Man Versus Microbe: What Will It Take To Win?

Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic that swept the planet in the early 2020s killed more than six million, delivered unimaginable human suffering and $22 trillion in lost global growth. We weren't prepared and should have been.Unraveling the secrets of microbes, an invisible parallel universe of tiny life forms all around us, is central to managing the big twenty-first-century challenges of pandemics, bioterrorism, food security and climate change. Scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and political leaders are racing to decode this biological realm with powerful new tools to extend human lifespans and make the world safer and more prosperous. Yet such technologies need to be handled with care. The price of getting this wrong will be unbearable.Man Versus Microbe is about humanity's competitive, symbiotic and precarious relationship with the microbial world. Brian Bremner (Senior Executive Editor, Bloomberg) offers a book on the exhilarating fields of synthetic biology and genetics, abundant with material on emerging technologies to deepen one's understanding of how virus hunters chase bugs or how geneticists unlock the workings of a microbe's constituent DNA. This book is for readers who want to learn more about humanity's fight to contain future pandemics and better understand the risks and opportunities of living in the world of microbes. After navigating through a disruptive pandemic, we are all amateur epidemiologists now.