5/22/2023 0 Comments The spillover book![]() There are people more embedded to do those books. ![]() I didn’t want to write about the politics or the medical and public health crisis. So I would do it by Zoom, by assembling a Greek chorus, 60 or 70 of the world’s most interesting virologists - which became 95 virologists - talk to them at length about their lives, as parents, as teachers, then tell a story of the virus itself, its evolution and the people studying it. By the end of 2020, it was clear I couldn’t do this book by having the usual field adventures. How soon could I get to Wuhan? Never? Maybe? That took me a year of shuffling my feet. Plus one of my operating principles has long been to go there: If you’re writing about chimpanzees passing viruses to humans, go to the Congo. I got back on March 2 they asked if I would push that book aside and do one on the pandemic. I was in Tasmania in February working on a different book for Simon & Schuster. Q: Why, when you eventually wrote a book on the virus, did you focus on science alone?Ī: Important tactical question. It mentioned coronavirus, atypical pneumonia, Wuhan, China. ![]() ![]() But I wondered when I started to take it seriously. ![]() After this virus got going a bit, I heard from an editor at The New York Times Op-Ed (asking me) to write about it. ![]()
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