Why did we overlook the lessons from some of our most transformative breakthroughs? The U.S. once excelled at scaling new technologies like clean energy and advanced medicine, such as the penicillin injection. But we've increasingly left promising innovations stuck on the shelf. So why did America fall so far behind in building?
Using the forgotten success of Operation Warp Speed as a blueprint, Abundance co-author Derek Thompson challenges us to imagine a world where we apply that same urgency to cancer drugs, carbon‑neutral cement, and beyond.
Timestamps
0:00 The implementation of penicillin
2:02 OSRD and scaling penicillin
3:41 Have we forgotten how to implement?
5:01 Operation Warp Speed
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
The implementation of penicillin
What made Penicillin the most important scientific discovery in medicine of the 20th century was not the discovery itself, it was implementation. I think this is a lesson that is sometimes lost for fans of progress and also for people in government. Invention matters, but implementation matters more. I'm Derek Thompson. I'm a journalist and I'm the co-author of the book "Abundance" with Ezra Klein.
So one of my favorite stories from this book is the story of Penicillin. Penicillin was famously discovered in 1928 by the Scottish scientist Fleming, and it was discovered famously by accident. Fleming was returning to his lab after a vacation, and he had been researching bacteria and saw that in this little Petri Dish where he was holding the bacteria, something seemed to have flown in through the window and landed in that dish and liquidated the colony. When he went under the microscope to figure out exactly what had done it, he discovered that it was a mold from the genus penicillium. So he named the product itself Penicillin.
This is a really, really famous story in scientific history because it does kind of seem like maybe the most important drug of the 20th century. I mean, the most important antibacterial of the 20th century blew in through this guy's window and landed on a Petri Dish in his lab, like truly the breath of God.
But let's say you took the story of Penicillin 13 years forward in the early 1940s, and you stop the clock and say 1942, only five human beings in the history of this medicine had ever been tried with Penicillin, and two or three of them had died. If you would stop the clock in 1942, you would say, this clearly isn't a medicine that's going to do anything for anyone. It's just hit a dead end.
OSRD and scaling penicillin
And the problem was the scientists who were working on Penicillin couldn't grow it in sufficient batches to test it in people. So they went from the UK, which was submerged in war in World War II, to the US. They got really, really lucky because just as they took Penicillin to the US, the US had started this program called OSRD, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was launched by FDR to coordinate all technological and scientific innovation during the war. So the Manhattan Project, which built the nuclear bomb, spun out of this.
One of the most important achievements of the OSRD was that they found a way to grow Penicillin at scale, to test it at scale. Three years after scientists took Penicillin to the US, we had grown it to the extent that the death rate from bacterial illness among American and British soldiers declined by a factor of 18. The lesson here is that what made Penicillin the most important scientific discovery in medicine in the 20th century was not the discovery itself, it was implementation.
And I think this is a lesson that is sometimes lost for fans of progress and also for people in government. Invention matters, but implementation matters more. Invention is how you take an idea from zero to one. Implementation is how you take an idea from one to one billion. That's the story of Penicillin. It's a story of scaling.
Have we forgotten how to implement?
When I look at American history in the last 70 years, I'm worried that we've somewhat fallen out of the habit of implementation, right? And American invented the elevator, and somehow we can't build apartment buildings. Americans invented nuclear power, but we basically stopped building nuclear power plants after the 1970s. Americans invented the solar cell, but we let the frontier of solar development escape to Germany and Japan, and now China. An American invented, or Americans invented, the transistor. But if you look at where the most advanced semiconductors are being built in the world, the vast majority of them are being assembled in Taiwan, not America.
So over and over again, I'm worried that while America clearly wins all the Nobel Prizes, if there were a Nobel Prize for implementing what we invent, we would not be so dominant. Now, here's where I think there's actually a success story that's been wildly underrated. It's Operation Warp Speed, which is the program under Donald Trump that in 2020 accelerated the development of mRNA vaccines that saved millions of American lives and maybe tens of millions of lives around the world.
Operation Warp Speed
Operation Warp Speed has a very, very, very strange reputation right now. Republicans don't like to brag about it because they've somewhat negatively polarized themselves against vaccines, and in particular, mRNA vaccines and in particular, particular the way that mRNA vaccines as a medicine got enmeshed with vaccine mandates. So their objections to the mandates became conflated with objections to the underlying therapy. But then on the Democratic side, I think what you see is that a lot of people don't talk about Operation Warp Speed because they don't wanna give a lot of credit to a program that was initiated under Donald Trump.
But Operation Warp Speed was a marvel, right? We did with mRNA Vaccines in 2020, what the World War II machine did for Penicillin in the 1940s. We took the germ of an idea, a little synthetic mRNA recipe that at first existed only in a lab, and we blew it out so that it could be implemented at scale, delivered to billions of people around the world. Operation Warp Speed did this in a really canny way.
There was push funding, so direct subsidies for pharmaceutical companies, but there was also what's called pull funding. We told some of these companies that we would guarantee a billion dollar payment for these vaccine discoveries or these vaccine products, even if another company had beaten them to market. In this way encouraged many, many, many different companies to try their best to pour money into the investment for developing, you know, vaccines for COVID.
Then once the vaccines were created, the government created this sort of glide path that allowed them to go from being in a lab to being injected into people's arms. We made it easier, for example, for the vaccines to be transported in special glass vials that were built by Corning. So we contracted with glass companies in order to help companies like Moderna transport these vaccines across the country.
And then finally, and very importantly, having bought all the vaccines, the federal government could have charged Americans whatever they wanted and they charged Americans the price of zero dollars and zero cents. So we had this extraordinary all of government achievement with Operation Warp Speed, and what is its legacy? We've basically forgotten about it. It's like, what if we landed a man on the moon and then like never talked about the Apollo Program? That's how I feel about Operation Warp Speed.
I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for everything. I want there to be an Operation Warp Speed for cancer drugs if we can, an Operation Warp Speed for addiction pills, an Operation Warp Speed for inflammation, an Operation Warp Speed for cardiovascular medicine, an Operation Warp Speed for dementia, for obesity, for clean cement. Cement that we manufacture that doesn't just cook the planet. In fact, if cement were its own country, sort of a weird thing to think about, it would be the seventh largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. But it's necessary. It's necessary to build things.
So how do we build cement without releasing tons of carbon dioxide in the process? That's a project where I would love to see in all of government effort to accelerate the development of, I mean, you look at what's happening right now, for example, in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a larval technology, right? Anybody is lying to you if they say they know exactly how it's going to work out on the positive side if it's going to accelerate drug discovery, on the negative side if it's going to lead to a world of utter chaos.
But one thing we seem to know for sure is that artificial intelligence is unbelievably energy thirsty. It takes a ton of electricity to train these models, to outfit the data centers where the models live in silicon. If the federal government is going to play a major role, I think in making sure the data centers that house AI are built in rather than built say in the Middle East, we really need to find a way to not only allow energy to be built efficiently, but also I think make it easier to build clean energy in this country. Because in the absence of clean energy, you're just going to burn more fossil fuels and accelerate climate change.
So where are the Operation Warp Speeds for accelerating enhanced geothermal, for accelerating modular nuclear power or even fusion power? Where are the Operation Warp Speeds for everything considering how fantastically successful the first Operation Warp Speed was? It's really bizarre that we like received this lesson that an all of government focus and implementation can do extraordinary things, break the land speed record for the fastest vaccine ever created, and we're basically just doing nothing with that lesson, right? This book says, no, we need to take the lesson of OWS very seriously and look at other places like medicines or clean cement or carbon removal, where these kind of mechanisms can really serve to take technologies that might now live in the 2040s and pull them closer to the 2020s.
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