TWiV 1023: Covering science with Katherine Wu

this week in virology the podcast about viruses the kind that make you sick from microbe TV this is twiv this week in virology episode 1023 recorded on July 7th 2023. oh how about that 23-23 I'm Vincent rack and yellow and you're listening to the podcast all about viruses joining me today from Ann Arbor Michigan Kathy Spindler hi everybody here it's a very pleasant 79 Fahrenheit which is 26 Celsius mostly sunny wow it's 30 C here in New York City it's so we're a little warmer so at least I didn't say 2023. if if this were episode 2023 in the year 2023 that would really something but episode 20 23 is not happening this year that's for sure also joining us from Madison New Jersey Brianne Barker hi it's great to be here it is 89 Fahrenheit um outside um not that in my office but very hot outside uh and I'm excited to be here we have a guest for you today she is a writer for Atlantic the Atlantic and she's just outside of Boston so we'll get to see what the weather is up there Catherine Wu welcome to twiv hello wonderful to be here and the weather is not so different than it is in Jersey it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit 32 degrees Celsius hot humid and thoroughly disgusting well I love hot and humid weather being of Mediterranean extraction but not everybody likes it that's for sure well thanks for joining us we uh we have all mentioned you here on Twitter a number of times in the past few years so we're interested to learn more about you you know Kathy I'm looking through the notes there's nothing to announce I know SV is in the history books in the can and uh uh Amy has hired a technician all right I don't have to advertise that unless she wants to which could very well be uh so we're ready to move uh right into science here so I just want to tell you Katie I subscribe to the Atlantic just so I could read all of your articles in the past week so you can tell you you can tell your bosses that um I I gave them some business right so they had the um that you know I got the digital subscription which you can't escape I guess but also for for no extra charge you get the magazine and um I I want to just carry it on the train it looked like an old timer reading a print magazine right nobody does that anymore I thought that would be fun I've got a question about the print version because I don't get that and that is all the things that you hyperlink in your article do people reading the print version get that as footnotes or not at all or not at all uh they are still Linked In the online version but as you can imagine that would create a I think a total mess of the footnotes so hmm yeah I thought it would be cool to have both and I actually also you know I'm a sucker for Instagram when an ad comes up I buy it so I got an ad for uh for the New Yorker which is another one of my favorite and so I subscribe to that also in the print and I'm having them both sent here to the incubator so when people visit they can they can read intelligent matter right that's exciting I'm only a subscriber to the digital for the Atlantic so next time I come to the incubator I'll have to look at the print version yeah it's no extra charge uh to do that you know so as we'll do that all right let's move on to you Katie uh let's start by getting uh a little bit of your history I want to go back as far as you remember I know you're not going to remember when you were two years old but you could tell us where you were born and educated and how you got to uh where you are today sure uh well I have it on good authority for my parents that I was born in Southern California in the Los Angeles area and I spent all through high school there and I guess the kind of amusing um slightly embarrassing part of my origin story is that I grew up not really liking science at all um I thought it was really boring all of my classes in science I could pass by just memorizing things and that's genuinely what I thought science was you know memorization looking through the glossary having an answer for every multiple choice question on every exam um so ironically I sort of grew up wanting to be a writer to the horror of my parents who wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer and so I went to college I immediately declared English as my major I went to Stanford um but I was surprised and maybe kind of pleasantly surprised that I really missed having numbers and data in my life I didn't realize that you know enter entering a major meant diving so fully into something and leaving so much else behind so I took a few science classes and it was really in college that I was able to figure out that science was so much about questions and storytelling and you know figuring out different ambiguities it overlapped with a lot of creative writing in ways that I hadn't expected and so by my junior year I had fully switched over to science um I had made the move into microbiology and it was really through taking a couple classes through still one of my favorite mentors to this day Stanley Falco who was a big player in medical microbiology who unfortunately passed away a few years ago but I took some classes from him spent a lot of time just talking to him in his office about his career he encouraged me to join a lab and see if I liked it I did and that's kind of how I stumbled into the the academic path um from there I went to grad school at Harvard joined Eric rubin's lab to study you know ostensibly mycobacterium tuberculosis but really spent a lot of time studying its benign cousin mycobacterium sphygmatis um and that's that was my deep foray into Academia that lasted a few years who else do you remember from Stanford in in your uh in your classes I'm just curious because I know a bunch of people there I I loved Stanford um I I am one of those people who thoroughly enjoyed College after feeling kind of meh about a lot of schooling before that um you know the campus was beautiful all the classes I took were great I was a human biology major which is still to this day one of the most popular Majors which meant they you know kind of our core classes they paraded a lot of really big names in a lot of human genetics and anthropology and psychology and of course you know molecular and cell biology in front of us um was really really fun I took some great classes from some great parasitologists um didn't actually take any virology in in college um not many you know it's interesting because I I almost went there and if I had you might have had me for virology but it's one of the reasons I didn't go because there was not a lot of virology there no yeah not even in any virology labs and so the lab I worked in undergrad was a gut microbiome lab and I really enjoyed that I thought I'd be doing bacteria forever and ever and ever I have to say that there are two after I I decided not to go a few years later they hired Carla Kierkegaard and Peter Sarno so their their virologists they hired um it was the CMV guy Kathy with the red hair at Stanford he was there and then he left to go to a company anyway they hired him so they did hire a few uh virologists but Stan Falco was the chair of the department and um he uh you know he he met me a few times and tried to recruit me and I remember once he's driving me from the airport and he said that's my house over there the one that's the color of puppy outspoken he was a New Yorker he's probably from Brooklyn right gosh where was he from he was definitely from somewhere in New York but maybe the Bronx or Queens yeah anyway um did you ever did you ever encounter Pat Brown no that he of the the fake meat right um impossible burger or Beyond Burger whatever it is he he started that company and uh microarrays of course yes the floss journals yes good other things too but yes at some point he decided to save the Earth and emissions from animals and now he's making beef and uh veal and chicken and so forth but um love to get him on sometime and tell his story anyways uh so you went to Harvard grad school uh and you talk what were you doing what what kind of first oh mycobacteria Ms magmatis Right um but you know my my whole thesis project was about uh proteases um you know what is sort of driving cell division what do bacteria have to sort of keep and protein homeostasis to manage successful cell divisions especially when you're growing so slowly like so many mycobacteria do have mycobacteria in my mind today because I I just got an email that Bill Jacobs is is giving a talk in a couple of weeks and he wanted to talk to me so I might make a foray up to Columbia it's on a Friday so I have to make sure I'm back here for uh yes and so that was in micro when you were at Harvard yes uh well you know we our graduate program was ostensibly biological and biomedical Sciences but I worked in the microbiology Department it was very as an Alum of one of the sister programs I know exactly what you're talking about yeah yeah that was at the medical school I presume right it was at the medical school in Longwood so I rarely spent any time on the Cambridge campus right and what did you do next well I guess this is where it gets kind of sort of weirder uh I spent I actually I loved grad school I loved Eric's lab I loved bench work I loved lab meetings I had actually entered grad school thinking maybe this is not for me maybe this is just kind of a I don't know a stop on the way to something a little different but by I think my fourth year of grad school I was thoroughly convinced that I was going to post-doc and try the whole 10-year track thing I applied to a bunch of different postdocs and uh my now husband was well I guess he is still a doctor and so we were trying to plan to figure out you know some school where we could both get jobs and eventually get maybe faculty positions but the summer before my final year of grad school I ended up doing a triple A S mass media Fellowship so you know aaas the same organization that publishes the science family of journals runs this Fellowship where they put scientists in training at different media Outlets across the country Smithsonian where I ended up National Geographic The Washington Post also a bunch of local papers like you know St Louis Post-Dispatch San Diego Tribune and I did that for 10 weeks the summer of 2018 I got to write just a bunch of science news articles for Smithsonian and I loved it so much more than I thought I would I loved it so much that I thought you know maybe this is not fate I don't necessarily believe in fate but the timing was so good I was about to defend I figured why not just try to do this full time and see what happens so you defended and then instead of doing a postdoc you started writing yeah uh instead of doing a postdoc I actually backed out of a postdoc that I had sort of kind of informally accepted um which was very tortured decision but I got a job in Boston at Nova you know this the PBS science documentary series doing science news articles for their website um and I was there for a little over a year freelanced for a little bit after that and then ended up at the times and then the Atlantic after that and so all of these were done with you in Boston you didn't have to move for any of this right right so Nova was already based in Boston uh so I did not have to move when I got the job at the Times the original plan was for me to move to New York but I got that job in December of 2019 and something very large happened after that that made it really difficult to move so I never ended up moving to New York at all yeah I was thinking if you had maybe you would have coffee with Carl Zimmer and stuff like that right in place I I did move because my husband was in training at Yale so uh you know the the one kind of I even hesitate to call it a silver lining because the pandemic had so few of those um but the silver lighting was that I didn't have to move to New York I could move to New Haven to be with my husband and got to hang out with Carl at his house sometimes that's cool he has three cats so nice that's important yeah he does come in now and then I know because once he came to our studio here and I interviewed him and had to coordinate with um him uh being in New York on one of those days yeah well and and so now you've been in the Atlantic for uh since 2019-ish is that right since early 2021 I was at the times for nearly a year um and then yeah it's been two and a half years at the Atlantic example so I guess you did some uh covet coverage at the times before you moved to Atlantic right quite a bit that was like 90 some percent of what I did at the times because I started there June of 2020 and things were absolutely bananas the news was coming in at all hours every second of the day and the deadlines were not impossibly tight but near impossibly tight yeah that's what Carl said yeah so how do you decide which stories um you're going to work on both at the times was that something that was assigned now at the Atlantic do you is that was that assigned or do you choose yeah it's a great question and you know the answer really differs a lot depending on whether I'm talking about the times or the Atlantic which makes some sense you know the times is explicitly a newspaper um you know one of the chief jobs at the Times is to break news to be first to you know really be giving readers sort of short digests of what is happening right now um so a lot of the things that I was writing about was coming as a direct assignment for my editors like oh my God we just saw this thing can you write it up do you think it's important to like start calling people like right now kind of thing or I would see something a you know a tweet from a scientist back when Twitter was a little bit less insane um I would get a text from someone alerting me to something uh news would break elsewhere and we would sort of scramble to verify it it was a lot of rushing and I think that sort of affected the proportion of my pieces that um you know I guess were coming for me as sort of original ideas versus everyone sort of coming together in a slack Channel and saying wow something is happening right now who is free to write it up as soon as humanly possible effectively that led to some assignments coming in at 10 30 pm at night some assignments coming in at five in the morning who like who's awake um and you know I certainly did Pitch some ideas I was especially fascinated by writing about all things Immunology uh a lot I did a lot of pieces on testing especially rapid testing and the kind of rise and fall of that and the the sort of cultural changes around that um but the things I covered really I think shifted as the the discourse around the pandemic continued to change and then of course uh in a big way when I moved to the Atlantic very different culture there has that changed now is uh is it less crazy and are you more able to pitch your own ideas yeah it's been really interesting I think at the Atlantic uh even when I was hired I was hired explicitly to write about the pandemic because that was January of 2021 so still very much in the thick of it I still spent I'd say the vast majority of my time in the first year and a half writing about covid um still a lot of Immunology but I sort of expanded my palette to do some viral Evolution a lot about variance definitely a lot about vaccines and then just you know what how people were reacting to the pandemic why people were continuing to care or what happened if they didn't started writing a lot more about long covid and really the the thing that changed significantly was you know my editors most want me wanted me to write about things that I was invested in of course it mattered immensely and it still mattered the most what readers were most interested in but also they cared what what sort of mattered to me what was sticking in my brain what I was obsessed with and we didn't have to be first to everything necessarily but we wanted to provide fresh perspectives forward-looking perspectives things that helped sort of Define the moment you know not predicting the future in any sense but giving people a sense of well here's what people are talking about right now why is that why does this feel so important why are people so stuck on this one question why are people so stuck on this one piece of misinformation so on and so forth so there are 10 issues a year and do you have something to write for every one of them and are there things that get posted for instance online in between how does that scheduling work yeah so I actually don't really write for the magazine um I think especially with newsier items as you can imagine publishing for the print magazine is something that unfolds over months if not years and so I pretty much write exclusively for the web the web has a lot more articles than end up in the print magazine uh newsier things happen there you know there are still many days where something happens and we write something and it goes up the same day uh which is just not going to fit with a print Magazine's publication cycle so we're I think on our desk which is science technology and health I think we're publishing as a group three to four pieces a day so a lot a lot a lot and they really range in length 800 words to thousands of words but the flip side is everything that is in the print magazine does end up online I'm not I don't want my print magazine anymore if you don't write for it I mean I got it to read your stories on the train what am I going to do now I guess there's other good stuff though right oh there's so much so much terrible dark secret is I actually don't get the print magazine either just mostly because a few years ago I swore off getting print magazines because it's like you subscribe to one you subscribe to 800 and suddenly they're all in your coffee table just you know guilting you it works really well Vincent if you read it on your iPad yeah I I totally agree with with Katie that um I had too many um magazines and I got rid of them all really but um you know I wanted to subscribe to Atlantic for this podcast and uh and the offer is no extra charge for the print right so I thought I would love to to sit on the train and show people that you can still read something because very few people do uh physics and I realize it's not good for the trees and so forth so after a year I'll cancel the the print magazine but I just wanted to try it right I mean I still personally prefer reading things in a physical form like when I read fiction when I read for pleasure I am always borrowing a book from the library or buying the paperback online it just it's what I grew up doing it's nice to turn a page but this this whole if the internet hadn't happened boy publishing would be so different right I mean you would be writing for print magazines and not writing three articles a day for sure no definitely not and I mean you know the times still obviously manages a daily newspaper and you know a lot of the pieces that I wrote for the times you know were in the paper the next morning which was kind of mind-boggling to see but even by then it's it's out of date it's it's it's kind of wild how the internet has changed what is breaking news and what is old news that the standards for that are just absolutely like it goes down to the second like if the post publishes something four seconds before the times they beat them oh my gosh four seconds well I mean it's changed all kinds of uh of activities it's changed education you know you can do podcasts you can print online but um and and not always for the better right because this idea that you need more clicks makes some sites just publish every 10 minutes and you can't have good stuff every 10 minutes yeah I I I'd say that's true you know there is this fine balance between quality and quantity always always always and you know speed is a big trade-off there I think you know the times and many other newspapers are extremely good at publishing really good accurate stories very quickly but I think there is a limit you know you go a little too fast you make more mistakes you go a little too fast and it's going to be exactly the same piece that someone else writes on the same deadline just because there's not enough time to build a deeper richer story with more context um but unfortunately that's that matches with the reader attention span so many people out there aren't even clicking the full piece they read the headlines they read the tweet and they move on that's right it's absolutely right and and uh Carlos Carl Zimmer was complaining about that he said yeah we don't have a lot of time to check things but also people don't read the whole article and it's it's really too bad but the same thing goes for science journal articles I think people read the headline and then they go look at the Tweet summaries you know some somebody summarize it and they don't read the paper which everything is changing but it even happens with emails you know people read the subject line and the first line of the email and they don't get to the bottom where there's important stuff yeah oh my gosh so how do you actually figure out which what part of that content and that complexity and that depth to get or who to talk to to help you get the story hmm uh good question I mean there's there's not going to be one single answer certainly for every piece that I do but I think what is nice is once I've written about a topic over and over and over again whether it's like covid or um you know uh I don't know polio vaccines is something that I've done a couple times like those are sort of different levels of um I wouldn't even call it expertise because I'm not necessarily an expert in both but my level of comfort just grows with every additional piece I write on a subject um I start just getting more comfortable being able to almost predict what people are going to tell me I always want to confirm it but a few strategies that I use I always try to talk to a lot of people for every piece um I never ended up quoting everyone I speak to just because there's not always room but I call I think as many people as it takes when I start to be able to anticipate what people are going to tell me when their answers start to get very similar I feel comfortable that I have reported enough that I have a good grip on the subject I read papers um just to sort of verify the facts we also do have official fact checking at the Atlantic so I'm constantly annotating my pieces like here is a statistic I pulled it from this paper we're going to hyperlink to it but also here it is for the fact Checker so that they can click on it and get a sense of like is this up to date is the stat from 2002 or is it from 2022 um we definitely want it to be the latter if it's available um and then I think in just in terms of just building a piece what I put in what I leave out that's always tricky I think before I start drafting a piece even before I start reporting a piece I try and get a general sense of this is what I think the story is you know for instance um covet Immunology is like a topic but for it to be a story it has to have um almost a thesis um a punch line a through line that gives it an arc a beginning middle and end like I don't know something about uh how difficult it is to do you strain or variant selection for this Falls vaccine that's more of a story um that is going to fall within the general category um of coveted vaccinology or coveted immunology and once I have that sense you know there are probably related items that could be really interesting like you know the the precise machinations of how the virus is evolving which is get definitely going to deserve a mention in a piece like that but it would probably be outside the scope of the piece to go into depth about like every variant in subvariant iteration and every single sort of immunological pressure on the virus that is causing it or you know prompting it to to evolve in response to that for instance so you you mentioned get talking to people and getting a sense for what might be correct by you know how many people are saying it but sometimes it's the minority that ends up being right right and so I think of everyone initially said oh I'm a crown is mild and you actually wrote an article about that which uh you basically questioned it is is that really the case um and now it turns out that it's not a study was just published which says it's just as virulent as the original it's just the immunity that makes a difference so I mean that must be hard if you have 20 people saying the same thing and then there's one outlier what can you do yeah and yeah that is sometimes the case I think in situations like those you know I can't always know I am definitely playing the or I'm attempting to play The Observer and trying to be as objective as I can but I do try and pay attention to whatever discourse is happening online or in one of our back channels I can sort of sneak my way into if I have a sense that there is disagreement I mean absolutely the dominant narrative especially in the media and I think in the public was that Omicron was mild and trivial nothing to worry about like oh the virus has evolved to be like completely benign this is a common cold now everyone was saying that but it depended you know how you defined everyone um I don't always necessarily trust the dominant thing that's in the media especially if it is something that is going to be like harmful for a particular group it didn't fit with my understanding of you know SARS Kobe 2's Evolution up until that point uh I knew there was this dimension of immunity that you know was not really really being appreciated in that whole discourse and I I was talking to yes it was maybe a minority of people that I was hearing from but there were several scientists on my radar already pushing back against that narrative um I can think of several who were tweeting about it or even just texting me about it at Out hours expressing their frustration and so it really helps when I have trusted sources that I go back to over and over sometimes I would especially at the height of the pendant where I'd check in with them and say hey what are people talking about right now what are people disagreeing about right now like what is frustrating you or are you seeing something in the media in other outlets that you know feel that you feel needs more Nuance can I add something to this conversation doesn't always turn into a story but in that case it was a really fruitful one yeah I I um I think if you have no time if you have to crank out three stories an hour then you hear five people say the same thing and that's what you go with I'm not saying you but you know other writers and that's a that's problematic because obviously you need more time to figure out if the minority is actually got something right yeah so how does it work when it could become difficult to play The Observer like what if for example you suddenly had to write an article about mycobacterium smegmatis where you might have uh you know a lot of your own opinions on things how do you sort of deal with that related to what you're hearing from others yeah that's a fantastic question actually and I think it's a it's a big kind of lingering question in the whole world of Journalism certainly not just science journalism which is you know a lot of times the task at hand is to be as objective as possible but there's no journalist not even any scientists that is going to be a hundred percent objective 100 of the time you develop biases you develop passions you you know get really excited about certain things and I think especially with journalism um you develop relationships with people that would make you feel terrible if you were to write anything potentially negative about them so I I doubt I wouldn't rule it out I doubt that I would ever have to write about Michael Jackson's big bodice um but if it did come up I might say actually I think this piece is better suited for someone else to write about I'm too close um you know and I might say the same thing about tuberculosis depending on what uh the exact issue at hand was if it was a piece that's centered on for instance my grad school advisor I would 100 recuse myself from that it's not appropriate for me to do that um you know that is someone who became you know a very close mentor to me is still you know a dear part of my life practically family for me I would not be able to write objectively about him or anyone else in my lab probably the same thing goes for a lot of other mentors I had in the department um that said you know for instance Harvard even the Harvard School of Public Health is a very big place I don't have a necessarily personal relationship with the majority of people there very comfortable interviewing someone for from that institution but I draw a hard line if I know that I would not be able to write about someone negatively it's a good litmus test not saying that every time I write about someone I would write something negative about them but if I'm not able to um it shows me that I would not be able to do my journalistic due diligence that said there are topics that I think I have a personal relationship with that I can fully acknowledge in certain pieces so for instance if um you know there's some amazing pieces on the Atlantic and other places uh where writers have come forward and said I have long coven but I am you know I'm including myself in the piece but I'm also going to interview a bunch of other experts to give me perspective but at some point in the piece I will sort of reveal the fact that I have long coveted maybe that was what gave me a vested interest in this topic I think as long as the the journalist is sort of disclosing what either could be a conflict of interest or just a perspective that would affect the way that they've reported on something the sorts of questions that they asked um the sort of main thrust of the piece um they just want to have an open almost dialogue with the reader to the extent that they can can you give us some insight as to how you actually do your writing and you know how you get going how you incorporate all the interviews that you've made and you must have this big stack of something it's not going to be paper I guess but it'll be bits how do you get it together and start writing it's it's really daunting I think you know it's it's it's not unlike having a giant pile of data and a lot of it is negative data and starting to think oh God I have to put together a manuscript and submit it to a journal somewhere um really just getting started figuring out like what's figure one what's figure two what's going to go in the supplement all of that is a question of structure and scope what belongs in the story what belongs at the Forefront of the story and and what order does It Go um so those are actually parallels that I think a lot about you know obviously science writing for a scientific journal is going to be incredibly different than what ends up in the Atlantic or the times or anywhere else really um but it's not so dissimilar that I haven't taken some lessons from that I think generally at the beginning of a process I have a decent sense of what a story is going to be about um that can always change drastically depending on what people tell me so sometimes people will ask me even before I interview them like so what's you know what's the angle of the story and sometimes I'm like I don't know it depends what you tell me um but generally speaking uh I end up with a ton of interviews I ask a lot of the same questions but I also try and tailor questions to each individual person's expertise and what they want to talk most about once I have all these interviews I will sort of start to outline I'll think back on all the conversations I had I'll jot down notes on what jumped out at me um you know whether it was like something funny someone said that would just add color to a piece a personal anecdote that maybe a patient told me that really illustrates the sort of the emotional Contours of a disease or just something that surprised me sometimes the things that surprise me are the most interesting things for me to write about because it gets me started on a bunch of other questions that I would have never otherwise addressed once I have a good sense of what has jumped out at me I try and put them in a logical order how could I open this piece how can I you know grab the reader um you know with something creative something interesting something that will make them keep reading do I have a a strong selling point for the piece something that will uh you know help generate a headline help generate the sort of thesis of the piece and then oftentimes at that point I start to work backward um if I want the reader to Come Away with say these three takeaways about the effectiveness of vaccines or you know uh whether or not vaccines can or cannot block transmission or block infection if I want them to have certain takeaways can I work backward and get a sense for if they need to know this what is the bare minimum amount of information for them to understand that point with enough Clarity and you know as few distractions as possible that they can get to that point most everything else can go especially if I'm giving the reader new information if I'm sort of challenging them to sort of learn as they go along the piece I don't want to overload them with information I don't want to inundate them and I don't want to give them too many tangents that might distract them from coming away with those main points do you ever write something and then throw it out but it was good for you to write that to get understanding a hundred percent I think on average if I'm writing say a 1500 word piece my first draft will be somewhere in the range of like 2500 and then I I cut it down before I send it to my editor and inevitably I'm a chronic overwriter so the editor will end up cutting even more but yeah sometimes I will write 400 words and it's much better said as 120 and that is just I I lose some detail but I gain a lot of clarity I think I'm wondering if how far into the English major you got in terms of writing training and if you ever had anything that would be anything like real journalism training or if you just came by it naturally yeah so really I think the last time I had formal training in journalism and I wonder if I can't even call it formal I did my high school newspaper but I chose not to do that in college because I was more interested in creative writing I thought for a while I might be a fiction writer or just you know a non-fiction writer a memoirist or something even but I I was in the English major for about a year and a half I declared a human biology Media or somewhere Midway through my sophomore year and then by the end of junior year I had some specialized into microbiology and infectious disease but I kept taking English courses and I actually did a creative writing minor alongside my human biology major because it was something that I was really passionate about I just had no idea I could possibly blend the two until grad school frankly cool what do you think was the hardest part about covering the pandemic oh gosh I mean this is still something that is difficult um because I'd say I I realize you asked this question before and I didn't fully answer it but um you know when I first joined the Atlantic I'd say still 90 of what I was writing was covet related now gosh it's maybe 20 25 but I'm committed to continuing to cover infectious disease I think so much of it has been getting people to care getting people to read There were spikes in interest that almost perfectly tracked uh the spikes in hospitalizations throughout the pandemic that's of course when people were most interested and but they were interested in very specific things they were interested in like is this vaccine working like How likely is it that I'm going to catch this particular variant like how harmful is this variant very sort of personal health focused questions a hundred percent understandable but getting people to care about I think like the machinations of viral Evolution getting them to care about like specific things in epidemiology um even writing pieces that were maybe a little bit of a gloomier perspective like actually no this virus has not magically evolved to be completely mild no this is not a common cold yet sometimes people were not very happy clicking on those pieces and so I think getting people to stay engaged getting people to remain invested in ways that would maybe affect their perspective on the pandemic and affect their daily actions whether or not to mask even that sort of thing it was tough and you know certainly my fellow writers and I got a lot of uh emotional reactions from readers when we weren't always writing what they wanted us to write did the does the Atlantic provide you with metrics to see how each of your articles is doing they do so there's a way to sort of log into a site to get a sense of you know how many clicks did this article get when did those clicks come and also how long are people spending on the page it gives you a good sense of are they just looking at the headline are they reading the first few lines and stopping or is there a high likelihood that they spent enough time on the page that they actually reached the end of the piece um but I'll be totally honest with you I don't spend a lot of time looking at those numbers because they kind of give me hives um the scariest part of being a writer for me is just how public this all is that was such a big change from being a bench scientist we're like oh no I I spilled my mini prep No One's Gonna notice you you mess up here and it's it's very public it's it's a lot so I actually like if I get reader email that says you know thank you I really enjoyed this or you know this really helped me understand X Y or Z that's the feedback I value most rather than the number of clicks or the number of Twitter likes or reshares or anything like that well if you go ahead sorry I was gonna say do you have uh any part in the headline writing or is that someone else yes and no I think you know you've probably all heard and maybe even tweeted about the fact that like a lot of writers don't end up writing their final headlines I think that's generally true across most outlets at the Atlantic you know we kind of Workshop headlines with each other um everyone actually jumps in and suggests different things but generally like once it goes up the Atlantic does um headline testing which you may have heard of a piece will appear in different places with different iterations of the headline and usually it's like the most popular one that wins and that I don't have a say and it's kind of like which is the most clickable which looks the most appealing so it's it's kind of a medium space um I think headline writing is a it's one of the curses of Journalism I've always hated it I've always felt very very stressed about it because you can never encapsulate a single piece of ending length in like what 10 words maximum 65 characters it's impossible it's terrifying and you know sometimes editors um I think especially at some other Publications I've worked at do swoop in with a headline that doesn't fully capture the the main idea of the piece and that can get a little contentious or stressful well you can um certainly get more clicks by making a certain kind of headline right and and maybe the headline doesn't even reflect the conclusion of the article but one small aspect of it and that that's often not fair I tell my virology class every year if any of you are going to be headline writers please do not ever write a headline that says the virus is mutating because that's like saying the Earth is flat and they laugh like crazy because I don't know if headline writers go to college or not but boy sometimes they're they're just not right and if you complain to the author as you said they say we didn't write it so there's not much you can do about it but yet but Katie if you listen to all the twiv you know that many of your articles have resonated with us over the past few years where it seemed that many many people were missing the Mark we often said hey look at look at her article this week it's saying exactly uh what we're saying in fact you covered something things that we talked about and the one that comes to mind is the tattoo article that you wrote on another podcast of our Cindy life you're on immune I talked about that very briefly as well so um we appreciate your your writing and your perspective and I think probably being a scientist in the field has something to do with it yeah I I like to think so I mean and I actually will say I had heard vaguely about that macrophage tattoo uh paper like when it came out but it was actually immune that reminded me of its existence so uh when I when I saw that there had been follow-up work on it um that's part of what inspired me to write that piece and um the other great thing about listening to immune and twiv is you know I've used both Cindy and Brianna's sources in in my pieces of it I don't think I would have heard of them if not for these podcasts but yeah I mean I do like to think that having a background having a PhD has enhanced my work I think the flip side of that is there are things I've actually had to actively um learn in transitioning from science to journalism and I certainly don't have the I think in-depth training and journalism that a lot of my colleagues have that make them incredible journalists in ways that I'm not you know so it's a big trade-off I don't think I am a superior journalist I'm just a very different kind of science journalist um but yeah the things I've had to um learn you know I think when I started science writing I was very much of the mind that like oh you know my main job is to get people excited about science like science is this great thing that like we should all be on board with and should feel connected with and I do still feel that way to some extent but back to the idea of being an objective Observer part of my job is also to hold Science And scientists to account you know scientists or humans sometimes they make mistakes there are people with scientific backgrounds that sometimes act in bad faith and sometimes it is my job to call that out even though it does sometimes make people wonder like should I be trusting scientists and of course the answer is like you should certainly trust the majority of science that's coming out but there's going to be bad data some places there's going to be data that's manipulated there's going to be data that is purposely misconstrued and you know here are some of the the ways to to look at the whole institution that gives you a sense of like what is going right and what is going wrong I think another thing that I think about often is um you know my first drafts always have to be edited they always have to change they always have to improve in the hands of my editor and I think I still lean toward being overly detailed I'm always very stressed about like well what if we didn't put in these like 16 other caveats a lot of times they do belong in a piece but other times they can be a distraction if it's something that I need to bring up and then immediately dismiss in the next sentence maybe both sentences can just go again if the the goal is to get the reader to take away some big picture points um sometimes if you over inundate them with the caveats to begin with they might be so distracted or LED down in a different path that they may not take away the main points and so I sometimes have to let the little things go which is tough because I want to put in like panel J and figure six it's always so I presume your editors are not scientists right they're looking at the writing they're looking at the writing but I mean they're also like trained science journalists actually a couple of them have either like Masters um in in in like a scientific field I think one of them spent a couple years doing a neuroscience grad program um but I mean they they are incredibly good at reading papers they have really sharp eyes for like is the data really saying this so it's not just the writing they all they're also looking for logical consistencies and inconsistencies which I really appreciate and our fact Checkers are definitely very good at that kind of thing as well you mentioned um that you feel like there are some of the pieces of Journalism training that you're missing that some of your other colleagues might have I'm kind of curious what kind of skills or pieces do you feel like um those might be uh maybe this is just me being like but I really like your articles I mean I I you know it's impossible for me to give a complete answer to that because I don't know what I I still don't know but I think some of the things that I had to just learn by doing or making mistakes or watching other people do it like it was an intuitive to me for instance when I first started this that like for instance I shouldn't interview people that I'm close to uh like if I if I stumbled across a topic that I knew really well because I was you know close with someone in grad school who had studied this my first instinct might have been like oh I know who to call for this like we can talk for hours about this and they already know who I am go pick up my phone call um but now I realized it was a conflict of interest um that was something that I sort of had to be taught and have a conversation about and how close is too close how far is just far enough there's no you know bright line threshold for that but something that I've sort of had to navigate as I go along um things like you know uh you're never supposed to let sources read drafts before they go to publication just how to navigate things like um you know the fact checking process when people disagree with each other uh all sorts of sort of minute almost sociopolitical conflicts that happen within the world of Journalism that aren't as intuitive and even just like what is typical and what is not typical in an interview which I think is something that is tricky sometimes when you're interviewing a source a science source that doesn't have a lot of media experience um I don't know about any of you but I got absolutely zero media training when I was in grad school and not that I suffered for it but it certainly left me not super well prepared to be tackling things from the other side and it's still you know to this day I get a lot of questions from sources that I think could be preempted by a little bit of media training and different academic institutions yeah we we uh we didn't but I think it's a good thing to have it can help you respond in certain ways that um you might not otherwise so I I would always recommend it um one of the one of the hot points in the pandemic and which you've written about this is one of the Articles we really got excited about it's called vaccines are still mostly blocking severe disease this is a time when you know we had just vaccinated a lot of people we're a few months in and you know the vaccines were doing a good job at preventing just about everything including infection and then of course the antibody and T Cell levels declined and infections started and the Press freaked out they said the vaccines failed and you know you you respond with an article like this and you and you question in the article you write back when it's not necessary the first protective Pinnacle the world sets its site on which is protecting against disease and death back when the vaccines were new in a near-perfect match for the circulating screen many people felt hopeful that we'd quickly clamber up some symptom-free Vista in capital letters which I think is cool maybe even Dart up to no infection point also in capital letters why was this High bar set at all Katie because that's not how most vaccines work where people just not familiar with that I don't think that they were and you know that this is always one of those tricky things I always hesitate a little bit to speculate on like oh what were people's motivations what were people thinking but I do remember so much about that and I think a lot of it does trace back to I think people set their expectations really low the first year of the pandemic you know when moderna and Pfizer were conducting their preliminary trials everyone was like oh God like I hope these vaccines are ready by 2022 and who knows when they will be ready and when they work how well will they work but then gosh was it November of that year when both Pfizer and moderna started publishing their first round of early results um everyone was like oh my God like 94.5 effective 95 effective and like people aren't getting infected but of course what was not fully addressed at the time was look at the time points at which they are collecting this data it's just like weeks out from people getting their shot maybe a couple months it is gonna look different down the line and I think people were so unaccustomed to thinking about clinical trials um thinking about how antibodies work like a lot of people didn't had never even heard the word antibody um it was such good news at the time that people got stuck on that single Freeze Frame rather than thinking about well how does this typically play out over months and years it's like people got you know a snapshot of a movie trailer from the first 10 minutes of the film and totally forgot oh there's actually 97 minutes of this movie left that we have not even had time to address and so when that started playing out in the real world it was People's First experience of it it was their first time even reading about you know breakthrough infections a word I still don't like in the news and it really got complicated people felt like they got duped because they saw those headlines and I think the Assumption was even if it wasn't explicitly said in the piece like this is going to be forever you know people have not really experienced a big vaccine trial like this one yeah this generation has I think the last one would have been the polio vaccine trial right nothing as big has happened and so no one's used to it and back then they looked for paralysis or not that was it we didn't have ways to look at infection and so back then yeah the vaccines prevent paralysis let's license them so I tell people you should read some history sometime old papers are good right yeah no it's it's really interesting like this is one of those topics this has been one of my favorite topics actually throughout the pandemic this whole discussion of like sterilizing immunity is that even a thing like how good are some of our best vaccines like polio MMR we were never looking for infection we didn't have the technology and it didn't matter that much like it was enough to eliminate those infections from a bunch of different countries like you didn't have to fuss about whether there's you know two or three viral particles bopping around in someone's nose so that I'm glad you bring up that that term sterilizing immunity you know often the the papillomavirus vaccines are quoted as being sterilizing but in fact what they do is prevent cervical cancer 100 right so they're really good and so people assume that it's sterilizing but in fact we don't look we don't do PCR we don't try and find if there's a virus and so unless you do that you can't Define sterilizing immunity you can't do it on disease alone right and yeah that one's a particularly interesting example to me because you know oh and I haven't reread up on this in a while but you know the the way that that vaccine works is actually really really interesting I mean if there is anything close to serializing that is certainly it the antibody level state insanely high for a very very long time like somewhere somewhere like those long-lived plasma cells are just they just keep going um but you know when they do pcrs I think they have actually done this in a few trials they aren't really detecting virus but then you start to ask like what is the threshold of detection are they surveying the correct sites it's sterilizing immunity is actually incredibly difficult to prove because how do you prove the absence of something is it just that you're knocking up against the limits of your technology and so you know when I was writing about sterilizing immunity as a concept for the first time I knew I had to call some people who were working on HPV vaccines and even they were like oh no we don't know if it's sterilizing we just know that it's powerfully effective and so like if it's clinically effective to the point where it can be assumed that it's sterilizing that's really interesting but it's a it's a difficult philosophical line to walk you don't want to guarantee that it's going to Stave off all infections permanently and what happens Katie is that well I I call them pundits there are certain people who are very vocal and get interviewed all the time and they hear some they hear sterile immunity and then they propagate it they repeat it without even looking at the data as you have right and then everyone all of a sudden is saying that things that are not correct and that's really bothered me about this there are a few of them who are very vocal and very visible with it and they just they they look at the head the the title of the article and that's it it's highly unfortunate I'll set I saw in your bio is that you've been involved with story collider and I'm not really very familiar with what that does and maybe you could tell us a little about that yeah I'd love to so story collider is very very different from my day job it is a science storytelling Series so if any of you have ever listened to the moth or risk or stories from the stage you know these are these events where people um Gather in like a bar or a pub and they do live storytelling just them and a microphone true personal stories um where story collider sort of fits into that whole big picture is it is still uh live true personal stories but with a science twist so we've had like scientists talk about how they got started in their field we've also had a lot of non-scientists talk about how science intersects with their lives and the way I like to describe it is sometimes the science is a major player in the story and sometimes it just makes a really quick Cameo um you know I remember we've we've had stories where like someone used the scientific method to figure out who is stealing the milk out of their fridge that's still a totally a science story but it's not a science story you would assume is coming from like someone who has spent their entire life in Academia but I'm a producer for those series we have a series here in Boston there's a bunch of places in New York that host story collider shows so if you're ever interested it's not too far nothing in Michigan yet so far but uh Brianne and Vincent can can check out some live shows and we have a podcast that comes out every week on Friday which is of course free but it's something that I've really loved doing I consider it very separate from my work at the Atlantic but I think it helps me humanize science stories it helps me ask questions that just add Dimension and it's always reminding me to not only feature the science and the data in my work but the people who are doing it cool one of the um hot topics these days I'm sure you know we have a potential presidential candidate who is apparently against uh all vaccines that's RFK Jr he's been on a couple of very prominent podcasts essentially spewing complete nonsense for example he said the 1918 pandemic was started by the vaccine which I mean someone needs to fact check him right because they weren't even flu vaccines or even influenza isolates at the time but um I'm wondering what your thoughts are and how how scientists can counter that we next week on Twitter we intend to go through uh a lot of his claims Point by point just but what else can be done oh gosh that is a big question and I certainly won't pretend to have all of the answers but yeah I think it is really troubling you know it's it's one more data point in this very long timeline of science becoming increasingly politicized and I think you know in a perfect world everyone would be able to look at the data and say oh great like I see this data I know exactly what's happening I have a good sense of what is you know true information and what is misinformation problem solved but unfortunately you know there's this idea in science communication uh like that idea is kind of like the deficit model right it's not just a matter of inundating people with information if if we were in that position and just giving people more data giving people more material if that were enough to solve the problem we probably could have done more about it years ago decades ago I think now it's kind of like everyone existing in the world today is interacting with data with a pre-existing set of beliefs uh that acts as like a filter they're going to be more likely to pay attention to certain streams of data they're going to be more likely to pay attention to certain narratives and completely ignore others that don't fit with their pre-existing beliefs and I think enacting cultural change is so much more difficult than introducing information onto a bunch of blank slates and I think that's where we are right now RFK Junior already has a loyal fan base there are a lot of people in this country who have not had any proper Science Education and aren't really set up to receive that data even if they were open-minded to it I I wish there were a quick fix for this but you know I think I appreciate any time a science or journalist does try and get the correct information out there tries to address the misinformation which is always really tricky because you always want to address and correct misinformation without accidentally amplifying the misinformation and unfortunately misinformation tends to be easier to remember than the actual Nuance to true and also you know if I I don't know if I were Queen for a Day I feel like I would go straight to the source improve Science Education in this country like even I as someone who science is a huge part of my job now I didn't even like science until I was 18 19 because I didn't have an understanding of what it was I thought it was memorization I thought it was boring I thought we had figured out a bunch of things and really the reason I love science now is for the things that we haven't figured out and the really interesting conversations that can happen I wasn't introduced to that idea until college and I think that is a huge shame I'm sure some of that is on me but some of that is also just on how we regard science in this in this country it's so not the way that we need to be teaching you know things a matter of fact it's so much about dialogue and I wish that that happened earlier for kids unfortunately that fixing of science which I totally agree is going to take a long time and we have an immediate problem which is that someone who spreads misinformation gets a lot more attention than uh the truth and um you know we do our best but we don't get millions of of views and uh you know he does on his podcast so it's it's rather frustrating we don't give up but I I think um it's very easy for as you say for people to uh to believe someone who is prominent and and has a very popular podcast and that's unfortunate because that's not the way science works I have a question that is a total different direction um so you have written about a lot of topics um covid but many many others and so I was just wondering kind of which stories have been your favorite or what's your favorite thing to write about please don't tell me it's brushing your cat's teeth uh I'm not gonna lie I did love that piece um but it is not my favorite um gosh I mean honestly before the pandemic started I didn't really consider myself much of a health writer and I'm I'm still not sure I necessarily do um you know it's not always a hard line between science coverage and health coverage of course science has to inform health and health informs the the topics that scientists often find themselves delving into but I've always really liked basic research I like just sitting with a big pile of papers I like thinking about ecology and evolution and animals humans are boring sometimes I don't just want to write about humans and their problems so a lot of my favorite pieces have just been about like wow what a bizarre occurrence in the natural world or anything that sort of humbles The Human Experience um humans love to fancy themselves unique or more evolved than other animals whatever that means it's certainly not true or you know that we're unique in certain aspects of our language or our cognition but there's so much more impressive biology out there than what we have eked out or complimented or even warped with technology and artificial selection I think my favorite topics just go beyond that and also I've really gotten a kick lately out of actually intersecting the two topics that have most dominated my journalistic career so far which is kind of weird animal stuff and Immunology and vaccinology I'm really interested in animal vaccination right now and how that is affecting animal conservation this is so Katie there's a uh a young Katie somewhere out there maybe in college who was who love science and is thinking of doing what you're doing what advice would you give them oh gosh um the first is uh you can listen to what I have to say but don't take my word as gospel listen to lots of other people because there is no single path to doing what I do or doing what my colleagues do the key is to just try it first see if you like it talk to a lot of different people get their perspectives and um I don't know I think so much of this job is just learning by doing I had zero sense of what doing signs was like until I started doing bench work in a lab until I learned how to use a pipette until I learned what it was to have a PCR fail over and over and over and over it's exactly the same thing in this job you got to learn by doing gotta learn by watching other people and be incredibly humble I think I am best at this job when I allow my mind to be changed sometimes even over the course of a single piece if someone tells me something that really surprises me or you know shocks me I try and pay attention to that I I will bold it I will highlight it I will ask them follow-up questions and the next person I talk to I'll ask I heard something that surprised me um what do you think of this is this something that you would expect to surprise other people what do you think of it um you know because if it surprises me there's a good chance it is something that is also unknown to one of my readers and so um I don't know I think I a that is one holdover from science that I really appreciate is still stuck in my brain when I do my work now you think that to to Be an Effective science writer you should have a science background I don't think it's a requirement I think it can be really beneficial I think it has been for me but also I think any person who is dedicated to the craft of Journalism is at heart a little bit scientific uh there is skepticism that is natural in this job there is digging that is natural in this job if you see inconsistencies you want to explore them all good journalists have those instincts and I think if they take the time to really know the subjects that they're writing about whether it's politics culture business real estate they will follow those instincts and I think sometimes when they're writing about science it will lead them to read papers which they will learn to read over time they will learn to think a little bit more like a scientist by talking to more people over time I think it can really help to you know take a course on Coursera about virology if you know you're going to be writing about that to learn about like how FDA regulation works but I don't think anyone needs explicitly like a degree in biology or certainly not a PhD or a master's to do this job well it just requires the same sort of commitment that you would put into any other piece of writing that you would be doing know the subject well do you have any plans to write a book I do get this question a lot um I hope so someday no immediate plans plans but um honestly if I were to write a science focused book someday I think it would have something to do with immunology and infectious disease I can't tell you what subset yet but um that would probably be what would interest me oh not frogs hey maybe frog Immunology who knows I'll work the frogs in somehow I got a colleague who works on that right down the hall if you want to talk to her oh my gosh yeah I would love to frog frog Immunology yeah that's right have your parents come around to you not being an engineer or physician [Laughter] I I think so um I mean uh yeah it's it's very I think different from what they might have expected I would do initially but um I think I'm doing okay financially that puts my mom's mind at ease and I think she's glad to know that whenever she sends me a science article um she rarely sends me anything from the Atlantic I will say that she she reads a lot of the other mainstream stuff that isn't always 100 accurate but I will try to vet it for her and so I'm glad I can do that sometimes so I'm useful Pride worthy but I'm at least useful I think you should be Pride worthy in her mind I think okay Catherine woo the Atlantic magazine you can find that at theatlantic.com go subscribe and read her articles thank you Katie for joining us today appreciate it yeah thank you so much it was a pleasure to be here thanks Katie thank you so much uh let's can we do just a few uh email maybe one email each and start to make some Headway because we haven't answered any in a long time um that's okay with with Kathy and Brienne yes sure all right Brianne can you take the first one please sure Ron writes hi twiv team I am in a discussion with a friend who insists that vaccines are designed to prevent infection and I remember this issue as vaccines are designed not to prevent infection of a pathogen but rather to minimize disease after an individual has been infected in our discussion my friend used polio vaccine as an example that prevented infection so who better to ask than you all and of course Vincent my friend's point is of course that the coveted vaccine should not be called a vaccine because it doesn't prevent an individual from being infected and that's why people get sick still even after receiving the vaccine hopefully you can help clear this up for both of us Ron um well Ron we just mentioned that a little bit but I think that um polio vaccine most certainly does not prevent vaccine that's part of the reason why we've seen polio in some Wastewater samples you said prevent vaccine you meant prevent infection I meant infection of course yes yes um and I also agree that the person I would ask about this is Vincent so but yeah we did talk about this that even people even some vaccines which are thought to be sterilizing like the HPV even the experts say well we actually don't have the evidence to say that it will it is 100 effective at preventing disease now the polio vaccines do not prevent infection in fact inactivated vaccine prevents paralysis and after after you get it your intestines are still susceptible to infection so you get infected but you don't get paralyzed the oral polio vaccines for a period of time will prevent infection but once antibody in the levels in the gut decline they don't same with the coveted vaccines once antibodies levels Decline and probably other immune correlates as well you get infected and you may get mild disease but they prevent severe disease and illness so to define a vaccine as preventing infection you can't have your own definition it's like RFK wants to define a placebo as either water or saline no you cannot have your own definition I'm sorry oh the vaccines haven't been Placebo tested because it wasn't water or saline so vaccines is a modified form of the pathogen that induces immunity but does not cause disease itself so I have to say that one of the biggest things that I've learned in the pandemic is that I had not thought much before about what vaccines actually do and if you had asked me before I would have thought that oh yes they prevent infection you get a polio vaccine fine you're not going to get paralyzed you you know you get a flu vaccine you're not going to get the flu but obviously that my view of things has changed a lot and now I understand that my understanding of uh vaccines and what they do was rather uh rudimentary that vaccines uh can prevent severe disease but they don't prevent infection yeah I think that when I've had to try to think about some of this for students and different ways I've done some exercises in class and things like that I've realized how much of it gets into talking about and thinking about probabilities and probability changes and changing the probability of this type of outcome changing the potentially changing the probability of transmission potentially changing the probability of this or probability of that um and people aren't very good at thinking about probabilities and so trying to figure out ways to communicate this that it's about probability changing but also what the heck probability changing means um can be a bit of a challenge I have trouble with probabilities too it's math yeah but yeah I I agree Kathy we haven't thought we hadn't thought a lot about infection versus disease although I look at my lectures and it is properly stated there but um so I I have been teaching the right thing at least I came up with a way to do an in-class model that gets at the probability thing Vincent if you ever wanted to play around with it in class I would love to would love to I would play around with it for myself well you kind of need a bunch of people okay we can do that um Kathy can you take the next one sure Lisa writes hello twiv gurus I have forwarded slides from the most recent CDC one Health Partners webinar beginning on slide 19 the current known non-human species that have been naturally infected with SARS Kobe 2 are outlined I thought you might be interested based on the discussion in episode 985. thank you very much for all you do and uh Lisa is a veterinarian in Oregon where she reports the temperature is 41 Fahrenheit so that's probably from a while ago in fact I do remember looking at the slide Set uh way back when and looked at slide 19 where it has the animals naturally infected with SARS cov2 as of January 16 2023 and it's got a large collection of them that's worth looking at I pasted that image in here but the whole slide set was pretty cool so thanks for that a lot of animals right yes wow cool um I I was so a couple of weeks ago we did a twiv at UPenn and uh before the twive there were four Talks by pan scientists and one of them was an ecologist who was studying infections of uh of whitetail deer in particular but he he said that at the beginning of the pandemic the UK was considering killing all house cats because it became clear that they were getting infected can you imagine no that they would and they didn't even have enough data to say it was an issue right they would just oh my God it would be a Revolt that that would be a big fat no you couldn't do that is it was it was bad enough that people are staying home and not working but to take their pets that they love oh my gosh they obviously called that off but laughs I wish everyone was shocked because none of us knew that before all right the last email is from yens dear twif team I feel like Batman being summoned via a light in the sky so since you called yes we did this is this is an old email we called the ends a while ago in two of nine seven three you replied to a letter by Joe who asked about the differences between species strains and variants you answered that a variant is basically like you Kathy Dixon me that is incorrect in particular regarding sarsko V2 but you also Ebola virus Etc variants are defined genetic lineages of a virus that have certain constellations of within the lineage fixed uh I.E selected for mutations SARS cov2 variance Alpha Beta Omicron are such defined lineages and each is represented by thousands millions of individual viruses that have additional genetic changes that come and go in short you and I may be infected with Omicron but that does not mean that you and I have the same virus one sequence the virus that infected us will have the necessary genetic makeup to make it SARS cov2 and to assign it to a variant Omicron but once the genomes are aligned you may find many nucleotide differences nevertheless subvariants therefore are new lineages within a defined lineage that gained additional fixed mutations on top of the variant defining trait and once again the sub lineage is represented by thousands of viruses that are variable on the individual level but share a common genetic trait to to go back to you guys all of you are isolates of human and you may or may not belong to the same genetic lineage okay so so let me just pause um I don't know you know definitions are tough because we make them all up but I thought and others have agreed with me that a variant is basically an isolate like if you isolate from Kathy and me and Brianne and sarsko V2 and they have it genome sequence difference they're variants they are isolates too but I think they're variants I didn't know this business about the fine genetic lineages so they're making more complicated you know Trevor Bradford said we should be naming all the Omicron sub variants variants and giving them we should be just up to sign now he said right something like that so I don't know about this uh Jens but I'm willing to listen um I just thought it was an isolate okay so I think I was just going to say I think one place where this gets tricky is that oftentimes we want to use things like the three of us as our examples like whole organisms yeah and there are a few more steps with the whole organism um before we get an individual changes so if you thought about a few cells in my skin um they might have picked up individual mutations so are those all isolates or variants of Brienne I think it's sort of a question of like totally scale we're on so maybe you define the your sequence as germ cell sequence right right because that's what could pass on that's an interesting question because every one of your cells has a slightly different sequence right right so you're full of variants Brian exactly so kind of how much of it's just about the polymerase versus how much about it is like in the germ cell and in selection and ability to go to a next um generation I think that that makes it hard to compare organisms and unicellular things and or viruses right all right going on uh in two of nine seven nine you begin discussing Realms and mega taxa in viruses and finally called me out in apparent desperation I like yes we do thank you for responding given that yours is a podcast all about viruses and given the seismic shift that has happened in recent years regarding our understanding of the virus fear maybe dedicate some time on an episode on this topic going through and summarizing some crucial papers as this is way too much for a reader's letter all right so Jens who do you think we should have on to do this I agree we should have a whole episode devoted to Realms and mega taxa it sounds like it would be a fascinating episode but he gives some references here um one paper a global organization of proposed Mega taxonomy of the virus World by coonan and I was the most important of them as it lays the groundwork for what are now the ICT accepted Realms by the way when I go to meetings and people talk about these yens I hear all kinds of size and groans because they don't like it so you guys may have all agreed in this room somewhere but a lot of people don't like it I'm not saying anything you know I don't I'm uh what do we say it's uh out of my agnostic it's out of my um out of my Lane uh later an additional two were added uh adnaviria and ribosiviria Eugene's paper also discusses the polyphily of viruses the meat of the paper that is the framework for the current virus Mega taxonomy is laid out in figure 11. then another paper virus is defined by the position of the virus here within the replicator space was the development of the now accepted ictv definition of virus as well indirectly the definition of viroid satellite nucleic acid and V reform this paper also defines the terms virosphere and its subdivisions into Ortho virosphere and perivirus fear and you haven't if you haven't yet heard the term veriform he gives a paper for that reforms a new category of classifiable virus derived genetic Elements by myself and Eugene as a primer Brienne and Kathy have you heard of viriforms I have not so we need to have someone come here you may be coonan and yens together wouldn't that be funny or someone else we'll talk about it just just as an aside I think that pronunciation at least in the United States should be primer really yes not primer oh because it's a primer yes you know when I saw the word I said what's the right way to say it and I'm thinking of oligonucleotides primer yes yes okay primer you're right uh as candy for dessert I would recommend another paper the global virum how much diversity and how many independent Origins Again by Eugene which discusses the questions how many Realms there really may be the term realm was chosen instead of domain because the genetic variability even within one virus clade that now is a realm is much higher than in the entire organismal tree of life and people thought that domain would be misleading and correct viruses do not fit into the Tree of Life remember twiv 357 with me which was called mistletoe on the tree of life and then a paper evolving perspective on the origin and diversification of cellular life in the virus fear by angio spraying it out you have also overlooked the massive expansion of prokaryotic RNA viruses starting with this paper expansion of known single stranded RNA phage genomes from tens to over a thousand by Julie callanan and Al at leading to Levy virus seats expanding and restructuring the taxonomy of bacteria infecting single-stranded RNA viruses also by Juliet Al and most recently the Fantastic predecessor paper of the one you discussed in the episode expansion of the global RNA virum reveals diverse clades of bacteriophages by URI nariad out which increased that clay to tens of thousands if interested in general RNA virus diversity the RNA virus fear how big and diverse it is it by Guillermo Dominguez Huerta might be great fun on top of that several of the papers above also address all kinds of cute things such as cute in Jen's sense of cute retroviroid satellites vyrophages all kinds of pozons Etc to eliminate to to assimilate all this vast new knowledge that has been accumulated recently by the various players in the field and their many colleagues together this should be sufficient for a short discussion to frame what virology has become smiley face and if you guys need a quick re-review on how the ictv works again and on all the ranks and the new binomial species nomancer Etc there's a great summary article about to be published in plus biology written by the ictv executive community community and additional colleagues cheers yens P.S I always say aubergine but eggplant is a wonderful example why viruses don't have to be renamed just because the name label might be misleading or incorrect no eggs in eggplant and yet Americans seem to do just fine with the term that's a good point right no egg in eggplant maybe that should be the title of today's another episode hold on let me just I can't type and speak at the same time the article that he mentioned was to be published February 13th in plus biology so it probably is already out there I'm kind of looking for it now yeah this can't talk and type at the same time either this this uh these emails have been here a long time because we've had distractions and we have many more in fact the next one is also from yens but he says in the next one it's funny um AKA Bruce Wayne what does that mean Batman Batman okay wait he's what is that the actor no it's the his real name his real Persona okay yeah yeah like like Clark Kent and Superman see I really don't know much virology nor much else I suppose at least not classification but let's do some picks of the week um Brienne what do you have for us today uh so I have um a story that I learned about um while I was in South Africa um one of the places that um we visit when I go is ameripane caves um where we learned about some of the work that was done there particularly the findings of the early hominid remains from homo naletti um and so I have both a link to just sort of the general information about about these caves and what's there and an article strangely enough from the Atlantic um about um the discovery of homo naletti and sort of the story behind the uh finding homonality which I think is absolutely fascinating um there were some um some samples that were found and the scientists then had to put up a Facebook ad to get some people with paleontology expertise um and there were a whole bunch of constraints on the people because they needed to be able to go into these very small tight caves and so it ended up being an entire team of women uh paleontologists because they were the only ones who were small enough to fit into the caves and go and get some of these samples so there's this really interesting team of these Six Women paleontologists who went into the cave um discovered all of these samples there are some videos that you can find elsewhere online though if you are claustrophobic I would not recommend watching them um who then went and found all of these homonality samples and so I think the story is just a really fascinating story I think there's a lot of great stuff that we can learn and I'm excited about this um you know team of women scientists who did this work cool you know when um when there used to be battleships made of wood right with cannons in the side the Brits had young kids do the candidates because the the ceiling was low and they're the only ones that could run up and down and load the Cannons because an adult would have to be bent over and it wasn't efficient and so lots of kids got killed because the boats were getting shelled from both sides but um uh I learned that in San Diego there's a boat there uh one of these Cannon Laden boats had um the the guide told us that yeah they were all young kids and so uh there was a lot of mortality in that age at that time because of that kind of skewed the life expectancy for a while sure Kathy what do you have for us I picked something that relates to a documentary that I saw here in Ann Arbor several months ago called being Mary Tyler Moore and so I included a link to the trailer the full movie is on HBO Max so I realized that there will be a lot of people who can't access it but maybe you'll have an opportunity to see it in the way that I did where uh we saw it as a film showing with two scientists involved in diabetes and uh also Mary Tyler Moore's husband who's a physician and so it has a lot of cool things for those of us for whom Mary Tyler Moore was a hero or heroine in that you know she was in one of her TV shows she was a a single woman with a career and uh so there there's that aspect to it but she also did work on uh for JDRF juvenile Research Foundation she discovered that she had it a type 1 diabetes when she was 33. and other travails that she had in her life but it was just really a nice mix of clips from her shows humor some serious stuff and uh just a really nice documentary so if you have a chance to see that I recommend it cool JDRF my pick is an article in the Atlantic you know I'm perusing my online subscription and I came across this cool article it's entitled Google isn't grad school by Arthur C Brooks having so much information at our fingertips is useful but seductive easily fooling us into thinking we know more than we do you get the picture right it's all about people thinking they could be experts just by a few Google searches uh and it's it's an interesting article I want to quote one part here and he's saying you know it's great to want to learn things learning about novel ideas is a thrill and indeed many researchers believe that interest itself is a positive emotion a source of pleasure rooted in The evolutionary imperative to learn new things I mean look at us here on Twitter we get excited to learn new things right we're genuinely excited we're not doing it to amuse you we're excited about we're doing it to teach you cruising the web in search of interesting things is great fun but beware your own susceptibility to the illusion of explanatory depth if you think he understands something Technical and complicated after cursory exposure you might be able to put the knowledge to good use in your life but you almost certainly don't understand it well enough to hold forth on the topic hold forth that means talking about vaccines when you don't know anything about them that's holding forth on the subject but good article and he also goes into um Academia so he's an academician he's a professor somewhere and he talks about how uh you know his colleague is it this article or is it another one I can't remember anyway it's it's really good check it out we also have Associated the Atlantic is a good uh should I do I call it a magazine is that the proper name magazine I call it a magazine but I also only read the website so I can see the confusion yeah it's it's still a magazine I guess we have to redefine our words just like Jens would say you know we're making very forms or whatever whatever it was um if there are no eggs in eggplant it's okay if there's no paper in my magazine well you know he also said years ago on Twitter that you know a lot of people complain when you have a genome sequence and then you say we're going to classify this virus he said you you don't have the virus some people think you need to have a virus isolate to clarify he said well we don't have any isolates of T-Rex and still we classify T-Rex as a dinosaur in a certain family so yeah he's asking humans to be consistent all right I just pulled out a couple of listener pics because we have a whole bunch of these uh one is from John after hearing your musings on the root cause of the world's problems in epitope 1013 I came across this interesting article that cites blez Pascal who once wrote All of Humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room a 2014 study lens support to this idea uh it's a it's an article in the world dot org and it says a new study found people are terrible at sitting alone with their thoughts how about you uh and the money quote from the article with a link to the study in science a recent study in the journal science found that many people choose to self-administer an electrical shock rather than sit quietly in a room alone with their thoughts oh my God oh my gosh I have no problem and I bet Kathy and Brienne have no problem sitting alone with her no problem no problem with plenty to think about I've never never told I tell people man if you can't think of stuff to think about but most people look at their phones right and then we have Alan that's from John who who uh and the next one is Alan who write not Alan Dove hello twif team here's a very on topic and excellent video from last year that not only provides a great introduction to viruses for non-scientists but also covers the Geo biochemical effects of viruses in the ocean which was featured in twif 1011 which is up in Quebec City it's a shy scishow epitope let's see if I could get the title without it playing what if all viruses vanished oh yes that's what we talked about in in Quebec I asked them what if all the viruses vanished when did they publish this a year ago I didn't take my question from this scishow okay um as always with Sideshow videos all the material research papers and articles are linked in the show notes looking forward to twiv 1012 all the best Alan P.S count me among the 50 percent plus non-scientists who listens to twiv on the regular my twiv saves lives research paper that you enjoyed was a way of saying thank you for all your education efforts thank you Alan all right that'll do it for twiv 1023 you can find the show notes at microbe.tv twive you can send your questions comments and pics to Twitter microbe.tv you can support us while you if you'd like to you can or you may we depend on your financial support to do these and you can find atmicrob.tv contribute a couple of ways for you to do that Kathy Spindler is at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor thank you Kathy thanks this is a lot of fun we embarkers at Drew University bio Prof Barker on Twitter thanks Brienne thanks I learned a lot I'm Vincent Dragon yellow you can find me at virology.ws I'd like to thank the American Society for virology and the American Society for microbiology for their support of twive Ronald jenkees for the music and Jolene for the timestamps you've been listening to this week in virology thanks for joining us we'll be back next week another twive is viral thank you [Music]

Channel: MicrobeTV

Views: 7,414

Keywords: virus, viruses, viral, virology, COVID-19, pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, science writing, headline writing, coronavirus, The Atlantic

Id: wO2ygux03-8

Length: 95min 44sec (5744 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023