Unlocking the Covid Code

By Jon Gertner

Edward Holmes was in Australia on a Saturday morning in early January 2020, talking on the phone with a Chinese scientist named Yong-Zhen Zhang who had just sequenced the genome of a novel pathogen that was infecting people in Wuhan. The two men — old friends — debated the results. “I knew we were looking at a respiratory virus,” recalls Holmes, a virologist and professor at...