IN DEPTH: A look at the disputes over the origin of COVID-19 --Washington Post

Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? Stanley Perlman, who has been studying coronaviruses for 39 years, got a nasty email June 4: "Dr. Frankenstein just wants more public money and wants to research things he shouldn't be messing with. THANKS A LOT FOR CORONA LOSER." Perlman, a mild-mannered, grandfatherly virologist at the University of Iowa, didn't know the author of the dyspeptic email and had nothing to do with the emergence of the coronavirus. But he had co-signed a letter to the Lancet in February 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was n Joel Achenbach, (c) 2021, The Washington Post YahooNews

Stanley Perlman, who has been studying coronaviruses for 39 years, got a nasty email June 4: "Dr. Frankenstein just wants more public money and wants to research things he shouldn't be messing with. THANKS A LOT FOR CORONA LOSER."

Perlman, a mild-mannered, grandfatherly virologist at the University of Iowa, didn't know the author of the dyspeptic email and had nothing to do with the emergence of the coronavirus. But he had co-signed a letter to the Lancet in February 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was not a bioengineered virus and condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."

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That remains the consensus of many scientists - but the "lab leak" theory has never gone away and has become louder than ever. It is not a theory so much as a constellation of scenarios that imagine how the virus may have emanated from a laboratory in China, ranging from the accidental to the sinister.

It dominates news coverage and public discussion of the origin of the pandemic, shoving aside the natural zoonosis hypothesis - which asserts that, like so many previous infectious pathogens, the novel coronavirus most likely jumped unassisted into the human population from a still-unidentified animal host.

Scientists haven't found that animal, however. Some virologists, including Perlman, have said they can't rule out some kind of unintentional laboratory accident.

It's possible, for example, that researchers studying coronaviruses in Wuhan did not even know they had SARS-CoV-2 in their facility. The new openness to such scenarios culminated last month when the journal Science published a letter from 18 prominent scientists calling for a more robust probe of the virus's origin and criticizing a World Health Organization report that called a lab leak "extremely unlikely."

This is a fraught moment not only for virologists, but for scientists broadly. They have had to deal with some version of the "Frankenstein" meme for generations. Now, they're faced with suspicion that somehow they are responsible for a plague that has killed millions of people.

The situation has exacerbated long-standing tensions within the sprawling and often cantankerous scientific community. The lab-origin possibility has reignited debate over "gain of function" experiments that, in an effort to anticipate future pandemics, may alter the potency of viruses in secure laboratory settings. Scientists have clashed repeatedly over the risks and rewards of that kind of research for the past decade.

"There's sniping going on in all directions," said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Her message to everyone: Cool it. She doesn't think a scientist who is open to the possibility of a laboratory accident should be labeled a conspiracy theorist. And some people are proclaiming certainties about the origin of the virus despite having limited knowledge or expertise, she said. ...