Rupert Beale

Measuring immunity is important, but it isn’t easy. The most obvious way is to look for the presence of antibodies. But antibodies to what? The virus has many components. Its main entry weapon is known as Spike. This is a large, sugar-coated protein complex that can rip a hole in the membrane of a cell to allow the virus to enter. Block Spike, and you keep the virus out. It’s easy enough to measure antibodies to Spike, but not all of them actually prevent the virus from entering cells. To find out whether the antibodies are doing their job effectively, you have to culture the virus in a high-containment facility, titrate tiny amounts of serum extracted from the test subject’s blood into the virus culture, and demonstrate that the serum blocks the virus. It’s painfully slow. We are working on ways to make these assays faster, easier and more accurate. So are many others, and for once I’m happy when another lab does something better.

On​ 29 July, I received ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) update: issue 97’ from my university. I understand from dimly remembered friends and colleagues outside the Covidology bubble that 2020 hasn’t been much fun for them either. We’re all tetchy. Those of us who have been working round the clock on increasing testing capacity are also thoroughly exhausted. In March we ran on...

Do you remember​ the spring? We were said to be ‘following the science’, but the scientific advice was kept secret. The minutes of Sage meetings were not published; even the ad hoc membership of the government’s advisory group was uncertain. Now that the minutes are available, they make grim reading. A vaccine would not arrive in any useful timeframe; there was no...

Biologists​ love abbreviations, but we often use them clumsily. What may sound like catchy acronyms to one group of researchers are tiresome jargon to colleagues in related fields. Fruit fly geneticists have taken whimsy to absurdity: MAD stands for ‘Mothers Against Decapentaplegic’. The ‘decapentaplegic’ bit comes from a mutant fly that doesn’t correctly...

In​ Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Challenger takes a party of adventurers to South America, where they discover a plateau filled with dinosaurs. The book’s lesser-known sequel, The Poison Belt, isn’t quite so thrilling, and not only because of the disappointing lack of dinosaurs. This time Challenger summons the same cast to Sussex, where he tells them that...