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It's a cloudy, freezing Friday night in January 2020 in Mainz, a university town in central Germany.

Urua Shahin, a doctor and cancer researcher, bikes home from his lab in the dark.

He makes a cup of tea and settles in to read the week's medical journals.

So my weekend starts with bleeding papers.

Uir had spent more than 20 years of his life trying to figure out how to use the body's

immune system to target and destroy tumors.

But tonight, a different disease catches his interest. An ominous new virus is spreading

in China. Medical Journal, The Lancet, has just published the first case descriptions for 41 people

who'd gotten sick in the city of Wuhan. Uyghur notices one thing right away.

A new message in this paper was that one of the family members had the disease,

was virus positive, but did not have fever or other symptoms.

This was new.

The asymptomatic cases meant the virus could spread in secret.

The symptoms described in the article are serious.

Pneumonia, heart injury, six deaths.

Uwer looks up the population of Wuhan.

...