How often do coronaviruses jump from animals to humans?

COVID-19 Coronavirus

Coronavirus with spike proteins

While there have only been two widespread coronavirus outbreaks in the past 20 years or so (SARS and COVID-19), a new paper suggests that spillovers from animals to humans is happening at a much more frequent rate.

A preprint in medRxiv, Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance and Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, suggest that up to 400,000 people a year are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses in South and Southeast Asia, These infections do not grow into widespread outbreaks, since the viruses are not adapted to humans.

400,000 spillovers sounds like a lot of infection but virologist Angela Rasmussen believes it is a fairly reasonable estimate. She tells Science, “in a region with likely hundreds of millions of bats and nearly half a billion people it isn’t that many.”

Zoonotic infection of humans is not well understood. This work is part of an effort to learn more about hot diseases jump from animal species to infect humans.

Charpentier and Doudna win the Chemistry Nobel

Charpentier Doudna

Doudna & Charpentier share the 2020 Chemistry Nobel prize for their work on CRISPR-Cas9. Only 7 women have won the award to date.

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have won the Nobel prize in chemistry this year for their work on CRISPR-Cas9.  There work has led to the development of widely used genome editing tools that work in virtually any type of cell. It has already generated therapies for sickle-cell anemia, some cancers and even blindness.

Doudna is a Howard Hughes Investigator at the University of California, Berkeley while, Charpentier is with the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. There have been over 185 chemistry Nobel prize winners, but before the two won the prize this year, only five had gone to women.

Read the official announcement and learn more about their research here

black chemists to know

Black African American Scientists Chemist

Alice Ball researched leprosy at the University of Hawaii.

Black history month is coming to a close and ACS’s publication C&EN published a list of  9 African American scientists who were pioneers in their fields of chemistry. It features scientists like Alice Ball who studied leprosy at the University of Hawaii, and Samuel Massie who contributed to the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb. Notably four of the scientists are women, highlighting the contribution of black women to STEM. Read the article to find out about the 5 men and 4 women and their contributions to chemistry.

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