During the dark days of the Second World War, the Allies found they were losing unacceptable numbers of planes to radar directed guns and fighters. So they came up with a solution, called Window. It involved sending some bombers to drop thousands of aluminium strips to deceive and blind German radar. When the main force attacked, the enemy fighters had locked on to the window, or were utterly unable to “see” past it.
Deception is as old as war. Now, in the war against the corona virus, a team of researchers at Leicester University is going to try the same idea. By now, we all know the virus makes its entry by hooking on to the ACE-2 receptors in our cell membranes. Their idea is to flood the blood with proteins which will be even more attractive to the SARS-Cov-2 virus, making it go for these in preference.
The whole thing is described by Vanessa Chalmers in the Daily Mail, and so I post a link for you, gentle reader, below.
It’s early days yet, but it’s so nice to see someone thinking in a new but feasible way. The chief weapon of SARS-Cov- 2 is its reproduction rate. Ours is our intelligence.
#VanessaChalmers #Universityof Leicester #DecoyProtein #SARS-Cov-2
Learning, Science and Society 