"A team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard began to suspect nearly two decades ago that so-called "emerging diseases" such as Ebola and Lassa virus were not quite what they seemed. Rather than being newly evolved contagions, mounting evidence suggested they were ancient pathogens that had circulated among humans for thousands of years. What really was emerging was accurate diagnosis: Medicine only recently had acquired the ability to detect these diseases and track the toll of outbreaks."
"Tutored at home by her older sister after her family fled Iran and resettled in Florida when she was 2 years old, she began learning math as a preschooler. By the time she began school she already knew the material so she concentrated on doing it faster than everyone else - a drive for excellence that never ceased. As an undergraduate at MIT, her adviser Eric Lander helped her see genetics as the mathematical code of life."
Researchers at the Broad Institute and Harvard concluded that many so-called emerging diseases are ancient pathogens and that improved diagnostics reveal their true prevalence. Those findings motivated the creation of Sentinel, a global disease surveillance network. The MacArthur Foundation awarded Sentinel $100 million as federal support declined, preventing possible closure. Sentinel co-founder Pardis Sabeti described pandemic preparedness and global health as facing an existential crisis due to reduced federal funding and said the award transformed the organization's prospects. Sabeti’s background includes early mathematical aptitude, immigration from Iran, MIT undergraduate study, a Rhodes scholarship, and a Ph.D. from Oxford.
Read at Harvard Gazette
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]