Biology of the new coronavirus

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Adam Rutherford explores what makes the new coronavirus so effective at making us ill. Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, explains the structure of the virus and how it gets into our lungs. Evolutionary virologist at Cambridge University, Dr Charlotte Houldcroft talks to Adam about how labs are detecting the virus and how they are studying the way it mutates to understand how it's moving around the world. Kate Jones, Professor of Ecology at UCL, tells Adam how bats live with coronaviruses, but they don't get sick. She says the reason they have moved from bats to humans is because we have taken them out of their natural habitat into places like the wet markets of East Asia. Sarah Gilbert at Oxford University explains how her team is developing vaccines, and Jonathan Ball looks at work to repurpose existing drugs that may be used as treatment for Covid-19.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:46.4	Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science
0:48.6	from BBC Radio 4, first broadcast
0:50.7	on the 12th of March, 2020. I'm Adam Rutherford. This week's program is a
0:55.3	coronavirus special. How is it that something so very tiny has caused a global
1:00.4	medical and economic crisis.
1:02.6	We're focusing on the virus itself, what it is,
1:05.1	how it evolved, host animals, and how our own behavior
1:08.6	caused the spillover from animals into us.
1:11.9	Dealing with an infectious disease of this scale is a complex ecosystem of medicine, of
1:16.4	behavior change, of policy and many other things, and other Radio 4 programs have devoted
1:21.2	their air time to different aspects of COVID-19 inside health and more or less
1:25.8	coronavirus specials are all available on BBC Sounds but all of the policy and medical
1:31.1	interventions rely on high quality science and that is what we
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.