What Science Has Learned about the Coronavirus One Year On

Science Talk

Scientific American

Science

4.2 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

About a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 (which wasn’t called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China. We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: there have been 69 million cases and more than 1.5 million deaths globally as of December 10, 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And as the virus raced around the world, science has also raced to understand how it actually works, biologically. Today on the Science Talk podcast, a virologist who has been part of that massive effort joins us. Britt Glaunsinger is a professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She has been studying viruses for 25 years, with a particular focus, before December 2019, on the herpesvirus. Over the past 12 months, her lab has been focusing on strategies the virus uses to suppress the body's innate immune system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. This is the Science Talk podcast from Scientific American.
0:38.5	I'm Jeff Delvisio.
0:43.6	Today's guest is Britt Glemsinger, a virologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
0:48.6	and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She's a specialist in infectious viruses,
0:54.0	and she's been studying them with a focus on the herpes virus, in particular for the last 25 years.
0:56.4	Welcome to Science Talk, Britt. It's great to have you.
0:58.5	Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here.
1:03.6	It's a really important moment to look back at our very different reality, just 12 months ago.
1:08.1	In December 2019, the first infections were just emerging inside of China.
1:12.7	SARS-CoV-2 didn't have a name yet, and no one could imagine the global effects that the virus would have on us all. But it was also clear that this novel coronavirus
1:18.1	lit a fire underneath the seat of science. So my question is, how far has our scientific
1:24.4	understanding about the biology and the behavior of the virus come since then?
1:28.9	Yeah, we have learned some really critical things about how the virus works and also importantly
1:35.6	about how our immune system responds to it and how this virus, SARS-Cope 2, essentially causes our immune system to misfire in cases of severe COVID-19.
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