Forty years with coronaviruses

Weiss, Susan R.

A virulent new coronavirus is currently holding hostage much of the human population worldwide. This virus, SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 disease, emerged in China from bats into a presumed intermediate species and then into humans. It then spread around the globe with ongoing devastating effects. This round of human coronavirus disease follows the appearance of the related lethal coronaviruses, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, in 2002 and 2012 respectively. The emergence of SARS-CoV was the first time the general public, as well as many scientists, became aware of this group of viruses and its potential to cause lethal infections in humans. Indeed, each one of these events has instigated an influx of researchers into this field. However, there is a long history of coronavirus research, starting as early as the 1930s, that has built a large knowledge base as well as technical tools for investigating these human pathogens. As someone who has worked with this group of viruses since the end of my postdoctoral period in the late 1970s until the present, I want to review some of the major findings over the last 40 yr in the field, summarized in Fig. 1 , and point out how they are relevant to the current coronavirus outbreak.