“We’ve learned a lot during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic … how a virus can affect our behavior,” Dartmouth University MD and Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dutton says in a short video that recently won second place in the 2021 Ivy+ Three-minute Thesis Competition. “But recent evidence suggests that other viruses may be capable of causing permanent changes to host behavior in the absence of social pressures.”
In a lab at the Geisel School of Medicine directed by David Leib, professor of microbiology and immunology, Dutton, while taking precautions against COVID-19, is studying one of those “other viruses”—herpes simplex.
“It is likely that over two-thirds of us are infected with HSV…
