David Quammen - Out of the Wild: What a Global Virus Teaches Us | Body of Wonder podcast

"We're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding our relationships with viruses.
Some viruses become endogenous retroviruses and insert themselves into our genomes and stay there...

The virus genome becomes part of our genome, in some cases that has no apparent function, but in some cases, including some viral genomes that were inserted in the mammal lineage very early on, they become crucial... like a gene known as Syncytin-2, which is absolutely essential to successful human pregnancy, creating a boundary between the placenta and the fetus.

That stretch of our DNA is an endogenous retrovirus inserted sometime in the evolution of mammals by a virus that infected us."
- David Quammen on the complex history of virus and human interactions

Body of Wonder is hosted by Dr. Victoria Maizes and Dr. Weil, and produced by the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. View other Body of Wonder episodes here: https://azcim.org/podcast

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Provided by the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. https://awcim.arizona.edu/

In the new series, Body of Wonder, Dr. Weil and internationally recognized integrative leader, author, and women’s health expert, Dr. Victoria Maizes will discuss integrative medicine with thought-provoking researchers, authors, and doctors. For two decades, Weil and Maizes have led a training program at the University of Arizona. Today, 2,000 healthcare practitioners have completed the Fellowship in Integrative Medicine and continue to apply the knowledge in their care of patients across the world, develop clinical research, author medical textbooks, and more.

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