Description: Virology-related and hopefully educational posts for people in the field or learning about it
In August 2019, Kattie Washington of Elsevier’s Cambridge MA office wrote to me to inform me that Alan J Cann had declined to develop the 7th Edition of his long-running franchise, and had suggested that I revise it instead. This was most unexpected and a signal honour, as I was of the opinion since the 1st Edition (in 1993) that this was the first Virology textbook that organised things they way I had in my lectures since the early 1980s – that is, he described viruses and how they work in a comparative wa
I was getting along quite well by early 2020, and I see Elsevier had even put up a pre-order page promising publication by June 2021: this of course did not happen, for a number of reasons – chief among which were that The Good Wife and I were running the Virology Africa Conference in February 2020 in Cape Town, that the COVID-19 pandemic was declared shortly thereafter, and that I unexpectedly became Head of our Molecular and Cell Biology Department in mid-2020. Accordingly, I ended up during a hard lockdo
Oh, I battled on when I had time, but that was in short supply until I thankfully reached the end of my sentence – pardon, HoD tenure – in December 2021, at which point I dived back in.