Jennifer Doudna at work in her lab at UC Berkeley. —Photo by Robert Durell

As word spread around the globe in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2020, that biochemist Jennifer Doudna ’85 had just been awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, the honoree herself was sound asleep.

“It’s a little bit embarrassing,” she admitted at a press conference later that morning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a professor of biochemistry. Even though—or perhaps because—she had been short-listed for the award by various prognosticators for several years, Doudna hadn’t given the impending announcement so much as a thought when she’d gone to bed that evening. She had even silenced her phone.

“I was awakened just before 3 a.m.,” she added. “My phone was buzzing, and for some reason, it finally woke me up because it turns out it had been buzzing before that, and I hadn’t heard it. But anyway, I picked up the phone and it was Heidi Ledford from Nature magazine, who is a reporter who I know, and she wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel. And I said, ‘Well, who won it?’”

The answer to that question may have surprised Doudna, but it came as a shock to just about no one else in the world of science. In the eight years since she and her research collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier—with whom she shares the 2020 award—first described the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9, their discovery has taken the world of biological, agricultural and medical research by storm. It has transformed genome editing from a complex, costly, time-consuming and imprecise endeavor into something that can be done with speed, economy and relative precision in just about any modestly equipped research lab in the world. By giving scientists everywhere—in the words of the Nobel committee—“a tool for rewriting the code of life,” Doudna and Charpentier have unleashed a flood of promising new science in everything from agriculture to cancer research, from faster COVID-19 tests to potential cures for such genetic diseases as sickle cell anemia.

By that day in early October, the two chemists had already received just about every other international science award possible, including the $3 million Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the Princess of Asturias Technical and Scientific Research Award, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Tang Prize, the Japan Prize, the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Harvey Prize in Human Health and the Wolf Prize in Medicine.

The Nobel Prize came as a giant exclamation point on the end of that list, ensuring that the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 will be remembered as one of the most significant in the history of science.

And if that sounds like hyperbole, check out this statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: “Since Charpentier and Doudna discovered the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors in 2012, their use has exploded. This tool has contributed to many important discoveries in basic research, and plant researchers have been able to develop crops that withstand mould, pests and drought. In medicine, clinical trials of new cancer therapies are underway, and the dream of being able to cure inherited diseases is about to come true. These genetic scissors have taken the life sciences into a new epoch and, in many ways, are bringing the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Jennifer Doudna (right) and Emmanuelle Charpentier receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research from Spain’s King Felipe VI at a ceremony in Oviedo, Spain, in 2015. —AP Photo/Jose Vicente

The Formation of a Nobel Laureate

Growing up on Hawaii’s Big Island, where her father was a professor of English literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Doudna fell in love with nature early on. But hers wasn’t the poetic love of a romantic—it was the analytical love of a budding scientist.

“Father’s big disappointment was I didn’t become a literature guru of some kind,” she said with a laugh. “It’s one of those funny things. It’s just who I am.”

For instance, during the energy crisis of the 1970s, Doudna spent long hours in the school library researching alternative forms of energy, such as geothermal. “I was just always fascinated by science and technology solutions to problems that we face in the world—and never imagined that I would become a scientist until I think I was maybe in 10th grade in high school, when we had a lecture series by people around the state of Hawaii who were professional scientists. A number of really fascinating people came through—marine biologists, volcanologists, astronomers—but the one that really caught my attention was somebody who was working on cancer biology.”

As the researcher talked about her path to becoming a biochemist, Doudna says she felt a light go on. “I thought, ‘That is exactly what I want to do. That sounds so interesting and so fun. I can’t imagine anything more interesting than that.’ That’s why I actually went to Pomona, right? I started thinking, ‘I want to be a biochemist.’ In those days—this is in the late ’70s, I guess, early ’80s, right around 1980—there were not very many undergraduate colleges that had a focus or even a class in biochemistry, much less a major.”

At Pomona, professors like Fred Grieman, who taught the yearlong physical chemistry sequence for seniors, and Sharon Panasenko, who had just been hired to teach biochemistry, would become the first of a series of key mentors who would help shape Doudna’s career. “Mentors are critical,” Doudna told UC Berkeley’s California Magazine. “And fortunately for me, I’ve worked with absolutely outstanding scientists at every stage of my career.”

What set Doudna apart, Grieman recalled, “was her excitement and joy about learning everything.” At times, he said, students can be put off by the challenging nature of chemistry. Not Doudna. “She really enjoyed the rigor and the excitement of learning something that was that difficult—but also something that she could apply later.”

Panasenko—now Sharon Muldoon—has long since retired, but she retains fond memories of Doudna as a junior in her biochemistry class, preparing to enter what was then an intimidatingly male-dominated field. “Most of the students were going to medical school,” she said in a 2017 interview. “Jennifer was one of the few who were interested in a research career, so we talked a lot about it.”Muldoon was so impressed by the young Doudna that she invited her to work in her research lab, studying the bacterial communication systems that permit organisms like Myxococcus xanthus to self-organize into colonial forms. “She really showed a tremendous amount of aptitude and talent for lab work, which certainly helps if you’re going into a research career.”

Doudna remembers being astounded to have been chosen to work in Muldoon’s lab in the first place. “I got this opportunity to work with her over the summer, and really work with her,” she recalled. It wasn’t just that she threw something over the fence and said, ‘Come back in 10 weeks when you’re done.’ It was every day, going in and planning out experiments with her, and it was just the most amazing thing.”

Doudna still cites her Pomona education as a key ingredient in her success. “I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly,” she said, “because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come in contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona.”

After Pomona, she earned her doctorate at Harvard under the supervision of geneticist Jack Szostak, who later won the Nobel Prize in medicine. It was under his tutelage that she began working with ribonucleic acid (RNA), the biochemical cousin of DNA, which she has continued to study throughout her career. She then did a postgraduate fellowship with another Nobel laureate, chemist Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and went on to teach at Yale University. In 2002 she returned to California as a professor at UC Berkeley, where she now holds the titles of professor of chemistry, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences.

A former member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees, Doudna has been back to campus many times since graduating. Most notably, she returned in 2009 as the featured speaker for the Robbins Lectureship, which has brought to campus a veritable who’s-who of the world’s preeminent chemists, including a number of Nobel winners. The news that Doudna would be joining that exalted group of laureates—becoming the first graduate of Pomona College ever to receive a Nobel Prize—was met throughout the college community with an outpouring of Sagehen pride.

“Jennifer Doudna’s revolutionary research in gene editing and her thoughtful consideration of its implications hold the potential to change the lives of countless people around the globe,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. “We are so proud that she  received her undergraduate education at Pomona College and that she continues to engage in the life of our community. Her sense of discovery, her commitment to rigorous work and her willingness to reflect on its meaning embody some of the highest values of the College.”

Early on Nov. 7, Jennifer Doudna sits on her patio, taking congratulatory calls. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

The Aha Moment

It’s hard to say where the road to discovery begins, but a conference of the American Society of Microbiology in Puerto Rico in the spring of 2011 is as good a starting point as any. That’s where Doudna, a biochemist specializing in the study of RNA, met Charpentier, a French microbiologist studying how bacteria cause disease.

Both, as it turned out, were intrigued by a type of genetic sequence in bacteria known as CRISPR—which stands for “clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeat.” These odd DNA sequences play a key role in a bacterium’s first line of defense against viruses by allowing it to recognize and cut up viral DNA. Charpentier had already demonstrated that RNA played a key role in that process, so it made sense for her to ask RNA expert Doudna if she’d like to team up. Doudna, impressed by Charpentier’s passion for her work, immediately said yes.

“We decided there to start working together on one particular element in the CRISPR pathway, a protein called CRISPR-Cas9 that, at the time, was clearly important for protecting bacteria from virus infection, but nobody knew how it worked,” Doudna explained. “And so that was the question we set out to investigate.”

Working with Doudna’s postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Martin Jinek, and Charpentier’s research student, Krzys Chylinski, they began to do experiments. One discovery led to another, and Doudna still remembers the aha moment when she realized how important CRISPR-Cas9 could be.

“Martin Jinek in the lab had done experiments showing that not only could we control the DNA sequence where Cas9 would make its cut in the double helix, but also that we could engineer it to be a simpler system than what has been done in nature,” she recalled. “And I think—you know, I remember that moment very, very clearly—that Martin Jinek was in my office, and we were talking about his data. And we looked at each other, and we realized that this could be an extraordinary tool in other kinds of cells because of its ability to trigger DNA repair, and thereby to trigger genome editing. And that really set us on a course that has been just amazing over the last eight years after publishing that original work in 2012.”

That first article, published in the summer of 2012 in the journal Science, one of the world’s foremost scientific publications, exploded onto the scientific scene like a Fourth of July rocket. Within a year and a half, labs around the world had confirmed that CRISPR-Cas9 was a truly revolutionary discovery. As Adam Rogers ’92 wrote in his 2015 article about Doudna and her discovery for PCM, “Not only was CRISPR a quick-and-easy way to edit a genome as easily as Word edits a magazine article, but it worked in just about every living thing—yeast, zebrafish, mice, stem cells, in-vitro tissue cultures and even cells from human beings.”

That’s what you call revolutionary. But as Doudna would soon discover, it can be just as hard to rein in a revolution as it is to start one.

Later that morning, Doudna sits in a studio at UC Berkeley taking Zoom questions from reporters around the world. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

The Accidental Ethicist

It’s easy to see the almost infinite possibilities for important and beneficial science embodied in the CRISPR revolution. The most compelling of these for Doudna is the potential for curing a range of terrible genetic diseases.

“When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, which is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then they suffer from it for many years with sort of progressive loss of neurological function,” she recalled in an interview for PCM. “And so being aware of that gene-mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that now there was this technology that, in principle, will allow correction of that kind of mutation is really a profound thought.”

However, there’s another side to the CRISPR revolution that Doudna hadn’t anticipated.

Previously, the two preferred techniques for gene editing—“zinc-finger nucleases” and “TALEN”—required the creation of custom-engineered proteins that were challenging to make and difficult to use. Buying one could set you back $25,000. Quite simply, the state of the art acted as a brake on the ambitions of aspiring gene editors everywhere.

Enter CRISPR. Today, a starter kit for using this relatively simple and precise technique costs about $65, plus shipping. Suddenly scientists all over the world have the tools in their hands to rewrite any gene they wish, pretty much at will.

What could possibly go wrong?

“People are people,” Doudna said in a recent interview. “If you have a powerful tool, there is some type of person that wants to use it for whatever—anything, right? Anything that can be done should be done. I think that CRISPR’s been no exception to that. What we’ve seen with CRISPR over the last few years is that there are a couple of things that’ve been done with CRISPR that are clearly, I think, irresponsible and shouldn’t be done. One of them, probably the one that got the most attention, was CRISPR babies.”

What she’s referring to is Chinese researcher He Jiankui’s announcement in 2018 of the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had altered in vitro using CRISPR. This shocking bit of news ratcheted up the ethical debate around the use of CRISPR and, a year later, landed the researcher himself in prison, with a three-year sentence for “illegal medical practices.”

Doudna’s reaction to all of this was clear: “Using CRISPR to change the genetics of human embryos, not for research but for actual implantation and to create a pregnancy—I think that clearly is something that just, at least right now, shouldn’t happen, because the technology isn’t ready, and we’re not ready, right? Society isn’t ready for that.”

But where should the lines be drawn?

Long before He’s ill-fated foray into designer babies, Doudna had decided that her personal responsibility in these matters went far beyond simply publishing her work. “I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because things were moving so quickly that the ethical discussions needed to get going very fast.”

In 2015 Doudna organized a meeting of top biologists to discuss these issues and became the lead author of their report—also published in Science—calling for a moratorium on the use of CRISPR to edit the human genome in heritable ways. Her concerns also helped shape the book she was working on at about the same time. A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, published in 2017, wasn’t just the story of a groundbreaking discovery and its potential benefits—it was also an exploration of the ethical dilemmas involved in controlling irresponsible use of that breakthrough.

“What I worry about the most,” she explained, “is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might harm people—because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that can be a very healthy drive in science, or in anything. In human endeavors, you know, people are competitive, and they want to move ahead with things and move ahead with ideas. I think it can also lead to problems, and in this case, I really hope that there’s a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology or ahead of the ethical debate.”

Doudna raises a glass of champagne as she celebrates with her research team. —Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

Of Patents and Pandemics

From the start, one key question has remained unanswered, and even now, eight years later, it still hangs in the legal balance.

Who owns CRISPR?

In a world where seemingly every scientific breakthrough gets monetized, that’s a very important question. Over the past few years, the competition for the legal rights to this revolutionary technology has pitted two main camps against each other in a series of courtroom battles. On one side is a group known as CVC, led by UC Berkeley and based on the work of Doudna and Charpentier. On the other is the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), based on the work of MIT researcher Feng Zhang, who published his own work on CRISPR seven months after Doudna and Charpentier, but with one key addition—evidence that it could be used to alter genes inside eukaryotic cells, the kind that make up all plants and animals.

Though Doudna and Charpentier were the first to publish about CRISPR-Cas9, Zhang’s team was the first to obtain a patent. Since then, competing claims have been caught up in the byzantine complexities of patent law, as adjudicated by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which has seemed to try the Solomonic approach, cutting the CRISPR baby in half and granting each side a piece of the action. This has left a rather confusing dividing line between the two claims while leaving the door open to further challenges. As a result, it’s still hard to say exactly who owns what.

In the meantime, startups galore have taken CRISPR and run, doing science that has the potential to improve people’s lives while banking on future profits. Doudna herself is the founder or co-founder of four startups now focusing on areas of research ranging from diagnostic tests to gene therapies. Other firms are trying to use CRISPR to detect genetic mutations, create customized plants and even grow human-compatible organs inside pigs.

So it’s no surprise that CRISPR is already playing an important role in COVID-19 research.

Way back in March, Doudna pivoted in her work to seeking ways to play a constructive role in bringing the pandemic to heel. “When it was clear that we were facing a global emergency with this pandemic back in the early part of this year,” she explained, “many of us asked ourselves, ‘What could or should we be doing to use our own expertise in this time of real need?’”

Her immediate answer was to start a clinical testing lab for the virus through the Innovative Genomics Institute, where she is president and board chair. “We also raised quite a bit of donor support for this,” she noted. “Because of that, we’ve been able to offer this test for free to many people in the East Bay Area of California, where quite frankly, many of those folks don’t have access to health care. They don’t have access to testing. A lot of our partner health care organizations service the unsheltered, the uninsured folks that are first responders, people that work in the California energy sector that are keeping our power plants running, police, firefighters, people working in nursing homes.”

Those tests don’t involve CRISPR, but research on CRISPR-based tests is ongoing. And just two days after the Nobel announcement, a new article in Science revealed that one of Doudna’s research teams has developed far and away the fastest diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus yet. Though this CRISPR-based test is not yet as sensitive as tests that take a day or more to process, it can detect the virus in five minutes flat. And it can also do something else that no other test can do—quantify the amount of virus in the sample, potentially enabling doctors to tailor their treatment to the severity of the patient’s infection.

Eyes on the Prize

On Dec. 10, there will be a big celebration in Stockholm, Sweden, with fanfare befitting a new bevy of Nobel laureates. When Doudna and Charpentier receive their award—whether or not the pandemic permits them to actually step onto the stage to accept their medallions from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden—it will be the first time in history that two women have shared the prize in chemistry.

The monetary value of the prize they will share is 10 million Swedish krona, a bit more than $1 million. However, its value in terms of prestige and history is incalculable. Patents and startups may come and go, but a Nobel Prize is forever.

For Doudna, however, the reward is still in the work.

“I still, in my heart, think of myself as that young girl growing up in Hilo and thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, I wonder if I could be a biochemist someday.’ I still think of myself that way, right? Honestly, I still have moments when I look around at my colleagues and the people I’m so lucky to work with every day, and I think, “Wow, I’m so lucky.’ I just feel grateful. For me, that’s what it’s about. It really is. It’s about doing work that I enjoy, where I feel like I’m making a contribution.”

In 2020, humanity slammed on the brakes, arguably for the first time in modern history.

If you could watch the passing centuries of human movement on an animated map, you would see oceans grow dense with activity as coal replaced wind, as oil replaced coal and as air travel became commonplace. Other epidemics wouldn’t even have registered: In the 19th century, as this frenzy of movement was gaining speed, six cholera pandemics killed millions, but people kept moving. “That was when steam power became common; people were just moving faster and farther than ever,” said Joyce Chaplin, author of Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. With the exception of a few blips during world wars—when travel, trade and fishing fleets were supplanted by battleships—this toy model of movement would have told a single story of acceleration. That story ended in March of 2020, when every government in the world said: “Stop. Stay home.”

Of course, we didn’t totally stop. A few Airbuses still paint contrails across the skies, though often carrying only a handful of passengers. Farmworkers still rise before dawn to pick the food that feeds the quarantined masses. Medical workers, cleaners, truckers and grocery-store stockers buzz even more urgently than before. Our map of movement hasn’t gone black. But it has dimmed more significantly than ever before.

This timeout is momentary. The trend of acceleration has already begun to resume. But the pause will also trigger lasting changes, and Pomona alumni working in transportation already have a sense of the long-term implications.

Rockwell “Rocky” Smith ’77 was looking forward to a few uneventful months to wind down his career at the Crowley Maritime Corporation when the realization set in that the pandemic would change everything. Crowley is—by and large—a shipping company: It moves products. And so, when the economy halted, Smith had to ask: Would anyone want to move clothes from the factories in Guatemala to the United States? Would towns in Alaska still need fuel oil deliveries? “In Alaska we were expecting huge impacts,” he recalled. “The tourists disappear; there are going to be no cruise ships. No one is going to need fuel.”

John Urgo ’03 was also at the cusp of a career transition. In February he was preparing for a move to Santa Cruz to become the planning director for the transit system there. But how do you plan for the future of a bus network when authorities are telling everyone to stay off the bus if possible? “My wife and I were like, ‘We have decent jobs in the Bay Area. Is this crazy?’” As soon as he landed in his new home, he faced a crisis: Half the routes had to be cut, and it was Urgo’s job to pick them. “No one else wanted that responsibility. In some sense it was good to be an outsider and an easy scapegoat to make bad decisions,” he said.

Urgo was willing to be the bad guy for a moment. He had bigger concerns: Once people finished complaining about the bus cutbacks and found other ways to get around, would they ever come back? Ridership plummeted by 90 percent.

There’s good reason to believe that some of those riders will never return. They’d stay home, not just in Santa Cruz, but everywhere, just as some of the highway commuters are done for good, according to Jarrett Walker ’84, author of Human Transit, who has become something of a public intellectual on the subject.

“I would be surprised if everyone now working from home ever goes back to the office,” Walker said.

Before the pandemic, employees were already starting to schedule days to work from home, and bosses were trying to figure out if they approved of the trend. Society was dipping its collective toes in the work-from-home water. Then the coronavirus came and pushed us all in. “At our company we discovered in the span of a few days that, hey, this is working pretty well,” Smith said. “People can do all this from home. Maybe we don’t need offices anymore.” His company and many others began scrambling to end leases. Rush hour disappeared overnight. Smith marveled at how quickly it was all happening. “If you think about this history of how we went to open offices and then to cubicles, it took a few years before people got it figured out,” he said. “But in the case of COVID, nobody could go to work tomorrow.”

Working from home saves companies rent money and saves workers the time and cash they devoted to commuting. Some are bound to decide they like it. That newly homebound workforce will reduce the number of commuters at rush hour. And even if this reduction is small, it will trigger huge changes.

Planners design every road and subway station for the rush-hour crush, Walker said. That means that for the rest of the 20-odd hours in the day, they are overbuilt and underused. It’s a ridiculous but unavoidable waste of money. Or at least it used to be unavoidable.

“That billion-dollar cloverleaf maybe doesn’t need to get built now,” Walker said.

The work-from-home revolution will also decrease the smog and greenhouse gases billowing off gridlocked freeways. In the United States, transportation is the single largest source of globe-heating gases. So the decline in commuting is a boon. But it also has a dark side: As white-collar workers stop commuting—and dispense with collars entirely—they may stop supporting the transportation systems that others still need.

Briana Lovell ’08, who manages transit strategy for the city of Seattle, noticed the dramatic decline in transit ridership. She also noticed a change in the demographics of the people on the buses. It was clear in the data she saw professionally and her own observations on the bus: There were fewer white people, fewer ties, fewer sloppy-on-purpose hoodies. But there were still riders: essential workers in scrubs or steel-toed boots, people in heavily worn clothes, people tucking sacks of groceries under the seats.

“The assumption that because a lot of high-wage, white-collar jobs may be able to telework we don’t need transit is just incredibly small-minded,” she said. “Transit is not just getting people to their jobs, but also to the doctor and to shopping.”

The pandemic provides a natural experiment, she said, showing transit officials exactly where and when people ride who truly have no better options. Instead of rush-hour commuter routes, people now are riding buses and trains more uniformly across nights and weekends and in the middle of the day. “For instance, the route that goes by my house: On weekends there’s a food bank, and there’s a ton of people who take the bus and come back with huge boxes and bags.”

In the before times, when well-connected professionals had to slog through traffic jams or endure delays on transit, they would complain about it, and they would sometimes even organize themselves to do something about it. Now that political pressure may evaporate.

“When fortunate people stop having a problem themselves, they tend to stop supporting solutions around it,” Walker said.

If that happens, some transit systems will die. The government stimulus package—the CARES Act—funded transit agencies around the country through the end of the year. But that money will run out long before there’s a vaccine, so there’s bound to be a reckoning. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which runs Boston’s T, has a half-billion-dollar hole in its budget next year, said Chris Dempsey ’05, director of a coalition of nonprofits and regional transportation planning agencies called Transportation for Massachusetts. “That’s extremely concerning to anyone in greater Boston who wants to make sure we have a viable transit system in the years ahead,” he said.

The T system isn’t going to disappear. In big cities a lack of money means that projects will be delayed and maintenance deferred, but transit will endure because it is simply irreplaceable: Trains and buses can move a lot of people in a small space, providing a solution for the implacable problem of geometry in cities. Without mass transit, city automobile traffic goes into a permanent stall, and movement slows to the pace of a brisk walk.

But in smaller sprawling towns, where cars are a viable alternative, the pandemic really could kill transit. In Santa Cruz, where Urgo is trying to plan for the revival of movement by bus, it’s possible residents will instead revive their affection for cars, which carry them so easily through, unbound by commuter traffic.

There was one positive change that Dempsey saw—one he hoped would become permanent. Cities and towns across Massachusetts were making room on the streets for pedestrians, cyclists and outdoor dining.

His own bike commute to his office in downtown Boston transformed when the city plunked down new traffic barrels separating cars from cyclists. “It had been honking cars, exhaust in your face, trucks and commuters jostling for space in a turn lane,” he said. “Now you cruise by them on your bike.”

In Europe the changes have been more profound: Paris is adding 400 miles of new bicycle lanes, and the United Kingdom is spending $2.5  billion on building better sidewalks and bike lanes—a “once-in-a generation change to the way that people travel in Britain,” according to Grant Shapps, the country’s transportation secretary. These cities are putting down concrete, not just traffic cones. But even traffic cones provide a glimpse of a different world.

“I think people have come to appreciate the value of being able to take a walk around their neighborhood in a way that maybe they never fully appreciated before,” Dempsey said. “The hope is that we experience that, we love it, and we decide to keep it in years ahead rather than giving that space back to vehicles.”

Back in Seattle, as the plague months ticked by, Rocky Smith was breathing easier. The pandemic hadn’t been the catastrophe for shipping that he had feared. The crash in Alaskan oil demand never came. “A lot of the fuel we sell is subsistence fuel—you gotta have the lights on, and it’s running the generators. In the winter you gotta heat your shack in Nome.”

And so the ships kept cutting through the water. They kept moving in the Caribbean as well. Sure, there might have been fewer orders from the big clothing companies for the factories in Central America, but there were also new orders for masks and protective gowns. Smith could retire with a clear conscience: He’d leave the company in a time of flux, but not in crisis.

For John Urgo, in Santa Cruz, the future looked much more uncertain. Surveys showed that people had no interest in getting back on the bus. Someday the students would return to the local colleges, and surely they would want to take the bus again—or would they? And when would that day come? Santa Cruz is famously progressive and green, but how long would it support a bus service that very few people were using?

The key to thinking about all this, said Dempsey, is to maintain perspective. The pandemic will end. A new normal will emerge. This isn’t—as some have suggested—the end of cities. “You can go back in time to the 16th century and find that people predicted the Black Plague was going to be the end of London,” he notes. London—let’s just check—still appears to exist. “We need cities. They are places where people innovate and share experiences and meet each other serendipitously and interact in ways that are really important to our economy and really important to our health and really important to our society,” Dempsey said.

It sometimes feels like the shutdown will never end. Decades from now, will future historians note this period as another curious blip on the graph? Joyce Chaplin, a present-day historian, isn’t so sure. Some changes will endure. Air traffic, which is both a speedy spreader of disease and extremely vulnerable to future shutdowns, will have to evolve. Airplane designers are proposing new ideas—flipping middle seats to face backward, raising dividers above armrests and transparent bubbles around headrests. And Chaplin expects that airlines might need to more nimbly impose flight quarantines to contain future epidemics.

If we return to that imagined map of transportation through the centuries: The modern perspective suggests an inevitable growth in movement up to this point. But, Chaplin said, if we broaden our view to the entirety of human history, we’d likely find other pauses—not because everyone got together and decided to quarantine, but because of past climate change. Surely the ice age and its end changed the way people moved around the world. “Yes, on a planetary scale we are living in an unusual moment,” she said. “But it may also be a return—part of a longer cycle that we never left.”