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

“The virus is SARS-CoV-2. It's hard, it's long, right? And then COVID-19 is the disease. So you could say the virus of COVID-19, that's fine.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that we have our early, probably the most of the, when we're studying viruses since 1900, right? Most of that time was because of diseases they caused. The first viruses discovered, yellow fever, virus smallpox, polio virus, influenza virus. Those were all because people got sick and they said, oh, look, this is a virus that's associated with it. And so we got good at learning how to take care of these infections, making vaccines and so forth over the years. And it's only in the last 20 years that we recognize that they're more viruses out there that are far more interesting, perhaps. But we've learned how to deal with the bad ones for sure.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, That human exists encourages viruses to infect us, right? When we were hunter-gatherers living in bands of 100 people, very few viruses because it was hard for the virus to go from one band to another. And perhaps a hunter, one of these humans would get an animal and bring a virus at the camp and some people would die, but it would never spread. Another. And then, when we started to congregate in cities, we figured out agriculture and so forth and how to harvest animals. Then we could get bigger and bigger populations, and the viruses went crazy. And they went from animals to us. So measles went from cows to humans when humans learned to domesticate cows and started gathering in big cities.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That 0.8% that were left had some form of resistance. They were variants. Every organism, not just viruses, makes mutants and there were some variants of the rabbits that could survive infection. And then in subsequent years, the virus became less lethal. And then the mosquitoes had a better shot of transmitting it from one rabbit to another if the rabbit lived longer. That's the selection probably. And so in the end, the rabbits lived on. The virus was there. It evolved to be more transmissible and less lethal. So that's the main thing.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now they had a problem. So they decided to use a virus to get rid of these excess rabbits. And they used a virus, a pox virus, called Myxoma virus, which is a natural virus of a different kind of rabbit. But for these European rabbits, it was quite lethal. And it's spread by mosquitoes. So they said, okay, let's release this virus. And the first year 99.2% of the rabbits were killed.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a strong selection pressure against being lethal and being more transmissible. Those two seem to work in opposite ways. And now we don't have a lot of data to support this. This is kind of a thought experiment, but there is one experiment done in Australia. Years ago. I don't know if you know this, but in the 1800s, the hunters in Australia imported a rabbit from Europe so they could hunt it. Because the native rabbit in Australia was too fast for them. They couldn't shoot them. So they brought in this European rabbit. And they reproduced out of control. Within a couple of years, they were everywhere. Millions of rabbits and all the watering holes.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people are being cared for at home or in hospitals, the doctors and nurses get virus, but people walking around, you're not walking around when you have Ebola. You're too sick. You have black, bloody diarrhea. You're vomiting. You're bleeding from your skin and mucus membranes. You're not walking around. You're not going to parties. So I think that's part of it, that if the infection is too lethal, you're simply not a good transmitter. And I think transmission is probably one of the most powerful selection forces for viruses because a virus always has to have find a new host. If it doesn't, it's a startup that fails, right? If it doesn't find a new host, it's gone. And so anything that makes Virus transmits better is going to help it. And if killing you, being less lethal is part of that, that works too.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a philosophical question, right? Because we could talk about why we haven't observed it. I mean, one issue is that You're killed too quickly by a highly lethal virus, you're not going to transmit it very well. So Ebola can kill you quite rapidly. And most of the transmission occurs.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a respiratory virus, you inhale the droplets virus and they reproduce in your upper respiratory tract, what we call the nasopharynx, right? The nose and going back to that little cavity just above your mouth. The virus reproduces really well. And then as you talk and sneeze and cough, you expel droplets, and then those are inhaled by other people. And then they reproduce. And for SARS-2, we now know there's a lot of reproduction just before you feel anything, if at all. So there's a lot of shedding and transmission before you get symptomatic. And many people don't ever get symptomatic. So they spread really easily. So that explains why some viruses can transmit a lot better than others. And if one happens to knock you out, then you're never going to transmit because you're in the hospital like SARS 1.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you compare Sars 1 and 2, you get somewhat of an answer, right? SARS 1 was more deadly. In fact, over half of the time when people were infected, they ended up in the hospital because they were that sick. And then The peak of virus shedding from them happened long after they went in the hospital. So it's easy to contain the infection when you're in a hospital. There was not much pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic Shedding with SARS-1.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I think you should let curious scientists just follow what they're interested in to a certain extent. You can't, you know, in science, we say we have translational research where we say, okay, here's some money, go cure cancer or diabetes or heart disease, whatever, right? And that's fine. But that often doesn't work out very well. What works better is to say, you have a good lab, you have a good track record, here's some money. Something, and that's where PCR CRISPR recommoninant DNA, all that stuff, which has made the field explode. That's all it came from, not from people saying I want to cure genetic diseases by gene editing, but by saying, what are these repeated things in this bacterium doing? Yep.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of it could be. Sure. I think the general principles, for example, how does the virus cause volatile organics to be made? It must be turning on some genes and you could learn principles from that, how the virus might do that. Sure. I think everything is broadly applicable. So to say it's not useful to study viruses of insects and plants is just wrong. Because in science, you probably know this. Maybe in your field it's the same. If you're curious, you're going to run into interesting things that you never... Planned on, right”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are so many things that impinge on our behavior, but Yeah, I think it's possible. I think it's highly possible if it does it in a plant, why not change some other organism's behavior? I think it's fine. Anyway, those fascinate me. There are lots of examples of those that are fascinating and how they work. People are trying to figure out. But there's not a lot of money to work on, you know, insect and plant viruses unless you're going to the USDA. So they don't get a lot of work moving forward.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can't do the experiment to test it, right? We have to observe, and that's always hard when you're observing because there's so many things that can confound what you're looking at.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked out this way. It just evolved. And you know, evolution is sometimes hard to trace, right? Like Darwin famously said he could never figure out how an eye evolved from a single cell, right? But it did.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's altering the behavior. Because somehow the virus infecting the plant cells gives off these organics and attracts aphids. And furthermore, Somehow when the aphid bites, it tastes horrible. So they immediately leave with the virus they've just picked up and go to another plant to spread it. So they're attracted and then repulsed at the same time.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then one more thing to answer the interesting, what are some of the viruses you really are fascinated by? There are a number of viruses that have clearly been shown to alter host behavior, and that's how they spread. I think those are fascinating. For example, Some viruses of plants. That are spread by aphids. And the aphid bites the plant, the virus reproduces in the plant, and it somehow engineers the plant to give off volatile organics to attract more aphids, which will spread the virus. That amazing”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you were, in fact, many physicians work in countries that have Ebola, so they get vaccinated because they understand the choice.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They only put it in a few thousand people. It's not like it's been in hundreds of thousands of people like the COVID vaccines has been. So it looks like it has high efficacy, but we'd like to have more data side effects maybe are not so great. There are a couple of different available vaccines. Some have been tested more than others. I would say this would probably not be widely accepted in the US.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At most, at most, usually a few hundred. And the biggest ever, in fact, this is why we didn't for years have an Ebola vaccine. The US military, together with Canada, developed an Ebola vaccine for service people, right? They wanted to say, well, we're sending people into these Ebola areas. We want a vaccine for them. So they had developed it through all the preclinical, which means before it goes into people. And that stopped because there was no money to do a phase one and a phase two and a phase three. In fact, for a phase two and three, you need to have infections going on because you're looking at how well the vaccine prevents infections, right? So then there was a West African outbreak in 2015, 2013, 2015, the most cases ever, 25,000. So they got to test the vaccine.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is difficult because there's not a lot of Ebola, right? It's not a continuous ongoing thing. There are sporadic outbreaks here and there.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be 50 to 90, but that's in Africa where the healthcare isn't great. You saw when cases of Ebola came to the US, we could take care of it. We knew how to take care of it. We had fancy hospitals and so forth. And now we have a vaccine. So we can, and the vaccine is really good, but there are many governments in Africa that are suspicious of us and they don't want to use our vaccine.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Arabian Peninsula, they have a MERS coronavirus issue. Every month, there are a couple of cases where a camel will infect the human, and the human can get very sick. So respiratory disease, very much like COVID. And so camels are very common there. They're raced. They're used as pets. They're eaten. So there's a lot of human camel contact. But the number of cases are rare to a month. So you don't want to immunize all the humans. So the idea would be to immunize the camels.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horses got infected and they died, and the humans who would take care of them would die also. So now they immunized the horses. Prevent the well, to save the horses, probably that's the motivation because these horses are hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? And then the people don't get sick because the horses don't get sick. You don't want to immunize all the people because it's too rare, but that approach is called one world health approach, which means everything's connected on the planet. And we have to think of everything in the grander scheme, not just us.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have viruses as well. So the rabies immunization is the only One I'm aware of for wild animals. We do immunize lots of other animals. We immunize chickens and pigs and cows, even fish, farmed fish. We pick each fish up and give it an injection when it's a small fish. But that's mostly so that the farmers get a good yield. We don't really care about the animals, right? We want a good yield for market. And then there's some examples where we... Immunize animals to prevent spillovers into people. There's a disease called Hendra in Australia, which was discovered in the 90s. It turns out there are bats, fruit bats, that have this virus. And the bats are fine, but sometimes they fly into horse stalls, and the horses get infected. And these are in Australia it was initially race horses, which are very expensive, right?”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life in the Wild is very tough, I think. Most animals have to, well, the carnivores anyway, they have to catch their food every day.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you have to get their consent before you do it. But we do. Immunized wildlife against rabies. We have rabies vaccines for wild animals. There are a whole bunch of them that get rabies. And we put it in bait and drop it from helicopters in the woods. And it drops down the incidence of rabies and people. People hiking, get bitten, and so forth, it drops the incident, so we can do that.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 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, someone emailed me the other day, you'll like this. They say, Why can't we just immunize all the bats in the world? Against these viruses. And I said, Well, how would you do that? There are caves everywhere, right? Said, well, maybe you could just go and aerosolize that.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you're bored. It just has to be bitten. Although some people claim you could walk into a cave and the bats breathing out rabies virus could infect you, but I don't really think that's well substantiated. Think it's a bite.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horrible. It's a horrible way to die. So I think most people know that it's been popularized enough in media, right? So then nobody would probably object to getting, oh, 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. 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 250, 300 million Americans. That's hard. The few thousand every year, it's easy.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arabies is great because everyone knows what happens when somebody gets rabies, right? Do you have fear of water, hydrophobia, your body becomes spastic and stiff. Shirks around, and you lose consciousness, you can't no more”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get bitten by a rabid raccoon or bat or dog, whatever. And there's still 70,000 deaths a year of rabies throughout the world because a lot of feral dogs running around that are infected. Unless you're vaccinated, you're going to 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 because the disease takes so long to develop 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, unless you're vaccinated, it will kill you.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the human perspective is a different story, right? That's always an issue. So There are a couple of different Categories of virus. So we could do the terrifying. And I think rabies is a terrifying virus because unless you're vaccinated 100% certainty you're going to die.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, terrifying to me, I'm not terrified because I think we can handle most viruses, as you see with this brand new one that emerged a year ago. We can handle it.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're the ones that we know the structures of, right? So, someone sent me last year a 3D model of SARS-CoV-2, but it's beautiful. It's actually cracked open so you can see the RNA. And the spikes are sticking out, and they even put some antibodies sticking onto the spikes. I mean, when I show this on a live stream, people love this. They go, Oh my God, that's beautiful. It is, it's absolutely gorgeous. My virus that I worked on most of my career, polio virus, I have a 3D model of that, which I actually just had made. It's gorgeous. And you can have it made in any color you want, right?”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the cell, they're not living anymore. So it's kind of, I think it's kind of like a spore, a spore of a seed, although the seed just doesn't work because the seeds, the cells in the seed have the ability to make their own energy and so forth. But a bacterial spore, and it's the same thing, doesn't do anything unless you add water and nutrients and then it starts to divide. But it doesn't need to get into a cell. It's very different from a virus. So that's why the particle. And when people think of virus, Always thinking of the particle, and that's why I say it can't be alive because the particle can't do anything on its own. But if you think of a virus as an organism with a particle phase in a part in a cell, then it makes sense to be alive.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've seen many people say, Oh, they have to be. They have nucleic acids, they evolve, they mutate. That's all true, but they don't do it on their own. The particles in my mug are just not doing any of that unless they get into a cell. So a virus-infected cell is alive. I totally agree with that because in fact, when a virus gets in a cell, it converts it into a virus-making factory, if you will. It's no longer a cell. Some people call it a virus cell. I don't really like that, but it's fine. So that's what I'm talking about. The particle is not alive. You can have your virus infected. But the particle, it just would not do anything forever without getting inside of a cell. But once it's in a cell, it is alive then, but it's no longer a particle. It's taken apart and nucleic acid is moving around the cell. It's making proteins. Eventually, it makes new particles. And then those particles release.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why I tell my students be careful about the anthropomorphizing because you're going to apply your values to a virus and you have a different value. You're human and you have what you think is the reason for this outcome may not be right. That's all. Just be open-minded.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean the point is, I think anthropomorphizing to a certain extent is fine because it helps people understand. But when you start to say, I think the virus is doing that because then you're putting a human lens on it and you may be wrong. Because you don't know why things happen for a virus. So right now we have variants emerging and people say, well, I think it's because the antibodies are selecting for variants. That's a good idea, but it may not be the only thing that's going on.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all passive, and it's just through so many years of evolution you select something that works and it continues. And what survives then goes on with perhaps a slightly different approach.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That inject them in, they're sucking sap out and they inject virus at the same time. Or farmers, they have contaminated farm equipment and they roll over the plants and introduces viruses. So those fungi and plant viruses, they don't have this specific receptor binding to get them into the cell, but everything else, yeah, the virus binds to something on the surface very specific. It's taken into the cell because that's what cells do when things bind their exterior. They take it in. Because in most cases, it's good. It's something they need. And so the virus slips in. I guess you'd call that a Trojan horse, right?”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They all have to get into cells. There are a couple of exceptions, though. There are viruses of fungi. And plants. So let's do the fungi. Fungi would be like yeast. The yeast cell wool is pretty hard to get through. So viruses typically don't attach to a yeast and get inside. Rather, they just live in the yeast forever. They multiply as mostly nucleic acids, and as the yeast divide, they go into the daughter cells. And that's how they exist. Plant viruses, also the plant cell wall, would be very hard to get across with a, by binding a protein. So plant viruses get into plants either by...”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some are. They don't have nuclei. They don't have mitochondria. They do have a nucleic acid, they have a membrane, and then, of course, there are spikes in the membrane that allow them to attach to cells. And so that completes our two different kinds.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Membrane. So our cells are coated with fatty membranes, right? Our cells, the outer plasma membrane, right? That's the same thing.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of baggage Yeah, it's expensive for them to reproduce. Yeah. And they don't move quickly. Yes, the RNA viruses are the fast moving members. So that's what a virus is. We call them obligated intracellular parasites. And then I told you there's DNA and RNA. But then let's go further. The nucleic acid is not naked. Because naked nucleic acid in the world isn't good. I mean, it existed in the pre-cellular world, but there probably weren't a lot of threats to it then. Naked nucleic acid doesn't last long in the environment. So they're covered. The nucleic acid is covered. It can be covered with a protein shell, a pure protein shell, or it can have a membrane around it, which would be lipids from the host cell.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say a bat in some cave somewhere. It's not just one genome, it's millions of different genomes of all kinds, all within the framework of, say, coronavirus, but they're all different. And one genome in there might just be right for infecting a person if it ever encountered that person. I mean, that's the thing that...”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much faster. And in fact, when I have an electron evolution, I don't know if you've listened to that when you should. It's really. I think it's really interesting. RNA viruses exist at their error threshold. Which means they can't make any more mutations when they reproduce, otherwise they're dead. They're evolving at their error threshold. DNA viruses are hundreds of times lower than their error threshold. And we know this, we can do an experiment to find that out now. Why that is is a good question. That's the reason why RNA viruses are far more successful. In fact, many more hosts, and they're very, I would say, slippery. They can change hosts really quickly because in any animal harboring an RNA virus.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, the relics, in my opinion, are the most successful viruses, the RNA viruses. And as SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, we can talk about why they're so successful. You have, broadly speaking, viruses with RNA genetic information, which are relics. Of course, they're contemporary. They have adapted to the modern world and the modern organisms living in it. And then we have DNA-based viruses, which are extremely conservative and slow. They're very successful. You know, everyone has a herpes virus infection, but they don't get the news like the RNA viruses do, the HIVs and the influenza viruses and the SARS-Coronaviruses. They get all the press and they're RNA-based because RNA lets you change more so than DNA.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old school, these are what we call relics, yeah, relics, and this has got a name, it's called the RNA world, which I think is great.”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DNA and RNA Broad categorizations RNA, and these are genetic material, can be two different chemicals. So RNA, everything else on the planet besides viruses is all DNA based. You and I are DNA-based. Everything on the planet today is DNA-based, except some viruses are RNA-based. And that's because, as I mentioned earlier, the first life that arose on the planet was RNA”
2021-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #216 – Vincent Racaniello: Viruses and Vaccines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source