Bushkin.

Why is Miami, Miami?

What does the heartbreaking fate of the Cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children?

Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports?

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. In my new audiobook, Revenge of the

Tipping Point, I'm returning to the subject of social epidemics and the dark side of contagious

phenomenon. Find revenge of the tipping point wherever you find audiobooks out now. From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

I'm Noah Feldman.

Today I'm speaking to one of the most influential and extraordinary scientists I know, Eric Lander.

Eric is the president and founding director of the Brod Institute of MIT and Harvard.

He's geneticist, a molecular biologist, a mathematician by original training, and he's also the host of a brand new Pushkin podcast

called Brave New Planet. Eric has been at the epicenter of a great transformation in biology

and indeed of science that's taken place over the last 30 years. A transformation focused

most fundamentally on what can be done with the gathering of

greater and greater and greater amounts of data about biological systems, including the human

body. These developments are crucial to how science is being done every day, and they're

absolutely crucial as well to how science has responded to COVID-19.

It's a thrill to have Eric on the podcast.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us. I want to start with the role you've played in really a transformative period in the history of

modern science, a period which in certain ways is being reflected in the cutting edge

developments that are happening every day that we all care about most in science, including

indirectly in the context of the vaccines for COVID-19. And that's a period in which big data has

...