(I am, too.) He and his wife are self-quarantining in their apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side. He’s a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and in the age range of the most vulnerable now, he told me. The other day, I phoned Morse to see how he’s holding up. Now it strikes me as terrifyingly accurate. Back then I thought it was a little bit melodramatic. “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.” I used that searing quote from Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, who was president of Rockefeller University and Morse’s boss, in the introduction to my book. Too many of us, I wrote, were blithely going about our business despite the growing threat. I wrote about how experts were identifying conditions that could lead to the introduction of new, potentially devastating pathogens-climate change, massive urbanization, the proximity of humans to farm or forest animals that serve as viral reservoirs-with the worldwide spread of those microbes accelerated by war, the global economy, and international air travel. When I started researching A Dancing Matrix in 1990, the term “emerging viruses” had just been coined by a young virologist named Stephen Morse, who would become the main character in my book. There’s also a personal reason why I’ve boycotted articles about early warning signs: Scientists were detailing those early warning signs decades ago, and a handful of science journalists were writing about their work. The time for “coulda, woulda, shoulda” would be later, I figured what matters now is whatever needs to be done in the next few days, and the next few days after that. Those articles were wreaking havoc with my anxiety level. In my obsessive reading about the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve avoided articles that focus on the early missteps that could have stopped COVID-19 if only we’d been more attentive, organized, and responsive. A version of this story appears in the July 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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