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Even in the largest of cities, plants are probably the most common living organisms we see, and yet plant blindness and children's recognition of plants as living things remains an important focus, also discussed in this issue. When looking back at the Covid-19 pandemic in years to come, our children and grandchildren are likely to ask why we didn't see it coming. Plant scientists are responsible for ensuring that food and fuel supplies are sustainable, for protecting biodiversity, and for providing insight into some of the impacts of climate change. [Extracted from the article]

The scientists who worked on these vaccines are an inspiration for others and demonstrate why biology and biological education are both so essential. In Sarah Gilbert's lab at the University of Oxford, scientists had already engineered a modified chimpanzee cold virus as the basis for a vaccine against other diseases, giving her a head-start in the development of a vaccine to Covid-19. The so-called Pfizer vaccine is equally impressive, being the first large-scale mRNA vaccine, causing human cells to generate harmless Covid-19 antigens, which then trigger an immune response. [Extracted from the article]