Bat Superpowers and Preventing Pandemics with Raina Plowright

Making Sense of Science

For this podcast episode, my guest is Raina Plowright, one of the world’s leading researchers when it comes to how and why viruses sometimes jump from bats to humans. The intuition may be that bats are the bad guys in this situation, but the real culprits are more likely humans and their intrusive actions.

Plowright is a Cornell Atkinson Scholar and professor at Cornell in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Read her full bio here. For a shorter (and lightly edited) version of this conversation, you can check out my Q&A interview with Plowright in the single-issue magazine, ​One Health / One Planet​, published earlier this month by Leaps.org in collaboration with the Aspen Institute and the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

In the episode, Plowright tells me about her global research team that is busy studying the complex chain of events in between viruses originating in bats and humans getting infected with those viruses. She’s collecting samples from bats in Asia, Africa and Australia – which sounds challenging enough but now consider that the diligence required to parse out 1400 different bat species.

We also discuss a high-profile paper that she co-authored last month arguing for greater investment in preventing pandemics in the first place instead of the current approach: putting all our eggs in the basket of trying to respond to them after the fact. Treating pandemic prevention as a a priority is a small price to pay compared with millions of people killed and trillions of dollars spent during the response to COVID-19.

Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs