It’s not every day that a biologist’s work makes it on to Comedy Central. But after giving a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City about herpes-like viruses in corals, that’s what happened to Rebecca Vega Thurber, then a marine biology postdoc.1 Her findings were mentioned on Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report, where the comedian called coral reefs the “sluts of the sea.”
“It was a huge honor,” Vega Thurber says. “The only next biggest step is the Nobel prize or being on Jon Stewart,” her postdoc advisor, San Diego State University marine biologist Forest Rohwer, concurs. Vega Thurber notes that the virus she found “is very distantly related to herpes viruses, but that’s its closest relative based on the [SEED and GenBank] databases.” That was apparently close enough for Colbert.
During her graduate years at Stanford University, Vega Thurber studied sea urchin development, but collecting ...
