Alina Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a genetic engineer who started doing some of the most controversial research on the coronavirus from her home. It started with the genetic blueprint of the virus: she studied SARS-CoV-1, which was spread to humans in 2003 and is closely related to the newer virus. What struck Chan was that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, did not seem to need to adapt to spread like SARS-CoV-1 did, and she could not figure out why. Chan typified her findings and included scenarios that could explain it, including the possibility of a non-genetically engineered virus being grown in a laboratory and accidentally spilled. Her article never claimed that the laboratory leak was the only a statement for the pandemic – just one that deserved consideration. But the political landscape last spring made the meticulous proposal radioactive in the scientific community. Before publishing her article, Senator Tom Cotton suggested that COVID be manufactured as a bioweapon by Chinese scientists. President Donald Trump said at the time that he had reason to believe that the outbreak originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. All of this meant that many scientists were reluctant to come close to Chan’s hypothesis when it was finally published, but she maintains that it is more than possible to use the “laboratory leak” theory without incorporating such dangerous ideas or to encourage. I spoke to Chan on Tuesday’s episode of What Next to further investigate the hypothesis. Our conversation has been edited and summarized for clarity.
Alina Chan: If you compare SARS-CoV-1 with SARS-CoV-2, it is striking that there is this period of rapid mutation adaptation in the host that you could see in SARS-CoV-1 and not the new virus.
Mary Harris: With SARS-CoV-1, you can see yourself changing from day to day, trying to figure out how to keep the host.
Not day to day, but between patients. Based on the series they received from patients at the time, you could see that it picks up dozens of mutations, functional mutations, within the first two or three months. But the new virus was genetically stable. It has changed very little.
You published this article in May 2020, where you said that we might have to consider the idea that this coronavirus comes from a laboratory. What was the main theory at the time about where COVID came from?
The Chinese government announced in January that the virus probably came from illegally sold game in a wet market. But over time, that story seemed to fall apart. And by May, about two or three weeks after my article appeared, the Chinese CDC director actually announced that the market is a victim. He said it was most likely a group.
Where did the Chinese CDC director think it started?
He gave no answers, but the genetic and epidemiological evidence at the time did not indicate that the market was the source of the virus. In Wuhan, there were early versions of the virus that apparently did not pass through the market. They seem to be ahead or parallel to the market.
I really want to be clear that I still trade wildlife is an acceptable scenario. But I think it’s essential that we do a real investigation, a credible investigation that is free of political influence, whether this virus could have come from a laboratory or from the wildlife trade.
Most of the questions you and others raise revolve around the Wuhan Institute of Technology. Tell me more about it.
This is China’s first BSL-4 laboratory. It is a very prestigious, highly funded institute that studies viruses.
BSL-4 is the highest level of international bioresearch security. There can be potentially dangerous stuff in there. And researchers are definitely studying viruses that look a lot like COVID, right?
Yes, they have the closest virus genome to SARS-CoV-2, and it’s called RaTG13. It has its own interesting story because it is linked to these issues among some miners in South China. The WIV was one of the laboratories that followed up on the mysterious cases. They collected numerous viruses from that mine where the miners were sick with the SARS-like disease, and the immediate family member was from the mine.
My understanding is that there was a researcher there who literally went into caves and would collect the virus and bring it back to the lab.
There were many younger scientists and staff entering the caves, which are not like tourist destinations where people can arrive by bus load. They really need to move in there and catch and taste all these tens of thousands of bats. And they’re been doing it for the past decade. Sometimes they have a complete danger pack, but sometimes they do not carry PBT when they collect.
Prolonged contact with so many bats means that these scientists are exposed to everything the bats carry in these caves – and any possible exposure goes with them to Wuhan. And the bats studied in southern China cannot fly as far as Wuhan.
The question is, what was the channel for a SARS-CoV-2 virus to get from southern China to central China, where Wuhan is? This genus of viruses that can be found just like a thousand miles south. Wuhan is not a place where millions of these viruses are in bats.
In addition, there is research from this institute that shows that it is quite rare for humans to be really infected by bats with the coronavirus. So it was unlikely that one became infected and came as far as Wuhan and started an outbreak. But years before COVID became what it is today, U.S. embassy officials visited the institute and sent warnings to Washington, saying there was not enough security at the lab. Have you had the chance to look at the cables and think about the implications there?
I looked at the cables, but the thing that was most interesting to me was that they said in one of the cables that China was prototyping the first global virus collection program. What happened to that then? Where is the prototype? Where is this virus collection? The safety issue is important, but it is also important to note that laboratories around the world, all have safety issues, and that it is not clear in which laboratories how many accidents occur per year. But these processes do have accidents.
Just because accidents happen.
We have spread all these virus hunting programs everywhere, especially in developing countries. It’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is not just so many, many groups of scientists who all draw from this money. There is a deterrent for them to plead for an investigation into the origin, as it may shift the perception of their work as life-saving, as pandemic-preventing, to a pandemic and lost lives.