Giday, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

And the dangerous idea that we frequently come back to on this show,

the dangerous idea that sits atop all other dangerous ideas,

or perhaps underneath, depending on your visualization of the metaphor,

really the purpose of this show, is to talk about the way that we talk about dangerous ideas,

to have conversations about the way we have conversations about things.

And today's guest is an expert in that.

She's a science journalist, the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Cosmos Magazine.

She's a regular contributor to Science Magazine, the American publicationfounder and former editor-in-chief of Cosmos Magazine. She's a regular

contributor to Science Magazine, the American publication. And she was trained as a molecular

biologist. She's written a book about how science works by kind of taking a few case studies

of big issues in science and breaking down the controversies behind them and then settling on what she

regards as the sensible balance of probabilities about what the truth is. Now, one of the areas that

she covers in her book is an entire chapter devoted to COVID and the lab leak theory. This is

the chapter with which she opens the book. And I thought it would be

interesting since I'm so ambivalent about this. I both think it's highly suspicious that the

virus came from the same city that had one of the leading labs that was researching these

viruses. And I also think it's perfectly plausible that it would be zoonotic in origin.

So I've heard quite a few arguments for the lab leak hypothesis.

And I wanted to speak to a knowledgeable science journalist who has done her work on looking

at the evidence against the lab leak and the evidence for the wet market in the context of

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