I'm Jennifer Strong, and this is I Was There When--an oral history project featuring the stories of breakthroughs and watershed moments in AI and computing… as told by those who witnessed them. This episode, we meet Dave Johnson, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna. Dave Johnson: Moderna is a biotech company that was founded on the promise of mRNA technology. My name is Dave Johnson. I'm chief data and AI officer at Moderna. mRNA is essentially an information molecule.

When pharmaceutical company Moderna announced the first clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine, it was a proud moment but not a surprising one for Dave Johnson, the company's chief data and artificial intelligence officer. Listen to or read a transcript of "AI and the COVID-19 Vaccine: Moderna's Dave Johnson." When Johnson joined the company in 2014, he helped put in place automated processes and AI algorithms to increase the number of small-scale messenger RNA (mRNA) needed to run clinical experiments. This groundwork contributed to Moderna releasing one of the first COVID-19 vaccines (using mRNA) even as the world had only started to understand the virus' threat. "The whole COVID vaccine development, we're immensely proud of the work that we've done there, and we're immensely proud of the superhuman effort that our people went through to bring it to market so quickly," Johnson said during a bonus episode of the MIT Sloan Management Review podcast "Me, Myself, and AI." "But a lot of it was built on … this infrastructure that we had put in place where we didn't build algorithms specifically for COVID; we just put them through the same pipeline of activity that we've been doing," Johnson said.

These are the people who qualify for membership in Mensa, an exclusive international society open only to people who score at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test. Mensa's mission remains the same as when it was founded in Oxford, England, in 1946: To identify and nurture human intelligence for humanity's benefit, to foster research in the nature of intelligence, and to provide social and other opportunities for its members. Nautilus spoke with five present and former members of the society: Richard Hunter, a retired finance director at a drinks distributor; journalist Jack Williams; Bikram Rana, a director at a business consulting firm; LaRae Bakerink, a business consultant; and clinical hypnotist John Sheehan. Together, they reflect on the meaning of genius, whether it can be measured, and what IQ has to do with it. If you pass that test, all it proves is that you have a certain IQ. That is not the same as making you an intelligent person, never mind a genius.