The Invisible Siege by Dan Werb is about the long, surprising history of coronaviruses— read an excerpt now
The book won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure by epidemiologist and journalist Dan Werb traces the surprisingly long history of the virus family and the scientists who went to war with it, as well as the lessons learned and lost during the SARS and MERS outbreaks. Werb argues there is no doubt coronaviruses will strike again, and that understanding them is the best way to be prepared.
The Invisible Siege won the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The $60,000 award recognizes the best nonfiction book published in Canada.
"Humans have a collective action problem. We all know that, we see it all the time. When you're trying to muster up a collective action for a threat that has not yet presented itself, its almost impossible. There are so many threats to health, there are so many other viruses that currently exist in the world that it seems irrational to devote attention to a future threat if you can't see it, you cant predict it and you don't know what its going to look like and you're dealing with things in the here and now," Werb said in an interview on The Sunday Magazine.
"If we want this pandemic to end — and really end, not to be something that we seasonally dealing with — we need to make sure that the kinds of protections that we as Canadians are enjoying are exported across the world. That's the most self-interested move we can make it we want to hasten the end of the pandemic."
Werb is an epidemiologist, policy analyst and writer currently based in Toronto. He is also the author of the nonfiction work City of Omens.
You can read an excerpt from The Invisible Siege below.
We look to the faces and bodies of our loved ones — our friends, our parents, and our children — for evidence of how grueling our journey through time really is. A wrinkle, a gray hair, momentary apprehension when walking up a flight of stairs — if we had no other way to measure time, our bodies would be enough to signal how far we've come and how quickly the path before us is dwindling. And yet, our experience of time isn't uniform, with some days and years lasting longer than others and adding more damage while the young around us grow at speeds that seem close to impossible.
Unlike human manufacturing, though, viral errors — which we call mutations — are a key to how viruses find new ways to poke through our bodies' defenses.
Scientists measure the passage of time in other ways: by the slow appearance of bars in a western blot (a technique for detecting proteins) when nucleotides bind with synthetic antibodies to reveal the presence of viral genetic code; by the speed at which virions (individual viruses) replicate in blood serum, thirstily hijacking human cells to make more of themselves, the assault contained in a petri dish; by the slow unraveling of human DNA under an electron microscope, tight coils delicately touched by proteins that cause them to unfurl, frondlike, and to sway elegantly in a cell's nucleus, their dance directing our bodies in its complex hidden functions. And scientists measure time by the breakdown of their tools: the inevitable obsolescence of their digital sequencers, the accidental fracturing of glass pipettes during routine activity, and the inevitable diminishment of the good hands that once allowed them to work in elegant mastery of their laboratories, which forces them to rely on the next generation to carry out the work.
Viruses age, too, but looking at a single copy of a virus cannot tell you anything about its passage through time. Instead, viral time is measured in the molecular changes introduced during the dance of replication. These mutations, at the level of the virion, are random. But level up to a single human host, with trillions of cells that can be invaded and transformed into staging grounds for the production of billions upon billions of virions, and the speed at which these random errors occur starts to fit a pattern. One magnitude higher, at the level of a virus's spread across the population of an entire species, and patterns of viral mutations become as predictable as clockwork.
LISTEN | Dan Werb on the history of coronavirsues:
While viruses are, by one definition, just simple carbon-based machines, their massive numbers — at least 100 million different viruses are known to infect vertebrates, invertebrates, lichens, and mushrooms — have led to incredible diversity, not only in their structure and activity, but in the pace at which they evolve over time. On average, a single virion can replicate in just three minutes once it worms its way into an organism's cell. Some highly infectious viruses, like influenza, replicate much faster when they move through new populations, finding weak prey within which they can wreak havoc. Others, like bacteriophages (i.e., viruses that prey on bacteria), coexist in harmony with humans by adding an additional level of protection from deadly invaders. We welcome them into the human virome, that lush garden of viruses living peaceably within our bodies.
In the case of highly pathogenic coronaviruses like SARS and SARS-CoV-2, there is no easy peace to be found. First, individual virions colonize our body's respiratory system, which is made up of about 10 billion cells, fertile ground for the viruses to penetrate. Once a virion enters a cell, a countdown to replication begins as the virus releases its genome, which then truculently makes its way through the cell and into the nucleus, where it takes control of the cell's infrastructure and uses it to build copies of itself that then spread anew.
The clockwork errors introduced during viral replication are like those found in every automated, high-volume production technique. Unlike human manufacturing, though, viral errors — which we call mutations — are a key to how viruses find new ways to poke through our bodies' defenses.
Excerpted from The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure by Dan Werb. Copyright © 2022 Daniel Werb. Published by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
