Inside the High Stakes New Life of a Coronavirus Specialist

For years, ​Timothy Sheahan​ was an expert in a field you paid no attention to. Now, he's doing some of the most important work on the planet—racing around the clock to find a coronavirus cure.​​​​ Think your job has gotten strange in the past month?​ ​​Imagine being tasked with rescuing humanity from a pandemic.
The Secret Life of Coronavirus Experts What's it Feel Like When Your Scientific Speciality Suddenly Goes Viral
Illustration by Robert Vargas

For years, pressure has been his constant. The pressure to publish. The pressure of writing grants. The pressure of long days in the lab, long nights on his laptop. A specific, highly annoying kind of pressure, unique to his workplace, that comes from needing to pee in the middle of a six-hour experiment, which means stripping off a full Tyvek suit, two pairs of gloves, a hood connected to a respirator—a 10- to 15-minute decontamination procedure—while acknowledging that he once again miscalculated his morning coffee intake.

These were some of the daily pressures of life for Dr. Timothy Sheahan prior to the pandemic.

Now there is new pressure, a type of pressure few of us will experience: being one of a handful of experts in a rarefied field of study that’s suddenly in the mouth of every news anchor, politician, and ordinary citizen trapped inside their home, who are all hoping that some expert or scientist somewhere will discover a drug to battle the first virus to shut down the globalized world—and that expert, that scientist, is you.

Two weeks ago, I started asking Sheahan about that pressure. We’re around the same age, and I wanted to know what it felt like. Sheahan is a virologist in the Baric Lab at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health. A rising leader in coronavirus research, he specializes in trying to find vaccines and antibodies that fight them—which now puts him basically at the epicenter of science’s battle against the pandemic. Of course, everybody feels anxious at the moment. Wash your hands. Wash your groceries. Then again, we’re not all esteemed virologists. “Definitely there's a lot of pressure. I don't know,” Sheahan said resignedly in one of our first conversations. He added, “I’d always hoped that my kids would be interested in virology and be able to talk to me about it. This is such a crazy way for them to get to know what I do at work.”

Against the coronavirus, we have no weapons. There is not a single FDA-approved drug to prevent any of the human coronaviruses, or to handle coronavirus-associated diseases like Covid-19. It’s a nightmare. It’s a microbiology fever dream. And there happen to be very few people on Earth who stand a better chance than Sheahan of making the nightmare go away.


Coronaviruses originally were a chicken problem, a pain in the ass for poultry farmers. The first coronaviruses that bothered humans, OC43 and 229E, weren’t discovered until the 1960s, and were mainly associated with the common cold—i.e., no big deal. Now, in the past 20 years, five additional human coronaviruses have appeared, including SARS-CoV-2, a.k.a. “the coronavirus,” the source of our current pandemic.

Sheahan first became interested in coronaviruses around 2003, when the news was dominated by SARS, the coronavirus that infected nearly 10,000 people, mainly in China and Hong Kong. Around that time, Sheahan was in a band, playing shows in Boston while working as a lab technician at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital. Researching graduate schools, Sheahan learned about the Baric Lab. Few places can be said to be epicenters of virology; thanks to Ralph Baric, a veteran microbiologist, Chapel Hill, NC, is one of them.

Work in Baric’s center is divvied by contagion: nearly 30 scientists performing research on norovirus, flavivirus, and coronavirus, among others. Right away, Sheahan felt he’d found investigators of like mind. “Ralph's lab, historically, they're not run-of-the-mill kind of people. It's an odd, motley crew, kind of misfits in a way.”

At the moment, that crew is reduced. The building is blocked to outsiders. Scientists who work on anything but coronavirus have been sent home to avoid accidentally getting Sheahan and his lab partners sick. Additional security measures had been put in place; Sheahan was wary of discussing them on the record. Basically, it used to be that he and his colleagues worried about exposure to pathogens in the lab; now the virus they’re studying is potentially on supermarket shelves. “If we get sick, there's the potential for our direct contacts to be quarantined for 14 days, which might mean that some or all of the lab could be shut down,” he mentioned, darkly. “At this stage of the game, where every day we're doing things that have immediate translation to the public health effort, that would be really bad.”

That’s because one of the few glimmers of medical hope for a successful treatment has origins in Sheahan’s lab. Back in January, a 35-year-old man in Everett, Washington, was admitted to the hospital after becoming sick after visiting family in Wuhan, China. As his condition worsened, clinicians tried an antiviral therapy called remdesivir. Within a day of it being administered, the man’s health significantly improved: As documented in the New England Journal of Medicine, he showed better breathing, better appetite, and was generally asymptomatic, “aside from intermittent dry cough and rhinorrhea” (a.k.a., runny nose). Ten days after he was admitted, all symptoms had resolved except his cough, which was decreasing.

Finding breakthrough therapies has been the core of Sheahan and his colleagues’ work. For years, the focus has been on creating vaccines and drugs that work against not only known coronaviruses, but ones yet to emerge. One subject of study, done in collaboration with colleagues at Vanderbilt and also Gilead Sciences, a biotech company, was the drug remdesivir. Remdesivir was used as a potential antiviral on patients with the Ebola virus. What Sheahan and his colleagues found is that the drug has a unique ability to inhibit virus replication and not just in coronaviruses—a discovery that would lay the groundwork for its potential use today to combat Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. “The goal was, can we help identify drugs for these maybe underappreciated viral pathogens, which may not be a huge problem in the United States now, but we may have a coronavirus problem in the United States in the future,” Sheahan said. “And look where we are today.”

From the Washington patient, the CDC was able to isolate the virus, grow it in Atlanta, and ship it out to a select group of labs that perform coronavirus research under high containment. Sheahan and company received their batch in early February. They immediately began growing their own versions to test not just remdesivir but other drugs, antibodies, candidates for vaccines. The work was endless; it remains endless. The extreme gravity took hold of everyone, Sheahan said. Working with deadly pathogens had always required a certain amount of focus—but now their experiments could have an immediate impact on public health. At the same time, science was operating faster and faster. Research papers that normally took months to be accepted, reviewed, finally published, might appear in little over a week. Clinical trials were getting set up in days, not years.

“This is not just fixing a plane while it’s flying—it’s fixing a plane that’s flying while its blueprints are still being drawn," Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of Science, wrote in a recent editorial. And yet, Thorp told me, our best response still comes down to a humble scenario: humans vigilantly collaborating on experiments. “In the end you can't solve these biological problems unless there's somebody in a lab holding the pipette,” Thorp said. “And making sure that those people can continue to do that is critically important.”

Drug development is not a hasty or simple process. At the same time, the entire country, nearly the entire planet, is experiencing widespread infection and death; a proven therapy could not only fight the disease but inspire millions. “I've never been so busy in my whole life,” Sheahan told me one evening. He sounded exhausted. I thought, from fixing a plane while it’s flying? The United States’s lack of preparedness deeply saddened him. For all of his awareness, Sheahan still never pictured a pandemic here on this scale. Sometimes he’ll post a photo on Instagram, something normal, and friends will joke, What the hell? Shouldn’t you be saving humanity? “I've never had my work be so urgent,” he confessed.


In 2006, the then U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, remarked, “Anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.” In our conversations, Sheahan was consistently self-effacing, easy with a laugh, quick to give credit to Baric, his mentor, or his colleagues at UNC, Vanderbilt, and Emory. All of which made sense. Science is a team sport. Hundreds of different studies are testing treatments. At the same time, Sheahan and his colleagues have a big head start. One afternoon last week, I checked Twitter and saw a tweet from Sheahan. He was the lead author on a paper about another drug he and his colleagues had been testing, called EIDD-2801, to show how it “works” against multiple coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. “Amazingly, [Sheahan] is positioned to have moved two drugs forward toward human testing in this current pandemic,” said Mark Denison, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation. “That is astronomical in its speed and importance.”

Sheahan and I emailed that night. I wondered: This discovery seemed like a major achievement, was that right? And what came next? “We go back to the drawing board and keep testing other drugs, antibodies, and vaccines,” Sheahan wrote back. “We will always need more in the event that remdesivir and EIDD-2801 fail. In addition, we must be more prepared for SARS-CoV-3!”

It honestly sank my heart to read that: SARS-CoV-3.

Because there’s the rub. There will always be another pandemic. Along the way, the scientific method offers few assurances. Experiments go sideways. Drugs that work on mice or monkeys may not perform as well in humans. Remdesivir is being tested in multiple clinical trials in the United States and abroad—randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials with sick humans: the gold standard—but even then, if the drug proves effective, it’s still a long way from reaching the market. Sheahan’s other drug, EIDD-2801, doesn’t enter patient trials until sometime in the next few months.

I asked Sheahan at one point what gives him hope. “I'm hopeful that this experience will change how we do things on a grand scale. Such that when we do get graded on this, it's actually a legit grade and we can respond better and faster than we have in the past.”

Seven days a week, Sheahan performs his job. He drinks five sips of iced coffee, suits up, and spends hours running experiments. At night, post-decontamination, he writes papers while listening to heavy metal. If anything, the lab has become a comfort zone, a place to escape the coronavirus, oddly enough. “It's almost meditative because there's no natural light—you just go in there and you're so focused,” he said. “It's such a comfortable place to be that you lose track of what's happening in the outside world.”

For remdesivir, the first results from a pair of trials being conducted in China are expected as early as this month. It’s possible the trial will produce positive results, negative results, results that are more mixed—there’s no way of knowing. Gilead has ramped up production just in case. In fact, a study published on Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine about a small group of patients who received the drug through so-called “compassionate use” requests—not as rigorous as a double-blind placebo-controlled trial—found that two-thirds showed improvement. Encouraging results, but the situation remains wait-and-see. In the meantime, for me, for you, for a misfit group of virologists, the world will continue to feel like science fiction. On Sheahan’s office wall is a framed Shepard Fairey poster for the punk supergroup OFF! The poster depicts a UFO hovering over Earth. In capital letters, white on red, is a simple message: YOU WILL DO WHAT WE SAY.

Science, if we weren’t listening before, we’re listening now.

Rosecrans Baldwin is a frequent contributor to GQ and is at work on a book about Los Angeles County, to be published by MCD x Farrar, Straus and Giroux.