The question of the next Pandemic is not if but when. The international travel required for a globalized economy brings concomitant increases in the g

Vaccines for the next Pandemic

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2021-08-25 20:00:08

The question of the next Pandemic is not if but when. The international travel required for a globalized economy brings concomitant increases in the global transmissibility of deadly viruses and bacteria.

This tradeoff is unavoidable in a world where lockdowns and travel bans are the only available tools to stop the spread of disease. We must either accept economic isolation or suffer through frequent outbreaks of deadly disease. However, improving technology allows us to transcend this tradeoff and have a more globalized world and better health.

mRNA vaccines and our greater control over mRNA in general will prove to be the most important invention of the 21st century. Advances are happening now because the study of biology has been inextricably connected to software. Exponential growth in computing power, software tools, and machine learning have precipitated complex mathematical tools that can sequence entire genomes, predict protein folds, and synthesize any chosen string of nucleotide pairs.

It was computer powered biology that allowed Moderna to synthesize a vaccine to a virus they didn’t have isolated on site in just two days. This strategy is already proving to generalize to other diseases like malaria, AIDS and even cancer.

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