Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Lauren Richardson. The COVID-19

pandemic has increased the visibility of scientists and the scientific

process to the broader public. Suddenly, scientists working on

virology and infectious disease dynamics have seen their public

profiles expand rapidly. One such scientist is our special guest in this

episode, Trevor Bedford, an associate professor at the

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. An expert in genomic epidemiology, he and his collaborators

built Neck strain, which shares real-time interactive data

visualizations to track the spread of viruses through populations.

A16Z BioD BioD deal team partner Judy Savitskaya and I chat with Trevor about how genomic epidemiology

can inform public health decisions, viral mutation and spillover from animals into humans,

and what can be done now to prevent the next big

pandemic. But first we discuss the shifts in scientific communication to

preprints and open science, a topic we will dig deeper into on future episodes.

While these pre-publication and pre-peer review research articles

speed the scientific process by sharing results early,

they can also lead to misinterpretation and misinformation.

Everyone loves the alliteration of the promise and the peril of pre-prints.

And I think this is the perfect use case of that.

We've seen a lot of work not peer reviewed,

but out in the world and making a huge difference

for the positive and you know really driving the science and the public health

...