Fifties, and high school, orbital electrons looked much different from the electron field theory that surprised me at university. Not a chemist, I wonder what a molecule is today. I believe there are stages to understanding them within the K-PhD curriculum continuum over time.

Decades ago, I was taught the difference between a monomer and a polymer. I envision a simpler element, L, with a valence shell, or electron field(s), binding simply into something or another. I’ve been told that polymer medicine is like origami. The molecular form of the medication is a folding polymer, which, like a jigsaw puzzle piece, must precisely fit and bind into the larger polymer binding site of a molecular biological aspect of a microbiological disease scenario. Often, for example, medicine does not defeat a virus, medicine defeats a membrane component here or there.

Just like old books and new books; it was odd to me to look at viruses after twenty years away from chemistry. I remember “Bucky Ball” more than the “novel” theory of viral form. In the nineties viruses looked bugs. Like Rip Van Winkle thinking George was still president, virology certainly was “novel” to me in 2020.

Now, looking back at this ’18-‘19 timeframe one hundred years after the 1918 Army Distinguished Service Medal was awarded for the first time during the Influenza; a macroscopic history of our century’s biology and war seems evident.

Today, relatively speaking, the 2018 Bayer Monsanto merger of life science chemistry and then COVID19 in the same instant, seems extremely pertinent to the post WWII US/Soviet/Sino struggle to build competing model societies. Morrill Federalism versus socialist collectivization. Agronomy, industry, and proximity of human habitation to such, along with cultural paradigms like Leviticus 11, all contribute to further hypothesis regarding Virology, and COVID19, in the context of the globalization construct of our century.