Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines | Lex Fridman Podcast #216

1. 0:00 – 3:11

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Vincent Racaniello, professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia. Vincent is one of the best educators in biology and in general that I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. I highly recommend you check out his This Week In Virology podcast and watch his introductory lectures on YouTube. In particular, the playlist I recommend is called Virology Lectures 2021. To support this podcast, please check out the sponsors in the description. As a side note, please allow me to say a few words about the COVID vaccines. Some people are scared of a virus hurting or killing somebody they love. Some are scared of their government betraying them, their leaders blinded by power and greed. I have both of these fears, and too, I'm afraid, as FDR said, of fear itself. Fear manifests as anger, and anger leads to division in the hands of charismatic leaders who then manufacture "truth," in quotes, that maximize controversy and a sense of imminent crisis that only they can save us from. And though I'm sometimes mocked for this, I still believe that love, compassion, empathy is the way out from this vicious downward spiral of division. I personally took the vaccine based on my understanding of the data, deciding that, for me, the risk of negative effects from COVID, short-term and long-term, are far worse than the negative effects from the mRNA vaccine. I read, I thought, I decided for me. But I never have and never will talk down to people who don't take the vaccine. I'm humble enough to know just how little I know, how wrong I have been and will be on many of my beliefs and ideas. I think dogmatic certainty and division is more destructive in the long term than any virus. The solution for me, personally, like I said, is to choose empathy and compassion towards all fellow human beings, no matter who they voted for. I hope you do the same. Read, think, and try to imagine that what you currently think is the truth may be totally wrong. This mindset is one that opens you to discovery, innovation, and wisdom. I hope my conversation with Vincent Racaniello is a useful resource for just this kind of exploration. He doesn't talk down to people, and he's the most knowledgeable virologist I've ever spoken to. He has no political agenda, no desire to mock those who disagree with him. He just loves biology and explaining the fundamental mechanisms of how biological systems work. That's a great person to listen to and learn from with an open mind. I hope you join me in doing so, and no matter what, try to put more love out there in the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Vincent Racaniello.

2. 3:11 – 8:33

   Microbiology by numbers

   1. LFLex Fridman3:11

      You mentioned in one of your lectures in virology that there are more viruses in a liter of coastal seawater than people on Earth. In the Nature article titled Microbiology By Numbers, it says there are 10 to the 31 viruses on Earth. Also it says-

   2. VRVincent Racaniello3:30

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman3:31

      ... that the rate of viral infection in the ocean stands at 10 to the 23 infections per second, and these infections remove 20 to 40% of all bacterial cells-

   4. VRVincent Racaniello3:44

      (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman3:44

      ... each day. There's a war going on. Do you, uh, what do you make of these numbers? Or why are there so many viruses?

   6. VRVincent Racaniello3:52

      So the, the numbers you're quoting, they're in my first virology lecture, right?

   7. LFLex Fridman3:57

      Yeah.

   8. VRVincent Racaniello3:57

      'Cause people don't know these numbers and they get wow, they get wowed by them, so I love to give them. So the-

   9. LFLex Fridman4:04

      By the way, sorry to interrupt, but-

   10. VRVincent Racaniello4:05

       Yeah.

   11. LFLex Fridman4:06

       ... as I was saying, uh, offline, you have one of the best introductory lectures on virology that, uh, I've ever seen. Introductory lectures, period. So I highly recommend people find you on YouTube an- and watch it if you're curious at all about viruses. It, it, um, it... Yeah, there's a lot of times throughout watching it I felt like, "Whoa."

   12. VRVincent Racaniello4:26

       Yeah, that's my goal is to whoa-

   13. LFLex Fridman4:28

       (laughs)

   14. VRVincent Racaniello4:28

       And, and it's what my students tell me. One student once said, uh, "Every day after every lecture, I could go home and tell my roommate something she didn't know-"

   15. LFLex Fridman4:37

       Yeah.

   16. VRVincent Racaniello4:37

       ... and, and it blew her away. So the number of viruses is really an amazing number. So that number, 10 to the 31, is actually just the bacterial viruses in the ocean. So there are viruses that infect everything on the planet, including bacteria, and there are a lot of bacteria in the ocean. And so 10 to the 31 is from basically particle counts of seawater all over the world. So there are more viruses than 10 to the 31, but just in the ocean, and that number is so big. First of all, the mass exceeds that of elephants on the planet by a thousandfold.

   17. LFLex Fridman5:12

       Mm-hmm.

   18. VRVincent Racaniello5:13

       And if you lined up those viruses end to end, they would go 200 million light years-

   19. LFLex Fridman5:18

       Mm-hmm.

   20. VRVincent Racaniello5:19

       ... into space. It's so big a number. (laughs) It's, it's amazing. And then yes, 10 to the 20 some infections per second of these viruses killing bacteria and releasing all this organic matter, and that's part of this what we call the biogeochemical pump, cycling of material in the ocean. Uh, the bacteria die, they start to sink, and then they get metabolized and converted to c- to compounds that, that are needed. A lot of it gets released as carbon dioxide and so forth. So these are actually really important cycles that are catalyzed by the virus.

   21. LFLex Fridman5:54

       Well, it's so wild that nature has developed a mechanism for mass murder of bacteria.

   22. VRVincent Racaniello5:58

       Well, that's one, that's one way to look at it, but it's just what happened, right? (laughs)

   23. LFLex Fridman6:02

       It's interesting. I mean, um, I wonder what the evolutionary advantage of, like, such fast cycling of life.... is. Is it just an accident of evolution that viruses are so numerous, or is it, um, is it a, is it a feature and not a bug?

   24. VRVincent Racaniello6:20

       So the, the fast is it rain- it does not all fast. Not all viruses are fast. Some are 20 minutes per cycle, some take weeks per cycle. Um, but that's just per second. There's so many viruses in the ocean that that's what you get per second, no matter how fast-

   25. LFLex Fridman6:39

       Right.

   26. VRVincent Racaniello6:39

       ... the cycle is.

   27. LFLex Fridman6:40

       (laughs)

   28. VRVincent Racaniello6:40

       But the, I look at it this way, viruses were probably the first organic entities to evolve on the planet, long ago, billions, billion years ago, just as the earth cooled and organic molecules began to form. I think these self r- we call them self-replicators. They're just short things that today would look like RNA, which is the basis of many viruses, right? They evolved and they were able to replicate. Of course, they were just naked molecules. They had no protection, and it was just RNA based. And that, that's tough because RNA is pretty fragile in the, in the world. And, um, it probably didn't get very big as a consequence. But then proteins evolved, and I'm skipping, like, hundreds of millions of years (laughs) of evolution. Proteins evolved maybe without a cell, maybe with a cell. But then to make a cell, there probably were some RNA-based cells early on, but they were pretty simple. But the cells that we know of today, even bacteria and, and single-celled eukaryotes-

   29. LFLex Fridman7:48

       Mm-hmm.

   30. VRVincent Racaniello7:49

       ... they have very long DNA genomes. And you need a lot of DNA to make a complicated cell. And so we think at some point the RNA became DNA. And probably one of the earliest enzymes that arose is the enzyme that could copy that RNA into DNA, which we now know today as reverse transcriptase, which my former boss, David Baltimore and Howard Temin co-discovered. And that, that enzyme arose and copied RNA to DNA. And then you could build big cells with D 'cause DNA can be millions and millions of bases in length. And RNA, the, the longest RNA we know of is 40,000, uh, bases, not much bigger than the SARS-CoV-2.

3. 8:33 – 16:32

   From bacteria to an organism

   1. LFLex Fridman8:33

      What, what would you say is the magic moment along that line? I saw it was, um, one or two bil- billion, maybe three billion years it took to go from bacteria to, to s- like, complex organism. Like, it seems like Earth had a very long time, like, not a very long time without life.

   2. VRVincent Racaniello8:55

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman8:56

      And then a very long time with very primitive life. Um, maybe I'm discriminating calling bacteria (laughs) primitive life, but-

   4. VRVincent Racaniello9:03

      Yeah, people would object to you- (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman9:04

      Yeah. (laughs)

   6. VRVincent Racaniello9:04

      ... doing that for sure. (laughs)

   7. LFLex Fridman9:06

      But it seems like complex organism, when you s- starts becoming something like, um, I don't know what's a good, uh, not animal-like, but more complexity than just, like, a single cell. Um, what, what do you think is the magic there? What's the hardest thing? If you were trying to engineer Earth and build life and build a simulation, so obviously we're living in a video game, what this is.

   8. VRVincent Racaniello9:27

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LFLex Fridman9:28

      So if you're trying to build this video, what's the hardest part along-

   10. VRVincent Racaniello9:31

       So bacteria-

   11. LFLex Fridman9:31

       ... this evolution pathway?

   12. VRVincent Racaniello9:32

       ... are mostly single cells. They do make colonies. They get together in biofilms, which are really important, but they're all single bacteria in that. And the key is making an organism where cells do different things, right? We have skin cells and eye cells and brain cells, and bacteria never do that. And the reason is probably energy. Bacteria don't, can't make enough energy to do that. And so there was another cell existing at the time, the archaea.

   13. LFLex Fridman10:04

       Mm-hmm.

   14. VRVincent Racaniello10:06

       And the idea is that a bacteria went into an archaea and became the modern day mitochondria, the energy factory of the cell. And that now let that cell develop into more and more complicated organisms like we have today. It was all about energy.

   15. LFLex Fridman10:21

       So the mitochondria, the energy, uh, the mitochondria is the magic thing.

   16. VRVincent Racaniello10:26

       I think so. Uh, it says actually not my idea. It's Nick Jones. Have you heard of Nick Jones? He's a evolutionary biologist in the UK and he's, he's done experimental work on this. And it's his idea that the defining point was the ability to make a lot of energy, which a mitochondria can do. It's basically a whole bacteria inside of a, a bigger cell. And that becomes what we now call eukaryotes. And, uh, uh, that they can get more and more complicated. So let me bring you back to the viruses.

   17. LFLex Fridman10:53

       Yeah.

   18. VRVincent Racaniello10:53

       I want to finish that story.

   19. LFLex Fridman10:54

       Yeah. Which points of viruses come along?

   20. VRVincent Racaniello10:56

       So remember we have these pre-cellular, they're called pre-cellular replicons, right? And, um, so we have a pre-cellular stage where we have these self-replicating molecules, then cells arise, uh, and then the self-replicating molecules invade the cells. Bec- why? Because it's a hospitable environment. And I mean, they didn't know that. They just went in and it turned out it was beneficial for them. So it stuck. And they replicate inside the cell now where they have pools of everything they need, they get more and more complicated, and then they steal proteins from the cell to build a protective shell.

   21. LFLex Fridman11:33

       Right.

   22. VRVincent Racaniello11:34

       And then they can be released as virus particles. They're now protected. They can move from host to host. And because they're at the earliest stages of cellular evolution, they can diversify to, to infect anything that arises. And that is why I think (laughs) there's so many of them, and everything on the planet is infected, because the ancestor of everything was infected many years ago.

   23. LFLex Fridman11:57

       So it's easier to steal than to build from scratch. So, like, it's easier to sort of break into somebody else's thing and steal-

   24. VRVincent Racaniello12:06

       Yes.

   25. LFLex Fridman12:06

       ... their proteins.

   26. VRVincent Racaniello12:06

       Yes.

   27. LFLex Fridman12:07

       (laughs)

   28. VRVincent Racaniello12:07

       My colleague, Dixon DePommier, calls viruses safe crackers.

   29. LFLex Fridman12:11

       Safe crackers.

   30. VRVincent Racaniello12:12

       (laughs)
4. 16:32 – 20:31

   AlphaFold 2

   1. VRVincent Racaniello16:33

   2. LFLex Fridman16:33

      Maybe this is, uh, a good time to take a quick tangent. What do you think about AlphaFold2? I don't know if you've been paying attention to that.

   3. VRVincent Racaniello16:39

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman16:40

      But, uh, them, uh, DeepMind solving the protein folding problem and then also releasing... well, first of all, open sourcing the code, which is, for me as a software person, I, I love.

   5. VRVincent Racaniello16:52

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman16:52

      And then second of all, also making, like, 300,000 predictions or something like that for different protein structures and releasing that data.

   7. VRVincent Racaniello17:01

      Yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman17:02

      Uh, so on the side of... 'cause you make... you're saying there's dark matter.

   9. VRVincent Racaniello17:06

      Right.

   10. LFLex Fridman17:07

       Like, is there something, um... what... first, what are your general thoughts, level of excitement about their, uh, their work? And second, how can that be applied to viruses? Do you think we'll be able to explore the dark matter of virology using machine learning?

   11. VRVincent Racaniello17:24

       Yeah. Absolutely, because in all this dark sequence, you can translate it and make a protein. You can see what a protein looks like. It has what we call an open reading frame, right?

   12. LFLex Fridman17:33

       Mm-hmm.

   13. VRVincent Racaniello17:34

       A start and a stop. And right now, it's just a bunch of amino acids, but if we could fold it, maybe the fold would recog-... would be like something we already know.

   14. LFLex Fridman17:43

       Mm-hmm.

   15. VRVincent Racaniello17:43

       Some protein fold, which gives you a lot of clues, right? 'Cause there are only so many protein folds, uh, (laughs) in biology, and that dark matter is probably one of them. So I think that's very exciting because for years, I followed structural biologists for years, and, you know, in the beginning, we couldn't even solve structures of viruses.

   16. LFLex Fridman18:04

       Yeah.

   17. VRVincent Racaniello18:04

       They're too big. We could do small molecules like myoglobin. I think that was the first one done. Took years to do that. Then as computational power increased, then they could start to do viruses. But it took a long time. X-ray crystallography be-... dependent on getting crystals of the virus, right? And now we can do cryo-electron microscopy, which is much faster. Uh, you could solve the spike of SARS-CoV-2 was solved in two months by, by Jason McLellan here in, uh, Austin actually at the beginning of the, the pandemic. But you're limited. You can't do huge proteins. You can only do moderately sized ones. So, or I sh- actually, you can do viruses but you can't do small proteins. So that's speeded it up, but it's still too fast to solve. Uh, you get a new protein, you wanna solve its structure. So if we could predict it, and I know from talking to structural biologists, this has been their holy grail from day one.

   18. LFLex Fridman18:58

       Mm-hmm.

   19. VRVincent Racaniello18:58

       They wanna be able to take a sequence of a protein, put it in a computer, and have the, the structure put out without having to do all the experiment. So that's why this is very exciting that-

   20. LFLex Fridman19:07

       Yeah.

   21. VRVincent Racaniello19:07

       ... you can predict it. That mean it's not finished obviously and there's more to do. But I think there will be a day where you could take any amino acid sequence and predict what it's gonna look like.

   22. LFLex Fridman19:17

       See, but-

   23. VRVincent Racaniello19:17

       Yeah.

   24. LFLex Fridman19:18

       ... like aren't structural biologists gonna get greedy? So once you have that, don't you wanna go more complicated then? Don't you wanna go ... 'Cause that's, that's just the first step, right?

   25. VRVincent Racaniello19:27

       Sure. Sure.

   26. LFLex Fridman19:27

       To go from amino acid to the structure.

   27. VRVincent Racaniello19:29

       Yeah.

   28. LFLex Fridman19:29

       Then there's like multiple protein interactions. Like, how do you get to the virus?

   29. VRVincent Racaniello19:34

       Well, so that's what the ultimate goal of getting a structure is, that then you can do experiments and figure out what the structure means, right? So many ... In the old days, structural biology was a career in itself. You worked with people who had a system and just solved proteins for them, and then you moved on to another one. You didn't really do any experiments. The other people got to do all the interesting experiments.

   30. LFLex Fridman19:56

       Right.
5. 20:31 – 45:57

   Simulating an evolutionary arms race

   1. LFLex Fridman20:31

      reinforcement learning is used in AlphaZero, for example, to learn chess and Go.

   2. VRVincent Racaniello20:36

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman20:37

      And that's using the self-play mechanism where the thing plays against itself-

   4. VRVincent Racaniello20:41

      Sure.

   5. LFLex Fridman20:41

      ... and learns better and better.

   6. VRVincent Racaniello20:42

      Yeah. Yeah.

   7. LFLex Fridman20:42

      Whether you can ... I wonder if you can simulate almost evolution in that way for a s- for primitive biological systems-

   8. VRVincent Racaniello20:49

      Sure.

   9. LFLex Fridman20:49

      ... have them in simulation fight each other and then see what comes out. Like a super dangerous virus comes out or a super like, uh, Chuck Norris type of thing that defends against the super dangerous virus.

   10. VRVincent Racaniello21:00

       You could.

   11. LFLex Fridman21:00

       And it's all in simulation.

   12. VRVincent Racaniello21:01

       Absolutely. So an example would be w- we have all these variants of SARS-CoV-2 arising, right?

   13. LFLex Fridman21:07

       Yeah.

   14. VRVincent Racaniello21:07

       Which, which look to be selected by, uh, immune responses. But we now, we know what amino acids are changing in the spike and how they block antibody bonding. You could simulate that.

   15. LFLex Fridman21:20

       Mm-hmm.

   16. VRVincent Racaniello21:20

       You could say, eh, the, what, what is the antibody looking at? You c- these are ... Where antibodies bind on proteins are called epitopes, right?

   17. LFLex Fridman21:27

       Mm-hmm.

   18. VRVincent Racaniello21:28

       You could map them all and change them in a simulation one by one and s- and go back and forth between the antibody and, and the virus. So all these ... Evolution is a, is what we call an arms race, right? The virus changes and then it evades the host, and then the host can change. The host takes longer to change though, unfortunately. It takes geological (laughs) time. But it can, and then the virus can change and it can go back and forth. And we can see evidence of this in s- in genome sequences of both viruses and their hosts. And so you can take a protein in a host that is a receptor for multiple viruses, and you can see all the impacts of virus pressure on it, and you could simulate that for sure. And that's just one thing that you could do. You could simulate, uh, changes in say a, an enzyme that makes it resistant to a drug and predict all the drug resistance. But, but the problem is people like me, the experimental virologists don't know how to do any of that. So we need to collaborate with people. I guess-

   19. LFLex Fridman22:27

       With all, with other humans.

   20. VRVincent Racaniello22:29

       (laughs) We do that. We do that.

   21. LFLex Fridman22:30

       Okay.

   22. VRVincent Racaniello22:31

       But with people from a field that we're not used to, like I suppose people who ... Would it be AI, I suppose?

   23. LFLex Fridman22:39

       Yeah, machine learning people.

   24. VRVincent Racaniello22:40

       Machine learning people. And you would say, "Look, this is the biological problem. Is there a way we can use your tools to attack it?"

   25. LFLex Fridman22:46

       The problem is those people are-

   26. VRVincent Racaniello22:49

       (laughs)

   27. LFLex Fridman22:49

       ... a- antisocial introverts that, uh, (laughs) -

   28. VRVincent Racaniello22:53

       (laughs)

   29. LFLex Fridman22:53

       ... that have a place like this and try to hide from other people in the world.

   30. VRVincent Racaniello22:57

       Yeah.
6. 45:57 – 1:07:41

   The most terrifying virus

   1. VRVincent Racaniello45:57

      right?

   2. LFLex Fridman45:57

      What would you say is the most fascinating, terrifying, surprising, beautiful virus to you? So, of all the viruses you looked at, sometimes when you just sit late at night with a glass of wine looking over the sunset, which virus do you think about?

   3. VRVincent Racaniello46:16

      So, uh, uh, fulfilling all of those adjectives is hard, right? Fascinating, exciting, terrifying.

   4. LFLex Fridman46:25

      Well, the terrifying is an optional one, I think, 'cause may- maybe that puts a lot of pressure.

   5. VRVincent Racaniello46:30

      Uh, see, terrifying is, to me, it, it... I'm not terrified because I think we can handle, uh, most viruses, uh, as you see with this brand new one that emerged a year ago, we, we can handle it.

   6. LFLex Fridman46:42

      From a virology perspective.

   7. VRVincent Racaniello46:44

      Yeah, I mean, the, the human perspective (laughs) is a different story, right? That's always an issue, but... Um, so I, I think there, there are a couple of different categories of virus. So we could do the, the terrifying, and I think rabies is a terrifying virus because unless you're vaccinated, 100% certainty you're gonna die.

   8. LFLex Fridman47:05

      (laughs)

   9. VRVincent Racaniello47:06

      So you get bitten by a rabid raccoon or bat or dog, whatever, and, you know, and there's still 70,000 deaths a year of rabies throughout the world because there are a lot of feral dogs running around that are infected. Unless you're vaccinated, you're gonna die. There's nothing we can do. But we do have a vaccine which we can actually give you even after you've been bitten, which is the only vaccine that works that way. It's a therapeutic, right? It will treat your illness 'cause the disease takes so long to develop, d- you know, eventually you get all kinds of neurological issues and paralysis and so forth. But it takes time, and you can be vaccinated, and it will prevent that in the meanwhile. So people always say, "What's the most lethal virus? Is it Ebola?" I said, "No, it's actually rabies." It, unless you're vaccinated, it will kill you.

   10. LFLex Fridman47:55

       But it's-

   11. VRVincent Racaniello47:56

       (laughs)

   12. LFLex Fridman47:56

       Maybe it's, uh, is good to linger 'cause we'll talk about vaccines, uh, a few times today.

   13. VRVincent Racaniello48:01

       Sure.

   14. LFLex Fridman48:01

       It's good to linger on cases where vaccines have clearly, um, undoubtably helped human civilization.

   15. VRVincent Racaniello48:11

       Mm-hmm.

   16. LFLex Fridman48:12

       And it seems like, uh, rabies is a good example.

   17. VRVincent Racaniello48:15

       Oh, rabies is great because everyone knows what happens when somebody gets rabies, right? They have fear of water, f- hydrophobia. Uh, your, your body becomes spastic and stiff and jerks around and-... you lose consciousness, you can't, uh, no, no more, uh-

   18. LFLex Fridman48:35

       It's, it's not a fun ride to death.

   19. VRVincent Racaniello48:36

       It's horrible. It's a horrible way to die. So I think most people know that. It's been popularized enough in, in media, right? So that nobody would probably object to getting... "Oh, I, I was just bit by this raccoon and it ran off." "Okay, well, we should assume it's rabid. We should immunize you." And most people are okay with that-

   20. LFLex Fridman48:55

       Yeah.

   21. VRVincent Racaniello48:56

       ... 'cause they know the consequences. And it's also pretty rare, right? It's not like something that you're trying to get into the arms of, you know, 3- 250, 300 million Americans. That's hard, but-

   22. LFLex Fridman49:08

       Yeah.

   23. VRVincent Racaniello49:08

       ... the, the, the, the few thousand every year is, it's easy.

   24. LFLex Fridman49:11

       So the transmissibility is difficult, right? It has to... Oh, it's not, it's not airborne, so-

   25. VRVincent Racaniello49:16

       It's not airborne. It's just... You has to be, you have to be bitten. Although some, some people claim you could walk into a cave and the bats, you know, breathing out rabies virus could infect you. But I don't really think that's well s- that's well substantiated.

   26. LFLex Fridman49:32

       Yeah.

   27. VRVincent Racaniello49:32

       I think it's a bite.

   28. LFLex Fridman49:33

       How would you do a study on that? (laughs)

   29. VRVincent Racaniello49:34

       Yeah. It's, it's very hard to do. You'd have to collect the vapors in the cave and show that they're infectious, which... And by the way, (laughs) someone emailed me the other day, you'll like this. They say, "Why can't we just immunize all the bats in the world (laughs) against these viruses?" And I said, "Well, how would you do that? They're caves everywhere, right?"

   30. LFLex Fridman49:52

       Yeah.
7. 1:07:41 – 1:22:25

   SARS-CoV-2

   1. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:41

   2. LFLex Fridman1:07:41

      So we talked about what is a virus, we talked about some of the most dangerous and deadly viruses.

   3. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:46

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:07:47

      Can we zoom in and talk about COVID-19 virus?

   5. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:51

      Sure.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:07:51

      I don't know what your preferred name is, but-

   7. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:53

      Well, there're two names.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:07:54

      ... maybe for this-

   9. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:54

      Right, the virus is SARS-CoV-2.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:07:56

       Yeah.

   11. VRVincent Racaniello1:07:56

       Which is hard, it's long, right? And then COVID-19 is the disease. So you could say the virus of COVID-19, that's fine. Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:08:03

       The virus of COVID-19. But for the purpose of this conversation, we'll, every once in a while just say COVID.

   13. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:08

       It's fine.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:08:08

       (laughs)

   15. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:09

       No problem. (laughs)

   16. LFLex Fridman1:08:10

       What, what is this virus from a... I don't know how many ways we can talk about it. I think from a basic structural, like the varian structure, biological structure perspective-

   17. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:25

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:08:25

       ... what is it? What are its variants? Can you describe the basics-

   19. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:30

       Okay.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:08:30

       ... the important characteristics of the virus?

   21. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:32

       So, viruses are classified by humans just to make it easier to keep track of them.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:08:37

       Yeah.

   23. VRVincent Racaniello1:08:37

       Right? So this is a coronavirus, which is because when they were first discovered, I think the first ones were animal coronaviruses. They, they looked at them under the electron microscope and it looked like the solar corona. And that's all there is to it. And I have to say that early in the outbreak, the, the place with the highest seropositivity in the US for a while, 68%, was a working class neighborhood in New York City called Corona.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:09:05

       Mm-hmm.

   25. VRVincent Racaniello1:09:06

       Can you, can you beat that? Right?

   26. LFLex Fridman1:09:08

       That's crazy. Yeah.

   27. VRVincent Racaniello1:09:09

       So coronaviruses, they have membranes, right? We talked about membranes, they have spiked proteins in the membranes so they can attach to cells. And inside they have RNA. And they are the viruses with the longest RNA that we know of. No, none other comes close. For some reason, they're able to maintain 30,000. So SARS-CoV-2 RNA is 30,000 bases of RNA, and some of the other coronas are even longer, 40,000.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:09:37

       This is a f- uh, coronas are a family of viruses-

   29. VRVincent Racaniello1:09:40

       Yes.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:09:40

       ... that included the w- what, the, the one you mentioned before, version one? (laughs)

Episode duration: 3:28:40