Inside The Covid-19 Lab With A Molecular Biologist

Oliver de Peyer is a molecular biologist working for the UK’s hospital services as part of the NHS Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital. With a PhD in molecular biology, de Peyer is one of the army of many hundreds of professional specialists working to provide testing, vaccines and antidotes to tackle the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. So what’s it like to be in the lab, handling the test tubes and working in a medical facility so close to people suffering from the disease?

Explaining why he wanted to get into the molecular biology ‘business’ in the first place, de Peyer says that his interest started while doing an astronomy evening course at a local college. He saw a poster on the wall about genetically modified algae digesting oil spills and remembers being fascinated by the whole idea. He then went on to study biochemistry at Oxford University. He has subsequently worked at NASA researching astrobiology and during his PhD, he created GM tobacco plants that produced a cow eye protein.

Inside the Covid-19 lab

So what does he actually do now, in the Covid-19 lab?

“It’s a fast-paced working environment built around two shifts – so you either end up getting up at the crack of dawn, or getting home well after dark. The lab is crowded and bustling – there’s no social distancing. We work non-stop to process patient samples, render them safe, extract the viral genetic material and then put it through a variety of different tests to see if Covid-19 is present. Then we get the medical staff to sign off the results and they then go up on a big flatscreen display. There is a moment of anticipation as we wait for the screen to update… and then a sombre moment as you see the real human cost: one person of a particular age = positive; the next person = negative… and so on,” said de Peyer.

Thinking about the emotional impact of handling actual Covid-19 patient samples, de Peyer notes that the lab operates on strict rules known as Biosafety Level 3 when actually opening and ‘decanting’ the patient samples. “It is safe when done properly but still deeply chastening, a bit like handling explosives I suppose,” he said.

Speed of testing factor

In terms of how his lab compares to testing being carried out elsewhere, the NHS Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital operation is much faster than the work being carried out in the UK’s big Lighthouse Labs Network project, which has received a lot of press and coverage in the UK government’s daily televised briefings from ministers and specialists.

“The reason we are faster is that we assembled a big team of PhD-level volunteers who had a wide range of expertise – including someone who knew about something a LAMP assay machine, a piece of kit more widely used in veterinary research. The team leader Stephen Kidd turned on a dime and quickly worked up a LAMP test for Covid-19, which is much faster. We’re the national pilot for this and we’re also rolling out testing all around the local area,” said de Peyer.

Asked about the special moments in the lab that most stick in the mind as result of his work, de Peyer calls out the several occasions when some of his colleagues have posted notes and updates about their work on social media. The team has seen some very high viral levels in some patients, so the medical opinion is that these people must surely infect everybody around them. They say that this part of the work really brings it home and has made it clear just how much infection is out there, even though it’s sometimes invisible – not all these patients even have symptoms.

Life after the lab: photo-realistic dreams

So can de Peyer switch off okay after leaving the lab to come home? He says that they obviously clean and disinfect themselves and don’t carry a bag full of Covid-19 samples around on the way home via the supermarket.

“But most of us (including me) are having intense photo-realistic dreams of being in the lab. Our brains really seem to be processing away all these experiences and dreaming about lab time (in full color!) has become a natural part of life at the moment,” he said.

In terms of whether the lockdown easing measures in the UK (and indeed around the world) have ‘followed the science’ closely enough and been clinically and mathematically accurate, does de Peyer think that ultimately been an inevitable amount of guesswork in most countries?

“Quarantine can never be too strict, only not strict enough. Ultimately it is a political decision – how strict are you going to be. If you are really, really strict and start early – and I can think of a few examples around the world – then the quarantine works even better and it is all over more quickly. I think the mathematical models have been fairly accurate, but it is what you do with them – that’s the politics. Some governments had the intelligence to grasp the fact that they had to go much further much earlier on. Personally, I keep seeing the really infectious patient samples in the lab, with my own eyes and I feel it is way too early to ease anything as of June 2020. You could call it my professional gut instinct,” said de Peyer.

Life in the new normal?

Bill Gates famously predicted another Ebola in his TED talk of March 2015, aside from a second peak of Covid-19, does de Peyer think the clock is already ticking on the next Covid-19 contagion?

“Yes – in the lab we have a machine called a Biofire which can test for many different types of disease at once – it can test for SARS for instance and MERS and both of those were Coronavirus outbreaks. It’s like a rogues’ gallery of serious Coronaviruses and other diseases and it really drives home that these pathogens are out there – biding their time. Soon no doubt Covid-19 will be on the list as well – for sentinels in the testing labs around the world, always double checking the odd, unusually ill patient for the next outbreak – or for something new altogether,” he said.

Looking ahead then, de Peyer is obviously a molecular biologist, not a politician or a behavioral psychologist… but regardless, does he think we humans be better at handling pandemics after all this?

His opinion is that hopefully it will be a rude shock to us all in terms of educating us as to what a pandemic is really like.

“How quickly we forgot. My mother’s village had a smallpox outbreak when she was a child in the 1950s, for instance. Quarantine is a very old word going back to the fifteenth century... and quarantine laws have been on the statute books for hundreds of years. We had to dust them off and reacquaint ourselves with them again this time, and no doubt it will happen again in our lifetimes,” concluded de Peyer.