You have written with concern about laboratories that create pathogens with pandemic potential

deliberately in order to study those pathogens with the idea that it might help society

be more ready.

You've written with concern because you're worried about the danger of those pathogens could actually cause pandemics. that it might help society be more ready.

You've written with concern because you're worried about the danger those pathogens could actually cause pandemics.

Now, here we are in the middle of a pandemic.

And my first question is, how relevant is your concern today?

I think it is relevant.

And just to be clear, I think in the setting of this pandemic the question

...