companies have never had to try to produce an entire world worth of vaccine in such a short period of time.

This quite frankly is our Generation's Manhattan Project. Hi, I'm Dr. Saline Gounder, and you're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health, and social impacts of the coronavirus

pandemic. When Kismikia Corbett joined the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in 2014, she wanted to make her mark.

I wanted to be different.

I tend to kind of try to like stay under the radar and work on something that a lot of other people aren't.

So in 2014, that meant studying something no one else was really talking about, coronaviruses.

Kasmikeia wanted to study potential vaccines for the viruses that cause SARS and MERS,

short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

I mean, when I started working in 2014 at the NIH, the MERS epidemic was just dying down.

We just seen SARS about a decade before that.

So I think it was pretty clear that this type of thing was bound to happen.

In 2017, she and others at NIH published research on the spike protein,

the little projections sticking out of the coronavirus that give it its unique shape.

That structure really led the way to understanding the immune landscape for what could be a good

coronavirus vaccine.

Kasmike's team at NIH started working with the pharmaceutical company Moderna to help them develop the technology that could turn her research into a vaccine.

Fast forward to 2020, that research Kasmekia was doing on vaccines for obscure

coronaviruses it was suddenly the focus of a global effort to develop a vaccine

for SARS COV2 and and Kismikia was ready.

And so when the sequence of the virus came out on January 10th,

we had a plan, and it was largely based on all of this research that we'd done before.

On the morning of November 16th, Kismikeya got an email.

...