From: mrou...@shaw.ca   
      
   On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 1:37:32 PM UTC-6, RichD wrote:   
   > The first COVID cases occurred in China, Dec. 2019.    
   > The first tests were developed in about six weeks.    
   > How did they do that?    
   >    
   > --    
   > Rich   
      
   Decades of research on virology, on mRNA isolation and amplification, on   
   sequencing, ... When scientists say that basic science matters, this is an   
   outstanding example.   
      
   What do you need to do to develop a test for a virus?   
   1. Isolate the virus. Lots of basic research done over a very long period of   
   time has made us very good at this.   
   2. Sequence the virus' genome. We've had a few decades of experience at   
   amplifying and sequencing mRNA, which involves a lot of steps optimized by   
   many, many scientists working in many, many labs around the world, eventually   
   leading to kits that can be    
   bought off the shelf to do all of the necessary operations (assuming you have   
   a normally equipped biochemistry lab). Most of the companies in this business   
   are themselves, in one way or another, spinoff companies from university labs.   
   3. Nail down a protocol for repeating this with samples obtained from the   
   field so that it's reliable and repeatable in any suitably equipped lab. Any   
   virology lab has tons of experience with this kind of optimization.   
      
   Every single step of this process was pioneered in a university lab somewhere,   
   and most of them were refined in these places or in spinoff companies from   
   university labs. All of that basic research carried out over decades made us   
   ready to develop    
   testing protocols for Covid-19.   
      
   Marc R. Roussel   
   Alberta RNA Research and Training Institute   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)