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In early January 2020, months before the World Health Organization officially uttered the word “pandemic,” a research hospital in Shanghai received a sample of a mysterious virus that had sparked a cluster of pneumonia cases more than 400 miles away, in Wuhan. Virologist Zhang Yongzhen, who had studied thousands of new viruses over the course of his career, quickly got to work.
Zhang sequenced the virus’s genome in less than two days and submitted his results to a US-run database
