XPost: misc.news.internet.discuss
From: here@is.invalid
They spent 12 years solving a puzzle. It yielded the first COVID-19
vaccines.
Long before anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2, a small band of government and
university scientists uncovered a prototypical key that unlocked
life-saving immunizations.
Jason McLellan was wandering around a ski shop of Utah's Park City
Mountain Resort, waiting for his new snowboarding boots to be
heat-molded to his size-nine feet, when his smartphone rang. It was
Barney Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center.
Two days earlier, the World Health Organization had announced that
several unidentified pneumonia-like cases had been reported in Wuhan,
China. People were fatigued and feverish, with dry coughs and
headaches. These symptoms weren't unusual for early January, but some
people were short of breath, and a few felt like they'd been hit by a
train.
Graham told McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of
Texas at Austin, that the ailment appeared to be a beta-coronavirus,
meaning it fell into the genus of viruses that causes severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS). He asked McLellan: "Are you ready to get
back in the saddle?"
This duo was part of a small band of government and university
scientists who had spent more than a decade cracking a complex viral
puzzle--and their skills were needed once more. Their years of
sleuthing and innovating ultimately contributed a microscopic but
critical piece to the most promising candidates for COVID-19 vaccines.
Two already authorized in the U.S. use their discovery, as do at least
two other top contenders.
....
....
"I have kind of felt like my whole career has been lining up for 'such
a time as this,'" Graham says
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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