“Some kind of threshold has been crossed" said Alina Chan

9-23-21     “Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said

Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral:  The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”  Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development.  For Chan the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses--something people previously speculated but had no evidence, may have happened.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed.  “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet.  “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”...

Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab.  “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept.  “In fact a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent--which it was not before I read the proposal.”

But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China.  “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana….

Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology who directs the developmental biology laboratory at New York Medical College, also said the fact that the viruses weren’t known to be dangerous didn’t preclude the possibility that they might become so.  “That’s really disingenuous,” Newman said of the argument.  “The people that are claiming natural emergence say that it begins with a bat virus that evolved to be compatible with humans. If you use that logic, then this virus could be a threat because it could also make that transition.”  Newman, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research and founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said that the proposal confirmed some of his worst fears.  “This is not like slightly stepping over the line,” said Newman.  “This is doing everything that people say is going to cause a pandemic if you do it.  Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center.  “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place.  The virus is going to undergo a whole bunch of changes to try and cope with its imperfections.  So who knows what will come of it.”  The risks of such research are profound and irreversible, he said.  “You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”…

  Daszak’s proposal was to be developed through a subcontract in the grant in Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not in Wuhan.  Baric did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment….Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it.  https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=theintercept