“I asked Eddie to give me one minute to think,’” Zhang recalls.

A few minutes later, Zhang was strapped in for takeoff and still on the phone-then Holmes asked permission to release the genome publicly. 11, he was on the runway at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport when he received a phone call from a colleague, Professor Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney. “The outbreak of COVID angered many people in the Administration and presented an election issue for President Trump,” Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, formerly President Obama’s chief adviser on Asia, said at a recent meeting of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.Īfterward, Zhang returned to Shanghai and prepared to travel to Beijing for more meetings. response to the pandemic has prompted a wave of racially tinged soundbites, such as “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” as President Donald Trump’s Administration seeks to divert blame onto the nation where the pathogen was first identified. Crises beget scapegoats and the coronavirus is no different. The events that followed Zhang’s discovery have since become swathed in controversy.

“Then I realized that this virus is closely related to SARS, probably 80%. “It took us less than 40 hours, so very, very fast,” Zhang tells TIME in an exclusive interview. 5, after toiling through two nights straight, they had mapped the first complete genome of the virus that has now sickened 23 million and killed 810,000 across the globe: SARS-CoV-2.

Zhang and his team set to work, analyzing the samples using the latest high-throughput sequencing technology for RNA, the viral genetic building blocks, which function similar to how DNA works in humans.

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