6/30/2020 The 3 Ways Science Will Get Us Through The COVID-19 Pandemic

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The 3 Ways Science Will Get Us

Through The COVID-19
Pandemic
Ethan Siegel Senior Contributor
Starts With A Bang Contributor Group
Science
The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

The novel coronavirus COVID-19, as illustrated here against a backdrop of a DNA molecule, contains...
[+] GETTY

As of April 6, 2020, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have tested
positive for COVID-19, with over 74,000 confirmed deaths so far. Those
numbers are continuing to grow at an alarming rate, with over 70,000 new
cases and 5,000 new deaths per day. However, there is a tremendous bright
spot that remains undimmed: the power of our scientific knowledge to guide
us through these difficult times.

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6/30/2020 The 3 Ways Science Will Get Us Through The COVID-19 Pandemic

We no longer live in an era where we have to rely on assumptions or

superstitions to understand what's occurring. We know what the novel
coronavirus COVID-19 is. We know how it spreads through the human
population. We know how to fight it, how to treat it, and how to minimize
the death rate from it. It's not only time to listen to what science tells us
about it, but to understand the three ways a scientific world has enabled the
best of humanity's response to it.

Scientists working on antiviral drugs, such as illustrated here, are only able to do so because of... [+]
GETTY

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1.) The modern frontiers. Within just weeks of the first reported case,
scientists had not only identified the microscopic virus responsible for the

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disease, but had sequenced its entire genome. Back when just a few hundred
cases had been reported, scientists already understood how it was
transmitted from person-to-person, and had quantified how contagious the
disease actually was.

And when only the first few dozen people had died from it, scientists and
medical professionals on the front lines were putting out reports that
detailed the various stages of the disease, from asymptomatic and
contagious to the various symptoms and the complications that arose in the
most severe cases. By the time January was over, we already knew what
the "best practices" would be, as a collective human society, to minimize the
deaths and infections from COVID-19.

The SARS virus (orange) has a crown-like structure, meaning that its part of the coronavirus family...
[+] NIH

Even though those recommendations were not sufficiently heeded, our

scientific and medical knowledge has continued to aid us in the fight against
this ongoing global pandemic. Drug treatments for COVID-19 are already in
the experimental phase, with many clinical trials ongoing and a number of

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vaccine candidates under development. Research into blood therapies,

including plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients, provides hope for a
treatment and possibly a cure.

The medical establishment, the healthcare industry, and the resources of

hundreds of thousands of professionals are using the full force of their
knowledge and resources to combat this global pandemic. Although no one
can predict which avenue will prove the most fruitful the earliest, we can all
play our part by listening to and respecting the advice of those professionals
who possess that sought-after expert knowledge.

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Dr. Andrew Terranella (EIS, 2010) processes blood samples during a December, 2010, epi-aid... [+]
NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH (NIOSH)

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We should all remain at home if our businesses are non-essential: aren't

providing food, shelter, or necessary medicine. When we do venture out, we
should make sure that we are clean, that we do not come into close contact
with any other individuals, that we travel only short distances from our
homes, and that we do not touch our faces.

We should be washing with soap and water and/or using hand sanitizer if
we touch any surfaces (door handles, bags, egg cartons, etc.) that have been
touched by another person. And we should all be doing this, simultaneously,
with 100% compliance. That is the most safe and effective way to reduce and
slow the spread of COVID-19. But all of these quality recommendations, and
all of this cutting-edge research, is only possible because of the science that
came before.

Federal funding is also vital in ghting global disease outbreaks, such as Zika, Ebola and more.... [+]
NIH: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES

2.) The curiosity-driven foundations. There is value, intrinsically, to

knowing something about any aspect of the natural world. We cannot know
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when a particular piece of knowledge will bear fruit in the realm of scientific
or medical applications, but the more comprehensively we've studied the
world, the better off we'll be when we're looking for a solution to the next
unanticipated problem.

With respect to COVID-19, we are already seeing the payoff of a wide swath
of curiosity-driven research. Studies into the population dynamics of bats
led to the understanding of disease transmission of many novel animal-to-
human disease strains, including COVID-19. The Human Genome Project,
begun as a purely scientific endeavor in 1990, led to the widespread DNA (or
in this case, RNA) sequencing that enabled us to rapidly determine how
COVID-19 is evolving with a view to long-term immunity against it.

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Mitochondria, which are some of the specialized organelles found inside eukaryotic cells, are... [+]
FRANCISCO J IBORRA, HIROSHI KIMURA AND PETER R COOK (BIOMED CENTRAL LTD)

The anthropological social structures of different cultures and the work of

behavioral psychologists on isolation and forms of interaction are critical
right now for understanding how people are responding to the severe
measures we need to be taking for the protection of ourselves and others.
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Mathematical modeling of various functions, along with the epidemiology of

disease spread and the social psychology of human behavior, are a necessary
foundation that make it possible to put forth optimal recommendations for
the actions that we should all be taking today.

And the very science of immunology, built on centuries of study of the

human immune response to various pathogens — along with an
understanding of the microscopic world where these critical conflicts
between our bodies and the virus take place — relies on an enormous
amount of basic research whose modern benefits were unimaginable when
that research was first being conducted.

Ligand-gated Q-cells are essential channels with multiple biological applications, and are... [+] BIOLIN

SCIENTIFIC

The curiosity-driven research of evolutionary virologists, of disease

ecologists, of biophysicists, and scientists across many other fields of inquiry
not only informs clinicians and policymakers, but also every cutting-edge
piece of research at the frontiers of the field today. The fact is that there's an
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entire Universe out there to learn about, and the lessons learned from
investigating one aspect of reality oftentimes have applications down the
road that we could never have predicted.

But we're guaranteed to remain ignorant of those applications if we never

conduct that necessary, foundational research in the first place. The cutting-
edge advances we're striving for today are built upon the backbone of this
curiosity-driven research across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. But
there's something even more profound that either enables or limits what's
possible: the most basic science of all.

The Future Circular Collider is a proposal to build, for the 2030s, a successor to the LHC with a ... [+]
CERN / FCC STUDY

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3.) The edge of the fundamental. This is the most powerful knowledge
in all of science: the fundamental limits of what's physically possible.
Scientists are constantly working to push the limits of what's known,
including:

at the high-energy frontier, looking for new types and properties of

matter and energy,

at the low-temperature frontier, looking for new physical phenomena

that may emerge close to absolute zero,

at the frontier of chemical-based life, searching for various ways that

biochemical processes can arise and play an important role,

or even at the astrophysical frontiers, where new secrets about the

Universe and extreme states of matter are often discovered for the
first time.

In times of crisis, these lines of inquiry are often the first to be treated as
"disposable," but disposing of them will fundamentally limit everything we'd
build upon them.

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The concept design of the LUVOIR space telescope would place it at the L2 Lagrange point, where a ...
[+] NASA / LUVOIR CONCEPT TEAM; SERGE BRUNIER (BACKGROUND)

Imagine trying to uncover the molecular structure or the DNA sequence of

an infectious pathogen if we didn't have atomic theory as our foundation.

Imagine attempting to deliver neutron therapy to a cancer patient without

the understanding derived from high-energy particle physicists.

Imagine using an X-ray as a diagnostic tool, or a scanning tunneling

electron microscope, without a knowledge of the wave-particle nature of
quantum physics.

Not only would these innovations have been impossible without an

advanced fundamental knowledge of the world, but they would have been
unimaginable from a scientific point of view. Many of today's most powerful
medical interventions are rooted in the fundamental discoveries made at the
frontiers of the physical world, from MRIs to positron emission tomography
(PET) scanning to radioimmunoassays and many more.

An fMRI of a human brain can show which areas of the brain are active at a given time, under... [+]
JOHN GRANER, NEUROIMAGING DEPARTMENT, NATIONAL INTREPID CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, WALTER REED NATIONAL MILITARY

MEDICAL CENTER

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If we want superior tools to combat the threats that humanity will face not
just today, but 50 to 100 years down the line, now is the time to redouble
our efforts. Scientific investment needs to occur not only on the front lines
of the current crisis, but on a wide-variety of curiosity-driven frontiers,
including at the fundamental level itself. The payoff comes simply by gaining
that knowledge, which won't be obtained in any other way.

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 is having a tremendous impact on our

world at the present time, but our response can demonstrate just how far
we've come as a civilization. The entire Universe obeys the same scientific
rules, and the better (and more fundamentally) we study it, the better
prepared we'll be for the challenges that come our way. The investments we
make today will lead to tomorrow's knowledge, and in turn, the day after
tomorrow's tools and techniques that lead to a better world for all of
humanity.

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other

work here.

Ethan Siegel

I am a Ph.D. astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, who professes physics

and astronomy at various colleges. I have won numerous awards for science writing…
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