Latest news with #BroadInstituteofMIT
CBS News
05-05-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Scientist who pushed for COVID lab leak theory investigation says high-risk research needs oversight
Five years after the COVID pandemic started, a scientist who warned against dismissing the controversial "lab leak" theory says more needs to be done to prevent high-risk research from potentially causing a global health crisis. Alina Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. When WBZ-TV interviewed her in 2021, she said she got online hate and even death threats over her belief that COVID could have originated from a lab in Wuhan, China. "The virus was highly adapted for human transmission," Chan said. "In December 2019, the virus we saw was ready go, ready to cause a pandemic." She said the lab leak theory got an "allergic response" from the scientific community and public health leaders. "They just could not accept the idea that a scientific research accident might have caused a pandemic," Chan said. But in January, the CIA under former President Biden's administration said a lab leak was a more likely cause of the pandemic than a natural origin. Chan said the damage was done, however, as the debate about COVID's origins had become a political issue. "Now we're seeing all these funding cuts, people are saying, you know, screw the scientists, we don't want to give them any more money," Chan said. "That's not coming out of nowhere." COVID lab leak not a conspiracy theory, scientist says On the White House website, there's a COVID-19 web page that has a picture of President Trump standing between the words "lab leak." Chan said that while the page claims almost definitively that COVID came from the Wuhan lab, it doesn't provide enough evidence or assessments by intelligence agencies supporting that conclusion. "The good news today is that it's no longer a conspiracy theory, the lab leak is a totally plausible path by which COVID-19 could have occurred and should be investigated," Chan said. "But the bad news is that we've kind of lost five years. In the last five years there has not been a proper investigation, there has not been a commission to find out how this began and how we can prevent it from happening again." Preventing another pandemic Chan wants a two-pronged approach moving forward. She says there needs to be a full investigation to find the true origin of COVID-19, and there should be an independent entity, like the National Transportation Safety Board for travel, to oversee high-risk laboratory research. "When a plane crashes, you send in an independent team to investigate," Chan said. "But when a pandemic could have started in a lab, there's no external independent investigation, even when millions of people are dead." She says by allowing researchers to self-regulate, "we are one scientist's bad day away from a pandemic." "There are at least dozens or maybe even hundreds of scientists around the world that are handling pathogens with the potential to cause pandemics," Chan said. "We are just one bad day away from that pathogen leaking from a lab."
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The scientist rewriting DNA, and the future of medicine
A revolution is underway in gene editing -- and at its forefront is David Liu, an American molecular biologist whose pioneering work is rewriting the building blocks of life with unprecedented precision. A professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Liu was awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences on Saturday for developing two transformative technologies: one already improving the lives of patients with severe genetic diseases, the other poised to reshape medicine in the years ahead. He spoke with AFP ahead of the Los Angeles ceremony for the prestigious Silicon Valley-founded award. He will receive $3 million for his work on "base editing" and "prime editing," and plans to donate most of it to support his charitable foundation. "The ability to change a DNA sequence of our choosing into a new sequence of our choosing is a fundamentally very powerful capability," the 51-year-old said, foreseeing uses not just in human medicine but areas like developing more nutritious or disease-resistant crops. - Correcting the code - DNA is made up of four chemical "letters" -- the nucleotide bases A, G, T and C. Mutations in this sequence cause thousands of human diseases, yet until recently, gene editing could only fix a limited number of them. Even CRISPR-Cas9, the groundbreaking technology that earned a Nobel Prize in 2020, has major limitations. It cuts both strands of the DNA helix, making it most useful to disrupt rather than correct genes, while the process can introduce new errors. "Being able to use genome editing to treat genetic diseases requires, in most cases, ways to correct a DNA misspelling, not simply to disrupt a gene," Liu said. That insight led his lab to develop base editing, which uses the Cas9 protein -- disabled so it can no longer cut both DNA strands -- to find a target DNA sequence and another enzyme to convert one letter to another -- for example, C to T or G to A. Reversing the change -- from T to C or A to G -- was tougher. Liu's team overcame the challenge by engineering entirely new enzymes. These base editors can now correct about 30 percent of the mutations that cause genetic diseases. The technology is already in at least 14 clinical trials. In one of them, Beam Therapeutics -- which Liu co-founded -- announced it had treated patients of AATD, a rare genetic disorder affecting the lungs and liver, with a single drug infusion. While traditional gene therapies often disrupt faulty genes or work around them, base editing repairs the mutation itself. "This was the first time that humans have corrected a mutation that causes a genetic disease in a patient," Liu said. - Cystic fibrosis hope - Base editing, quickly dubbed "CRISPR 2.0," can't fix every mutation. About 70 percent of the roughly 100,000 known disease-causing mutations remain out of its reach, including those caused by missing or extra letters. To expand the toolkit, Liu's lab introduced prime editing in 2019 -- a method capable of replacing entire sections of faulty DNA with corrected sequences. If CRISPR is like scissors that cut DNA, and base editors are like using a pencil to correct individual letters, then prime editing is the equivalent of a word processor's "find and replace" function. Creating this tool required a series of breakthroughs Liu's team describes as "small miracles." The result is, he said, "the most versatile way we know of to edit the human genome." Among the targets Liu and his team have already pursued with prime editing: cystic fibrosis, a common genetic disease usually caused by three missing DNA letters that causes thick mucus buildup in the lungs and digestive system. Liu's lab has made much of its work freely accessible, sharing DNA blueprints through a nonprofit library used by tens of thousands of labs worldwide. "The science we create -- which is ultimately funded by society, through governments and donors -- ultimately goes back to benefit society." This year's Breakthrough Prize awards come at a fraught moment for US science, as President Donald Trump's government strips funding for institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "The NIH is a treasure, not just for this country but for the world," said Liu. "Trying to dismantle the heart of what supports science in this country is like burning your seed corn." ia/sla/bgs
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize
For the past five years, David Liu – a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research facility in Massachusetts – has marked Thanksgiving by handing over his entire annual salary, after taking care of taxes, to the staff and students in his laboratory. It started as the pandemic broke and Liu heard that students who wanted to cycle instead of taking public transport could not afford bicycles. Given how hard they worked and how little they were paid, Liu stepped in. He couldn't unilaterally raise their incomes, so emailed them Amazon eGift cards. This ran into problems too, however. 'Everyone thought they were being scammed,' he recalls. And so he switched to writing cheques. As the co-founder of several companies, Liu can make ends meet without his Harvard salary, and has set up a charitable foundation to further scientific research. Its coffers are due to swell considerably now that Liu has received the $3m Breakthrough prize for life sciences, which he was presented with on Saturday at the annual awards ceremony in Los Angeles. The Breakthrough prizes, described by their Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, are awarded annually to scientists and mathematicians chosen by committees of previous winners. This year, two further life sciences prizes were given for landmark research on multiple sclerosis and GLP-1 agonists, better known as 'skinny jabs'. Other winners on the night were Dennis Gaitsgory, a mathematician in Bonn, for his work on the Langlands program, an ambitious effort to unify disparate concepts in maths, and more than 13,000 researchers at Cern for testing the modern theory of particle physics. Liu was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia. Scientists have worked on gene editing for more than a decade. Progress, they hope, will lead to therapeutics that correct the mutations responsible for thousands of genetic diseases. But the first generation of gene editing tools had limited success: they were good at disabling faulty genes, but not at correcting them. Base editing allows scientists to make changes to single letters of the genetic code, while prime editing has been compared to the search and replace function in a word processor, giving researchers the power to rewrite whole stretches of DNA. Together, they have enormous potential. 'The vast majority of known pathogenic mutations can now be corrected using prime editing or base editing,' Liu says. Liu grew up in Riverside, California, and traces his interest in science to playing with bugs in his back yard. He went to Harvard and worked with EJ Corey, a Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest chemists of our time. 'That was the start of what turned into a lifelong love of experimental molecular science,' Liu says. 'He encouraged me to follow my passions and curiosity.' His curiosity was not confined to chemistry. Liu read that radio-controlled plane enthusiasts wanted a plane that flew slowly enough to pilot around a room. After working the equations, he built the Wisp, a six-gram carbon fibre plane that zoomed around at a leisurely one mile per hour. Another project merged Lego bricks with the heat sensor from a burglar alarm to produce the 'mouseapult', a device that detected cats and lobbed toy mice in their direction. Video games also featured heavily. In the early 1990s, Liu hung out with Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the students behind the games developer Naughty Dog. He tested games and was an occasional voice actor. One performance made it into Way of the Warrior for the 3DO games machine. 'I said something like…' he pauses to adopt a mocking tone '…'my dead grandfather fights better than you'.' A riskier hobby took root while Liu was in hospital recovering from an operation. He wanted to beat blackjack and wrote a simulator to understand the mathematics. Before long, he had worked out a series of card counting techniques and went to Las Vegas to test them. He did so well that he was banned from all MGM Grand casinos and, to use the gaming euphemism, 'back-roomed' twice to be read the Nevada trespass laws. Later, as a professor at Harvard, a group of students persuaded Liu to run a class on card counting. 'The best decision I made about that team was that no members put in their own money and no members took out their own money. It all went back into the fund for us to fly to Las Vegas and pay for our hotel and meals,' he says. 'It was all about the fun of learning something really difficult.' In the lab, Liu was trying to crack a very different problem. Gene editing at the time could disable genes, but not rewrite the letters of the DNA code. But disabling genes would never be enough to treat genetic diseases. 'They need to be treated by fixing the gene,' he says. The first breakthrough came in 2016 when Liu's team described base editing, a way to correct single-letter mutations that account for nearly a third of genetic diseases. The procedure used Crispr guide molecules to find the faulty code and an enzyme to change the aberrant letter. Waseem Qasim, a paediatric immunologist at Great Ormond Street hospital, remembers reading the paper over breakfast the day after it was published. 'My kids were relatively small at the time. I spat on my cornflakes and said, look at this, guys, science fiction!' A follow-up paper in 2019 described prime editing, a less efficient but more powerful technique that in principle can repair nearly all disease-causing mutations. The benefits of base editing became clear in 2022 when Qasim's team became the first in the world to use the procedure on a patient. Alyssa Tapley, a 13-year-old from Leicester, had run out of options after chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant had failed to treat her leukaemia. The cancer affected her T-cells, a group of immune cells that normally fight infections. The doctors collected T-cells from a healthy donor and modified the genetic code so that when infused into Alyssa they would seek out and attack her cancer cells. The treatment worked: more than two years later, Alyssa remains in complete remission. More than a dozen clinical trials are now under way to test base editing and prime editing. Positive results have already been reported for leukaemia, sickle-cell disease, beta-thallasaemia and high cholesterol. But major hurdles remain. While Alyssa's treatment involved editing cells outside the body and sending them in, most diseases require mutations to be fixed inside the patient. This is a trick scientists have yet to crack. It's not the only problem. Qasim's team is treating more patients in a trial, but when the trial ends, there may be no one to fund future treatments. 'We are going to end up with treatments that work, but that nobody wants to pay for.' Liu is optimistic that researchers can find ways to deliver the therapies and reduce the costs, but he has grave concerns about the future of science, particularly in the US. He believes the recent wave of firings and funding cuts pose an existential threat to the next decade or two of progress that will have ramifications around the world. 'To me, slashing funding and people from science in the United States is like burning your seed corn. It's not even eating your seed corn. It's just destroying it,' he says. 'What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, and is indeed driven by, science.'
The Independent
23-03-2025
- Health
- The Independent
‘I still believe my Covid lab theory was the right one – and it could happen again'
Five years ago today, Britain woke up to a world few had ever experienced. People were ordered to stay at home, permitted to leave for essential purposes only, such as buying food or for medical reasons. Laws were passed that prevented them from travelling outside their local areas and all 'non-essential' high street businesses were closed. By May 2020, people were permitted to leave home for outdoor recreation (beyond exercise) and a month later, people were permitted to meet outside in groups of up to six people. The reason was the world was in the grip of a global pandemic which would take the lives of nearly two million people by the end of that first year. And it was under these circumstances in early 2020 that I became notorious for raising the possibility of a laboratory origin of Covid-19. But five years on, the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and went on to infect the populations of 229 countries and territories, taking over seven million lives, is still fiercely disputed. At the time, I was a little-known early career scientist (a postdoc) at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. The backlash I experienced for raising this was disproportionate and personally targeted - I was called everything from a 'race traitor' to a conspiracy theorist. It was as if the slightest sign of deviation from the official scientific consensus that the virus had come from sick animals in a wet market had to be slammed down and made an example of. Collaborators of the Wuhan scientists accused me of seeking attention by riding the waves of wild conspiracy theories. But it didn't make sense for me to do that. No sane scientist would have sought the type of attention I received. I was simply stating the fact that a laboratory origin was plausible, no matter how likely or unlikely. As I looked into the available evidence relevant to the origin of the virus, I continued to point out instances where Chinese scientists had not been honest or forthcoming. The harassment by fellow scientists grew. Some reached out to my employer to get me fired or disciplined – terminating a postdoc was an easy thing to do. Thankfully, I kept my job. In 2021, I accepted science writer Matt Ridley's invitation to write a book together laying out the clear arguments and evidence for both a natural and laboratory origin of Covid. At the time, I was terrified of what might happen if we wrote such a controversial book. It would provoke the Chinese government that had successfully squashed a children's book in Germany just for linking the pandemic to China and threatened publishers with filing criminal charges. I knew that it would also offend many scientific leaders and influencers. For months, I had been a lightning rod for the lab leak hypothesis. My family members and friends feared for my safety and advised me to change my name if I ever wanted to travel back to Asia. But, ultimately, I felt that someone had to tell the story of how the pandemic might have started and highlight the contributions of the few heroic scientists, journalists and sleuths who had dared to push back against the prevailing narrative. I believed it was important for me as a scientist to step up, despite the risks. Our book, VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, was published at the end of 2021 and updated in 2022. I felt immense pride for having completed the book in under a year. We had worked on it literally day and night since Matt Ridley and I lived in different time zones, and I wrote obsessively into the early mornings – knowing that angry virologists would descend on us once the book was published (and they did). Our argument for the lab leak hypothesis is as follows: the scientists in Wuhan were doing exactly what they said they were doing. To study viruses that might pose a threat to humans, they collected tens of thousands of samples from bats, wild animals, and even sick villagers or wildlife traders. In 2013, they discovered a novel lineage of Sars-like viruses from a mine in Yunnan province where workers had sickened and died from a mysterious respiratory infection. The scientists grew novel coronaviruses in the lab, experimenting with and genetically engineering them in ways that sometimes enhanced their ability to infect human cells and jump across species. Their work with live viruses was conducted at low biosafety, shocking even their close collaborators. The year before the pandemic, the Wuhan scientists and their US partners planned to insert a unique feature called a furin cleavage site into novel Sars-like viruses. Of hundreds of Sars-like viruses known today, only Sars-CoV-2 possesses this special feature, which is what makes it a pandemic pathogen. Despite the efforts of numerous research groups to find evidence for the origin of the virus in the wildlife trade, there have been no signs of an infected animal source or any evidence that such viruses circulate in Wuhan markets or its supply chain. In 2019, a virus matching the 2018 experiments by Wuhan-US scientists, well-adapted for spreading in humans and other animals, appeared abruptly in Wuhan and none of the other thousands of large population centres in the region not even two years after they concocted this plan, leaving no trace along its thousand-mile journey from the bat caves where Wuhan scientists frequently collected such viruses. Influential scientists were advocates for risky research where viruses are enhanced in laboratories. Years before Covid-19, they said such 'gain-of-function' research was a risk worth taking. When the virus spilled out of Wuhan, home to the largest novel Sars-like virus laboratory in the world, many of these leading scientists privately speculated that the Wuhan lab had conducted dangerous experiments at low biosafety. Yet, instead coming out to the public with: 'Yes, the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a laboratory by accident. As responsible scientists, we will investigate and hold our colleagues accountable. And, even if the virus did emerge naturally, the fact that it could have come from a lab means we must implement measures to prevent catastrophic research accidents', they did the opposite. These leading names organised and co-signed prominent letters for public consumption, ruling out and condemning suggestions of a laboratory origin as conspiracy theories. Our book was meticulously fact-checked and has more than 300 references so that readers can look into the evidence surrounding the origin of the pandemic. I received a great deal of fan mail, including from several virologists at top institutions who could not speak out publicly about the origin of the virus out of fear of retaliation and ostracisation by their peers. VIRAL had broken past the blockade at scientific journals and popular media, which continued to push the idea that Covid had come from the Wuhan market and that the case was closed. Since VIRAL was published, the case for a laboratory origin of Covid-19 has only gotten stronger. Last year, I worked with The New York Times to visually present the case for a lab leak hypothesis. The opinion piece was fact-checked and reviewed for accuracy by experts on this topic. It was published on the day that the US Congress questioned Dr Anthony Fauci, who had been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, on whether his institute had supported risky virus experiments at the Wuhan laboratory suspected of causing the pandemic. Five years since the pandemic began, biosafety standards are not stronger, clearer, or enforceable even within the US, not to mention globally I had half-expected my article for The New York Times to be ignored. I thought that people were by then bored of talking and hearing about the pandemic. I was completely taken by surprise by the overwhelming response to the piece, which racked up 1,597 comments in a day, occupied the cover of the Sunday Opinion print, and was praised by many respected journalists and scientists. Sean Spicer, a former White House press secretary, tweeted, 'Someone at [ The New York Times ] is probably getting fired for publishing this.' As far as I know, no one at The New York Times has been fired for publishing the piece. In fact, a growing number of experts now publicly favour the lab leak hypothesis. In January, the CIA released the assessment they had made under the Biden administration favouring a laboratory origin of the virus, albeit with low confidence. They join the US Department of Energy and FBI who also assessed a laboratory origin with low and moderate confidence, respectively. These are arguably the three US intelligence agencies with the strongest scientific expertise. More recently, news broke that the German foreign intelligence service, BND, has long held that Covid likely originated in a laboratory. Their latest assessment based on public and non-public information was made with a certainty of 80-95 per cent. The recent head of Germany's Robert Koch Institute, a federal agency tasked with disease control and prevention, also believes a laboratory origin to be more likely. There are rumours that the UK government will also adjust its position on the issue to back the lab leak hypothesis. A common question I get is how it feels to be vindicated. I am relieved that efforts to cast the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory have ultimately failed (although the personal attacks from virologists continue). And I am deeply grateful to the wonderful and brave scientists, journalists, advocates, and sleuths with whom I crossed paths during the search for the origin of Covid-19. There were many points in this journey where I felt close to breaking down and it was only through their support that I managed to stay positive. However, I am also depressed that many scientific leaders continue to insist that there is no evidence for the lab leak hypothesis and therefore no need for a significant reform of oversight over pathogen research with the power to upend civilization. The outcome of their refusal to acknowledge a plausible laboratory origin of Covid has meant that zero new measures have been put in place to prevent future catastrophic lab leaks. Five years since the pandemic began, biosafety standards are not stronger, clearer, or enforceable even within the US, not to mention globally. This month, two prominent virologists sounded the alarm that their Wuhan counterparts continue to work with potentially dangerous pathogens at inadequate biosafety. The prestigious scientific journal that published the experiments said it was up to each research institute to set their own rules and so they did not violate journal policy. Still, no independent entity, even within the US, has been tasked with tracking, regulating, and investigating research with the potential to cause pandemics. There is no systematic tracking of the pathogens discovered, created, and enhanced in laboratories. The legal consequences for the creation of pandemic pathogens and their accidental or deliberate release remain unclear. Contrast this with the response from atomic scientists who founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945 to inform the public about the consequences of nuclear weapons, and the creation of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Congress in 1974. After publishing VIRAL, I approached the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the end of 2021 to suggest the convening of an international, cross-disciplinary task force to generate new recommendations for research with pandemic risk. I offered to bow out before the task force was even assembled, worried that my reputation would cast a shadow on this important work. However, the Bulletin insisted that I stay and be part of the project. The task force was half constituted of virologists and infectious diseases experts from around the world. And some of my favourite people were virologists! Our recommendations were published last year, emphasising common-sense, bare-minimum measures that should have been enacted by any rational, functioning government and yet still have not. Leading members of the scientific community were advocates and funders of risky pathogen research for many years. Asking them to acknowledge that Covid likely resulted from a laboratory accident in Wuhan is tantamount to demanding a confession that they were wrong and that the cost of being wrong was millions of human lives and global disruption. One well-known virologist said in February 2020, 'If it turned out to be true [that the pandemic virus was a lab construct], that would bother the hell out of me, not just because of people dying and so forth, but it's kind of an indictment of the field, right?'
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Cat owners asked to share pets' quirks for genetic study
Cat owners are being asked share their pet's quirky traits and even post researchers their fur in an effort to shed light on how cats' health and behaviour are influenced by their genetics. The scientists behind the project, Darwin's Cats, are hoping to enrol 100,000 felines, from pedigrees to moggies, with the DNA of 5,000 cats expected to be sequenced in the next year. The team say the goal is to produce the world's largest feline genetic database. 'Unlike most existing databases, which tend to focus on specific breeds or veterinary applications, Darwin's Cats is building a diverse, large-scale dataset that includes pet cats, strays and mixed breeds from all walks of life,' said Dr Elinor Karlsson, the chief scientist at the US non-profit organisation Darwin's Ark, director of the vertebrate genomics group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and associate professor at the UMass Chan Medical School. 'It's important to note, this is an open data project, so we will share the data with other scientists as the data set grows.' she added. The project follows on the heels of Darwin's Dogs, a similar endeavour that has shed light on aspects of canine behaviour, disease and the genetic origins of modern breeds. Darwin's Cats was launched in mid-2024 and already has more than 3,000 cats enrolled, although not all have submitted fur samples. Participants from all parts of the world are asked to complete a number of free surveys about their pet's physical traits, behaviour, environment, and health. However, at present, DNA kits – for owners to submit fur samples – can be sent only to US residents, and a donation of $199 (£160) is requested to cover the cost of sequencing and help fund the research. Karlsson added the team had developed a method to obtain high-quality DNA from loose fur without needing its roots – meaning samples can simply be collected by brushing. The researchers hope that by combining insights from cats' DNA with the survey results they can shed light on how feline genetics influences what cats look like, how they act and the diseases they experience. 'Understanding the genetics behind personality traits could even shed light on human neurodevelopmental conditions,' said Karlsson. The team also hopes to learn more about the genetic diversity of different breeds and unpick the ancestry of modern cats, with Karlsson adding she is particularly interested in many-toed cats. 'I'm really curious to find out how common this trait is in different parts of the world. I hope one day we might be able to combine that information with genetics to trace this trait back to its origins,' she said. A spokesperson for the charity International Cat Care (iCatCare), which is not involved in the work, said: 'We're really interested in the collaborative approach of Darwin's Ark, particularly in encouraging pet owners as community scientists to help advance the collective scientific understanding of cats as a species.' Dr Jeffrey Schoenebeck, of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, also welcomed the . scheme. 'This is an important project that has the potential to improve our understanding of companion animals, the diseases that cause their morbidities, and the very nature of feline domestication,' he said.
