Most virologists say that the coronavirus probably emerged from repeated contact between humans and animals, potentially in connection with wet markets in Wuhan, China, where the virus was first reported. Now, gain-of-function research is once again centre stage, thanks to SARS-CoV-2 and a divisive debate about where it came from. The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know But many of the regulatory discussions have taken place out of the public eye. US funding agencies, which also support research abroad, later imposed a moratorium on gain-of-function research with pathogens while they worked out new protocols to assess the risks and benefits. Researchers around the world voluntarily paused some work, but the issue became particularly politicized in the United States. Many people were concerned that publishing the work would be tantamount to providing a recipe for a devastating pandemic, and in the years that followed, research funders, politicians and scientists debated whether such work required stricter oversight, lest someone accidentally or intentionally release a lab-created plague. The term first gained a wide public audience in 2012, after two groups revealed that they had tweaked an avian influenza virus, using genetic engineering and directed evolution, until it could be transmitted between ferrets 2, 3. The work was considered by some an example of ‘gain-of-function’ virology, in which scientists bestow new abilities on pathogens to study them. “Hindsight is 20:20.”īut the 2015 study did raise broad interest for another reason: some wondered whether such an experiment should ever have been attempted.
“It probably didn’t get the recognition it should have had from the general virology community and people involved in pandemic preparedness,” says Katherine Spindler, a virologist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the work. In just a few years’ time, that warning would prove prescient, as a distant cousin of SARS-CoV has now killed more than 4.9 million people worldwide. This chimaera came with a message: other coronaviruses have the potential to spark a human pandemic. In the laboratory, this particular mash-up was able to break into human cells and also make mice ill 1.
They took a version of the coronavirus responsible for the deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s - now known as SARS-CoV - and adorned it with surface proteins from a different coronavirus taken from Chinese horseshoe bats. In 2015, virologists led by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill reported the creation of their own chimaera.
In Greek mythology, the Chimaera was a fire-breathing monster, a horrifying mishmash of lion, goat and snake that laid waste to the countryside.
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