Marco Hein obtained his PhD under the supervision of Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Germany) where he used proteomics to map the human interactome. Working as an EMBO postdoctoral fellow with Jonathan Weissman at the University of California, San Francisco (USA), he became interested in virus-host interactions. Marco joined the Max Perutz Labs from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (USA), where he was a research fellow. We talked to him about the excitement of discovering something new and what we can learn from viruses about our cells and from viral pandemics about science.