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，当她看到有关一种新型病毒在中国失控传播的消息时，陈慧琳（Alina Chan）准备停摆。哈佛大学和麻省理工学院的分子生物学家开始储存药物和用品。到了3月，检疫工作迫在眉睫时，她已经从她最喜欢的剑桥鱼贩那里买了几百美元的鱼片，然后装进冰箱。然后，她开始缩减在实验室中的项目，将实验细胞从培养物中分离出来，并将其冷冻在小试管中。 但是，尽管为停工做好了准备，但她发现自己对被冻结下班的挫败感毫无准备。她在小公寓的墙壁上走来走去，感到无聊和无用。Chan从小就一直是个困惑的恶魔，这正是她热爱自己的工作-有机会解决有关病毒如何运作以及如何通过基因疗法将其重新用于治疗毁灭性遗传病的棘手难题。她凝视着自己的窗口，在Inman广场附近那条宁静而宁静的街道上，,吟着想到可能要再过几个月才能回到家。她的想法可以追溯到2003年，当时她在新加坡长大，十几岁时就在亚洲出现了第一种SARS病毒（这种冠状病毒的近亲）。原来不是这样的。这种病毒是如何从天而降并关闭地球的？为什么如此不同？她问自己。 然后它击中了她：世界上最大的难题是盯着她的脸。卡在家里，她只需要动动脑子和笔记本电脑。也许他们足够了。Chan首先将水壶烧开，然后变成了几百杯茶，在她的厨房柜台上堆放了四个盒子，将笔记本电脑抬高到适当的高度，拉开了长长的黑发，并开始阅读她所有的科学文献。可以在冠状病毒上找到。 不久之后，她就发表了一篇有关该病毒非凡稳定性的文章，尽管其复制量已达数万亿次，但其基因组与人类最早的病例相比几乎没有改变。这使陈迷惑。像许多新出现的传染病一样，COVID-19被认为是人畜共患病的-它起源于动物，然后以某种方式进入人类。当时，中国政府和大多数科学家坚持认为，这种跳跃是在武汉的海鲜市场发生的，但这对Chan来说没有道理。如果该病毒在市场上从动物飞跃到人类，它应该立即开始进化为新的人类宿主内的生命。但事实并非如此。 出于一种直觉，她决定查看有关2003年SARS病毒的文献，该文献从鲜活的人跃升为人们。宾果。几篇论文提到了它在诞生的最初几个月中的快速发展。Chan感到困惑的内啡肽激增。新病毒确实表现不正常。Chan知道深入研究这个难题将需要进行深入的遗传分析，而且她只知道完成任务的人。她打开了Google聊天，并向成喜湛发出了一条消息。他是不列颠哥伦比亚大学时代的老朋友，更重要的是，他是一个计算神。 “您想成为一张非常不寻常的论文的伙伴吗？” 她写了。 当然，他回答。 Chan注意到有关原始SARS的一件事是，在第一例人类病例中，该病毒与在先人间的病毒有细微的区别-几十个遗传密码字母。那意味着它立即变了。她请詹拉起武汉海鲜市场表面发现的冠状病毒基因组。它们与人类最早记载的病例有什么不同吗？ 詹进行分析。不，它们是100％相同。绝对来自人类，而不是动物。在大流行初期，中国卫生官员和世界卫生组织所拥护的海鲜市场理论是错误的。陈的拼图探测器再次跳动。她对詹说：“嘘，这篇论文太疯狂了。” 在接下来的几周里，随着春天的阳光在她的厨房地板上追逐阴影，Chan站在她的柜台前，ed着纸，几乎没有停下来吃饭或睡觉。显然，第一个SARS在其存在的头三个月中迅速发展，不断地调整其感染人类的能力，并仅在流行的后期才定居下来。相反，新病毒看起来更像是晚期SARS。“几乎就像我们错过了早期阶段，” Chan惊叹于Zhan。或者，正如她在论文中指出的那样，好像“它已经很好地适合人类传播”。 那是一条极具挑衅性的路线。Chan暗示该病毒将于2019年底在武汉举行的首次亮相聚会时已经熟悉人类生理。如果是这样，则有三种可能的解释。 也许这真是太不幸了：这些突变都发生在较早的寄主物种中，并且恰好是入侵人类的理想基因安排。但这没有任何意义。这些突变在旧宿主中将是不利的。 也许这种病毒已经在人类中传播了数月之久未被发现，正在解决这些问题，却没有人注意到。也不太可能。中国的卫生官员不会错过它，即使有，他们现在也可以通过存储的样本返回以查找早期版本的踪迹。而且他们什么都没想。 这留下了第三种可能性：丢失阶段发生在实验室中，该病毒是在人细胞上训练的。Chan知道这是潜在解释的第三条线索。当时，阴谋论者正在幻想生物武器，而陈不愿给他们任何弹药。但是她也不想隐瞒自己的发现而玩弄政治。Chan三十多岁，仍处于事业初期，他对科学过程的纯粹性抱有绝对的理想主义者。事实是事实。 或者至少他们曾经是。自大流行开始以来，特朗普政府就因在事实上轻描淡写而遭到批评，这些事实是否认，夸大或旋转事实以适合总统的政治需要。结果，许多科学家已经学会审查自己，以免担心他们的话会被错误地陈述。陈仍然认为，如果她只是为了避免参加向阴谋理论家或特朗普提供弹药而参加科学研究，她会比他们更好吗？ Chan知道她必须继续前进，并将调查结果公开。在论文的最终草案中，她用鱼雷破坏了海鲜市场理论，然后提出了一个案例，证明这种病毒似乎很好地适应了人类。她提到了所有三种可能的解释，并在第三种措辞上措辞谨慎，以强调如果新型冠状病毒确实来自实验室，那将是合法研究过程中意外的结果。 5月2日，Chan将论文上传到一个网站，该网站还共享尚未发表的生物学论文“预印本”，供同行同行评审。她在推特上发布了新闻并等待。5月16日，英国小报《每日邮报》接受了她的研究。第二天，《新闻周刊》刊登了一个标题为“科学家不应该排除实验室作为冠状病毒来源的新报道”的报道。 Chan说，那是“粪便到处爆炸”的时候。  Broad Institute的分子生物学家Alina Chan说，我们不能排除这种新型冠状病毒起源于实验室的可能性-即使她知道这是具有政治放射性的。/摄影：Mona Miri 在新闻周刊的故事通过她简洁明了的推文发布之前的一周，Chan就引起了我的注意。在大多数科学家避免认真讨论COVID-19从生物实验室中逃脱的可能性时，我感到耳目一新。我写了很多有关基因工程和所谓的功能获得研究的文章，这是引人入胜的（甚至令人恐惧的）科学领域，科学家们在其中改变病毒以使其更易于传播或致死，以此来评估这些病毒的接近程度造成大流行。我还知道致命的病原体以惊人的频率从生物实验室中逃逸。这些事故大多数最终都是无害的，但许多研究人员已被感染，因此人们死亡。 多年来，有关科学家警告说，这种病原体研究将引发大流行。其中最重要的是哈佛大学的流行病学家马克·利普西奇（Marc Lipsitch），他于2014年成立了剑桥工作小组，以游说反对这些实验。在一系列政策文件，专栏文章和科学论坛中，他指出，涉及致命病原体的事故在美国实验室每周发生两次以上，并估计只有10个实验室在10多个实验室中进行了功能增益研究。一年的时间将有近20％的意外释放风险。他辩称，在2018年，这种释放可能“导致有毒病毒在全球传播，这是前所未有的生物安全事件”。 部分由于剑桥工作组的缘故，联邦政府短暂地暂停了此类研究。但是，到2017年，禁令解除了，美国实验室再次受到了限制。如今，在美国和全球，每天都有数十个实验室对最致命的病原体进行实验。其中之一就是武汉病毒研究所。十多年来，其科学家一直在中国南方的蝙蝠中发现冠状病毒，并将其带回武汉的实验室。他们在那里混合了这些新型病毒不同菌株的基因，以测试它们在人细胞和实验动物中的感染力。 一月份有消息传出一种新的冠状病毒在武汉爆发-距离自然发现带有这种病毒谱系的蝙蝠一千英里-的爆发是，许多专家对此感到震惊。没有证据表明实验室是该病毒的来源，但片段合适。 尽管有证据，科学界很快驳回了这个想法。生态健康联盟主席彼得·达萨克（Peter Daszak）为武汉病毒研究所和其他实验室寻找新病毒的工作提供了资金，该概念被称为“荒谬”，许多其他专家也对此表示赞同。 不过，这不一定是每个科学家都私下里想的。一位科学家秘密地对我说：“他们不能直接讲话。”他指的是病毒学界担心，在当今充满政治色彩的环境中，他们的言论会引起轰动。“许多病毒学家不想被该领域的所有人所讨厌。” 推迟执行还有其他潜在原因。长期以来，如果公众和政客真正了解许多实验室正在进行的危险病原体研究，就会感到愤怒。因此，否认发生此类灾难性事件的可能性可以看作是一种职业保护。罗格斯大学微生物学家，剑桥工作组的另一位创始成员理查德·埃布赖特（Richard Ebright）告诉我：“对于进行功能获得研究的大部分病毒学家来说，这是避免对研究经费的限制，避免执行适当的生物安全标准，并避免实施适当的研究监督是强大的动力。” MIT Technology Review的生物医学编辑Antonio Regalado，直率地说。如果发现COVID-19来自实验室，他在推特上写道：“它将破坏科学建筑的自上而下。” 简单地驳斥整个假设是一个很好的诱因，但很快就构成了媒体的全球关注，通过代理人也吸引了公众。一种不健康的专制主义出现在：要么您坚持认为有关实验室参与的任何问题都是荒谬的，要么是您成为特朗普政府的工具，并且它无奈地将病毒归咎于中国。我习惯了社交媒体专家，忽略了不便或具有政治恶意的事实，但是我从没想到会从我们一些最好的科学家那里看到这一点。 这就是为什么Chan在Twitter上脱颖而出，敢于向权力讲真话的原因。她写道：“当一个假设被否定为阴谋论时，很难进行研究。” 然后，她向研究人员提供了认真的建议，建议大多数病毒研究应使用已预先去除复制机制的绝育病毒进行，这样即使逃脱了限制，它们也无法复制自己。她解释说：“如果不遵循这些预防措施，实验室逃生的风险将成倍增加，我希望这种大流行能够激发当地伦理和生物安全委员会仔细考虑如何降低风险。” 几天后，她在另一条推文中对此进行了详细说明： 波士顿的生物实验室有多安全？ 作为世界生物技术中心之一，该中心遍布着研究病原体的学术和公司实验室。其中最重要的是波士顿大学的国家新兴传染病实验室（NEIDL），这是该市唯一被指定为BSL-4的实验室（生物安全水平最高，与武汉病毒学研究所相同）。它是美国仅有的十几种能够与世界上最危险的病毒（包括埃博拉病毒和马尔堡病毒）的实时版本一起使用的病毒之一。经过十年的争议后，那里的研究人员于2018年开始这样做：许多当地人反对将这样的设施设在大都市区中心的风险。 好消息？在开业之前，NEIDL借鉴了其他设施的错误，进行了历史上最彻底的风险评估之一。就连向反对NEIDL的当地团体提供建议的位于华盛顿特区的军备控制与不扩散中心的高级研究员Lynn Klotz都对医学网站Contagion表示，该实验室可能具有最佳的安全协议和措施。地点。 但是现实情况是，Klotz补充说，大多数实验室事故是由人为错误引起的，而通过良好的设计和协议来主动防止此类错误只能做很多事情。（或者是为了防止心怀不满的研究人员有意释放，据说在2001年的炭疽热袭击中发生过。）罗格斯大学分子生物学家理查德·埃布赖特（Richard Ebright）长期批评潜在的病原体研究，他说NEIDL引入的风险还不够低，并且“绝对不”值得微不足道的好处。 不过，风险是相对的。Klotz估计每年从BSL-4实验室逃脱病原体的机会为0.3％，而NEIDL可能比典型的BSL-4实验室安全得多。而且，如果您担心捕获致命的病原体，那么，目前，您很有可能在自己的社区中找到一种病原体。在此问题得到解决之前，该市的生物实验室可能是镇上较安全的场所之一。 Chan仅在几天前就开始大量使用她的Twitter帐户，以此作为她论文的外展形式。社交平台已成为许多科学家相互了解工作的方式，研究表明，对Twitter的关注转化为对科学文献论文的更多引用。但这是一个著名的原始论坛。许多科学家没有为震撼Twitterverse的数字风暴做好准备，他们也无法很好地处理它。Chan起初很怕它，但很快就像数字本地人一样进入了Twitter。她说：“使用Twitter可以提升您的工作效率。” “而且我认为与非科学家讨论这项工作真的很有趣。” 阅读了她的推文之后，我查看了她的预印本，令我震惊，并写了一封这样的信。她感谢我，开玩笑说她担心这可能是“职业自杀”。 不久就开始看起来她可能是对的。 说到她的想法，即使面对谴责，事实证明，对于成龙来说，这不是什么新鲜事。成龙是加拿大人，但在新加坡长大，是世界上最压制的政权之一。她的父母都是计算机科学专业人士，他们鼓励女儿自由思考和认真询问，但当地的学校系统却不这样做。取而代之的是，它是一个系统的压力锅，该系统奖励了学生排队，并迅速采取行动使反叛者保持沉默。 对陈来说那是不合适的。她说：“你必须向老师鞠躬。” “有时其他班级的老师会出现，并请我向他们鞠躬。我会说，“不，您不是我的老师。” 当时他们相信体罚。一位老师可以大棒地打败你，在课堂上。我被殴打了很多次。” 尽管如此，Chan还是反叛了一点，逃学了，在商场里闲逛。她也对学习失去兴趣。“我只是真的不喜欢学校。我不喜欢他们在新加坡带给您的所有课外活动，”她说。当一位老师招募她参加数学奥林匹克竞赛时，情况发生了变化，在该竞赛中，一群学生争夺解决难题的数学难题。她说：“我真的很喜欢它。” “您只是坐在房间里思考问题。” Chan可能从事了数学职业，但随后她在奥林匹克竞赛中与来自中国的团队对抗。她说：“他们只会抹杀其他所有人。” “它们是机器。因为他们会走路，所以他们已经接受过数学训练。他们甚至在您理解问题之前就打了蜂鸣器。我以为，我不会在这个领域生存。” 陈决定改为在不列颠哥伦比亚大学学习生物学。她说：“我从小就喜欢病毒。” “我记得我是第一次了解艾滋病毒。我认为这是一个难题和挑战。” 这种本能使她进入哈佛医学院当博士后，其中的难题变成了如何构建病毒样生物分子以完成细胞内任务的方法，然后进入了Broad研究机构Ben Deverman的实验室。她说：“当我看到一个有趣的问题时，我想花100％的时间来解决它。” “我非常专注于回答科学问题。” 就德弗曼而言，他表示，当陈刚加入时，他并没有积极地寻求扩大自己的团队，但是当“雇用非凡人才的机会落在我的腿上”时，他接受了。他解释说：“艾琳娜（Alina）为实验室带来了很多价值，”她补充说，她具有在不同主题之间切换并追逐目标的能力。Deverman能够密切观察到，她的冠状病毒研究成果无处不在。实际上，Chan产生了很多想法，最终成为合著者。他说：“她很有见识，果断，并具有向其他科学家和公众解释复杂科学发现的罕见能力。” 当有关她的冠状病毒论文的消息传出来时，这些技能将非常有用。 如果Chan毕生都在学习如何寻求科学问题，那么她将大部分时间都花在学习中，以了解当您想到的答案具有政治放射性时会发生什么。在《新闻周刊》的故事传出后，偏爱保守派的出版物在她的论文中被抓住，作为确诊该病毒来自实验室的确凿证据。“每个人都专注于一条线，” Chan感叹。“小报只是放大了它。” 同时，阴谋主义者以其通俗的理论作为有力证据证明存在故意泄漏。 Chan花了数天的时间与许多误解了她的发现的人一起在网上开火。“我太天真了，”她低声自嘲地告诉我。“我只是想，世界不应该公平地考虑这一点吗？我现在真的必须踢自己。” 然而，更令人不安的是其他科学家的反应。一旦她的论文被媒体接受，该领域的知名人士就开始谴责她。加州大学戴维斯分校的著名教授乔纳森·艾森（Jonathan Eisen）在《新闻周刊》（Newsweek）和他颇具影响力的推特账户上批评了这项研究，并写道：“就我个人而言，我认为这份新论文的分析没有说服力。” 在长篇文章中，他认为将新病毒与SARS进行比较不足以表明它已预先适应人类。他希望看到与其他病毒从动物到人类的最初飞跃的比较。 片刻之后，达扎克继续前进。在特朗普政府得知其中一部分已用于资助武汉病毒研究所的工作后，美国国立卫生研究院最近削减了对他的组织生态健康联盟的资助。达萨克（Daszak）正在努力恢复它，并试图消除任何有关实验室连接的建议。他没有阻止陈。他在推特上写道：“这是一项草率的研究，这是一项设计不完善的系统发育研究，涉及太多的推论，而数据却不足，是在阴谋浪潮中产生了更大的影响。” 他用惊叹号给自己的推特加了句号，他攻击了论文的措辞，称它引用的一项实验是不可能的，并告诉Chan她不理解自己的数据。此后，达萨克（Daszak）的支持者跟进了他的话题，并提出了迈克（Mike）掉落的GIF动作。 这是一种古老而熟悉的动态：威胁着银背雄性男子企图欺凌该部落的一个初级女性成员。作为博士后，Chan处在弱势地位。科学界的权力结构仍然有些中世纪，少数机构和个人决定谁发表，谁获得职位，谁获得资助。反叛者的空间很小。 接下来发生的事情既不古老也不熟悉：Chan没有退缩。她发推文说：“很抱歉破坏麦克的下落。”并提供了与著名杂志《自然》上一篇论文的链接，“该论文确实做了您认为不可能的实验。” 她礼貌而坚定地证明了Daszak攻击的每个要点，向他展示了他的错误。最后，Daszak被简化为辩称她错误地使用了“ isolate”一词。Chan在一次政变中指出，这个词实际上来自NIH的基因序列数据库GenBank提供的在线数据。她提出将其更改为合理的内容。那时，Daszak停止了回复。但是，他坚持认为，陈过分地解释了她的发现。 在与Eisen合作之后，Chan同意通过寻找其他病毒感染新宿主的例子来检验她的假设。在几天之内，当冠状病毒从人类跃迁到欧洲皮毛场的貂皮的消息传出时，带来了一个绝好的机会。果然，水貂的版本开始迅速变异。“您实际上看到了快速发展的过程，” Chan说。“仅仅在最初的几周内，变化就很大了。” Chan还向Eisen指出，诸如bioRxiv（发音为“ bioarchive”）之类的网站的总体目标是在其上发布论文，目的是征求反馈，使论文在发表之前变得更好。好点，他回答。最终，他承认“论文中有很多有趣的分析”，并同意与Chan合作编写下一份草案。 Twitter与她强大的同事决斗并没有使Chan感到不安。她说：“我认为乔纳森很合理。” “即使他不同意我的意见，我也非常感谢他的专业知识。我喜欢这种反馈。它有助于使我们的纸张更好。” 对于Daszak，Chan更加谨慎。她说：“有些人难以控制自己的情绪。” “每当我看到他的评论时，我都会想，在这里我能学到什么吗？关于我应该解决的问题，他是否正确？最终，她决定没有了。 到5月下旬，对冠状病毒之谜感兴趣的记者和扶手椅侦探都发现Chan是我们沃森的一种福尔摩斯。她以两倍的速度处理信息，专注于我们忽略的小细节，并成为寻找COVID-19最新科学的无旋转解释者的首选。能够实时看到她的推理真是令人兴奋，这回想起了为什么我一直热爱科学，对科学的追求有时会导致激动人心的启示。CNET网站在一个有关“一群科学家转变为侦探”的故事中为她提供了特色，他们使用基因测序技术来揭示COVID-19的起源。消息出炉后，Chan在她的Twitter个人资料中添加了“科学家变成侦探”。 她辜负了她的新推文。随着对病毒来源的搜寻不断，一些科学小组发表了论文，确定了穿山甲中一种密切相关的冠状病毒。穿山甲是一种食蚁兽，在亚洲因其肉类和鳞片而大量贩运。许多不同的研究表明，这种病毒似乎在穿山甲中无处不在。许多科学家热切地接受了这样一种观念，即动物可能是将新型冠状病毒传给人类的中间宿主。它符合他们先前关于湿货市场的理论，这意味着没有实验室参与其中。 当Chan阅读穿山甲文件时，她开始怀疑。第一个是由一个小组分析的一组动物，这些动物被中国南方的反走私当局截获。他们在其中一些中发现了密切相关的病毒，并公布了该病毒的基因组。但是，其他一些论文却奇怪地不清楚它们的数据来自何处，或者其基因组是如何构造的。他们真的从实际穿山甲中提取了样品吗？ 陈再三给成喜战发了短信。她写道：“嘘，这里有些奇怪。” 詹从论文中提取了原始数据，并比较了他们发表的基因组。来自不同动物的病毒的单个副本应该具有很小的差异，就像某个物种的个体具有遗传差异一样。但是，所有穿山甲论文中的基因组都是完美的匹配-作者都只是使用第一组的数据集。该病毒并非无处不在，仅在少数绑在一起的穿山甲中被发现，目前尚不清楚他们是在哪里捕获的。这些动物甚至可能是从自己的走私者那里抓到的。 值得注意的是，《自然》杂志上的一组作者甚至似乎使用了另一篇论文中的相同基因序列，就好像它们在证实自己的发现一样。“这些序列似乎来自我们在本研究中鉴定出的同一病毒（Pangolin-CoV）。” Chan在Twitter上称他们为“当然，这是相同的Pangolin-CoV，您使用的是相同的数据集！” 作为背景，她后来补充说：“想象一下临床试验是否在迅速而宽松地处理其患者数据；重命名患者，将他们扔进不同的数据集而无须澄清，甚至可能无意间在不同研究中多次描述同一位患者。” 她和詹在bioRxiv上发布了一份新的预印本，用于拆卸穿山甲文件。6月份宣布了一项关于野生动植物交易中数百只穿山甲的研究结果的确认：没有一个穿山甲具有冠状病毒的迹象。Chan在Twitter上大获全胜：“一直以来都支持我们的假设。” 穿山甲理论崩溃了。 然后，Chan将自己的Holmesian权力转向更大的游戏领域：Daszak和武汉病毒研究所。从60分钟到《纽约时报》，达萨克一直在为他的案件辩护，并成功表达了对他的事业的同情，甚至使77位诺贝尔奖获得者签署了一封信，呼吁NIH恢复生态健康联盟的资金。 在几个冗长而详尽的“ twetorials”中，Chan开始对WIV的工作产生怀疑。她指出，那里的科学家在2013年的一个矿井中发现了一种病毒，与COVID-19冠状病毒的同源性超过96％，而在那里工作的三名矿工死于类似COVID的疾病。Chan指出，WIV直到2020年才分享这些发现，尽管这种工作的目标据认为是确定有可能引起人类疾病并警告世界的病毒。 尽管该病毒杀死了三名矿工，但达萨克说，当时尚不将其列为研究的重点。“我们正在寻找与SARS相关的病毒，而这种病毒相差20％。我们认为这很有趣，但风险不高。因此，我们对此没有做任何事情，而是将其放入冰箱中。”他对《连线》记者说。他坚持认为，直到2020年，他们才意识到它与COVID-19的相似之处而开始对其进行研究。但是Chan指出一个在线数据库，该数据库显示WIV已在2017年和2018年对该地雷病毒进行了基因测序，以他们过去与其他病毒的方式对其进行了分析，以准备对其进行实验。她写道，外交上却面无表情，“我认为达萨克被误导了。” Chan指出，好的措施几乎是顺带一提，其他人没有注意到：COVID-19包含一个罕见的基因序列，该基因序列过去曾被基因工程师用于将基因插入冠状病毒而不会留下痕迹，并且该序列落入正是在这一点上，实验者可以交换出不同的遗传部分来改变传染性。Chan解释说，相同的序列可以在冠状病毒中自然发生，因此，这并非是非自然起源的无可辩驳的证据，Chan解释说，“仅是观察”。尽管如此，一个Twitter用户仍然在想：“如果死刑像阿丽娜·陈（Alina Chan）对Daszak / WIV的故事一样痛苦，那将是非法的。” 达萨克说，的确是他被误导了，并没有意识到在矿井中发现的病毒是在2020年之前被测序的。他还说，一个拥有优秀科学家的伟大实验室现在正在被挑选出来，以寻找可疑的行为来支持某种行为。先入为主的理论。他说：“如果您深信不疑地发生了一些可疑的事情，那么您要做的就是仔细研究所有证据，然后尝试寻找支持该信念的事物。”真相。” Chan的tweetorials中的许多观点也是由其他人提出的，但她是第一位将所有观点综合在一起的著名科学家。同一周，伦敦的《星期日泰晤士报》和英国广播公司（BBC）都发表了一些故事，这些故事与成龙提出的面包屑痕迹相同，暗示在WIV进行了掩盖。这个故事很快在世界各地流传。同时，WIV坚决否认任何病毒泄漏。实验室主任王彦毅在中国电视台上描述了这种指控为“纯粹的伪造”，并继续解释说，2013年的蝙蝠冠状病毒与COVID如此不同，以至于它不可能如此迅速地进化成这种病毒，并且实验室只能测序它并没有从中获得活病毒。 迄今为止，尚无确切的证据证明该病毒是自然产生的还是实验室产生的，但关于武汉设施是病毒源的假说正日益成为主流，其背后的科学不再被忽视。陈在很大程度上要感谢他。 在春季末期， Chan几个月来第一次走进了Broad Institute的高大玻璃门。当她穿过闪闪发光的大理石门厅时，她的运动鞋吱吱声在寂静中回荡。就像布罗德的僵尸启示录版本一样。所有明亮的灯光，但没人。她穿着健身房的衣服上班，这感觉很奇怪。 几天前，Broad开始让研究人员返回实验室重新开始他们的项目。仍然需要远程完成所有计算机工作，但是只要他们每四天进行一次病毒检测，像Chan这样的替补科学家就可以跳进足够长的时间，以沿着他们的细胞培养进行移动。 在她的实验室中，Chan穿上了白色的实验室外套并清点库存，扔掉了数月的过期试剂并订购了新材料。然后，她从冰箱中取出了一些样本，坐在其中一个组织培养柜中-不锈钢，空气控制柜，细胞工程师在其中进行工作-开始恢复她的一些旧实验。 她对回来感到很困惑。让她的基因疗法项目摆脱停滞状态感觉很好，她和她和Deverman正在从事的新项目使她更加兴奋：一种在线工具，使疫苗开发人员可以按时间，位置，等特点。她说：“这是由于我个人无法快速获得答案而感到沮丧的。” 另一方面，她想念自己的侦探工作被全吃了。她说：“我想穿上穿山甲的印章后停下来，但这个谜团不断吸引着我。” 因此，当她等待细胞培养物生长时，她一直在旁听着-只是这一次她有更多的陪伴：越来越多的科学家悄悄地与她联系，以分享他们自己的有关COVID-19起源的理论和论文，不断增加的地下抵抗力。她说：“好奇心很大。” “人们开始对此进行更深入的思考。” 她说，如果我们要防止未来爆发，他们必须这样做：“重要的是找出来源，这样就不会再次发生。” 这就是使Chan整夜不眠的原因-来自同一来源的人类再度暴发的可能性。如果该病毒是从蝙蝠洞自然产生的，那么很可能存在其他可能扩散的病毒株。如果它们密切相关，那么我们开发的任何疫苗也可能对它们起作用。但是，实验室操纵的病毒可能并非如此。她说：“某人本来可以从不同的洞穴中取样病毒已有十年之久，只是在实验室中进行混搭，而且这些病毒可能彼此如此不同，以至于我们的疫苗都无法对它们起作用。”她说。无论哪种方式，“我们都需要找到它的来源，并将其关闭。” 无论她发现什么重要信息，我们都可以确定Chan将与全世界分享。她的论文没有引起争议而动摇，而是比以往任何时候都更加坚定地坚持一条很容易被超越的路线。她说：“科学家不应该审查自己。” “我们有义务将所有数据放在那里。我们不应该决定，如果公众对此一无所知，那就更好了。如果我们开始这样做，我们将失去信誉，最终我们将失去公众的信任。这对科学不利。” 实际上，这会引起怀疑的流行，这对我们每个人都不会有好处。 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!
