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.”