“A citizen’s guide to viruses

The deluge of news about covid-19 can be overwhelming, but chemical engineering professor Arup Chakraborty has written a guide to help: Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity (MIT Press, 2021, $19.95), coauthored with Genentech scientist Andrey Shaw.

“People who read the book will now have a conceptual framework and facts to think about how viruses emerge to cause infectious diseases, how they spread, how we combat them naturally, and how we can combat them with vaccines and therapeutics,” says Chakraborty. The result, he hopes, could be a more pandemic-resilient world.