It’s me again,
Thanks a lot everyone for subscribing/following/listening/sharing, and especially to those of you who’ve been in touch with comments and suggestions. I will certainly use them to improve as we go on - just bear with me :)
Episode #1 is now out! It is a conversation about viruses with a virologist who decided to switch gears when the pandemic hit. He quit research and now works as a full-time science communicator, so expect lots of interesting stuff about viruses, and a few thoughts about leaving academia, missing home, and the impact that social media has on us. His name is Efra Rivera-Serrano and he was just such a joy to speak with, so I’m sure you will enjoy this.
If you like it, please tell your friends!
And again, I’m pasting the episode transcript down below if you need to (or would rather) read it.
Thanks again!
Pablo
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Episode transcript
New York, 1981. Reports start to come out about the spread of a new mysterious disease. “Rare cancer sending four to one homosexuals.” That was one of the headlines on the New York Times on July the 3rd. That was the start of an outbreak. Two patients would be admitted to hospital one day, one with cancer, the other one with pneumonia. It wouldn't be obvious at all that they both had, in fact, the same disease. Because AIDS is actually a range of diseases caused by a virus called HIV. Infection progressively destroys your immune system. And because those cells are no longer patrolling your body, you're left vulnerable to other bugs. It is those secondary infections and cancers that ultimately kill you. Or they used to, anyway. 30 million lost lives later and despite decades of stigma, particularly against gay men, you can now live with HIV if you're tested and treated on time. Because we now have not just better policies, but also therapies that can bring the virus to its knees to a point where it's no longer detectable in your blood and so no longer transmissible.
That was not the first modern epidemic though.
In 1918, the so called Spanish Flu had killed more people in a year than died in four years of World War One. Then SARS in 2003. MERS. More recently, Ebola and Zika… In 2020, of course, a novel coronavirus locked us all up at home. And we're still fighting back. But are all all viruses bad?
There's viruses out there that love to infect and destroy cancer cells. Those viruses are now being harnessed as cancer therapy. But not all viruses necessarily are bad for us. Some can be beneficial for the species. And some, we can even actually take advantage of the things that they do to help us.
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Welcome to the very first episode of How To Make A Scientist. My name is Pablo Izquierdo, and today I’m joined by Efra Rivera-Serrano. He’s a virologist by training but he’s now working full time in science writing and communications, because that’s also what a science career can look like. Enjoy!
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If your story was made into a book or a paper, where would it start?
My life story? A lot of changes, a lot of putting this big puzzle together. And it's really hard for you to put it all together because you don't know whether those pieces belong to the puzzle you're trying to build. And so I learn as I go.
You were born in Puerto Rico, right? What was it like growing up there?
Yeah, so I grew up in Puerto Rico raised by a single mom. In a very rural town, there were only a few houses there. And so I grew up in a farm race in different types of animals and plans for living. And so that shaped, what I became because I've always been exposed to life around me. And I was raised in an environment where I was very lonely, just me and nature.
Have you always been interested in viruses as well? Or is it mostly sort of animals in the beginning?
None of the above. So when I was, you know, I grew up with dogs and chickens and ducks and birds and all that. So I always thought that I wanted to treat animal diseases. But there's no veterinary school in Puerto Rico to this date. So you have to leave the island and go to the US or whatever. And then I never wanted to do that. I always thought that I was going to stay in the island because I loved it so much. And I was going to have to let go of that dream.
Fast forward in time, I ended up doing a PhD or a better school. So the irony in all that is hilarious. But when I went to college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my degree. I just knew that I loved biology, I loved life. And while there I took a course in botany, so the study of plants, and I just fell in love. I just what I want to do for those in my life is study plants.
Okay.
And as I was finishing my college degree, I applied to grad school for a PhD program in the US to study plants. And I started grad school for plants. I really thought that plants were really cool. And I wanted to manipulate their genome and make them you know, produce more vitamins for the developing world, or, you know… Many things happened during that training phase. I was in my early 20s. And I decided that that position was not for me. So I ended up leaving my doctoral degree. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to keep studying science went through a lot of mental health issues. So I was lucky enough that I had a lot of mentors. And I had built a sense of community throughout grad school. So I ended up switching fields completely and um, and I applied to a program at the veterinary school, so again going back full circle.
And it felt different because my background was always in plants. So I knew biochemistry, I knew photosynthesis left and right. And now here I am, having to study blood and immunity. And my first rotation was in a biology lab, she was so passionate about viruses and about why they cause disease and why some people get sick and why some people don’t, that I just became, I fell in love with the discipline itself. And so I ended up switching from plants to viruses and did my PhD in biology. And then I stayed in virology for many more years and did my postdocs and everything in that field. I know a lot about plants. I know more much more about viruses, of course, but they're both who I am as a person.
You did your PhD on how viruses can harm your heart.
Correct.
And I don't think I've ever heard that, like I've heard of viruses that can harm your lungs. And we're all familiar with at least one that does at the moment. Your liver, that's hepatitis virus, your brain that's rabies, but but never heart.
It's definitely an understudied system that has our that almost all of us would have had a viral infection in the heart at some point in our lives. And so in most cases, we will get an infection that will have some implications in the heart whether the virus gets to the heart, or whether the immune response that is mounted against the virus reaches the heart and damages it. And so the good thing for us is that most viral infections resolve on their own, our immune system does a really, really good job at clearing them up. So that's a really good thing for us, we only have one heart, and it's essential. So if we lose it, you know, we're not here anymore.
And so we have a really good immune system. But there are cases where that doesn't happen. And we are not able to resolve it. Or as I said, it's so common, then you can also think of it as an additive effect, that you're just getting exposure after exposure. So by the time that you are in your later years, you have accumulated a lot of damage. And this is because compared to other many other organs, the heart itself is not really good at replacing itself, or regenerating if you will. And so if you think about the intestine, for example, if you have a viral infection in the gut, that results in diarrhea, you're destroying a lot of your gut cells. But those cells have a stem cell niche, and you're going to create new cells, so you lose them during a severe acute infection in your gut but then you get them right back up. It doesn't happen in the heart, we're in school that issue mitosis of like the cell divides and creates these two and these two creates four. But that doesn't really happening in the main cell type of the heart. What this essentially means is that you're listening to this and you're an adult, chances are that the bulk of the cells that are in your heart muscle cells are the same ones that you had as a kid. So you can think about any damage that is caused to the heart it adds up because it's not able to replenish itself, it is not able to regenerate the cells that were lost because of the infection.
So hang on, how does the virus get to your heart in the first place?
Yeah, there's many ways in which a virus can get to the heart. If you think about the heart, it's one of his many functions is to pump blood across the body. So if a virus or bacteria, whatever your favorite bug is, as access to the bloodstream, it essentially has access to the heart. But there are instances, for example, that the virus perhaps may not get to the heart. But again, a lot of the mediators of inflammation and all that happens around infection, all the proteins that are being secreted, all those signaling molecules, then you can get them to the blood. So if they get to the heart then in principle you're damaging the heart indirectly.
Because I've read that some COVID patients also have heart damage. But so when we breathe, how does that get into your blood?
For COVID, there is evidence at least patients that were already clearing up their symptoms, otherwise asymptomatic at this phase, they had recovered. But they were having a lot of cardiac issues, arrhythmias and problems with breathing. And so there was immediately people were searching for any signs of cardiac damage by this virus. And long behold, there was a lot of evidence for that statistically, from epidemiological showing that a percentage of people that had recovered we're still showing symptoms of cardiac damage somehow. And then that moved into a more of in vitro experiments where people were demonstrating that in fact, this virus can infect muscle cells, at least in a petri dish and so all those links started happening.
To answer your question, there is a very intricate relationship between the lungs and the heart, right? So we breathe in that is sort of like why we call it the cardiovascular system. Because we depend on both of them, they rely on each other. So you need, we breed because we need oxygen and the heart is there to pump the oxygenated blood throughout our body so that all of our cells get oxygen. And so there's a lot of questions about how a virus can get from here to here to there, it can cross from one cell to the other then it just causes a layer and then eventually gets into the bloodstream. It can just get to the heart by perhaps infecting an immune cell and the immune cell just happens to travel to the blood and delivers it to the heart. So there's a lot of different ways in which any virus can do that.
How big is a virus anyway?
Yeah, so viruses are even though we traditionally think of them as sort of microscopic particles, meaning that you cannot see them with even with a basic light microscope, you need what we call an electron microscope is because they are in the nanometer range that is much smaller than the light spectrum.
And so we cannot really resolve them, we cannot see them through traditional microscopy, they really cannot resolve the size of a virus because they are so tiny. So in most cases, we can see is just the effects of our own infection.
Now, there's a lot of evidence of what we call giant viruses, but those tend to infect amoebas, and all that, but those are definitely typically larger than we think about viruses.
But viruses are made of the same stuff as our cells right?
So every virus out there is composed of at least two things.
A genetic material. Just like ourselves, we have DNA, viruses have their own genetic material. Now, these can be in the form of DNA, just like what we have, but they can also have RNA, but even within these two definitions, their DNA can be double stranded, it can be single stranded, it can be linear, it can be circular, but they do have material nonetheless.
And they all have a shell protecting it. If you think about ourselves, we have our DNA and it is within cells nuclei, and is protected there. And you have sort of like a structure shielding the DNA material viruses, similarly, have the same structure. And they have, in this case, a protein shell. In the case of coronavirus, for example, it has a lipid bilayer around that shell. So there's a little difference, a lot of differences there, but for the most part, protein shell protecting genetic material, and that's essentially as minimalistic as it gets.
Okay, so why do they need us? Why can they just, if they're like that, just reproduce outside her body?
Because even though they have generic material, and they have shield, they have no way of replicating it. And so a virus will have the material, but there's no way to make more copies of it. So if you think about a viral replication, sort of like our reproduction, then a virus cannot make more copies of itself without that machinery. That's why they need cells, because cells will have the organelles that they don't have. Our cells produce energy, viruses don't. So they need that energy for chemical reactions. Just from that very, very basic need. A virus needs something that creates proteins for itself. And likewise for genetic material, he needs nucleotides, he needs everything that is needed to make your own material from scratch. It just has the recipe to make him.
Right. So I guess that's why people usually speak about viruses as not really being alive. But if they're not them, how can we kill them?
Viruses are essentially macromolecular assemblies. And so all they have is a recipe to make more copies of themselves. Now, of course, they have evolved ways of making sure that they can accomplish that task. But whether you refer to them as alive or not, antivirals or any other compound there that affects a virus anyway, it could be it affects the way that it replicates or it affects the way that it enters a cell, regardless of how that happens, it is through inactivation. So you have a molecular chemical compound that could bind to the protein or the virus that is required to make more copies of itself. Let's say that the virus has this protein called a polymerase, that is required to copy that generating material. If you have an antiviral that binds to have viral protein and activates it so they cannot make more copies, then you are essentially, quote unquote killing the virus. If you have a drug that binds to the part of the virus that is required to enter the cell. So now you lock it and it cannot enter the cell, then you are again activating it. So it’s not really killing or not, it is preventing it from continuing its replication cycle.
Okay, and what we want to kill or not kill all viruses like, are they all bad for us? Because we know, for bacteria, for example, that sure there's some that give us disease, but there's also some others that, you know, live in our gut, and they help us digest food and so on. Do we have any viruses around that are actually good for us?
Yeah, that's that's an excellent point. Because I think the word virus intrinsically comes with a negative connotation. And people do think of viruses as negative and disease causing, but not all viruses cause disease.
So when I go back to my roots in plants, there's a couple of viruses known that when they infect plants, they actually make them grow better. And from a non human centric point of view, there's quite a bit of evidence that you have viruses that yes, they destroy crops, and they're very negative for agriculture but there are some that benefit the host. Furthermore, if you want, then go back to a more human centric point of view, there's viruses that specifically kill cancer cells. And so I always thought of those as fascinating because we don't talk about them so often. And they have evolved preferentially kill cancer cells because of molecular reasons, as these cells grow really fast, and all that, so there's viruses out there that love to infect and destroy cancer cells. And so there's a whole new field, of oncolytics, onko, from cancer and litic from healing. And so those are now being harnessed as cancer therapy. But not all viruses necessarily are bad for us. Some can be beneficial for the species, and some we can actually take advantage of the things that they do to help us.
What would a world without viruses look like then?
A world without viruses will not be the world as we know it. Knowing that we have a lot of sequences, viral sequences in our genome, that has shaped who we are as a species, I don't think this world would exist as we know it even from that basic point of view, because they have been shaping our evolution for so long.
Not only from a genetic point of view, for example, we know there's a lot of viruses in in the ocean. Now a lot of those affect bacteria. And so there are bacteria, phages, there's millions of those hanging around in a teaspoon of ocean water.
Hang on. So these viruses are just swimming around in the ocean.
Essentially, any species out there can be infected by virus. So if you go as miniscule as a bacteria to as large as a blue whale, we all have viruses in us. And so the ocean is quite big. So there's a lot of viruses out there. But for the most part, they're just doing their thing and maintaining the ecosystem, growing, whether is population control of some species or helping bacteria do something or killing bacteria. They're just there.
Do we know of any organism that has managed to escape viruses?
As far as I know, every species out there can be infected, I think that will be a like an almost like a nobel price discovery. Sequencing technologies will tell you that, but I don't think that hasn't been done. I don't think it will ever be done. Just because they have been running around for millions of years doing their thing.
Right. You mentioned mitosis a little earlier. And of course, that's how one cell splits into two cells. And that's how not just everything begins in that, you know, embryos, that's how everything starts. But also that's how tissues are renewed. Of course, that's not something that viruses do because they can't replicate, like you explained, but the heart does it only really rarely, I gathered that from what you said. Is that why you have a tattoo around your wrist that I just noticed?
Yeah, no, I have a lot of biology tattoos. So I just happen to have a mitosis tattoo. And it's because, this goes back from when I was just a kid and I was introduced to the concept of cell division which a lot of students hate it. And I always thought that was the coolest thing like how can a cell program everything like accordingly, when you think about mitosis, even though it is simplified as a cell division process and that’s it, there's a lot more that happens behind the scene.
So mitochondria have to divide, or the membranes have to double because you have to cells, the DNA has to be replicated on a very specific phase. So there's a lot goes on in that, in that we just call mitosis. And that's a whole different topic for a different podcast. But it just, it just fascinates me.
Okay, so it doesn't have anything to do with a bet that you lost or won, depending how you want to see it on Twitter, does it?
Of course, yeah. So that was a Twitter bet, but I would have not made a bet on something that I completely hated. I don't think I would have gotten that tatoo had the bet never happened. But I would have never also like throwing a random thing that I would hate it in my body. It just gave me an excuse to be proud of my scientific endeavors. I have Darwin evolution tattoos. So it's not the only one that happened to be just the one that it was my very first science tattoo, but I definitely have more than that.
I mentioned Twitter, because you now work not as a researcher, but as a science communicator full time and you manage the social media of different scientific organizations. What role do you think social media have? And how is it important for science and scientists to you know, get out there and be present and vocal on on social media?
So I started when I was midway through my PhD, I was taking my exams. And one of my criticisms that my committee had was that I knew a lot about one topic. And one topic alone, which a lot of grad students can probably relate, we just in our training, we just became so submerged into the topic that we started that we forget that there's many, many other things around them.
I decided at that point, I'm just gonna join social media, not from personal view, but just to like, follow scientists and just learn about different topics. So I started following people in ecology and physics and everything, journals. And my point of view was, well, I cannot just read every article that comes out there or read every magazine, but I can just read a tweet, few characters. Yeah, I can do this. And so that's how I started.
And then I was like, wait a minute, I'm also a scientist, I can I can read and I can learn, but I can also voice what I know. Fast forward in time, right now I made that side of social media as my career, I essentially get paid to tweet science, which I never thought about as a career. When I was when I joined social media was for me to learn. And here I am now making a living out of social media.
And that is because everyone realizes that social media is growing and is shaping all aspects of how we behave as humans. It is an ccessible way, it’s free, no one has to pay, all you have to do a search. And you will find someone who studies x or y. And it also presents sort of like the behind the scenes, you get to know the people who are doing the research and you feel comfortable about asking them, it's not just a blog out there that you will never be able to reach out the author. These are real people. I am real.
So do you think it's important, as you know, an active scientist to, you know, be loud about your latest finding on Twitter?
I think it's important for every training to at least have a presence, it opens a lot of doors. After my PhD, I will say that I probably have had five, six different jobs since I finished grad school. And all of them I got through social media, whether I reached out to the employer or they reached out to me, I wouldn't be who I am, my resume would not be what it is, if it wasn't for social media, and I do things now that I never thought that I will ever be doing.
And so now my goal is slightly different. I still follow a lot of people because I love to learn and I will not be reading papers on like primate biology or planets or have you, but I do learn from from the people who post this article. But now my main goal really is switching roles and being the one facilitating science communication. I do this both from my personal account, but also from like four or five different accounts and no one knows that I'm managing and the person behind them.
But but I love it, I think it's worth it. And I tweet for different journals and magazines, topics that range from cell biology to genetics to physics or engineering. So here I am now taking articles that are not in my field - Engineering, Physics - reading them and promoting their content on social media, explaining it so that anyone who stumbles upon that post can understand them and want to know more about them. So that is that's what I do now.
What role do you think social media has had during this pandemic?
Yeah, so I think the pandemic, and social media overall, has really help when it comes to creating a sense of community and a sense of, you're not alone. And we're all struggling ever since a pandemic hit, and to the point where we sometimes forget who we are as a person, that we have a life outside of our profession. If we were to choose science as a career, just like I did, that is just a very miniscule part of who we are as an individual. And so social media to me has helped me always remember that beyond everything and beyond who I am. And beyond that resume, I am a human, I have a family, I have my friends and I have my interest and seeing all those scientists embracing that side of them. And oh, this scientist also runs and the scientist loves to go hiking to the sort of like, gives you a space for outsuide your computer or your phone, and you can just chat with other people that you normally would have not ever encounter.
What was that jump into science communication like for you?
I think all my life is just full of ironies. I came from the US even though and I ended up doing a PhD or a vet school, even though I didn't want to become a vet because I didn't want to go to a vet school in the US. And so here I am, I trained to be a virologist. I do a lot of researching different viruses, then a viral pandemic hits, and I leave my career. So a lot of people will think of a pandemic almost as a guaranteed job for a virologist now, you know, as job security. And here I am leaving my career after like 10 years starting for it right in the middle of a pandemic. But it was because of that, I think that pandemic shaped my my world.
When the pandemic hit, back in March, I was actually teaching a course, in Nicaragua. And so I remember I finished the course and I was flying back to the US. And that's when the whole thing happened. And so I got back to the US went back to the lab. A week later, we’re all in shutdown.
And the level of misinformation that was going on, and people didn't, not knowing why you need to wash your hands or how a virus gets transmitted, or how vaccines work. All those things that I took for granted for so long, because that's what I did, seeing my mom getting like Facebook messages about conspiracy theories, like all of those things just shape who I am now. And so when the lockdown and it I, I just couldn't go back, I saw myself as I can actually make a better impact through education and communication than years of moving liquids in a laboratory or making chemical reactions.
So the lockdown ended. And we all go back to our normal lives, quote, unquote, normal. And within a couple of weeks, I put my notice, I couldn't go back. I didn't know what I was gonna do. So I started reaching out to people that were into science communication. And I was like, well, can you help me? Like, how do I get a job in communications? Like how do I get paid to write science or write blogs about vaccines? And here I am employed doing exactly that.
Social media, going back full circle, it can be a source of information, and it was the root of why I ended up leaving, but it was also the reason why I'm employed and enjoying what I do now.
Okay, but it did spend a lot of years working in research. What do you think that teaches you that you can bring with you out of academia?
Problem Solving hands down.
We take it for granted. You know, when our experiments fail or when we're under a lot of stress and deadlines and pressures and… but during those years of training, you've learned so much, and so many things that you won't even realize it. From every time that you go to a conference and you have to present your results, how you craft those PowerPoint slides and how you give that speech, you are communicating science. Every article that you write, every abstract that you write, you are honing into in different skills. As a science communicator as a career, your audience here broadens and changes over time. I am no longer only speaking with scientists. The difference is your audience changes.
And when you're not talking about science, what are you up to?
I'm a nature guy, I'm always outside, either gardening have a lot of plants in the house, six dogs. So I'm still that little kid from Puerto Rico surrounded by plants and animals to this point in time, but once the computer goes down the real Efra is the one that is hiking and the one that is petting dogs, and then one that is learning about plants and growing new crops in his backyard. So that is Efra. Little has changed in since I was a kid. I'm just an adult now with a beard and tattoos, but I am still the same kid that loves animals and plants.
If that if you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?
If I can live anywhere in the world, I will probably go back home.
I love where I live now. I live in North Carolina, in the US in the East Coast, and it’s an excellent place to be, there's plenty of jobs, you can change universities whenever you want. It's just this area is really good for that. Now that I don't need that, because I work from home and I'm not a scientist in the lab anymore. Um, I will go back. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I should say I have a family here. So you know, and I like it here. But I do miss my culture every now and then if that makes any sense.
It’d be nice to like not having to like drive 30 minutes to go to the Hispanic market to get an item that you are craving. I am from the beach, raised like five minutes away from the beach. Like, now, I have to drive three hours. And overall, I think the culture and speaking to my people in my language and eating what I want to eat is definitely something that I miss. And I mean, meantime, I don't think that will ever happen. I think I'll stay here until my very last day. But the good thing is that I can still go and visit.
Nice. Well, wherever you end up, best of luck!
Yeah, I need to go I spent like three years and I keep saying, you know, when COVID is over, we'll go back. But um, it's been a while and all my family is still there, except for my mom who's was here now. And so, you know, it's tough. And when I left the island, you know, I left with a vision of this will be like a four or five year thing and then I'll go back.
I don't think I'm ever going home. But… just being proud of where you come from. And always embracing your heritage and your culture is such a key thing that I see my role now as like maybe I am here and I'm not there. But I can show other people my way of thinking and how my culture shaped my problem solving skills and who I am. And so it's all good, I think. It’s an exchange, I am learning every day, even more so than if I had stayed over there. Moving it's always good, change is great. Evolution is change and we wouldn't be here without it.
Efra Rivera-Serrano, thank you so much. Muchísimas gracias.
Thank you very much for for having me. I hope I answered…
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Well that was Episode 1! I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, share it with your friends and use social media for good. Music for this episode was by Borrtex and Vasily Novikov. I’m Pablo Izquierdo. And this is How To Make A Scientist.