Jon Cohen, a staff writer at Science magazine, had been interested in universal flu vaccines before the pandemic began. So, when SARS-CoV-2 came along, he naturally became interested in universal coronavirus vaccines.
“That’s what initially piqued my interest in the other coronaviruses,” he said.
Four years and many, many conversations (and pitches) later, that kernel turned into “Covid’s Cold Cousins” at Science. He talked with me about how the story began and developed.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What was the genesis of this story?
I have been collecting string for a long time on common cold coronaviruses because, prior to the pandemic, I never thought about them. And when I started to learn about them, I was fascinated by their history and how the field didn’t exist until 1967. There was no word “coronavirus.” Then that just got me interested in the question of what happened and who did what and when. Then I became fascinated by the question of how they interact with SARS-CoV-2. When I started to look around at the discovery of the four human cold-causing coronaviruses, I found people who had been involved in the discovery of three of them, and that astonished me.
To the credit of my editors, they saw this as an interesting story, particularly if I could find evidence that it actually mattered, and there was a lot of evidence that it mattered in terms of our response to SARS-CoV-2.
How long did you work on this story?
I became interested in coronavirus evolution [looking at his notes] January 9, 2020. That was when the seed was planted. As soon as this coronavirus surfaced, I wanted to understand coronaviruses on a deeper level. I pitched the story several times — I kept threatening to do it, and it became kind of a running joke. The formal pitch is dated Oct. 31, 2023, but that’s pretty far down the road, and I certainly had been discussing it prior.
How did you begin your research process?
I went back to the oldest references I could find and read all these studies from the early 1960s. It was really easy to read everything because there’s not that much of it. It was a bit hard to figure out how things connected because names changed; they weren’t called coronaviruses.
There were all these characters involved who are not famous scientists today, and they made major discoveries, and several of them were women. I mean, one of them was a woman who was the greatest electron microscopist (June Almeida) and didn’t have a college degree.
Then there was Dorothy Hamre, who was nowhere near as renowned as David Tyrrell, who was head of the common cold unit and received a tremendous number of accolades for his work, and they ran the same types of studies and made the same discoveries. So, I was interested in celebrating unknown, successful researchers who deserve attention.
How did you decide to go with the lead that you used?
My first draft started with a different lead about a meeting being organized about coronaviruses in 2003, but my editors said, “That’s interesting. It’s not the lead.” I had the influenza of 1889-1894 buried, and my editor said, “This is dramatic. Go there; it makes the point that you’re really trying to get at, which is raising the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 is going to change into something else over time that isn’t as damaging and devastating.” So I thought my editor made a good call on that.
I strongly feel that my editors make me look smarter than I truly am. The editing process is a wrestling match, there’s a lot of back and forth and honest debate and discussion, and it can be emotional. But at the end of the day, we’re both trying to serve a reader, and I fortunately work with really smart people at Science who often see things that I’m too thick-headed to see. Part of it also is that there is no right way to tell a story. It’s not as though we’re doing math and you either get it right or you get it wrong. Storytelling is exciting because of its plasticity and because different people approach it in unique ways.
You interviewed a lot of people here. How did you decide who to interview and when you had spoken to enough people?
My MO in journalism is to overreport. I had an editor who told me this saying he had heard that “Journalism would be a great job if you never had to write.” I love interviewing people who are passionate about this subject, so I just tried to talk to everyone, and I asked people I interviewed who else I should speak with.
I sometimes get in trouble from my overreporting because of deadlines, and because of having too much information that isn’t really needed to tell the story. I think one of the dangers of interviewing too many people is you do develop a feeling like, they gave me a lot of their time, so you have to include all these different thoughts.The truth is, the editor comes along and couldn’t care less. “Does this add to the story you’re trying to tell or not?”
You have a lot of history here. How did you pull it all together?
I made a timeline of everything to keep it all straight, and I kept getting confused and going back to my timeline. With a lot of journalism, the first thing in a feature story that gets cut is the history. There is a ton of stuff that didn’t make it into this story. I certainly have more of an appetite for going in depth, into the history, than every editor I work with, and that’s okay with me. When it gets cut out, I still feel like I got it off of my chest. It’s out of my head.
If another reporter wanted to embark on a story like this, looking at the history of understanding a particular disease or group of viruses, or even a broader story that has a lot of different rabbit holes, what advice would you give them?
A lot of stories that involve the history of science, the challenge is that the old literature often references things that changed names. For example, there’s a lot of literature about “fowl plague” and epidemics of fowl plague. At one point in the 1920s, it led New York to prohibit any poultry coming into the city. It was an avian influenza — now we know that — but it wasn’t called that. So when you’re doing that kind of research, you have to keep your mind open to the idea that they’re talking about exactly what you’re interested in, but it went by a different name. That’s true of the names of cells, for example, that can change.
The other thing that’s fun for me is understanding how many people got it wrong. When you look at the early coronavirus stuff, there are all sorts of people who got it wrong. That’s part of the glory, figuring out the mistakes that people make in real time trying to understand nature and the mysteries of things that you can’t see with your plain eye. That’s fascinating.
And, I love trying to find the patterns. They’re not always obvious. That’s the other thing that I think is a real challenge, but a real joy, is figuring out, how do you connect dots? The easiest type of science journalism is having a new research paper in a prominent journal and writing a story about it. Those are important — I’m not downplaying their importance — but it’s handed to you on a platter: Talk to the authors, get outside sources to comment on it, figure out the science, translate it into plain English, find a clever way to get in, find a nice way to get out that reflects something about the beginning or that somehow gives you a future quote, that’s your story.
But if you’re going for a real challenging feature story, none of that applies at all. It becomes a real challenge to connect dots that haven’t been connected before. That’s the joy of it. That’s what makes the story original and enterprising and exciting to put together because it hasn’t been done before.
