Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.The coronavirus was sequenced in a matter of weeks, testing became available quickly, and vaccines that would normally take years may be developed in a year or less, and “it’s all been built on the back of basic science advances that have been developed in the past three decades,” McNutt said.She pointed to gene sequencing and polymerase chain reaction, which allows for multiple copying of precise DNA segments.
That latter discovery won the 1993 Nobel in chemistry.And even further back, in 1984, the Nobel in medicine went to a team for theories on how to manipulate the immune system using something called monoclonal antibodies.