Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee! Illustration by Benjamen Purvis In January, as she watched the news about a novel virus spreading out of control in China, Alina Chan braced for a shutdown. The molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT started stockpiling medicine and supplies. By the time March rolled around and a quarantine seemed imminent, she’d bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of fillets from her favorite fishmonger in Cambridge and packed them into her freezer. Then she began to ramp down her projects in the lab, isolating her experimental cells from their cultures and freezing them in small tubes. 
一世1月，當她看到有關一種新型病毒在中國失控傳播的消息時，陳慧琳（Alina Chan）準備停擺。哈佛大學和麻省理工學院的分子生物學家開始儲存藥物和用品。到了3月，檢疫工作迫在眉睫時，她已經從她最喜歡的劍橋魚販那裡買了幾百美元的魚片，然後裝進冰箱。然後，她開始縮減在實驗室中的項目，將實驗細胞從培養物中分離出來，並將其冷凍在小試管中。 但是，儘管為停工做好了準備，但她發現自己對被凍結下班的挫敗感毫無準備。她在小公寓的牆壁上走來走去，感到無聊和無用。Chan從小就一直是個困惑的惡魔，這正是她熱愛自己的工作-有機會解決有關病毒如何運作以及如何通過基因療法將其重新用於治療毀滅性遺傳病的棘手難題。她凝視着自己的窗口，在Inman廣場附近那條寧靜而寧靜的街道上，,吟着想到可能要再過幾個月才能回到家。她的想法可以追溯到2003年，當時她在新加坡長大，十幾歲時就在亞洲出現了第一種SARS病毒（這種冠狀病毒的近親）。原來不是這樣的。這種病毒是如何從天而降並關閉地球的？為什麼如此不同？她問自己。 然後它擊中了她：世界上最大的難題是盯着她的臉。卡在家裡，她只需要動動腦子和筆記本電腦。也許他們足夠了。Chan首先將水壺燒開，然後變成了幾百杯茶，在她的廚房櫃檯上堆放了四個盒子，將筆記本電腦抬高到適當的高度，拉開了長長的黑髮，並開始閱讀她所有的科學文獻。可以在冠狀病毒上找到。 不久之後，她就發表了一篇有關該病毒非凡穩定性的文章，儘管其複製量已達數萬億次，但其基因組與人類最早的病例相比幾乎沒有改變。這使陳迷惑。像許多新出現的傳染病一樣，COVID-19被認為是人畜共患病的-它起源於動物，然後以某種方式進入人類。當時，中國政府和大多數科學家堅持認為，這種跳躍是在武漢的海鮮市場發生的，但這對Chan來說沒有道理。如果該病毒在市場上從動物飛躍到人類，它應該立即開始進化為新的人類宿主內的生命。但事實並非如此。 出於一種直覺，她決定查看有關2003年SARS病毒的文獻，該文獻從鮮活的人躍升為人們。賓果。幾篇論文提到了它在誕生的最初幾個月中的快速發展。Chan感到困惑的內啡肽激增。新病毒確實表現不正常。Chan知道深入研究這個難題將需要進行深入的遺傳分析，而且她只知道完成任務的人。她打開了Google聊天，並向成喜湛發出了一條消息。他是不列顛哥倫比亞大學時代的老朋友，更重要的是，他是一個計算神。 “您想成為一張非常不尋常的論文的夥伴嗎？” 她寫了。 當然，他回答。 Chan注意到有關原始SARS的一件事是，在第一例人類病例中，該病毒與在先人間的病毒有細微的區別-幾十個遺傳密碼字母。那意味着它立即變了。她請詹拉起武漢海鮮市場表面發現的冠狀病毒基因組。它們與人類最早記載的病例有什麼不同嗎？ 詹進行分析。不，它們是100％相同。絕對來自人類，而不是動物。在大流行初期，中國衛生官員和世界衛生組織所擁護的海鮮市場理論是錯誤的。陳的拼圖探測器再次跳動。她對詹說：“噓，這篇論文太瘋狂了。” 在接下來的幾周里，隨着春天的陽光在她的廚房地板上追逐陰影，Chan站在她的櫃檯前，ed着紙，幾乎沒有停下來吃飯或睡覺。顯然，第一個SARS在其存在的頭三個月中迅速發展，不斷地調整其感染人類的能力，並僅在流行的後期才定居下來。相反，新病毒看起來更像是晚期SARS。“幾乎就像我們錯過了早期階段，” Chan驚嘆於Zhan。或者，正如她在論文中指出的那樣，好像“它已經很好地適合人類傳播”。 那是一條極具挑釁性的路線。Chan暗示該病毒將於2019年底在武漢舉行的首次亮相聚會時已經熟悉人類生理。如果是這樣，則有三種可能的解釋。 也許這真是太不幸了：這些突變都發生在較早的寄主物種中，並且恰好是入侵人類的理想基因安排。但這沒有任何意義。這些突變在舊宿主中將是不利的。 也許這種病毒已經在人類中傳播了數月之久未被發現，正在解決這些問題，卻沒有人注意到。也不太可能。中國的衛生官員不會錯過它，即使有，他們現在也可以通過存儲的樣本返回以查找早期版本的蹤跡。而且他們什麼都沒想。 這留下了第三種可能性：丟失階段發生在實驗室中，該病毒是在人細胞上訓練的。Chan知道這是潛在解釋的第三條線索。當時，陰謀論者正在幻想生物武器，而陳不願給他們任何彈藥。但是她也不想隱瞞自己的發現而玩弄政治。Chan三十多歲，仍處於事業初期，他對科學過程的純粹性抱有絕對的理想主義者。事實是事實。 或者至少他們曾經是。自大流行開始以來，特朗普政府就因在事實上輕描淡寫而遭到批評，這些事實是否認，誇大或旋轉事實以適合總統的政治需要。結果，許多科學家已經學會審查自己，以免擔心他們的話會被錯誤地陳述。陳仍然認為，如果她只是為了避免參加向陰謀理論家或特朗普提供彈藥而參加科學研究，她會比他們更好嗎？ Chan知道她必須繼續前進，並將調查結果公開。在論文的最終草案中，她用魚雷破壞了海鮮市場理論，然後提出了一個案例，證明這種病毒似乎很好地適應了人類。她提到了所有三種可能的解釋，並在第三種措辭上措辭謹慎，以強調如果新型冠狀病毒確實來自實驗室，那將是合法研究過程中意外的結果。 5月2日，Chan將論文上傳到一個網站，該網站還共享尚未發表的生物學論文“預印本”，供同行同行評審。她在推特上發布了新聞並等待。5月16日，英國小報《每日郵報》接受了她的研究。第二天，《新聞周刊》刊登了一個標題為“科學家不應該排除實驗室作為冠狀病毒來源的新報道”的報道。 Chan說，那是“糞便到處爆炸”的時候。  Broad Institute的分子生物學家Alina Chan說，我們不能排除這種新型冠狀病毒起源於實驗室的可能性-即使她知道這是具有政治放射性的。/攝影：Mona Miri 在新聞周刊的故事通過她簡潔明了的推文發布之前的一周，Chan就引起了我的注意。在大多數科學家避免認真討論COVID-19從生物實驗室中逃脫的可能性時，我感到耳目一新。我寫了很多有關基因工程和所謂的功能獲得研究的文章，這是引人入勝的（甚至令人恐懼的）科學領域，科學家們在其中改變病毒以使其更易於傳播或致死，以此來評估這些病毒的接近程度造成大流行。我還知道致命的病原體以驚人的頻率從生物實驗室中逃逸。這些事故大多數最終都是無害的，但許多研究人員已被感染，因此人們死亡。 多年來，有關科學家警告說，這種病原體研究將引發大流行。其中最重要的是哈佛大學的流行病學家馬克·利普西奇（Marc Lipsitch），他於2014年成立了劍橋工作小組，以遊說反對這些實驗。在一系列政策文件，專欄文章和科學論壇中，他指出，涉及致命病原體的事故在美國實驗室每周發生兩次以上，並估計只有10個實驗室在10多個實驗室中進行了功能增益研究。一年的時間將有近20％的意外釋放風險。他辯稱，在2018年，這種釋放可能“導致有毒病毒在全球傳播，這是前所未有的生物安全事件”。 部分由於劍橋工作組的緣故，聯邦政府短暫地暫停了此類研究。但是，到2017年，禁令解除了，美國實驗室再次受到了限制。如今，在美國和全球，每天都有數十個實驗室對最致命的病原體進行實驗。其中之一就是武漢病毒研究所。十多年來，其科學家一直在中國南方的蝙蝠中發現冠狀病毒，並將其帶回武漢的實驗室。他們在那裡混合了這些新型病毒不同菌株的基因，以測試它們在人細胞和實驗動物中的感染力。 一月份有消息傳出一種新的冠狀病毒在武漢爆發-距離自然發現帶有這種病毒譜系的蝙蝠一千英里-的爆發是，許多專家對此感到震驚。沒有證據表明實驗室是該病毒的來源，但片段合適。 儘管有證據，科學界很快駁回了這個想法。生態健康聯盟主席彼得·達薩克（Peter Daszak）為武漢病毒研究所和其他實驗室尋找新病毒的工作提供了資金，該概念被稱為“荒謬”，許多其他專家也對此表示贊同。 不過，這不一定是每個科學家都私下裡想的。一位科學家秘密地對我說：“他們不能直接講話。”他指的是病毒學界擔心，在當今充滿政治色彩的環境中，他們的言論會引起轟動。“許多病毒學家不想被該領域的所有人所討厭。” 推遲執行還有其他潛在原因。長期以來，如果公眾和政客真正了解許多實驗室正在進行的危險病原體研究，就會感到憤怒。因此，否認發生此類災難性事件的可能性可以看作是一種職業保護。羅格斯大學微生物學家，劍橋工作組的另一位創始成員理查德·埃布賴特（Richard Ebright）告訴我：“對於進行功能獲得研究的大部分病毒學家來說，這是避免對研究經費的限制，避免執行適當的生物安全標準，並避免實施適當的研究監督是強大的動力。” MIT Technology Review的生物醫學編輯Antonio Regalado，直率地說。如果發現COVID-19來自實驗室，他在推特上寫道：“它將破壞科學建築的自上而下。” 簡單地駁斥整個假設是一個很好的誘因，但很快就構成了媒體的全球關注，通過代理人也吸引了公眾。一種不健康的專制主義出現在：要麼您堅持認為有關實驗室參與的任何問題都是荒謬的，要麼是您成為特朗普政府的工具，並且它無奈地將病毒歸咎於中國。我習慣了社交媒體專家，忽略了不便或具有政治惡意的事實，但是我從沒想到會從我們一些最好的科學家那裡看到這一點。 這就是為什麼Chan在Twitter上脫穎而出，敢於向權力講真話的原因。她寫道：“當一個假設被否定為陰謀論時，很難進行研究。” 然後，她向研究人員提供了認真的建議，建議大多數病毒研究應使用已預先去除複製機制的絕育病毒進行，這樣即使逃脫了限制，它們也無法複製自己。她解釋說：“如果不遵循這些預防措施，實驗室逃生的風險將成倍增加，我希望這種大流行能夠激發當地倫理和生物安全委員會仔細考慮如何降低風險。” 幾天后，她在另一條推文中對此進行了詳細說明： 波士頓的生物實驗室有多安全？ 作為世界生物技術中心之一，該中心遍布着研究病原體的學術和公司實驗室。其中最重要的是波士頓大學的國家新興傳染病實驗室（NEIDL），這是該市唯一被指定為BSL-4的實驗室（生物安全水平最高，與武漢病毒學研究所相同）。它是美國僅有的十幾種能夠與世界上最危險的病毒（包括埃博拉病毒和馬爾堡病毒）的實時版本一起使用的病毒之一。經過十年的爭議後，那裡的研究人員於2018年開始這樣做：許多當地人反對將這樣的設施設在大都市區中心的風險。 好消息？在開業之前，NEIDL借鑑了其他設施的錯誤，進行了歷史上最徹底的風險評估之一。就連向反對NEIDL的當地團體提供建議的位於華盛頓特區的軍備控制與不擴散中心的高級研究員Lynn Klotz都對醫學網站Contagion表示，該實驗室可能具有最佳的安全協議和措施。地點。 但是現實情況是，Klotz補充說，大多數實驗室事故是由人為錯誤引起的，而通過良好的設計和協議來主動防止此類錯誤只能做很多事情。（或者是為了防止心懷不滿的研究人員有意釋放，據說在2001年的炭疽熱襲擊中發生過。）羅格斯大學分子生物學家理查德·埃布賴特（Richard Ebright）長期批評潛在的病原體研究，他說NEIDL引入的風險還不夠低，並且“絕對不”值得微不足道的好處。 不過，風險是相對的。Klotz估計每年從BSL-4實驗室逃脫病原體的機會為0.3％，而NEIDL可能比典型的BSL-4實驗室安全得多。而且，如果您擔心捕獲致命的病原體，那麼，目前，您很有可能在自己的社區中找到一種病原體。在此問題得到解決之前，該市的生物實驗室可能是鎮上較安全的場所之一。 Chan僅在幾天前就開始大量使用她的Twitter帳戶，以此作為她論文的外展形式。社交平台已成為許多科學家相互了解工作的方式，研究表明，對Twitter的關注轉化為對科學文獻論文的更多引用。但這是一個著名的原始論壇。許多科學家沒有為震撼Twitterverse的數字風暴做好準備，他們也無法很好地處理它。Chan起初很怕它，但很快就像數字本地人一樣進入了Twitter。她說：“使用Twitter可以提升您的工作效率。” “而且我認為與非科學家討論這項工作真的很有趣。” 閱讀了她的推文之後，我查看了她的預印本，令我震驚，並寫了一封這樣的信。她感謝我，開玩笑說她擔心這可能是“職業自殺”。 不久就開始看起來她可能是對的。 說到她的想法，即使面對譴責，事實證明，對于成龍來說，這不是什麼新鮮事。成龍是加拿大人，但在新加坡長大，是世界上最壓制的政權之一。她的父母都是計算機科學專業人士，他們鼓勵女兒自由思考和認真詢問，但當地的學校系統卻不這樣做。取而代之的是，它是一個系統的壓力鍋，該系統獎勵了學生排隊，並迅速採取行動使反叛者保持沉默。 對陳來說那是不合適的。她說：“你必須向老師鞠躬。” “有時其他班級的老師會出現，並請我向他們鞠躬。我會說，“不，您不是我的老師。” 當時他們相信體罰。一位老師可以大棒地打敗你，在課堂上。我被毆打了很多次。” 儘管如此，Chan還是反叛了一點，逃學了，在商場裡閒逛。她也對學習失去興趣。“我只是真的不喜歡學校。我不喜歡他們在新加坡帶給您的所有課外活動，”她說。當一位老師招募她參加數學奧林匹克競賽時，情況發生了變化，在該競賽中，一群學生爭奪解決難題的數學難題。她說：“我真的很喜歡它。” “您只是坐在房間裡思考問題。” Chan可能從事了數學職業，但隨後她在奧林匹克競賽中與來自中國的團隊對抗。她說：“他們只會抹殺其他所有人。” “它們是機器。因為他們會走路，所以他們已經接受過數學訓練。他們甚至在您理解問題之前就打了蜂鳴器。我以為，我不會在這個領域生存。” 陳決定改為在不列顛哥倫比亞大學學習生物學。她說：“我從小就喜歡病毒。” “我記得我是第一次了解艾滋病毒。我認為這是一個難題和挑戰。” 這種本能使她進入哈佛醫學院當博士後，其中的難題變成了如何構建病毒樣生物分子以完成細胞內任務的方法，然後進入了Broad研究機構Ben Deverman的實驗室。她說：“當我看到一個有趣的問題時，我想花100％的時間來解決它。” “我非常專注於回答科學問題。” 就德弗曼而言，他表示，當陳剛加入時，他並沒有積極地尋求擴大自己的團隊，但是當“雇用非凡人才的機會落在我的腿上”時，他接受了。他解釋說：“艾琳娜（Alina）為實驗室帶來了很多價值，”她補充說，她具有在不同主題之間切換並追逐目標的能力。Deverman能夠密切觀察到，她的冠狀病毒研究成果無處不在。實際上，Chan產生了很多想法，最終成為合著者。他說：“她很有見識，果斷，並具有向其他科學家和公眾解釋複雜科學發現的罕見能力。” 當有關她的冠狀病毒論文的消息傳出來時，這些技能將非常有用。 如果Chan畢生都在學習如何尋求科學問題，那麼她將大部分時間都花在學習中，以了解當您想到的答案具有政治放射性時會發生什麼。在《新聞周刊》的故事傳出後，偏愛保守派的出版物在她的論文中被抓住，作為確診該病毒來自實驗室的確鑿證據。“每個人都專注於一條線，” Chan感嘆。“小報只是放大了它。” 同時，陰謀主義者以其通俗的理論作為有力證據證明存在故意泄漏。 Chan花了數天的時間與許多誤解了她的發現的人一起在網上開火。“我太天真了，”她低聲自嘲地告訴我。“我只是想，世界不應該公平地考慮這一點嗎？我現在真的必須踢自己。” 然而，更令人不安的是其他科學家的反應。一旦她的論文被媒體接受，該領域的知名人士就開始譴責她。加州大學戴維斯分校的著名教授喬納森·艾森（Jonathan Eisen）在《新聞周刊》（Newsweek）和他頗具影響力的推特賬戶上批評了這項研究，並寫道：“就我個人而言，我認為這份新論文的分析沒有說服力。” 在長篇文章中，他認為將新病毒與SARS進行比較不足以表明它已預先適應人類。他希望看到與其他病毒從動物到人類的最初飛躍的比較。 片刻之後，達扎克繼續前進。在特朗普政府得知其中一部分已用於資助武漢病毒研究所的工作後，美國國立衛生研究院最近削減了對他的組織生態健康聯盟的資助。達薩克（Daszak）正在努力恢復它，並試圖消除任何有關實驗室連接的建議。他沒有阻止陳。他在推特上寫道：“這是一項草率的研究，這是一項設計不完善的系統發育研究，涉及太多的推論，而數據卻不足，是在陰謀浪潮中產生了更大的影響。” 他用驚嘆號給自己的推特加了句號，他攻擊了論文的措辭，稱它引用的一項實驗是不可能的，並告訴Chan她不理解自己的數據。此後，達薩克（Daszak）的支持者跟進了他的話題，並提出了邁克（Mike）掉落的GIF動作。 這是一種古老而熟悉的動態：威脅着銀背雄性男子企圖欺凌該部落的一個初級女性成員。作為博士後，Chan處在弱勢地位。科學界的權力結構仍然有些中世紀，少數機構和個人決定誰發表，誰獲得職位，誰獲得資助。反叛者的空間很小。 接下來發生的事情既不古老也不熟悉：Chan沒有退縮。她發推文說：“很抱歉破壞麥克的下落。”並提供了與著名雜誌《自然》上一篇論文的鏈接，“該論文確實做了您認為不可能的實驗。” 她禮貌而堅定地證明了Daszak攻擊的每個要點，向他展示了他的錯誤。最後，Daszak被簡化為辯稱她錯誤地使用了“ isolate”一詞。Chan在一次政變中指出，這個詞實際上來自NIH的基因序列數據庫GenBank提供的在線數據。她提出將其更改為合理的內容。那時，Daszak停止了回復。但是，他堅持認為，陳過分地解釋了她的發現。 在與Eisen合作之後，Chan同意通過尋找其他病毒感染新宿主的例子來檢驗她的假設。在幾天之內，當冠狀病毒從人類躍遷到歐洲皮毛場的貂皮的消息傳出時，帶來了一個絕好的機會。果然，水貂的版本開始迅速變異。“您實際上看到了快速發展的過程，” Chan說。“僅僅在最初的幾周內，變化就很大了。” Chan還向Eisen指出，諸如bioRxiv（發音為“ bioarchive”）之類的網站的總體目標是在其上發布論文，目的是徵求反饋，使論文在發表之前變得更好。好點，他回答。最終，他承認“論文中有很多有趣的分析”，並同意與Chan合作編寫下一份草案。 Twitter與她強大的同事決鬥並沒有使Chan感到不安。她說：“我認為喬納森很合理。” “即使他不同意我的意見，我也非常感謝他的專業知識。我喜歡這種反饋。它有助於使我們的紙張更好。” 對於Daszak，Chan更加謹慎。她說：“有些人難以控制自己的情緒。” “每當我看到他的評論時，我都會想，在這裡我能學到什麼嗎？關於我應該解決的問題，他是否正確？最終，她決定沒有了。 到5月下旬，對冠狀病毒之謎感興趣的記者和扶手椅偵探都發現Chan是我們沃森的一種福爾摩斯。她以兩倍的速度處理信息，專注於我們忽略的小細節，並成為尋找COVID-19最新科學的無旋轉解釋者的首選。能夠實時看到她的推理真是令人興奮，這回想起了為什麼我一直熱愛科學，對科學的追求有時會導致激動人心的啟示。CNET網站在一個有關“一群科學家轉變為偵探”的故事中為她提供了特色，他們使用基因測序技術來揭示COVID-19的起源。消息出爐後，Chan在她的Twitter個人資料中添加了“科學家變成偵探”。 她辜負了她的新推文。隨着對病毒來源的搜尋不斷，一些科學小組發表了論文，確定了穿山甲中一種密切相關的冠狀病毒。穿山甲是一種食蟻獸，在亞洲因其肉類和鱗片而大量販運。許多不同的研究表明，這種病毒似乎在穿山甲中無處不在。許多科學家熱切地接受了這樣一種觀念，即動物可能是將新型冠狀病毒傳給人類的中間宿主。它符合他們先前關於濕貨市場的理論，這意味着沒有實驗室參與其中。 當Chan閱讀穿山甲文件時，她開始懷疑。第一個是由一個小組分析的一組動物，這些動物被中國南方的反走私當局截獲。他們在其中一些中發現了密切相關的病毒，並公布了該病毒的基因組。但是，其他一些論文卻奇怪地不清楚它們的數據來自何處，或者其基因組是如何構造的。他們真的從實際穿山甲中提取了樣品嗎？ 陳再三給成喜戰發了短信。她寫道：“噓，這裡有些奇怪。” 詹從論文中提取了原始數據，並比較了他們發表的基因組。來自不同動物的病毒的單個副本應該具有很小的差異，就像某個物種的個體具有遺傳差異一樣。但是，所有穿山甲論文中的基因組都是完美的匹配-作者都只是使用第一組的數據集。該病毒並非無處不在，僅在少數綁在一起的穿山甲中被發現，目前尚不清楚他們是在哪裡捕獲的。這些動物甚至可能是從自己的走私者那裡抓到的。 值得注意的是，《自然》雜誌上的一組作者甚至似乎使用了另一篇論文中的相同基因序列，就好像它們在證實自己的發現一樣。“這些序列似乎來自我們在本研究中鑑定出的同一病毒（Pangolin-CoV）。” Chan在Twitter上稱他們為“當然，這是相同的Pangolin-CoV，您使用的是相同的數據集！” 作為背景，她後來補充說：“想象一下臨床試驗是否在迅速而寬鬆地處理其患者數據；重命名患者，將他們扔進不同的數據集而無須澄清，甚至可能無意間在不同研究中多次描述同一位患者。” 她和詹在bioRxiv上發布了一份新的預印本，用於拆卸穿山甲文件。6月份宣布了一項關於野生動植物交易中數百隻穿山甲的研究結果的確認：沒有一個穿山甲具有冠狀病毒的跡象。Chan在Twitter上大獲全勝：“一直以來都支持我們的假設。” 穿山甲理論崩潰了。 然後，Chan將自己的Holmesian權力轉向更大的遊戲領域：Daszak和武漢病毒研究所。從60分鐘到《紐約時報》，達薩克一直在為他的案件辯護，並成功表達了對他的事業的同情，甚至使77位諾貝爾獎獲得者簽署了一封信，呼籲NIH恢復生態健康聯盟的資金。 在幾個冗長而詳盡的“ twetorials”中，Chan開始對WIV的工作產生懷疑。她指出，那裡的科學家在2013年的一個礦井中發現了一種病毒，與COVID-19冠狀病毒的同源性超過96％，而在那裡工作的三名礦工死於類似COVID的疾病。Chan指出，WIV直到2020年才分享這些發現，儘管這種工作的目標據認為是確定有可能引起人類疾病並警告世界的病毒。 儘管該病毒殺死了三名礦工，但達薩克說，當時尚不將其列為研究的重點。“我們正在尋找與SARS相關的病毒，而這種病毒相差20％。我們認為這很有趣，但風險不高。因此，我們對此沒有做任何事情，而是將其放入冰箱中。”他對《連線》記者說。他堅持認為，直到2020年，他們才意識到它與COVID-19的相似之處而開始對其進行研究。但是Chan指出一個在線數據庫，該數據庫顯示WIV已在2017年和2018年對該地雷病毒進行了基因測序，以他們過去與其他病毒的方式對其進行了分析，以準備對其進行實驗。她寫道，外交上卻面無表情，“我認為達薩克被誤導了。” Chan指出，好的措施幾乎是順帶一提，其他人沒有注意到：COVID-19包含一個罕見的基因序列，該基因序列過去曾被基因工程師用於將基因插入冠狀病毒而不會留下痕跡，並且該序列落入正是在這一點上，實驗者可以交換出不同的遺傳部分來改變傳染性。Chan解釋說，相同的序列可以在冠狀病毒中自然發生，因此，這並非是非自然起源的無可辯駁的證據，Chan解釋說，“僅是觀察”。儘管如此，一個Twitter用戶仍然在想：“如果死刑像阿麗娜·陳（Alina Chan）對Daszak / WIV的故事一樣痛苦，那將是非法的。” 達薩克說，的確是他被誤導了，並沒有意識到在礦井中發現的病毒是在2020年之前被測序的。他還說，一個擁有優秀科學家的偉大實驗室現在正在被挑選出來，以尋找可疑的行為來支持某種行為。先入為主的理論。他說：“如果您深信不疑地發生了一些可疑的事情，那麼您要做的就是仔細研究所有證據，然後嘗試尋找支持該信念的事物。”真相。” Chan的tweetorials中的許多觀點也是由其他人提出的，但她是第一位將所有觀點綜合在一起的著名科學家。同一周，倫敦的《星期日泰晤士報》和英國廣播公司（BBC）都發表了一些故事，這些故事與成龍提出的麵包屑痕跡相同，暗示在WIV進行了掩蓋。這個故事很快在世界各地流傳。同時，WIV堅決否認任何病毒泄漏。實驗室主任王彥毅在中國電視台上描述了這種指控為“純粹的偽造”，並繼續解釋說，2013年的蝙蝠冠狀病毒與COVID如此不同，以至於它不可能如此迅速地進化成這種病毒，並且實驗室只能測序它並沒有從中獲得活病毒。 迄今為止，尚無確切的證據證明該病毒是自然產生的還是實驗室產生的，但關於武漢設施是病毒源的假說正日益成為主流，其背後的科學不再被忽視。陳在很大程度上要感謝他。 在春季末期， Chan幾個月來第一次走進了Broad Institute的高大玻璃門。當她穿過閃閃發光的大理石門廳時，她的運動鞋吱吱聲在寂靜中迴蕩。就像布羅德的殭屍啟示錄版本一樣。所有明亮的燈光，但沒人。她穿着健身房的衣服上班，這感覺很奇怪。 幾天前，Broad開始讓研究人員返回實驗室重新開始他們的項目。仍然需要遠程完成所有計算機工作，但是只要他們每四天進行一次病毒檢測，像Chan這樣的替補科學家就可以跳進足夠長的時間，以沿着他們的細胞培養進行移動。 在她的實驗室中，Chan穿上了白色的實驗室外套並清點庫存，扔掉了數月的過期試劑並訂購了新材料。然後，她從冰箱中取出了一些樣本，坐在其中一個組織培養櫃中-不鏽鋼，空氣控制櫃，細胞工程師在其中進行工作-開始恢復她的一些舊實驗。 她對回來感到很困惑。讓她的基因療法項目擺脫停滯狀態感覺很好，她和她和Deverman正在從事的新項目使她更加興奮：一種在線工具，使疫苗開發人員可以按時間，位置，等特點。她說：“這是由於我個人無法快速獲得答案而感到沮喪的。” 另一方面，她想念自己的偵探工作被全吃了。她說：“我想穿上穿山甲的印章後停下來，但這個謎團不斷吸引着我。” 因此，當她等待細胞培養物生長時，她一直在旁聽着-只是這一次她有更多的陪伴：越來越多的科學家悄悄地與她聯繫，以分享他們自己的有關COVID-19起源的理論和論文，不斷增加的地下抵抗力。她說：“好奇心很大。” “人們開始對此進行更深入的思考。” 她說，如果我們要防止未來爆發，他們必須這樣做：“重要的是找出來源，這樣就不會再次發生。” 這就是使Chan整夜不眠的原因-來自同一來源的人類再度暴發的可能性。如果該病毒是從蝙蝠洞自然產生的，那麼很可能存在其他可能擴散的病毒株。如果它們密切相關，那麼我們開發的任何疫苗也可能對它們起作用。但是，實驗室操縱的病毒可能並非如此。她說：“某人本來可以從不同的洞穴中取樣病毒已有十年之久，只是在實驗室中進行混搭，而且這些病毒可能彼此如此不同，以至於我們的疫苗都無法對它們起作用。”她說。無論哪種方式，“我們都需要找到它的來源，並將其關閉。” 無論她發現什麼重要信息，我們都可以確定Chan將與全世界分享。她的論文沒有引起爭議而動搖，而是比以往任何時候都更加堅定地堅持一條很容易被超越的路線。她說：“科學家不應該審查自己。” “我們有義務將所有數據放在那裡。我們不應該決定，如果公眾對此一無所知，那就更好了。如果我們開始這樣做，我們將失去信譽，最終我們將失去公眾的信任。這對科學不利。” 實際上，這會引起懷疑的流行，這對我們每個人都不會有好處。 As prepared as she was for the shutdown, though, she found herself unprepared for the frustration of being frozen out of work. She paced the walls of her tiny apartment feeling bored and useless. Chan has been a puzzle demon since childhood, which was precisely what she loved about her work—the chance to solve fiendishly difficult problems about how viruses operate and how, through gene therapy, they could be repurposed to help cure devastating genetic diseases. Staring out her window at the eerily quiet streets of her Inman Square neighborhood, she groaned at the thought that it could be months before she was at it again. Her mind wandered back to 2003, when she was a teenager growing up in Singapore and the first SARS virus, a close relative of this coronavirus, appeared in Asia. It hadn’t been anything like this. That one had been relatively easy to corral. How had this virus come out of nowhere and shut down the planet? Why was it so different? she asked herself. Then it hit her: The world’s greatest puzzle was staring her in the face. Stuck at home, all she had to work with was her brain and her laptop. Maybe they were enough. Chan fired up the kettle for the first of what would become hundreds of cups of tea, stacked four boxes on her kitchen counter to raise her laptop to the proper height, pulled back her long dark hair, and began reading all of the scientific literature she could find on the coronavirus. It wasn’t long before she came across an article about the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. This perplexed Chan. Like many emerging infectious diseases, COVID-19 was thought to be zoonotic—it originated in animals, then somehow found its way into people. At the time, the Chinese government and most scientists insisted the jump had happened at Wuhan’s seafood market, but that didn’t make sense to Chan. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t. On a hunch, she decided to look at the literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people. Bingo. A few papers mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Chan felt the familiar surge of puzzle endorphins. The new virus really wasn’t behaving like it should. Chan knew that delving further into this puzzle would require some deep genetic analysis, and she knew just the person for the task. She opened Google Chat and fired off a message to Shing Hei Zhan. He was an old friend from her days at the University of British Columbia and, more important, he was a computational god. “Do you want to partner on a very unusual paper?” she wrote. Sure, he replied. One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different—a few dozen letters of genetic code—from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans? Zhan ran the analysis. Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. Chan’s puzzle detectors pulsed again. “Shing,” she messaged Zhan, “this paper is going to be insane.” In the coming weeks, as the spring sun chased shadows across her kitchen floor, Chan stood at her counter and pounded out her paper, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. “It’s almost as if we’re missing the early phase,” Chan marveled to Zhan. Or, as she put it in their paper, as if “it was already well adapted for human transmission.” That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations. Perhaps it was just staggeringly bad luck: The mutations had all occurred in an earlier host species, and just happened to be the perfect genetic arrangement for an invasion of humanity. But that made no sense. Those mutations would have been disadvantageous in the old host. Maybe the virus had been circulating undetected in humans for months, working out the kinks, and nobody had noticed. Also unlikely. China’s health officials would not have missed it, and even if they had, they’d be able to go back now through stored samples to find the trail of earlier versions. And they weren’t coming up with anything. That left a third possibility: The missing phase had happened in a lab, where the virus had been trained on human cells. Chan knew this was the third rail of potential explanations. At the time, conspiracy theorists were spinning bioweapon fantasies, and Chan was loath to give them any ammunition. But she also didn’t want to play politics by withholding her findings. Chan is in her early thirties, still at the start of her career, and an absolute idealist about the purity of the scientific process. Facts were facts. Or at least they used to be. Since the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration has been criticized for playing fast and loose with facts—denying, exaggerating, or spinning them to suit the president’s political needs. As a result, many scientists have learned to censor themselves for fear that their words will be misrepresented. Still, Chan thought, if she were to sit on scientific research just to avoid providing ammunition to conspiracy theorists or Trump, would she be any better than them? Chan knew she had to move forward and make her findings public. In the final draft of her paper, she torpedoed the seafood-market theory, then laid out a case that the virus seemed curiously well adapted to humans. She mentioned all three possible explanations, carefully wording the third to emphasize that if the novel coronavirus did come from a lab, it would have been the result of an accident in the course of legitimate research. On May 2, Chan uploaded the paper to a site where as-yet-unpublished biology papers known as “preprints” are shared for open peer review. She tweeted out the news and waited. On May 16, the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, picked up her research. The very next day, Newsweek ran a story with the headline “Scientists Shouldn’t Rule Out Lab as Source of Coronavirus, New Study Says.” And that, Chan says, is when “shit exploded everywhere.” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, says we can’t rule out the possibility that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab—even though she knows it’s a politically radioactive thing to say. / Photo by Mona Miri Chan had come to my attention a week before the Newsweek story was published through her smart and straightforward tweets, which I found refreshing at a time when most scientists were avoiding any serious discussion about the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a biolab. I’d written a lot about genetic engineering and so-called gain-of-function research—the fascinating, if scary, line of science in which scientists alter viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal as a way of assessing how close those viruses are to causing pandemics. I also knew that deadly pathogens escape from biolabs with surprising frequency. Most of these accidents end up being harmless, but many researchers have been infected, and people have died as a result. For years, concerned scientists have warned that this type of pathogen research was going to trigger a pandemic. Foremost among them was Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, who founded the Cambridge Working Group in 2014 to lobby against these experiments. In a series of policy papers, op-eds, and scientific forums, he pointed out that accidents involving deadly pathogens occurred more than twice a week in U.S. labs, and estimated that just 10 labs performing gain-of-function research over a 10-year period would run a nearly 20 percent risk of an accidental release. In 2018, he argued that such a release could “lead to global spread of a virulent virus, a biosafety incident on a scale never before seen.” Thanks in part to the Cambridge Working Group, the federal government briefly instituted a moratorium on such research. By 2017, however, the ban was lifted and U.S. labs were at it again. Today, in the United States and across the globe, there are dozens of labs conducting experiments on a daily basis with the deadliest known pathogens. One of them is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For more than a decade, its scientists have been discovering coronaviruses in bats in southern China and bringing them back to their lab in Wuhan. There, they mix genes from different strains of these novel viruses to test their infectivity in human cells and lab animals. When word spread in January that a novel coronavirus had caused an outbreak in Wuhan—which is a thousand miles from where the bats that carry this lineage of viruses are naturally found—many experts were quietly alarmed. There was no proof that the lab was the source of the virus, but the pieces fit. Despite the evidence, the scientific community quickly dismissed the idea. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which has funded the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs searching for new viruses, called the notion “preposterous,” and many other experts echoed that sentiment. That wasn’t necessarily what every scientist thought in private, though. “They can’t speak directly,” one scientist told me confidentially, referring to the virology community’s fear of having their comments sensationalized in today’s politically charged environment. “Many virologists don’t want to be hated by everyone in the field.” There are other potential reasons for the pushback. There’s long been a sense that if the public and politicians really knew about the dangerous pathogen research being conducted in many laboratories, they’d be outraged. Denying the possibility of a catastrophic incident like this, then, could be seen as a form of career preservation. “For the substantial subset of virologists who perform gain-of-function research,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and another founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, told me, “avoiding restrictions on research funding, avoiding implementation of appropriate biosafety standards, and avoiding implementation of appropriate research oversight are powerful motivators.” Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, “it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.” That’s a pretty good incentive to simply dismiss the whole hypothesis, but it quickly amounted to a global gaslighting of the media—and, by proxy, the public. An unhealthy absolutism set in: Either you insisted that any questions about lab involvement were absurd, or you were a tool of the Trump administration and its desperation to blame China for the virus. I was used to social media pundits ignoring inconvenient or politically toxic facts, but I’d never expected to see that from some of our best scientists. Which is why Chan stood out on Twitter, daring to speak truth to power. “It is very difficult to do research when one hypothesis has been negatively cast as a conspiracy theory,” she wrote. Then she offered some earnest advice to researchers, suggesting that most viral research should be done with neutered viruses that have had their replicating machinery removed in advance, so that even if they escaped confinement, they would be incapable of making copies of themselves. “When these precautions are not followed, risk of lab escape is exponentially higher,” she explained, adding, “I hope the pandemic motivates local ethics and biosafety committees to think carefully about how they can reduce risk.” She elaborated on this in another tweet several days later: “I’d also—personally—prefer if high biosafety level labs were not located in the most populous cities on earth.” How Safe Are Boston’s Biolabs? As one of the world centers of biotech, the Hub is peppered with academic and corporate labs doing research on pathogens. Foremost among them is Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), the only lab in the city designated as BSL-4 (the highest level of biosafety and the same level as the Wuhan Institute of Virology). It is one of just a dozen or so in the United States equipped to work with live versions of the world’s most dangerous viruses, including Ebola and Marburg. Researchers there began doing so in 2018 after a decade of controversy: Many locals objected to the risks of siting such a facility in the center of a major metropolitan area. The good news? Before opening, NEIDL undertook one of the most thorough risk assessments in history, learning from the mistakes of other facilities. Even Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Washington, DC–based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who advised local groups that opposed NEIDL, told the medical website Contagion that the lab likely has the best possible security protocols and measures in place. But the reality, Klotz added, is that most lab accidents are caused by human error, and there is only so much that can be done through good design and protocols to proactively prevent such mistakes. (Or to guard against an intentional release by a disgruntled researcher, as allegedly happened in the anthrax attacks of 2001.) Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of potentially dangerous pathogen research, says the risks introduced by NEIDL are not low enough and “definitely not” worth the negligible benefits. Still, risk is relative. Klotz has estimated the chance of a pathogen escape from a BSL-4 lab at 0.3 percent per year, and NEIDL is probably significantly safer than the typical BSL-4 lab. And if catching a deadly pathogen is your fear, well, currently you run a good risk of finding one in your own neighborhood. Until that gets cleared up, the city’s biolabs are probably among the safer spaces in town. Chan had started using her Twitter account this intensely only a few days earlier, as a form of outreach for her paper. The social platform has become the way many scientists find out about one another’s work, and studies have shown that attention on Twitter translates to increased citations for a paper in scientific literature. But it’s a famously raw forum. Many scientists are not prepared for the digital storms that roil the Twitterverse, and they don’t handle it well. Chan dreaded it at first, but quickly took to Twitter like a digital native. “Having Twitter elevates your work,” she says. “And I think it’s really fun to talk to nonscientists about that work.” After reading her tweets, I reviewed her preprint, which I found mind-blowing, and wrote her to say so. She thanked me and joked that she worried it might be “career suicide.” It wasn’t long before it began to look like she might be right. Speaking her mind, it turns out—even in the face of censure—was nothing new for Chan, who is Canadian but was raised in Singapore, one of the more repressive regimes on earth. Her parents, both computer science professionals, encouraged free thinking and earnest inquiry in their daughter, but the local school system did not. Instead, it was a pressure-cooker of a system that rewarded students for falling in line, and moved quickly to silence rebels. That was a bad fit for Chan. “You have to bow to teachers,” she says. “Sometimes teachers from other classes would show up and ask me to bow to them. And I would say, ‘No, you’re not my teacher.’ Back then they believed in corporal punishment. A teacher could just take a big stick and beat you in front of the class. I got whacked so many times.” Still, Chan rebelled in small ways, skipping school and hanging out at the arcade. She also lost interest in her studies. “I just really didn’t like school. And I didn’t like all the extracurriculars they pack you with in Singapore,” she says. That changed when a teacher recruited her for math Olympiads, in which teams of students compete to solve devilishly hard arithmetic puzzles. “I really loved it,” she says. “You just sit in a room and think about problems.” Chan might well have pursued a career in math, but then she came up against teams from China in Olympiad competitions. “They would just wipe everyone else off the board,” she says. “They were machines. They’d been trained in math since they could walk. They’d hit the buzzer before you could even comprehend the question. I thought, I’m not going to survive in this field.” Chan decided to pursue biology instead, studying at the University of British Columbia. “I liked viruses from the time I was a teen,” she says. “I remember the first time I learned about HIV. I thought it was a puzzle and a challenge.” That instinct took her to Harvard Medical School as a postdoc, where the puzzle became how to build virus-like biomolecules to accomplish tasks inside cells, and then to Ben Deverman’s lab at the Broad Institute. “When I see an interesting question, I want to spend 100 percent of my time working on it,” she says. “I get really fixated on answering scientific questions.” Deverman, for his part, says he wasn’t actively looking to expand his team when Chan came along, but when “opportunities to hire extraordinary people fall in my lap,” he takes them. “Alina brings a ton of value to the lab,” he explains, adding that she has an ability to pivot between different topics and cut to the chase. Nowhere was that more on display than with her coronavirus work, which Deverman was able to closely observe. In fact, Chan ran so many ideas past him that he eventually became a coauthor. “She is insightful, determined, and has the rare ability to explain complex scientific findings to other scientists and to the public,” he says. Those skills would prove highly useful when word got out about her coronavirus paper. If Chan had spent a lifetime learning how to pursue scientific questions, she spent most of the shutdown learning what happens when the answers you come up with are politically radioactive. After the Newsweek story ran, conservative-leaning publications seized on her paper as conclusive evidence that the virus had come from a lab. “Everyone focused on the one line,” Chan laments. “The tabloids just zoomed in on it.” Meanwhile, conspiracists took it as hard evidence of their wild theories that there had been an intentional leak. Chan spent several exhausting days putting out online fires with the many people who had misconstrued her findings. “I was so naive,” she tells me with a quick, self-deprecating laugh. “I just thought, Shouldn’t the world be thinking about this fairly? I really have to kick myself now.” Even more troubling, though, were the reactions from other scientists. As soon as her paper got picked up by the media, luminaries in the field sought to censure her. Jonathan Eisen, a well-known professor at UC Davis, criticized the study in Newsweek and on his influential Twitter account, writing, “Personally, I do not find the analysis in this new paper remotely convincing.” In a long thread, he argued that comparing the new virus to SARS was not enough to show that it was preadapted to humans. He wanted to see comparisons to the initial leap of other viruses from animals to humans. Moments later, Daszak piled on. The NIH had recently cut its grant to his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, after the Trump administration learned that some of it had gone to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work. Daszak was working hard to get it restored and trying to stamp out any suggestion of a lab connection. He didn’t hold back on Chan. “This is sloppy research,” he tweeted, calling it “a poorly designed phylogenetic study with too many inferences and not enough data, riding on a wave of conspiracy to drive a higher impact.” Peppering his tweets with exclamation points, he attacked the wording of the paper, arguing that one experiment it cited was impossible, and told Chan she didn’t understand her own data. Afterward, a Daszak supporter followed up his thread with a GIF of a mike drop. It was an old and familiar dynamic: threatened silverback male attempts to bully a junior female member of the tribe. As a postdoc, Chan was in a vulnerable position. The world of science is still a bit medieval in its power structure, with a handful of institutions and individuals deciding who gets published, who gets positions, who gets grants. There’s little room for rebels. What happened next was neither old nor familiar: Chan didn’t back down. “Sorry to disrupt mike drop,” she tweeted, providing a link to a paper in the prestigious journal Nature that “does that exact experiment you thought was impossible.” Politely but firmly, she justified each point Daszak had attacked, showing him his mistakes. In the end, Daszak was reduced to arguing that she had used the word “isolate” incorrectly. In a coup de grace, Chan pointed out that actually the word had come from online data provided by GenBank, the NIH’s genetic sequence database. She offered to change it to whatever made sense. At that point, Daszak stopped replying. He insists, however, that Chan is overinterpreting her findings. With Eisen, Chan readily agreed to test her hypothesis by finding other examples of viruses infecting new hosts. Within days, a perfect opportunity came along when news broke that the coronavirus had jumped from humans to minks at European fur farms. Sure enough, the mink version began to rapidly mutate. “You actually see the rapid evolution happening,” Chan said. “Just in the first few weeks, the changes are quite drastic.” Chan also pointed out to Eisen that the whole goal of a website such as bioRxiv (pronounced “bioarchive”)—where she posted the paper—is to elicit feedback that will make papers better before publication. Good point, he replied. Eventually he conceded that there was “a lot of interesting analysis in the paper” and agreed to work with Chan on the next draft. The Twitter duels with her powerful colleagues didn’t rattle Chan. “I thought Jonathan was very reasonable,” she says. “I really appreciated his expertise, even if he disagreed with me. I like that kind of feedback. It helped to make our paper better.” With Daszak, Chan is more circumspect. “Some people have trouble keeping their emotions in check,” she says. “Whenever I saw his comments, I’d just think, Is there something I can learn here? Is there something he’s right about that I should be fixing?” Ultimately, she decided, there was not. By late May, both journalists and armchair detectives interested in the mystery of the coronavirus were discovering Chan as a kind of Holmes to our Watson. She crunched information at twice our speed, zeroing in on small details we’d overlooked, and became a go-to for anyone looking for spin-free explications of the latest science on COVID-19. It was thrilling to see her reasoning in real time, a reminder of why I’ve always loved science, with its pursuit of patterns that sometimes leads to exciting revelations. The website CNET featured her in a story about “a league of scientists-turned-detectives” who were using genetic sequencing technologies to uncover COVID-19’s origins. After it came out, Chan added “scientist-turned-detective” to her Twitter bio. She’s lived up to her new nom de tweet. As the search for the source of the virus continued, several scientific teams published papers identifying a closely related coronavirus in pangolins—anteater-like animals that are heavily trafficked in Asia for their meat and scales. The number of different studies made it seem as though this virus was ubiquitous in pangolins. Many scientists eagerly embraced the notion that the animals might have been the intermediate hosts that had passed the novel coronavirus to humans. It fit their preexisting theories about wet markets, and it would have meant no lab had been involved. As Chan read the pangolin papers, she grew suspicious. The first one was by a team that had analyzed a group of the animals intercepted by anti-smuggling authorities in southern China. They found the closely related virus in a few of them, and published the genomes for that virus. Some of the other papers, though, were strangely ambiguous about where their data was coming from, or how their genomes had been constructed. Had they really taken samples from actual pangolins? Once again, Chan messaged Shing Hei Zhan. “Shing, something’s weird here,” she wrote. Zhan pulled up the raw data from the papers and compared the genomes they had published. Individual copies of a virus coming from different animals should have small differences, just as individuals of a species have genetic differences. Yet the genomes in all of the pangolin papers were perfect matches—the authors were all simply using the first group’s data set. Far from being ubiquitous, the virus had been found only in a few pangolins who were held together, and it was unclear where they had caught it. The animals might have even caught it from their own smuggler. Remarkably, one group of authors in Nature even appeared to use the same genetic sequences from the other paper as if it were confirmation of their own discovery. “These sequences appear to be from the same virus (Pangolin-CoV) that we identified in the present study.” Chan called them out on Twitter: “Of course it’s the same Pangolin-CoV, you used the same dataset!” For context, she later added, “Imagine if clinical trials were playing fast and loose with their patient data; renaming patients, throwing them into different datasets without clarification, possibly even describing the same patient multiple times across different studies unintentionally.” She and Zhan posted a new preprint on bioRxiv dismantling the pangolin papers. Confirmation came in June when the results of a study of hundreds of pangolins in the wildlife trade were announced: Not a single pangolin had any sign of a coronavirus. Chan took a victory lap on Twitter: “Supports our hypothesis all this time.” The pangolin theory collapsed. Chan then turned her Holmesian powers on bigger game: Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak had been pleading his case everywhere from 60 Minutes to the New York Times and has been successful in rallying sympathy to his cause, even getting 77 Nobel laureates to sign a letter calling for the NIH to restore EcoHealth Alliance’s funding. In several long and detailed “tweetorials,” Chan began to cast a cloud of suspicion on the WIV’s work. She pointed out that scientists there had discovered a virus that is more than 96 percent identical to the COVID-19 coronavirus in 2013 in a mineshaft soon after three miners working there had died from a COVID-like illness. The WIV didn’t share these findings until 2020, even though the goal of such work, Chan pointed out, was supposedly to identify viruses with the potential to cause human illnesses and warn the world about them. Even though that virus had killed three miners, Daszak said it wasn’t considered a priority to study at the time. “We were looking for SARS-related virus, and this one was 20 percent different. We thought it was interesting, but not high risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, he maintained, that they started looking into it once they realized its similarity to COVID-19. But Chan pointed to an online database showing that the WIV had been genetically sequencing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, analyzing it in a way they had done in the past with other viruses in preparation for running experiments with them. Diplomatic yet deadpan, she wrote, “I think Daszak was misinformed.” For good measure, almost in passing, Chan pointed out a detail no one else had noticed: COVID-19 contains an uncommon genetic sequence that has been used by genetic engineers in the past to insert genes into coronaviruses without leaving a trace, and it falls at the exact point that would allow experimenters to swap out different genetic parts to change the infectivity. That same sequence can occur naturally in a coronavirus, so this was not irrefutable proof of an unnatural origin, Chan explained, “only an observation.” Still, it was enough for one Twitter user to muse, “If capital punishment were as painful as what Alina Chan is doing to Daszak/WIV regarding their story, it would be illegal.” Daszak says that indeed he had been misinformed and was unaware that that virus found in the mine shaft had been sequenced before 2020. He also says that a great lab, with great scientists, is now being picked apart to search for suspicious behavior to support a preconceived theory. “If you believe, deep down, something fishy went on, then what you do is you go through all the evidence and you try to look for things that support that belief,” he says, adding, “That is not how you find the truth.” Many of the points in Chan’s tweetorials had also been made by others, but she was the first reputable scientist to put it all together. That same week, London’s Sunday Times and the BBC ran stories following the same trail of breadcrumbs that Chan had laid out to suggest that there had been a coverup at the WIV. The story soon circulated around the world. In the meantime, the WIV has steadfastly denied any viral leak. Lab director Yanyi Wang went on Chinese television and described such charges as “pure fabrication,” and went on to explain that the bat coronavirus from 2013 was so different than COVID that it could not have evolved into it this quickly and that the lab only sequenced it and didn’t obtain a live virus from it. To this day, there is no definitive evidence as to whether the virus occurred naturally or had its origins in a lab, but the hypothesis that the Wuhan facility was the source is increasingly mainstream and the science behind it can no longer be ignored. And Chan is largely to thank for that. In late spring, Chan walked through the tall glass doors of the Broad Institute for the first time in months. As she made her way across the gleaming marble foyer, her sneaker squeaks echoed in the silence. It was like the zombie apocalypse version of the Broad; all the bright lights but none of the people. It felt all the weirder that she was wearing her gym clothes to work. A few days earlier, the Broad had begun letting researchers back into their labs to restart their projects. All computer work still needed to be done remotely, but bench scientists such as Chan could pop in just long enough to move along their cell cultures, provided they got tested for the virus every four days. In her lab, Chan donned her white lab coat and took inventory, throwing out months of expired reagents and ordering new materials. Then she rescued a few samples from the freezer, took her seat at one of the tissue-culture hoods—stainless steel, air-controlled cabinets in which cell engineers do their work—and began reviving some of her old experiments. She had mixed emotions about being back. It felt good to free her gene-therapy projects from their stasis, and she was even more excited about the new project she and Deverman were working on: an online tool that allows vaccine developers to track changes in the virus’s genome by time, location, and other characteristics. “It came out of my personal frustration at not being able to get answers fast,” she says. On the other hand, she missed being all-consumed by her detective work. “I wanted to stop after the pangolin preprint,” she says, “but this mystery keeps drawing me back in.” So while she waits for her cell cultures to grow, she’s been sleuthing on the side—only this time she has more company: Increasingly, scientists have been quietly contacting her to share their own theories and papers about COVID-19’s origins, forming something of a growing underground resistance. “There’s a lot of curiosity,” she says. “People are starting to think more deeply about it.” And they have to, she says, if we are going to prevent future outbreaks: “It’s really important to find out where this came from so it doesn’t happen again.” That is what keeps Chan up at night—the possibility of new outbreaks in humans from the same source. If the virus emerged naturally from a bat cave, there could well be other strains in existence ready to spill over. If they are closely related, whatever vaccines we develop might work on them, too. But that might not be the case with manipulated viruses from a laboratory. “Someone could have been sampling viruses from different caves for a decade and just playing mix-and-match in the lab, and those viruses could be so different from one another that none of our vaccines will work on them,” she says. Either way, “We need to find where this came from, and close it down.” Whatever important information she finds, we can be sure Chan will share it with the world. Far from being shaken by the controversy her paper stirred, she is more committed than ever to holding a line that could all too easily be overrun. “Scientists shouldn’t be censoring themselves,” she says. “We’re obliged to put all the data out there. We shouldn’t be deciding that it’s better if the public doesn’t know about this or that. If we start doing that, we lose credibility, and eventually we lose the public’s trust. And that’s not good for science.” In fact, it would cause an epidemic of doubt, and that wouldn’t be good for any of us. 
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/ |
Thank you to Sidney Powell for exposing corruption on all sides. The Republican Party sold out for some cash and the American People have found out! Now wait and see the real uniting- patriots stand for a nation not a party! RINOS join your minions on the left and get out of America’s way! We are for freedom and we are standing up!
These two sold our votes and constitutional rights to China for a buck! The devil went down to Georgia and indeed he found some to fiddle with!
