Fifty thousand times the research downloaded, it has already been shared about ten thousand times on social media. And all that in a week’s time: no mean feat, for a technical article about the molecular details of how the genetic material of a virus works.
But this is not just any virus. It’s about the coronavirus, sars-cov-2. And there’s something weird going on with the way his RNA is supposed to be put together. Spread over its length, the RNA has molecular seams that could indicate that someone has welded the genetic material together in pieces. Instead of fairly random chunks, some large and some small, the seams divide the RNA into pieces that are roughly the same size.
You can feel it coming: that can hardly be a coincidence, argue three young scientists in the pre-publication concerned. This virus has been messed with! Apparently the RNA has been copied in a lab: an operation in which the RNA is cut up and temporarily housed in the form of bacterial DNA, from which researchers can ‘launch’ it again, as it is called.
“We believe that sars-cov-2 was synthesized in the lab using normal methods, probably for normal research purposes,” the trio wrote. “This looks like an accident.” So anyway! The coronavirus, which has been raging around the globe for three years and has killed 20 million people, is simply a laboratory accident. “Why isn’t this front page news?” some readers wonder.
It will not be up to the researchers in question. Lead author Alex Washburne is a mathematician and ecologist working for a commercial lab, while his associates Tony VanDongen and Valentin Bruttel are cancer researcher at the American Duke University and molecular immunologist at the University of Würzburg, respectively. No fools from the fairytale forest, in any case.
Where there is smoke, there is not always fire, but often hot air. So I put the matter to professor of coronavirology Eric Snijder (LUMC), who after all works with the viruses. He’s not very impressed. And for good reason: “The presence of these alleged scars from genetic cutting and pasting, which is what this is all about, makes no sense at all,” he explains, after perusing the article. ‘You can easily avoid them. That is less work and has a greater chance of success. It seems very unlikely that the authors of this article themselves know very well how this technique works’, he complains.
In fact, the three are neglecting a piece of evidence that does not suit them, says Snijder. Because although the trio makes it a point that the seams divide the virus RNA into equal-sized pieces, the seams also create a very small piece. Washburne doesn’t say a word about that uneven piece. Another thing: closely related animal coronaviruses, such as ‘BANAL-247’ (from bats) and ‘PcoV-MP789’ (in pangolins), also have the seams. ‘Have they worked towards a result on the basis of self-selected parameters?’, Snijder wonders aloud.
He is not the only one who makes mincemeat of the study. “So flawed it wouldn’t make it through molecular biology kindergarten,” grumbles infectious disease geneticist Kristian Andersen (Scripps Research Institute) on Twitter. In his response, he adds a few other animal viruses, which are even more like SARS-COV-2 in terms of seams. “This is just nonsense disguised as science,” Andersen said.
And gone is the ‘discovery’ again. The deeper you dive into the matter, the clearer it becomes that sars-cov-2 has nothing that several related coronaviruses from the animal kingdom don’t already have. Some have even more nicely spaced seams than sars-cov-2, while actually coming straight out of the back of a bat.
But in the few days I worked on this piece, the article has been downloaded and excitedly shared a few thousand times on the Internet, and US Republican politicians have released a report stating that the virus really does come from the lab, without any tangible evidence. . ‘The discussion had just settled down a bit,’ says Snijder. “And now this again.”
The story of the sloppy Chinese who let a virus slip out of his lab is a lot more manageable than the inconvenient truth: lugging animals, and a new pandemic virus is what you’ll get every now and then.