We will probably never know the origins of the pandemic, says Quammen. What emerges is a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers in the nuances of gain of function and the wider ecology of pandemics without straying into invective. This not only allows him to leaven the science with vivid pen portraits but makes him a shrewd judge of character. Although most of the interviews for this book were conducted via Zoom, Quammen has previously tramped through jungles in south-east Asia and visited caves with many of the scientists who feature in his pages. Instead, in 390 pages encompassing 76 chapters, Quammen takes us on a whistlestop tour from Wuhan to Washington DC, via labs and researchers in cities as diverse as Hong Kong, Sydney, Edinburgh, Rotterdam and New Orleans. This is a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers in the nuancesīreathless does not address those suspicions right away. To date, that virus is the closest genetic match for Sars-CoV-2, and since Kunming is 1,300 miles from Wuhan as the bat flies, suspicion has fallen on Chinese scientists. That bat shit was brought to the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) where scientists succeeded in growing live virus from it. This is important because from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the origins of Sars-CoV-2 have been the subject of feverish debate: was it the result of a natural spillover from animals or was the virus engineered in a lab and unleashed upon the world, either by accident or design?Įxhibit one in the latter theory is the recovery, prior to the pandemic, of a viral sequence, labelled RaTG13, reconstructed by Chinese researchers from bat shit recovered in 2013 from a cave near Kunming, in Yunnan.
And it takes a process known as “gain of function” to convert them into the genomic equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. It takes several more steps, including culturing them in animal cells, to make them strut the world’s stage. In literary terms, they are merely texts. Thus, we learn that the genetic codes of viruses are no more viruses than the play Hamlet is a performance. Photograph: Lynn DonaldsonĪs with Spillover, his 2012 bestseller about the risks posed by coronaviruses and other viruses harboured by wild animals, Quammen always has a literary reference to hand when the science gets difficult. David Quammen: ‘always has a literary reference to hand when the science gets difficult’.
0 kommentar(er)
