Written by TPS Fellow Alex Turo

Times being what they are, it’s important to have not just the right information in front of you, but also to have it in a way you enjoy consuming. Enter one of my favorite podcasts, which I’ve listened to for nearly a decade and is enjoying some unintended and unprecedented popularity: This Week in Virology (TWiV). As a program, it’s exactly what it sounds like; TWiV is a discussion of the week’s events relating to virology. For more than 700 weeks, the panel of hosts have discussed breaking virus news as relates to both public health concerns and scientific breakthroughs. They used to talk about many viruses, from the popular ones like HIV and the Poliovirus to the more obscure but very interesting Mimivirus. Now, of course, they talk about just one virus.

Image 1 - The TWiV logo, featuring some molecules of interest. I'm pretty sure these are poliovirus (full disclosure, I'm 100% not a virologist, that's why I listen to these folks)

I think the primary thing that TWiV has that differentiates it from other similar science discussion podcasts is that it’s not a production by career science communicators; they’re all faculty at various research universities- for the most part they represent what may be considered the “old guard” of virology research today (for example, the main host Vincent Racaniello post-doc’d with David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate who originated the Baltimore classification system of virus). The upshot of this is that between the co-hosts, they know everyone in the field and they’re the epitome of subject matter experts in virology. Having said that, they’re also humble about admitting when they don’t know things, and every once in a while they’ll have to google something that they should know but can’t remember (or, on more than one occasion, email a colleague mid-episode).

Since they’re well-connected, though, they have no trouble getting important, timely guests. On January 10^th, they released an hour-long discussion with Emily Travanty, the director of the public health facility in Colorado that was the first in the US to detect the B.1.17 variant of SARS-CoV-2 only the previous week. Further, the podcast issues a weekly special episode they call a “Clinical Update” featuring Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist in downstate NY who treats COVID-19 patients, where Daniel discusses the disease, the numbers of the week, what those numbers mean, and what to expect in the future of COVID-19.

The TWiV crew on a recent episode in 2020

I recommend this podcast as a great way to learn more about what we’re up against. A big advantage for me is that podcasts don’t further addictive doom-scrolling through social media feeds. I enjoy the collegial atmosphere, I enjoy the general audience-friendly discussion of molecular biology, and most importantly I enjoy the feeling I get when I listen- that I actually understand some of what’s going on at the macro and micro levels of this pandemic.