26 September 2022 - “In 1977, the world witnessed both the eradication of smallpox and the beginning of the modern age of genomics”. That’s the starting point for a recently published EMBO Reports review by Nash Rochman, Yuri Wolf, and Eugene Koonin. The paper, entitled “Molecular adaptations during viral epidemics”, asks what we have learned from the seven major epidemics that have emerged in the half-century in which we’ve had the molecular genetic and genomic tools to analyze the pathogens responsible for them. Co-authors Eugene Koonin and Nash Rochman discuss some of the lessons learned (and open questions) on this episode of the EMBO podcast. We also talked about virology, pandemics, and Rochman et al’s paper with veteran virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University.