Dr Alina Chan, a 33-year-old scientist, is thinking of changing her name. Why? Her 18-month investigation into the theory that the Covid-19 virus really could have come from the Wuhan laboratory after all.
Dr Alina Chan has an unusual to-do list. For the next few weeks she'll be publicising her first book. After that she's planning to change her name. The aim, she says, is to fade into obscurity to save her career and stay safe.
If this sounds like an odd strategy for a debutant author, it helps to know that the book, which she has co-written with the British science writer Matt Ridley, is about the origins of Sars-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic.
It's not that Chan thinks she knows for sure where it came from. Instead, the case she's been making since May 2020 – and this is a line of argument that has earned her online deaths threats, furious insults from Chinese state media and fierce condemnation from eminent western scientists – is that we can't be certain that it did not emerge from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory that specialises in bat coronaviruses and lies just a few miles from where the first documented Covid cases occurred.
When she first spoke out, the lab-leak theory was dismissed – in public, at least – by senior virologists as a fantasy of populist politicians and internet cranks. Facebook and Wikipedia banned any mention of the possibility that the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, branding it a conspiracy theory. Today, thanks in part to Chan, a lab leak is broadly acknowledged as quite plausible.
Reframing the debate has taken a toll. "Writing the book was my way of trying to close this chapter of my life. It's been very satisfying doing this work, but it's also terrifying and exhausting, and I don't think I can keep it up," she tells me via Zoom from her home in Massachusetts.
Friends have warned her that she's made too many enemies in science; that the book – Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 – will cut her off from grant money and prevent her research being published.
"And then there's also the Chinese government. It's a real concern and it keeps me up quite a bit: that I am probably on some watch list. So it's just safer for me if I change my name."
She didn't set out to bait Beijing. Chan, 33, is a post-doctorate researcher at the prestigious Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is affiliated with both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work involves looking at how viruses can be modified to carry useful genetic material into a patient's body to treat disease, a field known as gene therapy. When the first reports emerged of a mysterious pneumonia of "unknown aetiology" in Wuhan, she was an early-career scientist with no public profile.
Soon, though, she found herself bridling at how a small number of influential researchers seemed to be lulling their peers into a kind of group think. Papers published in high-calibre journals – The Lancet in February 2020 and Nature Medicine the following month – dismissed out of hand the idea that the virus might have originated in a Wuhan lab.
Chan thought that seemed too hasty. In particular, she thought that the stability of the coronavirus's genetic material was puzzling.
Sars-CoV-2 is quite closely related to the original Sars virus, which killed nearly 800 people in 2003. But when "Sars 1" first infected humans, having jumped from bats via a creature called a palm civet, it went through a phase where it rapidly accumulated a host of new mutations as it adapted itself to infect human cells more efficiently.
Sars-CoV-2, the Covid bug, did not seem to undergo the same frantic spell of adaptation. Instead, it appeared to spring from nowhere, perfectly tuned to rip through a human population. It was, Chan argued in May 2020, as if it was "pre-adapted" to spread among us, to infiltrate our cells. In a paper that was released online but has never been peer-reviewed or accepted by a scientific journal, she and two colleagues outlined three potential explanations.
It was possible, they conceded, that the virus had indeed evolved in bats or another creature to a point where it was, by pure fluke, already highly capable of passing from human to human. Or perhaps it had been spreading undetected in people somewhere in China, gathering the critical mutations it needed.
Or maybe, they said, it had been multiplying in a lab somewhere. It was plausible, Chan and her colleagues suggested, that Sars-CoV-2 had been allowed to replicate in human cells grown in a petri dish or possibly in "humanised mice" – rodents with human genes spliced into them.
The chance that a non-engineered virus could have "adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory", they said, "should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely".
She now says that she was naive, that she had no idea of the storm that would follow.
"I just wanted to question how this virus got so well adapted for spreading in humans. After that, everything was just led by my curiosity. Also, I have this bad habit of not really thinking through personal consequences."
Colleagues had told her that she should share a condensed "tweetorial" version of the paper on Twitter. "After that, it just snowballed. Tons of really interesting people showed up. And I don't mean that in a negative way, by the way, because this is kind of how the first version of Drastic got together – the Seeker showed up on the thread, and they started talking among each other."
To those who haven't followed the labyrinthine debate over the origins of Covid, this will need to be translated. "Drastic" is a group of amateur sleuths who have coordinated their efforts online and have tried to stand up the lab-leak theory. "The Seeker" is one of its members. His real name is Prasenjit "Jeet" Ray and he lives in Bhubaneswar in India.
He has been accused of working for the CIA or Indian intelligence. Actually, according to Chan and Ridley, who tracked him down, he's just a "very clever young man" with excellent internet research skills.
Not all of its conclusions pass the sniff test, but Drastic has unearthed material any investigative reporter would be delighted with. Using the Wuhan Institute of Virology's own records, including an obscure master's thesis squirrelled away on a Chinese website, they revealed how the institute had amassed a collection of coronaviruses – taken from bats – that belong to the same sub-family as Sars-CoV-2.
The Covid pandemic had been raging for a year before the Wuhan Institute researchers admitted that Drastic's findings were correct.
One reading of the evidence is that the institute sought to obscure where its scientists had collected these viruses, which was in a copper mine in Yunnan province, nearly 1,000 miles from Wuhan. Ominously, six workers who had been dispatched to collect bat guano from the same mine in 2012 were later admitted to a hospital in the provincial capital of Kunming with coughs, fevers, head and chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three eventually died of a mysterious lung disease.
Accidents happen; Sars 1 has escaped from labs at least six times. So could this be how the present pandemic began: with a sample that was transported for 1,000 miles from a remote bat cave to the bustling city of Wuhan?
Chan doesn't know. Nobody does. "There is presently little evidence to definitively support any particular scenario," she wrote in her original paper in May last year. That hasn't changed. Last month, an investigation by US intelligence agencies concluded that the origins of Sars-CoV-2 may never be determined. Animal-to-human transmission and a lab leak were both plausible hypotheses, it concluded. The World Health Organisation is of much the same mind. An original WHO investigation, which travelled to China in January, was widely criticised after it failed to gain access to the Wuhan laboratories as well as for including Peter Daszak, a controversial British scientist who leads a group called EcoHealth Alliance and who has close working ties with the Wuhan Institute. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, now says that the "laboratory hypotheses must be examined carefully", with a focus on facilities that were working with coronaviruses in Wuhan before Covid was first identified. He has dismissed as "premature" the conclusion of the initial WHO investigation that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely".
In their book, Chan and Ridley document numerous other twists that, at the very least, look odd. In February 2020, for instance, when the Wuhan Institute released a first description of the virus it failed to mention an unusual feature known as a furin cleavage site – a small sequence of genetic code that is potentially suspicious because it makes the virus far more transmissible among humans and has not been seen in any other coronavirus closely related to Sars-CoV-2 .
It's impossible to know whether it was put there by a scientist; it could have appeared naturally. But Chan sees the failure of the Wuhan bat-virus experts to highlight this critical and highly unusual feature as damning, comparing it to "describing a unicorn and not mentioning the horn".
There are other pieces of circumstantial evidence: the earliest Chinese medics to spot the virus were silenced; the bat virus in the Wuhan Institute's collection that was most closely related to Sars-CoV-2 was weirdly renamed; a key database vanished; journalists have been forbidden from going near the Yunnan copper mine; a senior Wuhan Institute researcher has said that when Sars-CoV-2 was initially identified her first thought was, "Could it have come from my lab?"
Chan's campaign to drag these matters into the light hasn't gone unnoticed in China. An article in the Global Times, part of the Chinese state media, accused her of "filthy behaviour and a lack of basic academic ethics".
"After that piece was published, I got a ton of messages from Chinese-speaking people calling me a race traitor, telling me to die. I don't really want to talk about that because it freaks out my family," she says.
A Canadian passport holder, Chan was born in Vancouver and her heritage is part Chinese. Her parents returned to their native Singapore when she was a small child, but she went back to Canada after high school, completing a PhD in medical genetics at the University of British Columbia. By the age of 25 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
In 2020, the political atmosphere in the US made it difficult to discuss the virus's origins. As Boston magazine put it, "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." That idea chimed with Chan enough for her to retweet it. At the same time, though, if Sars had emerged in a city in a western country, it would have been far easier to investigate the lab origin idea.
Chinese scientists are clearly not free to explain and reveal everything they've been doing with bat viruses, she says. "If it had been in the US, I think a lot of American journalists would have swarmed into that city to investigate. People would just do their own thing because they're not afraid of being thrown in prison and being tortured.
"It should not be the case that we can only investigate lab escapes in western countries and not Asian countries just because we're afraid of being perceived as racist. I think that's unscientific, and kind of hilarious."
But she argues that if the lab-leak theory does eventually turn out to be true, the west won't be free of blame. "I think this whole thing has been cast as 'China doing reckless research'. But I don't think it's a China-only problem. It's a very international problem. These scientists [at the Wuhan Institute] were not working in a vacuum. They were working with partners from Africa, from America, from Europe. So it was a global collaboration."
The most obvious figure here is Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance chief. His life's work, as well as the millions in grant money his organisation has been awarded, including from the US government, has pivoted on the idea that collecting animal viruses from the wild and then studying – and modifying – them in the lab can help prepare humanity for pandemics. It's not hard to see why he might want to discount the idea that such work had actually brought forth a plague.
"I don't really want to name people, because when I've done that in the past it really brings a lot of harassment to them," Chan says. "I think that a credible investigation should be set up so that a balanced and fair investigation committee can then reach out to these individuals, interview them, find out what they know and get hold of any of the communications or documents they have exchanged."
After her first tweetorial was picked up by media around the world, Chan was unnerved by the attention. "I don't think I slept for more than two hours in those, like, five days. I thought that I had committed group career suicide for me and all my co-authors."
Idealism and workaholism appear to have carried her through. When the pandemic struck, her own lab research was wound down. It's hard to imagine Chan sitting back on furlough. She tells me a story about how, a few years ago, she and her husband basically got married during a lunch break. "My boss was like, oh, where were you this morning? And I said, 'We got married.' It was pretty, I don't know, no frills."
What did her family say? "They found out afterwards and now they would like me to have a real wedding at some point, but they've been pestering me for more than four years and I've never done it. Too busy working."
At Harvard, she'd previously made a whistleblower complaint about working conditions in a lab. (She has declined to give any more details.) And in a previous interview with MIT Technology Review, she described herself as "a born shit-stirrer".
She has a friend who describes her as "the living embodiment of 'See Something, Say Something' – a reference to a long-running campaign by America's Department of Homeland Security to coax people to raise the alarm if they see something suspicious, in the name of thwarting terror attacks.
"I tend to think of long-term consequences more than short-term consequences," she tells me. "Yes, I'm paying a price for this lab-origins stuff. But if nobody does this, if no one blows the whistle on egregious misconduct or on a virus that killed millions of people potentially coming from a lab accident, then we're just heading for more of this. We're just creating a precedent for continued misconduct or continued lab accidents causing pandemics."
For many months she said that she was equivocal on the pandemic's origins. She originally intervened, she says, to make sure that a theory that had been sidelined too quickly got a hearing.
"The reason I've had to push so hard for the [lab-leak hypothesis] is because scientists have pushed so hard against it – by that, I mean a few scientists who are very visible have pushed very hard.
"If they had been pushing against the wildlife trade origin [theory], I would push really hard for wildlife trade origin. For me, it's about bringing balance and honesty back into the question."
This September, though, she says that a new piece of information published by The Intercept website about an application for a scientific grant tipped her towards the lab-leak explanation. "We had already sent the book to the publishers and we were still feeling pretty 50/50, maybe leaning a little towards the leak.
"We went to the publishers and said we have to put this into the end of the book because I think this really pushes it – it shifts the balance more towards the lab origin."
The grant application shows that as early as March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance and collaborators including the Wuhan Institute of Virology had plans to create new Sars-like virus genomes. The aim was to introduce what a specialist would call "novel furin cleavage sites" – snippets of genetic material that could dramatically improve the virus's ability to infect humans cells.
In other words, they were asking for money to create viruses that would look a lot like Sars-CoV-2.
The application, made to a research arm of the US military, was rejected. But Chan still sees it as significant. "It shows us that the scientists in that city, maybe even two years before the pandemic started, had a pipeline for generating such a virus," she says.
This isn't a smoking gun. It is more, as she puts it, "a gun that is warm to the touch. There's no bullet. You don't have definitive proof that Sars-CoV-2 was made in that lab. But you could see how it could be. It very plausibly could have resulted from the work that was being done in Wuhan."
What really seems to anger her is that the scientists who made the application did not volunteer the information immediately. "It's very shocking to think that when this virus was detected, the scientists who all knew about this pipeline of work said nothing about it. They said nothing for almost two years until someone leaked the proposal.
"I think it shows that some of the people who know the most about where this virus might have come from have not been very forthcoming about what they know. They have suppressed information that would have led many to speculate that this came from the lab."
If the lab-leak theory is correct, it seems likely that there is a group of scientists in China who are sitting on two things: knowledge of exactly what happened; and, presumably, an unfathomable sense of guilt.
"I don't see them as culpable of manslaughter. I see them as individuals who are in this hurricane but they have no ability to stop the wind from blowing," Chan says.
She has discussed with a colleague the options that would be open to such scientists. "Your whole family could be imprisoned. They could be disappeared. So we agreed that, in that situation, we would just not say anything for decades."
So if the lab leak was confirmed, what would the next day look like? The geopolitical fallout would be huge, obviously. There would be legal, moral, ethical dimensions. Chan's co-author, Matt Ridley, has already denounced the arrogance of science as an institution. Science journalists, not generally known for interrogating scientists, might reassess how they do business.
But Chan appears more interested in practical measures. There are steps that the world should already be taking, she believes, no matter what the truth is behind Covid.
This would include ending practices she sees as reckless. This wouldn't only mean refraining from so-called "gain of function" research, where scientists deliberately try to alter viruses in a lab to make them more dangerous, hoping to collect information that might be useful when a pandemic strikes.
For Chan, it would also mean giving up the kind of virus-hunting conducted by the Wuhan scientists, work that involves collecting samples of blood or faeces from bats or other creatures and then bringing them back to laboratories in major urban centres to sift them for threatening pathogens. "I don't know why scientists are still doing this," she says. "Why don't we move these pathogen research labs to more isolated areas, where there's a good quarantine protocol before scientists can come back into a metropolitan area?
"Extremely prominent scientists are already saying that we should start taking pre-emptive measures based on the knowledge that this pandemic could have come from a lab – for them, it almost doesn't matter any more whether it did.
"They say that now we should really be taking actions to regulate this type of risky research, and I agree. You have millions of lives at stake. Do we need a second pandemic of ambiguous origin before we take steps to make this research more transparent and safe?"
Written by: Rhys Blakely
© The Times of London
