Stanley Perlman, M.D., Ph.D.: Insights from a coronavirus expert on COVID-19

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Stanley Perlman. Stanley is a professor of microbiology and immunology, along with being a professor of pediatrics and the chair of virology at the University of Iowa. Stanley has researched coronaviruses for nearly four decades, and his lab is currently using mouse models for SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 to better understand the more severe diseases that affect humans.
I wanted to talk with Stanley for a few months now. Understandably, he has been incredibly busy.
We have been part of a collaboration that is working on a longer study trying to understand the durability of immune response and the impacts of that, which we discussed very briefly at the end of this podcast. So most of our contact has actually been through that, but as we got a little bit of breathing room in and around our other projects, inclusive of the one we're working on together, we decided it made sense to finally sit down and have this discussion, especially as a beautiful extension of the discussion that I already had with David Watkins. So I do recommend that you would listen to these podcasts in that order. The one with David Watkins, of course, goes over the immunology a little bit. Here we talk specifically about coronaviruses, including the sort of common cold coronaviruses, and of course, more importantly, the three versions that really have caused incredible damage to humans, none more so than the one we're in today.
In this episode, we talk about a whole bunch of things that, again, just, you can probably imagine, interest me to no end. When we were talking specifically about SARS-1 and MERS, what did they teach us about this coronavirus? What does our knowledge of this coronavirus today versus what we knew, say, five months ago, tell us about how this story ends? And what do I mean by ending? All of these are topics that we get into, along with a very interesting discussion around the therapeutic side of things, the vaccination side of things, and ultimately what could happen again. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Stanley Perlman.
Hey Stanley, thank you so much for making time to talk today. I've wanted to speak with you for a couple of months now, and I know when we first connected, it was just nuts, and you said, hey Peter, thanks for reaching out. Can we talk when things calm down a little bit? And I was so gracious, first of all, that you even took the time to respond. And then of course, now we've been able to work together on a separate project that maybe we'll talk about down the line. But I'll tell you, the reason I reached out in the first place was really the result of something that my research team came to me and said, which was, look, Peter, if you want to understand coronaviruses, you've got to speak to Stanley Perlman. Everybody is an armchair coronavirus expert now, but you actually want to talk to the guy who was studying coronaviruses before they were sexy, and that's Stanley. So before we get maybe into how you became obsessed with coronaviruses, how did you get involved in medicine and immunology per se?

**Stanley Perlman** (3:39)
Well, I actually started, I obtained a PhD many, many years ago in the areas actually of cell biology and developmental biology and virology. So I did a whole potpourri of training as a PhD student, and then again during post-op, and then I went to medical school. So there was a period there where I learned, though, I didn't do coronavirus research, but I learned how to do research.
And so then when I went to medical school, I became interested in pediatrics, men and infectious diseases. And I don't know what my plans were exactly when I started medical school, but became really interested in how baby brains interacted with viruses, which was not good. So when babies are getting infected with viruses, especially in utero, it often has devastating consequences. And I worked with somebody who was really good at thinking about those babies. And I became just interested in research issues around how viruses interact with the brain. So at that time point, I became interested, it turned out that coronaviruses in mice provided a model that could lead to potentially important information.