Our Immune Systems Are Full of Ancient Weapons
5/12/202630 min
Billions of years ago, battles between bacteria and viruses wrote the rulebook for how hosts and pathogens behave. Today, our immune system follows suit. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Viviane Callier about how recent discoveries could shape how we think about the evolution of immunity. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
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First 90 secondsSamir Patel· Host0:00
[music] We see evolutionary arms races play out all the time. Take COVID, for example. A strain would run through the population, we built immunity from vaccines or getting it, and then another strain mutated and adapted to get around our defenses would come along and be successful, and the cycle would start all over again. That's evolution, and there's obviously nothing new about it. Bacteria have been in this kind of evolutionary arms race with viruses for as long as they've existed, billions of years. Evolution is a mad scientist, but it's also very demanding and, in the end, pragmatic. Mess around just a little bit and you might go extinct, and when evolution finds something that works, it tends to run with it. [music] Welcome to the Quanta Podcast, where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math. I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quanta Magazine. It seems like the more we learn about the way that evolution operates, especially at the molecular and cellular levels, the stranger the story gets. In a recent piece in Quanta called The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today, science journalist Vivian Callier explores a surprising evolutionary connection across