“When in the first week of January came the news that was spreading in China, a respiratory infection is not identified and then broken out of the epidemic, the chinese authorities have announced that they have discovered that the cause was a new virus. This virus had already achieved the isolation and sequence of the entire genome, in a fraction of the time, making it public to the entire scientific community. Then we moved immediately. We gathered around a table and we thought: we want a molecular diagnostics. We got to work and they have done so”. Dr. Maria Rosaria Capobianchi , director of the Laboratory of Virology of the Spallanzani tells us of the days of tense, stressful and exciting research on the coronavirus, and he speaks of his laboratory as if it were a constellation, a sky, and where it does not shine with never a single star. “Only those who are in the know…”, he says.