Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souti,

and today I'm going to be talking to a writer who has his first book, Pathogenesis, coming out soon.

He's a reader in politics and global health in the Centre for Public Health and Policy at Queen Mary University of London,

where he's also co-depity director of the Centre for Public Health and Policy.

And his research has explored, amongst many other things,

the link between populist politics and vaccine hesitancy in Europe,

the negative impact of the CIA drone strikes on polio eradication efforts in Pakistan,

and, as we read in the book, how an outbreak of yellow fever led to Scotland

entering the union with England

in 1707. So pathogenesis is described as the story of how human exposure to viruses has

changed the course of everything from our history to our biology. And as we'll see, the two

intertwined a lot of the time. It's a really enthralling book. It taught me so much I didn't know already. I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to him about it today. Jonathan Kennedy, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Thank you, Izzy. It's great to be here. I've just finished the book. It's crammed with so much. I regard it as history told through the lens of infectious disease. I think different people

will pick up different bits from it. But there are so many surprises like the fact that we as

humans give birth rather than lay eggs because of a virus. And I have to say before I read it,

if you'd said to me, if I'd met you at a party or something and he'd said, this is what I do, I'd just always thought of viruses as evil and as plagues as evil and as bacteria, sort of understand that they're a good bacteria. But generally, I would have just thought, they're bad. Do you find that that's what a lot of people think? Yeah, and it's probably what I thought until a couple of years ago when I started

to read about this kind of thing in earnest. And yeah, there's so many interesting facts, as you

point out, that when I was researching for the book, they just blew my mind. The phenomenon of

a retrovirus is a really interesting one. So retroviruses reproduce by basically inserting some of their

DNA into our genome. And sometimes when they manage to infect

either sperm or egg cells, these genes have passed on to subsequent generations. And so about

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