From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
The Associated Press reported this week:
In the critical month of February, as the virus began taking root in the U.S. population, CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests—an average of only a dozen per day.
At a time in which the failure of the Centers for Disease Control to promptly organize mass coronavirus testing is a national disgrace, the following sounds like a boomer clickbait headline:
Mother of Two Tests Herself, Her Kids, and Her Neighbor for COVID-19
But it’s true.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you or I could carry out a do-it-yourself quantitative polymerase chain reaction test. After all, the woman who did this, who prefers to be called S in this article, is a professor of genetics at a state flagship university where she researches bacterial genetics, with a focus on CRISPR...
The larger point that this example highlights is that the United States of America in particular, the Anglosphere in general, and the world overall have a very deep bench of talented and trained medical and scientific personnel who can step up and take the initiative even when the official channels get bogged down. The U.S. has invested heavily in genetics and other biomedical sciences in recent decades and is poised to reap some benefits in this crisis.
Although we have been lectured incessantly (at least until about a week ago) about the lack of women in computer coding and physics, for the last two generations talented women have tended to flock in large numbers instead to the life sciences, which, at the moment, seems like a very good thing.
Read the whole thing there.
