Wyss Institute members assemble to take on COVID-19
On March 13, as cases of COVID-19 started to balloon across the globe, hundreds of researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University were directed to shut down and vacate their labs within five days to minimize the risk of infection. The only people who would be allowed in the buildings going forward would be those performing critical functions like taking care of animals and maintaining equipment, or those researching the novel coronavirus itself. By the following Wednesday, more than 30 people from six teams of scientists at the institute had submitted petitions to shift their focus entirely to COVID-19, voluntarily putting their own research on hold in exchange for spending long, lonely days and nights in mostly deserted labs, racing to fight a foe that they couldn’t see but knew was very, very real. “It was self-assembly at its best: the spontaneous coalescence of teams of people who said, ‘I...