Pavel Volchkov is an exceptional voice among the Russian scientists now dealing with the corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic.

The current Covid-19 policy administrators in Moscow are of the same academic generation but they have trained as doctors;  Volchkov is a geneticist. They have spent their formative careers inside Russian institutions;  Volchkov spent more than ten years in the US, at the University of Chicago then at Harvard.

Volchkov is the head of the Genome Engineering Lab (GEL) in Moscow; it is one of more than fifty laboratories which are part of the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (MIPT). The institute is the third-ranked science teaching university in Russia.

Volchkov specializes in the technology known as CRISPR-Cas9. The first acronym stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats; the second for CRISPR-associated complex protein 9; for meaning and diagrams, click to open.  The  purpose of the technology is to engineer or edit genome sequences in living organisms, in the short run for defence against deadly viruses, and in the longer term to remodel medical diagnostics and the treatment of serious diseases; for background, read this.