Episode 18: Making a Zombie

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

• Deepa: 3 out of 10 product placement Pepsi cans
• Jen: 1 out of 10 infected eye blood drops

PLAN

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Theme Music and SFX: Kevin MacLeod (CC BY) - RetroFuture Clean, Danse Macabre-Big Hit 2