One of the many benefits of sharing data publicly is increasing the speed of scientific discovery. We are witnessing that benefit in action in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
An article published in The Washington Post detailed the timeline from the illness first being reported to the time the virus’ DNA sequence was available on the NIH genetic sequence database, GenBank, which allowed scientists all over the world to begin to analyze the virus’s DNA sequence. It is estimated that vaccines could be tested in humans as early as three months from the time the genome was first sequenced. This would be 17 months faster than it took to test vaccines for the SARS outbreak in 2002.
Learn more about COVID-19 virus resources in our recent Becker Blog post.
Visit Becker Library’s Data Management and Sharing webpage to learn more about data sharing.