COVID Near You Citizen Science, Fact-Check Your Feed. March 27, 2020, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Just a note, due to the need for social distancing this week, |
| 0:06.7 | we won't be taking calls during this edition of Science Friday, which was pre-recorded earlier in the week. |
| 0:13.1 | One of the biggest issues in the U.S. when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic is testing, getting more tests produced and the struggle to get one if you need |
| 0:24.6 | it. But what exactly is the science and technology behind those PCR tests? How do they work? Maggie |
| 0:31.8 | Kerth is here to fill us in on that story and other COVID headlines from this week. She is |
| 0:36.9 | senior science reporter for 538.com based |
| 0:40.3 | in Minneapolis. Welcome to Science Friday. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:44.3 | Let's talk about this coronavirus. It's made up of RNA. And that is what the tests are analyzing. |
| 0:51.2 | Can you give us a little thumbnail on that? Yeah, so the tests are all, it turns out, |
| 0:56.8 | the ones that we've been using for the past few weeks at any rate are all based around the same |
| 1:01.6 | technology. That's true here. It's true in other countries. And basically what's going on is |
| 1:08.1 | that a medical professional sticks a swab way, way, way, way up the back |
| 1:12.9 | of your nose. And then they take that biological gunk in technical terms. And they first have to |
| 1:21.9 | isolate viral material, the RNA, out of that goo, separating it off from mucus, random cells. |
| 1:29.2 | And RNA is sort of like, you can imagine it is like half of a ladder. |
| 1:33.1 | So if DNA is like a twisted ladder, RNA is sort of like that split in half. |
| 1:38.2 | And so the first thing that they have to do is turn RNA into DNA. |
| 1:42.9 | That's called reverse transcription. And it's something that can be done with |
| 1:47.7 | what amounts to science kits that researchers buy from scientific supply companies. They do that. |
| 1:55.1 | And then the next step is something called polymerase chain reaction, which is a long-established technology and method |
| 2:03.3 | used for multiplying the numbers of DNA fragments that you have, so that you have enough |
| 2:09.7 | that you can actually study. And a big part of what makes the test that we have from the CDC |
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