Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Peter Kolchinski. Peter is a scientist and an investor in biotechnology companies.

He's written three fascinating pieces for Citigernal over the last month on the coronavirus crisis,

and we're very pleased he could join us on the podcast to talk about his recent work.

He's the author of an important new book called The Great American Drug Deal, which we'll discuss as well.

If you haven't seen our coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak already, I encourage you to head over to the City Journal website to check it out.

Also, the team is hard at work on the next print issue of the magazine,

so stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks on that. Peter, thanks very much for joining us on 10 blocks. Thanks very much for having me, Brian. As I mentioned in the introduction, you're a

scientist and an investor, and you're specifically trained in

virology, the study of viruses, which makes you pretty well suited to talk about the present

situation. Just for our listeners' sake, could you describe a little bit your background,

you know, just briefly? Sure. I did HIV research in graduate school studying how the virus enters into cells.

And I did this Dana Farber at Harvard University.

And after that, I became an investor, which still required me to understand a lot of what I learned

in graduate school about not just viruses, but the immune system and the inner workings of the

cell. Eventually, I had an opportunity to invest in companies that were developing drugs to treat HIV,

later drug companies that tackled hepatitis C, hepatitis B.

And so my professional work has still kept me involved in the field of virology,

though I have broadened out to other diseases.

When did you first become concerned that the outbreak in China was going to, or at least threatened

to become a global problem?

I would say that I realized it too late, like many people.

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