Science Vs - Coronavirus: Was It Made In a Lab?

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Since the outbreak started, we’ve been hearing that this coronavirus came from bats before jumping to humans. But recently, claims that the virus escaped from a lab have been getting a lot of attention. So did it? Is there an evil scientist behind all of this? To find out, we talk to microbiologist Professor Benhur Lee, Christian Stevens, and virologist Dr. Oscar MacLean. Also: FROGS!! UPDATE 4/27/20: An earlier version of this episode played a quote from a politician saying that China has only one biosafety level 4 lab. This is incorrect, and the episode has been updated. Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/3eWnFNE This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler, with help from Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Sinduja Srinivasan and Laura Morris. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Kirsty Short, Dr. Ximena Bernal, Henry Legett, Dr. Muhamed Amin, and Professor Kristian Andersen. And special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Today on the show, was this coronavirus made in a lab? Since the early days, we've been hearing that this virus came from bats and jumped to humans. But another claim has popped up that's getting a lot of attention. And developing tonight, the US government is looking into the possibility COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory. The killer coronavirus probably originated

from a laboratory in Wuhan. A Pew Research poll recently found that 30% of Americans believed that this virus was made in a lab and not in nature. We're looking at it. A lot of people are looking at it. It seems to make sense. And here's what some people are pointing to as evidence. You see, early in this pandemic, some news reports were saying that the outbreak took off in this animal market in Wuhan. But then... Chinese researchers say the first known patient had no exposure to

the market. Adding fuel to the fire, it turns out that some 10 miles away from that market is a high-security lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists study some of the most dangerous viruses around. This is a laboratory that contained highly contagious materials. So is it possible that someone cooked up this virus on purpose? And how could we even know? Today on the show, the story of how scientists are tracking down the origins of this virus, delving deep into its genome to look for human fingerprints. And even if you don't think this virus was made in a lab, stick around for this one, because it's quite the adventure. Science versus coronavirus, escape from the lab,

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Welcome back. Today on the show, did this coronavirus escape from the lab? To answer this question, we called up Ben-Hur Lee from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Ben-Hur studies how diseases emerge. And he was like, yeah, the fact that this high-level lab in Wuhan is so close to the outbreak. I mean, the optics of it, right? I mean, the optics of it doesn't look good. But scientists don't need to rely on optics

to find out where this virus came from. They use science. More specifically, genetics. You can think of the genetic code of this virus as the scene of a crime, and we're looking for evidence of foul play. By early January, scientists all around the world were invited to inspect the crime scene. On January 10th, the full genome sequence was released.

And from that, you can infer the origins in terms of where it came from. The first thing scientists wanted to do with that sequence was compare it with viruses we already know about to see if it's a match. Over the years, scientists from all around the world, in New York, London, Wuhan, they've collected samples of different viruses and sequenced them and then popped them into a big database. So basically, we can just look and see, have we seen this virus before?

Because if we had this exact same coronavirus on file, then we'd know this wasn't some new thing cooked up in a lab. Have we found the exact same coronavirus that's now infecting people in nature, like in a bat, in anything? No. No. No, we have not. So there's no smoking gun. No smoking gun?

So where did this virus come from? Could scientists have made it in a lab? Well, we know it's true that scientists are out there playing around with viruses in labs. And they do this for all sorts of reasons, like trying to understand how viruses work and how dangerous they might become. If this was your job to make this coronavirus,

like, could you do it? Not from scratch. To design a virus from scratch, it's extremely difficult. Like building a 30-storey building where 1,000 different items on each floor, let's say beams, your windows, doors, elevators, wiring, plumbing, fire alarms, sprinklers, etc. They all have to come together exactly, right? Ben-Hur says that when scientists are messing around with viruses like coronaviruses,

what's really happening is that they're tweaking viruses that already exist. They're not building coronaviruses from the ground up. It's more like redesigning the doors. So I think that that's the scale that we're talking about. This coronavirus, for instance, it has around 30,000 bits of genetic code called nucleotides, and they're all working in perfect, horrific harmony. And Menher says that scientists just don't know how to make all that from scratch. So you need a building, a starting place.

You need something from nature. You need a backbone. A backbone, as in a really similar virus that you just need to tweak. So our next question is, do we have a similar enough virus that you could just change a little to make this coronavirus? Well, a paper published in Nature looked through the virus database and said that the most closely related virus that we know about is called RATG13. It was found in China in a type of horseshoe bat. You know, tiny little bats. They have very big ears. If you look at their face, if you use your imagination, it looks like a horseshoe.

These two viruses, the one causing the pandemic and the one in horseshoe bats, they are similar. On average, they share 96% of the same genes. And it's led some people online to argue that this was the backbone that scientists tweaked to create our coronavirus. Couldn't the backbone have been that bat, the horseshoe bat virus? But it's not. It's not. But it's not. Ben Hur says, hold your horseshoe. The problem with RATG13 is that it's not similar enough. In the land of genetics being 96% similar, it's actually a huge difference. I mean, it's different in all sorts of different ways. So when you zoom in on the genomes of these viruses, there are actually

more than a thousand tiny genetic differences, and they're sprinkled all along the genome. So a scientist would have had to go in and change them one by one. Yes, yes. I mean, and hope that it works. It's extremely difficult. And there's another glaring piece of evidence that suggests this virus isn't the work of some evil geniuses. And it's this. If scientists did design this virus, they made an unexplainably dumb choice in putting it together. And it all has to do with this.

This piece called the Polybasic Cleavage Site. And so that's, you know, it's a big mouthful. It is a mouthful, but I tell you, by the end of this, you'll be spouting Polybasic Cleavage Site after you've downed 10 beers. So let's go. Okay, that was Christian Stevens, who you just heard. He's Ben Hur's PhD student. All right, so what's the big deal with these polybasic cleavage sites

that Christian is odd about? Well, viruses use these sites to get into our cells to infect us. But for them to work, a protein from our body has to come along and snip something off that site. As though a pair of scissors came through. Once this virus has been circumcised, it can then enter our cells and start attacking us. And Christian says it's useful to think about this site like a button. Only once you push that button is it ready to go.

And while other viruses have this button, our coronavirus has a button that's bigger and easier to find. That's the Poly Basic Cleavage site, the big button. And we think that it means that the virus might be able to do more damage in our bodies. But here's the thing. When researchers saw that big button in our coronavirus, they didn't see a big Made in China sticker on it. And that's because for years, scientists have been studying what makes the best cleavage site,

the biggest button, the easiest to press. And they could spot it in the jeans. And let me tell you, this one, it ain't it. Producer Rose Rimler talked to Christian about it. It's very easy to know how to make that in the perfect way. And this is made in a very imperfect, almost seemingly random way. If you were an evil scientist training minions of evil scientists and you told them, like, make a cleavage site to end all cleavage sites. That was their assignment.

What grade would you give them? So not a good grade. Then her, Christian's teacher, agrees. The PolyBasic site is a crappy PolyBasic site. Someone designed it, you know, they didn't do a very good job. So here's where we're at. To have made this virus in a lab, scientists would have needed to have a very similar virus on hand that they could tweak.

A secret virus. And sure, if I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I could buy that. But then, when they went in to tweak it, they could have easily made this polybasic cleavage site much more dangerous. But they didn't. It doesn't make sense.

And if scientists wanted to cause chaos with a virus, they really didn't have to go to so much trouble. In my private moments, I'm like, there are much easier ways to make a deadly virus. If you didn't catch that, he says, there are much easier ways to make a deadly virus. Ben Hur and other scientists we spoke to said that if you wanted to cause a lot of trouble,

you wouldn't do it this way with this coronavirus. Here's what you'd do instead. You'll get me in trouble. So you can make, you know, yeah, supercharge it. I mean. So bottom line, if you know what you're doing, you don't pick a coronavirus.

Yes. Yes. You know, people could do stuff much more easily than making a SARS coronavirus. For Ben Hur and other scientists who study viruses, they knew right away that there was nothing suspicious here. There's no human fingerprints on its genetic code. As a scientist,

is it just really silly to ask if this was made in a lab? Or is this a legitimate question that people might have? As a scientist, as a bona fide scientist, it's a ridiculous question. I mean, I would say it's a ridiculous question once we knew the full sequence, because you can just compare the full sequence and you know anything about virology and coronavirus and how hard it is. It's just a non-sorter kind of question, you know. Even the Department of Homeland Security agrees that this virus did not come from a lab in China or anywhere else. So if this virus didn't come from a lab, then where could it have come from? What other suspects do we have? They've got scales. They look pretty badass. They look a little bit like a dinosaur. That's coming up after the break.

Welcome back. We just learned that the best evidence tells us that this virus wasn't cooked up by an evil genius. So, where did it come from? Well, scientists think it came from nature, an animal, and then eventually moved to us. And they think this because this kind of thing, it happens a lot. In fact, scientists say that most new infectious diseases come from animals. Ebola, HIV, SARS, bird flu, swine flu. They all spilled over from animals. So the big question is, what animal gave us this coronavirus?

Well, you guessed it. It's porpoises. Just kidding. We think bats are probably involved. That's because we already know that bats get a ton of other kinds of coronaviruses. Like one big study in this space collected the pee and spit from bats from all over the world. And they found almost a hundred different kinds of coronaviruses in them. Now, we haven't found our virus in bats yet,

but Ben Hurley says that's not surprising. We just haven't tested enough bats yet. That big study, it looked at around 12,000 bats. It sounds a lot, but that's not a lot when you compare it to, like, you know, how many bats there are and how many species there are, right? There are lots of bats out there. Like like seriously, millions and millions of them. So what scientists are basically trying to do right now is find the right bat. And it's a mammoth task. This is needle in a haystack kind of stuff. And it can take time. In fact, get this, science has known about Ebola for more than 40

years, and we still haven't found the exact same virus in animals. And that's not for lack of trying. I mean, CDC has sent teams over there over the years that can sample everything that moved, you know, from insects to shrews to rodents ticks. They couldn't find Ebola. And further complicating this quest to find our coronavirus, there's a chance that another animal is involved here. Now, we know from other viruses that this can happen. For example, take the deadly nipper virus. We know this virus has jumped from bats to pigs before eventually reaching us.

Christian, who you heard from before, told us how we think that jump happened. Somebody started a mango farm in the same place they had their pigs. These fruit bats would eat mangoes over the top of these pigs. And, you know, they drip saliva down or, you know, occasionally they'll urinate

and that could fall into what the pigs are eating. There are a lot of different ways we can see that happening. The pigs got the virus from the bats, who then gave it to humans. And something like this might have happened with this coronavirus. So to help us find the possible accomplice here, we called up Oscar McLean. He studies viruses at the University of Glasgow. And Oscar told us that one possible suspect that has recently gotten some attention is the pangolin.

Pangolins are a nice one because they're a cool animal. They've got scales. They look pretty badass. They look a little bit like a dinosaur with a quite long tail. To me, they look like half dinosaur, half cat. I bet they wouldn't be so cuddly, though. That's the problem. So the story of how these scaly dino cats made their way onto scientists' radar starts about a year ago. Officials in China intercepted a shipment of 21 live pangolins that were being smuggled through customs. They sent them to a wildlife rescue centre. The pangolins were actually really sick and researchers at that rescue centre wanted to

find out why. So they were sick and they decided to sample all the viruses on the basis of what was making the nail. When the scientists took tissue samples, they found that some of the pangolins had been infected with coronaviruses. They sequenced the viruses and published the data. Now, after this outbreak started, a separate group of scientists went back and looked at the pangolin coronaviruses. And they found that one of them was like a cousin to the virus infecting us now. In fact, there was one little piece of that pangolin coronavirus that looked very familiar. The spike protein. The spike protein was much closer than anything that we'd sequenced before.

Maybe you've heard about this spike protein. It's like the little nubs that surround the coronavirus and help it attach to our cells. And this pangolin spike is super similar to the one on the virus that's infecting us. So now scientists are wondering if maybe a bat and a pangolin got mixed up somewhere, shared some virus, and that eventually led to the one we have now. Scientists are still out there looking for the exact source of this virus, whether it's just a bat or a pangolin or some other animal. But big picture, we're pretty sure that this kind of thing is what happened. Some unlucky human came in contact with some animal

and the virus took off, unluckily for all of us. And, of course, there is one thing that all the evidence points to, which is that this virus wasn't cooked up in a lab. Given all this, Rose asked Oscar. Why do you think that this made in a lab idea is so appealing to people? I just think it's a convenient scapegoat. I think we've come up with this massively complicated society and it's sort of an inconvenient truth that 30,000 letters of RNA can sort of crumble it. Yeah. 30,000 little genetic bits make up this coronavirus. And that's wreaking havoc across all the world.

It's just so awkward. Awkward is such a great word for it. Like how awkward that we think we're the most powerful things on the planet and something invisible to us is actually more powerful than we are. Yeah, exactly. It's easy to sort of ignore the reality of just how much, how vulnerable we are to these sort of things. And now, time for a little NCBC.

Time for some non-coronavirus content. NCBC for short. Today, we're going to a rainforest in Panama. If you look by the edge of a stream, you might see some tiny pug-nosed tree frogs. And what makes these little guys so special is the sneaky way they attract mates while avoiding predators. You see, the male frogs call out to attract female frogs. But when they do, nearby bats can hear their call.

And for the bats, that call is like a dinner bell because these bats love eating tasty frogs. So scientists have been studying this really clever way that the frogs have outfoxed the bats, or rather outfrogged the bats. Here's how it works. One little male will start the call. This is an actual frog the researchers recorded, by the way.

Now, almost immediately, he's copied by all these other frogs. And scientists figured out that while the bats might go for that first frog, the other frogs that chime in are safe to get the girls. Scientists still don't know how the frogs decide who makes the first call, because that guy's kind of a sucker, right? But maybe it's kind of a game of frog chicken. Poor little guy. That's Science Versus.

Hi, Wendy. Hey, Rose Rimler, producer at Science Versus. How many citations in this week's episode? This week there are 98 citations. 98? That's right. Wow, my voice broke on that one. And if people want to see those citations, where should they go?

They can click on the link to our transcript, which they'll find in the show notes, or they can go to the website, which is scienceverses.show. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. Hey, that's the first time I did it in one take. One take. One hit, Rose. That's what first time I did it in one take. One take. One hit, Rose. That's what they call me.

This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Rose Rimler, with help from Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Sindhuja Srinivasan, and Laura Morris. We're edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard, music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bergala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Kirstie Short, Dr. Himana Banal,

Henry Leggett, Dr. Mohamed Amin and Professor Christian Anderson. A special thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll talk to you next time.