This episode is presented by eBay.

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Welcome to the Scientific American podcast, Science Talk, posted on March 29, 2013.

I'm Steve Murski.

On this episode, I have the bioterrorist who's a guy who's working on what are called

chromophores, and they're the colored substances that animals have, and animals have tons

of different chromophores, and he figures out how to put them into a have, and animals have tons of different

chromophores. And he figures out how to put them into a virus, and then he does a lot of

very elegant work to figure out how it'd be made to infect humans.

That's science writer Dennis Meredith. Dennis has been a science communicator at some of the

nation's leading research institutions, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke, and the University of Wisconsin.

He got his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Texas and a master's in

biochemistry and science writing from Wisconsin, Go Badgers.

And he's the author of a new novel called The Rainbow Virus.

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