TWiV 691: SciArt with Laura Splan

December 10, 2020

SciArtist Laura Splan joins TWiV to reveal her transdisciplinary work that intersects science, technology, design and culture, then we discuss an inverse correlation between mumps virus antibodies induced by MMR vaccine and COVID-19 severity, and whether ivermectin is indicated for treatment of COVID-19.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, and Brianne Barker

Guest: Laura Splan

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Download TWiV 691 (79 MB .mp3, 132 min)
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Links for this episode

Weekly Picks 1:51:36

Brianne – Patterns for Virus snowflakes
Kathy – 2020 Nobel Prize lectures (hepatitis C) (link to all and concert) Historical review by Harvey Alter
RichNew Data Confirm 2020 SO is Upper Centaur Rocket Booster from 1960’s (Wiki)
VincentThe Right Stuff

Listener Pick

MiikaelTiny tweak behind COVID-19 vaccines

Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees

Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv

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5 comments on “TWiV 691: SciArt with Laura Splan

  1. Janet Dec 10, 2020

    Pandemic Poem 2- an Exchange.

    If I had time
    This moment
    Would, fractal-like,
    Spiralling, grow and expand,
    Persist and remain
    Forever
    Or
    At least until
    I had explored
    And understood
    And communicated,
    And been…
    But

    I have to cook-
    And 5 people of varying capacities must eat,
    Trusting that we have enough in common,
    That my taste is good enough
    (One man’s food is another’s poison, after all)
    That their needs are met
    And they survive.

    Which of our metaphors
    Are good enough?
    Like Bowlby’s ‘good enough mother’:
    Freedom is:
    Freedom from pain,
    From hunger, from want.
    Freedom to roam,
    Freedom to behave…
    Freedom to breathe.
    A series of priorities.
    Which of our metaphors, if any, is good enough?
    And what, of our urges,
    Is not born of
    Our constantly evolving biochemical negotiations.
    Which of our metaphors then,
    Is not a failure
    To truly represent them?
    Lost in translation…
    The antagonism is unavoidable
    When what it all boils down to is:
    Fit/No Fit.
    Uninterrupted, at an interface with itself,
    Ravelling and unravelling, entering and leaving, trying and failing,
    Feeling, seeing and hearing,
    Hypotheses evolving.
    Life is Art.
    And Art is Life, focussed.

  2. Terry Doyle Dec 10, 2020

    Reading 12/10/20Twitter post of Zeynep Tufekci (glad I don’t have to pronounce that!). She shows a graph that Brianne alluded to on TWiV 691 about the efficacy of a single shot (like Moderna or Pfizer’s MRNA vaccines). Says that there is evidence that a single shot is maybe 80% effective – which you can kinda-sorta tell by the number of infectees between the 1st and 2nd shots. in the phase 3 trials.

    There’s a graph that shows the placebo arm of the study continuing to get Covid-19 while the single shot folks are 80% reduced infection. Given that there is a super shortage of either vaccine for Americans, mightn’t it be best to gain coverage by going with a single shot. What do you think?

    Personally, I thot there might be a lot of other things you’d like to know like how LONG immunity would last and how/when you’d ever get your second shot. What would that do to long term immunity?

    Here’s a link and one of the 1st responses was from Michael Mina who agrees with her.
    https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1337125198437502978

    posting the embeded tweet below which maybe will work.

    I wrote up the case for launching immediate trials to test a single-dose regime. Calling for volunteers among < 65 health-care workers for single dose and later booster seems like the minimal prudent response to this chart. We could know fairly quickly. https://t.co/UpSRZHYzTe— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) December 10, 2020

  3. Allan Seidel Dec 10, 2020

    As of this date, 12/10/2020, the download link on this webpage https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-691/ is an ort from the TWiV 688 webpage. The link points to the TWiV688 download and its text is also TWiV688 instead of TWiV691.

  4. John Hempel Dec 10, 2020

    Thanks for that C&EN link, Mikael! I had been hunting for the exact basis for the Pro substitutions and had assumed that it was merely to stabilize and give the antigen a longer half-life. The actual reason is much better!