A Covid conspiracy

As the world finds itself dealing with a global pandemic, all sorts of conspiracy theories are circulating about what caused it and why it’s happening, and I recently found out some people believe I’m part of one such conspiracy.

I’m a microbiologist and supervise a team of scientists in the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab. We make nasty bacteria (superbugs) glow in the dark (bioluminescent) to try to find new antibiotics and understand what makes some bacteria infectious. More than 10 years ago, I was part of a three-year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make the bacterium that causes tuberculosis glow. TB kills thousands of people around the world every day.

There are lots of reasons making bacteria glow in the dark is useful. For starters, they only glow when they are alive, so if the bacteria die, the light goes out. Measuring light is easier and quicker than waiting for bacteria to appear on Petri dishes. Which is really handy if those bacteria take weeks and weeks to grow on Petri dishes, like the one that causes TB.

To make superbugs glow, we engineer them with the genes that naturally glowing creatures (like fireflies and glow worms) use to make light. We mostly use genes that originally came from a soil bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens, which is found in the guts of some microscopic worms.

Fireflies, glow worms, and P. luminescens all make light using a simple chemical reaction. A protein called an enzyme acts on another protein called the substrate, producing light as a byproduct. While fireflies, glow worms, and bacteria like P. luminescens use very different enzymes and substrates for their light-generating reactions, the enzymes are all commonly referred to as luciferases and the substrates as luciferins.

It seems some people believe there is a satanic plot by Bill Gates, ‘‘ominously’’ codenamed Luciferase, to microchip the world’s population. And because I work with luciferases and was once funded by the Gates Foundation, some people think I’m part of this plot.

The funny thing is, luciferase and luciferin aren’t named after Lucifer the devil. A 19-century French scientist Raphael Dubois named them from the Latin word lucifer, meaning ‘‘bringer of light’’. Because that’s exactly what they do.

Some people believe there is a satanic plot by Bill Gates codenamed Luciferase to microchip the world’s population.