The Kottke Ride Home podcast has been humming away since August and host Jackson Bird has been sharing some great stuff lately. From today’s show comes this New York magazine piece by David Wallace-Wells about the stunning speed with which the Covid-19 vaccine was developed:
You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial.
Monday’s show featured the intrigue behind the discovery of a real life treasure:
And if you look back to last week, Jackson clued us in to Radiooooo (“The Musical Time Machine”), Tetris championships, China’s Chang’e 5 mission to the Moon, and DeepMind’s AI breakthrough in protein folding.
If any or all of that sounds interesting to you, you can subscribe to Kottke Ride Home right here or in your favorite podcast app.
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