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Science is moving fast right now. The novel coronavirus pandemic has created the conditions for rapid knowledge generation: about the virus itself, its behavior in individual humans and societies, the social interventions necessary to slow its transmission and hopefully stop it, and technological innovations necessary for testing, diagnosing, preventing infection, and hopefully inoculating against it. New questions continually challenge the existing state of knowledge. (Why are mortality rates so much higher in Italy than in Germany? When do which types of masks make a difference?) Continual feedbacks between research and application allow rapid testing and validation of what is being learned. (How well are epidemiological models predicting disease transmission? Are different levels of social distancing leading to discernibly different infection rates?) By the time you read this, many new and different questions will emerge, and along with them, much new knowledge.
But is fast science always a good thing? In the Spring Issues Interview, editor William Kearney asked Jennifer Doudna about this. Doudna, of course, is a codiscoverer of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. This is the tool that scientist He...