December 13, 2021
No one knows for sure where the virus came from. It could have been the murky depths of one of the hundreds of bat caves scattered across China. Carried inside a bat on a nightly sojourn, the virus may have jumped to another wild animal, perhaps one of those sold in the wet markets in the region. It’s also possible SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, slipped out of a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, unbeknownst to the researchers studying bat-borne coronaviruses, who were perhaps unintentionally infected by the very thing they were trying to learn how to defend against. In either case, it had to ride in something. A virus, being just a bundle of genetic material wrapped in a bundle of proteins, needs the machinery of a living thing to reproduce. It’s in the dark caverns of bodies that it continues to shift shape, finding new ways to spread and thrive.
Only as the virus emerges from the shadows of these favored havens does it confront its most formidable foe: the scientists quietly awaiting it. How they responded was less mysterious, and certainly less unpredictable, than the virus they targeted. Their medium was light, and the brightness of scientific truth, which they painstakingly pursued in brilliantly lit research labs and “clean rooms” scrubbed of airborne particles—and produced brilliant results.
Read more at TIME.