Waiting for the Penicillin Moment: my new feature on antiviral drugs for Wired

On my way to give a keynote talk at a genome meeting in California, I noticed in the Hartford airport that the April issue of Wired is on the newsstand. And in that issue is a feature I wrote about fighting viruses, based on visits and interviews with scientists exploring new ways of doing battle with these invisible foes. It's not yet on Wired's web site yet (I'll post a link when it goes online), but here's the introduction for a taste:

There's a moment in the history of medicine that's so cinematic it's a wonder no one has put it in a movie. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a British microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his workspace. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn't just spreading through the culture, though. It is killing the bacteria surrounding it.

Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments that confirmed it made a Staphylococcus-killing molecule. And Fleming then discovered it could kill many other species of infectious bacteria as ...