The Times Magazine 45r 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.”
D
WHEN SHE FIRST SPOKE OUT, THE THEORY ABOUT
A LAB LEAK WAS DISMISSED – IN PUBLIC, AT LEAST
British scientist and WHO team member Peter DaszakGuards protect the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the World Health Organisation visit to China earlier this yearPREVIOUS SPREAD: TONY LUONG/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE. THIS PAGE: REUTERS, GETTY IMAGES