Episode 18: Making a Zombie

2020-10-09

SUBJECTIVE It's spooky season, which means it's time to talk about spooky things! Like the LIVING UNDEAD! (I want you to picture a clap of thunder and flash of lightning here.) As with vampires, "zombies" is just too broad a topic to cover in one episode, so we're giving you three! In the first episode of our zombie trilogy, we're going to talk about how you make a zombie. Or at least, how Cambridge scientists made zombies and also destroyed all of the UK in 28 days. We'll discuss not-living-not-dead pathogens, RAGE, and why no one...

SUBJECTIVE

It's spooky season, which means it's time to talk about spooky things! Like the LIVING UNDEAD! (I want you to picture a clap of thunder and flash of lightning here.) As with vampires, "zombies" is just too broad a topic to cover in one episode, so we're giving you three! In the first episode of our zombie trilogy, we're going to talk about how you make a zombie. Or at least, how Cambridge scientists made zombies and also destroyed all of the UK in 28 days. We'll discuss not-living-not-dead pathogens, RAGE, and why no one should use Ebola as a viral vector for gene therapy.

OBJECTIVE

Resources, Citations, and Mentions:

"Zoinks! Tracing The History Of 'Zombie' From Haiti To The CDC" by Lakshmi Gandhi, NPR Code Switch, Dec 2013
"The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies" by Mike Mariani, The Atlantic, Oct 2015
"Response to 'I Walked with a Zombie'" by Amy Wilentz, version appeared in Harper's in Dec 2011
"A Zombie Is a Slave Forever" by Amy Wilentz, New York Times, Oct 2012
"How the zombie represents America’s deepest fears" by Zachary Crockett and Javier Zarracina, Vox, Oct 2016
28 Days Later Wiki - Rage Virus, accessed October 2020
Lundstrom, Kenneth. “Viral Vectors in Gene Therapy.” Diseases (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 6,2 42. May 2018
IDSA Ebola Facts - Infectious Diseases Society of America, accessed October 2020
Science Mag "What does Ebola actually do?" by Kelly Servick, August 2014
"One doctor's nearly real, totally believable zombie apocalypse scenario" by Gemma Zigman, Hub at Johns Hopkins University, Oct 2012

ASSESSMENT

How 28 Days Later makes zombies