Germs, Genes and Genesis: The History of Infectious Disease - Professor Steve Jones

[@bassam5782]

Thumbs up for those who are here during the Covid-19 pandemic.

[@TheJoshA]

*scam-demic

[@bonafide9931]

@@TheJoshA of course, its pandemic, just not as dangerous as we supposed to think before :)

[@Simon-ho6ly]

"this is an interesting time to be an epidemiologist" he said in 2016... i wonder what he is saying now in mid 2020

[@Green-lk1cp]

A gifted speaker on a very interesting subject.

[@louisthomas8550]

Very interesting; I have had the pleasure of seeing Prof. Jones speak twice.

[@fj6864]

Excellent lecture, not least in these days.

[@prissynonee1999]

absolutely fascinating...will look for more of his lectures

[@WildBillCox13]

Well presented. Thanks again, professor Jones and Gresham!

[@sashablikhar7347]

Very good digest on infection's evolution, despite those numerous religious outstandings..

[@adhipmitra]

The art of good speaking with humour and entertainment

[@impossibleexperiments]

It's very interesting, especially in the context of the current Covid-19 epidemic. I wish he had had some time to talk about how modern vectors like air traffic and increased mobility in general fit into the picture.

[@praaht18]

Excellent and very interesting. Much of this we were taught in the 70-s during medical training. The world is slowly catching up.

[@mathewelias7698]

I learnt a lot of this 25 years ago studying zoology, it’s not all about medical training!!!!

[@charlotte-mg9wj]

I like this guy, he reminds me of Mr Mackey, Mmmmmkay?

[@alexcarter8807]

Mr Mackey after Tweak gave him a pot of coffee yeah

[@xyzllii]

Very good.

[@fredd298]

Quite riveting. I looked at the WHO outbreak news as of recent. You can read individual cases of how outbreaks originated and spread. Enthralling.

[@wordscaninspire114]

Great lecture thank you

[@squareysquare3150]

Looking Glass, not Wonderland, Professor.

[@AB-fq4mr]

How sad that there is so much information out there, yet we have a baboon in our White House that can't even read a book about this kind of stuff.

[@zholud]

Potato has more vitamin C than lemon, really? This statement is at least misleading: lemon has 53mg per 100gr, while potato has 19.7mg per 100gr. While an average potato weighs 2-3 times more than a lemon and therefore has more vitamin C, this is not a fair comparison. Should have been said explicitly "there is more vitamin C in an average sized potato than in an average sized lemon" instead of "potato has more vitamin C than lemon"

[@alexcarter8807]

Not only that, I doubt anyone ever ate 14 lbs of a potatoes a day. Overall potato consumption may have been that much per capita, what with spoilage, feed for livestock, some being used to make potato vodka, etc.

[@impossibleexperiments]

@alex I think he misspoke and simply meant 14 pounds per week, that sounds more reasonable.

[@citizen240]

@Dimitri Professor Jones says that A potato has more vitamin C than A lemon.

[@ellenbryn]

Excellent lecture. However, it's marred by the fallacy at the end: Africa's population is rising, ergo, we should assume black people will cause the next pandemic. He camouflages this dubious argument by claiming Africa is a cradle of infectious diseases, but his own examples in this lecture show that viruses are not as geographically selective as he is. Smallpox, plague, leprosy, SARS and MERS did not emerge in Africa, the 1918 flu pandemic originated in the US, and, as he says, AIDS didn't become a pandemic until it had spent a few decades in Haiti, jumped to the US, and then the US spread it to the world. One could argue that diseases may originate mostly in the tropics, but _pandemics_ tend to spring from first world countries with lots of international travel. He's also assuming that African countries, with their decades of AIDS and Ebola experience, will fail to handle a pandemic, while western countries like the UK and US will take all the necessary steps to contain an outbreak, even though they (unlike Africa and and Asia) have no experience with stopping outbreaks. Obviously, since I'm writing this in the summer of 2020, we now know this is not the case. Some African countries are struggling, but others are doing a better job than many western countries. For quite a while Africa was COVID19-free, until we infected them. White Europeans and their descendants are still super spreaders. But all this is really beside the point. My point is, most of the lecture was good, he simply shouldn't have tied it up with a racist conclusion. What he said before that was sound: To counteract the pandemic risks posed by intercontinental travel, we can comb different populations for genetic subtypes whose exposure to past diseases gives them some helpful genetic defense that also works against an emerging one. This is a constructive way of looking at race and disease.

[@paulcolbourne9112]

2:16 "Of course males more than most"?. Seems he's really underestimating the power of the female or demonizing the male here. It was difficult to continue listening to him after hearing such a grossly oversimplified, asinine statement as that. He doesn't even see the vast complexity of the male and female relationship. If he's never experienced it first hand, you'd at least think he'd read a book about it somewhere.

[@stuartwray6175]

...ok...ok...ok. An example of contagion - It's an American habit isn't it?

[@alexcarter8807]

Yeah he's totally an American.

[@tomdrowry]

This guy is so inhumane