from. Although Bedford and Neher initially focused on flu, the
platform now tracks everything from Zika to tuberculosis.[16]
Nextstrain has proved to be a powerful idea, not just because it
brings together and visualises all the available sequences, but
because it’s separate from the slow and competitive process of
publishing scientific papers.
As it becomes easier to sequence pathogens, phylogenetic
methods will continue to improve our understanding of disease
outbreaks. They will help us discover when infections first sparked,
how outbreaks grew, and what parts of a transmission process we
might have missed. The methods also illustrate a wider trend in
outbreak analysis: the ability to combine new data sources to get at
information that has traditionally been hard to come by. With
phylogenetics, we can uncover the spread of outbreaks by linking
patient information with the genetic data of the viruses that infected
them. These kinds of ‘data linkage’ approaches are becoming a
powerful way of understanding how things mutate and spread in a
population. But they aren’t always being used in the ways we might
expect.
goldilocks was a dishonest, foul-mouthed old woman who burgled
a trio of well-meaning bears. At least, she was when poet Robert
Southey first published the story in 1837. After swearing her way
through three bowls of porridge and breaking a chair, the woman
heard the bears come home and made her escape through a
window. Southey didn’t give her a name or golden hair; those details
would come decades later, as the villainous woman evolved into a
troublesome child and finally the Goldilocks most of us know today.
[17]
The tale of the bears has been around for a long time. A few
years before Southey published his story, a woman named Eleanor
Mure had written a homemade book for her nephew. This time the
bears caught the old woman at the end of the story. Angry at the
damage, the bears set her on fire, tried to drown her, and then
impaled her on the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral. In an earlier folk
story, three bears saw off a mischievous fox.