Viral, Matt Ridley
Viral, Matt Ridley
2 Rating(s)
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Viral
The Search for the Origin of Covid-19

Author: Matt Ridley, Alina Chan

Narrator: Gavin Osborn

Unabridged: 11 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 11/16/2021


Synopsis

""Chan and Ridley write with an urgency...that inspires gripping depictions of what viruses are, how infectious-disease laboratories work and wonderfully lucid descriptions of bats. . . . They powerfully recount how dangerous pathogens can both leak from a lab and emerge in nature."" (New York Times Book Review) Understanding how Covid-19 started is crucial for the future of humankind. Viral is the most incisive and authoritative book about the search for the source of the virus.A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometres away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travellers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings. To try to solve this pressing mystery, Viral delves deep into the events of 2019 leading up to 2021, the details of what went on in animal markets and virology laboratories, the records and data hidden from sight within archived Chinese theses and websites, and the clues that can be coaxed from the very text of the virus’s own genetic code. The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery. One by one the authors explore promising tunnels only to show that they are blind alleys, until, miles beneath the surface, they find themselves tantalisingly close to a shaft that leads to the light.

About Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley's books—including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)—have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 and 2021, and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.

About Alina Chan

Dr. Alina Chan is a postdoctoral researcher with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and vector engineering. At the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Dr. Chan is currently creating next generation vectors for human gene therapy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chan began to investigate problems relevant to finding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and in parallel spearheaded the development of the COVID-19 CoV Genetics (covidcg.org) browser for scientists worldwide to rapidly track virus lineages and mutations by locations and date ranges of interest. Follow Dr. Alina Chan on Twitter at @Ayjchan


Reviews

Goodreads review by JanB

How serendipitous that this book became available from the library as I’m home recovering from Covid, my souvenir of a trip overseas. (Thankfully, a mild case). Yep, I avoided it for 2+ years despite babysitting for my little germ-carriers...er, grandchildren.....I had to go overseas to get it...and......more

Goodreads review by Gerhard

First of all, there is no ‘smoking gun’ revelation in this book. I was startled to realise by the end (at the 65% mark of the Kindle version) that everything relayed by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley is common knowledge, especially if you have been following all of the debates, exposures and revelations......more

Goodreads review by Jun Y

Frankensteined, Just leaked or Natural? In the early months of 2020, as the world dragged itself into a pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the now famous biologist Alina Chan was doing some serious work. She discovered that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, “it was already pre-a......more

Goodreads review by John

This review went missing…it’s all here… The Chinese lies, the furrin cleavage, the lack of a zoonotic source, the geographic isolation…all been proven true…Covid 19 came from a lab…......more