Transcriber: Nhung Nguyen Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
My name is Theodora Hatziioannou, and I’m a virologist.
I was born and raised in Rhodes, Greece, and studied in the UK and France,
and eventually ended up in New York City in the US,
where I have lived for the last 20 years.
I'm currently an associate professor at Rockefeller University,
where I work very closely with my husband, Paul Bieniasz.
We live in Manhattan in an apartment with our two kids.
Our work focuses mainly on the virus that causes the other pandemic, HIV-1.
But we have expanded to other viruses and studied quite a few of them
and also obviously know would say a thing or two about them.
In fact, one could even say that I’ve written the book on viruses.
So when the virus that causes the current pandemic,
SARS-CoV-2 arrived in the Western world, it affected our lives like everybody’s,
but it had perhaps a little different effect.
So what I thought might be of interest is to walk you through how this affected
our lives inside the lab, outside the lab and all the spaces in between.
So let's go back to March 2020,
when the virus first officially arrived in New York City and the Western world.
We wondered with Paul whether we should switch our research
and start working on SARS-CoV-2.
And of course, SARS-CoV-2 is quite a different virus from HIV-1
and the other viruses we have been working on.
It’s a coronavirus,
and some of the techniques required to study are quite different
to what we were used to.
So we did hesitate and discuss it over and over.
Furthermore, it was a previous virus related to SARS-CoV-2,
SARS-CoV that arrived in the world around 2002
that originally was assumed might cause a pandemic,
but eventually it didn’t spread as much and did not cause the havoc
that this virus is currently causing.
So we had, I think, reasonable doubt
whether this was truly a pandemic at the time,
and whether we should really jump into the fray and start working on it.
We also had noticed that several of our colleagues
and other labs appeared to be switching and truly wondered
whether we should also join this bandwagon.
We thought, yes, perhaps we could actually contribute something
and contribute something to figuring out how this virus works,
and we thought we would start with doing what we knew best.
So as I mentioned, we’re not coronavirus experts,
but we do know other viruses pretty well,
and we do know that we can use them
to generate tools that will help us study this coronavirus.
So what we focused on was
this little protein you can see in the image behind me;
the red protein that is on the surface of the virus
and allows it to attach to your cells and infect them.
So we can manipulate viruses and take this protein from SARS-CoV-2
and use it to decorate viral particles from different viruses
and also equip those other viruses with what we call reported genes,
which when the virus infected cells, you makes it glow in the lab, obviously,
so we can very easily measure infection.
And at the same time, assays like this allows us to measure how our responses
stop the virus from infecting the cells,
such as, for example, neutralizing antibodies.
And this is exactly what we did,
and the tools that we developed have proven extremely useful,
and we have distributed them to over 100 labs around the world.
Like us, many other labs at Rockefeller University
considered at the time to work on this new virus,
and we decided to embark on a very close collaboration with
the two labs here on campus Michel Nussenzweig and Charlie Rice.
So Michel’s lab is an expert on neutralizing antibodies,
and Charlie’s lab works on many, many viruses
and could actually do experiments with coronaviruses.
This required a different type of work,
and in order to move really effectively and really fast,
we really pooled our resources together and decided to work very, very closely,
exchanging not only reagents, information and data, but also people.
People coming from one lab worked in another lab,
and the project didn't really belong to any one person,
but it was a collective effort.
So we did start and worked at a frenetic pace.
We have never worked like this before.
We always prided ourselves on working very hard.
But this was really at a different level.
And we have recruiting volunteers
and we are very grateful for all the people that came forward.
Our own work really focused on was these neutralizing antibody responses.
Initially, what antibodies were produced by people that got infected by the virus?
And later, what antibodies were produced by vaccinated people?
How did these responses evolve over time? And how did the virus counter evolve?
How did variants emerge? What changes happened in the spike?
It was not only us working in this space and not only us establishing this;
this really big and open collaborations;
but many, many scientists around the world worked in the same way.
And that is unprecedented!
What allowed this unprecedented speed and progress in this field that
I would say is incomparable to anything else that has happened before in virology.
One of the results of these efforts is the development of vaccines,
which might appear to some as they have arrived very, very fast
and out of nowhere.
But in reality, if you know the field
just because they appear to arrive fast, they didn’t actually arrive.
They weren’t actually developed so fast.
They rely on past technology
and knowledge of the field and a previous knowledge of the field.
For example, the arrival, as I mentioned of the previous corona virus,
allowed this study of the virus and its more vulnerable point.
So we already knew that
we had to target this red protein, the spike, as a good vaccine target;
and also advances in mRNA, in synthetic RNA technology allowed
the generation of these very effective mRNA vaccines.
So again, we were in,
we are in a far more technologically advanced place than we have been,
and our knowledge and collective expertise
has allowed us not only to progress so quickly,
but also to probe
how the immune system interacts with a new virus in real time,
which has really never happened before as such detail.
And with these techniques on a previous work on viruses like HIV-1
allowed both us, but also many other labs to transport these technologies
and apply them to this new virus.
So the work in the lab was extremely exciting and rewarding,
and we made a lot of progress, and it was really
a pleasure to work in these circumstances
and see your work actually affect policy in real time
and contribute to combating this pandemic.
So this is what happened inside the lab, what was happening outside the lab?
So again, March 2020, the virus officially arrived in New York City.
In reality, it was already spreading in communities around here long before,
but we didn’t know about it.
Again, we were watching this pandemic develop,
and we’re seeing a lack of action
both from local and, of course, federal government at the time.
And we were wondering what was going to happen.
And we’re wondering what can we do to change this?
In particular, I remember my own personal feelings were like standing on a beach,
watching a tsunami approach.
And people were building sandcastles and we had to --
I was very frustrated and had to do something about it.
And at one night I returned home and just sat down and composed a letter
urging the mayor of New York City and the chancellor of the school system
to shut down the schools.
Because to me, that was the minimum way
of mitigating spread of the virus we knew very little about at the time.
And Paul agreed help me edit it and we contacted about 36 of our colleagues
in all major institutions in New York City.
And we’re very happy to receive very positive, great support from all of them.
And we signed an open letter to the mayor
and the chancellor of the schools in New York.
That was published online,
and several newspapers actually picked it up.
So the response from the local government
was not what we expect, at least not from the mayor.
But some of the local politicians did pay attention,
and I know that our letter went all the way to the governor’s office.
And I was very happy to see that the next week,
the governor decided to close down the schools.
And I would be thrilled to think that
our letter contributed in some small ways to make these important decisions.
And that letter, it was, would first got the attention of journalists,
and the first interaction with the press was about this advocacy and about policy.
And a lot of journalists from around the world were calling me
to ask me about the pandemic and about what should be done.
And I honestly try to give them honest opinions,
and stress the limitations of my knowledge were when addressing such concerns.
Obviously at this age of social media,
access to information and access to people is far easier
and more wide than just newspapers and news channels.
So, for example, our local senators that really appreciated our letter was
the first to contact us and set up a Facebook town halls,
where citizens of New York could call in and ask us all sorts of questions
about how to handle groceries and whether to eat out in restaurants or not.
And we’re very happy to participate in that and answer questions.
Also, I participated in panels, Zoom panels organized in Greece,
where people could submit questions about vaccines when they came around.
And that was also very rewarding.
I think that if I helped even one person change their mind and take the vaccine,
then I would feel very satisfied.
But of course, the flip side of all this
is that social media does not bring only joy.
It brings quite a lot of angst and also frustration,
because a lot of people appear to misunderstand certain things
or spread false information and target scientists,
which to me does not make any sense whatsoever.
We are not in the pocket of companies
and we are not really have any interest in deceiving people.
We just do our work and we are happy to inform everyone about it
and hopefully help influence decisions
based on actual data, not in any secret agenda.
But perhaps the worth of these people were the doctors and some fellow scientists
who seem to deliberately misrepresent information.
Even from my own data,
I've seen someone say things that were absolutely not true,
and it is unclear to me and to what end or what they are trying to achieve.
The only thing I can think of is that they really want attention to themselves.
Gain more followers.
Or some other reason that I really cannot fathom.
So we’ve talked about what went on inside the lab
and what went on outside the lab.
What happened to the spaces in between?
So in a very personal note, while I did have the attention
of some politicians at least, and journalists around the world,
our own family friends appeared to some of our family friends
did not take to my advice very readily,
and unfortunately, our family became extremely isolated.
In particular, I was very concerned about our kids
because they, unlike us, they didn’t have the reward
of doing the heart of the work
and contributing to the fight towards this pandemic.
But I am hoping that as kids, they are resilient
and as we slowly go back to some sort of normalcy,
they will recover.
On the other hand, another dichotomy was in the work itself.
For 20 years, I’ve worked on HIV-1,
and one of the first questions I used to get was
when are we going to get a vaccine against this virus?
And in sharp contrast, we now have a vaccine,
a very effective and safe vaccine against this new virus.
And people are refusing to take it.
Why is that?
What has changed in these last 20 years?
And I’m sure many things have.
But one of the things that I can point to is social media,
and the amount of information
that is now available at the touch of a button to anyone.
And although this dissemination has progressed,
what hasn’t progressed is education.
So you have all this information available,
but a lot of people are not equipped adequately to evaluate it,
so they cannot distinguish what is true and what is false.
So don't fall into the trap of just following people that agree with you
or the preconceptions and prejudices that you might have,
but really look for the real data and look at diverging opinions.
Let’s move forward!
Today, September 11, 2021, what happens now?
The virus is here to stay.
Our lives are going to change as they have changed before due to other events,
and we all have to learn to live with it, but we have excellent weapons against it.
Vaccination, masking and social distancing.
And we can do this, we can take care of our own health
as well as the health of other people.
Like my kids, I hope that we are all resilient
and can get through this.
Thank you for listening.