Virus Hunting - What's the Point of the Programme?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The whole point of the programme is to identify which viruses might spill over and cause future pendemics. There's four key classes of experiments that you perform on an animal virus to determine whether it's a good candidate for causing a pandemic inhumans. You want to know, how tightly does this virus bind to human target cells, how readily does it actually infect those cells,. How readily does the backbone of the virus licate and churn out new copies of the virus irrelevant human tissue types. And because you can't test it in humans, of course, how readily is it transmitted in animal models chosen for their similarity to humans.

In this episode of the podcast, Rob Reid and Kevin Esvelt discuss USAID’s new “Deep VZN” program, which aims to discover new pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes to the world. Esvelt estimates that there are currently around 30,000 people who could then easily build them.

If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.