48 The Times Magazine
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 individualswho 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 meanrefraining 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?” nViral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19
by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley is published by
4th Estate on November 16 (£20)‘YES, I’M PAYING A PRICE, BUT IF NO ONE BLOWS
THE WHISTLE, WE’LL HAVE MORE PANDEMICS’