We will not know the long-term impact of the SARS-CoV-2 viral outbreak for some time yet, but many of us have already begun to feel the effects—not only on our daily lives but also on our work as life scientists. With partial or complete institutional shutdowns in countries worldwide, the global COVID-19 health crisis has rapidly impacted the life science landscape, including our patterns of work. Some life scientists may today feel essentially “stuck,” unable to carry out experiments because of COVID-19-related working restrictions or because they need to look after children in connection with the closure of schools and kindergartens. This can be a frightening feeling, especially for young life scientists, who usually have short-term contracts and may worry about their future careers.

Other scientists may have begun using the times of shutdowns and curfews to develop scientific projects further while working from home. In fact, Isaac Newton developed the essence of his groundbreaking scientific work during a pandemic when he was forced to work from home due to a plague outbreak in 1665, when the University of Cambridge sent its students home to continue their studies. For Newton, this meant Woolsthorpe Manor, the family estate about 60 miles northwest of Cambridge, where he was isolated for over a year. On his return to Cambridge in 1667, he had developed his seminal theories on classical mechanics as a student working from home [1]. Only 2 years later, he became a professor at the University of Cambridge. Of course, a lot has changed since the seventeenth century. Science today is international, globally connected, and increasingly collaborative. There are means to work from home on the computer while connecting with colleagues locally and globally using a wide range of video conferencing (VC) systems, teleconferencing platforms, or collaboration tools such as Slack [2]. For computational biologists and data scientists, collaborations can be facilitated through electronic means of communicating analysis results or co-development of computational code. The fact that nearly all communication these days is electronic also spurs new collaborations and online activities, such as virtual journal clubs held internationally, virtual scientific seminars, and ad hoc workshops and training activities on topics of common interest. Scientific conferences are increasingly held as “virtual meetings,” such as the international EMBO| EMBL Symposium “The four dimensional genome–Virtual”(normally taking place in