#1757 - Dr. Robert Malone, MD

Robert Malone (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

So, first of all, thanks for coming, and very nice tie.

Robert Malone (0:18)

Christmas present. Actually, Ryan Cole is the one that first got these, and my wife has been jealous ever since, so this is what I got for Christmas.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Where does one get a Covid tie?

Robert Malone (0:27)

I don't know, she looked it up on Amazon or someplace and found it.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

You got to love how industrious some of these folks are. They find a niche, like I know what I want to sell, Covid ties, and there you go.

Robert Malone (0:41)

I got to have a tux for an event that's coming up in Texas in a couple of months. So my wife is writing to the guy that does the ties to see if he can make a bow tie that's got the virus on it.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

Are you, I mean, are you tired of this?

Robert Malone (0:57)

Tired.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

Dealing with this? Do you feel a duty to talk about this?

We should just say, because historically, we should just state what's happening here. So today is the 20th, no, the 30th of December, and yesterday you were kicked off Twitter, correct?

Robert Malone (1:14)

True.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

We scheduled this in advance. It's just coincidentally that you were kicked off Twitter.

What, what were you kicked off, first of all, before we even do this, please tell everybody what your history is and what your, what your degrees are and what you do.

Robert Malone (1:31)

Okay, so I'm going to do the short version. So, you know, this can last for an hour. If we go into the whole history of mRNA vaccines and all that kind of stuff.

My history, I, I am, I was originally a carpenter and a farmhand in the Central Coast of California and decided that I wanted to go back to school and did two years of computer science and then decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life looking at a computer monitor in a basement. Bad decision and decided that I wanted to try to become an MD, which was a hard thing to try to do in the, in the late seventies. So that was a real stretch objective. Went to UC Davis after two years of undergrad at San Barbara City College.

And, and wanted to work on this new tech space called Molecular Biology, and in particular on cancer. My mother was deathly afraid of breast cancer. And so I looked around and found a laboratory at UC Davis with a guy named Bob Cardiff and another guy named Murray Gardner that were working with retroviruses and their links to breast cancer. And it just happened that while I was in there, this is circa 83, 84, this whole thing cut loose in San Francisco with the Immunodeficiency Syndrome in men. And the lab ended up right at the forefront of that. You know, Davis is just down the street basically from San Francisco. And at the Davis Primate Center, they had discovered that there were monkeys that had had immunodeficiency. And so I was there in the lab as an undergraduate, as a total bench rat, when Preston Marks and Murray Gardner and others made the first discovery of a retrovirus basis for immunodeficiency in primates. And then Murray went to the pastor, brought back the virus literally in his pocket, went there with Bob Gallo, met with a guy named Luke Montagnier that you may know.

And that kind of kicked off the whole vaccine effort for AIDS. So that's kind of what I cut my teeth on.

And so I came out of that. You know, it was really bold to think that I could get into medical school.

And I kind of overshot the mark. I got an MD-PhD scholarship at Northwestern University in Chicago. And so I went from having grown up in Santa Barbara with my wife, we were high school sweethearts, to Chicago. And that was kind of an abrupt transition. So we decided I would do my graduate work at San Diego. And I'd been accepted into a program at UC San Diego that had two of the top gene therapy specialists. I really wanted to do gene therapy with retroviruses. That was what I thought was going to be my life.

And so we moved down to San Diego, and I started working in the laboratory of Indiverma, which is in the Molecular Biology and Virology Labs at the Salk Institute. And this is a place where graduate students normally aren't allowed to go. It was, there was seven Nobel laureates at the time, plus Jonas, a really intense competitive environment. Carved out a little niche that I was going to work on for my graduate work, which was asking questions about how retrovirus RNA is packaged. And from that, I had to develop a series of technologies to manufacture RNA and structure it and eventually put it into cells. And that, through a cascade of events, being at the right place at the right time, asking the right questions surrounded by geniuses, led to this series of discoveries that now forms the basis of the RNA technology platform that gives rise to these vaccines. And ten issued patents from nd they were all filed in 89 So that's kind of my origin story, that it relates to this virus and vaccine and this. But since then, went on, finished my MD, did two fellowships at UC Davis, taught pathology for years, set up a gene therapy lab, had many other discoveries, came out to the East Coast, created the technology platform that is now the basis of the company called Inovio. We actually originally founded Inovio in the United States. This is Pulse Electrical Fields. They have one of the DNA vaccines for Covid.