34 Scientific American, March 2022M
ost of the time science is a
slow and tedious business.
Researchers toil away for
decades at obscure limits of human
knowledge, collecting and analyz-
ing data, refining theories, writing,
debating, and advancing our un-
derstanding of the world in tiny in-
crements. Working in small teams
on highly specialized projects far
from the public eye—that is what
most of us are accustomed to doing.
But a calamity upends every-
thing. In early 2020 COVID spread
around the globe. Millions of lives
were at stake. Yet we knew next to
nothing about the nature of the
threat. Just a few months earlier
no one had ever seen the SARS-
CoV-2 virus.
For researchers, the emergence
of the disease was an all-hands-on-
deck moment. Biologists such as
the two of us, along with virologists
and immunologists, all pivoted to
focus on the new pathogen. And
other researchers from across the
scientific ecosystem—economists,
physicists, engineers, statisticians,
psychologists, sociologists, and
more—dropped everything to learn
about COVID and figure out how
they could contribute. Public inter-
est exploded. Scientists with scant
experience in public communica-
tion learned to work closely with
journalists, informing a worried
public about what was happening,what to expect next and what peo-
ple could do to keep themselves
safe. The scale of cooperation and
collaboration is staggering. Large-
scale surveys of scientists done in
2020 and 2021 show that roughly a
third of researchers in the U.S. and
Europe contributed to the effort.
This vast collaboration moved
quickly and effectively in several
areas. On December 30, 2019, an
epidemiological surveillance net-
work published the first English-
language note about a cluster
of pneumonia cases of unknown
cause in Wuhan, China. Eight days
later Chinese scientists identified
the pathogen as a novel corona-
virus. The full genome sequence
was published just two days after
that. Then on January 13, 2020,
the World Health Organization
published instructions for a PCR-
based diagnostic test based on
that genome.
The genome sequence also
opened the door for vaccine devel-
opment. Scientists used it to de-
termine the 3-D structure of the
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, and by
the end of January they had fig-
ured out how to stabilize the pro-
tein to make it an effective vaccine
component, leading to mRNA-
based and other vaccines, which
were developed, tested and dis-
tributed in less than a year.
The urgency of COVID drove
scientists to adapt. Discussions
that previously took place at con-
ferences, on the telephone or in
revision notes on manuscripts
moved to social media platforms
such as Twitter, review sites such
as PubPeer and all-hours Zoom
rooms. Researchers and clinicians
spontaneously organized into fo-
cused teams and working groups.
By rapidly sharing information on
their patients, physicians figured
out that people with severe
COVID were at high risk for dan-
gerous blood clots in their lungs,
so anticoagulants became a stan-
dard of care and saved lives.
In general, traditional modes of
publication were far too slow. We
embraced a rapid alternative mod-
el: preprint archives, where pa-pers are posted prior to peer re-
view or consideration at a scientif-
ic journal. The number of papers
submitted to medRxiv, a key re-
pository of biomedical preprints,
increased 10-fold in the first few
months of the pandemic.
These changes also shifted early-
stage science from a private activity
to part of the public discourse. In-
stead of presenting the world with
polished scientific articles, investi-
gators worked in open view, think-
ing aloud, offering preliminary
speculations, arguing, making
wrong turns, following dead ends
and pursuing some hypotheses that
would ultimately be refuted.
This approach to communica-
tion does have a downside. Previ-
ously private communications
were now open to exploitation and
distortion by politicians and pun-
dits. For instance, flawed blood-
sample research reported in an
April 2020 medRxiv paper purport-
ed to show that COVID was a mild
disease with a very low fatality
rate. Although the scientific com-
munity quickly pointed out a host
of problems with the work, people
seeking to avoid business restric-
tions, school closures and mask
mandates ignored the criticism
and used the paper to undermine
public health interventions.
Rapid and unorthodox chan-
nels of communication also could
not solve all the problems scien-
tists encountered. We took too
long to recognize the importance
of airborne transmission of the vi-
rus. We spent early 2020 washing
our groceries but not wearing
masks. Most critically, we have
been largely unsuccessful at antic-
ipating and managing the human
element of the pandemic. By not
accounting for ways that behavior
would change in response to infor-
mation—and misinformation—we
have struggled to predict the size
and timing of successive disease
waves and virus variants. A collec-
tive failure to stop misinformation
from spreading on social and tra-
ditional media platforms has left
large segments of the population
unvaccinated, vulnerable and un-A High-Speed
Scientific
Hive Mind
Emerged
Researchers found new forms
of rapid communication and
collaborationBy Joseph Bak-Coleman and
Carl T. Bergstrom