All About That Base thatbase

Biology and culture collide! We discuss the intersection of sex, gender, and sports with Dr. Adrianna San Roman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge who studies sex chromosome aneuploidy. Adrianna first walks us through the biological basis of sex and explains why it is more complicated than just male and female. Definitions in place, we then talk about the cases of Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya, Olympic athletes who have been banned from competition due to elevated testosterone levels. You’ll be Sry if you miss this one!

Over 200 papers on COVID-19 are published every day! In this episode we chat with Emily Nelson, PhD, about her work on the COVID-19 Literature Surveillance Team (https://www.covid19lst.org/), a group of 50 individuals who are collecting, annotating, and summarizing the daily deluge of papers. Emily’s work with COVID LST uniquely positions her to give us a 20,000-feet view of trends in the literature, including what the science is telling us (and not telling us) about serology test development, whether we can get COVID-19 twice, and potential treatments on the horizon.

Returning champion Xueting Qiu tells us about the newest findings from analyzing 10,000+ SARS-CoV-2 genomes. We discuss what the genomes tell us about the origins and spread of the outbreak across the US, how fast the virus is mutating, whether different 'strains' of the virus exist, and - the question on everyone's mind - how we can reopen the country.

Xueting Qiu, a molecular epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, revisits AATB to talk about the current state of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and why we needed to start social distancing yesterday.