Question: I have 3 questions: Firstly, what do you once you once you record the virus do you e-mail it to whoever or what? Secondly, if you discover a new virus that people can catch, do you find the cure to it or send it to other scientist to find the cure. Finally, how do you actually contain the virus, do you trap it in some container to kill it or what? Thank you for your time. :) P.S. Your joke was terrible!

Christopher Richardson answered on 16 Nov 2017:

They are such good questions, and ones not everybody thinks about. Firstly when you discover a virus you have to actually check that it is a new discovery. You can imagine all the scientist in the world doing experiments there’s a good chance that somebody else has discovered it as well! You can check if its new by looking at its DNA and if its got parts that are new we know is a new virus. You would then publish what we call a “scientific paper” which is like an essay that describes from start to finish what you did in your experiment, why and what you found. You would have to describe the new virus, what it does, where it was found, what it looks like and what its closely related to. These papers are published in very important and special science journals, books and websites throughout the world for other scientists to read and they decide if your research is of a good quality to allow it to be accepted. If you reach this stage then it is generally accepted that your research is correct.

Secondly if you do discover a virus that is infectious you don’t have to find a cure no, unless you have been asked to. Usually if you find a new infectious virus that nobody knows about then you have to tell the government and they will come and get involved because they have to make sure that public are not at risk.

There are several ways to contain a virus but the most common way to contain viruses that infect humans is to take human or animal cells and stick them to the inside of a small plastic flask (looks like a rectangle water bottle). Then you add cells that you know are infected as a liquid with a small amount of body fluid to keep the cells alive. You would then put the flask in a heater at 37 degrees usually to allow the virus to grow and infect the other cells. Once 24 hours have passed you would take the flask and use a special ash fluid that has enzymes in it to wash all the cells from inside the flask out and into a tube. Now the viruses are stuck inside the cells at the moment because that’s what they infect, so we use a machine that vibrates the cells very quickly and makes them burst and break apart. Once they’ve been broken apart all the cells insides will leak out including the very very tiny viruses. All we do then is put the tube in something called a centrifuge which spins the tube round 10,000 times a minute and makes all the rubbish stuff in the cell that leaked out and the cell itself go to the bottom leaving a liquid at the top that contains virus. We take that liquid off using a pipette and filter it into another clean tube through a small filter to make sure nothing but the liquid and virus passes through. This gives you a tube of pure viruses that we can then use to look at under the microscope or test to see what drugs work and kill it!

Haha you can’t say that about my joke without telling me one yourself! 😉