Historical Perspectives On Contemporary Issues
Neeraja Sankaran — A Tale of Two Viruses
Closed-captioning available on Youtube.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Neeraja Sankaran, author of A Tale of Two Viruses: Parallels in the Research Trajectories of Tumor and Bacterial Viruses.
In her book, Neeraja Sankaran compares the research trajectories of two groups of viruses: cancer-causing viruses and bacteriophages, which infect bacteria. She discusses how their respective discoveries--in 1911 by Peyton Rous and 1916 by Felix d'Herelle--changed our understanding of what viruses are, how they operate, and what they are capable of doing in animal and human bodies. Dr. Sankaran discusses the ways in which the phenomenal development of biomedical imaging and identification technologies in the middle decades of the 20th century allowed for our current understanding of viruses. She ends her discussion with a poignant and timely call to recognize that stigmas of all kinds--whether against certain groups of people, or against viruses themselves as potential agents of disease--have often hindered the development of science and medicine.
Neeraja Sankaran was a 2018-2019 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Neeraja Sankaran, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, August 30, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/122.
Neeraja Sankaran is Senior Research Scholar at the Descartes Centre of Utrecht University. She is a historian of science and medicine interested in the recent and near-contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, and has worked on the history of virus research, molecular biology, immunology, and origins of life research.