James' World 2

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IN 2020, AMAZON turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213bn (£150bn), it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Group, America’s Costco, and every British retailer. Only Walmart, with more than half a trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon was by far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was more than just an online shop, however. Its huge businesses in areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media, and hardware added a further $172bn in sales.

At the heart of its success is a staggering $36 billion research and development budget in 2019, used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum leaves other companies – and many governments – behind. It is not far off the UK government’s annual budget for research and development. Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain – with annual sales in excess of £50 billion – had a research lab whose budget was in “six figures” in 2016.

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Nadav Kander

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Henning Jacobson, a 50-year-old minister, put his faith in his own liberty. Back in his native Sweden, he had suffered a bad reaction to a vaccine as an infant, struggling for years with an angry rash. Now he was an American citizen, serving as pastor of the Swedish Lutheran Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That gave him the full protections of the U.S. Constitution.

So when the Cambridge board of health decided that all adults must be vaccinated for smallpox, Jacobson sought refuge in the Constitution’s promise that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

The year was 1904, and when his politically charged legal challenge to the $5 fine for failing to get vaccinated made its way to the Supreme Court, the justices had a surprise for Rev. Jacobson. One man’s liberty, they declared in a 7-2 ruling handed down the following February, cannot deprive his neighbors of their own liberty — in this case by allowing the spread of disease. Jacobson, they ruled, must abide by the order of the Cambridge board of health or pay the penalty.

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Marti Head, Ph.D., had a bad feeling. It was mid-February of 2020. She’d just returned to her home in Tennessee from a work trip. Somewhere, probably in an airport, she’d picked up what she thought was just a cold.

Sure, physically she felt crappy. But the bad feeling, which she described as “itchy,” came from the news coming out of China. A career spent working with infectious diseases had given Head all the info she needed on what, exactly, the novel coronavirus might be capable of.

And so, when her nose started running and her throat got scratchy, Head quarantined herself and her husband. Instead of watching trashy TV in bed to recover, she tucked into her quarantine cocoon of a home office—with tissues and tea at hand—and started hunting.

Head is a drug hunter. A computational chemist by training, Head uses complex computer simulations to search for molecules that can gum up the gears of a virus hell-bent on infecting human cells. She focuses on therapeutics—the things doctors rely on to treat disease. Head spent decades at a major drug company searching for drugs that would combat diseases, including viruses like HIV. But in February of 2020, she was working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Moving to public sector meant Head had an obligation to find something, anything, that might serve the public good in this time of crisis. It also meant that she had access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

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Doug Strickland

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