Lab-leak fears are putting virologists under scrutiny

BOSTON - The experiment probed a coronavirus mystery: Why is the omicron variant apparently less deadly than the original Wuhan strain?

The researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (the NEIDL, pronounced like “the needle”) created a new version of the virus, combining the spike protein that studs the surface of omicron with the backbone of the ancestral strain.

The result: The “chimeric” virus was only a little less deadly than the Wuhan strain, killing 80 percent rather than 100 percent of laboratory mice that are particularly sensitive to the virus. But it was still much deadlier in these mice than omicron. This suggested that the spike protein wasn’t the only element of omicron making it less lethal. Another mutation had to be playing a role.

On Oct. 14, the researchers posted an early draft of their results online. Such studies usually fly under the radar. Not this one.

“Experts slam Boston lab where scientists have created a new deadly Omicron strain with an 80% kill rate in mice,” blared a headline in the Daily Mail.

Critics view pathogen research as the Wild West of science. Virologists have faced online abuse and even death threats amid fears that what they do is dangerous. Above all, conjectures that the coronavirus pandemic might have originated from secret laboratory research have cast a shadow over the field.

Independent of that rancorous debate about covid’s origin, the National Institutes of Health is preparing an overhaul of the policies on government-funded research, with draft recommendations by its biosecurity board expected to be released Friday.

The board’s recommendations, which could determine how virology experiments are conducted, will land in a politically charged environment. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, leveraging their newly acquired subpoena power, have launched an investigation of the pandemic that will include the origin of covid and what they believe could be the involvement of American scientists and government officials.

The “lab leak theory” has revived a durable cultural meme, that of the mad scientist, of human hubris creating things that nature would not. Virologists, in turn, argue that the assault on their integrity has potentially dire consequences for public health. Covid is still sickening and killing people across the planet. The natural world teems with pathogens that could create yet another plague.

The editors of the journal of the American Society for Microbiology in December published an editorial warning that if scientists trying to protect humanity from the next pandemic continue to be viewed with suspicion, we will be “doomed to have pathogens control us, rather than vice versa.”