Roughly 80 percent of the U.S. population is infected with the herpes virus. While the virus is very easy to get, it remains dormant in many people, who never even know they have it. This is partly because it effectively evades the immune system, taking up refuge in the central nervous system.

Dr. Greg Smith is a herpes expert. He is a professor in the microbiology-immunology department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. After obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Smith did a post-doc at Princeton University.

His research on herpes looks at novel targets for antivirals and engineering recombinant viral particles as effective gene delivery vehicles.

In this episode, Smith talks with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis about his educational and research path to becoming a herpes expert. He also touches on polio as an example of an earlier virus that was largely defeated, and how that was different than herpes. Finally, Smith touches on the development of viral vectors and vaccines to win against the more severe forms of herpes that some people are genetically predisposed to get.

For a list of Smith’s publications, check out his bio page at web site of Northwestern University: http://tinyurl.com/jl6jsam

:47: Smith’s lab studies the molecular mechanisms that propagate and are responsible for the spreading of Herpes.

2:47: Ken Ford reads 5-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk, from “I prefer DOS IHMC”: ‘Fantastic lineup and well-assembled, informative conversations on fascinating topics. Keep ‘em coming.”

4:18: Smith’s interest in research began in elementary school, when his father bought him an Apple II computer for Christmas—and told him to program his own games. Programming “really helped me think in a logical, progressive way,” Smith said.

5:46: In college, Smith discovered that “molecular biology was a way to get at the programming that underlies life.”

6:12: In graduate school, Smith studied microbes, which he describes as “essentially the best human biologists; if you study them, you are studying yourself.”

7:56: Smith was not interested in viruses initially because they seemed like simple entities. He didn’t want to study just one protein.

8:56: Smith worked with Lynn Enquist at Princeton University, a “bacteriologist-big thinker,” Smith says, who got him thinking: “How do larger, more complex viruses get into our nervous system? That got me started on the path that I’m still on today.”

9:16: Viruses are extremely diverse entities in biology; they are more diverse than the rest of life put together. Any organism is infected by many viruses, which are “small nanomachines that are genetically derived.”

10:43: Smith describes what a virus looks like: a shell made up of a thin layer of protein.

12:00: Smith wanted to study something with a lot of diversity/complexity. With that comes very interesting biology. All viruses have two things in mind: They want to make more copies of themselves, and they want to disseminate those copies all over place. Herpes, because of its larger genetic content and physical size, allows it to do a lot of interesting things to achieve those goals.

13:00: Polio is a small neuro-invasive virus. You ingest it and it replicates in your gut. It can get into your blood, and nerves/spinal chord. This can cause polio myelitis, which was rampant in the 1950s.

14:18: Herpes is evolved to get into nervous system. That is how it survives. It’s extremely good at it.

15:00: Most people know about herpes simplex virus type 1, or HSV-1, which causes cold sores. But it actually goes into the central nerve system (CNS) and sets up shop. It does not express proteins, so essentially lies dormant there. “The immune system doesn’t know it’s there. So now you’ve got it there for the rest of your life.”

17:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition,