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The Seattle area, where I live, has become something of a hub for the study of infectious diseases. The University of Washington has an excellent global health department and one of the best medical schools in the country. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which I mentioned in Chapter 1, provides detailed statistics and computer models to governments around the world. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, though focused primarily on cancer, is also home to top experts in infectious diseases. (It's high-profile enough that it's known around town simply as Fred Hutch.) PATH is a leading nonprofit dedicated to making sure that innovations in health reach the world's poorest people. Put so many intelligent people who are passionate about the same field into one city, and they are practically guaranteed to start kicking around ideas. Over the past few decades, Seattle has become home to a thriving, informal network of researchers who exchange ideas within and across institutions. It was through this network that, over the summer of 2018, a handful of people in genomics and infectious diseases came to a joint realization. Although they represented different institutions--the Fred Hutchinson center, the Gates Foundation, and another group called the Institute for Disease Modeling*--they were all worrying about the same problem: outbreaks of respiratory viruses. These outbreaks kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and are the most likely culprits for a pandemic, but the field needed to learn a lot more about how they move through communities. And the tools at scientists' disposal were, at best, limited. For example, researchers have access to case counts from hospitals and clinics, but those statistics represent only a small share of the total. The Seattle scientists talked about how they needed to know much more before they could understand how a virus like influenza spreads * The Institute for Disease Modeling is now part of the Gates Foundation.