For the past two and a half years, graduate student Tong Zhang has been figuring out how bacteria protect themselves against phages — the viruses that infect them. All the while, doing so as a student far from her hometown of Beijing, China. Phages and bacteria are in a constant arms race, which those in the field call the Red Queen Conflict: Alice in Wonderland running to stay in place, the queen making chase. Both the infector and the infected are constantly forced to adapt — the host and the…
