Virus named RaTG13 was discovered in an abandoned mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, nearly 10 years ago
Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), is the common thread through which many key research projects and gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses are connected.
Her work shows a curious pattern of deception, tracing through her publications from 2013 to 2020, in which a key source for the coronavirus most closely related to COVID-19 was concealed.
In 2002, an outbreak of the novel coronavirus known as SARS resulted in the deaths of 774 people worldwide. Investigations quickly established that the virus spread from bats to civets and then on to people.
The SARS outbreak would prove to shape Shi’s career, moving her from field research to work in level-2 biosafety labs before culminating in gain-of-function experiments in China’s first and only level-4 lab, located in Wuhan.
Her search for the originating source of the SARS outbreak began in 2004, when she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bats in Southern China.
Shi’s early research was captured in a 2005 article, in which she reported that “species of bats are a natural host of coronaviruses closely related to those responsible for the SARS outbreak.”
Shi and her team would continue their search for the source of the 2002 outbreak for years, and the samples her team collected were sent to Wuhan for analysis and further experimentation.
On Dec. 12, 2007, Shi and her team published a paper in the Journal of Virology that showed how viruses could be manipulated to infect and attack human cells using an HIV-based pseudovirus. This experiment, funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was the first indication that Shi’s Wuhan laboratory was acquiring the technologies and skills required to manipulate viruses collected in the wild.
In June 2010, Shi co-authored a paper showing that her team had built on the 2007 experiments by manipulating additional bat virus specimens and testing their interactions with human SARS-CoV spike proteins. They found that the “alteration of several key residues either decreased or enhanced bat ACE2 receptor efficiency.” The study was again funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 2011 and 2012, Shi and her team conducted a “12-month longitudinal survey” of a colony of horseshoe bats “at a single location in Kunming city, Yunnan province, China.” This single location was Shitou Cave.
BY JEFF CARLSON AND HANS MAHNCKE
