The coronavirus has ground social, economic, and educational exchanges to a halt around the world. For now, public health officials are relying on tools like social distancing to minimize the harm of the virus, but in the long term, a COVID-19 vaccine is the best hope of a return to normalcy. It normally takes a few years to develop a vaccine, but in the face of the coronavirus, biotechnology companies and regulatory agencies are taking aggressive steps to make a COVID-19 vaccine widely available sooner than that. I study biomanufacturing and synthetic biology, and it is fascinating to watch this…

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