Safe harbours

ROBERT FITZROY would have taken a dim view of tracking evolving viruses; the theories of his friend and Beagle shipmate Charles Darwin were anathema to him. But the idea of forecasting disease by accumulating and mapping data would have resonated with him. FitzRoy took a very similar approach when, in 1860, he invented what he called the “weather forecast”.

Like those now looking at ways to monitor the spread and mutation of pathogens, he was spurred on by tragedy—in his case, the Royal Charter gale of 1859, in which some 450 souls were lost on the eponymous steam clipper, along with over 100 smaller vessels which had the ill fortune to be at sea that night.

FitzRoy was convinced that with atmospheric pressure for ports around Britain plotted on a map, and with a general understanding of northern-hemisphere storms, such tragedies could be averted. He set about creating a system whereby the telegraph—the Victorian internet—delivered him barometer readings from British ports every night which allowed him to produce morning forecasts for the insurers at Lloyd’s, the gentlemen at the Times and the Admiralty. When a storm looked likely, specific warnings would be telegraphed to ports in its path.

This may seem a happy forerunner for a predictive approach to pandemics to look to. But it is not an unproblematic one. In 1866 a committee of the Royal Society found “that as a matter of fact [FitzRoy’s] daily forecasts are not shown to be correct and that they are not, in our opinion, useful.” FitzRoy had a good idea; but he lacked the data and tools to make it work.

Today’s biology utterly outclasses FitzRoy’s meteorology. It has its basic theory; FitzRoy’s friend’s theory of evolution shapes the doings of the biosphere as firmly, if not as deterministically, as the fluid mechanics not yet developed in FitzRoy’s age governs the atmosphere. The precision of biological observation seems all but limitless. It picks all the antibodies out of drops of blood, finds antigens in smears of mucus, pulls genomes out of wastewater and sifts through such data by the terabyte.

This does not mean it can easily be fashioned into a prediction system; that will demand institution building and perhaps new norms as well as technical nous. A jittery post-pandemic world may suffer some dodgy forecasts. But as The Economist wrote in 1866, receiving unreliable storm warnings still has benefits. “Even when the master of a ship is not deterred…from putting to sea, he takes care that all is right and snug, and he turns in at night with his weather eye lifting.”

And although reputable meteorologists mostly, and wisely, content themselves with forecasting, biomedical research is in the thwarting business. Covid-19 has shown that in its current state of development it can thwart as never before. With big trials it can find life-saving drugs; with CRISPR-enabled screening it can discover new drug targets; with a bit of time, and now a lot of incentive, it may well produce new antivirals. And it can program vaccines from the keyboard.

People may never glance at their phones to see the viral forecast for their children’s school, as some boosters might imagine, or get this winter’s must-have antibodies delivered by Amazon. But unless the lessons of covid-19 are ignored, and the technological advances it has pulled out of the lab allowed to gather dust, the world can expect better testing, better drugs, better vaccines and better foresight in crises to come—and between them, too. ■