YouSaid · the spoken record

Vincent Racaniello

lines on the record: 239
first: 2021-09-01
most recent: 2021-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So people tried many, many different vaccines. And in fact, there are no human licensed vaccines that are DNA vaccines, although there is a West Nile vaccine for horses that's a DNA-based vaccine. So if you have a horse, you can give it this vaccine. But no humans.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in fact, we have about a dozen different virus vectors that have been studied for 20 years. And those are the set of vaccine vectors that we're using. So it includes adenovirus. Stomatitis virus, which is a cousin of rabies, but doesn't make people sick. Influenza virus is being used as a vector, and even measles virus. So we're familiar with how to modify those to be vectors, and those are being used for COVID vaccines. And then, of course, we have the new nucleic acid vaccines. So years ago, people said, why can't we just inject DNA into people? Take the spike and put it in a DNA and inject it.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in 10 to 15 years, most cancers will be treatable with viruses. Yeah. And not only can we put things in the vector to kill the tumor, we can target the vector to the tumor specifically in a number of ways. And that makes it less toxic, right? It doesn't infect all your other cells.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're now using viruses At our bidding, we're using them as vectors, not just for vaccines, we can cure monogenic diseases. That is, if you have, if you're born with a genetic disease, you have a deletion or a mutation in a gene, a single gene, we can give you the regular gene back using a virus vector. Answers to we can cure cancers with vectors.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were very precise, and then you splice in the gene for the spike And then you use that to deliver the gene, and it becomes produced as protein, and you make an immune response.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we A virus that will infect humans. Will not make you sick in the case of adenovirus. The years and years of people studying it has told us what genes you could cut out and allow the virus to infect a cell but not cause any disease.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the most modern. But even before mRNA vaccines, we learned that we could use viruses to deliver Proteins from a virus that you want to prevent. And so the Ebola vaccine, we took the spike gene of Ebola virus and put it in a different virus, and we deliver that to people. And that's called a vector vaccine. Some of the COVID vaccines are vectors of different kinds of most famous are adenovirus vectors carrying the spike gene into the cell.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We may not have picked the right vaccine. There was a big fight in the US and other countries between the inactivated polio and the infectious polio vaccines, which ones we should be using because we found out that the infectious vaccine actually caused polio. And eight to ten kids a year in the US alone got polio from the vaccine, which looking back is really not acceptable in my view, although the public health community said it was to get rid of polio. So now we're close to eradicating polio globally. But this vaccine-derived polio is a problem. So now we have to go back to the an activated vaccine, which is tough because it's injected.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could take that virus and put it into an animal and give it polio. And in fact, Parents of some kids in the 60s and 70s who were immunized got polio from the vaccine. The rate was about one and one and a half million cases of polio. So it's called vaccine associated polio. And I always argue that”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That made the virus not cause disease but still make an immune response Those are called replication component. We now have the polio vaccine, which was developed in the 50s after the yellow fever. Then we had measles, mumps, rubella. Those are all replication competent vaccines. And you mentioned that's a good idea. They are all safe vaccines. The only one that has had an issue is the polio replication competent vaccine. It's called Sabin vaccine or oral polio virus vaccine because you take it orally. It's wonderful because you don't have to inject it. Is the perfect delivery Either intranasal for a respiratory virus or orally for polio, it goes into your intestines, it reproduces, and it gives you wonderful protection against polio. However, you do shed virus out.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that. Yeah, that would be the idea. You'd have to engineer it in. Anyway, these were the first one yellow fever vaccine that was made because that was a big problem. And this virus, and the way you do this Back in the old days, it was empirical. So Max Tyler, who did the yellow fever vaccine, he took the virus, which is a human virus, right? I think he used chick embryos. And he went from one embryo to another and just kept passing. He did that hundreds of times. And every 10 passages, he would take the virus and put it in a mouse or a monkey, whatever his model was. And then eventually he got a virus that didn't cause any disease after 200 and some passages. And then that was tested in people. And it became the yellow fever vaccine that we use today. He selected for...”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people are thinking about that because now we're engineering viruses to treat cancers and other diseases. And we may want to put kill switches in them just to make sure they don't run away.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it can be somewhat problematic. Yes, as you might imagine, because once you put that virus in you, you have no more control, right? It's not like you have a kill switch in it, which. Actually, it would be a great idea to put in”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then the next generation of vaccines which arose in the 50s were what we call replication competent where the virus you take and it's actually reproducing in you.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's definitely a variable there, but there's certainly many people that don't feel anything after the vaccines, and there's some that have A whole range of things like soreness and fever, etc. Yeah.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it is definitely a perception because for your symptom may be nothing to me or vice versa, right? And so. You're doing this, it's a little bit of an imprecise science because, and even it's a cultural thing. In some countries something that would make us feel horrible, they wouldn't even bother reporting. No, I didn't have any symptoms. So it's a little bit imprecise and it clouds the results. So if you can measure things, it's always better. But you start out with a symptom. And if you say, if someone tells you this virus, 20% of the people are asymptomatic. They don't report symptoms. That number is probably not a constant. It depends where you did the study. It could be different in China versus South America, Europe, etc. Yeah.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sign is something that someone could measure and tell that you're infected. Virus in your nasopharynx or something else, right? Signs and symptoms. And so in a vaccine trial, they tell you, if you have any of these symptoms, they give you a paper with the exact symptoms listed to make sure you're picking them up, right? So for flu, it would probably be fever, sore throat cough. You call them and then they will do a PCR and make sure you've got flu and not some other virus that makes similar symptoms. And then they would say, Are you a vaccine or non vaccine arm? And count up all the infections and see how the vaccine did, basically.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a good time to say what a symptom is, okay? A symptom. What you only can feel. Only you can feel an upset stomach or a sore throat or that sort of thing.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illness, not infection. We usually don't measure infection when we're testing a vaccine. We just measure sickness. That's really easy to score, right? You do a trial and you say if you feel sick, give us a call.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's what we think. So that's why probably the flu vaccines are just not very good. 60% efficiency at the best, right? Which is not really good.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very easy. You could do it in cells and culture, but eggs were convenient. And in the 1940s, we didn't have cells and culture. We didn't know how to do that. So we had to use something else. It's easy to do, but the process of inactivating the virus with a chemical makes it not the best vaccine you can make. The flu vaccines that we have today, which are mostly based on this inactivation, is called inactivated virus vaccines.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the same collection of chemicals you can use for all kinds of which have been used for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines also. Same technology”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, embryonated so they get fertilized, and there's a 10 or 12 day embryo in it Virus in it, it grows up, and then you harvest it. You get about 10 MLs of fluid, and then you take that, you treat it with formaldehyde or formalin, and it inactivates the virus, so it's no longer infectious. You just inject that into people. And that was the first flu vaccine that was made for the U.S. Army, actually. And then it got moved over to people. We still use that old school tech today.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's really easy to make an old school vaccine. The way the first influenza vaccines were made was actually Jonas Salk worked on them in the 40s. You just grow lots of virus and you grow it in eggs, by the way, chicken eggs.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could do that, sure, but that would not eliminate them from humans. Even if you had the best vaccine, you would never get rid of it in people because there would always be someone who's not vaccinated or in which the vaccine didn't work. No vaccine is 100%.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all deriving That one was called swine influenza. Swine influenza started in a pig, but it had bird. It had RNAs from bird influenza viruses. These viruses are all reassortants of different viruses from pigs and birds and humans. But influenza can cause pneumonia and can kill you as does SARS-CoV-2. So it depends on the virus. So there is another influenza virus that's currently circulating. So right now we have the 2009 pandemic virus that's still around. And then the 1968 pandemic virus, which was the one before 2009, that one is still around too. And that's more lethal. And depending on the season, some seasons, the 2009 virus predominates, some seasons the 1968. And when the 68 is around, you get more lethality.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the there are many flavors or vintages of influenza virus, some are dangerous and some are not, right? It depends on which one, some like the 1918 apparently was very lethal, killed a lot of people. But more contemporary viruses, we had a pandemic in 2009 of influenza. That wasn't such a lethal virus. We don't know exactly why, but it didn't kill that many people. It transmitted pretty well.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the genes are on separate pieces. They're all packaged inside that virus particle of influenza virus, but they're in pieces. And why that's important is because if two different influenza viruses infect the same cell, the pieces as they reproduce can mix and out can come a virus with a new assortment of pieces. And that allows Influenza virus to undergo extremely high frequency evolution. That's why we get pandemics. When we have a new flu pandemics, is because somewhere in some animal two viruses have reassorted and made a new virus that we hadn't seen before.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the influenza viruses, not only is it minus RNA, but it's in pieces. It's in eight pieces. We call that segmented, whereas the corona is in one long piece of RNA.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A minus RNA is not the right strand to make proteins. So it has to be copied first. And then the plus minus is both together. So the SARS coronaviruses, all the coronaviruses have plus RNA. So as soon as that RNA gets in the cell, boom, it starts an infectious cycle. Same thing with polio virus, by the way, which I worked on. Influenza viruses are negative stranded. So they cannot be translated when they get in the cells. So that's tough for the virus because The cell actually cannot make plus RNA from minus RNA. It doesn't have the enzyme to do it. So the virus has to carry it in inside the virus particle. And then when the minus RNA is in the cell, the virus enzyme makes plus RNAs and those get translated. It's a big difference. And then”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting difference. They both have membranes, right? So then they have spike proteins embedded in them. And they're different spikes. In fact, for influenza, there are two main ones. They're called the HA and the NA. But what's inside... Is RNA, but it's very different RNA. And here we have to explain that. Viruses with RNA can have three different kinds of RNA. Can have what we call plus RNA They can have minus RNA, or they could have plus minus actually two strands hybridized together. The plus RNA simply means that if you put that plus RNA in a cell, your cell has ribosomes in it that make the proteins that you need. The ribosomes will immediately latch onto the plus RNA and begin to make proteins.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what drives a field forward when people improvise and come up with new technologies that really make a difference. We have a bunch of those now.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to decide on a target. I'm going to make an antiviral. What am I going to target in the virus? And there are a few things that make more sense than others. Usually we like to target enzymes. I don't know if you remember your biochemistry, but enzymes are catalytic. You don't need a lot of them to do a lot of things. So they're typically in low concentrations in a virus infected cell. So it's easier to inhibit them with a drug. And the coronas have a couple of enzymes that we can target. You figure that out ahead of time and decide what to go after. And then you can look for drugs that inhibit what you're interested in. It's not that hard to do.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, you don't need to work on the virus, you can take bits of it and work. You could take, say, just the spike, right? And say, can we make a vaccine with just the spike? Because that doesn't require BSL3. So, yes”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And the problem with SARS, the COVID virus is it's 30,000 bases. There's a lot of stuff there. What makes it more difficult is that you have to, it's been classified as a BSL3 agent, biosafety level three. So, not everyone has a lab that's capable of doing that, so it limits the number of people who can do experiments. We're lucky to have a few in New York City, but not every place has them. So you cannot work with a virus just out on the bench like we do with many other viruses. You have to wear a suit and have to have special procedures and containment and so forth. So it makes it difficult to do basic experiments on the virus.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you could say you can cut out a gene. You see some genes in the sequence. I don't know what these genes do. Let's cut them out. And then you could cut them out of the DNA. You put the DNA in cells and maybe you get virus out. And you go, oh, clearly that gene's not needed. The virus to reproduce at least in cells, right? Or maybe you take the gene out and you never get any virus, so it's lethal.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stick the RNA and then, of course. And in fact, in January 2020, as soon as the genome sequence was released from China, the Labs all over were synthesizing this 30,000-base DNA.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For RNA viruses, it was difficult. And so then from that point on, for influenza, every other RNA virus and coronaviruses, people made DNA copies, and that's what they used to modify and ask questions about what things are doing, right? What's this gene doing? What if we take it out? What happens?”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, remember, David Baltimore. And Howard has discovered this enzyme in the 70s. Got the Nobel Prize for that. And when I went to David's Lab at MIT, he had the enzyme in the freezer. He said, here, take this and make a DNA copy of”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the start now. Since then, everybody has taken that technique and used it for their virus. You can now do it with SARS-CoV-2. You make a DNA copy of any RNA virus. You can modify it and you put it back into cells and you're modified virus out. So that's an important part of understanding the properties of the virus, it's say in an animal. By changing the virus, you're changing a DNA copy, you're making the virus then and putting it into the animal.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. So I made a DNA copy of polio virus. It's only 7,500 bases. It's much smaller than Corona. And I took that DNA and I put it in a piece of DNA from a bacteria called a plasmid. And you can grow plasmids in many, many bacteria, make lots of them and purify the DNA really easily. And I took that DNA. And I sequenced it because we didn't know the genome sequence of polio at the time. And that took me a year, by the way, because the techniques we had were really archaic. And nowadays you could do it in 15 minutes, right? It's amazing. And I took the DNA, I put it into cells, and out came polio.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nicely so you can study that. But the other thing that's important that we should mention is how do you manipulate these viruses? So these are RNA viruses. Can't manipulate RNA. We don't know how to do it. DNA, because of the recombinant DNA revolution that occurred in the 70s, we can change DNA any way we want. We could change a single base. We can cut out bases. We can put other things in really easily. And if I may. Give it a personal aspect. When I went to MIT as a postdoc in 1979, David Baltimore said, here's what I want you to do. The moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments on viruses has just been lifted. I want you to make a DNA copy of polio and see if you put that in a cell, whether it will start an infection.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interaction, you need to first need an animal of some kind to infect, right? You can use mice. People have used ferrets, guinea pigs, non-human primates, all of the above non-human primates are very expensive, so not many people do that. And then you can put the virus in the respiratory tract. But in fact, none of them get sick like people do. Many people with COVID get a mild disease, but 20% get a very severe longer lasting disease and they can die from it, right? No animal does that yet. So we have no insight into what's controlling that. But if you just want to look at the very first part of infection and the shedding and the transmission, you can do it in any one of several animal models. Ferrets are really good for transmission. They have nasal structures like humans and you can put them in cages next to each other and they'll transmit the virus really.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make it cause a pandemic Millions of people as opposed to SARS 1. Well, the genome is 20% different from SARS-1, say. And in those bases, there are things that make it different from SARS-1. It binds the same receptor, ACE2 on the cell surface. That's remarkable. It has a lot of the same proteins. They look similar. Like if you look at the structure of the spikes, they look similar, but there's enough amino acid differences to make the biological. And what it is, we don't know because. How do you figure that out? You need to study animals because you can't infect people. And the animal models aren't great.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looks really good. That was developed five years ago, but never taken into humans. It could have been ready. So we dropped the ball and then the next decade, 2012, MERS coronavirus comes up in the Arabian Peninsula. This comes from camels and infects people. But probably the camels got it from bats originally. Some time ago. But that never transmits from person to person very rarely. Every new little outbreak is a new infection from a camel. That was 2012. And now here we are 2019, the new outbreak of respiratory disease in China. And this one really goes all over the world where SARS-1 could not. And it's a coronavirus. It's different enough from SARS-1 that it has very different properties.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, some people started making vaccines. They tested them in mice, but they never got into people. And some people started working on antiviral drugs. Nothing ever came of them because industry, there's no disease. It's gone. Why should we make vaccines and drugs? And NIH in the US, you submit a grant and they say, it's too risky. There's none of this virus around. So people were really short-sighted because I always say we could have had antivirals for this absolutely. For sure, no question. In fact, the one antiviral that's in phase three is called Molnu Pyrivir. It's the only one that you can take orally. It's a pill.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can go and pick out an animal, and the guy will slaughter it for you and give it to you. And then, of course, there's blood everywhere, and that's how they got infected. And they figured out that there's this animal called a palm civet. That was the source of virus. The palm civets are shipped in from the countryside. And the palm civets somehow in the countryside got it from a bat. So they went looking in caves in the countryside, and they found in one cave all the viruses that could make up SARS-1. And that was 2000, well, I would say took about five, eight years after that outbreak. So that was the first hint that bats have coronaviruses that can infect people and cause problems, right? And after that, we should have been ready.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we first learned of them in animals, a lot of animals, pigs and cows and horses have coronaviruses. And then in the 60s, we discovered a couple of human coronaviruses that just cause colds, very mild colds that you wouldn't even think twice about, right? And then suddenly in 2003, there's this outbreak of severe respiratory disease in China. It started in November and they didn't tell the world until February. And that was really bad because it was already spreading by the time they told people about it. But this. Went to 29 different countries, only 8,000 people were infected, and then it stopped. And that was the first time we saw an epidemic coronavirus. And what they did afterwards is they said, okay, it looks like it came from the meat markets. They have live meat markets in Guangzhou, in the south of China.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, coronaviruses that have membranes, right? We talked about membranes, they have spike proteins in the membrane so they can attach to cells. And inside, they have RNA. And they are the viruses with the longest RNA that we know of. 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.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So viruses are classified by humans just to make it easier to keep track of them, right? So, this is a coronavirus, which is because when they were first discovered, I think the first ones were animal coronaviruses. They looked at them in 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 place with the highest seropositivity in the US for a while, 68% was a working-class neighborhood in New York City called Corona. Can you beat that, right”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source