Part 2:
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.”
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.