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Home » Something Non-Human Has Been Here A Long Time – Dr. Garry Nolan (Transcript)

Something Non-Human Has Been Here A Long Time – Dr. Garry Nolan (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Stanford professor and prolific biotech entrepreneur Dr. Garry Nolan’s interview on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast episode titled ” Something Non-Human Has Been Here A Long Time”, filmed on July 7th, 2025.

Introduction and Background

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Dr. Garry Nolan is an immunologist, academic inventor and biotech entrepreneur. Serial biotech entrepreneur. He’s a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and somewhat surprisingly, a ufologist. We talked about his career, his research interests, the rise of AI and his interest in unidentified aerial phenomena.

So, Dr. Nolan, Garry, before we get to the heart of the matter with regards to your interest in unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, let’s talk a little bit about you so that we can situate you in the minds of our readers. So you have a remarkable research background and a technology background. Clue us in a bit and tell us who you are.

DR. GARRY NOLAN: So I’m a professor in the Department of Pathology. I hold the Ratchford and Carlotta A. Harris Endowed Professorship and the major focus of my lab’s research, frankly over the last 30 years since I’ve been at Stanford, has been on the immune system and creating technologies that allow us to collect more and more data about the immune cells and cancer cells that we’re interested in.

And so that’s led me from the development of retroviral techniques for gene delivery and gene therapy. So all the retroviruses and lentiviruses that are used in the world today for gene therapy were developed based on a technique that I came up with called the 293T cell technique. And frankly that’s old technology to me, but it still generates a nice royalty stream.

And then from there it’s about measuring more and more what we call parameters per cell, which are events that relate, we think, to the biology of the cells. And so we’ve created and spun out, I don’t know, probably at least half a dozen companies on that side of things alone. Lately we’ve been moving into artificial intelligence. We’ve started and spun out two companies there, and now I’m actually moving into atomic imaging because I sort of feel like that’s the next level down of information that I need to get at to understand gene function. So I’ve raised the money to create a whole new kind of instrument that can measure things at the atomic level.

Revolutionary Atomic Imaging Technology

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Tell me about that a little bit. What, what? I mean, that’s electron microscope territory. You have a new technology that you’re. I know that’s an old technology.

DR. GARRY NOLAN: Now it’s a fusion of two technologies, something called atomic probe tomography and field ion microscopy. And it’s a way to bring the two together because previously they couldn’t sort of exist in the same machine. So by bringing them together, we can go another order of magnitude lower. We can get down to what’s called sub angstrom, like the bond length between two atoms is the sub angstrom realm.

But this technology that we’ve developed not only can see down at that level, but can also determine what kind of bond structure we have locally. And that has a range of applications all the way from biology through to metals, alloys, nanotechnology, et cetera. And actually, the instrument is already half built down at a lab in here in Cupertino that we’ve set up. So we’re excited about that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So how many companies have you started or been involved in starting?

DR. GARRY NOLAN: About a dozen. And we’ve had about eight successful exits so far.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good track record, all things considered.

DR. GARRY NOLAN: All things considered. One complete failure, but that’s okay. One failure out of that many isn’t so bad.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, if you don’t fail, maybe you’re not trying enough diverse things. I mean, that seems to be particularly true on the entrepreneurial side. Right. It’s very difficult to invent something and then equally difficult to make it profitable or maybe perhaps more. Right. So on the medical side, tell me a little bit more about your research into viruses.

Viral Research and Medical Breakthroughs

DR. GARRY NOLAN: So our research into viruses was. Well, first of all, the retroviruses. I got involved with HIV research back in the day, and that was mostly trying to understand what turned the virus on and off in the immune system. So I was involved with what was called the cloning and characterization of the, what are called transcription factors that turned the virus on and off. And I actually cloned it in David Baltimore’s lab at MIT. When I was a postdoc there, David won the Nobel Prize, actually, for reverse transcriptase. Very famous man, obviously.

So. But when I came to Stanford and using the technologies that we developed, we did everything from Ebola research to Zika to whatever the current manifestation of whatever the plague was that people were worried about. And we even actually saw the first COVID lungs from unfortunately deceased patients. And that’s what really. That actually scared the bejesus out of me when I realized that we’re dealing with something extremely serious with COVID at least in some people.

But most of my research these days is in cancer research and looking at how the immune system interfaces with the tumor and trying to learn about the signals that the usually tumor manifests to turn off the immune system or to disrupt the function of the immune system. And so that required the development of new instruments to see things at a level previously people were incapable of, but then also to develop the algorithms to understand the complexity, because you’ve got thousands of cells in a complex dance with the cancer.