A recent paper by Physics World explains how physicists help fight the COVID-19.
SDG 3 “Good health and well-being” is sadly in the world news these days, as the COVID-19 pandemics seems to extend everywhere. It shows more than ever that we collectively need more basic sciences in order to prevent and treat such infections.
The British monthly Physics World has just published a paper about how physics helps to fight viruses. A story that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, and with the subsequent work of Max von Laue, William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg, or of John Desmond Bernal and Dorothy Hodgkin. Cryo-Electronic Microscopy, whose pioneers got the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is also part of the game.
The author also mentions synchrotron radiation, a great advance to produce X-rays beams with good characteristics to enhance the performance of structural determination. SESAME, one of the founding partners of IYBSSD 2022, may help to this regard.
And if you don’t want, or cannot, read the paper, you can listen to the latest Physics World Weekly Podcast episode: the first ten minutes are an interview of the paper’s author, Jon Cartwright. This episod is embedded here, and can be found on (and downloaded from) all the main podcast platforms.
We also strongly recommend that you listen this podcast in full: the other topics (quantum mechanics, exoplanets, etc.) are less pressing, but who knows where these research could lead, and how they could help to progress toward the SDGs in the future? Certainly Röntgen didn’t thought about fighting viruses.
