Within days of the first reports of patients suffering from a mysterious
pneumonia in Wuhan, scientists in China had produced a complete genetic
sequence of the virus and confirmed that it was a novel SARS-like
coronavirus. The genetic sequence was deposited in a public database,
making the genetic code available to scientists anywhere in the world.
The result was that weeks before the WHO declared the outbreak a global
public health emergency and months before COVID-19 was formally
designated a pandemic, virologists around the world were already
studying the protein spikes on the virus and designing vaccines, which
were developed much more quickly, and turned out to be much more
effective, than even the most optimistic had predicted. All of this was
possible because a biological revolution had taken place a decade
earlier: the world had moved into the postgenomic era.
In this book, the distinguished microbiologist Hugh Pennington argues
that COVID-19 is the first 'postgenomic pandemic' - that is, the first
pandemic to sweep the world after the postgenomic era was initiated in
2008. Pennington explains the science behind this crucial development
and shows how it has revolutionized our ways of understanding and
dealing with pandemics, including the pandemic that brought our world to
its knees.
