Скачать или смотреть The coronavirus lab leak conspiracy

Could SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, have leaked from a lab? It’s a complicated story of science, ethics, not-quite-smoking guns and bat caves—so I wanted to take a look at the genetic evidence, by printing out covid’s genetic code.

Video chapters

00:00 Introduction
02:38 Enter the variants
04:57 The Wuhan Institute of Virology
06:39 1. A natural virus escapes (RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine)
09:30 2. ‘Gain of function’ research (how to make a ferret sneeze)
11:23 3. An engineered virus (splicing SARS-1 for fun and profit)
14:07 Covid’s family tree


Sources and further reading

The lab leak hypothesis

Update 01/2023: There’s now an increasingly strong preponderance of evidence (albeit frustratingly not conclusive) that covid originated naturally at the Huanan Seafood Market. Two back-to-back papers gave the evidence for this in July 2022, and the evidence is laid out in this excellent thread on Twitter:   / 1551937826580824070  
An even-handed case for the prosecution for the lab leak hypothesis https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/op...
The deleted coronavirus sequences from early in the pandemic https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
Open letter from researchers calling for an investigation into covid’s origins https://science.sciencemag.org/conten...

RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine

Discovery of RaTG13 in a mineshaft by WIV researchers https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Comparing SARS-CoV-2 to RaTG13 https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
The mysterious miners’ pneumonia https://www.reuters.com/business/heal... and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...

Gain of function research

This is a great article on WIV’s gain of function research, and the history and risks of this kind of work in general https://www.technologyreview.com/2021...
It relates to this 2015 paper https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
And here is a letter expressing concerns about the work: https://www.nature.com/articles/natur...

Other interesting stuff

Paper about the N501Y substitution https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
The UK’s incredible coronavirus genome sequencing https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-...
How smallpox claimed its final victim https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...
A (rather unnerving and almost certainly incomplete) list of lab leaks in the past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Data

SARS-CoV-2.0 genome https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/...
SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant definition https://covariants.org/variants/20I.A... and https://cov-lineages.org/global_repor...
SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant definition https://covariants.org/variants/21A.D... and https://cov-lineages.org/global_repor...
SARS-CoV-1 genome https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/...
SARS-1 phylogenetic ‘family tree’ adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_...

Images

The lab I’m ‘sitting in’ is adapted from this image by the National Cancer Institute. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with coronaviruses! But those are real sequencing machines… Thank you, as ever, to the US for making all its taxpayer-funded photos copyright-free! https://unsplash.com/photos/oCLuFi9GYNA
During the end screen, my laptop is running Nextclade, which is absolutely mind-boggling. You can provide it with loads of coronavirus sequences, and it will fire up a multithreaded alignment algorithm right in your web browser to tell you which variant they each are, along with interesting information about their mutations. Truly we live in the future when tech like this is available for free. https://clades.nextstrain.org/

Pedantic PPE note

What I’m wearing in the thumbnail isn’t good PPE practice! Firstly, where are my googles?! Secondly, to get a proper seal with an FFP3/N95 mask, you need to be clean-shaven, which I’m not! Finally, this obviously isn’t appropriate for, eg, a BSL-4 lab… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafe...


Credits

Many thanks to Tran Nguyen for her help with this video!


And finally…

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