UTMB scientist who visited Chinese lab acknowledges risks
A leading Texas scientist who visited a Chinese laboratory conducting coronavirus research acknowledged that while that facility made security a priority, it is possible that an accident could have led to the global virus outbreak.
James Le Duc, the director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, has had a professional relationship with several Chinese biocontainment labs since 2013, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The lab studies some of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases, including coronaviruses in bats.
The Wuhan laboratory’s research has prompted speculation by Trump administration officials and others that the lab may have had a role in causing the coronavirus outbreak in China’s Hubei Province, the virus’s epicenter. Administration officials also have called on China to close its “wet markets,” widely viewed as the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Le Duc visited the Wuhan lab in 2017, shortly before it opened, and even hosted the lab’s building engineers at the Galveston National Laboratory for a training program on building operations and maintenance while it was under construction. While Le Duc said he did not see anything during that visit that alarmed him or hinted at lax safety protocols, he acknowledged that even laboratories with the highest level of security are prone to accidents.
Diplomatic cables from 2018 obtained by The Washington Post warned about questionable safety and inadequate training at the lab and the risk potential of coronaviruses from bats being transmitted to humans and causing a pandemic similar to SARS in 2003.
“Accidents happen,” Le Duc told the Houston Chronicle. “You do your best to prevent it, and you prepare for an eventuality if it should happen. So all I can say is (the Wuhan lab) was built comparable to ours, with a whole series of redundant safety measures in place. We did our best to share best practices so that they knew how to drive it and keep it safe. But it would be foolish to say there’s no risk, because there’s risk in everything.”
Source of virus?
Senior officials at the Wuhan lab have consistently denied any link between their facility and the coronavirus outbreak.
“There is absolutely no way that the virus originated from our institute,” Yuan Zhiming, a top scientist at the Wuhan facility, told Chinese state television recently. The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that all available evidence suggests the novel coronavirus originated in animals in China and was not manipulated or produced in a laboratory.
Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan lab and one of the world’s leading researchers on bat coronaviruses, told Scientific American last month that she initially feared the virus could have originated at her facility, but was relieved that none of the genetic sequences taken from infected patients matched the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.
“That really took a load off my mind,” Shi said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
Yet the coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab so alarmed American science diplomats that they requested the U.S. provide further support beyond the assistance that the lab was getting from UTMB. In another cable, diplomats noted “the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this highcontainment laboratory.”
Le Duc was hesitant to ascribe blame or speculate on any specific cause of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. He did, however, acknowledge China’s relative lack of experience in establishing high-security biocontainment labs.
“I can say that this was a brand-new laboratory that was working at a level of biocontainment that they had not worked at in the past, so it’s not surprising that they don’t have a whole lot of people with experience in it,” said Le Duc, who joined UTMB in 2006 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think that that means that they were any less appreciative of safety and security than anyone else.”
Engaging with China
UTMB’s relationship with China dates back to 2013, when the medical branch opened discussions with three labs that were under construction, including the Wuhan complex. Le Duc led a team that provided individualized, hands-on training in biosafety, biosecurity and biocontainment laboratory operations to international partners from around the world.
The Galveston National Laboratory hosted a team of engineers that was building the lab in Wuhan to train them specifically on maintenance and operations of biocontainment labs. The national laboratory also hosted two Chinese post-doctoral scientists from the Wuhan lab. They completed the nearly yearlong training needed to gain independent access to the Galveston facility and collaborated with UTMB faculty on Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus research.
“We wanted to make sure that we were engaged with (China) because they’re a huge country, they’ve got tremendous intellectual power, and a lot of ongoing scientific collaborations,” Le Duc said. “We just wanted to make sure that as they stood up their new biocontainment labs, that they were aware of our experiences and kind of open up a dialogue so that we could share best practices.”
Le Duc spoke highly of Shi, whose research he admires. Both scientists attended annual meetings hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, where Le Duc listened to Shi warn of the dangers of coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans as far back as 2015.
While one of the 2018 diplomatic cables obtained by The Post warned of the public health risk of bat-associated coronaviruses, Le Duc said this has been common knowledge in the scientific community for years.
“It wasn’t breaking news and it wasn’t a surprise to the scientists that are working in this field,” he said.
‘Big disservice’
Le Duc has kept in touch with Shi since the outbreak and is saddened her integrity has come into question. Le Duc said he believes Shi’s account of when she was first notified of the first coronavirus infections and that the timeline of events suggests to him that the virus did not originate in the Wuhan lab.
“It’s all speculation that the lab was involved and I think it’s very appropriate that people look into this because that’s where some of the work is done, but the timeline doesn’t make sense,” he said. “I’m not at all trying to defend her or the laboratory, and frankly I think the Chinese government has done themselves and the global community a big disservice by not being more transparent as to what’s going on, but that’s a whole different set of issues.”
Le Duc also dismissed conspiracy theories suggesting that the coronavirus was man-made in the Wuhan lab, saying it “almost certainly originated from nature” given its similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses.
“We as scientists try and use the best practices,” he said. “Nobody wants to get sick, nobody wants to take their work home with them. Like anything, it’s a highly specialized field, there are tools and procedures that protect the individuals working in the field and we all try and use them.”