Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch.

Then came Ardem Patapoutian.

In 2010, Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches — proteins called Piezo1 and Piezo2 (piezo is Greek for the verb “to press”). This week, Patapoutian shared a Nobel prize with David Julius, who similarly discovered how sensations of heat and cold enter our awareness.

In mammals like humans, piezo receptors transmit mechanical sensations to the nervous system. When cells that contain these piezo receptors are stretched, the receptors open up, letting in ions (charged particles) and setting off an electrical pulse.

But each type of receptor has a slightly different use. Piezo1 is part of our body’s built-in blood pressure monitoring system, as well as other internal systems that rely on pressure-sensing. Piezo2, on the other hand, is “the principle mechanosensor for touch and proprioception,” Patapoutian told me in 2019.

That is, without Piezo2, we couldn’t feel another person’s hand graze our own.

Proprioception, which also relies on Piezo2, is less well-known than the sense of touch, but it’s sometimes referred to as the body’s “sixth” sense. It’s our sense of where our bodies are in three-dimensional space.

It’s easier to explain proprioception with a demonstration. If you put a cup out in front of you and then close your eyes, you can still find the cup with your hand. Proprioception is what guides your intuition of how far to move your hand and in which direction.

“It’s truly fascinating that we are not aware of it,” Patapoutian said of proprioception during a 2019 interview with Vox. “When I give lectures, even to college students or graduate students, I sometimes ask: “How many people know of proprioception?” Even specialized biologists often don’t know anything about it.”

I spoke to Patapoutian for a story about people who are missing Piezo2 receptors in their bodies because of a genetic inheritance. When they close their eyes, “it’s like I am lost,” one of them told me. With their eyes closed, they cannot reach for the cup in front of them. They have no idea where it is. They have no idea where their arms are in space.

Patapoutian helped me understand that the human sense of touch contains multitudes — and to this day, scientists don’t fully understand it. But as scientists learn more about touch receptors, they’re also figuring out how to tend to a body that’s in pain.

This conversation, which took place in 2019, has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Resnick

What is the sense of touch?

Ardem Patapoutian

We think about the five senses: vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch. If you really start digging deep into touch, it’s so different than the rest of the senses.

When you talk about touch, there’s so many modalities to it: There’s different physical forces we sense, like temperature and mechanical force. There’s itch. There’s this [spectrum] of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.

It’s a very complex system. The demarcation of when pleasant touch ends and painful touch starts is actually very flexible. If you have a sunburn, for example, the same amount of touch that could have been pleasant becomes painful.

All of what I was just talking about is sensation on skin.

Again, if you put on top of it proprioception and internal organ sensation, it’s a very complicated sense that we don’t really understand. There’s no totally, well-agreed terminology even to describe clearly what we mean by touch and somatosensation.

Brian Resnick

How is proprioception related to touch?

Ardem Patapoutian

Proprioception is dependent on your sensory system detecting muscle stretch. When that muscle gets stretched, these nerve endings that are wrapped around it can sense it. Piezo2 is actually sitting right at the ends of these nerves, where [they] wrap around the muscle.

When you close your eyes and touch your nose, how are you doing this? What’s the information that you’re basing this on? It’s all about learning, as you grow up, to sense how much each of these muscles are being stretched when you’re making these complex motions of your hand. From that, you know exactly where things are.

People sometimes call it muscle memory. It’s actually mostly these proprioceptive neurons that are giving you this understanding of where your limbs are compared to your body — simply from detecting how much your tendons and muscles are being stretched.

Brian Resnick

Touch and proprioception use the same receptor: Piezo2. But all those other sensations you described — temperature, itch, pain — do those all enter us through different receptors? Is it the case that all these different types of touch feelings have a different specific molecule responsible for them?

Ardem Patapoutian

Absolutely, the molecules are different. There are temperature sensors at very different ranges of temperature. Cold, heat, warm are all different.

From 2000 to 2010, my lab studied temperature sensation. We, for example, identified the first cold-activated ion channel. It ended up also being the receptor for menthol. Anytime you use one of these chewing gums or toothpastes that gives that cooling sensation in your mouth, it hijacks the cold-activated channel.

Brian Resnick

Is the goal to try to find the sensor responsible for each sensation?

Ardem Patapoutian

Yeah. What seems to have worked is starting with a very reductionist approach, in the sense of finding the sensor.

Brian Resnick

Are some of these sensors still elusive?

Ardem Patapoutian

Absolutely. Without Piezo2, you don’t have touch, you don’t have proprioception. However, acute touch — the hammer hitting your finger “ouch” kind of feeling — the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown.

Brian Resnick

I don’t know if this gets more into philosophy than science, but are we just the sum of all these inputs?

Ardem Patapoutian

I think the clear thing one has to realize is that sensory biology is not telling us about reality. It is representing reality.

[Reality is] very related to these senses. But that’s the thing I would emphasize — it’s kind of an approximation. We’re interpreting the world according to what sensory systems we have.

Every year, malaria kills more than 400,000 people, most of them children. There has been significant progress against the disease in the past few decades — death rates have fallen nearly in half since 2000 — but there’s still a long way to go.

For decades, researchers have been working on developing a vaccine. It hasn’t been easy. Malaria, a parasite infection, is hard to vaccinate against, and many attempted vaccines haven’t produced durable immunity.

But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children for the first time, after encouraging results from a pilot study that has reached hundreds of thousands of children across parts of sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. The vaccine, called Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is far from perfect — it produces about a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria in fully vaccinated children, which is lifesaving but smaller than would be hoped for.

Kids are back in school. The federal government seems to be on the verge of approving vaccines for younger children. And as more adults are fully vaccinated, much of the US is slowly returning to normal.

But there remains a lingering question, particularly for parents of young children: What is the risk of Covid-19 to kids, especially after the rise of the delta variant?

There were reports this summer of more children under 18 falling ill with Covid-19, and some pediatric hospital wards filling up, leading many to believe that the pandemic is now a serious threat to children, too. At the very least, it’s abundantly clear now that children can be infected by and transmit the coronavirus.

But experts maintain that the risks most children face from Covid-19 are low, even with the delta variant. “The risk in children has not changed with the new variant as far as we can tell,” Betsy Herold, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told me.

Herold estimates that less than 2 percent of children known to be infected by the coronavirus are hospitalized, and less than 0.03 percent of those infected die. It’s difficult to draw direct comparisons to American adults now that two-thirds in the US are vaccinated, while most kids aren’t. But before widespread vaccination, about 10 percent of people infected with Covid-19 were hospitalized, and around 1 percent died.

While there isn’t as much research on children and Covid-19 as experts would prefer, the data we do have suggests the risk of longer-term consequences, like long Covid or MIS-C (in which several organs become inflamed), is also very low.

The delta variant is both more transmissible and more widespread than earlier variants, which has meant that even a low-risk disease has filled up many pediatric wards. But while delta has made more children sick, it has not made infected children sicker — it doesn’t appear to be linked to worse disease among kids, experts said.

That’s still a public health problem. If the risk of death for children is around 0.01 percent and 1,000 children are infected, you would expect no deaths. But if 1 million are infected, you would expect 100 deaths. Increased transmission, not a deadlier virus, helps explain why pediatric wards are more crowded now than they were earlier in the pandemic, and shows that even a low-risk disease could lead to many deaths if enough children catch it. With nearly 5 million children with confirmed infections in the US so far, we are seeing that in the real world.

It’s become a time-honored tradition in certain segments of American society: two families cross-reference their respective calendars to find a spot free of school or soccer or other obligations. On the appointed day, one child travels to the other’s house, typically accompanied by a parent. The children build a Lego village or glue googly eyes on felt or participate in some other ostensibly wholesome activity. Snacks are consumed. The parents, meanwhile, hang out and complain lightly about their children or spouses, stopping periodically to intervene in tantrums or boredom or failures of sharing.

This is — or was — the playdate. Prior to 2020, it had become the primary mode of non-school social life for a lot of American kids, replacing the more unstructured play that many millennials and Gen X-ers remember from their childhoods. As Charis Granger-Mbugua, a Georgia mother of two, put it, “that’s how children play now.”

The pandemic, of course, put a stop to playdates for a lot of families. Granger-Mbugua’s two children, now 7 and almost 5, barely saw anyone outside the family from March 2020 until this spring. “They were super isolated for that entire school year,” Granger-Mbugua said.

Now that adults and teenagers can be vaccinated, and shots for younger kids are on the horizon, families are starting to have playdates again. “We’re already seeing birthday parties, we’re already seeing weddings and funerals,” Tamara Mose, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and the author of The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play, told Vox. As more kids get vaccinated, “people will feel more comfortable, and so the playdates will continue.”

The return of the playdate, though, may not be an unalloyed good. Some fear that parent-organized socializing deprives kids of the chance to explore and build self-sufficiency. “It’s a lost childhood,” Stacey Gill, a mom of two who has written about playdates, told Vox.

The rise of the scheduled, structured “date” for children in the decades preceding the pandemic also increased the burden on parents, especially moms, who were expected to spend their weekends curating social experiences for their kids.

Then there were the social implications. For middle- and upper-middle-class families, playdates could be exclusionary — a way for parents to shore up connections with others they saw as “like them” in terms of class, race, politics, and a host of other factors. “You’re basically selecting the friends of your children based on the networks you’re creating as adults,” Mose said.

Now that children’s play, like so many other sectors of society, has been disrupted by Covid-19, some say there’s a chance to rethink what it should look like. We might not go back to the days when kids “went outside and didn’t come in till the streetlights came on,” as Granger-Mbugua remembers from her childhood. But there’s an opportunity to make play more equitable, less labor-intensive for parents, and maybe even more fun. As Gill put it, “kids need a little more freedom to just be kids.”

The playdate as we know it was invented in the ’90s

The playdate is a fairly new phenomenon. Growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Gill remembers spending Saturday mornings playing in the basement and watching cartoons with her sister. At a certain point, their mom would send them outside to play — and lock the door. If they got together with other kids, it wasn’t anything organized: “You just hung out,” Gill said.

Beginning in the ’90s, however, middle- and upper-middle-class parents, especially in cities, began pulling their kids back from unstructured play in public spaces out of concerns about crime. Highly publicized kidnapping and child murder cases such as that of Polly Klaas in 1993, along with the rise of crime shows like America’s Most Wanted, helped contribute to a climate of fear among more affluent American parents. Over time, more play took place inside families’ homes and other private spaces. “It felt safer for parents to have something that was organized and looked after,” Mose said.

By the 2000s, the word “playdate” — meaning organized play for children, typically directed by parents — was in common parlance. For parents, such a date wasn’t just a time for kids to get together: “It was a presentation of self,” Mose said. “You wanted to present yourself in a particular manner so that parents would know that you were a ‘good parent.’”

That meant providing the right kind of food — “people really snubbed their nose at fast food or junk food,” Mose said. It also meant offering not just supervision but, ideally, a fun yet wholesome activity to keep kids entertained. Far from locking them out to play in the street, Gill joked, “You have to have, like, a craft fair at your house.”

All this was also, of course, a performance of a certain class status. It’s no accident that the concept of playdates started with upper-middle-class families and trickled down to the middle class, remaining less common among working-class people. The requirements of a playdate, from healthy food (ideally organic) to art supplies to a private indoor space big enough for multiple kids, could get expensive quickly.

That performance of affluent, “good” parenting wasn’t for kids — it was for other parents, who often joined their kids on playdates, especially at younger ages. “Kids might be in one room playing together but the parents are socializing in another room,” Mose said.

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When planning play for their kids, parents would select people they wanted to get to know better, often because they shared common traits from neighborhoods to values. “People tend to find people like themselves,” Mose said. “That’s who they feel comfortable with.”

That tendency, coupled with the expense of playdates, led to a stratification along race and class lines. While kids organically coming together at a playground might form friendships across such divisions (at least within the limits of America’s segregated neighborhoods), playdate culture instead reinforced socioeconomic rifts as wealthier parents encouraged their kids to socialize within a carefully curated social bubble.

For those able to afford them, though, playdates essentially became a form of networking — the kid-friendly version of having the boss over to dinner. “In an office, you tend to network with certain types of people and exclude other types of people, and it’s a similar type of interaction when we have a playdate,” Mose said. “We tend to create an environment that’s sanitized in order to facilitate certain social networks.”

The creation of such an environment may not have been conscious — few parents would say they set out to segregate their children’s social worlds. But it led to the concentration of a number of advantages — from the small, like organic snacks, to the large, like a group of well-connected and affluent parent-friends — among those who could afford the entry fee to the playdate in-crowd. It may not be the most glaring example, but playdate culture belongs in any conversation about “nice white parents” and privilege-hoarding.

It was also just a huge amount of work for parents. Most of that work fell to moms, who historically have shouldered not just the majority of child care responsibilities but also the mental load of juggling kids’ schedules. The demands of playdates are probably part of the reason that parents today spend significantly more time on child care every week than they did in the 1960s, even though many more moms are also working outside the home.

The demands of kids’ social calendars meant parents could “no longer have a life,” Gill said. “I understand when the kids are young, they need constant attention and supervision. But it just extended indefinitely, to forever.”

Yet throughout the 2000s and 2010s, parents kept shuttling their kids to playdates. Even if you weren’t consciously trying to “network,” the custom could be hard to break out of. After all, letting children play unsupervised is now deeply stigmatized — and for low-income people and people of color, who already face discrimination as parents in America, it can even lead to arrest. For middle- and upper-middle-class kids, meanwhile, opportunities to just “hang out” have fallen victim to the rise of extracurricular activities like organized sports.

In her neighborhood outside New York City, “there’s a million kids you could play with,” Gill said. “Only now you can’t play with them because they’re all scheduled.”

The pandemic put a stop to playdates — for a while

That is, they were scheduled. Then, in March 2020, millions of Americans began sheltering in place to help limit the spread of Covid-19. “For many people, playdates simply ceased,” Mose said. “We were all afraid of people spreading germs, and as we know, children are very germy.”

Not everyone took Covid-19 protocols seriously, and there has been widespread disagreement over how to weigh the risks of the virus among children, who are less likely than adults to become severely ill. Still, for many American children, the first year or so of the pandemic was a very isolated time. Granger-Mbugua’s son and daughter, for example, didn’t have playdates, and other social outlets like in-person school, church, and storytime at the local library were on hold as well. “We didn’t have a lot of interaction with friends,” Granger-Mbugua said. Her kids “have some family, but that’s about it.”

As the pandemic wore on, however, families started experimenting with socializing again. Some formed “pods” with one or two other families so that kids could play while still limiting exposure. Others allowed their kids to see friends, but only outdoors. “Playdates changed in terms of location,” Mose said.

Now, as American society inches toward reopening, playdates are fraught terrain for a lot of parents. It’s not just the risk of Covid-19, it’s also the etiquette — do kids wear masks in the house? Do adults? What about snack time? What if your approach to Covid-19 safety doesn’t align with that of your hosts (or guests)? Arguments among adults over Covid-19 protocols — and the politicization of those protocols — have caused a lot of anxiety among kids, Eugene Beresin, executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Vox. “It’s put a great deal of tension into certain situations.”

Tension or not, playdates are returning. “I think most people have already gone back” at least in some capacity, Mose said. And vaccines for children aged 5-11, which could arrive as soon as November, are likely to accelerate the process. “There will be a lot more freedom once everybody’s vaccinated,” Mose said. “Or a sense of freedom, anyway.”

The time may be ripe to rethink play

Many parents are looking forward to that day with bated breath. But rather than going back to playdates-as-usual, this time, when many families are rebuilding their social lives from scratch, could be an opportunity to reimagine what play should look like.

Part of that is rethinking who’s in charge of a child’s social life. “I think if we allowed it to be somewhat children-led, we would see a difference in how children play together,” Mose said. Adults may gravitate to people they perceive as being like them, but “children don’t have that lens yet when they’re little,” she explained. “They truly just want to play with whoever is nice to them.”

Giving kids more of a say in who they play with can make playdates less exclusionary, and open up the social world of the whole family to new people and experiences. “Our kids naturally have a diversity about them that they’re interested in exploring in terms of their outlook on social life,” Mose said.

Letting kids choose what they do at a playdate, within reason, is also important, Beresin said. Rather than setting up a craft fair in the living room, parents can let kids pick out their activities and work out any disagreements about what to play on their own (again, within reason). Offering choices helps kids feel empowered and like they have control over the situation, Beresin said.

After all, kids’ play is “a very, very important part of development,” Beresin said. “Play is the way they work out their anxieties, it’s the way they work out their conflicts, it’s the way they share with each other, it’s the way they learn how to be respectful of other kids.” Learning to be independent and make your own choices is part of that process, too.

It’s hard to imagine a return to the world that Gill or Granger-Mbugua remember from their childhoods, when kids ran around with little interference from adults. But even before the pandemic, some efforts were afoot to give kids a bit more autonomy in their play. “Adventure playgrounds,” for example, which deemphasize traditional play structures in favor of more interactive (and chaotic) elements like old electronic equipment and hammers, have spread across Europe and popped up in the US. One such playground on New York’s Governors Island explicitly bans parents.

The Free-Range Kids movement, meanwhile, advocates for more independence for children, including unsupervised play. Started in 2008 by a mom who was criticized for letting her 9-year-old take the subway alone, the movement has helped inspire laws in Utah and elsewhere that protect parents from prosecution if they let kids play or walk home by themselves.

Individual parents are also finding less regimented ways to help their kids socialize. “There’s a lot of anxiety that I feel around structured, organized play,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I really prefer more organic play in spaces where children are naturally together,” whether that’s a church function or a birthday party with extended family.

As pandemic restrictions lift, “I would like my children to get to know the people in the neighborhood, I would like to get them to know the people in their classes that they feel most comfortable with and pursue friendships and relationships that way,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I want my children to seek out friendships that feel good to them, and let me know, and then I will do my part to support that.”

Such a kid-centric approach may find adherents at a time when a lot of the strictures of pre-pandemic society, from wardrobes to office jobs, are being questioned. And for anyone wanting to reevaluate their own kids’ social lives in our new reality, Gill, for her part, advocates a back-to-basics approach: “Let them be. Let them figure it out. Let them use their brains.”

In other words: “Just let them play.”

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out.

The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal with pathogenic threats than we currently have — which is why a recent paper about a new advance in tracing genetic editing is particularly exciting.

Bioengineering often leaves traces — characteristic patterns in the RNA or DNA of an engineered organism that are a product of a plethora of design decisions that go into synthetic biology. That fact about bioengineered genomes raises an interesting question: What if those traces that gene editing leaves behind were more like fingerprints? That is, what if it’s possible not just to tell if something was engineered but precisely where it was engineered?

That’s the idea behind genetic engineering attribution: the effort to develop tools that let us look at a genetically engineered sequence and determine which lab developed it. A big international contest among researchers earlier this year demonstrates that the technology is within our reach — though it’ll take lots of refining to move from impressive contest results to tools we can reliably use for bio detective work.

The contest, the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge, was sponsored by some of the leading bioresearch labs in the world. The idea was to challenge teams to develop techniques in genetic engineering attribution. The most successful entrants in the competition could predict, using machine-learning algorithms, which lab produced a certain genetic sequence with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to a new preprint summing up the results of the contest.

This may seem technical, but it could actually be fairly consequential in the effort to make the world safe from a type of threat we should all be more attuned to post-pandemic: bioengineered weapons and leaks of bioengineered viruses.

One of the challenges of preventing bioweapon research and deployment is that perpetrators can remain hidden — it’s difficult to find the source of a killer virus and hold them accountable.

But if it’s widely known that bioweapons can immediately and verifiably be traced right back to a bad actor, that could be a valuable deterrent.

It’s also extremely important for biosafety more broadly. If an engineered virus is accidentally leaked, tools like these would allow us to identify where they leaked from and know what labs are doing genetic engineering work with inadequate safety procedures.

The fingerprint of a virus

Hundreds of design choices go into genetic engineering: “what genes you use, what enzymes you use to connect them together, what software you use to make those decisions for you,” computational immunologist Will Bradshaw, a co-author on the paper, told me.

“The enzymes that people use to cut up the DNA cut in different patterns and have different error profiles,” Bradshaw says. “You can do that in the same way that you can recognize handwriting.”

Because different researchers with different training and different equipment have their own distinctive “tells,” it’s possible to look at a genetically engineered organism and guess who made it — at least if you’re using machine-learning algorithms.

To be clear, this work, called genetic engineering attribution, is very different from genetic engineering detection: it’s not about determining whether a sequence is engineered, but looking at sequences already known to be engineered and figuring out who built them.

The algorithms that are trained to do this work are fed data on more than 60,000 genetic sequences different labs produced. The idea is that, when fed an unfamiliar sequence, the algorithms are able to predict which of the labs they’ve encountered (if any) likely produced it.

A year ago, researchers at altLabs, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and other top bioresearch programs collaborated on the challenge, organizing a competition to find the best approaches to this biological forensics problem. The contest attracted intense interest from academics, industry professionals, and citizen scientists — one member of a winning team was a kindergarten teacher. Nearly 300 teams from all over the world submitted at least one machine-learning system for identifying the lab of origin of different sequences.

In that preprint paper (which is still undergoing peer review), the challenge’s organizers summarize the results: The competitors collectively took a big step forward on this problem. “Winning teams achieved dramatically better results than any previous attempt at genetic engineering attribution, with the top-scoring team and all-winners ensemble both beating the previous state-of-the-art by over 10 percentage points,” the paper notes.

The big picture is that researchers, aided by machine-learning systems, are getting really good at finding the lab that built a given plasmid, or a specific DNA strand used in gene manipulation.

The top-performing teams had 95 percent accuracy at naming a plasmid’s creator by one metric called “top 10 accuracy” — meaning if the algorithm identifies 10 candidate labs, the true lab is one of them. They had 82 percent top 1 accuracy — that is, 82 percent of the time, the lab they identified as the likely designer of that bioengineered plasmid was, in fact, the lab that designed it.

Top 1 accuracy is showy, but for biological detective work, top 10 accuracy is nearly as good: If you can narrow down the search for culprits to a small number of labs, you can then use other approaches to identify the exact lab.

There’s still a lot of work to do. The competition looked at only simple engineered plasmids; ideally, we’d have approaches that work for fully engineered viruses and bacteria. And the competition didn’t look at adversarial examples, where researchers deliberately try to conceal the fingerprints of their lab on their work.

How genetic fingerprinting can help keep the world safer

Knowing which lab produced a bioweapon can protect us in three ways, biosecurity researchers argued in Nature Communications last year.

First, “knowledge of who was responsible can inform response efforts by shedding light on motives and capabilities, and so mitigate the event’s consequences.” That is, figuring out who built something will also give us clues about the goals they might have had and the risk we might be facing.

Second, obviously, it allows the world to sanction and stop any lab or government that is producing bioweapons in violation of international law.

And third, the article argues, hopefully, if these capabilities are widely known, they make the use of bioweapons much less appealing in the first place.

But the techniques have more mundane uses as well.

Bradshaw told me he envisions applications of the technology could be used to find accidental lab leaks, identify plagiarism in academic papers, and protect biological intellectual property — and those applications will validate and extend the tools for the really critical uses.

The past year and a half should have us all thinking about how devastating pandemic disease can be — and about whether the precautions being taken by research labs and governments are really adequate to prevent the next pandemic.

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The answer, to my mind, is that we’re not doing enough, but more sophisticated biological forensics could certainly help. Genetic engineering attribution is still a new field. With more effort, it’ll likely be possible to one day make attribution possible on a much larger scale and to do it for viruses and bacteria. That could make for a much safer future.

Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

Four executives from Big Oil — “the richest, most powerful industry in human history,” according to environmentalist Bill McKibben — testified before Congress on Thursday at a hearing meant to reveal how the oil business has undermined government action on climate change.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, alongside the presidents of two powerful lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Democratic lawmakers who control the committee interrogated the executives about how their institutions misled the public and funded misinformation campaigns that questioned the severity of climate change.

But the executives, testifying virtually, were evasive. “As science has evolved and developed, our understanding has evolved and developed,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, answering a question about why his company rejected climate science throughout the 2000s, when scientists already agreed that global warming was an urgent threat. Republican lawmakers argued the hearing was a farce, a distraction from other issues, and a veiled attempt to ban oil production.

Big Oil’s big secrets about its climate change activities may begin to unravel in any paperwork committee staff can get their hands on. For 40 years, the oil industry has worked to delay and obstruct policies that would hurt the profitability of its products, even when their own scientists warned that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. Thousands of pages of documents in the public record — obtained through lawsuits, leaks, and undercover videos — patch together a portrait of how the oil industry has fostered climate change denial.

The Oversight committee requested additional documents dating back to 2015, but so far witnesses “have failed to adequately comply with the Committee’s request,” according to a statement by Democratic lawmakers. When reached for comment, an API spokesperson countered that the group has been actively working to comply “and has already produced thousands of pages responsive to their request.”

After nearly five hours of questioning, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) closed the hearing by announcing she would issue subpoenas for the documents the committee did not receive, saying it had received only financial reports, social media posts, and press releases that were already publicly available. Maloney called for detailed funding information, board memos, and senior executive communications to help the committee “understand their payments to shadow groups and to over 150 public relations companies and advertisements on social media, payments that today’s witnesses seem intent on continuing.”

“I do not take this step lightly,” Maloney added, saying that the committee’s goal is to “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas we will.”

Climate activists hope that this moment could be an inflection point for accountability in the oil industry, similar to when Congress investigated other industries that have profited from misleading the public, including tobacco, asbestos, and lead companies. “There’s ongoing pressure to get these companies to fess up in one way or the other, or pay up,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the advocacy research group Climate Investigations Center, who has collected his own database of oil documents. “How and when that comes, and how much they can do to blunt that, is the drama that’s playing out this week.”

What secrets are oil companies still keeping from the public? There are at least five key areas Congress can dig into to discover the truth about Big Oil’s activities on climate change. The documents Democrats are after could also paint a fuller, more recent picture of the oil industry’s own climate change goals. Some purport to aim for net-zero emissions in the coming decades, but they could turn out to be hot air.

How much has the oil industry spent trying to undermine climate legislation?

In the words of one ExxonMobil lobbyist, the company has worked with “shadow groups” against early efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

In June, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace published a video of then-lobbyist Keith McCoy speaking on what he thought was a recruiting call. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy said. “Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.” McCoy no longer works for ExxonMobil.

Similarly candid admissions about oil’s attitude toward climate action may lurk in their internal records.

Oil companies are finally promising to change, but how much of their climate commitments are just greenwashing?

According to McCoy, the ExxonMobil lobbyist in Greenpeace’s exposé, the company had also been feigning support for a carbon tax, a policy that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to reduce demand.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, ‘Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,’” McCoy said.

There are other ways oil companies have inflated their records on climate, a tactic known as greenwashing. As of December 2019, the world’s five biggest oil companies had spent a combined $3.6 billion in advertising over the previous 30 years. One of Exxon’s recent marketing pushes has been in promoting its investments in research for using algae for car fuel. Someone who watches these ads might assume Exxon spends a significant portion of its budget on algae, when it accounted for 0.2 percent of its refining capacity.

Despite the rhetoric, the oil industry seems likely to stay true to its core products. As BP America CEO David Lawler said in the hearing, “This doesn’t mean BP is getting out of the oil and gas business.”

Who is calling the shots for the politicians and groups that deny climate change?

Astroturfing is the “practice of creating an illusion of public support for a cause,” according to the environmental news outlet Grist. Instead of expressing skepticism of climate science or promoting controversial policies directly, oil companies and their allies have spent big sums on other organizations that promote its priorities.

One example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has received more than $1.7 million from Exxon and its affiliates before the company left the council in 2018. ALEC has helped reverse renewable portfolio standards and plastic bag bans by pushing model legislation in states. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon also led corporate donors in giving almost $31 million to special interest groups that promote climate change denial.

This is only a small glimpse into the grants Big Oil has given to third-party groups. The public doesn’t yet know what, exactly, the grants were for.

How much current polarization on climate change can be traced back to early disinformation campaigns by the industry?

In 2015, the LA Times and Inside Climate News published separate investigations showing that scientists in the oil industry had urged companies to consider how its products were fueling global warming via internal memos dating all the way back to the 1960s. Instead of heeding these calls, Exxon worked with other top oil companies to form a coalition that would sink a binding global climate agreement in 1998, according to documents.

From the LA Times:

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

What are the end goals of Big Oil’s enormous marketing push?

One of the mysteries of the oil industry is the type of work it contracts out to consulting and public relations groups, which have helped Big Oil craft a benevolent public image.

Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, wonders what the oil industry deems a PR “success.” “Who’s measuring the success of these ads? You’re spending millions of dollars on these ads, how do you measure the win?” he added.

Shedding light on the PR world’s activities could pressure the biggest firms to consider severing their ties with oil giants.

The efforts of oil companies to market themselves also loom large in a growing number of lawsuits alleging malfeasance. Rep. Ro Khanna said Thursday’s hearing is likely just the first part of a series getting to the bottom of oil industry campaigns, with a second focused on the PR industry’s role working with oil companies.

“We have a huge amount of documentation going back 40 years,” said Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes ahead of the hearing, during a call with the progressive group Our Revolution.

On Thursday, the company executives claimed their position reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuels cause climate change. But the industry has not focused on climate-friendly policy in its lobbying.

The four oil companies present at the hearing, along with API, have spent nearly $453 million combined to lobby the federal government in the past decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The analysis suggests the industry has been far more concerned with protecting tax breaks for fossil fuels than it has protecting the planet.

For example, the industry has publicly said it supports the Paris climate agreement, but in the halls of Congress, it lobbied on the matter only eight times out of 4,597 lobbying examples in the analysis. The industry devoted more than half its time lobbying on tax-related issues.

“I don’t think we really need more research … on what these companies have done, and the way they have misrepresented the truth, the facts, and continue to propagate dangerous practices,” Oreskes said on the Our Revolution call. But she thinks the hearing can help the public realize this. “We’ve been lied to … we have work to do to really get that message out.”

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