Two things interfere with DeRisi’s ability to solve the nation’s biggest problem. The first is that U.S. hospitals are either contractually obliged or habitually inclined to send tests to the for-profit labs, and the for-profit labs aren’t moving fast enough. The tests that arrive each morning and evening at the Biohub’s nonprofit lab come from the UCSF hospital down the street or public health clinics in surrounding counties. These clinics are places of last resort for people without health insurance, but they now offer the fastest and most reliable coronavirus tests.

But the bigger problem is the scarcity of testing kits, for both rich and poor. Actually that’s not quite right. If you roll into a hospital parking lot with a dry cough and a fever and ask to be tested and they say, “Sorry, we have no testing kits,” what they likely mean is “We have no nasal swabs.” The long translucent sticks that can be inserted deep into the nasal passage, and offer the only reliable, safe method to obtain a sample of the virus, were manufactured in a single factory in Northern Italy. The virus crippled the factory, and other countries moved faster than the U.S. to soak up the nasal swabs on the market. “It’s the one thing if I could go back in time and change I would,” says DeRisi. “I wish I had bought 100,000 swabs. It was not on my radar. It was not a thing I thought would be a limiting factor in life.”

When he said this, he was leaning back in a chair in a room down the hall from his new lab, filled with a dozen exhausted volunteers. Like DeRisi, the students were mostly infectious disease researchers, and so I took it as an opportunity to ask actual experts a bunch of seemingly relevant questions.

“What comes first, a treatment or a vaccine?” I ask.

Every one of them thought a treatment. “Coronavirus vaccines are tricky,” says DeRisi. “We still don’t have one for the common cold.”

“How many of you are worried about getting the virus yourself?” I ask. They were all in their 20s and, I assumed, more or less immortal. Every hand in the room went up. Some already knew a person their age who had died from it.

“It’s starting to knock off people who matter to us personally,” one says.

More to the point: None of them knew why some people walked around never knowing they had the virus, while other people were killed by it. The knowledge simply didn’t exist.

“It feels like a roll of the dice,” another of the young scientists adds. “But it’s a nasty roll of the dice.”

Maybe hoping to cheer everyone up, DeRisi pointed out just how much worse the situation could be. “If the virus had a higher fatality rate we might be looking at societal collapse,” says DeRisi. “What if it was worse in kids? Would I be here? Or would I be looking for a cabin somewhere?”