Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Vianess and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Steven Thrasher, where I ask him, for viruses classist.

Welcome to Getting Curious, this is Jonathan Vianess. This is going to be an interesting intro because usually honey I go right into it, but I just sort of do you guys.

Can always tell me that I say milk in a really weird way because I don't say milk. I say milk.

I also just learned I do this in other words when I was practicing this intro with our stunning guest Dr. Steven Thrasher holds the inaugural Daniel H. Remberg chair at Northwestern University's Medell School, the first journalism professor ship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research.

His new book, The Viral Underclass, explores how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Wow, Dr. Steven Thrasher, how are you today?

I'm great, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to talk to you. When I first understood my sexuality, it was when the first iteration of queer I was on the air.

So it's really a big honor to get to talk to you in its new incarnation as I am releasing my first book.

Was it Cyan for you too? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, me too. I mean, Cyan just really shivered my temper and still does to this day. We like love Cyan. They're just gorgeous. It's not their fault.

So I am obsessed with the new book, The Viral Underclass. When I read that title, I was like, honey, what does it mean?

As I read your work, I was like, oh, this is incredible. And then I realized that you also know Dr. Celeste Watkins-Hays, who were obsessed with. I want to be like the president of their fan club.

I'll fight you for that job. And no, no, I'll just be I'll be vice. I can't fight. You don't have to get in and fight. I'll be like vice. So I could be like co-chair or like, or not even co-chair.

I just want to be in the club. I just like want to be in that club. It's a great club. But like this is a book about the ways that viruses impact communities differently. So first off viruses.

We think about them a lot, especially in the last two years. But can you share with us what are viruses at their core?

Sure. Viruses are extremely small organisms. And it's a biological and philosophical question about whether or not they're alive.

They're very, very small. If you can imagine bacteria, they're even smaller than that. We first understood that they even existed when a scientist tried to filter up bacteria and saw something bad was still happening and realized there was something smaller than that that was moving its way through.

So viruses are very, very tiny bits of organic matter. And they differentiate from bacteria which can grow outside of bodies and reproduce. Viruses can only reproduce when they're inside what we might call a host.

And that's a very scientific term. We shouldn't call people hosts and when we're talking about individuals. But viruses do need some kind of living host to be able to replicate when they're outside the body. They really can't do so.

And they are extremely prevalent in our universe. There are more of them just on this planet than there are stars in the universe. So I think that we have to treat them with a lot of respect and understanding because they're not going anywhere.

There's more viruses. Do you mean copies of the viruses we already know about are like different ones?

I mean actual units of virus. So if you think of a star in the sky and of course we can always see a small fraction of them.

Think of units of viruses and as individual units when I'm saying that. And for instance, if you have COVID, if you become infected with SARS-CoV-2, for every cell in your body there are 10 viruses.

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