By Prof. Victor Chukwuma
“On a day-to-day basis, scientific research deals mostly with small problems. You are faced with some intriguing fact or observation that tickles your curiosity. Thinking about it, you let your imagination run, using all available clues, all the bits of relevant knowledge you happen to have in store, trying to come up with some plausible explanation.
“This is the truly creative part of scientific activity, what it has in common with the arts. But it is only the first step. Then, comes the hard job of confronting the hypothesis with facts. Does it fit with all observations? And, especially in the experimental sciences, how can you best test its validity? Not by trying to prove it right, incidentally, but by doing your best to prove it wrong- and failing.”
– Prof Christian de Duve, Winner, Nobel Prize, Medicine, 1974
In my mind, there is hope on finding a cure for the COVID-19. In this respect, I want to rely on Prof Christian de Duve to state that given that COVID-19 stays up to four days outside a living host, it is not a “moving target,” and as such, it could be isolated, and all that is required is to find the solution is creativity.
Creativity in defining the problem, and describing its solution in a way that makes it understandable and amenable to a scientific investigation.
However, at the heart of this creativity is a distinction between a true and a pseudo-virus.