More 'we', less 'I': A prescription for pandemic control

When I was doing my seven-plus-day home quarantine recently, I watched the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die. The storyline of the $250 million production follows the plot of its prequel Spectre, in which the CRISPR bioweapon was modified by a MI6-backed scientist into a kind of nanobot weapon for, well, protecting the United Kingdom. CRISPR, the acronym for clustered interspersed short palindromic repeats, is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea.

In the film, the lab is broken into and the scientist kidnapped. The "retired" agent Bond (Daniel Craig) is prompted back into action by a friend from the CIA, Luther, to rescue the rogue scientist. Of course, nothing is straightforward in this oracle-like British movie directed by a Japanese American, Cary Joji Fukunaga.

The timing of the movie－it started shooting in 2019－coupled with the delayed release due to its theme (a plague that ends the world), enshrouds No Time to Die in layers of mystery. Was the movie affected by the pandemic or did it predict it? The plot thickens when the scientific formula is robbed by another CIA agent acting as the lackey of a vengeful villain, Safin (Rami Malek)－himself orphaned because of the weapon－who is after Bond's girlfriend and their five-year old daughter.