What a changed world we now live in with the internet now supporting global networking and data sharing. It allows anyone to become involved in what would have previously been hidden areas of research. Coronavirus is the best example to date of the benefits that the internet offers in terms of instant internet networking and data sharing. The openness now applied to this type of “save the human race” research with the removal of all commercial and governmental secrecy (as far as I know) has allowed the ordinary individual to become party to these events in real time. Now it is accepted that what you get to read and research being “first hand” is often far too technical to understand. This in my opinion is a good thing since it is not always good for you to only read what the media have decided to simplify for your consumption. The simplification detracts from the complexity which allows social media pundits to draw very simplified conclusions and propose their own direction of travel without knowing the underlying detail.
So in the case of coronavirus what can we get access to that may have been previously kept away from the public view?
One of my popular websites on viruses is http://virological.org where I can gather around the coffee machine with the world’s virologists for a morning chat. Unfortunately like many a chat what I get to read one day maybe gone the next. Best to remember the internet has its own fluidity. Someone on the other end is always moving things around to confuse you. Always look to capture it on own your own digital hardware. I am not even a full convert to the Cloud Architecture. Remember they are businesses running them. Sorry for about the gripe. But it is a blog !!!. So moving on with the subject in hand.
So I got to see the original posting from edward_holmes as introduced below :-
“10th January 2020. This posting is communicated by Edward C. Holmes, University of Sydney on behalf of the consortium led by Professor Yong-Zhen, Fudan University, Shanghai.”
It opens with “The Shanghai Public Health Clinical & School of Public Health, in collaboration with the Central Hospital of Wuhan etc etc …………is releasing a coronavirus genome from a case of respiratory disease from the Wuhan outbreak. The sequence has also been deposited on GenBank (accession MN908947 20.2k) and will be released as soon as possible.”
So this was post by Professor Edward Holmes working at the University of Sydney. He is an expert on infectious diseases particularly RNA viruses that jump boundaries to infect humans. He can be located on http://scholar.google.com.au giving you a link to his paper published in 2020 “A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China” with excellent links to published articles based upon the paper.
Now the link on the post lead to go to http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov so then follow the path NCBI>DNA7RNA>Nucleotide Database where you can actually view the complete underlying genome code for “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 isolate Wuhan-Hu-1 complete genome”.
This site is the National Centre for Biotechnology Information in the USA. Now GenBank is the NIH genetic sequence database of publicly available DNA sequences. GenBank is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration with Japan and Europe. These international centres process such data on a daily basis so it is real time research.
Now if you like searching through data that that means nothing to you this is the place to visit. Maybe it is my computer background but I enjoy just searching through data and the less I understand it the better. The internet now allows you to become involved in any subject and at any level of research. So today I am an amateur virologist. But what it does achieve is to make you aware of the complexity that the normal media looks to avoid in their published stories. In my case it always triggers me to want to learn more so once again the internet becomes invaluable. Just Google or Wikipedia every word you do not understand. Even buy a book or even if you are digitally dependant an eBook off Amazon. But alongside this information the key difference these days is you can have access to the first hand sources on the subject and in real time see how things are unfolding. In fact it pays to pick a few experts to follow where their bio and writings make you want to make them your new best research friend.
The big difference is with coronavirus as the current subject matter under the spotlight it is uncharted and things are unfolding in real time. This along with it being relevant to everyone, because anyone can catch it and die, makes it currently the ideal subject to have access to this inside information over the internet. Fortunately the scientists working on solving the problems are adopting currently a none commercial open systems approach freely sharing their information on open access websites. Within 12 days of the Chinese sharing the digital genome of coronavirus over the internet an American team had shared an analysis showing the mechanism by which the coronavirus entered human cells. Then within 12 hours scientists in China had shown there analysis was correct. The speed of data interchange about the virus was starting to match the speed at which the virus was spreading. But unfortunately developing the solutions would take a lot longer.
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