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WITH THE CORONAVIRUSepi-

demic sparking a global health

scare, it can be hard to keep up

with the terminological devel-

opments.

For the official name of the

disease caused by the virus, the

World Health Organization has

settled on

“Covid-19,”

short for

“coronavirus

disease 2019.”

While the

outbreak is

thought to have emerged from

an animal and seafood market

in Wuhan, China, health offi-

cials have avoided naming the

disease after its place of origin.

“Having a name matters to pre-

vent the use of other names

[Virus]

WORD ON

THE STREET

BEN

ZIMMER

literal or figura-

tive kind. The

Oxford English

Dictionary re-

cords a polemi-

cal pamphlet from 1599 titled

“Master Broughton’s Letters,”

in which the author plays with

the word’s similarity to another

Latinism,vires, meaning “pow-

ers”: “You have spent all the

viresand power you have for

the defence of a vain paradox,

and spit out all thevirusand

poison you could conceive.”

In the world of medicine,

“virus” was first used in medi-

eval times for the discharge

from an ulcer or wound, even-

The

Spread of

A Latin

Term for

Poison

that can be inaccu-

rate or stigmatiz-

ing,” WHO chief

Tedros Adhanom

Ghebreyesus told re-

porters earlier this

month—although

that hasn’t stopped

people from giving

the disease names

like “Wuhan flu” or

even “Wuflu.”

As for the virus

itself, the Interna-

tional Committee on

Taxonomy of Vi-

ruses is now dub-

bing it “SARS-

CoV-2” (for “severe

acute respiratory

syndrome coronavi-

rus 2”). The journal

Science reports that the WHO

isn’t happy with that choice,

with officials opting for “the vi-

rus responsible for Covid-19” or

“the Covid-19 virus” instead.

Amid the shifts in nomencla-

ture lies one unchangeable word,

“virus,” which can elicit deep-

seated anxieties all on its own.

The English word “virus” is

based on a Latin word for “poi-

sonous secretion,” and early on

it often kept to its original

meaning of “venom,” either the

tually shifting to sub-

stances within the

body that cause infec-

tious diseases. It

could also refer to an

infectious substance

used for vaccination,

as when Edward

Jenner published his

discovery in 1799 that

“cow-pox virus” could

be used as a vaccine

against smallpox.

As biological sci-

ence advanced, “vi-

rus” took on a more

specific meaning for

tiny infectious agents, smaller

than bacteria, that replicate in

living cells. Early glimmers of

viruses in the modern sense

were discerned by the Dutch

microbiologist Martinus Beijer-

inck, whose experiments with

infected tobacco plants in 1898

led him to posit what he called

a“contagium vivum fluidum”(a

contagious living liquid) that

could pass through filters de-

signed to keep out bacteria.

Beijerinck was wrong about the

liquid nature of viruses, but he

opened up the new field of vi-

rology. It took off especially in

the 1930s, when electronic mi-

croscopes allowed scientists to

see viruses for the first time.

“Virus” spread in new meta-

phorical directions later in the

20th century. David Gerrold’s

1972 science-fiction novel

“When HARLIE Was One” imag-

ined a computer “virus pro-

gram” that replicated itself like

biological viruses do, predicting

a threat to computers that has

become all too real.

The adjective “viral,” used in

a more benign way, became

popular in marketing circles in

the late 1980s, when “viral mar-

keting” was first used for word-

of-mouth advertising. The rise

of the internet meant that in-

formation about a product or a

service could “go viral” when

shared by customers.

All the while, scientists have

struggled to keep pace with ac-

tual biological viruses, identify-

ing and naming newly discov-

ered ones. In 1968, an article in

the journal Nature reported

that virologists had recognized

what they called “coronavi-

ruses”—so named because the

fringe around the virus, when

viewed with an electron micro-

scope, resembles the corona of

the sun. As viruses continue to

replicate, so does the language

used to describe them.

An electron

microscopic image of

the first U.S. case

of the ‘Covid-19’ virus.

Medicine, which has a longer lead

time for publication, receives 20 to

45 submissions a day about the new

coronavirus, said executive editor

Edward Campion. The journal had

published 10 studies as of Tuesday,

putting them on a webpage dedi-

catedtothevirus.

It’s all a big change from past ep-

idemics, when key findings could

take weeks or months to be shared.

Many researchers once snubbed

preprint servers, fearing that shar-

ing their work there would jeopar-

dize their chances of publication in

an established academic journal. “If

you look at the rate at which people

are publishing and sharing data on-

line, it’s great,” said Ian Lipkin, a

veteran microbe hunter and director

of the Center for Infection and Im-

munity at Columbia University’s

Mailman School of Public Health.

“Things have improved.”

Still, the amount of research be-

ing published can be overwhelming.

“It’s like a mob scene on bioRxiv,”

said Timothy Sheahan, an epidemi-

ologist at the University of North

Carolina’s Gillings School of Global

Public Health who is studying the

effects of antiviral drugs on the new

virus.

Rapid information sharing can

also include misinformation or find-

ings that longer-term research dis-

proves. Some reports, for instance,

have claimed that the new coronavi-

rus originated in a laboratory in

Wuhan. A statement published in

the medical journal The Lancet this

week by 27 scientists and public

health leaders pushed back, declar-

ing that analyses of the virus con-

ducted in many countries “over-

whelmingly conclude that this virus

originated in wildlife.”

In another controversial publica-

tion, a research team at the Indian

W

hen Chinese scien-

tists posted the

genetic blueprint

of a deadly new

coronavirus online

last month, Dmitry Korkin jumped at

the opportunity to fight the epi-

demic. The computational biologist

hunkered down with a team of grad-

uate students in his laboratory at

Worcester Polytechnic Institute in

Massachusetts. They slept just a cou-

ple of hours a night while they con-

structed a three-dimensional model

of the new virus and analyzed its

proteins for clues about what drugs

or vaccines might work against it—a

process that normally can take

months. “I would have meetings at 3

a.m. with my research group,” Dr.

Korkin said.

Eager to share the findings, Dr.

Korkin submitted them as soon as

they were ready earlier this month

to a “preprint” server called bioRxiv.

It posts papers within a few days,

getting them out to the public before

they have gone through the meticu-

lous, time-consuming process of re-

view by a set of peers required by

traditional academic journals. To get

the word out even faster, he also

posted the findings on his lab’s web-

site and publicized them on Twitter

and Facebook. “We felt the urgency

of this work,” said Dr. Korkin, direc-

tor of WPI’s bioinformatics and com-

putational biology program.

More than 76,000 people in 26

countries have been infected with

the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes

a respiratory disease called Covid-19.

They include health care workers in

Wuhan, China, and retirees on a

cruise ship that was quarantined in

Japan. More than 2,200 people have

died.

MATTHEW BURGOS/WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

BYBETSYMCKAY ANDKATIECAMERO

Many scientists around the

world are rushing to decipher the

secrets of the new virus and shar-

ing their findings as quickly as they

get them, often on public preprint

servers such as bioRxiv, Virologi-

cal.org and medRxiv. Their work is

being published more quickly than

in any previous epidemic, research-

ers and journal publishers say,

helping scientists and public health

officials to combat the virus’s

spread more effectively.

Both bioRxiv and medRxiv are

currently receiving about 10 papers

a day from authors in 110 different

countries, said John Inglis, co-

founder of the sites. So far, bioRxiv

has published 67 papers on the new

coronavirus and medRxiv has pub-

lished 105. Dr. Inglis says that his

sites, like most community-based

preprint servers, are non-profit ven-

tures run by academic organiza-

tions, though a small number are

owned by commercial publishers

such as Elsevier.

“The aim is to accelerate science,

but we try to signal strongly that a

preprint is not necessarily conclu-

sive or accurate,” said Dr. Inglis.

“We are looking with care at the

coronavirus papers and doing ev-

erything we can to speed their pas-

sage through our screening pro-

cesses.” That process is designed to

ensure that submissions are scien-

tific papers and not hypotheses,

opinions or review pieces; it also

checks for plagiarism and potential

risks to the public’s health. Papers

are then reviewed by one of 170 in-

vestigators, experts in a range of

fields who decide if a paper can be

posted or requires further scrutiny.

The New England Journal of

Scientists researching the new

coronavirus are bypassing traditional

medical journals to publish their findings

more quickly online.

Sharing

Data Faster

To Fi g h t

An Epidemic

Institutes of Technology recently

posted an analysis on bioRxiv that

purported to find an “uncanny simi-

larity” between tiny segments of

the virus’s genes and sequences

found in HIV. They suggested that

those unusual sequences might have

been added to make the virus more

infectious and harder to eliminate.

The paper fueled conspiracy theo-

ries and provoked an immediate

storm of critical reviews. The re-

searchers withdrew the paper and

revised the findings, and it is under-

going peer review, said one of its

authors.

Public health leaders are pushing

for more cooperation and informa-

tion sharing among researchers. In

2016, a group of leading public

health journals and funding agen-

cies signed a landmark statement

endorsing preprint publications and

data sharing during public health

emergencies. Last month, 94 jour-

nals, funders and scientific societies

signed another statement, pledging

to make research on the new coro-

navirus publicly available as quickly

as possible. Last week, the World

Health Organization gathered scien-

tists and companies to set research

priorities, including epidemiological

studies, research on the origin of

the virus, and development of drugs

and vaccines.

Preprint publications have be-

come more common during epidem-

ics. Between May 2014 and January

2016, when Ebola swept through

West Africa, 75 preprint papers on

the disease were published, accord-

ing to a 2018 study in the journal

PLOS Medicine. Between November

2015 and November 2017, as Zika

spread around the Americas, 174

preprint manuscripts on the disease

were published. Still, the study con-

cluded, only a small proportion of

all the Zika and Ebola papers during

those epidemics were initially pub-

lished as preprints.

According to Dr. Korkin, his

team’s research suggests that some

antiviral drugs that had been in de-

velopment for Severe Acute Respi-

ratory Syndrome, or SARS, might

work against the new coronavirus.

Proteins targeted by those antiviral

drug candidates are similar in both

viruses. He said that the work,

which other scientists have down-

loaded, shows how data-driven sci-

ence can help to accelerate the

search for treatments.

“I haven’t seen the engagement

of the research community to such

an extent before,” he said. “This is

an amazing experience.”

—Robert Lee Hotz contributed

reporting.

In past

epidemics,

key findings

could take

weeks or

months

to be shared.

Researcher Dmitry Korkin

with his 3-D models

of the new coronavirus.