Instead, led by Doudna and Zhang, most academic labs declared that their discoveries would be made available to anyone fighting the virus. This allowed greater collaboration between researchers and even between countries. The consortium that Doudna put together of labs in the Bay Area could not have coalesced so quickly if they had to worry about intellectual property arrangements. Likewise, scientists around the world contributed to an open database of coronavirus sequences that, by the end of August 2020, had thirty-six thousand entries.4
