Viruses are deceptively simple little capsules of bad news.I They are just a tiny bit of genetic material, either DNA or RNA, inside a protein shell. When they worm their way into a cell of an organism, they can hijack its machinery in order to replicate themselves. In the case of coronaviruses, the genetic material is RNA, Doudna’s specialty. In SARS-CoV-2, the RNA is about 29,900 base letters long, compared to more than three billion in human DNA. The viral sequence provides the code for making a mere twenty-nine proteins.
