Research in the time of covid

Maria Zuber got the word on a Friday: Harvard had shut down its research labs. As vice president for research, Zuber consulted with lead researchers across campus over whether MIT should follow suit. "Don't you dare," she remembers them saying. "Don't you dare be like those Harvard people." As covid-19 cases continued to rise across the country, however, she and other senior administrators made the difficult decision by that Sunday: MIT would be scaling down its research to near zero for the first time since opening its doors 155 years ago. "It was a complete shock to people," Zuber says.