No problem not being nice to Dickson in this episode, because he’s absent for a discussion of a new giant virus that replicates in the cytoplasm yet transiently accesses the nucleus to bootstrap infection.

The esteemed doctors of TWiV review a new giant virus recovered from the Siberian permafrost, why influenza virus gain of function experiments are valuable, and feline immunodeficiency virus.

This Week in Virology and Futures in Biotech join together in a science mashup to talk about a virophage at the origin of DNA transposons, and unintended spread of a recombinant retrovirus.