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The renowned Australian virologist considered the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, before changing his mind. He never expected his considerations to be at the centre of an international debate.
Second, the furin cleavage site was clearly “atypical” and not the type a scientist would insert as part of an experiment. And most crucially, data came in from a Hong Kong team that was sequencing coronaviruses found in pangolins seized by Chinese customs.
The coronaviruses had receptor-binding domains nearly identical to those seen in SARS-CoV-2. “It was there in pangolins, which really showed it was natural,” Holmes says. “And if the receptor binding domain is natural why not the furin cleavage site?”asked four scientists on whether Holmes’ conduct was a normal part of the scientific practice or a cover-up. Should the scientists have disclosed their earlier fears about a lab leak? “No. Absolutely not. Not the prior talks, no. Certainly, not in a scientific paper,” says Professor Sujatha Raman, who holds chair in science communication at the Australian National University. Scientists should debate hypotheses, Raman says, but a paper just needs to reflect the conclusion, not the debate. Professor Dominic Dwyer, a member of the World Health Organisation’s mission to China to investigate the source of the pandemic, described Holmes’ conduct as “absolutely reasonable, and typical of good scientific debate”. Other researchers disagree. Professor David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California, says the evidence simply wasn’t strong enough to support the hypothesis in the scientific paper published in March 2020. The paper, Relman says, rested on the “faulty assumption” the Chinese had published all the sequences for viruses they held in their labs. “Some of these authors continue to show a lack of objectivity and a continued interest in overstating what we know and don’t know,” he tellsRichard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who has become among the most-outspoken scientific critics of a natural origin, goes even further. He accuses the researchers of “scientific fraud”. The released emails “make it absolutely clear the authors knew the conclusions of the paper were unsound,” he says. “There is nothing – absolutely nothing – that resembles ‘a normal part of the scientific process’ in the process revealed by the authors’ correspondence.”stymie debate on the origins of COVID-19? While the paper calls a lab leak implausible, in the very next sentence it notes “more scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favour one hypothesis over another”. Indeed, the acres of newsprint devoted to the topic would suggest little debate has been stoppered.Holmes, again, is incredulous.“This is not the 14th century. I’m not the Pope,” he says. “If you don’t believe it, write your own paper.” Some did. Several scientists, including Relman and Canadian evolutionary biologist Professor Michael Worobey, wrote a call for the lab leak hypothesis
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