Such delays are a problem across science and medicine. When Jeremy Farrar took over as director of the Wellcome Trust in March 2014, he told The Guardian that clinical research often took too long, something that became apparent in the following months as the Ebola outbreak grew. ‘The systems we have got in place are not fit for purpose when the situation is moving quickly,’ Farrar said. ‘We have nothing that enables us to respond in real time.’[13]
This culture is gradually changing. In mid-2018, what would become another major Ebola outbreak began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This time, researchers were quick to release new sequence data. Teams also launched a clinical trial of four experimental treatments. By August 2019, they’d shown that a prompt infusion of anti-Ebola immune cells could increase someone’s chances of survival to over 90 per cent, up from a historical average of around 30 per cent. Meanwhile, outbreak scientists are increasingly posting draft papers on websites like bioRxiv and medRxiv, which aim to make new research accessible before it undergoes peer-review.[14]
During her time working in Sierra Leone, Sabeti discovered that the word for Kenema, the city where they were based, meant ‘clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze’.[15] This openness was reflected in her team’s work, with those ninety-nine sequences shared early in the outbreak. The attitude has also taken hold among the wider community of outbreak researchers. One of the best examples is the Nextstrain project, pioneered by computational biologists Trevor Bedford and Richard Neher. This online platform automatically collates genetic sequences to show how different viruses are related and where they might have come from. Although Bedford and Neher initially focused on flu, the platform now tracks everything from Zika to tuberculosis.[16] Nextstrain has proved to be a powerful idea, not just because it brings together and visualises all the available sequences, but because it’s separate from the slow and competitive process of publishing scientific papers.
As it becomes easier to sequence pathogens, phylogenetic methods will continue to improve our understanding of disease outbreaks. They will help us discover when infections first sparked, how outbreaks grew, and what parts of a transmission process we might have missed. The methods also illustrate a wider trend in outbreak analysis: the ability to combine new data sources to get at information that has traditionally been hard to come by. With phylogenetics, we can uncover the spread of outbreaks by linking patient information with the genetic data of the viruses that infected them. These kinds of ‘data linkage’ approaches are becoming a powerful way of understanding how things mutate and spread in a population. But they aren’t always being used in the ways we might expect.
goldilocks was a dishonest, foul-mouthed old woman who burgled a trio of well-meaning bears. At least, she was when poet Robert Southey first published the story in 1837. After swearing her way through three bowls of porridge and breaking a chair, the woman heard the bears come home and made her escape through a window. Southey didn’t give her a name or golden hair; those details would come decades later, as the villainous woman evolved into a troublesome child and finally the Goldilocks most of us know today.[17]
The tale of the bears has been around for a long time. A few years before Southey published his story, a woman named Eleanor Mure had written a homemade book for her nephew. This time the bears caught the old woman at the end of the story. Angry at the damage, the bears set her on fire, tried to drown her, and then impaled her on the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral. In an earlier folk story, three bears saw off a mischievous fox.
According to Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University, we can think of culture as information that mutates as it gets transmitted from person-to-person and generation-to-generation. If we want to understand the spread and evolution of culture, folk stories are therefore useful because they are the product of their society. ‘By definition, folktales don’t have a single authoritative version,’ said Tehrani. ‘They are stories that belong to everybody in the community. They have this organic quality.’[18]
Tehrani’s work on folktales started with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. If you live in Western Europe, you’re probably familiar with the tale as told by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century: a girl visits her grandmother’s house, only to be met by a wolf in disguise. However, this isn’t the only version of the story. There are several other folk tales out there that bear similarities to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. In Eastern Europe and the Middle East, people tell the story of ‘The Wolf and the Kids’: a disguised wolf tricks a group of baby goats into letting him into their house. In East Asia, there is the tale of ‘The Tiger Grandmother’, in which a group of children encounter a tiger that pretends to be their elderly relative.
The tale has spread across the world, but it’s difficult to tell in which direction. A common theory among historians is that the East Asian version was the original, with the European and Middle Eastern stories coming later. But did ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Wolf and the Kids’ really evolve from ‘The Tiger Grandmother’? Folktales have
