Tens of thousands of scientists are redeploying to fight coronavirus

Michelle Cipicchio (right) trains two lab technicians at the Broad Institute to extract viral RNA from patient samples.Credit: Scott Sassone/Broad Institute

As labs shut down around the world, researchers are finding creative ways to donate their time, supplies and expertise.

Working around the clock, scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts can run about 2,000 COVID-19 tests per day. In places where testing is still scarce — which is to say much of the world — similar efforts can provide vital relief to public-health systems stretched to their limits. As they shutter their labs indefinitely, tens of thousands of scientists are volunteering to help the pandemic relief efforts in any way they can.

Universities are organizing, researchers are banding together, and efforts to get volunteers and equipment where they are needed most are in progress around the globe. “All of the people who are now suddenly not working have skills that can be applied,” says Michael Monaghan, a molecular ecologist at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin.

The Association of American Universities, for example, a consortium of 65 leading US research universities based in Washington, DC, has urged its community members on Twitter to donate spare personal protective equipment to hospitals and medical facilities. Many have heeded the call.

Volunteers get organized

Twitter also has served as a platform for organizing volunteers. Nadia Khan, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, offered her expertise to hospitals and testing facilities in the region. By chance, she linked up with Alexandria Trujillo, a former pharmacologist who now works in science policy. Together, the two started collecting information from other qualified scientists in the area who were looking for a way to help.

“When we made the spreadsheet, I thought we would get maybe 10 people,” Trujillo says. Instead, they had over 100 responses in just two days. She and Khan are now working to connect the volunteers with institutes that need them; Khan started her first volunteer shift running diagnostics at Mount Sinai on 24 March.[…]