TWiV 1339: Ebola up close with Tom Ksiazek

0:00This Week in Virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind that make you sick.

0:10From Microbe TV, this is TWIV. This Week in Virology, episode 1339, recorded on July 10th, 2026. I'm Vincent Racaniello, and you're listening to the podcast all about viruses. Joining me today from Madison, New Jersey, Breanne Barker. Hi, it's great to be here. I think we're probably going to get a storm pretty soon. It's pretty cloudy, 84 Fahrenheit. And good day to be inside recording a podcast. Here in New York, it's 30 C and cloudy. It's pretty humid today. Also joining us from Austin, Texas, Rich Condit. Howdy. 92 degrees, sort of high light overcast. It's Texas here. Texas. Well, we have a guest for you today, and he's also in Texas.

1:12He's at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, coming back a second time on TWIV. Tom Kysak, welcome back, Tom. Hi, it's 89 degrees here, and I don't see the humidity, but it's humid outside for sure. I remember last time, so Rich and I were there in October 2019. That was a couple of lifetimes ago. Yeah, it was pre-pandemic, which is basically another era, right? And that's how I learned how to pronounce your name, Tom, because I asked you before we started. Kysak. You were on TWIV 583. That was called Texas Virus Hunters. It was you, Jim LeDuc, and Bob Tesh. And we were supposed to, at the time, have C.J.

2:10Peters on. And he canceled at the last minute. So he couldn't make it. And unfortunately, he's passed away recently, just not too long ago, right, Tom? Yeah, last Saturday. That's too bad. And so CJ and Fred Murphy, two giants in virology. And you mentioned, Tom, another person who passed recently. Barney Easterday, who was my mentor when I first went to the University of Wisconsin, also died about two months ago. So he's a big personality in flu and more to the point in my career. He was in the Army and did Rift Valley Fever. He's one of the first guys in the U.S. that really became in Rift Valley Fever.

2:57He wrote a review that a lot of people still refer to when they talk about Rift Valley Fever. Okay. Well, before we get to Tom, let's do a few things of business here. Remember, if you enjoy these programs, we'd love to have your support. You can go to microbe.tv slash contribute. The Rosenfeld Lab in Philadelphia has openings for postdoc and technician. You can email her, RosenfeldA at MLHS.org. And don't remember, the American Society for Virology annual meeting is coming up at the University of Minnesota, July 27th through 30th. Go to ASV.org for more details. The registration fee goes up after July 13th, not too long from now.

3:48So if you want to go, check it out. So, Tom, we did talk about your history, but that was ages ago. And let's go back again and tell us all about your training. Okay, so I'm a veterinarian by training. is that me is that you guys everything sounds good here okay i i just had a computer ding come up well i was trained as a veterinarian i uh was it uh i'm a kansan i was uh went to university at kansas state university got a dvm in 1970 it was uh you know sort of mid vietnam war still at that point. And like almost all my classmates, you got to go some way or another. So I had signed up to go into the Air Force sort of pre-graduation under a program called the Early Commissioning Program and went in the Air Force and ended up in Texas for a short period after I went through a tech school and then went to England for three years.

4:58And while I was there, I applied for a graduate training program, and they sent me to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to get a master's degree in virology. And once I got that, they deployed me to a Navy lab in Taipei, Taiwan. And subsequently, I did another tour in the Far East at a detachment of that laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia. and then I applied for graduate training again under the Air Force and they sent me to Berkeley to get a degree in sort of virology epidemiology. And while I was at Berkeley from 1980 till very early 1984, they did away with the veterinary corps in the Air Force and somehow or another, Well, probably mostly my graduate advisor, Bill Reeves, who is an extremely big name in arbovirology, made arrangements for me to get hooked up with USAMRID at Fort Detrick.

6:03And that's where I went for a short period before once again going overseas to another Navy lab in Cairo, Egypt. So that's sort of my training in what I would call postdoctoral events that got me to where I am in high containment researches and VHF, arboviruses to begin with and then eventually into the hemorrhagic fevers. and I have sort of a mechanical proclivity and I ended up being heavily involved in the operation of BSL-4 labs at CDC where I went after I retired from the Army following C.J. Peters to CDC and then eventually after I retired from the Army here and CDC here at UTMB. How did you get interested in science?

6:56Were you always interested in science from a young age or You know, interested in veterinary medicine, which is a science of sorts. There's a fair amount of art to medicine, I would say, but there is a fair amount of science. And I like school and university. And I figured out when I went in the Air Force that they offered opportunities to be trained in, you know, sort of postgraduate education. And I was most interested in pathology, actually. But for whatever reason, I chose to have virology training. And that sort of set me on a path which I have sort of endured, I guess, for many years now.

7:41I'm also interested in the motivation behind all this because, you know, how deliberate is all this? Sounds like you very deliberately wanted to be a veterinarian. No, I did. And then things happened. Yeah. Right. I often describe myself as really being like Forrest Gump. I really didn't, you know, I didn't have a plotted course. Things happened. And fortunately enough, I had had training in the background, field experience while I did those tours in the Far East and the Navy labs, et cetera, that allowed me to take advantage of opportunities that were presented. And, you know, that's sort of the history of the thing.

8:28And I've, you know, rubbed shoulders with some of the people we just talked about a little earlier and, you know, had a pretty storied history. Not because of my great intellect, but just because I was there and had enough experience to take advantage of them. And I had very good colleagues, Stuart Nickel and Pierre Rolland, are my long-term collaborators. And we each played slightly different roles in things like the Hanna virus in 1993,

9:05NEPA, SARS. You know, the group I was in at CDC played a very large role in a lot of very important virologic events. Yeah, so at CDC, you were in the special pathogens branch, is that correct? Yeah, the special pathogens branch. They now call it viral special pathogens. Okay, and so what's their job? Well, it was created by another name you guys will recognize, Carl Johnson. And, you know, sort of the mid-70s, early 70s, I think the U.S. became a little bit more aware of the threats of international travel and people being overseas. I mean, the military always had, you know, more than a passing interest in that because we had a lot of troops deployed and they might be deployed in some other areas and you end up encountering tropical diseases.

10:04So Walter Reed and Usamrid, to a lesser extent, were involved in those things. And that was part of what I was exposed to when I transferred into the Army and went to Usamrid. And CDC, on a sort of a parallel path because of Peace Corps and international travel becoming more and more of a reality, stood up a group that studied these exotic high hazard pathogens. Carl Johnson was the guy who did it. Carl's sort of history was that Machupo and then Lhasa were things that he was involved in, and that's what the branch sort of, I think, initially started to do. In fact, as the Hanna virus episode emerged in 1993, I was spending most of my time trying to develop some better or newer diagnostic tests for Lhasa when all of a sudden this outbreak in the Southwest appeared, which helped to put special pathogens on the map because it led to line item funding for the branch.

11:09We had sort of existed on a shoestring prior to that. How do you get up to speed on sort of these new viruses as things emerge? Because it sounds like you were working on LASA and then suddenly had to be a HANTA virologist. So how do you sort of make that pivot? Actually, that's not exactly true because the army was very interested in Korean hemorrhagic fever, which is a HANA virus. And I had been part of a group that I had been directly involved in developing an IgM assay that was important for early diagnosis of HANA viruses. And that supported a vaccine, not a vaccine, a drug trial that they did in China for ribavirin.

11:58So I had had direct experience with hana viruses already. In fact, in 1986 or 87, we went to Yugoslavia, was still Yugoslavia at the time, to help them in an outbreak of a virus that we now call Debrava. So, you know, I wasn't a stranger to hanoviruses at all. Seems to me that, well, from what you're saying, the U.S. had a huge role, the CDC and others, in international understanding of outbreaks. Is that going to continue or is that the end of it? I'm going to frown, first of all, here. Okay. Yeah, and you've been following what's happened in our government, of course. And, you know, how do we become involved in outbreaks?

12:55I'm talking about special patients at CDC. There were two means. One is largely through contacts with WHO, and often we would deploy as part of a WHO response. Another way that we often became involved, I'd say it's probably 50-50 or something like that, is that PEPBAR, the program that President Bush, the second Bush, installed for helping with HIV treatment, largely in Africa, had put together entities or establishments in many countries in Africa. And often those provided an entree and sometimes a bilateral arrangement to respond to emergencies of hemorrhagic fevers, which is what the branch, again, that I was involved in primarily did.

13:50So things like Marburg outbreaks, Angola 2005, Ebola outbreaks, Gulu 2000, you know, those are experiences that were supported by PEPVAR, but also USAID. and you guys know the politics and the recent news. Essentially, USAID is now decimated. I would suggest it hardly exists. The State Department has sort of taken over, as I understand, some role in establishing foreign aid on a bilateral basis, but then something like this outbreak, I guess that we're going to talk about in a minute, in Eastern DRC pops up and USAID's not there. And USAID was not only a conveyor of aid, but also a pretty solid logistical base for things like these outbreaks.

14:49And there is discussion in the press about what the impact of the last lack of USAID being on the ground has had on these outbreaks and on this particular outbreak of Budubugio virus. You think it had an impact on the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak? Well, not so much because that's kind of a floating international event. So, you know, I was involved also with that one because in I think it was 97, there was an outbreak in Argentina of a virus that ends up being a new HANA virus called Andes virus. Now, not during that outbreak, but I think shortly thereafter, there was evidence of person-to-person transmission.

15:37That's essentially the only HANA virus that's really known to create or have a person-to-person transmission. And we were involved in some, to some extent, and the investigation of some of the early person-to-person events that occurred. But you're right. We're going to talk about the current Bundy Bujo outbreak in DRC. But before that, maybe you've been following Ebola viruses the whole time. Can you give us a little history of Ebola outbreaks? Well, you have to, first of all, bring up Marburg virus, which is a cousin that's in the same family, philoviruses. Fred Murphy, one of the individuals who recently passed, is responsible for some of the first electron micrographs, which lead to the name filoviruses because of the filamentous appearance of the viruses on EMs.

16:36And so Marburg happened in 1967 when a bunch of primates were imported for polio vaccine manufacture in Germany and a couple of other places were also involved because the primates were distributed not only to. and they came from Uganda from a primate center there and that created an outbreak among humans by exposure to the primate or primate tissues that now known as Marburg from the town where it was first sort of noticed and described and since then have been Marburg outbreaks as well in the natural sort of surroundings Africa where the virus comes from and that's the one villivars where we know what the reservoir is now.

17:24That's an important discussion we can maybe put off for a bit. But in 1976, there were two outbreaks occurring simultaneously, one in southern Sudan and the other in sort of north-central, what was Zaire at the time, formerly the Belgian Congo and now the DRC or Democratic Republic of Congo, where there was high mortality and person-to-person transmission, often sort of centered in transmission in medical care facilities that don't have a lot of resources and infection control. In the initial outbreak in DRC, there's often, you'll see in descriptions, the use of things like syringes multiple times, and that played a role in how much of the early transmission went on and sort of now the lore.

18:25The other thing is I guess we have a lot more disposable sort of things that stop that sort of thing from happening. But it is clear that Ebola is pretty dangerous if you are exposed directly, it's a blood-borne disease the way I would describe it to a patient that has it. And sort of part of that is that you, just like any infectious disease, have a incubation periods or a prodrome where essentially you're not sick. It depends on the strain, five to seven to maybe even as long as 10 days with some strains, develop a fever that gets progressively worse. When it first appears, it's pretty nonspecific fevers and myalgias, and then worsens to a hemorrhagic fever.

19:10And that's somewhat of a misnomer because these people don't, as a lot of the sort of public image of this thing, they don't bleed to death necessarily. They suffer sort of a septic sort of consequences, which is partially responsible from the patient's own immune response overreacting to the viruses replicating in the body in creating this sort of septic shock or hemorrhagic fever situation. And the fatality has been, for Zaire, high. It's gotten a little better with better care of patients, fluid replacement, et cetera, in recent epidemics. But the initial outbreaks were usually around 90 % for the Zaire strain, or what they now just call Ebola.

19:59And then the Sudan strain, or what they now call Sudan virus, a little bit less, around 50 % historically. And that may have gone down with better therapy as well. I haven't really followed those outbreaks, and they're less frequent, GULU being the last one, last big one.

20:20So these things are episodic. They're zoonotic. One of the big mysteries is where do the viruses reside? So the answer for Marburg is pretty well worked out. It is a primate and not a primate, a bat. It's a particular bat. It's a fruit bat that's cave dwelling. And the group that I was with at CDC and about the time I worked out, there was an outbreak that occurred in DRC that gave some clues. And then there were a couple of follow-up outbreaks in western Uganda that have led pretty much to nailing it down to one particular species, the bat. And there have been subsequently either small outbreaks or individuals exposed in some of the caves where these bats live that, you know, I would say that went done.

21:17But the big mystery is where do Ebola viruses reside and what is the reservoir? And I would say that I'd bet quite a bit on it being a bat, probably a fruit bat, probably a forest dwelling fruit bat. But we've not been able to demonstrate convincingly that it's one species or the other. In the case of Barb? Just based on evolutionary biology, there's probably a different bat host for each of the different viruses that have evolved sort of from a common ancestor that had a common ancestor of the virus that now has what we call these different strains of virus as well. So, yet to be seen. In the case of Marburg, is it known whether the virus does anything to the bats or is it an asymptomatic infection?

22:16pretty much asymptomatic. It circulates in the population. It's sort of synchronous with breeding seasons in that you brew up susceptible new younger bats. And the cave dwellings are pretty crowded. If you've ever seen pictures of some of these caves and outbreak investigations, you'd see what I mean. It's just, you know, the chick by jowl hanging from the ceiling in these caves. When you talked about all of the historic Ebola outbreaks, how many of those did you participate in? And in what way were you participating? I've probably been to a dozen or more of those. So I'm not a French speaker, and often these have occurred in countries where French is the one of the primary languages is probably, you know, the sort of universal language for the countries.

23:17And so a colleague of mine, Pierre Rolland, is a native French speaker from France. He usually was in the first response. And then if the outbreak went on, I was usually in the second tier. That's not altogether the case, but that's often the scenario. So I've been, you know, to the big ones, Kickwit, Gulu, the West African outbreak. I was already gone from CDC, but I went on behalf of CDC to help respond to that one as well. So, and then a bunch of smaller ones as well. And a lot of other, you know, pathogens, HANA viruses, Nipah virus in particular, or another, I have a couple more of the examples, Rift Valley Fever.

24:02I have passports that have extra pages in. And what was your role when you did that? I'm not only a virologist, I'm an epidemiologist. And I was pretty much at the stage where I often was the lead for CDC, at least, and often the lead for outbreaks. For instance, the NIP outbreak in Malaysia, I was sort of the international lead in that particular outbreak in 1999, I think it was when that outbreak really occurred. So the current outbreak, well, first of all, one more question about historic. Do we ever identify the source of any specific outbreak? Well, sometimes we think we know who the first patient was, but I'm not sure that's always the case.

24:59So there's a term in epidemiology called the index case, which means the first one we know about. But is it really the first patient? And often, you know, we sort of go hunting in a number of the outbreaks. We also are interested in the ecology. So we'll send along people who can look for what the host is. And we'll often try and what the most obvious to us, first patient to follow up what they were doing and what their surroundings were and try and exploit that. But unfortunately, without success. So, you know, even with a lot of effort in some of these instances. And so I presume that's also the case with the Bundy-Bugio outbreak.

25:46Do we know even when it started? Well, the first one in 2007, you know, we know about it when we know about it. So usually, again, that story is that it's centered around a small medical center outside of the town of Bundabugio and does involve eventually the larger district hospital in Bundabugio itself. And so we kind of know when patients began to appear and when the transition, transmission pattern sort of evolves to the point that you become suspicious. Hey, there's something going on here that we need to investigate further. And so that's when, in the case of the Bundabugio outbreak in 2007, the PEPVAR group that was located at the Ugandan Virology Research Institute in Entebbe became involved.

26:39And then specimens were sent back to Atlanta that led to the identification of the virus and the recognition that it was a new strain. And the current outbreak, when is this thought to have begun and why is there so much uncertainty about it? Well, you know, this is, you know, I would say this is much a repeat of the 2014 West African outbreak story that it went on without recognition for a considerable period, which means that the scope of the outbreak gets too large for what, you know, the sort of classical means of controlling an outbreak. if you get involved early on is, okay, here's a patient, find out who their contacts are, follow them up on a daily basis.

27:30If they become sick, put them into a treatment facility where the people taking care of them won't get infected and they won't infect anybody else in the community. And by that, you know, this disease is not something where if you're walking around in a town that has an Ebola outbreak, I mean, I've done this a lot of times and I don't really have any fear for my life. It's really the people who are taking care of these people, you know, in an intimate way and being exposed to their excreta and helping to clean them and feed them that are the people that are really exposed. And unfortunately, with this disease, there's another element to it.

28:10That is, the longer the disease goes on and the more seriously ill the patient becomes. And with their eventual death, the virus load keeps going up and up and up. And a common theme to transmission is that the funerals of people who die of the disease are very important in the chain of transmission. So a lot of the cultural issues that arise, and you've seen it in the press for this Bundabugio outbreak that's currently ongoing, is that there's cultural aspects to saying goodbye to your loved one when you die, and it involves direct contact with the cadaver. And that's a bad thing. And so in an effort to do that, they try and do respectful, but burials that don't allow the intimate contact that's so often still playing a role in the transmission of this virus and this current outbreak.

29:10And that leads to violence often. I mean, you've probably read about it just as I have in the press. Yeah. How does the Bundibudio strain of Ebola compare to some of the other types of Ebola? Well, it's a little different in a number of ways. I mean, if you're a virologist and you grow it, it's a little bit slower in terms of its growth. If you put it into non-human primates, of which there's some limited studies, it's a little bit slower. And Sudan and Zaire are pretty much 100 % lethality in non-human primates. Not true for Obun de Bujo. And then also in the human situation, the mortality rate is lower, about 50%, I think, in the first outbreak.

30:02Like somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of what we have seen in the two outbreaks that occurred prior to the one that's occurring now in eastern DRC. 50 percent is just unfathomable. It's just a huge number. Well, it's better than 90. Right. So one of the problems is that the Zibov vaccine, right, the VSV Zibov, doesn't work against Bundabugio, right? Well, that remains to be seen. I mean, there have been a very limited, done here actually by Tom Geisberg, a trial of vaccinating non-human primates with that vaccine and then challenging them with the Bundabugio strain. and there's some suggestion that there's some protection.

30:56But the problem is that the animal model, as I think I've already mentioned, is not 100 % lethal. So it makes interpretation with small numbers of primates difficult. So there is a human trial, as I understand it, that's being undertaken using the vaccine. But it's not, and I think one of the survivors that was taken to Germany had been previously vaccinated with the VSV vaccine, but he was sick, but he did survive. Was that luck or good therapy, or was it the vaccine that helped him survive? So can you give us an idea of how much cross-reactivity there is between Ebola and Bundabugio and what might expect in terms of vaccine effectiveness?

31:53That's a hard question to answer, I think, because there is immunologic cross-reactivity depending on the reagents you use, but it's really a matter of are there protective antibodies there or not? And there are certainly monoclones that recognize both species, I guess we're calling them, but are those neutralizing our protective epitopes? And I'm not sure we know the answer to that. I believe that there is one monoclonal product that at least in some animal models shows some cross-protection. And there are probably some monoclones out there developed against Bundabugio. I mean, one of the problems here is that there'd been two minor outbreaks with Bundabugio, and I don't think a whole lot of people thought a whole lot about it.

32:49There have been vaccine candidates developed, and I think people have developed monoclones, but how long or how far those were taken along a development track is not far at all. Is anyone now developing or trialing Bundabugio vaccines? So one of the, yeah, I think that there are candidates out there. There's VSV candidates. I think that that's one of them is developed here. I think we also have an mRNA potential vaccine that's been developed here in collaboration with Moderna. But the problem is they've not really been investigated much beyond showing that they might be a viable choice in mice.

33:42They develop antibodies. I would say, first of all, that the mouse models are not particularly great in terms of determining whether a product, a medical countermeasure is going to be effective or not. But it's a start anyway. So in a situation like this where you have a serious outbreak and you have candidates that are analogous to vaccines that have been very successful against other strains of Ebola, what are the barriers to getting a candidate vaccine into the field? Well, doing what you have to do in order to satisfy FDA regulations, since that's what we live under, is part of the traffic.

34:29And, you know, sort of developing candidate vaccines takes money and effort. But doing those trials is what costs even more. And that's sort of a separate bunch of people that do that stuff. I mean, I guess you could do a phase one. In the context of the outbreak, right? Yeah. And then... That can be done, you know, anywhere for that matter. Anywhere. Yeah. That's just safety, basically, right? Yeah. Yeah, basically. Is the vaccine going to kill me or not? Right. But then if this outbreak continues, I mean, some people are saying it's going to go on for a year. You would also have time to do a phase two, right?

35:11Yeah, no. And beyond that, I would say, I mean, how long did it take to take the sequences into an mRNA vaccine and to do the trials in the face of the pandemic? A year, I guess. It was a year. So it is possible. And the other question is, I understand there are some monoclonals, and you have said that also against Bundabuja. Would they have any role in this outbreak? How would they be used? Yeah, I think that there's a clinical trial. I don't follow this stuff particularly closely. I'm not sort of part of the direct discussion, but I believe that I've seen press reports of some clinical trials of some of these entities beginning now.

35:57Okay. What about antivirals? Yes. Yeah, same thing. There are some that are, I think, thought to be generally effective against Ebola viruses and have been shown, I think, in vitro to have some effect. So one of the things I do here at UTMB is maintain collection of viruses for various purposes. And so having challenged viruses, Bugio Bugio, is something. So all of a sudden there's a lot of interest in different labs that can handle these different BSL-4s. are interested in having the strains if they already don't have it. A lot of the labs had

36:39distributed the 2007 strain, but we have a second 2013. It's fairly closely related. I'm not quite certain how distantly related the current strain is from those. I mean, one thing about filoviruses, if you look at the phylogenetics, which are pretty well published, you'll see that each outbreak has its own phylogenetic signature. They're different. They've evolved in a different geographic area, and they accumulate maybe a 1 % to 2 % difference. Is that enough to make one, let's use Zyre for an example, to make that vaccine not work in the 2014 outbreak in West Africa? And the answer was no in that case, but you don't know that until you've had the virus and try it, which is something that, again, might be done here at UTMB by others in the group of faculty and PIs that work on these things.

37:45How do you get all of those strains, and do you think you will end up getting a version of this outbreak's Bindibugio virus? There's two answers to that. One is we can make it by reverse genetics. And that's already being undertaken. I don't have a lot of faith in those myself. And generally what FDA really wants in terms of models and challenges is they want the authentic virus taken from a fatal case of the disease in order to really something that sort of satisfies their wants. And we're desperately trying to get the virus. We don't got it yet. What are the barriers to that? Well, there's a couple barriers.

38:32One is just the logistics and security surrounding the movement of these materials is unbelievable compared to what it was early in my life as a virologist. And then secondly, there's political issues of one type or another. Now, if we did have a Bundabujo vaccine, how would it be deployed in this outbreak? Let me back up a little bit and ask you another. I'll ask you guys a question. Sure. What role did the effective Ebola vaccine eventually shown pretty convincingly have in stopping the 2014 outbreak? I think the biggest role was that of infection control. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, you know, sort of the sort of tried and true method to control an outbreak, I think I've probably already talked about this a little bit, is to essentially apply case finding and contact tracing in such a way that you stop transmission by that.

39:44The problem with 14 and right now with this one is the scope gets too big to sort of pull that off with any aplomb. You know, it's just hard and it's everywhere. And people that have the skills and the willingness to do that are not not that widespread. So what what what I believe happens in the face of outbreaks, this is true, I think, even in the 1976 outbreak, is it gets apparent to the local people that, hey, this is not a fairy tale. This is real. And it's killing my friends and neighbors. And I think I know now because people are trying to tell me, and I'm observing what the risk factors are that kill them.

40:36And so that becomes sort of the means of stopping huge. And I believe that's what happened in 2014. You know, if you look at Liberia, the models and everything else, I think we essentially wrote that one off. And it didn't go all the way to the very dire projections. It sort of ended up controlling itself. And again, the vaccine had no role in the control of Liberia. So I've said my piece on that, and you guys answered the question as well. So basic – go ahead. You know, the problems are public health resources and cultural issues, right? Because I'm thinking if you, you know, seeded a dozen cases of Ebola in the U.S., it would probably be taken care of pretty quickly, right?

41:42Well, I don't think it would go anywhere. I guess I was a little bit surprised about what happened in Dallas. Yeah, remind us of that? Remind us, yeah. Yeah. So there was a case of a guy from Liberia that made it to Dallas. He appeared, I think he was sent home, if I remember the story correctly. And then he reappeared and went into an ER in a hospital in Dallas. And then we had two nurses who were carrying from them who managed to get infected. Right. And I think that was just lack of, you know, you can stop that sort of transmission even in an emergency treatment center in Africa with probably even less resources than those folks had.

42:34I think what happened was they had no experience in doffing the PPE that they wore and somehow managed to, you know, self-contaminate. And that's unfortunate because the PPE, I believe, is adequate that was being used. But you have to use it correctly in order for it to be fully effective. So there's a lot of hand-wringing about not having a vaccine or antivirals or monoclonals, but in fact, contact tracing would really be the way this is stopped, right? Yeah, no, in some way or another, yes. I mean, if you go back to 76, there's stories about individual small villages sort of controlling it themselves because the chiefs recognized, hey, this is infectious.

43:23They quarantined off the village and then anybody who they had in the village who was infected, they put them off to a hut, you know, at the edge of the village and maybe left some food outside the door until things happened. And then that stopped it. So how is the current infection control doing in DRC in Uganda? Well, you know, not very well. I mean, because first of all, it's spreading to areas where, you know, they didn't know what this was or even if they knew what it was, the outside resources usually that bring the PPE and adequate protective gear into place were not yet spread out. So, you know, again, the story is often that the medical care personnel are among the first cases you know about.

44:11There were usually some person who had it to begin with, but then with inadequate, you know, care on the part of medical care personnel, those individuals become sick. And, you know, they're part of an establishment that, you know, the word gets around pretty quickly. And that's how outbreaks are usually known about. In the days before Gulu, Dr. Peters, one of the people we just talked about, used to talk about the sentinel nun. Because a lot of the hospitals were missionary facilities. And you'd usually hear about it because some of the European caregivers got it. That's how Kickwit was discovered.

45:02I understand that they have a lot of trouble there. For example, some of the health care workers are going on strike because they're not being paid. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't help, right? No, it absolutely does not. I mean, there's a lot of things that have to do with the logistics. In the 14 outbreak, I was sent as a CDC leader for a period of about six weeks. And one of the stories that emerges is that one of the ways you handle infection control in these not very well constructed or advanced hospitals is to use a lot of disinfectants. Usually chlorine beach or you can make your own chlorine beach with calcium hypochlorite.

45:45And so having supplies of that, and you'd find that people were either stretching calcium hypochlorite or providing something else that wasn't calcium hypochlorite simply because they could make a quick buck. And that sort of thing, unfortunately, worked its way into these circumstances. So is there a role for differences in diagnostics or do you think that these infection control issues would have made this look the same if it was Zaire versus Bundabunio? Diagnostics can play a big role in infection control because you can identify patients up front. But and if you do that, you know, I mean, one of the circumstances you have to know about is that if I come in with a fever and people suspect I have Ebola and they throw me in an Ebola ward, it's not good for me.

46:44You know that I'm likely to get it because of the condition. So often they sort of separate sort of, OK, we don't know for sure this guy has Ebola yet. But if you have diagnostics on hand that can sort that out, that's a big advance. The other thing is that you're sure of who is a patient, and therefore you can go out and identify the people that really are contacts as opposed to some guy who's got malaria and trying to follow up all those contacts that go along with so many of those people. So that helps tremendously. The other way that you have to think about this is people are reluctant to come to an Ebola treatment facility.

47:29There's a lot of cultural misunderstanding and stuff that has to do with that. And I think one of my personal hopes is that having effective countermeasures, whether it be vaccines or therapeutics, might help people to come forward because that offers circumstances that would save your life. Uh, but so far that really hasn't worked out that way. Um, you know, you know, there needs to be some way of trying to get that across the local population so that there is more willingness to, uh, present, to identify contacts. Uh, so that, I mean, one of the ways of measuring how successful you are in your control efforts is, uh, if you keep getting patients appear on your doorstep in a treatment facility and they're not a known contact, you're doing a terrible job of contact tracing.

48:25Are there differences in diagnosing this Ebola virus compared to others? Well, there's, you know, the tests have been developed for Sudan and Zaire primarily. It's not that hard to put something together to work if you have the appropriate monoclones or certainly the molecular tests can be put together. And those are pretty fieldable these days, you know, with some expense and some training for the people that would field them. That was part of the problems in the early history of these. There were no on-site diagnosis of any real significance. And the GULU outbreak was really the first one in which field deployable diagnostics played a fairly large role in identifying patients.

49:13I was part of that exercise as well. So why has Uganda controlled it so well? Well, I'd say that they learned their lesson following the Gulu outbreak. Again, this PEPFAR unit that the CDC supported at Uvri established a permanent laboratory and helped to train response units with the idea that if we identify this outbreak early and bring to bear contact tracing and isolation of patients, it works. And there's actually a paper that demonstrates that through a number of very small Marburg and Sudan outbreaks that were sort of nipped in the bud. I understand there's a Marburg outbreak in Uganda at the moment also.

50:03Is that true? Well, my understanding is there's two cases that have been owned up, and I don't know anything more than that. Okay. Because that would be a mess if there were an overlapping one, right? Well, yeah, if it got out of hand, yeah. I mean, you know, the largest Marburg outbreak, unfortunately, was Angola in 2005. And that one, you know, was approaching the size of the largest filovirus outbreak. There were, I think, 320 or so patients in that one. And that particular strain of Marburg is more lethal for humans and for non-human primates as well. It's often now used as the challenge model, of course, in trying to develop Marburg countermeasures.

50:46So you've mentioned a few times the American presence, U.S. presence in these previous outbreaks. Is there a presence in this current outbreak now? Well, CDC has, I think, an officer located in the capital city, and I don't know whether they've deployed anything further. I mean, one of the things that I can say with almost certainty is that because of the security situation, you won't be seeing official Americans in the middle of what's going on right now. So, I mean, there are other organizations like MSF in particular that's very, very skilled, has really the logistical oomph to pull a lot of this off that will deploy and, you know, will have an impact.

51:40There are other NGOs, largely sort of a religious nature, that preexisted in the area, and hopefully they'll be able to strengthen their efforts and help with the eventual control of this as well. Does WHO have a presence? Well, WHO, yeah, has a presence and they will supplement what goes on and will provide additional resources. They can bring to bear things like transportation and other things that help with the control efforts. I mean, how do you get around during an outbreak like this? So, you know, that's the thing that often, as being a member of a CDC team, I rode a motorcycle a lot. uh, WHO had driving around in cars.

52:31Do you have any sense for how long this will last and how many cases there will be? I'm sure you've seen some of the projections. Not good. Yeah. Some of the ones are, well, the, the old, the extreme one is 60 ,000 cases. Yeah. Bigger than the West African outbreak. Yeah. I mean, but you have to remember the projections for the West, the outbreak were, uh, even larger, you know, on attuned to what the current projections are. But again, you know, my belief is that social realization and action by local communities had to do with the eventual real control of the outbreak, simply, you know, by infection control of a sort.

53:15So is it fair to say that this got off to a strong start, apparently, with a lot of cases because we're delayed in understanding what was going on? So it established a bigger foothold. have I talked about the initial identification of Bundabugio at CDC was, you know, we weren't certain what this was. And so the specimens that were sent by the PEPVAR group came and we did what we usually did. And something that was uncertain is that we set up all of what we had, which would have been a molecular assay. PCRs were fairly advanced in 2007, but they were targeted at the strains that we knew about. We set up the antigen detection test that had been developed and was really used during the Reston outbreak, and we also set up virus isolation.

54:20And what happened was that the molecular assays were negative. The antigen detection assay was positive, and virus isolation eventually was positive. It just takes time to grow the virus. So, you know, sort of putting our noodles together at CDC said, hey, this looks like a new one. So then the molecular guys got on their bicycles and broadened the primer sets. And yeah, it's a new one. So, you know, that's how this becomes a different species called Bundabugio now in the initial thing. Did that really change the circumstances of the response? Not in any real way, at least in 2007. Why is Bundy Bujo rarer in only a few outbreaks?

55:10Is it the virus? Is it an ecological thing? I would say it's probably ecological. Is it maybe it could be in a region that's less populated? You know, the Congo, I read a newspaper article a couple of days ago, you know, sort of, If you get further down south in DRC, in the eastern border regions, it's pretty highly populated. There's a lot of refugees that have taken up there. It's prosperous in one way. They've got a lot of natural resources, particularly gold. And that's one reason that the populations are high. And they live under pretty rough conditions as well. So once it gets going, that may promote transmission.

55:59But, you know, what was the source that got it started? And, you know, that's nobody knows the answer. I think that I've heard or read that they think there were cases as early as April now. I think that it really the sort of bona fide cases are late May or something like that. But is it so it's some kind of a zoonotic initiation, right? Is this, and you think it's probably some kind of a bat, so is this a case of people looking for meat in the forest? Is that what it would be? Yeah, bush meat, or it could be contamination of fruits by the fruit bats and exploitation of those. I mean, the stories along with Nipah in Bangladesh often have a tinge of that to them.

56:47Right. So, you know, nobody knows would be the short answer. Everybody can guess about it. I mean, what you read about where there was a tree and some kid went to the tree, I don't put a lot of credence in that stuff. What about miners in caves? Is that a plausible word? The initial discovery of sort of the hosts of Marburg have to do with exploitation of caves with bats in them in DRC and then the follow ups in the outbreaks in the Queen Elizabeth Park and another old mine in far western Uganda as well. And that's pretty clear, but that's Marburg and a different species of bat. you know nobody knows what the bat species which i believe is probably the case with these is for bundabugio or for zyre for that matter and so you know yeah i remember when we visited you in galveston years ago you said it's very difficult to identify the species it's hard work and it's dangerous i don't know it's dangerous i mean we have i mean i can i can gum up some pictures for you of people investigating bats in the Marburg outbreaks, for instance, where we thought we could kind of learn something about it.

58:10And they're protecting themselves. And I always said when I was at CDC that we always bring back the same number of people we take out. But you have to go in the cave with full PPE, right? Yeah. You must know John Towner. You must know John Towner, right? Yeah, no, he's one of my my favorite buds. He still goes and looks in caves. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, they're still, I think, trying to work out more about the ecology and dynamics of Marburg transmission among the populations of the bats that are the reservoir hosts of that virus. And they continue also to partake in searches for what the natural host of Zaire and Sudan and the others are.

58:56So let's say we do identify, I mean, we know it for Marburg, yet it doesn't help prevent outbreaks, right? Well, you know, the CDC has tried to help with, for instance, if there's tourists involved, there have been the last couple of cases in Westerners for Marburg were people who visited caves, a cave in Queen Elizabeth Park. So we tried to help the, I'm talking about CDC when I was still the notion of limiting exposure of tourists so they wouldn't casually pick up Marburg virus. And there was a case in the Netherlands and a case in the U.S. where that was the circumstance. I have just one question more, and that is, my understanding is that during or after the West Africa outbreak, they built Ebola treatment facilities in the U.S.

59:58But now we are not using them in the current outbreak. Is that correct? Well, you know, they were targeted, you know, after the Dallas case, I would say in particular, and we did medevac people who became infected, you know, sort of, if you're going to send me out to treat Ebola patients, of which there is some risk of something untoward happening, what are you going to do for me? Are you just going to plop me down in that Ebola ward and let me go through the course and see if I survive? Or are you going to do something more in terms of Western medicine for me? And so we have several facilities in the U.S., which during the West African outbreak did take people who returned from West Africa with Marburg, or no, rather the same Ebola, and successfully treat them.

1:00:50And the survival rate was very good. I mean, it seemed remarkable to me, actually. And so partially because of Ebola, but also because there might be other pandemic diseases. We set up some regional centers that initial cases might be treated in that have training and facilities and the skills to take care of these people if they do pitch up. One of them is here in Galveston at our hospital. And so that is sort of the lure behind it. And they get support. I think it was directed through CDC. But under the current circumstances, the current administration has said, we ain't bringing none of those Ebola cases back here to the U.S.

1:01:38And they're constructing a facility in Kenya, which I'm not sure what the current status is. But the politics in Kenya are that it's been injunctured from being completed. And meanwhile, one individual was sent to Germany, right? That happened sort of before a fair amount of this happened. One was sent to Germany, one to Yugoslavia. It's one of the – no, Czechoslovakia, I think it was. And then there's a recent case in France of a return position as well. There's no more Czechoslovakia. Czech Republic maybe. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. If I were working there, if I were an American going there, I wouldn't be happy that I couldn't come back here and use these treatment facilities.

1:02:29Yeah, no, and CDC had put together, you know, a set of air ambulances, and I was involved in trying to get people out, you know, successfully and back to the country, to the U.S., from Sierra Leone in a number of instances. Yeah, I've been trying to imagine what the transport of a patient from Africa back to the U.S. would be like. That's a containment problem itself, right? Well, they do have special transport units that isolate the patients. And if you're just a suspect patient that's had a pretty severe exposure, you're not going to be shedding the virus immediately. So getting them out, you know, in more or less a normal fashion, if you pull the trigger and get them out early is probably what you want to do.

1:03:21Is it correct that you don't shed until you have symptoms? Yeah, I would say that's true. I mean, I wouldn't want to have a transfusion from somebody that was incubating, but failing that, I, you know, sitting next to him in a car would not be a great risk, at least in my estimation. got it rich and brand you have anything else i'm good no i don't think so tom did we is there anything we should have asked you uh let me see And, you know, again, I mean, one of the issues that we've talked sort of on the skirts of is the demunition of our international health efforts, of our global health efforts in a real way.

1:04:14And in addition to that, science in general is suffering right now. And, you know, I would urge all your listeners, the deadline's coming up real quick, to respond to the OMB, essentially, effort to even further politicize science. And, you know, unfortunately, one of my favorite former jobs was at CDC. And you can really see the politicization of CDC at the moment. And it's not good for science. It's not good for the country. I'm sure I'll suffer from that and get nasty letters. No, our listeners are with it. Yeah. But it's not good for the world, right? Not just us. As well. I mean, we were a real major player in global health.

1:05:10And that's been greatly diminished. Last I knew, viruses didn't have political parties or nationalities. No, and they don't pay attention to borders either. No. Yeah. Well, I tell you, Tom, this is going to change, okay? It has to change because we can't live this way. Well, I mean, you know, actually what I'm thinking of is that one of the messages I'm getting from Tom is that the way these outbreaks ultimately are limited is that the population that's affected realizes that this is a real thing and that they have to do certain things to overcome it. And I would say that on a global scale, the same applies to what's happening to science, that there will be consequences.

1:05:57And people will ultimately realize that that's not good and that we have to get back in the game. It would just be nice if we could do it without some of those consequences. Yeah, you know, I mean, there's homegrown versions of this measles vaccination. And what's happening in our own country is, you know, a consequence of some of the, you know, sort of, I don't know, vaccine hesitancy that was, you know, I would lay it on some of the misinformation that are part of the COVID response. Yeah. As a former military person, you must love the flu outbreak right there in Texas, right? Yeah, I mean, that's a very interesting story that has its own, you know, sort of consequences and morals.

1:06:41I understand someone has died, or a 25-year-old. Yeah, there was one death that I know about. I don't know what else to say. I mean, this is just unacceptable. As I'm sure you know, the military needs to be vaccinated, right? Yeah. No, I mean, there have been controversies throughout my career. Anthrax vaccination during the first Gulf War was one of them. I worked at Usainberg where everybody got it anyway, so it didn't make any difference to me. But it depends on the risk, and you've got to take care of the risk. Sure. All right, Tom Kysak from University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

1:07:19Tom, thanks for all your work over the years. Yeah, absolutely. Keeping us safe, and thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Yeah, appreciate it. Look forward to seeing you. This is fascinating. Bye-bye. Oh, interesting. Interesting. So basically, it's all about infection control, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even if we had a... Public health is important. Public health is important. But it's hard to do in these countries. Maybe not in Uganda, right? But in DRC, it's very hard. It is. Especially in rural areas, as you said. But, you know, if you talk to people there, they'll say Ebola is not our big concern.

1:08:02It's other stuff. Right. It's not your big concern until it is, right? I guess it could be. Then you do something about it. Yeah, I mean, the West African outbreak was horrible, right? A lot of people died. Yeah, but it is hard to, you know, it's hard to imagine the circumstances. uh i i can't imagine i've never been in those uh in those uh sorts of situations where there are problems bigger than the ebola outbreak and there are and there are huge logistical and cultural barriers to doing something about the outbreak even once you realize what's going on i'm i'm really interested in tom's career path i love hearing about people's career paths because, you know, my granddaughter's going off to college.

1:08:59And there's, at that point for people, there's this feeling like you're making this huge decision that's going to affect everything down the road. Okay. And this is it. This is going to determine the course of your life. And that's nonsense. That's every day. Yep. Every day determines the course of your life, okay? And Tom's a great example. It's just, you know, not a straight line. Yes, I know. So many college students are like, what am I going to do? I can't do this. Just chill. Relax. It'll be okay. I feel like in retrospect, sometimes your story can look like a straight line, but I don't know how much it ever feels like it.

1:09:45And I think that if you actually know the details, it never is. Well, I had no idea what I was going to do. The day I graduated college, I had no idea. In Tom's case, the military told him, you're going to work on viruses. Yeah. Oh, really? Not a bad thing. It's kind of lucky for a lot of us that he did. Absolutely. He's a real fountain of knowledge, man, on this stuff. Just an incredible amount of experience and all the field experience. It's terrific. Really great. Let's do some email, and then we'll do some pics. Brianne, can you take the first one? Sure. Aisha writes, Dear Twivsters, I wanted to follow up on a letter read on Twiv 1336.

1:10:29I am also a woman of a certain age who has always been too old for every revision to the cutoff for HPV vaccination. I was, however, very happy to get both my children vaccinated for HPV when they were tweens. After listening to your discussions on the possible benefits for vaccination, even for older patients, reading the relevant literature myself, and discussing it with both my GP and gynecologist, I resolved to get the vaccinations, even if it cost me$1 ,000 for the three-shot series. I got the second shot last month at my GP's clinic, and I am pleased to report that Blue Cross, Oklahoma paid in full for jabs one and two.

1:11:07I thought your listeners might like to know that at least some insurance companies are covering the vaccination for older patients, even if they would not tell me so when I asked before I got the shots. Thanks for everything you do to teach and inform, especially now that so many institutions we used to count on have become sources of disinformation. This is Aisha from Norman, Oklahoma. And the letter, it sounds like there's some information in clinical update 1338. Yeah, we had a letter from a doc who said it can be covered under Medicare. You just have to go to the right program and listen to the clinical update.

1:11:49You can find that out. So there is a lot of people have been complaining that they can't get it at an older age, but you can. Yeah. Even under Medicare, you can get it. Yeah. So my personal experience with this is that I also was often at the wrong age relative to the cutoff. In fact, I think that they approved it two months before I aged out, but it wasn't available yet. until after my birthday kind of thing. So I was always in that. I also talked to my physician, and it was entirely covered for me. Yeah, that's good. Rich, can you take the next one? So this is relevant to the retractions of a couple of Max Planck's publications that we covered.

1:12:37G'day, Twivarians. I'm suggesting that Professor Max Planck had several journals to which he might potentially submit his papers. It was not until the Science Direct bot collapsed the probability wave that we knew precisely where the paper had been published, at which point the alternative citations were no longer relevant and had to be retracted. Regards, Dr. Dave Jackson. Oh, it's so good, right? Yeah. Just crazy. I love it. Thank you, Dave. You're very smart. All right, Mike writes, I'm learning a bit about horizontal gene transfer from the book The Tangled Tree by David Kwaman. This may have been a pick or a casual mention in one of your shows.

1:13:25I think he was even on the show. Maybe that was... Kwaman was on the show, yeah. I'm surprised to find that the concept has been lingering undeveloped for over 100 years. first discovered in some experiments pre-antibiotics where they concluded that characteristics from one pathogen were transferring to another when they did a dual pathogen exchange challenge experiment. Only lately have they had tools to start seriously studying how it functions with genetic codes and what impact it might have on evolution. I'd be interested to learn what you or your co-hosts may have studied with regards to HGT.

1:14:03Is there evidence for any HGT in normal viral infections as there was some hype about the virus and the vaccine rewriting genes during the pandemic. I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are about deliberately using viruses as gene therapy vector for certain chronic and acute conditions. I assume a virologist, an immunologist, and a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist would each have slightly different takes on the subject. I'd be fascinated to know what you or your co-hosts may think about this. This is another one of the things that I like about the microbe TV suite of podcasts. When something is new and not fully discovered or studied, how does a trained scientist analyze the incoming and unproven data?

1:14:44Do you think at all like my engineer's mind, which immediately grapples for how we might use this new knowledge and practical applications? No, I don't go to the practical at all. I'm just trying to understand what the heck's going on. Yeah, sometimes I go to the evolutionary of how did that evolve, but not the practical in the future, what you could use it for. It depends, right? So we have Shingrix vaccines and dementia. That's a practical application. But other things like white flies and whatever it is that we talked about last week, I don't remember. That's just, wow, it's cool. Yeah. But, you know, horizontal gene transfer is important.

1:15:29I mean, phages exchange DNA among hosts all the time. It's rampant. And probably eukaryotic viruses do. However, the mRNA vaccines did not rewrite the code. It did not integrate into humans. This is just nonsense spoken by people who don't know any better. But yeah, I think using viruses for gene therapy is fabulous. It's already being used. It works. It's going to be, it's being used for cancer therapy. They can be manipulated and made safe and effective. It's just amazing. And we talk about this now and then here as well. I think the one thing to remember is you should think about whether we're talking about a host for the virus that is unicellular or multicellular.

1:16:20because it's a big deal if you're only one cell big and a virus infects you and adds some new nucleic acid to your one cell because that's your whole organism. If I am infected with a virus today and that virus transfers some nucleic acid to one cell of me, the rest of my body isn't going to actually have any kind of change. And so that may be a more minor issue for me. It also might be harder to detect and harder for us to know a lot about. And so a lot of times we talk about horizontal gene transfer when thinking about phages because it's really easy to see the impact on that one individual cell.

1:17:09Sometimes we talk about horizontal gene transfer when a virus might infect, say, a germ cell and then actually get transmitted to future generations. And we've got a bunch of examples of that. But I think sometimes some of the examples in multicellular organisms are a little bit hard because you'd have to find the individual cell out of that whole multicellular organism that has picked up the new DNA and see what changes have happened. But you're absolutely right. The ways that we can apply this to deliver nucleic acid to specific cells that we want to deliver nucleic acid to in gene therapy is fantastic.

1:17:53I'm thinking I have a specialized case here of horizontal gene transfer that is not transfer among multicellular organism, of a transfer among viruses. The thing that came to my mind, and I had to poke around in my brain for this, is the foulpox carrying reticuloendotheliosis virus. That was actually, I think, originally traced to a laboratory where a foulpox vaccine picked up this retrovirus that's in the foulpox genome that actually makes for a nastier disease. And it has now gotten back out into the wild, if I understand it correctly. I'd have to go back. We did episodes on this a long time ago.

1:18:43Yeah, that was a cool story. Very cool. Okay, two more. We have, Rich, you're next. Let's see here. Kim. Kim writes, In today's, that's July 2nd, Washington Post, Scott Atlas advocates in his opinion piece for the defunding of NIH and NSF. He tells us this funding is a waste of federal dollars, rife with politics, and better if funded through private resources. Thoughts? Who best to write a rebuttal? him, who is a professor emerita of biological sciences at Kent State University. We talked about this when last we met, I think. The notion that NIH and NSF are a waste of federal dollars is insane.

1:19:43That's completely insane. You know, the United States preeminence in science for decades is a direct result of the federal funding through NIH and NSF that was boosted in the post -World War II era. That was a novelty at the time, and it has created a huge resource in scientific research that never would have been done privately. And, you know, the private sector is just going to be looking to make a buck, right? And it's going to – I just don't see it happening. Right. Well, so part of it gets to sort of the size of a project that is going to get supported and the scope. Some of it is about whether or not we're doing basic science versus applied science, you know, whether we're specifically trying to make a buck or just trying to find things out.

1:20:48And there are all sorts of sources. I've been sort of trying to catalog them as I've seen them recently about, you know, how much each congressional district gets back from NIH funding compared to what it pays in, but also how much sort of we've seen that overall economic benefit to the United States since Vannevar Bush started all of this in the post-World War II period. And we can think of all sorts of really critical medical or other technological advances that came because of our knowledge of basic science, that nobody was looking for a cure for or a solution for X. But they eventually, as Mike earlier pointed out, realized a way they could use that new knowledge in a practical application.

1:21:43So I agree that this is a sort of ridiculous idea. I don't know who would be best to write a rebuttal, but I do think that rebuttal is important. And I think that there's a lot of key evidence to be used. Let's see if we can get Alan interested. Tons of evidence. So Scott Atlas, you may know, is one of these people who was against COVID lockdowns, of which, by the way, you weren't locked in your home during COVID, okay? You were not. You couldn't go to school. You couldn't go to theaters. But in China, you were stuck in your home. That was a lockdown. But stop saying that. Mask mandates. And, you know, he's—I don't understand.

1:22:25I mean, he's a Stanford professor. or he should know the value of NIH, but he has been corrupted by politics, by conservative politics. That's why this is just the return on investment of NIH is huge. I mean, all the therapies we have, all the gene therapies that are working, CAR T-cell therapy. What else comes off the tip of your tongue? CRISPR. Most of our pharmaceuticals involved some kind of basic science knowledge to get a mechanism. It's the triumvirate of NIH, government, university, and industry. Okay? The government funds university to do basic science, which industry doesn't do. And then when they have something that can be developed, the industry does it.

1:23:10And it's worked beautifully for over 50 years. And so this is just ignorant to say this. I'm sorry. CRISPR starts. actually you could call this uh private uh private investment but if i'm not mistaken crisper starts with uh people working at dan and dan and yogurt trying to figure out uh how to keep the phage out of their bacteria so in lithuania i think so i think so i've always heard it as sort of three separate groups one the dan and yogurt group one a group that was trying to do um strain identification for bioterror to be able to say which strains were which. And one, this is Luciano Marafini, who is in Spain and just looking at the genetics of the bacteria in the bay in his city.

1:24:07And trying to figure out why there were some weird repetitive sequences. Right. All right. The last one, Brianne, can you take that, please? Sure. Anne writes, Hello, Professor Racaniello. I just heard the June 14th release of TWIV and wanted to comment on your pick of the week, Captain Steve's YouTube channel. There is, in my opinion, a much better channel from which to get information regarding airplane incidents, flight safety detectives. The team does analysis of all types of plane accidents with the kind of rigor that you would appreciate. From an article about the podcast, John Goglia and Gregory Feith are two of aviation's most well-known, well-informed, and outspoken aviation safety insiders.

1:24:55They discuss in a new podcast series called Flight Safety Detectives a wide range of aviation issues that are making the news daily, as well as provide insiders with the backstories that are important to the flying public and the aviation industry. Gogla and Fythe talk about the technical aspects of aviation and aerospace incidents and accidents as well as bluntly discuss the politics and policies behind many issues that can mean life or death in the skies. In addition, they inform listeners about technologies and improvements in the industry that make aviation the safest form of transportation today.

1:25:32The podcast is available here and wherever you get your podcasts. I guess I don't know where here is. Let's see. Gogla has more than 60 years in the aviation safety business. He is the only airframe and power plant mechanic to get a presidential appointment as an NTSB board member, where he spent nearly a decade leading the most important aviation investigations and influencing policy. His experience in the industry has made him a highly sought after consultant, expert, speaker, and writer. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes magazine and author of Torqued, a monthly column appearing in AIN Online.

1:26:12Gogla is also a chairman of the Professional Aviation Maintenance Association. Fythe is a former NTSB senior air safety investigator and GO Team captain. He has more than 40 years of aviation safety experience. Feith spent more than two decades with the NTSB serving as the investigator-in-charge or U.S.-accredited representative for numerous high-profile aircraft accidents, including Value Jet in the Florida Everglades, American Eagle ATR -72 in Roselawn, Korean Air Boeing 747 in Guam, among many others. He has investigated more than 2 ,500 aircraft incidents worldwide. In addition, Vaith led a team of mountain climbers to 21 ,000 feet on Mount Ilimani in Bolivia to investigate the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 980, the highest controlled flight into terrain crash in aviation history.

1:27:10Vaith is also an aviation's product inventor and has been inducted into the living legends of aviation. There's a, pardon me for the interruption, but there's an interesting phrase. Controlled flight into terrain. Like, this is the one where the, yeah, the guy deliberately drove the plane into a mountain. Yeah. Yeah, there are quite a few phrases in here that I'm learning. I have been a PowerPoint mechanic in my life. Yeah. You can tell that that's what I spend more time thinking about. Todd Curtis, another host, is an aviation safety analyst with years of experience doing research on risk assessment and accident prevention.

1:27:56You may have seen John or Greg on television as lead investigators on accidents reporting out to the public the basic facts of accident investigations. Both have Wikipedia pages that will provide more info about them and their work. Both John and Greg have expressed their dismay with the type of reporting that happens on YouTube with folks like Captain Steve. because some of these channels rush out speculation about what has happened in accidents. And they feel these pilots, who are not accident investigators and often do not fly the aircraft they are discussing, do not have all the facts and sometimes mislead the public about the accidents.

1:28:34I think you will appreciate John Gogla's erascibility when he discusses those who do accident explanations without evidence. He considers it a grave harm to the public since folks are not getting the correct information. It takes the NTSB a while to gather and compile the necessary information describing about accidents. They have learned to wait for the FSD analysis of an accident, because I know they are bringing their expertise to understand what has happened in the accident. So many people want to know how or why an accident has happened, and unfortunately, just as with so many science topics, the internet offers up a range of answers, not all of them correct.

1:29:15Here are a few links to some of their coverage of a recent accident, DC midair collision, the Lion Air final report, 737 MAX, and an article about their reactions to NTSB recommendations after the 737 MAX crashes. They did a couple of episodes about the 737 MAX crashes, and their analyses helped me understand that there were more than just issues with the type of plane that led to the crashes. And they provide a bunch of links. I appreciate that. Yeah. Vincent, I think she's got your number here. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I got it. Yes. No, we complained about the same thing. Yeah, exactly. People going out of their lanes.

1:29:56And that's, you know, I mean, pilots are not accident investigators. That's absolutely true. I definitely feel like I want to hear Alan's take on all of this. Oh, yeah. I'll listen. I'm going to listen to this. Okay. It's fine. Thank you very much, Anne. I appreciate that. All right, let's do some pics of the week. Breanne, what do you have for us? I have an astronomy picture of the day from earlier this week. This is from July 7th. And every time on July 7th when I opened a new browser window, I was delighted each time I saw this picture. So this picture is called the Dragons of ERA. And so these are some gas and dust clouds that are shaped like dragons.

1:30:45And this is just this absolutely beautiful photo of these dust and gas clouds that I enjoyed looking at quite a bit. Amazing. So I'm looking to see what instrument took these photos. Yeah, I was just doing the same. I don't see it.

1:31:06It says captured from Queensland, Australia, but doesn't say. Sounds like it's an earth-based scope of some sort. Interesting. Yeah, that's cool. All right. Yeah, it's this guy, Rod Presires, who does astrophotography in Brisbane. Yes. In fact, if you click on one of the links, the one that says picture, it takes you to his Instagram. And it says it's his latest image from home captured under Bortle 7 Suburban Skies. Wow. It's amazing. Amazing. It's really amazing. Using some imaging gear he's been testing. Nice. Wow. Yeah, good work. Very cool. Rich, what do you have for us? Okay, so I really was looking for a science pick, which I will do down the road, because if you'll recall, as sort of a teaser here, when we talked about the bacterial flagellum, I got interested in the motor, and I was wondering if there was any, since both that and the membrane ATPase are rotating structures that involve ATP being either created or burned.

1:32:18I was wondering if there was any similarity. And so I'm chasing that down. The answer is not really, but the answer is in more detail. Very interesting. So I'll get back to that. That's a preview. But I stumbled across this, which was this guy talking about iconic bass riffs. And it caught my eye because it's got a picture of, on the front, Paul McCartney with his bass. And this is just this delightful, he's an Italian guy who has the most deadpan delivery. that's absolutely hilarious. And he goes through 10 Beatles songs that have iconic bass riffs that Paul McCartney did. And for me, it was absolutely fascinating because, of course, I know all the songs.

1:33:19And it's very interesting to hear his take on the bass riffs and to hear the bass riffs in isolation from the rest of the song and how it really drives the song. So I really recommend it. And I have to say that for another reason, some weeks earlier, and this probably seeded my interest in this, it has something to do with sort of the music I'm involved in. I got interested in the notion of bass riffs in particular or riffs in general that drive a whole song. Where the song starts out with this riff and it carries through the whole song. Ticket to Ride is a classic. I Feel Fine of The Beatles is another classic.

1:34:06So that ultimately got me to a wiki page on riffs. Okay, so you can read all about what a riff is for background to this, and you can go down to a subsection called Riff Driven, which it describes several examples of how riffs can drive a song. So there you go. That's this episode's dive into bass riffs. I watched this guy, Davey. I like him very much. He's funny. He was new to me. But I think you can go down a bass guitar, electric bass guitar rabbit hole that is deep, right? I mean, there are people, and he finds these people in different countries, who are famous on social media for their bass playing.

1:34:49And they're mostly young people, but not all. And they're incredible. And they play fretless basses, which is amazing. They have like a regular bass has six or four strings and they have more six strings and basses. And he's always doing challenges with other of these. You know, he's really good actually himself at playing. He's done some amazing complicated things. But, you know, riff has a non-musical connotation as well, right? And like we'll say, let's riff on this paper. Right? Just, you know, two ideas, which is not really the same as the musical riff. The musical riff is some repeated part or something like that.

1:35:35So I don't know how it arose. Let's riff on this, right? Okay, so Rich, how did you get from the ATPase to the spaceship? I was just in YouTube, you know, looking, you know, YouTube scrolls all your stuff in front of you. And you see a picture of Paul McCartney and the title, The Iconic Bass Riff That Nobody Can Play. How can you not click on that? That's true. I've been seeing that. So I subscribed to him. I've been seeing that video in my feed for weeks now. Okay. And I've been meaning to, but I haven't done it. This guy has an amazing presentation. He defines deadpan. It's incredible. Yes. With this really wonderfully thick Italian accent.

1:36:22Yes. It's good. I like him very much. So I have a musical pick also. And so I got inspired by Rich's pick because I've been listening to Santana lately. You know, when I was a kid, I just loved this band. His first album came out in 1969 when I was in high school. And it was amazing. And so this is called The Song That Made Carlos Santana, A Rock Legend. It's a YouTube video. It's an AI-generated thing, okay? So it's not... But it has some good history to it. It's basically... So I didn't go to Woodstock, but it happened during my youth. And if you look at the videos of Woodstock, the performance by Santana was one of the best of the whole thing.

1:37:17and they did Soul Sacrifice, right? Which is a musical piece. There's no vocals to it. And the story, this goes through Santana's youth. You know, he grew up in Mexico and so forth. Now he got into music. It's really cool because he's an amazing guitarist, right? He's got an iconic sound. But these guys, Santana himself used to play at Fillmore West, right? And the guy who used to run the Fillmore, I forgot his name. uh billy graham billy graham he liked santana a lot and he you know he had a show where the guitarist didn't show up and santana he said go go do it and he ad-libbed the whole thing and he said this guy is brilliant so when woodstock was being organized he was one of the organizers and he said you got to have santana and they had not released an album yet right so so they go to play and they're there and they're going to come on at night.

1:38:15So they all drop some acid or something, right? And they're completely zoned out. And then they say, okay, you're on in an hour. So they had to go on completely hallucinating. And so most of their sets sucked. They were out of sync. They were off key. It was horrible. And then this last song, Soul Sacrifice, they nailed it. and i watched that video over and over and over it is so freaking good and this made them a star suddenly everybody knew about them they released their first album and then the rest is history it's such a cool story and the video is a little obnoxious okay the ai is just yeah i want you to look at all its other stuff and blah blah blah but the story is really cool and that's it i i just love his guitar playing i like the old band it's really good and i listen to it a lot because i'm trying to relive my youth now yeah so my first uh memory or awakening to santana was uh i placed myself in the first year of graduate school which would have been like 1971 and that was santana abraxas yeah which was kind of in a way the soundtrack to my first year of graduate school.

1:39:35That's right. His second album was released a year after. He's amazing. It's also very good. But then he got, um, he, he got into the Eastern stuff. We went to see a yoga over at yoga in, in India. And he got confused by that. His, his music took on this, um, jazzy thing. He collaborated with John, uh, McLaughlin for a while. and the band broke up because they didn't like the direction he was taking in and then years later he realized that commercially it was a failure to do this stuff so he went back to his old sound and he did better so anyway that that soul sacrifice it just gets me every time i uh i was with my grandson uh yesterday or yeah yesterday the day before when i ran across this bass riff thing and I told him I was going to use it for a twib pick and he says like can you pick anything yeah pretty much pretty much it's something you like they used to be they used to be science picks right yeah it used to be not anymore besides I think music is its own science anyway you know what the amazing thing I find is I listen to music now I can't even understand the words but these songs i know the freaking lyrics by heart yeah listen to them so much yeah and they were clear i understood the lyrics back then actually because one of the bios that we uh you i think posted on uh tom kizak says he's a rock and roll freak okay and he sent a zz top and Who, Kysak?

1:41:15Yeah. Wow, I didn't know that. Let me see if I can find it here. This spotlight on Tom Kysak. Oh, yes, yes. Well, that's cool. Good for him. Let's see. Oh, yeah. I understand you're a rock and roll enthusiast. What are your favorite musicians? This is right from like 2016. he is kizak says i like all kinds of music mostly older music from my younger years i guess today you'd call it classic rock i like to listen to it while i work my interests are broad but i suppose if i had to choose i would say some of my favorites are rolling stones pink floyd eagles guns and roses and zz top and i like a lot of motown and i'm a fan of movie soundtracks good for you tom Good.

1:42:10That's cool. So, Brianne, who's your favorite musician? I've always been a pretty big fan of Pearl Jam. Yeah, Pearl Jam is wonderful. Absolutely. Black. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, very good. How about you, Rich? I don't know. It's probably got to be the Beatles. The Beatles are great. Yeah. I've been on a sort of a Queen trip lately. Queen's pretty fun. Yeah, one of the exercise classes that I'm in, all the exercise classes I'm in play a lot of music. And there's some queen that shows up in one class where they play music from the 50s and 60s because it's a class for seniors, right? And what else? Oh, yeah.

1:42:58One class introduced me to Pink. I didn't know anything about Pink. Pink is great. Man, she's great. She's awesome. I like Lady Gaga too. Also good. What an amazing talent. Just an amazing talent. Yeah. All right. I've been listening lately to Santana, Allman Brothers. Oh my God. I mean, Southern Rock. I'm not a big fan of Southern Rock, but they are just amazing. Yeah, it's hard to close them out. They're good. And Cream. Cream, man. That's going back. Way back. Buffalo Springfield, if you're going to do that, I'm going to come back with Buffalo Springfield. Buffalo Springfield. Listen, I was in Fort Collins.

1:43:43I was sitting outside one morning having coffee, and I started playing Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills and Nash. It just transported, right? I mean, let me just say, that song, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, it's just amazing. It's about Judy Collins. Did you know that? Oh, yeah. because he was dating her and she broke up with him. So the song is all about, but I was just sitting there and it's sunny day. And I'm like, I could just sit here all day and listen to this stuff. It's amazing. It's really good. It's clear. You can understand the lyrics. I love it. You're making me think back to being a little kid and listening to all the music my dad played.

1:44:25Yeah. It's like, you're all, you're talking about exactly my dad's music tastes. Some of this stuff, But some of this stuff has lasted so long. It's so durable. It's amazing. Oh, well, I will listen to it today, but there's still a little part of me that thinks about being a little kid and my dad listening to it. I mean, Stephen Stills was an amazing songwriter. Yeah. Right? And Buffalo Springfield, which he was in that, did you know they were the house band of Whiskey-A-Go-Go, this club in Los Angeles? No, I didn't know that. yeah and so he okay there one night there was a there was a riot outside because the neighbors were pissed that um they made so much noise late right and so that some kind of curfew was instilled and people didn't like the curfew so there was a riot and he wrote a song about that there's something happening here what it is i'm not okay that was all about the that riot but i didn't know they were the house band it was so cool so i probably i probably ought to have another pick here have you seen the documentary called the history of the eagles no i have not it's about three hours long as it's in two parts i mean is it interesting why i mean there's the music is okay but are they interested their music is more than okay dude okay well it's a style you have to like okay yeah you know um yeah it's the whole uh so uh blen fray and i can never the drummer.

1:46:00I mean, Don Henley. They are the backbone of this. And they, both of them, I think independently, deliberately went to LA to make their mark. And they were Linda Ronstadt's band. Okay? And they played for her and toured with her for quite a while. And then I forget how the other guys fell into it. And they, apparently this was unusual. They discovered that they were really their own thing. And they went to Linda and they said, um, uh, we really, uh, need to get out of here and do our own thing. And apparently ordinarily in the rock world, that would cause a stir. But she said, oh, cool. Go do it.

1:46:49Um, and you know, it has them. I think if I've got the story straight, you know, they rented an apartment in the same building or ruined with Jackson Brown and it's all this stuff. Great stuff. It's a good story. So Pearl Jam, the guy, the lead singer, right? Fabulous. He used to pump gas in Seattle or something like that, right? Yeah. And he just got, he kept trying to do music and he got finally together with a band and it turned out to have a lot of talent. It's nice when you can do that, right? You pursue your dream and eventually you get there. Not everybody does it, but you can't give up you have to stick with it actually the i read eric clapton's autobiography and that was one of the first ones that impressed me uh with what what motivates these people and it's not just music it's anything where you run across something that you're actually genuinely passionate about and you just can't not do it and you're just doing it all the time and these guys go home they sit in their room and practice riffs all day long.

1:47:56That's how you become a great rock musician. So one last story. So Cream, they have this song called Badge, right? Which is a totally nonsensical song. You've heard about the swans in the park. That's one of the lines, right? It was written by George Harrison, who also played rhythm guitar. So at the time, of course, He was with the Beatles and he identified himself as L 'Angelo Mysterioso so he wouldn't get in trouble with his record label. But he wrote the word. The title of the song was Bridge by George Harrison. But Eric Clapton misread it as Badge. And that's how the song was published. And Badge has nothing to do with the song.

1:48:45PowerPoint mechanic. Well, actually, Bridge wasn't even the title. It was the bridge, right? The part of the song that's the bridge, the instrumental part. And Eric thought that. But I think these famous musicians, they're screwing up, right? Everybody screws up anyway. Music is great. I love people who are really good at what they do, who are experts. Yeah. That includes musicians, right? And that is TWIV 1339. You can find show notes at microbe.tv slash twiv. You can send questions or comments or pics. You can send pics to twiv at microbe.tv. And if you enjoy these programs, we'd love your support.

1:49:25Microbe.tv slash contribute. Breanne Barker's at Drew University, Bioprof Barker on Blue Sky. Thank you, Breanne. Thanks. I learned a lot. Rich Condit is an emeritus professor, University of Florida, Gainesville. He's currently in Austin, Texas. Thank you, Rich. Sure enough. I love this stuff. Always a good time. We were in Austin. We went to some club where the music was really loud. Yeah. Chris Sullivan took us to the club. What's the name of that place? I don't know. It would be interesting. It's famous. I mean, that was before I moved here, right? It's a famous place. It may have been Antones.

1:50:00I mean, Antones is the place, okay? So for all I know, I've been to Antones, but I was very confused about the whole thing. Well, we couldn't talk. It was impossible to have a conversation. No, it was crazy. It was crazy. It was crazy. I'm Vincent Racaniello. You can find me at microbe.tv. I'd like to thank the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology for their support of TWIV, Ronald Jenkes for the music, and Jolene Ramsey for the timestamps. You've been listening to This Week in Virology. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week. Another TWIV is viral.