# Insight from Larry Brilliant ## expand\_more ![Erez Manela and Larry Brilliant sitting in chairs, talking, at the front of Memorial Churh](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/jodidi-lbrilliant-marthastewart-conversation-700px.jpg?itok=B4ARxmVZ) *On Wednesday, March 29, 2023, Dr. Larry Brilliant delivered the* [*Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture*](/lectureships/jodidi "Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture Series") *at Harvard’s Memorial Church. Titled “Helping Bend the Arc at the Hinges of History: A Conversation with Larry Brilliant,” the event included opening remarks from Brilliant—a noted epidemiologist, technologist, philanthropist, and author—and a conversation with Weatherhead Center Acting Director Erez Manela, before opening it up to questions from the audience.* *Excerpted below are some of the words of wisdom Brilliant shared with the audience, lightly edited for clarity and length.* [*The full lecture*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJpZ4sPMqa0&ab_channel=WeatherheadCenterforInternationalAffairs) *is available on the Weatherhead Center’s* [*YouTube channel*](https://www.youtube.com/@HarvardWCFIA)*.* ## On future pandemic preparedness and public trust: Are we prepared? I don't think we're prepared at all. I think that the first thing you have to prepare for, the most important thing to be able to deal with a pandemic or any epidemic, is you have to have public trust. Without public trust, there's no public will. Without public will, there's no political will. And I don't think anybody in this room would say that any of the institutions in America are having too much public trust. So that puts us at a disadvantage right away. So many good epidemiologists, so many great virologists, so much wonderful success in making a vaccine—the mRNA vaccines are a miracle. The fact that it was done in one year—I mean, the previous winner in the clubhouse was four years. And that was for the mumps vaccine. We had a smallpox vaccine for 170 years before we eradicated smallpox. We had a polio vaccine for seventy years before we even embarked on a global polio eradication program. Being able to make a vaccine that quickly is amazing. And yet, we have some people in Congress who are absolutely certain that it doesn't work or that it's got a little chip that Bill Gates put in it in order to control them. That's not something public health can fix. That's above our pay grade. But we need to figure out a way to make that work. Otherwise, nothing's going to work. ![Two audience members, seated in church pews, listen to lecture.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/jodidi-lbrilliant-marthastewart-audience-700px.jpg?itok=xGwRg26N) ## On World Health Organization (WHO) struggles: WHO is the UN agency charged with responsibility for dealing with the health consequences of climate change. And that convergence of health and climate change is vitally important for all of our lives for the next decade. The WHO budget for each country for climate change and health is $25,000. That's for the country. I don't think we can grasp how underfunded WHO is. I'm not saying that it's not wasteful. I'm not saying that it doesn't have corruption. I'm just saying, with the amount of money that it has, the corruption is so little money. You do have a lot of other issues with WHO. Historically, vertical campaigns—like smallpox eradication, polio eradication, Guinea worm—are not popular in WHO, because they're trying to build up public health systems all over the world. So they've overinvested in “barefoot doctors.” And there's a great place for them. But they really are deliverers of medical care and medical services in the villages. I wouldn't necessarily call them public health workers. We don't have a good public health system for the world. And WHO has squandered some of the respect that it should have had over the years by making bad choices. In totality, it's done a very good job. But people look at the mistakes, and they magnify them. In the case of COVID, WHO did not declare COVID as a pandemic until March 20. Almost all of us who work in the field knew that it was a pandemic in January. We had a meeting of a group called Ending Pandemics on January 15. We had people from WHO, CDC, the Gates Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation—all the groups working together. We knew then that this was a pandemic. We started writing about it as a pandemic. It took two more months before WHO called it a pandemic. They did call it a PHEIC. That's a Public Health Emergency of International Consequence—a PHEIC. Did I mention that we're not very good at marketing? But by calling it that, it didn't have the salience of calling it a pandemic. And so we lost two months. And during that period of time, we had people in China and in the United States make terrible decisions based on nationalism. ![Larry Brilliant gives opening remarks at the podium at Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/jodidi-lbrilliant-marthastewart-podium-700px.jpg?itok=48b65ruA) ## On balancing faith and science: I'm doing this series for Time magazine on science and faith, to try to give me an excuse to interview people who are struggling with putting those two things into their own self. I don't see how you can be a scientist and look at the wonder of the world and not have faith. It's interesting that one of \[Swiss-French epidemiologist\] Nicole Grasset's inspirations, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote all the time about science and faith. He was a scientist who's a paleontologist. And \[the theologian\] Paul Tillich said that it was in the understanding of evolution that he came to see the face of God. Albert Einstein—who was able to do what we call a Gedankenexperiment in his mind to work out the entire formula for e=mc2 and its mathematical proof—said that looking at the way the world is put together, how can you not believe that it didn't happen by accident? And he famously said, I do not believe that God plays dice with the universe. You know, sitting in a church, you can go back to Galileo. All the scientists were people of faith. The original clerical robes that we now look at as academic robes—if you go to a graduation ceremony, those are all clerical robes with just a little bit more pizzazz on them. I don't know people of deep faith who have honestly looked at the world who do not believe in science. Earlier I mentioned the Aga Khan, who is a great scientist and a great person of faith. The Dalai Lama constantly talks about how important science is. And maybe some religions are more amenable to that than others. But I think it's more in recent times that we find an evangelical right wing that doesn't believe in science or doesn't—I shouldn't say they don't believe in science, but don't prioritize science. Science is only the way that God works mysteriously to make things happen. I don't find a contradiction. But I know I'm in the minority on that. The people who have faith who can work harder and longer because of that—and work on science—inspires me. I don't think you have to have faith to be a good scientist. I don't think you have to be a scientist to have good faith. But it's something that, for me, seems like maybe the most important question that we can ask in this material age is how we can find a way to navigate our way through a difficult and mysterious world. So I'll be trying to do that. That's sort of my next act. ## On love, compassion, and being a better ancestor: So Maharaj-ji would tell us to love, serve, remember. There's a foundation named Love, Serve, Remember of the folks around Ram Dass and Maharaj-ji. And love came first—even before service. Bill Foege \[physician, epidemiologist, and former CDC director\] has a program, and he has written a lot about the goal in life is to become a better ancestor, to leave the world better than you found it. He has a teaching series which has nine lessons on how to be a better ancestor. And each of these lessons takes something that we learned from smallpox and makes a lesson about it that you can use in whatever your project is. The first lesson is this is a cause and effect world. The second lesson is truth matters. The third lesson is about transparency of what you've learned. And there's a series of lessons like this. And love and compassion are at the heart of it all. Building trust is the most important thing. Being truthful is a necessary condition for success—and I think for life, actually. For those of you who have read anything that Ram Dass has written about his guru, that’s Neem Karoli Baba. And we were lucky enough to sit at his feet and to learn from him. People like that exist today. It's not all over. It's not that all these wonderful, lucky people got to go to India and meet these saints and there are no more, over, end of story. There's lots of saints living amongst us that we don't know—and in every religion. You don't have to be exotic. I don't know how we could have gone on without that kind of fuel, the love that he gave us. When we sat in front of Maharaj-ji it wasn't just that we felt like he loved everybody in the world. That was his job. He was a saint. If a saint doesn't love everybody in the world, fire him. What was so difficult for us to understand is that, when we sat in front of him, we loved everybody in the world. I mean think about that. Have you ever had the feeling that you love everybody in the world—other than when you were stoned? I mean, it doesn't come naturally. Sitting around him, that's the way we felt. I still feel that way when I think about him. I wish it were more often. So, yeah, I mean, if I could encourage people to do things, it would be to find people that you love to work with, to find people who inspire you, to be part of what they're doing, and to be around people who love as much as you want to love, which I hope is a lot. Thank you for that. ![Two young attendees sitting in pews listen to Larry Brilliant's lecture.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/jodidi-lbrilliant-marthastewart-students-700px.jpg?itok=RdcMwRtz) ## On advice for youth: So for the gray hairs here—those of us who got to live through the 1960s got the best deal of the hand. We lived at a time when it seemed like possibilities were endless. We were raised with the idea that every generation would be richer and happier than the previous generation. That was the social contract. I think your generation hasn't had that yet. When we talked to the president \[of Harvard\]—another Larry—he said that he thought the students at Harvard felt shortchanged; that they were even angry about what my generation had bequeathed to them. And how could you not be angry? I mean, we've not left the world better than we found it. The world is worse than we found it in so many ways. I can list 100 ways in which it's better. Believe it or not, there are fewer people in uniform fighting wars. There are fewer wars. There are fewer deaths from war. Life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years. One hundred years ago, life expectancy was forty. Now it's over eighty. But the United States has dropped two years in the last year because of opioids and COVID. But still, there's a lot of great things that have happened. I find it exhilarating that we see phenomenal telescopes that we put into space. And we look back at the very origin of the whole thing. And we watch that space is expanding. And we infer from that that time is continuing. I mean, wow. I find it breathtaking that the scientists at CERN have discovered what they call the Higgs boson particle, which is called the "God particle." And it's called the God particle because it begins life as a wave with no weight, no mass. And as it goes through the universe and through time, it somehow picks up cosmic dust. And it arrives at that cyclotron with weight and mass going from nothing to something. It must be God's will. That's why they call it the God particle. I'm so curious about that. I see so many advances in science. The vaccine is the most palpable example. But for those of you who have friends who have cancer, looking at CAR T gen, a brand new cure for cancer, there's so many cancers that can be cured now. Look at CRISPR, the ability to take microscopic particles of the human genome and mess with it, and clip it out, and move it into different places. I even have a lot of fun with ChatGPT-4. I asked ChatGPT-4 what I should tell you today. But it lied. I also asked it to tell me about Wavy Gravy's children. And it announced that he had four. And it gave them fabulous names that are nonexistent. But I love talking to ChatGPT-4. I think there are so many things to celebrate being alive today, but it would be disingenuous not to say that we've been shitty ancestors. And we owe you a lot more than we've given you. But it's your chance now. ## Captions 1. Acting Center Director Erez Manela (left) in coversation with Larry Brilliant (right) for the Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture held on March 29, 2023 at Harvard’s Memorial Church. *Credit: Martha Stewart* 2. Attendees sit in the church pews, listening to Larry Brilliant deliver remarks. *Credit: Martha Stewart* 3. Larry Brilliant delivers opening remarks at the church podium. *Credit: Martha Stewart* 4. Attendees of the lecture included students and members of the community. *Credit: Martha Stewart* \--- *Watch the full Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture, “Helping Bend the Arc at the Hinges of History: A Conversation with Larry Brilliant” on YouTube:* See also:- [ Centerpiece: Spring 2023 ](/newsletter-issues/centerpiece-spring-2023)