The great project: how Covid changed science for ever
For scientists, 5 January was a turning point in the fight against the coronavirus. That day, a team led by Prof Yong-Zhen Zhang at Fudan University in Shanghai sequenced the genetic code of the virus behind Wuhan’s month-long pneumonia outbreak. The process took about 40 hours. Having analysed the code, Zhang reported back to the Ministry of Health. The pathogen was a novel coronavirus similar to Sars, the deadly virus that sparked an epidemic in 2003. People should take precautions, he warned.
The Chinese government had imposed an embargo on information about the outbreak and Zhang and his co-workers were under pressure not to publish the code. The blackout couldn’t hold. On 8 January, news broke about the nature of the pathogen and was confirmed a day later by Chinese authorities. To sit on the code now seemed ridiculous.
Eddie Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, and a collaborator of Zhang’s, called him to push for publication. Zhang was buckling up on a flight bound for Beijing. As the plane left the runway, they two agreed to break the gagging order. On 11 January Australia time, the day China announced its first official death from the infection, Holmes published the sequence on a website called virological.org. It was a crucial act for researchers around the world. Holmes calls it “ground zero for the scientific fight back against the disease”.
It was the beginning of a remarkable, unprecedented global effort to test, treat and ultimately vaccinate against Covid-19. As one scientist put it: “In the last 11 months, probably 10 years’ work has been done.”
Nothing makes sense in 2020 outside the shadow of the pandemic. The horrendous number of deaths and families bereaved; the destruction of businesses and livelihoods; the harms to mental health, still to be tallied; the failures of governance and leadership; the countless lost opportunities. And nor does the call to arms, the frantic mobilisation of global science. In labs and hospitals around the world, and from computers on their kitchen tables, researchers came together to tackle the crisis. “Everybody who has some expertise to offer has literally dropped everything, and has been working on nothing but Covid,” said Gabriel Leung, the dean of medicine at Hong Kong University and an adviser to the Hong Kong government. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, is in awe of the response. “I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “It has been all hands on deck.” The phenomenal effort will change science – and scientists – for ever.
To publish the virus’s genetic code was to fire a starting pistol. As governments nervously watched to, were also quick off the blocks.
