Going Viral

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 3 Hey there, it's Lizzie from The Food Nanny. Did you know our signature kamut flour isn't just delicious, it's packed with nutrients and easier to digest than modern wheat?

Speaker 3 It's an ancient grain with a rich, nutty flavor that makes everything from bread to cookies taste amazing. Plus, it's naturally high in protein and trace minerals.
Ready to give it a try?

Speaker 3 Visit thefoodnanny.com or stop by a local store near you. Keep cooking.
Your family is worth it.

Speaker 4 Your global campaign just launched. But wait, the logo's cropped.
The colors are off and did Lego clear that image?

Speaker 4 When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through, but not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Speaker 5 Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

Speaker 5 And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected and consistent everywhere. Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Speaker 4 You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases. Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 4 But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 6 I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Dara O'Brien.

Speaker 4 And this is Curious Cases, the show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them. With the power of science.

Speaker 6 I mean, do we always solve them?

Speaker 2 I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

Speaker 6 But it is with science.

Speaker 4 It is with science.

Speaker 4 One of the big problems about post-COVID, as well as all of the other massive problems,

Speaker 4 is that

Speaker 4 I just think that viruses have ended up with quite a bad reputation, you know?

Speaker 6 You think they've ended up with a bad reputation? I'm literally standing in front of you here with a t-shirt that says virus is bad.

Speaker 6 I'll put a lot of money into the t-shirt, into the virus is bad t-shirt. Are you telling me it's a grey area?

Speaker 4 I think you need to get a permanent marker and pop a little question mark on there at least. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 6 See, this is the thing, you see, I'm very settled in my virus is bad. Stance.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I don't want to be, you know, it'd be embarrassing to have to probably back down now.

Speaker 4 Wouldn't it? Yeah. Well, guess what's going to happen over the next half hour, Dara?

Speaker 6 It's like, you know, I often take a snap judgment against people, right?

Speaker 4 And then you have a reputation for doing so. I do, I do.
I'm known for it, like, whatever.

Speaker 6 And you don't want to be on the wrong side of me if I just randomly decide you're not a good person.

Speaker 6 Unless they win to spend up any time at all together, in which case they go, oh, yeah, they're all right, actually.

Speaker 4 You never surprise me. Oh, really?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I do a lot.

Speaker 4 I do think that

Speaker 4 my wife goes, oh, really?

Speaker 6 Did you have lunch with them and now you think they're okay? I mean, that's like a cliche.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, will you sit down for lunch with the virus?

Speaker 6 I will. I will happily, me and one say, virus and the other.

Speaker 4 Don't viruses eat?

Speaker 6 Oh my god, these are so many things we need to know about viruses.

Speaker 4 I mean, are they even alive?

Speaker 6 That's a, that's, that's, I know that's the question. I do know that that's the question.
I will, do you know what? I'll ask in a second.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, viruses are on the menu for today because we have had this question come in from Elizabeth in London.

Speaker 7 Hi, Hannah and Dara. I'm Elizabeth and I'm in London.
I'm wondering if all viruses are evil.

Speaker 7 We once reacted to bacteria as if all bacteria were evil, but now we find that lots of bacteria are beneficial. Indeed, many are positively essential.
Are any viruses beneficial or essential?

Speaker 7 Do we even know? Thanks as always for your great program and the opportunity to ask.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much, Elizabeth, and thank you for doing a better introduction to an episode than we just did or have ever done.

Speaker 4 That was

Speaker 4 really good.

Speaker 6 And it was also put in context, put in the bacterial context of us going, oh, yeah, bacteria are bad, but actually turns out you're not good bacteria.

Speaker 4 Well, that's it, right? Whoever the PR rep is for bacteria, you know, they're out on a field day. They're doing really, really well.
They're doing great.

Speaker 4 They've got the bacteria. Yeah, the whole little

Speaker 4 things. Yeah.
Goodness me.

Speaker 6 Wow, that, I mean, that was genius. Bacteria is high-fiving all around the room.

Speaker 4 They were inside your stomach, they were doing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I'm in a little victory dance.

Speaker 6 And somewhere in a bar, there's two viruses looking at tell you going, we need that. We need better PR.

Speaker 4 In the corner of the bar, you come on and you're wearing your virus badge.

Speaker 6 They're going, this is no, look, we gotta do something about this.

Speaker 4 Okay,

Speaker 4 I'm open-minded about this. All right, let's sit down and have lunch with some viruses then, shall we?

Speaker 8 Fine.

Speaker 6 Joining us to pass judgment on the moral character of these off-maligned microbes are Marilyn Rusink, Professor Emeritus of Plant Virology at Penn State University in the US, Professor Martha Cloakie, virologist at the University of Leicester, and Jonathan Ball, Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Liverpool.

Speaker 6 Jonathan, let's start with the basics. What is a virus?

Speaker 8 If you want the posh definition, it is always, always. It's an intracellular, obligate, or an obligate, intracellular parasite.
Now, less posh. Now, less posh.
Keep it up for me.

Speaker 8 Okay, I like to think of them as some of the simplest forms of life, but that's contentious whether or not a virus is living.

Speaker 8 But it's essentially a bit of genetic material wrapped in a protein shell that has to get inside another cell to then hijack that cell to enable it to replicate.

Speaker 4 If you were to take a virus for lunch, right,

Speaker 4 what would it eat?

Speaker 8 That's a very good question.

Speaker 4 Does it eat? Well, it doesn't really.

Speaker 8 No, we wouldn't think of a virus as eating a cell. What they're doing is getting inside the cell, they're hijacking it, they're using the machinery to make lots and lots of copies of themselves.

Speaker 8 And then those viruses break out of that cell.

Speaker 8 They can cause the cell to burst, but essentially, when they get outside, they'll try and find another cell to infect, and so continues the life cycle of a virus.

Speaker 6 And so, this is why there's a debate about whether they're alive or not because they cannot survive on their own.

Speaker 8 Exactly. So if there's, well there will be, there'll be literally millions of viruses on this table and they can't survive unless they get inside a cell to replicate.

Speaker 8 They will be viable or lots of them will be viable but until they get into a cell they can't replicate therefore they can't continue that viral line.

Speaker 6 Marta, were you going to add something?

Speaker 9 Oh just that we have our own metabolism and it's that metabolism that a virus needs. So it needs so we we eat and the viruses kind of in a way use what we've eaten to

Speaker 9 they they hijack out that transcriptional and translational machinery.

Speaker 4 So if you're at a lunch day with a virus, it's not eating anything, it's invading you and using your body to eat. Yeah.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 4 It's not going wrong.

Speaker 6 Can I just ask what the fundamental question is? How many are there?

Speaker 8 Well, I mean, billions and billions. People say more than the stars in the universe.

Speaker 9 Yeah, ten ten to the thirty-one.

Speaker 4 More than the stars in the universe. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 And when you say ten to the thirty-one, that's that is of of including copies of,

Speaker 6 that's not, that's not, in terms of different types of viruses, how many do we think?

Speaker 9 Well, they're the most genetically diverse thing that exists. You can find viruses anywhere that literally have nothing in common with each other.
So there's millions of different types of viruses.

Speaker 9 And then for each bacteria that exists, it's thought that there's between 10 and 100 bacteriophages.

Speaker 9 So in a litre of seawater, for example, there's more viruses in there than there are humans on the planet. There's 10 billion viruses in a litre of water.

Speaker 9 I mean, that's a more scalable number to get your head around.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but also

Speaker 6 scary in the sense of how do we presume that we could possibly survive this oxidal? Because the presumption is they're all bad.

Speaker 4 No, no, not at all, not at all.

Speaker 9 They're not more bad than bacteria. A subset are bad, like a subset of bacteria are bad.
But they're just these ones in seawater, none of them, you can accidentally drink seawater, you'll be fine.

Speaker 9 They'll just infect the, they won't even hurt your bacteria because they'll just be infecting the bacteria that are in seawater.

Speaker 6 Okay, so there's lots of them. They're tiny.

Speaker 6 And most of them would pass without affecting us in any way at all.

Speaker 8 Yeah, indeed, there are so many viruses out there that we simply haven't yet discovered. We think that we know a tiny, tiny fraction of what we call the virome.

Speaker 8 So, where the mass, the wealth of viruses are out there.

Speaker 8 And as techniques in the lab are improving, we're discovering more and more viruses that we didn't know about in different places, many of which don't cause disease.

Speaker 8 We only really know the ones that we think are unfriendly, but there are huge numbers that we don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 6 And where to swab inside inside of my mouth or my ear

Speaker 4 and swear?

Speaker 4 There'll be lots there.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And most of them, you know, they're not causing disease. They're going to be living on other things which are living in your ears or on your skin.

Speaker 8 So you are a walking zoological garden of microbes.

Speaker 4 Put that on your t-shirt.

Speaker 4 All right, when you said there that they're going to be living on things that are living on Dara, right, so does that mean that viruses are infecting other life forms?

Speaker 8 Absolutely. Yeah, and it's a bit like that,

Speaker 8 God, and I can never remember it. You know,

Speaker 8 the fly thing and ad infinitum.

Speaker 9 Little fleas have lesocles upon their vexabatum, and lessocles have lessocles on, so adenophytum.

Speaker 4 Oh, right.

Speaker 8 So, yeah.

Speaker 4 Never remember that. So, is that true then?

Speaker 4 Is it sort of like inception all the way down?

Speaker 8 As I said, every life form will have at least one and it will have multiple viruses that infect it.

Speaker 6 Marilyn, tell us about the kind of virus we find in plants, fungi, animals.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so I have spent most of my life working on plant and fungal viruses. I've done some work on wild plant viruses and every plant has them.

Speaker 10 We've never found a plant without a virus in it in the wild, and usually many. And also fungi.
Fungi almost always have viruses. So they are everywhere.

Speaker 4 I can see the benefit for the virus here, right? Like you find a host, you sort of infect it, you use it, it's kind of mechanisms for your own ends. But what about the host itself?

Speaker 4 Is it always bad to be infected with the virus?

Speaker 10 So in fact, if you think about it, it's not a good thing for the host to get sick.

Speaker 10 If the virus makes the host sick, that's a big disadvantage for the virus. So I think viruses that cause disease are just in the wrong place.

Speaker 10 So in their natural host, in their normal environment, they're going to, if they do anything, they're going to help the host. So there are many examples of beneficial viruses, mutualistic viruses.

Speaker 4 So give me an example then.

Speaker 4 Give me a story about a virus that's beneficial to the host.

Speaker 10 Okay, my favorite story is one in Yellowstone National Park. There are plants that grow there in the geothermal soils with temperatures over 50 degrees centigrade.

Speaker 10 Plants normally cannot grow at those temperatures, but these plants are colonized by a fungus. And if they don't have the fungus, they can't grow.
But the fungus is infected with a virus.

Speaker 10 So you have to have all three.

Speaker 10 You have to have the virus, the fungus, and the plant for this holobiont, we call it, which is three symbiotic organisms in this case, that live together, and that lets them grow in these really hot soils.

Speaker 4 It's like a three-way microbial rom-com you're describing there. It is.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Just so set against the beautiful backdrop of Yellowstone. What about humans? Are there any viruses that are good for humans?

Speaker 10 Yes, definitely. There are a number of viruses in humans like hepatitis G virus or now it's usually called GB virus.
That is ubiquitous. It's very common in humans.

Speaker 10 It doesn't cause any disease we know of. But if you get HIV, it delays the onset of disease.

Speaker 10 And in fact, our genomes are full of viruses too. So there are classes of viruses that integrate into the genome and about 8% of our genome is retrovirus in nature.

Speaker 10 For one thing, we wouldn't have our, we wouldn't be placental if we didn't have a virus.

Speaker 10 So it's a retrovirus integrated into our genome that allows the formation of the placenta, which is, you know, we know required for mammalian birth.

Speaker 4 I feel like I'm here to massively go back here because you just said placentas wouldn't wouldn't exist without viruses. Just walk me through that.

Speaker 10 Okay, so retroviruses are integrated into the genome to replicate. They all do that.
If that happens in a germline cell that is one of our reproductive cells, then they are there forever.

Speaker 10 All future generations will have that virus incorporated in its genome.

Speaker 4 Okay, so you've got viruses floating around invading cells all over your body. That's kind of just happening all the time.

Speaker 4 If it just so happens that a virus invades a cell that is used as part of your reproduction, you can pass on that change in DNA to your offspring. That's right.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So you end up essentially with alien DNA in your offspring.

Speaker 10 Well, I don't know if it's alien.

Speaker 8 It's just about 8% of you is alien.

Speaker 4 I bet you are.

Speaker 8 8% of your DNA is

Speaker 4 alien.

Speaker 10 Eight percent we can recognize as pretty much intact viruses.

Speaker 4 Wait,

Speaker 4 human DNA comes from viruses.

Speaker 6 And can we tell when that happened? Can we go, well, that was, I mean, was it from an instance,

Speaker 6 one instance where one virus got into DNA and that's just propagated?

Speaker 8 We can look across the DNA of different species and see when they likely shared a common ancestor. And we know for mammals,

Speaker 8 we've acquired these syncytian genes multiple times in different species. So clearly, this was an advantageous thing to do.

Speaker 6 Ah, so it would have happened a number of times and it would have rested into the DNA a number of different times and then just become

Speaker 6 achieved success and become standard to our DNA.

Speaker 8 Absolutely, and we're seeing it in action now. We're seeing a koala virus invading the koala genome in real time at the moment.

Speaker 8 So we've got two different populations of koala in Australia, Australia, one of which is very susceptible to the disease caused by a retrovirus.

Speaker 8 The other one is actually getting its genome invaded by that retrovirus and we think that's happened within the last hundred years or so and it's offering it some protection against the disease.

Speaker 4 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a lot of words going on here, like retrovirus and genomes.

Speaker 4 And I'm and I just, I think. This is a trouble when you put a load virologist.
I know, I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 What you are saying is so crazy to me. I just want to make sure they haven't just fantasized the whole version that we're 8% aliens.
It's my own mind. You're still stuck on being 8% alien.
Of course.

Speaker 4 Of course.

Speaker 6 That is up to

Speaker 6 past one knee.

Speaker 4 80% could be the little cell. It's at least the little sound.

Speaker 4 Okay, okay. Koalas, right? So you've got a baddie koala virus, right, that makes some koalas sick.

Speaker 4 And then one day, that baddie virus happens to invade a cell in that koala koala that is

Speaker 4 part of

Speaker 4 generating the offspring of that koala, right? So then, am I right? Yes, you're right.

Speaker 4 So now the baddie virus is like in the baby koala.

Speaker 8 But it's been tamed.

Speaker 4 Tamed because it's sort of subsumed it.

Speaker 8 It's been attenuated.

Speaker 4 It's like Spider-Man. Yes.
Right? Like you become spider. I've never seen Spider-Man.
Is that the flop? No, that's the flop.

Speaker 8 I haven't either, so I can't help you out there.

Speaker 6 But the spider didn't bite the dad of Spider-Man.

Speaker 6 In an area that may affect the breeding of the next Spider-Man.

Speaker 4 No, that's not what happened. Okay, but so the bad, the

Speaker 4 now, this like super kind of nuclear baby koala who's like protected from bad koala virus because it has subsumed all of the koala virus bad DNA.

Speaker 8 Yes, and we'll end up losing lots of it. It will keep the bits that are useful for it.

Speaker 4 It's a bit like your junk drawer at home, you know.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but that's not going to be passed on to her children. I mean, God with the day, that's all going to skip.

Speaker 6 When the kids get to clear the house out, you know, that's none of that stuff is.

Speaker 4 Along with all my awards. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 God, she's really proud of this stuff.

Speaker 4 Marilyn, Marilyn, let's come back to you. So is this what happened when humans got placentas or mammals got placentas?

Speaker 10 Yes, it is. That's how we got them.
The protein that was required to make the placenta is called synthetin, and it is a retroviral protein.

Speaker 10 And it's true there are many different ones in different mammal lineages and it's not really clear.

Speaker 10 Some people think that there was an initial invasion of this virus that started the first placental mammal, but then perhaps it's been replaced over time by different viruses, similar viruses.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's like the one we have is different than the one you find in cats, for example. But that's it.

Speaker 10 If we didn't have that virus, we wouldn't have placental mammals and who knows where we'd be.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and going back to the point about multiple invasions, as it were, if you look through the genome, you can see multiple copies of these genes that have been acquired, but not all of them are switched on.

Speaker 8 And it just so happens that the one that we use in humans, syncitin 1, makes the placenta.

Speaker 8 But there's also a related viral protein called syncitin 2 that we think allows the mother to tolerate the presence of the baby because, you know, you've got an alien inside you, let's face it.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 8 basically, yeah, an alien parasite. So you're trying to, your natural instinct will be to get rid of that.

Speaker 8 And so synciting too, we think, gives some tolerance to the fetus as it's growing and developing.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 are we saying now then that the only reason why

Speaker 4 babies exist in the way that they do is because of viruses?

Speaker 8 Pretty much. That's what gave rise to mammals, or placental mammals.

Speaker 4 It's like a good, good bit of aliens.

Speaker 10 There are evolutionary biologists who think that we are just coalesced viruses.

Speaker 10 I happen to be one that kind of tends to think that way. It all started with viruses and then they just kept coming together and adding more and more genes.
And voila, we have a human now.

Speaker 4 Well, then, so then, so then, does that mean that we're not 8%? That actually, you know, the further you go back, there's more and more and more that came from viruses at some point in time.

Speaker 10 There's a lot of other DNA that we have that's probably viral in origin. The 8% is what we can identify as intact retrovirus.
This is extraordinary.

Speaker 6 When you do the DNA, you send off for the the DNA test, you spit in the cup and send off, you know, to find out, you know, I'm, you know, I'm 63% Viking and 29% Irish.

Speaker 6 It doesn't go, and you're 8% viral. No, they don't.

Speaker 4 If you use my DNA service, you will. People would be really, really shocked if they went, oh, God, what?

Speaker 4 It does put a different twist on the phrase going viral,

Speaker 4 essentially. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Hi, friends. It's Lizzie from the Food Nanny.
You know us for our Kamus flour, but have you ever tried our amazing sourdough starter, French salt, or signature cookbooks?

Speaker 3 We've curated the best tools and ingredients to help you fall in love with cooking again.

Speaker 3 Whether you're baking bread or planning meals for the week, we've got everything you need to make dinner time nutritious and delicious. Stop by a store near you or shop online at thefoodnanny.com.

Speaker 3 Keep cooking, your family is worth it.

Speaker 11 Looking for adventure, culture, and craft beer? Head to Fort Collins, Colorado. Start your day with a hike around the stunning Horse Tooth Reservoir or a trip to the farmer's market.

Speaker 11 Quench your thirst at one of Fort Collins' world-class breweries. Then soak up live music all night at a local venue.

Speaker 11 Fort Collins is a bike lover's paradise with more than 285 miles of trails and lanes. Fort Collins, Colorado, where open spaces create open minds.

Speaker 11 Start your adventure and book your stay now at visitfortcollins.com.

Speaker 6 All right, I can see how essential viruses are for life, but they can also be deadly and harmful to humans. So I'm not entirely committed to this yet.

Speaker 4 All right, Dara's not convinced yet. Fine.
But Martha, you've got a model there. Just talk us through.
Is that bacteria?

Speaker 9 Yeah, so

Speaker 9 these are viruses that infect bacteria, so they're a little bit more complicated.

Speaker 4 Okay, so what we have here is we have a sort of like a yellow peanut, right? Sort of a bit bigger than a glass of water. And a giant giant model of a bacteria.

Speaker 4 And around the outside, it's got all of these holes that are different shapes. Some of them are round, some of them are

Speaker 4 shaped.

Speaker 9 So they're representing different proteins that would be on the side of a bacterial cell. Okay.
And

Speaker 9 all bacteria have these natural enemies, but they're very specific. So all these viruses that exist, all the different types, that specificity is really, really intricate.

Speaker 9 So most viruses can only infect just one species or a very small number of different types of.

Speaker 4 In reality, then, on the bacteria, on the surface of the bacteria, it's not like you can just,

Speaker 4 if you're a virus, you can just invade anywhere you like.

Speaker 9 Exactly. So, bacteriophages, they can only infect, they don't infect humans, animals, plants, or fungi.
They will just infect bacteria.

Speaker 9 And then, within that, as you can see, you've just infected that bacteria with lots of viruses that don't infect it.

Speaker 4 This is

Speaker 4 one.

Speaker 9 There's only one true connection.

Speaker 4 Oh, I see.

Speaker 4 I see. I understand.

Speaker 6 This is in which it's a pirate in a barrel and you put swords into it. And then, you know,

Speaker 4 there are similarities.

Speaker 4 Hold on, that was because there's so many. Hold on.

Speaker 11 You're close.

Speaker 9 You're pretty close. There's only one left of, I think, that you haven't tried.

Speaker 4 At least it's not 10 to the power of 31 of these.

Speaker 4 The only one left that I haven't tried this one here.

Speaker 6 I've never played this game before.

Speaker 4 Never.

Speaker 4 Never, have you? Yes. Oh, okay.

Speaker 6 But as I said, it's a pirate in a barrel. And he pops up at exactly the right time.

Speaker 4 Oh, no. There it is.

Speaker 9 You infected that bacteria with the appropriate bacteria of age and they released

Speaker 9 all the. So that's what bacteria is.

Speaker 4 And then it's

Speaker 4 all of these other viruses.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so this is a previous virus that's gone in there and it's taken over that replication, like we talked about, and made lots of viruses within that bacterial cell.

Speaker 9 And then they burst out and then they'll infect other bacteria and more and more bacteria. So that's the way that they're.

Speaker 4 But now, I mean, your lunch date with this virus is suddenly looking.

Speaker 6 I'm getting on very well with the virus this day. We've chatted about, you know, I said I think you're alive.
And I've won him over. I've also clearly gendered him.

Speaker 4 I've won him over.

Speaker 6 And now I'm training him to attack a bacteria I don't like.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 9 So viruses that infect bacteria can be very useful for us because we have a lot of problems now with antimicrobial resistance. There's more and more bacteria we can't treat.

Speaker 9 So anything you go to your GP for and you ask for antibiotics, chest infection, skin infection, that's becoming very hard actually for doctors to give you antibiotics that still work in many contexts.

Speaker 9 So we need new treatments. I think at the moment last most recent figure said that 8,000 people in the UK died from an antibiotic resistant infection.
So it's becoming more and more problematic.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 9 where are we going to find new ways to treat bacteria? Well we can actually just harvest these guys. These guys are just there and they were actually discovered before antibiotics were discovered.

Speaker 9 But they're quite complicated due to the specificity that you showed when you tried to find the right hole because you have to get exactly the right bacteria of age to target the right bacteria.

Speaker 9 So this is why there was considered to be a more complicated thing to actually develop as a treatment, which is why we focus on antibiotics.

Speaker 6 And does the fact that it's now becoming

Speaker 6 urgent the way we describe it now, or more increasingly urgent, mean that we may,

Speaker 6 if we put the resources into it, this may be a solvable problem?

Speaker 9 Yeah, we haven't. We have another chance at this.

Speaker 9 So at the moment, we're working together as phage biologists, so we're working together with doctors who are getting increasingly desperate to be able to treat their patients.

Speaker 9 So we're working to collect the data that we need to be able to convince the regulators and for them to become a mainstream medicine. They are used in some places actually already.

Speaker 9 They're used in Georgia and Tbilisi and former USSR. This is one of the places what bacteriophages were discovered and they never stopped using them actually.

Speaker 9 So they still treat hundreds of people per year with bacteriophages, but they're not available as a treatment in the UK.

Speaker 6 And we can manufacture, we can engineer,

Speaker 6 we can model a virus depending on what bacteria we want to attack.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. Is it difficult to do? Is it a problem?

Speaker 9 Well, first of all, we can just find them. We don't need to necessarily engineer them.
We may be able to, we may have to engineer them down the line.

Speaker 9 But the main thing is, if we know what bacteria are causing us problems, like for example, E. coli is a very common thing, thing, causes urinary tract infections, ban wounds.

Speaker 9 So we can actually grow those bacteria and then we can find the right viruses initially and try to understand which, because there's, as we said, thousands of different types of viruses, so we can work out which ones kill most effectively.

Speaker 9 And then we can make products that contain those viruses that we can give as treatments to people.

Speaker 6 And presumably it becomes an incredibly targeted attack as well. Yeah.
Because they're not going to, as we can see, there, it's not going to open any other bacteria.

Speaker 9 No, absolutely.

Speaker 9 So unlike an antibiotic, where you take an antibiotic and you feel kind of rough rough for some days after, it kills all the good bacteria as well as the bacteria that you're trying to target.

Speaker 9 The bacteriophages will just take out that one pathogen, that one bacteria that's causing a problem that you want to get rid of. So they're highly specific targeted treatment that can be used

Speaker 9 to treat both antibiotic-resistant bacteria and also sometimes just

Speaker 9 where it's difficult to reach an area of the body, like a bladder or inside a wound or something, it's quite hard to get antibiotics to the area. So again, phages are very useful in that context.

Speaker 4 There are other ways that you can use viruses in clinical settings, right?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, certainly, we can use viruses to deliver gene fixes, as it were. So, we know that there's a whole host of different viruses that have currently being studied in clinical trials.

Speaker 8 Some have been approved for use,

Speaker 8 where they can deliver a gene into a cell which has a genetic defect, fix that genetic defect, and therefore bring about a cure.

Speaker 4 And viruses are actually absolutely essential.

Speaker 8 And viruses are essential to do that. They are the things that deliver the genetic information into the cell, because we're harnessing what a virus just wants to do naturally.

Speaker 4 Get into the cell.

Speaker 8 Get into the cell, replicate itself, deliver its genetic material into that cell.

Speaker 4 Amazing.

Speaker 4 Do you think

Speaker 4 the future of medicine is going to, I mean,

Speaker 4 depend substantially on our use of viruses?

Speaker 8 Well, if you think about a lot of the research that goes on in labs all around the world, most of that research takes advantage of one enzyme. So these are proteins that

Speaker 8 basically do a job, they have a function. But most of the research in labs relies on an enzyme called reverse transcriptase.
So that is an enzyme that comes from these retroviruses.

Speaker 8 We've heard so much about them. These are the ones that are invading your genome.

Speaker 8 But this particular enzyme can turn RNA, which is the kind of reading the blueprint to make proteins, but it can turn it from RNA back into DNA.

Speaker 8 And it's the DNA that we can find most useful when we're doing experiments. So we can put that DNA into bacteria and grow lots and lots of copies of it.

Speaker 8 We can then take that DNA out and make lots and lots of a protein, a vaccine, for example, against a disease.

Speaker 8 So this one particular enzyme underpins so much of the research in every lab around the world that if we removed it, I'm not sure where we'd be.

Speaker 8 But also, even things like, you know, we are taming viruses to our advantage. So, a lot of the vaccine research that's going on.
Does it feel?

Speaker 6 I mean, I'm sorry to be maybe taking too positive view on this, but I feel we're entering the age of the virologist.

Speaker 6 You're perfectly placed for this.

Speaker 6 And that at some point, if this works out, we'll be looking back on antibiotics as a fairly clumsy tool.

Speaker 9 I think we will. I think

Speaker 9 if we can get bacteriophages right, we'll look back and think antibiotics were just something that distracted us from developing bacteriophages properly.

Speaker 4 Hold on a second, Toro, Briel. We started this with you wearing a virus' bad t-shirt, refusing to talk to them, destroying their reputation on national radio.
And now, and now, here he is.

Speaker 6 The best little bodies we have.

Speaker 10 I think that we have long neglected the benefits of viruses. And

Speaker 10 we still are.

Speaker 10 But I wrote a paper a few years ago for the Journal of Virology, which was called Move Over Bacteria, because viruses are now making their mark as mutualists.

Speaker 10 And so I think that the more that we understand the value of viruses and their usefulness, the more we'll use them for all kinds of things.

Speaker 6 If viruses have gathered together and hired you all to act as PR, they have done very well.

Speaker 4 An incredible job.

Speaker 6 A fantastic job. Thank you for that.
It's been genuinely like has changed my attitude enormously.

Speaker 4 All right, thank you, T-shirt. I will.
I'm going to burn the teachers.

Speaker 6 I'm reworking the t-shirts.

Speaker 6 Virus good. That's what I'm going to say.
Some virus good. All right, let's do that.
Thank you to Jonathan Ball, Martha Cloakie, and Marilyn Rusink.

Speaker 4 Well, well, well, Dara Bryn. We started off.
You were wearing a t-shirt.

Speaker 6 I've gone on a journey. You were

Speaker 4 antiviruses.

Speaker 6 I'm now knitting like little

Speaker 6 bunting with viruses on it, you know, and I'm writing a song about about them, like a jingle for them.

Speaker 4 Organising a march. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 4 You intended the 31 viruses following you down the street.

Speaker 6 Yeah, very slowly, just stomping along on the virusy legs.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 then people were then saying, Whoa, whoa, we still have the cold. And I'll go, oh, yeah, fair point.

Speaker 6 And I'll have to take a measured view.

Speaker 4 Is that all it is then, Dara? Do you just agree with the last person who spoke to you?

Speaker 6 They were really, really convincing those people.

Speaker 4 They kind of wear it.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I'll join you on your march.

Speaker 6 If you want to be notified as soon as a new episode is released, make sure you're subscribed to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and have push notifications turned on.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Amol Rajan and from BBC Radio 4, this is Radical.

Speaker 1 We are living through one of those hinge moments in history when all the old certainties crumble and a new world struggles to be born. So the idea behind this podcast is to help you navigate it.

Speaker 4 What's really changed is the volume of information that has exploded.

Speaker 1 And also by offering a safe space for the radical ideas that our future demands.

Speaker 4 Go to the chancellor and say radically cut the taxes of those with children.

Speaker 9 Telling our stories is powerful and a radical act.

Speaker 1 Listen to Radical with Amo Rajan on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 2 Tires matter. They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.
Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Speaker 2 Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy. Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Speaker 2 Go to tirerack.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the special offers.
TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Speaker 11 Fort Collins wants to know what's your favorite fall activity. Heading out on hiking trails? Fort Collins has more than 280 miles worth.
Paddling pristine waters, Horsetooth Reservoir has you covered.

Speaker 11 Listening to live music. Check out the Mishawaka Amphitheater or Washington's downtown.
Trying locally brewed beers. Cheers a pint at one of our many craft breweries.

Speaker 11 Feasting on farm-to-table cuisine?

Speaker 4 Bon apetite.

Speaker 11 Plan your perfect fall getaway to Fort Collins, where open spaces create open minds. Start your fall adventure now at visitfortcollins.com.