Viral Time | Carl Zimmer

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good evening I'm Alexander Rose the executive director at the long now foundation and as you know we like to select a long short before each of these talks and that's a short film that exemplifies long term thinking this month's came from a friend of mine Daisy Ginsberg and her team that that worked on the an entry for the iGEM competition and some of you may remember in drew Andes synthetic biology talk he mentioned that there's a student competition for synthetic biology and this particular group won in 2009 with their project called eco my and I think it'll give you an idea of not only some of the context of tonight's talk but also where some of this may be going synthetically in the future Thanks ikura is an experimental collaboration between designers and scientists working in synthetic biology in 2009 17 with University undergraduates spent the summer learning the tools of synthetic biology which is essentially a new approach to genetic engineering using standardized sequences of DNA in a format that's called BioBricks they learned to engineer bacteria they designed their own BioBricks using genes copied from the existing organisms and started them into e.coli and created bacteria that secrete colors visible to the naked eye a quorum I went on to win the International genetically engineered machine competition at MIT in 2009 and joining us now is one of the winners of the iGEM competition welcome to science Friday miss Bolan hi thank you so much I am part of the Cambridge seven a nine item team and our product was called ich Roma and what we were trying to do is to improve bacterial biosensors there bacteria and that can tell you the concentration of the pollutant in water and they can do this because inside them they have a detector so we developed two different parts the sensitivity tuner and this actually tells the detector when to turn on and when to turn off so you have control over what levels of the pollutant you're detecting and how does the bacteria show that it's on or off we use something called a color generator which means with our bacteria changed color when the detector got switched on wow so they light up in a different color they actually change color it's visible to the naked eye so let's say if you put a swab of the bacteria in the polluted river back here we just change color yep exactly so you'd probably want to put a sample of your water on a bacterial plate maybe other way around well how would you envision something like this being used are other ways in the future as designers we worked with the team to explore Kramer's potential as they were developing in the lab and together we imagined the timeline proposing ways that living color could evolve over the next century the Sumari is some of which are shown in this film explore the different agendas that could she be revised use and in turn our everyday lives one of the first real applications for this technology may arrive quite soon a cheap disposable by a sensor for testing groundwater contaminated by arsenic bacteria could also be used to produce natural colorings and dyes by 2015 there may be a profession of people who hunt for new pigments and the genes responsible bringing them back fees and the food and textile industry by 2030 9 you can go to the supermarket and buy the simple probiotic yogurt for cheap personalized disease monitoring the yogurt drink contains eco my bacteria which established a colony in your gut they monitor for chemical signals that indicate the presence of a wide range of diseases if they detect a disease they start generating the corresponding colored pigment producing an easily visible output to prompt need to seek your doctor 20:49 sees the rise of the Orange Liberation Front terrorist organization from the Netherlands who are angry because a biotech company in China has bases hit the gene for the color orange in 2069 Google releases pollution mapping bacteria in the atmosphere that turn red at the presence of excess co2 as the saying goes red sky in the morning Google health warning a corporation meant that you chromite was a technology that's designed from the start and are both a genetic and the human scale and with the long term outlook we found that design and science could have a meaningful exchange in the lab which could prove useful when developing technologies in the future hi I'm Stuart brand from along now foundation I remember the day of computer hackers and seeing what these bio hackers are up to their terrifyingly responsible which one would want them to be of course they're working with a very large organism mostly bacteria we're gonna get to the really little guys tonight Carl Zimmer is the science writer and that interests me because scholars write about science in a certain way for a certain audience and it doesn't generalize often very well scientists write about their science very well and talk about it very well but they typically you're focusing on the problems that they're most interested in and necessarily how it fits in except kind of highly directed way there is a good science writer journalist knows all that stuff but it's also aware of why it's newsworthy where it fits into the general picture of that science that discipline and the world's needs and the news situation so journalists spend a lot of time keeping up not only with the science but with the world where they fit together Carl Zimmer has written this beautiful little book it's as small as a virus that he'll be signing afterwards and the other thing happening afterwards is there's a reception right over there at the long now Museum and hope to see you there meanwhile here's mr. virus Carl Zimmer [Applause] Thank You Stuart and thank you all for coming so my talk tonight is called a viral time and it's the kind of title that needs a little explanation it's kind of a way of asking a question and the question for me is is what is time in the world of viruses I think with any such question you have to start with ourselves talk about our own experience with time and then try to bootstrap our way out from there so so what is time for us what is a day if you're in an airport and your plane is delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed and then finally cancelled and then you spend the night in the airport and you finally get out 24 hours later that's a very long day but let's say that while you're dealing with that you met some guy seemed pretty nice struck up a conversation with them had a drink and then by the end of those 24 hours he's head over heels in love with you and proposes and talks about how he wants to have children with you and scatter rose petals on your grave when you die you might say whoa wait it's only been a day so I mean a human day can feel very long or way too short just depending on the scale of what's happening in it there's there's a natural time scale for our lives and our experiences and you know if you look across the natural world there are different time scales so this is Ming the clam Ming was minding its own business off the coast of Iceland when some English marine biologist very rudely dredged it up and we're kind of curious to figure out how old it was and you can actually age clams by counting the rings on their shells it turned out that was about 400 410 years old so when me Ming was actually named after the dynasty when it was born and this was around the time you know Shakespeare was writing his plays and so on but you know by the time Shakespeare was dead Ming was still you know just getting started on its life it has seen you know the rise of modern civilization and basically might have gone on living who knows how much longer if it hadn't been judged up by curious scientists now it's it's a hazardous exercise to try to get inside the mind of a clam we can have a debate of where the clams have minds but I am curious what it's it was like for me you know for that day that can feel so long to us what's it like for Ming was it just like a few minutes would Ming feel like 10 years was still not long enough to get to know another clam to get into a long-term relationship I don't know I don't know but certainly the experience of time and the scales of time for Ming very different than say for a mayfly when the mayfly emerges as an adult it may live for only a day or just a few hours so I would bet that the mayfly would be more than willing to get married in that 24-hour period because it was going to be dead pretty soon so in fact it might even have proposed to you a few seconds after meeting you now if you think about life in terms of these timescales when you think about a virus maybe a virus is kind of like a mayflies mayfly you know because of viruses way of making more viruses happens really fast now a mayfly has to go from being an egg to being adult and then reproducing and producing more eggs and that does take a while but viruses are fast so this diagram here just shows you the sort of a basic cycle of one virus I picked out the flu virus so you get a you get a virus which is basically genes in a protein shell it comes into a host cell for heat for humans that they're going to come into the cells that line your airway they're going to basically pop off their protein shell and the genes are going to start being copied into new genes and those genes are going to be wrapped in new protein shells and then BOOM new viruses are going to pop out this does not take long this can take a matter of minutes or hours before you're having new viruses being assembled so that is basically why viruses live in some ways in such a different time scale than we do it doesn't take very long for a virus infection to explode inside you a single virus could over the course of say a few days produce millions sometimes even billions of viruses and so when you get the flu or the cold and you sneeze each one of those droplets is going to be loaded with viruses because they replicate so fast so you can kind of think of that little circle of arrows there like the hands on a clock and that clock is moving very fast and that means not just that you're going to have a lot of viruses but it also means that those viruses are going to undergo changes that are very different than what we're familiar with because the problem the thing about viruses is that every time they copy themselves or that they get copied they're very sloppy so when we have kids we might acquire each of them about a hundred 130 new mutations in their DNA but our genomes are huge about three and a half billion nucleotides viruses are very small genomes and they don't have good ways of fixing their DNA are their genes and they also do weird things like have sex with each other so save two different strains of the flu come into the same cell their genes might get mixed up and repackage and all of a sudden you have this bizarre hybrid virus that it wasn't there before so all this means that viruses have an incredibly high mutation rate this graph here can give you a sense of it so we're we are higher eukaryotes we have a fairly low mutation rate as living things go but the flu mutates 10,000 maybe a hundred thousand times faster depending on the estimates you see so what that means is that even inside of your body while you're sick you're producing all sorts of new kinds of viruses now a lot of those viruses are just big mistakes they come out of the cell and they they're just misfits there their genes don't work they can't invade another cell they're done in a few cases however they're actually able to do better than the other viruses and it just takes a little edge for a mutation to let a virus take over the population and this happens again and again and again and again so when you're sick with hepatitis or the flu or what have you viral time is so fast that the viruses are actually adapting to your body they they are evolving to fit you and your niche and this is actually a regular part of disease now scientists recognize is is the evolution of the viruses within you now that is just one aspect though of what I'm calling viral time now you think about the mayfly I mentioned you know it comes out of the ground and it as an adult it can live for I'm sorry comes out of the water and then it can live for say a day but it was a larvae before that and actually if you take the the full life of a fly it it's not that short it's just that we're quite captivated by being adult for just a day so so the mayfly lives at different scales and what happens if you step back a little bit further and you say well you know the mayfly exists in a population of mayflies so maybe there are may flies that are living around a stream and maybe that population of mayflies has been there for years or decades maybe centuries at so that scale of the mayfly time operates in a very different way well the same goes for viruses but just more so everything with viruses is very extreme as I'll explain tonight so for example you know there are some viruses like a cold a virus that causes the common cold you get it you feel lousy for a couple days and generally your immune system knocks it out and it's gone so that population of viruses in your body it was kind of living on mayfly time now if you got chickenpox that'd be a little different because the chickenpox might retreat into your nervous system and then come out decades later and cause you shingles so the hepatitis hepatitis C for example can and you know might infect you as a young person and you wouldn't even know about it for 20 years until suddenly your doctor says your liver just stopped working so viruses can exist at these different time scales just within one person but they can also we can also step back and think about viruses as populations so think of viruses as being kind of clouds of DNA clouds of genes if you think of you know the hepatitis C not just in one person but in all hepatitis C around the world the 200 million people who are carrying these viruses inside of them you can start to ask different kinds of questions about how time works because it wasn't it's not like there was always hepatitis C it wasn't always HIV these things come into existence now the way that they come into existence typically is that they have come into humans from some animal usually an animal that's fairly like us that's because they can use similar receptors on our cells to get in they already have equipment that can at least let them get a little bit of entry into into our biology a lot of times this doesn't work out very well but sometimes it does so you have cases for example where viruses are trying quote-unquote trying to establish themselves in our species but they just can't manage it so let's take rabies for example you know there are thousands of people who get infected by rabies every year they get bit by dogs and bats and other rabid animals but they don't bite each other there there's no human rabies virus I mean at least they're not biting each other right now I can't guarantee about the future I can't guarantee about what David Cronenberg would say but in any case as far as we know there's no human rabies of virus so if you were somehow to get rid of all the rabies in dogs and bats and so on and you left humans alone there would be no rabies because we couldn't support it that that viral cloud just doesn't exist in us now there are other cases where there have been little clouds that have formed so in 2002 for example there was a an epidemic that came to be known as SARS and it's short for sudden acquired respiratory syndrome what happened here was that there was a virus that we just didn't know about before which suddenly hit the scene in in China and in Hong Kong people were starting to get horrible fevers a few people were dying and so public health workers realized they were dealing with some some kind of outbreak they were able to identify the virus that caused it it wasn't a virus that anyone had seen before so they said well where did it come from it took a little while to get to the bottom of it so the they first found SARS in this animal called Palm Civet which is often sold in Chinese animal marketplaces and so people said AHA the virus had jumped the civets two people that turns out probably not to be the case because then scientists also found a lot more SARS and SARS like viruses in bats so it appears that that this virus made a jump from bats into civets and humans where it was circulating around now it's really fascinating to think about what happened with SARS you know maybe maybe the the younger among you may not be quite clear on what SARS was for those those of us who lived through it we thought oh my god this is going to be horrifying because several hundred people died of SARS and nobody really knew what was going to happen and people were carrying SARS on planes to other countries it was a terrifying moment fortunately people were able to stop SARS through some pretty basic public health measures identifying people who were sick quarantine them shutting down some of the marketplaces and so on and SARS disappeared that has not been seen in humans since so this was a viral cloud that only existed for really maybe a few months maybe more a little bit longer that we don't know about a short period of time as far as we can tell there is no SARS now that might illustrate how smart we are about dealing with viruses or it might show how lucky we are or maybe both I'm inclined to think both there are certainly cases where we haven't been so lucky and where we have had we have had viruses enter our species and get established and this can take this can take a while you have to scale back to you know a timescale of decades to understand some of these kinds of emerging viruses so for example about a century ago there were some viruses that infected chimpanzees now we didn't know about these viruses in these chimpanzees at the time they didn't have a name the chimpanzees that were getting them they would be spreading them to each other through sex perhaps through fighting and transmitting it through blood in any case this these viruses would attack the immune system of these chimpanzees they were slow viruses they weren't like a cold they weren't like Ebola they took a long time to make their effects felt on these animals so initially the chimpanzees immune systems could could ward off the disease the virus at least keep it in check but over the years the chimpanzees immune systems were eroded until they started to become sick with things that normally they wouldn't get sick up from so over this long scale of viral time the chimpanzees started to weaken and die they would they would die years before the normal lifespan of a chimpanzee now we wouldn't have known about this chimpanzee virus if it hadn't been for the radical changes that we brought to the world of chimpanzees we started cutting down their forests we started making more contact with them and in Africa people started hunting chimpanzees in large amounts for food and this is just a picture from the the bush meat trade which started to become a very important part of getting protein in certain parts of Africa and it was probably in Cameroon where this bush meat trade brought people into contact with what came to be known as HIV now initially there were probably a lot of failed attempts to cross that barrier say temps I mean in sort of a non conscious way there would be infections where people would pick up these chimpanzee viruses and nothing much came of it but there was this opportunity there was this new niche and the viruses were replicating and there were mutations that allowed some of the viruses to survive in the human body and they did better and better at surviving the human body and going from human to human than living in chimpanzees and eventually they became HIV instead of the chimpanzee virus and this is a tree an evolutionary tree that shows the relationship between those chimpanzee viruses and human viruses so in this picture the human branches are in yellow and so you can see actually that it's likely that HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans three times there may have been more times but we're not sure and you can actually look at the mutations in those viruses those mutations I was talking about that happened so much to to actually estimate when this changeover happened probably happened in the early 1900s it just so happens to be when all those changes that I told you about we're occurring in in Africa where HIV got its start not only that but you can then track the spread of HIV by looking at these mutations so you can see where it spread to other places there are people from Haiti who were in Africa at the time who came back to Haiti brought the virus with them there were it you can track how its spread to the United States and so by the time that HIV actually kind of made itself known as it were 30 years ago it had actually been around for perhaps 50 years and it had been hiding because it had this stealthy way of passing through time of being hit for for such a long period of time in its host's that it was sort of hard to figure out how to link the symptoms to a particular virus now here's a case where we can go back in time and look at the origin of a virus we can do it by looking into mutations you can even go back as some scientists have - tissue collections and they can find HIV from as far back as 1959 but it's not as if there were no viruses before the 20th century when scientists could actually see viruses for the first time viruses have been with us for a very long time so I want you to step back on a longer time scale so how so how do we know that viruses have been around for a long time well they've kind of left over their mark on human history even in the names that we give to viruses so let's take for example influenza kind of has a nice ring to it if you just stop and not think about what it's like to have the flu you say influenza sounds like a village somewhere in Tuscany or something it's an italian word which means influence the influence they were talking about was the influence of the stars that were believed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to control our health and in some cases to cause terrible epidemics associate with fevers and aches and often death so so you can go back through history and see the mark that certain viruses have left on that history you can even see the mark on people themselves so this is actually probably the oldest sign of viruses in human civilization this is Ramses the fifth pharaoh of egypt about three thousand years ago and you might be able to see there are lots and lots of pock marks on his face and that was smallpox so Ramsey's you know even the Pharaoh could be felled by smallpox three thousand years ago so so viruses span all of human civilization okay we've gone from minutes to hours to days to decades centuries millennia but it's not as if before the rise of human civilization we lived in some sort of you know pre viral Eden we know that our early ancestors got sick with viruses too now going back into that that prehistory of viruses before you know the records that we humans kept it's not easy you can't dig up a fossil of a virus like you can a trilobite but you can look at viruses themselves and their genes as kind of a fossil record so for example there are some viruses like CMV cytomegalovirus where there are some really striking patterns about its evolution so we humans get one kind of cytomegalovirus and the closest relative to that virus are in other primates and if you go out along the branches of the CMV evolutionary tree you go out on the branches of the primate tree as well so what that suggests is that these viruses have kind of diverged along with their hosts they haven't switched around a lot like I showed you with HIV they've been very loyal to their hosts and when their host gives rise to new species they form new species too but what's really amazing to me is that there is actually a fossil record in our own genome and I want to explain to you how we know that I want to jump back again to HIV remember how I showed you before how the way the flu replicates HIV and viruses like it have a somewhat different way of going about their business they infect cells but when they infect cells their genes don't just sort of spill out their genes actually get inserted quite precisely into the host cell's genome so in effect they have become part of the host cell's genome now typically what happens is that they they get into that genome and their genes basically instruct the cell to make lots of new HIV and the HIV pops out of the cell and eventually the cell just wipes out ruptures dies end of story sometimes with these kinds of viruses something happens a little bit differently so imagine what happens if one of these viruses the this group of viruses is called retroviruses imagine if it gets into an egg now imagine what happens when that egg is fertilized and it becomes two cells now those two cells both have the virus's DNA in them and then four cells they all have the viral DNA in the genome - that when that egg develops into an adult every single cell in that organisms body carries that viral DNA in it so in the sense the virus has has fused to its host so you know if you think of viruses as being kind of let's abandon the cloud metaphor and think of rivers so it's like a river of genes going through time well now it's river and its host river have have merged together now when this happens the this retrovirus is called an endogenous retrovirus meaning it's within now initially it may be possible for that DNA of virus to produce new viruses that can go infect other cells or other hosts but they mutate along with the rest of our DNA and after a while those viruses just get so disabled by commute ations that they're stuck there they're just we just carry them along in our genome and we actually have a lot of these and you can go and look through the human genome and you'll be going along and you say like okay well that's a gene for collagen and okay that's the gene for keratin and then you're going along you say whoa wait a minute that's a gene for a protein gel for a virus like HIV in our own genome and you can see it it might be a little bit degraded but the signature is clear enough that you can see and they're actually multiple copies sometimes of these viruses because once they lose ability to the break out and infect other hosts they could still make copies of themselves that get put back in so there's one of these which is called HERV k where we have a number of copies in our genome and it's believed that they come from a virus and infected our ancestors maybe say about 2 million years ago so that's a hypothesis but you know these this is just stretches of DNA how do we know that they were really a virus well some French researchers came up with a really clever way of testing this so so this is the hypothesis showing how virus would go into a germ cell egg or sperm and then eventually would become just part of the human genome to understand how the scientists figured this out that these particular stretches of DNA really were from viruses let me give you kind of a thought experiment let's say that today several of your friends texted you and said hey you can hear that talk viral time but you know iPhones fat thumbs you know autocorrect what-have-you you get mistakes so you get the you get all these different versions of the talk tonight and you're usually thinking like what what what did they have in mind what was the original message well you know leaving aside your ability to let's say you didn't you couldn't actually like look at that and sort of recognize the words let's just say you use pure powers of deduction well well you one thing you could do is you could just identify the letters that were a little different in each one as you can see here each one only has one that's different and from that you can you can pretty safely assume that the original title was viral time that these are sort of did the offspring the mutant offspring that your friends sent you well this is what these French scientists did basically they work their way back from these different versions of this virus in our genome and they said okay we think that this was the original sequence of the virus that we think was a virus that infected our ancestors so they they synthesized this genetic sequence they made a piece of DNA and they stuck it in a human cell and lo and behold it made viruses so here we have a virus we've been caring for 2 million years it's been hanging along quietly mining its own business and these scientists had the gall to bring it back to life so these are actually pictures of the virus budding out the new virus is budding out of the cell when they put that that gene sequence in now this is just 2 million years actually you can you can track the evolution of these things these things way back one of the ways you can do that is look at our relatives so for example there are some viruses that are found only in our US and our closest relatives like the great apes so they must have they must have infected our ancestors at that point in time the common ancestor of great apes which lives say about ten million years ago you can find other of these viruses that in the genomes of humans Apes old-world monkeys so that pushes you back for their in time still you can find others that infect all placental mammals that puts you put you back way back in time and what's really amazing is that there are a lot of these viruses in your genome scientists have identified about a hundred thousand elements in your genome that came from viruses now to put that in perspective we all have 20,000 protein coding genes that takes up about 1.2 percent of our genome viruses these things take up about 8 or 9 percent so you could say you're about six times more virus than you are human if you're so inclined so so we're dealing with with a time scale that that that we carry in our own bodies that is really you start to get into unimaginably old periods of time I mean I've just marked an era where the Grand Canyon formed and you have viruses that are older than that in your own genome this is a this is a deeply weird concept I mean that to think of our human genome having been gradually eroded like the Grand Canyon for millions of years by viruses now our genomes didn't you know go willingly we actually have lots of genes that seem to be specifically adapted for fighting off these viruses as they try to enter the genome and then as they try to replicate we try to put a stop to this because it can be very disruptive I mean if a virus plops in and does and happens to plug itself where there's a really essential gene there can be trouble these a lot of retroviruses are associated with cancer so evolution has favored defenses against these things but that's not to say that these viruses haven't ended up being useful actually mutations can essentially borrow some of the genes from viruses and use them to benefit us and my favorite example and really the most startling one is one that's involved with pregnancy so in order to in in order for a embryo a mammal embryo to develop I should say placental mammal embryo it has to form a placenta which attaches to the uterus and in many groups of mammals what happens then is that there is a layer that forms here these sort of kind of purplish cells here that's a layer that allows the embryo to draw in nutrients from the mother and and to attach to the to the uterine wall and it's very distinctive because it's formed by cells but then the walls between the cells break down and so it's just sort of a big open kind of layer of cytoplasm cell juice basically there's a protein that makes that happen if you knock the gene out from mice they cannot reproduce it is it is fatal to an embryo not to be able to form that layer with that protein that protein comes from a virus actually this this has happened repeatedly in evolution different mammal lineages have actually borrowed the similar viral genes to make that layer so if it wasn't for viruses none of us would have even been born now I've taken you back now about a hundred million years but really to appreciate the full scope of a viral time I need to actually take you back a bit further and to do that we have to sort of leave the leave the mammals behind leave the animals behind and look at really the most important hosts on the planet and those are the microbes they outweigh us they're much more important in terms of the biogeochemistry or the planet this is really a microbial planet and those microbes are heavily infected with their own viruses there they're called bacteriophages so this actually shows you an e coli which is as being which is actually popping out lots of new pages that are going to go off and infect other ones so where can you find these phages well inside of all of you because you have trillions of bacteria inside of you that you depend on for your health and survival and they are getting infected regularly by phages so each of you who pretty much all sound healthy so the healthy among you have four trillion pages inside of you right now in your nose in your mouth and your lungs and your gut and you're eating them every day in yogurt pickles or all sorts of different foods you're picking up new phages and they're breeding inside of you and you're releasing them into the environment and we'll leave it at that we've already to have the chrome eyes we don't need to think about these things anymore but in any case you have an incredible diversity of phages inside of you a estimated about 1,500 different species dwelling inside of you but they're not infecting you they're not making you sick they're they're after your bacteria so humans and other animals are wonderful places to find phages but there are lots and lots and lots of other places to find them so here's a place called the cave of crystals it's about a mile underground those are actually crystals that have formed there you know 60 ton type crystals like the biggest the biggest crystals ever found it's a marvelous place they're wearing these space suits partly because it's incredibly hot and but also because they don't want to infect it with their bacteria they're actually bacteria that live in the water that comes in to this cave from the surrounding rock and they get infected with viruses in fact if you scoop up a spoonful of that water it'll have 200 million viruses in it this may not look like a good place to look for viruses but in fact it's a great place to because a couple miles underground under the ice I should say and then dart god there's something called lake vostok lake vostok is home to an ecosystem dominated by bacteria and those bacteria have lots of viruses in them they even actually have viruses that infect other viruses which is interesting but in any case just about anywhere you look on earth where there's life there are viruses the ocean actually was thought to be pretty much virus free for a long time people just thought well how can viruses live in seawater let's just do harsh we know better now actually and if you take that spoon and scoop up a spoon of seawater you'll find a billion viruses just in that spoonful so there are viruses in the soil there are viruses in all sorts of other places and so that leads scientists to say well how many viruses are there and obviously they can't count them all up but they can do surveys and they can estimate from sampling and ocean and soil and sediment and so on and this is the number they come up with is a big number that's one with 31 zeros after that so it's kind of hard to think about how many viruses that is and my favorite way that scientists have tried to wrap their heads around this is to say hmm what would happen if we took every virus on earth and stacked them one on top of the other they never explained how they do this but in any case they say well would it extend a mile into the air would it go to the moon would it go out of the solar system well the answers to all that is no because actually it would go a hundred thousand light-years I have an arrow pointing here to a galaxy that's actually it would go past galaxies I'm sorry 100 million it was you start to you start to get fuzzy on these numbers after a while because they're just so many yes I'm sorry that is correct 100 million light-years yes so you go out way past your local guy give your local galaxies so what does it mean that the most abundant organism on earth by far our viruses this is why I call the book a planet of viruses if you want to add up organisms and I consider viruses organisms viruses are way at the top of the list what does that mean well one of the things that means is that viruses are planetary forces so here's another example of viral time viruses are continually infecting microbes in the ocean there's a there's a vast number of infections that are happening every second and in many of the Kayo's cases they are making lots of copies inside those bacteria and then blowing up the bacteria to get out and they're dumping all the carbon inside of the bacteria into the ocean viruses kill half of all the bacteria in the ocean every day now what happens is that carbon scientists don't really know because they've just you know figured this math out in the last few years and they're saying wait a minute this is incredible this is a colossal amount of carbon now some of it is probably sinking down to the ocean floor some of it might actually be fertilizing the growth of microbes in the in the upper ocean it's probably having a huge effect on a lot of different things one of the things maybe is climate because by screwing up the carbon cycle as it were they're affecting how much carbon that the the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere and thereby helping to set the climate because in the atmosphere the carbon dioxide is trapping Heat scientists can't say you know it wasn't for viruses the earth would be so many degrees warm or colder because there are many complex effects of these viruses we just don't know yet but we know it's got to be big now the other weird thing about viruses in the ocean and this is something I'll get to in more detail in a second is that not all the viruses are killing their hosts a lot of viruses I'm actually regularly insert their their genes into a microbial host and that's it they just hang out now they can still every now and then make new viruses and pop out if they need to but pretty much they're along for the ride and when these viruses go from hosts of folks they can sometimes pick up host genes and carry them along with them and then after a while they can create kind of a whole kind of shopping cart full of genes which sure they can bring to a new host and they're actually some viruses floating around the ocean that carry a whole bunch of genes for photosynthesis now they can photosynthesize on their own what they do is they go and they find a bacterium they infect it they insert their genes into the into the microbe and all of a sudden the microbe turns green in the sense that it can now photosynthesize it couldn't before when it gets infected you can start harnessing harvesting sunlight and it's believed that about 10% of the photosynthesis in the ocean is produced this way penny Chisholm from MIT has been studying these bacteria and the viruses that infect them and she has just found that this is happening around the world so in every breath you take you are breathing in some some oxygen from viruses so the reason that I'm talking so much about microbes and their viruses is that for a long time that's what this planet was like it was a microbial planet this is a picture of stromatolites which are microbial mats these are from Australia and these were the you know the big players on the planet for perhaps the first couple billion years these stromatolites are loaded with viruses and so that's a pretty good clue that there were viruses on the very early Earth another way of figuring out how old viruses are on a sort of Earth history scale is to look at the Tree of Life and we can look at those endogenous retroviruses that showed you before they only go back about hundred million years before the signal gets kind of fuzzy so then scientists have to look at the viruses themselves this is a tricky thing because the viruses are mutating so fast that it can be hard to really see their deep history in their genes because the DNA mutates so much that sometimes it kind of erases its own record of itself mutates and mutates again and you tates again and you can't you can't do that reconstruction I was showing you but we've got a growing catalog of virus genes they're being gathered by people like craig Venter so after craig Venter led the the private effort to sequence the human genome he took off on his yacht was a bunch of other scientists and they started scooping up seawater and basically sequencing every gene that could find in them and there are millions of genes many of which were from viruses and so as scientists have more of this kind of data to look at they start to see some really big patterns to those viral genes this is kind of a classic now classic view of life so we are part of that Eukarya branch we're about here and their scientists recognize three main branches the bacteria the Eukarya and the archaea well by looking at these viral genes scientists have discovered that they're pretty weird and this is a particularly groovy illustration actually published in a scientific paper but you know I salute their aesthetics so you've got bacteria bacteria archaea and eukaryotes over here the three domains then over here you have a viral branch these are these are virus genes virus genes that are really way off on their own and scientists are now arguing that there should we should recognize a fourth domain in life which is represented by viruses not all viruses but a particularly interesting bunch of them called giant viruses which were discovered just a few years ago they've probably been sitting in front of us and we just haven't realized that viruses because they were too big they scientists literally just thought they were bacteria but it turned out they're viruses they just happen to be viruses with way too many genes in them and they're just way too big to be recognized as viruses in any case so now we sort see that viruses having this incredible ancestry in their genes and I just wanted to point out these things here this looks a little bit different than Darwin's branching pattern that's because the viruses are viruses would shuffle genes back and forth between the different domains so so you know all of life is a product of this this mosaic created in large part by viruses and this is a process that's still going on the the coli outbreak that started up in Europe and may turns out it's a strain of e.coli that seemed totally harmless before but basically viruses delivered a bunch of genes to it that turned it into this vicious killer so this is you know we've got two time scales here we've got the time scale of last week and the time scale of four billion years you know a lot of people ask me well okay when did viruses start and you know I don't think anybody really knows that but there's a certain logic that leads you to believe that viruses were there as soon as there was anything that we consider alive because basically it's just a great way of making a living you just you just exploit others and you know unfortunately cheating is a very successful strategy in life and so you can imagine you don't even need cell walls imagine that you've got jeans floating around and they're interacting with each other and these these jeans are being very polite with each other and working together and cooperating and they're producing more copies of themselves that could be a great target for a virus that gets those those genes to make copies of itself instead of themselves the last issue that I want to talk about in terms of the deep past of life is DNA so DNA is this marvelous molecule double-stranded way of storing information and it's it's a very peculiar virus it's a very peculiar molecule scientists have had I had a hard time trying to figure out how DNA itself evolved from you know the building blocks of life fortunately there there's a pretty clear possibility for what came before DNA when DNA is used to make proteins a single-stranded version is produced called RNA and turns out that RNA does lots of other things in ourselves too and so it can it might be able to act kind of like a gene and a protein so maybe we started with RNA and then went to DNA well how did we do that how did that happen Patrick forterra a French researcher and Pasteur Institute argues that actually viruses evolve DNA first they would infect RNA cells and the RNA cells would attack them in the same way that bacteria actually can attack the viruses that infect them so there were some viruses that evolved a double-stranded version of their genes which protected them and it was a great way to get into your host and protect your genes so they wouldn't get cut up and then eventually the hosts co-opted the DNA and used it for their own genes it's a very it's a very obviously a very speculative hypothesis but it is something that you can test by looking at viruses and very exotic microbes and so it's actually stimulating a lot of research on the weirder forms of life on Earth so that's the past and I just want to end by talking briefly about the future I I'm always a little leery of trying to to look into the future I don't think anybody does a good job of it and least of all myself however we're we're here at the long now and we're thinking about the future so there are a few informed guesses that I can make one is to expect more flu if there's anything I'm sure we will continue to have the flu the our children will get the flu our grandchildren will get it and not only that but we're going to be fighting the flu we're not going to eradicate it the problem is that as I mentioned before viruses are very sexy they they like to mix it up and this is a diagram just showing how two different viruses in one cell can produce these new kinds of viruses these are viruses that can escape our immune systems attack they can escape our vaccines which is why you need to take a vaccine every year and this is a diagram just showing what happens over the course of a year this is going to continue to happen we're not going to be able to stop this process now every now and then flu viruses take a shift we we go from different combinations of the existing flu viruses to something that's really different from what we've seen before where do they come from they come from birds and birds actually the flu is a gut infection they get sick in their gut but it can make us sick in our Airways and all the human flus all the human flu strains are just in these three groups so there's lots more flu viruses lots more diversity of flu that could make it into us a lot of these are gonna be dead end infections but some are going to make it through the swine flu the of 2009 was actually a cocktail of a couple different Pig flus plus a human flu plus a bird flu it's just a big old orgy going on that eventually produced what is now the dominant seasonal flu strain and you know I I don't expect us to be getting rid of these sort of farm factories anytime soon I expect we're going to have industrial scale pig farming and all that means great opportunities to make more flu now there are probably going to be other cases where viruses show up that we didn't even see before so there's an interesting study that I have written about for the New York Times so that came out recently about hepatitis C infects 200 million people there are until just a couple weeks ago there were no reports of any hepatitis C like viruses out there in animals so people said well where did it come from a lot of people thought well maybe it came from japansese because you can actually experimentally in fact a chimpanzee with hepatitis C and there they were actually being studied in terms of developing hepatitis hepatitis C treatments that way well some scientists actually discovered the the first close relative of hepatitis C that thing with the red dot there and all those yellow guys or hepatitis C strains they actually discovered in an unexpected place so you can see it's called chv what does the C stand for it stands for canine there were these dogs that were suffering from respiratory diseases and kennels and scientists were trying to figure out what the virus was it didn't match any virus they had seen before when they sequenced the genes it come from a virus that was a lot like hepatitis C so it's it's likely that at least one of the one of these strongest hypotheses to explain this virus is that it went from dogs to humans now that doesn't mean that your dog is gonna give you a potato see but what it does mean is that you know viruses are going to continue to jump into our species sometimes from unexpected sources now it's easy when you talk about viruses in the future to get kind of crazy you know the many science fiction movies have been made like this not just rabid but 28 days later an outbreak and you know there are some pretty insane viruses out there in the real world Bakula viruses actually they infect insects and they grow these incredible numbers they actually make the caterpillars fat and then the caterpillars get this urge to climb up to the top of a tree they get what's called treetop disease and then they hang off the trees the virus is making to do these bizarre things and and then once they're hanging off the tree these fad virus loaded caterpillars literally dissolve the virus releases an enzyme it dissolves the caterpillar entirely and the virus is rained down on the leaves below where they can be eaten by other caterpillars and if you go out and you buy a head of lettuce or cabbage today it's probably covered with millions of Bakula viruses it's okay though you're not a caterpillar okay so you know when you see that sort of stuff you say oh my god you know we're gonna get some incredible viral strain it's gonna make us all blow up and dissolve and spray all over other people and I don't I don't buy that I don't think so I mean I don't think that the diseases we're gonna be worrying about it may be things like Ebola I just don't I think they're gonna we're gonna be worried about a replay of 1918 where 50 million people died billions of people actually got infected with this this particular strain of flu quote-unquote only 50 million people died it was able to be so devastating because it could spread so easily and part of that meant that it wasn't totally fatal it wasn't it wasn't science fiction he was just horrifying and so that you ended up with this relatively small fraction of people who were infected who died but still because it infected such a huge part of the planet the death toll was astonishing you know another possibility might be an HIV like thing or a hepatitis C like thing where maybe there's some new virus already among us and we don't even know yet and it's not going to make itself known for years and by then maybe it's going to be a global epidemic that's what happened with hepatitis C and HIV I don't know I don't want to be too pessimistic though we have had a few triumphs so smallpox for example is now restricted as far as we know only to two laboratories in the United States and Russia that's it rinderpest which is a virus that killed cows just gone so we have at some triumphs there you have to be the only certain kind of viruses can can enjoy this well can suffer I should say this kind of fate I think with things like a HIV we're gonna sort of have a slow gradual conquest so you can see actually a Doulton death adult and child deaths due to AIDS are actually ended on the decline and there is finally some research that's suggesting that maybe we can actually eradicate the virus instead of controlling of antivirals you know what I think it's going to be really interesting in terms of viruses is the positive side the upside of viruses so I mentioned you know none of us would be R without viruses because they help us stick to the the uterine wall we actually make some viral proteins in our brains nobody knows what they're doing there but they clearly come from from viruses that became part of us those baculovirus as I mentioned they're great for pesticides it's a great way to kill off pests you don't like and you can actually genetically engineer the viruses so that instead of they like to make these protein balls where the viruses are embedded kinda like a food cake you would not want to eat you can engineer the virus so that the that it makes instead of the the regular baculovirus protein it makes any protein just about that you want and so actually it's very important biotechnology now we actually now right now have viruses building batteries Angela Belcher at MIT has pioneered using viruses as little robots as it were to assemble things just by engineering them so that they can grab elements and assemble them together and they do it very quickly and finally really the the the most interesting idea the most speculative is what if we could use viruses to treat the whole planet you know there's been a lot of talk about geoengineering our way out of the trouble we've gotten ourselves into viruses are exerting a huge control over the planets biogeochemical cycles and probably the climate so if we were to engineer viruses to to alter bacteria in the oceans what could we do I don't know I I don't know too much about the future I'm pretty sure that humans won't be around in a couple million years but I am sure that as long as there's life on Earth there will be viruses and that is the one prediction that I will be I will make with total confidence so thank you so much for coming and we're happy to talk with Stuart let's go sit that was sensational I can't think of a speaker who's worked his subject so far into the long now thank you for doing that no I enjoyed it yeah so um one term I came across recently doing research on mostly microbes but then seeing how the viruses are these DNA these gene transporters there's the term called the pen genome mm-hmm what is it and do you think it's a way to think about stuff so the pen genome is a term that came up when scientists started sequencing the genomes of bacteria so for example they sequenced the genome of E coli or rather I should say they sequenced one kind of e coli that standard laboratory one that everybody studies called k12 okay we've got k12 great it's about 3,000 genes now we know e coli well then they sequenced another strain of E coli I believe the the next one they did was one that's called one57 h7 which is the one that makes hamburger a little dodgy sometimes if you don't cook it all the way through and it was cause the spinach outbreak a few years back it's not well we'll see like a couple different you know genes in it that make it kind of unhealthy as opposed to harmless ah and they found I think it was about they found it like roughly like like a third of the genes from k12 were missing from a 1/5 787 and vice versa it was crazy I mean basically there was sort of a backbone of kind of e.coli genes but then there were hundreds of genes that were not shared by them so you have sort of a Venn diagram like this and then they sequenced another a coli genome and they discovered that it had some genes in common with one and then the other in the other so there's and I had three the Venn diagrams they started to get like you know twelve circle ven degree after a while and they said this is crazy there's no there are very few genes that all e.coli have they're all e.coli but you know ecole you know one a collie might have three thousand genes the pan genome that is the genes found in all eco lies I think they're up to 20 or 30,000 genes more genomes and genes in the human genome so and those genomes are those genes are being moved from strangest reigned by viruses and so it's happening all the time happening in our bodies it's happening in the environment so you can't yeah so you can't just think of there being a genome for a species things are much more dynamic and complex than that sound so you're dealing by the planetary scale genome oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah I mean and and viruses are there are the other things to do it I mean the the viruses I show the I showed the picture of the cave of crystals in Mexico the viruses in there their closest relatives seem to be on the other side of the world in the ocean so the viruses are traveling down probably through underground connections across the world viruses travel really fast you know they showed up West Nile virus showed up in the United States and I was believing 99 within a few years there across the whole continent so they catch right in airplanes do they also just you know travel through the air they'll be more likely to travel in birds you know if they're if in case of West Nile virus they'll they'll travel yeah I mean there are there are plant viruses that are you know that spread across countries very quickly and so they might be riding on pollen and things like that you know naked viruses don't do that well in the air that's why flu virus is particularly bad in the winter because the droplets hang mm-hmm so if I sneeze on you it's more likely that you're gonna get sick if in the summer I'd sneeze on it yeah right but in the summer kind of go people be on the floor out so Kevin Kelley raises the question with all this variety how can you refer to species and he said there 1500 species of virus on board us what's the species what's the species I wrote a whole article about what is the species and it's it's not even easy to define species among animals and plants hmm when you get to viruses it's it's kind of a nightmare even with microbes too I mean basically when I say he's when I talk about a virus I mean a relatively distinct lineage that's different than other kinds of viruses so some of the microbial guys talk about sort of functional species like units is that also apply in viruses or you're just talking about lineages of genes for them um I don't think that's thinking about virus species has gotten that far actually like a lot of our I'll just say it just doesn't even matter they're they're there so you know the idea of species is something that we really developed as humans looking around in the world and figuring out what to eat and what not to eat and it's it's kind of a it's a quaint concept that doesn't really work in the microbial world so a 1500 varieties would you know what what's that number actually specify if anything really it's it all comes down to the tree the the evolutionary trees so these are 1,500 bigwigs twigs yeah yeah we're we're you know the the influenza are you know really close to each other very very far away from you know the phages and so on it's it's more of an evolutionary perspective on it let the record show he was waving both his hands very rapidly I'm not the only one yeah I know we all crisped a lot glop as a question of phage therapy was explored in the early 20th century could it be revived yes it could be so I didn't have time to talk about this so thank you so phages were discovered in World War one by a Canadian born doctor named Felix Durrell he was treating soldiers who were sick with dysentery in France during the war I mean dysentery was a horrible killer at the time no antibiotics to treat them and he was analyzing them and one of the things they would do is they would filter the stool samples and so he would actually filter and filter and filter them you know mixed with water and then he would filter them finally through porcelain so it's too small for bacteria to get through and he had this clear solution and he could take that solution and then he would we could put it into a colony of dysentery bacteria actually a form of e.coli and it would kill them and he realized that what he had was viruses that only attack bacteria very controversial idea at the time he had Nobel Prize winners saying you're crazy this is not right but he turned out to be right and he immediately said I could use this to treat my patients and he did and he would he would go and do one spectacular case after another of curing people with phages it was such a sensation that if you read the book Arrowsmith that's based on Durrell they made a movie out of it so you have the movie star now of this virologist and he actually went into business the company that became L'Oreal made these sort of phage pads that you could use like una' to disinfect a wound antibiotics totally knocked this out in the West and so people all shifted antibiotics however phage therapy as it's known survived in the Soviet Union and there were researchers there who had learned from Durrell he had visited there and kept developing the phage therapy Soviet soldiers in World War one would be treated with the wounds on the front should they be treated with phages apply to the wounds after the fall of the Soviet Union the idea of phage therapy started to trickle back into the West and now that we have this horrible crisis with antibiotics phage therapy starting to look kind of attractive again and not only that lies you to work around well antibiotics yes well for starters you know antibiotics as antibiotics fail we have very few new ones coming down the pipeline so we're getting to a situation where you have certain resistant strains of bacteria where you really hope that you know one really heavy-duty antibiotic works on them because you've got nothing else mmm you know we're at that point now we had this great 50-year run where antibiotics were the Silver Bullet took care of everything and we're starting to come to the end of that where doctors are dealing with patients they cannot treat because they don't have the drugs anymore so antibiotics were just which are essentially you know chemicals produced by microbes it takes a very long time for them to go through the pipeline and be developed we've got you know nature has all these phages just at the ready that we could just you know and and for each species of bacteria there are lots and lots of different species of phages that could attack them so you have this ready-made you know pharmacopoeia waiting and I like that what we can engineer them now to make them even more effective so phage therapy might finally come back this raises a question Ryan feel and asks with so much death and destruction why don't we see more viruses that make us smarter better-looking or longer lived wouldn't this work out better for everyone involved that would be great well you know me I won't what I Jim be coming up with viruses pretty soon that he'll make a smarter and longer-lasting stuff well certainly viruses are certainly viruses are an important part of gene therapy so viruses are being used as vehicles to deliver genes to so if you use therapy to cure disease can't use therapy like that to give you an expert or something you you would have to figure out something that could could effectively and reliably infect an embryo or a fertilized egg and always insert in the right place I mean it's it's it's a tricky operation so you know the for the caterpillars it was crap didn't explode and dissolve but in fact if you can do stuff like that the caterpillars it could make them smarter and more beautiful and longer lift right I think it's easier to make a caterpillar explode and dissolve than to make a caterpillar smarter I'm just a science writer but that's my guess back to death and destruction a question from Barry yeah that's easy is there any way we would know if irises have caused pcs extinctions in the past that's a good question we're in the future or in the future well it's it's conceivable certainly the way that there are some viral outbreaks going on these days they're they're quite surprising and how ravaging they are and so for example I mentioned the endogenous retroviruses the viruses become one of us well koalas right now are actually dealing with a really nasty retrovirus that is giving them cancer and but it's also at the same time inserting itself into their genome so you have some cause that have it in all their cells and then others that don't and in the some are dying of cancer and it's really one of these situations where they're they're just wondering if this could just do them in I mean it could conceivably wipe them out unless you know unfortunately there's there's a few koalas like off on an island and haven't gotten this virus but so so yes it's imaginable it is imaginable conceivable that some species have gone extinct because of viruses would we know if that happened I guess not well there are some researchers are testing this by looking at for example some of the species that died off species of mammals had died off at the end of the last ice age and they've suggested that maybe humans showing up in North North America brought with them viruses and just oh then they spread like crazy through them and so they're actually trying to look for certain viruses in the frozen tissues of these animals so wasn't Spears of his germs we don't know it could be a combination I mean certainly when Europeans showed up in the New World they brought smallpox that's your you know that's your tip the scales and no kidding question from Chevy our prions precursors to viruses or perhaps degeneres or is this a different subject entirely so prions are misfolded proteins and they when they come into contact with other proteins they can sort of force them as it were to take their configuration and that's generally believed to be what's behind mad cow disease and some other diseases like kuru I would say that they're probably the I would just I think that those are just sort of kind of spun off from mammals or other you know animals that are producing proteins and it's just a weakness of a particular kind of protein I don't think that it has anything to do with the origin of viruses but it's a bring up they're not a parasite they're poison well they well they they certainly do raise this interesting question of what it means to be alive you know which is a question that people often ask about viruses and you've moved to thinking there are organisms therefore alive yes right so so so prions have some of the characteristics we think of as qualifying things as being alive viruses have more of those things so I would say they're kind of alive okay a couple of the scientific term Kevin Kelly's reaching um so two questions how much evidence for extraterrestrial viruses linked to given the scale of viral natural mutate do you worry about synthetic viruses okay so it's there there's their hat you know the Levi's fred hoyle championed this idea that viruses are raining down on us from space there's no evidence of that and you know we viruses are very much part of this biosphere when you look at their genes they're not aliens you know but it's certainly interesting to think about I mean could they can presumably manage interplanetary travel yes I mean there's even some bacteria that can do that so virus is for rockets knocked off the earth and goes to Mars that can they have some attacks viruses on board now or need something for those guys to infect mm-hmm parasitize in order for them to prosper right right and as we saw how difficult it is for a virus to get from you know a bat a mammal into humans that's not a done deal because you know if there is life on Mars it's probably fairly different than life on Earth question from Graham Lynn do virus has ever hop from humans to other species yes they do yes unfortunately humans can sort of bequeath viruses to species chimpanzees and gorillas are actually suffering from some of the some viruses they're picking up from human contact which is actually start raising some questions about how much tourism and even research there should be on great apes because we can we can bring them viruses they didn't have before that's going to put a dent in the eco tourism business seriously yeah I did read about this there's some of the mountain gorillas I guess we're getting what flu or what from us are we sneezing on the marrow we're not hugging them very much we're not we're not but you know we're grabbing onto plants that they're grabbing on to and you know I just we're around we're in the neighborhood qty bola I know gorillas are getting hit by but it's not clear if they're getting it from us or if it's coming from a reservoir what's the quantity issue here I mean you and I are probably swapping viruses as we speak in each other's direction only the good ones yeah right you can feel your IQ Rises yeah well it's true everybody in the room is having an effect and I'm just getting the third diagram whereas the people watching the video don't get that effect yeah their loss there's some other things they don't get though you're cold but to catch a cold to get I start to catch a flu it takes more than one virus it seems like it takes some kind of threshold quantity of you know a quantity coming in a certain level of sensitivity and the receiver all of that stuff what quantities are we talking about and if you know if the guy behind you in the airplane sneezes once is that different than if he sneezes 20 times uh obviously the more they sneeze the more likely you will be to get infected but you know a droplet could do it I mean there are a lot of viruses in a droplet so you know yeah it takes more than one but more than one virus to ensure that you get sick but you know a single droplet may hold a whole bunch of viruses and so it doesn't take much I would imagine we would be enormous ly more sicker even than we are if we're that susceptible to that small quantity of a bad virus well if if that if those viruses can get through all your defenses and they might be enough to make you sick but it's true well you know we we are picking up viruses all the time and we're doing a pretty good job of knocking them out we're just you know every day where we're waging war and sometimes we don't notice it sometimes you know you may have just like wake up one day and be like I don't feel so good and you just take it easy for the day and the next day you're you're feeling better that might have been you know a virus maybe a virus we haven't yet identified so it's it's happening all the time so our bodies maybe do it's own phage therapy or what well you there they're doing their own antiviral therapy there they're attacking okay what's our antiviral mechanism how do we usually deal with the viruses we know it's a standard immune system or something else yeah well there's there are lots of different ways you know we can our bodies can make antibodies to recognize and attack some viruses we actually have you know genes that allow cells that are being invaded to fight off them we have some very cunning kind of strategies encoded in our Jone genomes so for example we have proteins that interfere with retroviruses so that they mutate too much they increase the amount of mutation that happens in in viruses and basically the may have sort of a mutational meltdown so that they become less able to spread so so so so we are you know our own cells are tweaking the mutation rate of viruses which is amazing whoa so I like that a lot even though not only defeat them by slowing down their mutation rate they can defeat them by speeding it up so they just spin out yeah and actually there are a bunch of researchers who are trying to adapt that concept like if you had hepatitis or HIV you could take a pill that would ink that would that would be able to increase the mutation rate so that the viruses would kind of go into this mutational overload but your own cells would be fine and you know that's actually for HIV that's actually in clinical trials now keep and the question of the future you went through a list of things you expect to happen you've been tracking the science and part of your whole point now is that the science of biology is moving very rapidly there's a lot of discovery going on more discovery than there is understanding some respect what's your sense of how the science will proceed over the next couple decades but what remains to be discovered what's important what do you think you'll be reporting for the next while what kind of scientists are you keeping an eye on yeah well I you know I'm a couple things so I'm really fascinated by the people who are looking for viruses in extreme environments because they are really stretching out our understanding of where viruses live and what they can tolerate I mean really viruses are the frontier of biodiversity because I mean if you took a it's also the frontier of evolution it's that they're the big evolutionary apparatus yeah you describe Darwin is behind the times well you know I mean Darwin was fascinated by viruses he just didn't quite realize that they that you know what they were capable of but what I guess what I meant by you know these people looking for viruses in the environment is that if you take a catalogue of all the genes on earth probably most of them are viral genes if you look at the diversity like the differences among genes most of the diversity of genes is in the world's viruses so the so if we want to understand life on Earth and its full complexity we have to understand viruses and we've only just started I mean if you go I mean we have high school kids doing science experiments where they scoop up some dirt and they get to name viruses new you know new species um the most of the viral genes that you scoop up in seawater or in soil or what have you they don't have any close counterpart in all the databases of genes in the world so every so it's not like you're finding one little sort of minor variation on unknown virus you keep finding things that are just out in left field every single time you look for new viruses and so so there's that and then I'm also curious about looking at what's going on inside of us you know what are what are these these viruses doing for us inside of us these four trillion that are inside of you right now what are they doing that's something to think about thank you very much thank you [Applause] [Music] you [Music]
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Channel: Long Now Foundation
Views: 3,224
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Science, Virus, Environment, Medicine, Evolution, bacteria, Genetics, Virology, COVID-19, Corona Virus
Id: rnm7chCN8do
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Length: 97min 28sec (5848 seconds)
Published: Thu Mar 12 2020
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