A year ago, most people were cooped up trying to keep themselves occupied by making sourdough starter or binging Netflix.

Alina Chan, she was trying to keep busy too. Only Alina is a genetic engineer.

So it's like this when they see something strange happening, they want to study it.

It's just like an inherent characteristic of scientists is that you want to solve problems.

And last year, the strange thing that was happening was COVID,

which meant Alina was asking herself,

What could I do at home?

This is how Alina began doing some of the most controversial research into the coronavirus, from her home, the same way a lot of us have been working.

It all started with the virus's genetic blueprint. And so at that time, the news came out that

this virus was genetically stable. It was changing very little. So it looks so stable that at the time, a lot of experts said that maybe we don't have to worry about our vaccines and our antibody therapies because the target is so stable.

And this sounds like great news, but it got Alina's attention because she knows a little something

about viral evolution.

She'd studied SARS-1, which spread to humans back in 2003.

That virus, it's so closely related to this coronavirus, that some people call COVID SARS-2.

If you look, especially at SARS-1, which is, again, the most related virus to SARS-2 in terms of human outbreaks,

when you compare SARS-1 to SARS-2, it is striking that there isn't this period of rapid mutation,

adaptation to the host that you could see in SARS-1, but not SARS-2.

So with SARS-1, you could just see it, like, changing day-to-day,

trying to figure out how to stick around its host.

Not day-to-day, but between patients, based on the sequences that they got from patients at the time,

you could see within the first two to three months, it was picking up dozens of mutations,

like functional mutations.

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