This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I’m Steve Mirsky.“I guess we're in the middle of a sort of a major virology education.”Charles Rice of the Rockefeller University in New York City.“I think that, you know, the field has definitely changed, you know, since the days when I was a graduate student.And I think one of the things that is very reassuring now is really the global response to this pandemic in the sort of academic and clinical and, you know, sort of pharma communities. The rate of progress.”Earlier today, October 5, 2020, Rice was informed that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C.The identification of the virus has led to tests and treatments for the condition.Rice shared the prize with Harvey Alter of the National Institutes of Health and Michael Houghton of the University of Alberta.“It took us months and months of toil to sequence a single viral genome.Now people can do that in a matter of hours.And the rate at which people have been able to make progress on understanding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is just spectacular.”Rice spoke this morning on a Web press conference from Rockefeller University.“So I think it’s taught us a lot of things about science in general.
