For Benefit to All

by Inyan Kara & L. Portnoy

Few things are truly vital to human life, breathing is one such thing. The average adult takes approximately 20,000 breaths each day and in doing so inhales and exhales an extraordinary number of molecules. So many molecules that each day every one of us inhales molecules “from the breaths of every person who has ever lived” says Bill Bryson. It’s an interesting juxtaposition then, that society has ground to a halt and our very livelihoods now rest on the fate of a virus that rides on our collective breaths but is itself not alive.