Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by way of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W.I.V.), a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.

它從何處來？經過了三年多的疫情和數百萬人死亡後，關於新冠病毒的起源仍眾說紛紜、充滿爭議，一大堆分析和假說使用的事實，如同掛在有刺的黑暗樹枝上的聖誕彩燈。一種觀點認為，這種科學上稱為SARS-CoV-2的病毒是從某種動物身上傳給人類的，溢出地點可能是在武漢華南海鮮批發市場，那個雜亂無章的大賣場裡曾有大量的各種魚、肉，以及作為食材的野生動物出售。還有一種觀點認為，這種病毒是在實驗室裡造出來的，目的是感染人類，給人類造成傷害，也就是說，它可能是中國人民解放軍出資支持的某個「影子計劃」設計的一種生物武器。第三種觀點雖比第二種溫和，但也牽涉到實驗室的工作，這種觀點認為，該病毒是通過位於武漢東部的中國科學院武漢病毒研究所的一次事故侵入首名人類受害者體內的，也許是並無惡意但魯莽的基因操作使這種病毒對人類的危害更大。

If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren’t the only one.

如果這些可能性把你搞糊塗了，讓你無法決定誰對誰錯，對過於自信的斷言持懷疑態度，或者你只是厭倦所有關於新冠病毒大流行的話題以及是什麼不起眼的小東西引發了疫情，請放心，有這樣想法的不只你一人。

Some contrarians say that it doesn’t matter, the source of the virus. What matters, they say, is how we cope with the catastrophe it has brought, the illness and death it continues to cause. Those contrarians are wrong. It does matter. Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer.

一些持反主流觀點的人說，病毒的起源不重要。他們說，重要的是我們如何應對病毒帶來的災難，及其繼續造成的疾病和死亡。那些人錯了。搞清楚病毒起源很重要。研究課題的輕重緩急、世界各地如何為未來的大流行做準備、衛生政策，以及公眾對科學本身的看法，都將受病毒起源問題答案的深遠影響，如果我們能夠得出一個明確答案的話。

But much of the evidence that might provide that answer has either been lost or is still unavailable — lost because of failures to gather relevant material promptly; unavailable because of intransigence and concealment, particularly on the part of Chinese officialdom at several levels.

但許多可能提供答案的證據要麼已經丟失，要麼仍然無法獲得。丟失是因為未能及時收集相關材料，無法獲得是由於不合作和隱瞞，尤其是中國各級官員的不合作和隱瞞。

Take the natural-spillover hypothesis, for instance, and assume that the virus passed to humans from a wild animal — maybe a raccoon dog (a foxlike canine) or a Malayan porcupine — somewhere in the Huanan market. To test that hypothesis, you would want samples of blood, feces or mucus taken from the raccoon dogs, porcupines and other wildlife that languished, caged and doomed, in the market. You would screen those samples for signs of the virus. If you found the virus itself, or at least sizable bits of its genome, you would then make a comparative analysis of genomes, including some from the earliest human cases, to deduce whether people got the virus from the wildlife or vice versa.

以自然溢出說為例，它假設病毒在華南市場某處從野生動物身上——可能是貉（一種似狐狸的犬科動物）或豪豬——傳給了人類。為了驗證這個假設，需要從市場上的貉、豪豬，以及其他關在籠子裡奄奄一息、氣數將盡的野生動物身上採集血液、糞便或粘液樣本。對這些樣本進行篩查，尋找病毒的蹤跡。如果發現了病毒本身，或者至少找到了病毒相當大的基因組片段，就可以對基因組、包括與一些來自最早的人類病例的基因組進行比較分析，以推斷人類是從野生動物身上感染病毒的，還是反之。

But you can’t do that, because whatever raccoon dogs or porcupines or other wild animals were on sale in the market during December 2019 had vanished by Jan. 1, 2020. On that date, the market was closed by order of Chinese authorities, with no (reported) effort to sample the most suspect forms of wildlife.

但現在已經無法這樣做，因為該市場在2019年12月期間出售的貉、豪豬或其他野生動物已在2020年1月1日前全部被消滅。中國當局那天下令關閉了華南市場，沒有對最可疑的野生動物進行採樣的努力（至少沒有這種報導）。

Or take the lab-engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, as recently offered in an article in The Sunday Times of London. The two Times reporters cited unidentified “U.S. investigators” who “scrutinized top-secret intercepted communications” and concluded that the Chinese military was supporting a covert project to develop a weaponized coronavirus. The article also posited a related vaccine effort, to protect China’s populace once the killer virus was unleashed on the world. It’s a riveting narrative. The virus engineering occurred, according to this account, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reporters didn’t name their intelligence sources or supply evidence to make their allegations concrete, but if they did, it would be explosive news.

Or take the lab-leak scenario, some versions of which point accusingly at a nonprofit organization in New York, EcoHealth Alliance, and its collaborative relationship with Dr. Zhengli Shi, a senior researcher at the W.I.V. Shi and her team study coronaviruses, especially those carried by bats, extracting fragments of viral RNA (the molecule in which coronavirus genomes are written) and occasionally live virus, from samples of guano and other bodily material, and assembling whole genome sequences, like jigsaw puzzles, from the fragments. They perform experiments, sometimes combining an element of one virus with the backbone of another, to learn how that element might function in the wild; and they publish scientific papers, warning which bat viruses could pose a threat to humans. What if a researcher or technician under Shi’s leadership, handling a virus very much like SARS-CoV-2, became infected by accident and then spread the infection to others? That question became, from the early months of the pandemic, a suspicion and then a hypothesis and then an accusation.

再以實驗室洩漏說為例，一些版本的洩漏說將矛頭指向紐約一家非營利組織——生態健康聯盟——以及該組織與武漢病毒研究所高級研究員石正麗博士的合作關係。石正麗和她的團隊從事冠狀病毒研究，尤其是蝙蝠攜帶的冠狀病毒，從鳥糞和來自動物身上的其他樣本中提取病毒RNA片段（冠狀病毒的基因組用RNA編寫），偶爾也提取活病毒，然後將RNA片段像拼圖那樣排列出全基因組。他們做實驗，有時將一種病毒的功能部分結合進另一種病毒的主體，以了解該部分在野生環境中有什麼作用；他們發表科學論文，對哪些蝙蝠病毒可能對人類構成威脅發警告。要是石正麗領導的一名研究人員或技工在處理與SARS-CoV-2非常相似的病毒時意外感染了病毒，然後將病毒傳染給其他人會怎麼樣呢？這個問題在新冠病毒大流行的最初幾個月裡先是以一種懷疑出現，然後變成一種假設，最後成了一種指控。

Even now, the trade in claims and counterclaims remains brisk. Last month, in a Substack newsletter called Public, three authors asserted — citing unnamed “U.S. government officials” — that one of the first people infected with SARS-CoV-2 was a scientist named Ben Hu, from Shi’s lab. That assertion was significant, and important if true, but no proof or identified sourcing so far supports it. Ten days later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released (as required by a law passed three months earlier) a declassified report outlining whatever was known to the U.S. Intelligence Community about potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the pandemic. The report concluded, among other things, that W.I.V. personnel had collaborated at times on coronavirus work with scientists associated with the People’s Liberation Army, but that (so far as available evidence showed) such work involved “no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”

And then, on July 11, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Representative Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, convened a hearing at which he and colleagues interrogated two scientists, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, about their authorship of an influential 2020 paper that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine. That paper was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The tenor of the hearing was foretold by its own announced title: “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up,” and the proceedings that day consisted of accusation and defense, without shedding any new light, let alone yielding certitude about the origin of the virus.

Certitude is an elusive goal and a high presumption, even for science, even for a director of national intelligence, even for the chairman of a select congressional subcommittee. Philosophers have recognized that, and so have novelists and poets. “I was of three minds,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds.” In the poem, Stevens found 13 different ways of looking at a blackbird. There are at least that many ways of viewing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and to do justice to the question, you’ll need, like him, to hold several possibilities in your mind at a time.

即使對科學而言，即使對國家情報總監、對國會特別小組委員會主席而言，確定的結論也是一個難以實現的目標和一種高度非分的假設。哲學家們早已認識到了這點，小說家和詩人們也認識到了這點。「我有三種看法，」華萊士·史蒂芬斯寫道，「就像一棵樹/上有三隻黑鳥。」在這首詩中，史蒂芬斯找到了觀察黑鳥的13種不同方法。對SARS-CoV-2起源的看法至少也有這麼多種，為了公正地對待這個問題，你需要像他一樣，在腦海中同時保留幾種可能性。

How you regard a blackbird or an origin hypothesis may be influenced by where you’re coming from. That’s an old truth, but I was reminded of it during a conversation with Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, and one of the best-qualified among those who argue that the lab-leak hypothesis deserves robust investigation. Bloom studies the evolution of viruses, for two reasons: It happens fast, and therefore illuminates evolution in general, and it has large implications for public health.

你如何看待黑鳥，或如何看待起源假說，可能與你自身的淵源有關。這是一個古老的真理，但我想起這一點是在與傑西·布魯姆談話的時候，他是西雅圖弗雷德·哈欽森癌症中心的進化生物學家，在認為實驗室洩漏假說值得進行深入調查的人中，他是資歷最高的人之一。布魯姆研究病毒的進化有兩個原因：它發生得很快，因此可以解釋普遍的進化；它對公共健康具有重大影響。

When I spoke with him back in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, and asked about the origin question, Bloom said, “I think what you have is a lot of people strongly defaulting to their prior beliefs.” Scientists who study zoonotic diseases (those that spill over from nonhuman animals into people) might be inclined to assume a natural origin. Scientists who have long argued against the risks of “gain of function” research (experimental work exploring the evolutionary capacities of potentially dangerous pathogens) might readily assume a lab leak. National security experts with strong views of the oppressive, secretive Chinese government might lean toward scenarios involving Chinese malfeasance and cover-up.

2021年2月，也就是疫情暴發一年後，當我與他交談並詢問病毒起源問題時，布魯姆說：「我認為很多人都堅定默認了他們的先驗信念。」研究人畜共患疾病（從非人類動物傳染給人類的疾病）的科學家可能傾向於自然起源假設。而長期以來一直反對「功能獲得」研究（探索潛在危險病原體進化能力的實驗工作）風險的科學家可能很容易假設實驗室洩漏。對高壓、隱秘的中國政府抱有強烈看法的國家安全專家可能會傾向於中國有不法行為和掩蓋事實的情況。

More recently, Bloom told me that his own “prior” inclination would be toward a natural spillover. “But you certainly wouldn’t think it’s, like, 99.99 percent the most likely explanation,” he said, adding, “There could be other possibilities.”

最近，布魯姆告訴我，他自己的「先驗」傾向是自然溢出。「但你肯定不會認為這是可能性高達99.99%的解釋，」他還說，「也許還有其他可能性。」

That gave me pause to consider my own priors. For the past 40 years, I’ve written nonfiction about the natural world and the sciences that study it, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. During the first half of that, my attention went mainly to large, visible creatures like bears, crocodiles and bumblebees and to wild places like the Amazon jungle and the Sonoran Desert. I came to the subject of emerging viruses in 1999, during a National Geographic assignment, when I walked for 10 days through Ebola-virus habitat in a Central African forest. Later I spent five years writing a book about zoonotic diseases and the agents that cause them, including the SARS virus, the earlier killer coronavirus now often called SARS-CoV-1, which emerged in 2002 and spread in human travelers from Hong Kong to Singapore, Toronto and elsewhere, alarming experts deeply. Scientists traced SARS-CoV-1 to palm civets, a type of catlike wild carnivore sold as food in some South China markets and restaurants. But the civets proved to be intermediate hosts, and its natural host was later identified as horseshoe bats.

這讓我停下來思考自己的先驗傾向。在過去的40年裡，我寫了一些關於自然世界和研究自然科學的非虛構作品，尤其是生態學和進化生物學方面。這40年的前半段，我的注意力主要集中在熊、鱷魚和大黃蜂等肉眼可見的大型生物上，並關注亞馬孫叢林和索諾蘭沙漠等野生地區。1999年，我在執行《國家地理》任務期間接觸到新興病毒這一主題，當時我在中非森林的伊波拉病毒棲息地徒步10天。後來，我花了五年時間寫了一本關於人畜共患病及其致病因子的書，其中包括SARS病毒，這是之前出現過的致命冠狀病毒，現在通常稱為SARS-CoV-1，出現於2002年，通過人類旅行者從香港傳播到新加坡、多倫多和其他地方，讓專家們深感震驚。科學家追溯SARS-CoV-1的源頭是果子狸，這是一種像貓一樣的野生食肉動物，在中國南部的一些市場和餐館中作為食品出售。但果子狸被證明是中間宿主，其自然宿主後來被確定為馬蹄蝠。

The story of SARS is only one chapter in the saga of dangerous new viruses emerging from animals. The grim tale of how H.I.V. got into humans and caused the AIDS pandemic is another — a tale known partly by inference and partly by molecular evidence, and traceable back to a single blood-mingling event between a person and a chimpanzee, probably hunter and hunted, in the southeastern corner of Cameroon around the start of the 20th century. Human contact with nonhuman animals accounts for our influenzas as well, which usually emerge from wild aquatic birds. Hendra virus, in Australia, comes to humans from bats, generally through an intermediate host: horses. Machupo virus, in Bolivia, abides in rodents when not infecting people. Hantaan virus, discovered in Korea, and its relative Sin Nombre virus, in the American Southwest, also spill over from rodents. Nipah virus, in Bangladesh and some surrounding countries, comes from bats. It’s excreted in bat feces, saliva and urine, and when certain fruit bats visit date palm trees that are being tapped for their sugary sap — a custom in Bangladesh — the virus contaminates the sap, which is sold fresh on the street to local customers, some of whom die. These cases and many others like them are among my own priors, and no doubt they do incline me toward the idea of natural spillover. It happens often, sometimes with dire consequences.

在動物身上出現危險新病毒的長篇史詩中，SARS的故事只是其中的一個章節。另一個是愛滋病毒進入人類並導致愛滋病大流行的慘痛故事——這個故事部分通過推理，部分通過分子證據而為人所知，源頭追溯到大約20世紀初的喀麥隆東南部，可能在一次獵人捕獵時，人類和黑猩猩之間發生了血液混合。流感也源於人類與非人類動物的接觸，通常來自野生水禽。澳洲的亨德拉病毒通常通過中間宿主馬從蝙蝠傳播到人類。在玻利維亞，會感染人類的馬丘波病毒平時寄生於嚙齒動物體內。在韓國發現的漢坦病毒以及在美國西南部發現的近親辛諾布爾病毒也通過嚙齒動物傳播。在孟加拉國和一些周邊國家的尼帕病毒來自蝙蝠。它通過蝙蝠糞便、唾液和尿液排出，從棗椰樹採集含糖汁液是孟加拉國的習慣，當某些果蝠光顧這些棗椰樹時，汁液被病毒污染，這些新鮮汁液被帶到街上，出售給當地顧客，其中一些人死亡。這些例子以及許多其他類似例子都是我自己的先驗經歷，毫無疑問，它們確實讓我傾向於自然溢出的說法。自然溢出經常發生，有時會帶來可怕的後果。

Research accidents have occurred, too, in the history of dangerous new viruses, and longtime concerns over such accidents constitute the priors of some who favor the lab-leak hypothesis for Covid. Such accidents might number in the hundreds or the thousands, depending on where you put the threshold of significance and how you define “accident.” There was an event that (probably) reintroduced a 1950s strain of influenza in 1977, causing that year’s flu pandemic, which killed many thousands of people, and a 2004 needle-stick injury of a careful scientist, Kelly Warfield, while she was doing Ebola research (but she proved uninfected by Ebola). Also in 2004, just a year after the global SARS scare, two workers at a virology lab in Beijing were independently infected with that virus, which spread to nine people in total, one of whom died. This followed two other single-case lab-accident infections with SARS virus the previous year, one in Singapore, one in Taiwan.

在危險新病毒的歷史上也曾發生過研究事故，而人們長期以來對此類事故的擔憂構成了一些新冠病毒實驗室洩漏假說支持者的先驗傾向。這樣的事故可能發生過數百起或數千起，具體取決於你對重要性的閾值設置以及對「事故」的定義。1977年發生的一次事件（有可能）再次引入了1950年代的流感病毒，導致當年的流感大流行，數千人死亡；2004年，小心謹慎的科學家凱莉·沃菲爾德在研究伊波拉病毒時被針刺傷（但事後證明她沒有感染病毒）。同樣是在2004年，即全球SARS恐慌發生一年後，北京一家病毒學實驗室的兩名工作人員分別感染了該病毒，總共傳播給九人，其中一人死亡。此前一年還發生了另外兩例SARS病毒實驗室事故感染事件，一例發生在新加坡，一例發生在台灣。

When the first known cases of an “atypical pneumonia” began turning up at Wuhan hospitals in late 2019, and then exploded into a coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the location itself seemed to fit, in different ways, the priors that might incline one toward either a natural-origin explanation or a lab-leak explanation. The potential lab-leak connection was easiest to note: The city contained a research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with a well-known laboratory devoted to coronavirus research. On the other hand, Wuhan was also a major nexus for the significant national trade in wild animals for food, fur and traditional medicines (estimated at more than $70 billion annually), where such creatures, and the viruses they carry, were sold at many crowded markets — one of which, Huanan, lay at or near the center of the spatial pattern of earliest known cases.

2019年底第一批已知的「非典型肺炎」病例開始在武漢的醫院出現，然後在2020年初冠狀病毒疫情暴發，這個地點本身對於不同的人來說符合不同的先驗傾向，人們要麼選擇自然起源說法，要麼選擇實驗室洩漏說法。實驗室洩漏的潛在關聯是最容易注意到的：該市有一個研究機構，即武漢病毒研究所，其中有一個致力於冠狀病毒研究的著名實驗室。另一方面，武漢也是全國用於食品、毛皮和傳統藥物的野生動物的主要貿易樞紐（每年估計超過700億美元），這些生物——連同其攜帶的病毒——在許多擁擠的市場出售。華南海鮮市場就是其中之一，位於或接近最早已知病例所在範圍的中心。

So, starting from simply those circumstances, was a lab accident more “likely” than a natural spillover? And under either of those scenarios, how much did Chinese-government pressure and obscurantism constrain the availability of evidence for assessing one or the other? Because there exists no definitive account — yet — of the particular events that delivered SARS-CoV-2 into the human population, even experts are forced to frame their views as probabilities, based on data and circumstance, influenced variously by prior beliefs as to how the world works.

那麼，僅僅考慮這些情況，實驗室事故比自然溢出更「可能」嗎？在這兩種情況下，中國政府的高壓和隱瞞傾向在多大程度上限制了評估其中任何一種證據的可用性？由於目前還沒有關於將SARS-CoV-2傳播給人類的具體事件的明確描述，即使是專家，也被迫根據數據和環境將其觀點限定為概率，這些概率受到對世界如何運作的先驗信念的不同影響。

In assessing the probabilities for yourself, you might want to step back from the noise, anger, vitriol and politicization that have clouded the controversy and focus on the evidence we do have. To that end, it may help to note some events in the order they occurred.

在自行評估可能性時，你可能需要從給爭議蒙上陰影的喧囂、憤怒、刻薄和政治化中後退一步，專注於我們確實擁有的證據上。為此，按時間順序記錄一些事件可能會有所幫助。

On Jan. 11, 2020, in Shanghai, just 11 days after first reports of the outbreak in Wuhan circulated globally, a team of scientists led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of Fudan University released a draft genome sequence of the novel virus through a website called Virological.org. The genome was provided by Edward C. Holmes, a British Australian evolutionary biologist based in Sydney and a colleague of Zhang’s on the genome-assembly project. Holmes is famous among virologists for his work on the evolution of RNA viruses (including coronaviruses), his pristinely bald head and his mordant candor. Everyone in the field knows him as Eddie. The posting went up at 1:05 a.m. Scotland time, at which point the curator of the site there in Edinburgh, a professor of molecular evolution named Andrew Rambaut, was alert and ready to speed things along. He and Holmes composed a brief introductory note to the genome: “Please feel free to download, share, use and analyze this data,” it said. They knew that “data” is plural, but they were in a hurry.

Immediately, Holmes and a small group of colleagues set to analyzing the genome for clues about the virus’s evolutionary history. They drew on a background of known coronaviruses and their own understanding of how such viruses take shape in the wild (as reflected in Holmes’s 2009 book, “The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses”). They knew that coronavirus evolution can occur rapidly, driven by frequent mutation (single-letter changes in a roughly 30,000-letter genome), by recombination (one virus swapping genome sections with another virus, when both simultaneously replicate in a single cell) and by Darwinian natural selection’s acting on those random changes. Holmes traded thoughts with Rambaut in Edinburgh, a friend of three decades, and with two other colleagues: Kristian Andersen at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif.; and Robert Garry at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, joined the huddle later. These five would form a sort of long-distance study group, aimed toward publishing a paper on SARS-CoV-2’s genome and its likely origin.

霍姆斯和一小群同事立即開始分析基因組，尋找有關病毒進化史的線索。他們利用了已知冠狀病毒的背景，以及他們自己對這種病毒在野外如何形成的理解（參見霍姆斯2009年出版的《RNA病毒的進化和出現》一書）。他們知道，冠狀病毒的進化可以迅速發生，由頻繁的突變（在大約3萬個字母的基因組中發生單個字母的變化)、重組（當兩種病毒同時在一個細胞中複製時交換基因組片段）和達爾文的自然選擇作用於這些隨機變化所驅動。霍姆斯在愛丁堡與他30年的好友蘭博特和另外兩位同事交換了意見：他們是加州拉霍亞斯凱瑞普斯研究公司的克里斯蒂安·安德森；以及紐奧良杜蘭大學醫學院的羅伯特·加里。哥倫比亞大學梅爾曼公共衛生學院的伊恩·利普金後來也加入進來。這五個人組成一個遠程研究小組，旨在發表一篇關於SARS-CoV-2基因組及其可能起源的論文。

Holmes, Andersen and their colleagues recognized the virus’s similarity to bat viruses but, with more study, saw a pair of “notable features” that gave them pause. Those features, two short blips of genome, constituted a very small percentage of the whole, but with potentially high significance for the virus’s ability to grab and infect human cells. They were technical-sounding elements, familiar to virologists, that are now part of the Covid-origin vernacular: a furin cleavage site (FCS), as well as an unexpected receptor-binding domain (RBD). All viruses have RBDs, which help them attach to cells; an FCS is a feature that helps certain viruses get inside. The original SARS virus, which terrified scientists worldwide but caused only about 800 deaths, didn’t resemble the new coronavirus in either respect. How had SARS-CoV-2 come to take this form?

霍姆斯、安德森和其他人認識到這種病毒與蝙蝠病毒的相似之處，但經過更多的研究，他們發現了兩個「值得注意的特徵」，這讓他們感到不安。這些特徵是基因組的兩個短點，在整個基因組中只佔很小的比例，但對病毒捕獲和感染人類細胞的能力卻具有潛在的重大意義。它們是病毒學家熟悉的技術元素，現在已成為新冠病毒起源術語的一部分：一個呋喃裂解位點(FCS)和一個意想不到的受體結合域(RBD)。所有病毒都有RBD，這有助於它們附著在細胞上；而FCS是一種幫助某些病毒進入細胞的功能。最初的SARS病毒曾經嚇壞了全世界的科學家，但它只導致了大約800人死亡，而它與新型冠狀病毒在這兩方面都不相似。SARS-CoV-2是如何成為這種形式的？

Andersen and Holmes were genuinely concerned, at first, that it might have been engineered. Were those two features deliberate add-ons, inserted into some coronavirus backbone by genetic manipulation, intentionally making the virus more transmissible and pathogenic among humans? It had to be considered. Holmes called Jeremy Farrar, a disease expert who was then director of the Wellcome Trust, a foundation in London that supports health research. Farrar saw the point and quickly arranged a conference call among an international group of scientists to discuss the genome’s puzzling aspects and the possible scenarios of its origin. The group included Robert Garry at Tulane and a dozen other people, most of them distinguished European or British scientists with relevant expertise, like Rambaut in Edinburgh, Marion Koopmans in the Netherlands and Christian Drosten in Germany. Also on the call were Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health and therefore Fauci’s boss. This is the famous Feb. 1 call on which — if you believe some critical voices — Fauci and Collins persuaded the others to suppress any notion that the virus might have been engineered.

起初，安德森和霍姆斯確實擔心這可能是人為設計的。這兩個特徵是不是故意添加的，通過基因操作插入到冠狀病毒的骨架中，故意使病毒在人類中更具傳染性和致病性？這一點是必須考慮的。霍姆斯打電話給疾病專家傑瑞米·法拉爾，後者時任惠康基金會負責人，這是倫敦一家支持健康研究的基金會。法拉爾理解這麼做的意義，很快安排了一個國際科學家小組的電話會議，討論該基因組令人困惑的地方及其可能的起源情況。該小組包括杜蘭大學的羅伯特·加里和其他十幾個人，其中大多數是具有相關專業知識的歐洲或英國傑出科學家，如愛丁堡的蘭博特、荷蘭的馬利恩·庫普曼斯和德國的克里斯蒂安·德羅斯特恩。參加電話會議的還有時任美國國家過敏和傳染病研究所所長安東尼·福奇和時任美國國家衛生研究院院長、福奇的上司弗朗西斯·柯林斯。就是在這次著名的2月1日電話會議上——如果你相信一些批評人士的說法——福奇和柯林斯說服其他人壓制了病毒可能是人為設計的觀點。

“The narrative going around was that Fauci told us, Change our mind, yada, yada, yada, yada. We were paid off,” Holmes said to me. “It’s complete [expletive].”

「坊間流傳的說法是，福奇告訴我們，改變我們的想法，諸如此類。我們被收買了，"霍姆斯對我說。「這完全是XXX（此處是一句髒話）。」

Andersen concurs. “There is no universe in which this would even be possible,” he told me. Recently, based on selections of their private email and Slack traffic made public, Andersen and his colleagues have been accused of concealment and dissembling: Their messages, critics contend, prove that even as they were deeply concerned in private about the engineered-virus or lab-release possibilities, they were striving to keep both out of public discussion. But as the researchers describe it, these apparent contradictions were simply a reflection of their fast-evolving views. After initial concern that the receptor-binding domain in SARS-CoV-2 might be a sign of engineering, for instance, they learned soon after the Feb. 1 conference call of a very similar RBD in a coronavirus that infected pangolins. It was detected from a public database by a bioinformatician in Houston, Matt Wong, and posted on the Virological website, where it eventually came to the group’s attention. It showed that such an RBD had evolved in the wild and might well have gotten into SARS-CoV-2 by recombination, the natural gene-swapping process. Andersen and the others also recognized that furin cleavage sites occur naturally in other coronaviruses, like the MERS virus, though not (as so far detected) in any other member of the subgenus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.

安德森也是這麼說的。「這種事無論如何都不可能發生，」他告訴我。最近，根據公開的私人電子郵件和Slack對話記錄，安德森和同事們被指控隱瞞和欺騙：批評者認為，他們的郵件和對話記錄證明，儘管他們私下裡對病毒系人工或源自實驗室的可能性深感擔憂，但他們卻努力讓這兩件事遠離公眾討論。但正如這些研究人員所云，這些表面上的矛盾之處只是反映了他們的觀點在快速變化。例如，他們最初擔心SARS-CoV-2中的受體結合域可能是人為操縱的標誌，但在2月1日的電話會議後不久，他們就得知，在感染穿山甲的冠狀病毒中存在非常相似的RBD。它是由休士頓的生物信息學家馬特·黃（音）從一個公共數據庫中發現的，並發布在《病毒學》網站上，最終引起了該小組的注意。研究表明，這種RBD系野外進化而來，很可能通過重組（自然的基因交換過程）進入了SARS-CoV-2。安德森和其他人還意識到，在其他冠狀病毒（如MERS病毒）中，呋喃裂解位點也會自然出現，儘管在SARS-CoV-2所屬亞屬的其他成員中卻沒有出現（迄今為止尚未發現）。

Such new data led to a new conclusion, in what Andersen called, on Twitter, “a clear example of the scientific process.” Sixteen days after the conference call, they posted a preprint (a draft, not yet peer-reviewed) of their paper, and four weeks later it appeared in the journal Nature Medicine — this was the one titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Andersen and his co-authors stated their conclusion at the top: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” That still left the possibility of a natural virus, evolved in an animal host and passed into humans by zoonotic transfer — or perhaps a natural virus accidentally leaked? Near the paper’s end they stated something more nuanced: that while intentional engineering of the virus could be ruled out, “it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.” That said, they added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

這些新數據導致了一個新結論，用安德森推文中的說法，這是「科學過程的一個清晰例子」。那次電話會議的16天後，他們發布了（尚未經過同行評議）的論文預印本，四周後，這篇論文在《自然·醫學》雜誌上發表，論文的標題是《SARS-CoV-2的近端起源》。安德森及合作者開門見山地陳述了他們的結論：「我們的分析清楚地表明，SARS-CoV-2不是在實驗室裡造出來的病毒，也不是有意操縱出來的病毒。」儘管如此，仍存在一種可能性，那就是在動物宿主中演化出來的天然病毒，通過人畜共患疾病傳播給了人類，或者，也許天然病毒意外洩漏出來？在論文快結束的段落，他們使用了一種更細微的說法：雖然可以排除病毒經過了有意設計的可能性，但「目前仍不可能證明或反證本文所述的其他有關病毒起源的理論」。話雖這麼說，他們補充道，「我們不認為任何以實驗室為基礎的情況有道理。」

One other coronavirus quickly came to light as the closest known match to SARS-CoV-2. This wasn’t actually a virus “in the flesh” — in physical presence. It was a genome sequence, assembled from RNA fragments extracted from a fecal swab sample of a bat, captured in a mine several years earlier in 2013. The mine was in Yunnan Province, 1,200 miles southwest of Wuhan. The genome was 96.2 percent identical to the SARS-CoV-2 genome as sampled from people during the early days of the pandemic. That degree of similarity — or a 3.8 percent difference — suggests a common virus ancestor some years ago and independent evolution in the years since. So this represented a cousin to SARS-CoV-2, not its progenitor.

還有一種冠狀病毒很快就被發現是與SARS-CoV-2已知親緣關係最近的病毒。實際上發現的不是一個「活體」病毒，不是病毒本身，而是一個基因組序列，該序列是很多年前的2013年，研究人員用從一個廢棄礦井採集的蝙蝠糞便樣本中提取的RNA片段組裝出來的。那個礦井位於距離武漢約2000公里的西南省份雲南。該基因組與新冠疫情初期從感染人群中採集的 SARS-CoV-2基因組有96.2%的序列同一性。這種程度的同一性（或者說3.8%的差異性）暗示，它們幾年前有過一個共同祖先，在那之後經歷了獨立的演化。所以，該冠狀病毒是SARS-CoV-2的一個近親，而不是其祖先。

The work of sampling the bat and assembling the sequence (first just a portion, then, with better technology, nearly the whole thing) had been led by Zhengli Shi, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi and her team labeled the sequence RaTG13, coding the facts that it came from an individual of Rhinolophus affinis (Ra), the intermediate horseshoe bat, captured in that mine in Tongguan (TG), a town in the Mojiang district of Yunnan, in 2013. RaTG13 has attained renown, not just because it constituted strong evidence of SARS-CoV-2’s ancestry in bat viruses but also because the Mojiang mine figures in some of the more lurid scenarios for a lab-leak origin.

對蝙蝠的病毒進行採樣和基因測序，然後將基因序列組裝起來的工作（開始只是部分序列，後來在更好的技術幫助下，幾乎組裝出全部基因組），是在武漢病毒研究所的石正麗領導下進行的。石正麗及其團隊用RaTG13來標記那個冠狀病毒序列，因為它來自一隻學名是Rhinolophus affinis (Ra)的中間宿體馬蹄蝠，是在雲南省墨江縣通關鎮(TG)的一個礦井中捕獲的，時間是2013年。RaTG13名聲大噪，不僅因為它為SARS-CoV-2起源於蝙蝠病毒提供了有力證據，也因為墨江礦井是一些更駭人聽聞的實驗室洩漏起源說的重要部分。

Part of what makes the very name Mojiang seem lurid is that in 2012, three workers at the mine died of unidentified respiratory infections after days of underground labor there. What got into their lungs and killed them? Was it a fungus? Was it a virus? Some lab-leak proponents suggest that those deaths, described in two obscure medical theses written in Mandarin, represent the earliest known fatalities from a virus — possibly RaTG13 — that either already was, or in Shi’s lab became, SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate progenitor (that is, something far more similar than a cousin). The inference is that Shi’s team, a year after the mine workers died, may have taken the virus back to Wuhan. But the Mojiang deaths were also reported in 2014 in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases by scientists who found an entirely different virus, also potentially dangerous because it had similarities to Nipah and Hendra viruses, and was carried in the Mojiang mine by rats, not bats. One takeaway: Sample the rats and bats and other fauna in a mine, and you might well find a variety of viruses you wouldn’t want in your lungs.

墨江這個名字聽起來令人毛骨悚然的部分原因是，2012年，在墨江礦井的井下工作了幾天後，三名工人死於不明原因的呼吸系統感染。他們的肺裡進了什麼東西，導致了他們的死亡？是真菌？還是病毒？他們的死亡在兩篇晦澀難懂的中文醫學論文中有描述，一些支持實驗室洩漏說的人認為，這三人的死亡代表著冠狀病毒（可能是RaTG13）造成的已知最早死亡，這種病毒或已經演化為SARS-CoV-2，或是在石正麗的實驗室裡演化為SARS-CoV-2或其直系祖先病毒的（直系祖先與SARS-CoV-2的序列同一性高於近親與SARS-CoV-2的序列同一性）。他們由此推論，石正麗的團隊可能是在礦工死亡一年後將該病毒帶回武漢的。但墨江礦工的死亡事件也在科學家們2014年發表在《新型傳染病》雜誌的文章中有描述，他們描述了一種完全不同的病毒，這種病毒也有潛的危險，因為它與尼帕病毒和亨德拉病毒有相似之處，而且，墨江礦井中這種病毒的攜帶者是老鼠，不是蝙蝠。這篇文章提示人們：對礦井中的老鼠、蝙蝠和其他動物進行病毒採樣時，很可能會發現多種對人類肺部有害的病毒。

Another problem with the RaTG13 scenario: Its genome differs from that of SARS-CoV-2 at more than 1,100 scattered positions throughout its genome. To engineer SARS-CoV-2 into existence by starting with RaTG13 would have been unreasonable and impractical, according to Holmes and other experts in coronavirus genomics. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that RaTG13 was a genome sequence, not a live virus: It was information, not a biological entity. Coaxing a virus that lies dormant in bat guano to grow in a cell culture is difficult, and usually the effort fails. Zhengli Shi told Jon Cohen, a senior correspondent for the journal Science, in her answer to a set of emailed questions, that she never grew RaTG13 in her lab. She told me the same thing during a two-hour conversation by Zoom: “No, no. We couldn’t culture any of the sample from this cave at Mojiang.”

實驗室洩漏說中RaTG13的作用存在另一個問題：它的序列與SARS-CoV-2的序列在1100多個分散在整個基因組的位點上存在差異。霍姆斯和其他研究冠狀病毒基因組學的專家說，以RaTG13為起點製造SARS-CoV-2的做法，既不合理，也不切實際。再說，不要忘記RaTG13隻是個基因組序列，不是活病毒；它是信息，不是生物實體；這點也很重要。將蝙蝠糞便中潛伏的病毒放在細胞培養物中生長不容易，這種努力通常以失敗告終。石正麗在回答《科學》雜誌資深通訊員喬恩·科恩通過電子郵件發給她的一系列問題時寫道，她從來沒有在實驗室裡培養過RaTG13。她在與我進行的兩小時Zoom通話中對我說了同樣的話：「沒有，沒有。我們沒有培養過從墨江那個洞穴中採集的任何樣品。」

Shi was in Shanghai for a conference on the night of Dec. 30, 2019, as she explained it to me, when word reached her about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading dangerously among people back in Wuhan. Preliminary lab results suggested a coronavirus — not SARS virus, but something similar — might be the cause. She was asked to help identify the thing. She put her lab team to work on that immediately and took a train back to Wuhan the next day. Within hours, her lab had received a partial sequence from another lab. Her first instinct was to compare it with sequences of viruses they had worked on themselves, “and we found it’s different,” she told me. “So, the afternoon of Dec. 31, I already know it’s nothing related to what we have done in our laboratory.”

這是石正麗告訴我的情況：2019年12月30日晚，她在上海參加一個會議時收到消息，一種奇怪的呼吸道疾病正在武漢人群中危險地傳播。實驗室的初步結果表明，導致疾病的原因可能是一種冠狀病毒，不是SARS，但是一種類似的病毒。她被要求幫助確定病原體。她馬上叫實驗室團隊開展有關工作，並在第二天乘火車返回了武漢。幾小時內，她的實驗室就收到了另一個實驗室發來的部分序列。她的本能反應是將其與他們自己在實驗室裡研究過的病毒序列做比較，「我們發現不是同一個東西，」她告訴我。「所以，我在12月31日下午就已經知道，這與我們在實驗室做的事情無關。」

Some critics, she was well aware, had suggested that her urgency in checking her own records was an implicit admission of error or guilt. “It’s normal!” was her response.

石正麗早就知道，一些批評者暗示，她急於檢查自己的記錄是不直接言明地承認錯誤或有罪。她的回應是，「這很正常！」

Jon Cohen mentioned the possibility of a lab leak in a report published in Science on Jan. 31, 2020, noting that not all the earliest confirmed cases had some direct link to the Huanan market. Fourteen of the first 41, according to one study, did not. Might those people have picked up their infections somewhere else, and maybe not from an animal at all? After describing a couple of vivid but unsupported allegations, including the idea that SARS-CoV-2 resembled a snake virus (and snakes were sold at Wuhan wet markets), Cohen added, “The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the premier lab in China that studies bat and human coronaviruses, has also come under fire.” Concerns had been voiced, he wrote, about the security of the W.I.V.’s biosafety procedures and facilities.

Evidence regarding the origin of the virus, apart from what could be read from the genome itself, remained scarce during those early months. In place of evidence, there was the weight of scientific authority on one side and the volume of outcry on the other. On Feb. 19, 2020, an open letter appeared online in The Lancet, a British journal, signed by 27 scientists, some of them eminent senior figures in virology and public health, others researchers in the full heat of distinguished careers. It was a statement of solidarity with Chinese scientists and health professionals, who were then on the front line in efforts to understand and control the virus. The letter was organized by Peter Daszak, a British American disease ecologist, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a collaborator with Zhengli Shi. Besides voicing support for Chinese colleagues, it said: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” That expression of confidence, so soon, would prove to be counterproductive, and the phrase “conspiracy theories” landed like bacon grease thrown into a campfire, causing skeptics to flare and sizzle.

The lab-leak idea, meanwhile, took hold in some political circles, partly because it dovetailed with attitudes toward the Chinese government, its repressive policies and its penchant for secrecy. In late January 2020, even before Cohen’s Jan. 31 article, The Washington Times ran an article suggesting links between the W.I.V. and a covert bioweapons program of the Chinese military. The article (later walked back with an editor’s note) was based largely on assertions by a former Israeli military-intelligence officer. Several weeks afterward, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas voiced a similar suspicion about the Wuhan lab on Fox News. “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” Cotton said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.” Soon enough, Donald Trump’s mind began to change. The president spoke supportively about China throughout the early weeks of the pandemic and on Feb. 7 said of President Xi Jinping, “I think he’s handled it really well.” Then the winds shifted, and four months later Trump was inciting his rally crowds by calling Covid-19 “the kung flu.”

與此同時，實驗室洩漏說在一些政界人士當中盛行起來，部分原因是它與人們對中國政府的態度、它的高壓政策以及缺乏透明相吻合。2020年1月底，甚至在科恩1月31日的文章發表之前，《華盛頓時報》就發表了一篇文章，暗示武漢病毒研究所與中國軍方的一個祕密生化武器項目之間存在聯繫。這篇文章（後來附上編者按重發）主要是基於一名以色列前軍事情報官員的說法。幾周後，阿肯色州參議員湯姆·科頓在福克斯新聞上表達了類似懷疑。「我們沒有證據表明這種疾病起源於那裡，」科頓說道，「但由於中國從一開始就撒謊、不誠實，我們至少需要提出這個問題。」很快，川普的想法開始改變。在疫情暴發的頭幾週裡，這位總統一直對中國表示支持，並在2月7日談到習近平主席時說，「我認為他處理得很好。」之後風向就變了，四個月後，川普在集會上煽動群眾，稱新冠為「功夫流感」。

The attractions of the lab-leak idea weren’t entirely partisan. Jamie Metzl is an author and political commentator who worked in the Clinton administration and, at one point, as a Senate committee staff member working closely with Senator Joe Biden. Metzl has a blindingly luminescent and liberal-tinged résumé that includes a Ph.D. from Oxford, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a senior fellowship at the Atlantic Council and 13 ironman triathlons. A former member of the W.H.O. expert advisory committee on human genome editing, Metzl called early on for an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, including, in his words, “the distinct possibility this crisis may stem from a research-related incident in Wuhan.”

實驗室洩漏說的吸引力並不完全是因為黨派之爭。傑米·梅茨爾是一名作家和政治評論員，曾供職於柯林頓政府，並一度在參議院委員會工作，與參議員喬·拜登聯繫協作。梅茨爾的履歷光彩奪目，且有自由派傾向，包括牛津大學的博士學位、哈佛大學法學院的法學博士學位、大西洋理事會高級研究員，13次參加鐵人三項比賽。作為世衛組織人類基因組編輯問題專家諮詢委員會的前成員，梅茨爾很早就呼籲對疫情的起源展開調查，用他的話來說，包括「這場危機很有可能源於武漢的一起與研究相關的事件」。

Having spoken up about this in the early months of 2020, Metzl encountered resistance that seems to have startled and aggrieved him. “When I was seeing this different story,” he told me, “and I started speaking publicly about it, friends of mine would say two things.” The first was, “You’re a progressive, liberal Democrat” — but — “you’re delivering a message that’s helpful to Trump.” Implication: Metzl should get back on the right side of scrimmage. The second sort of comment, he says, was: “Who the F are you? You have all these senior scientists and Nobel laureates and others who are saying it comes from nature? Who the F are you to say that, based on your analysis and your deductive reasoning, you have additional questions?”

在2020年初的幾個月裡，梅茨爾曾談及此事，但他遭遇了阻力，看來這讓他感到震驚和委屈。「當我看到了這個不同的說法時，」他告訴我，「我開始公開談論它，而我的朋友們會做出兩種反應。」第一個是，「你是一個進步的、自由主義的民主黨人」——但是——「你現在卻在傳遞有利於川普的信息。」言下之意是：梅茨爾應該站回正確的一邊。他說，第二種反應是：「你他X以為你是誰？那些資深的科學家、諾獎得主和其他人都說病毒來自大自然，難道他們不如你？你他X是誰，就憑你的分析和演繹推理，就有更多疑問了？」

The proselytizing by Metzl and others who saw a “different story” from natural spillover — plus the swing of Trump’s message, plus the prevailing cultural disposition to distrust experts, plus no doubt other factors — had an effect on public opinion and media attention, if not on scientific consensus. According to the Pew Research Center, polling Americans in March 2020, 43 percent believed that the virus emerged naturally, against less than 30 percent who thought it came from a lab, developed either by accident or intentionally. By September 2020, another polling organization found the natural versus lab options embraced almost equally. By June 2021, a Politico-Harvard poll put the lab-origin idea ahead by a two-to-one margin: 52 percent of Americans versus 28 percent.

像梅茨爾這樣看到除自然溢出之外還有「另一種情況」的人轉變立場——加上川普的言論影響力，以及不信任專家的文化氛圍，當然還有其他的因素——對民意和媒體的關注點，甚至還有科學共識，是有影響的。據皮尤研究中心2020年3月的一項對美國人的調查，43%的人認為病毒是自然出現的，認為來自實驗室——無論是否出於故意——的人不到30%。到了2020年9月，另一個民調組織發現，自然說和實驗室說的支持者幾乎是持平的。2021年6月時，一項Politico-哈佛調查得出的結果是，52%的美國人支持實驗室起源說，幾乎是支持自然溢出說（28%）的兩倍。

Metzl himself has maintained the somewhat agnostic position that accidental release is a possibility but not the only possibility. In his eventual March 2023 testimony to Congress, he urged “fully examining all relevant origins hypotheses, obviously including a lab origin, but also a market origin, which some experts I respect believe to be more probable.” Among those experts, he cited Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona.

梅茨爾本人持著較為不可知論的立場，認為意外釋放是可能的，但並非唯一可能。他最終於2023年3月在國會作證，呼籲「全面審視一切相關的起源假說，其中當然包括實驗室起源，但也包括市場起源，一些我尊重的專家認為後者可能性更大」。他例舉了其中一位專家，亞利桑那大學演化病毒學家麥可·沃羅貝。

Worobey is a Canadian-born, Oxford-educated scientist who speaks mildly and sometimes entertains provocative theories. One such theory was O.P.V., the “oral polio vaccine” hypothesis for the origin of the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic. I first interviewed Worobey a dozen years ago to hear about that. The O.P.V. hypothesis asserted that the virus (H.I.V.-1, Group M) was put into humans, inadvertently, during reckless trials of an oral polio vaccine on unsuspecting African “volunteers,” including hundreds of thousands of children. The vaccine had been developed in chimpanzee cell cultures — so the hypothesis claimed — and contaminated with a chimpanzee virus that became H.I.V.-1-M. In early 2000, Worobey left his doctoral studies in Oxford, flew to a war zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spent weeks collecting chimpanzee dung in the forest to test that hypothesis.

生於加拿大、畢業於牛津的科學家沃羅貝語調和婉，有時也會考慮一些爭議性的理論。其中一個理論是OPV，也就是關於HIV/愛滋病疫情起源的「口服脊灰炎疫苗」假說。我在十幾年前首次採訪沃羅貝時聽他講過。OPV假說認為，病毒（HIV-1，M組）是在一項魯莽的口服脊灰炎疫苗試驗中意外輸入到受試者體內的，「志願」參加該試驗的非洲人，包括數十萬兒童，對此不知情。疫苗是用黑猩猩細胞培養而成——該假說聲稱——並且被一種後來成為HIV-1-M的黑猩猩病毒所污染。2000年初，沃羅貝離開在牛津的博士研究項目，飛到戰火紛飛的剛果民主共和國，在那裡的叢林中花了幾週收集黑猩猩糞便，以驗證該假說。

His senior partner on this wildcat expedition was William Hamilton, a famous Oxford biologist who considered the O.P.V. hypothesis plausible. Worobey and Hamilton collected their chimpanzee samples, with help from local forest guides, and then scrambled out of Kisangani, Worobey with his arm in a sling from a badly infected forest wound, Hamilton desperately ill with malaria. They reached England, and Hamilton died soon afterward from complications. The samples got lost in baggage handling, then found, then tested negative for the chimpanzee virus, except for one sample that proved inconclusive.

他的這場不計後果的冒險有一位資深合作者，著名牛津生物學家威廉·漢彌爾頓，他認為OPV假說是合理的。沃羅貝和漢彌爾頓在當地森林嚮導協助下收集了黑猩猩樣本，然後狼狽地離開基桑加尼，沃羅貝因為在林中受傷導致嚴重感染，手臂吊著繃帶。漢彌爾頓則因瘧疾生命垂危。回到英格蘭後，漢彌爾頓很快就死於併發症。樣本先是在行李中轉過程中丟失，後來又被找回，然後黑猩猩病毒檢測呈陰性，只有一份被證明無效的樣本是例外。

Such are the labors and frustrations of science. Worobey, along with other scientists, drawing on other evidence, eventually showed that the oral-vaccine hypothesis was false. Open-mindedness toward a provocative hypothesis, and a commitment to confirm it or refute it as the evidence may dictate, are among his priors.

科學本就這樣，充滿了勞苦與沮喪。沃羅貝和其他科學家一起，最終依據其他的證據證明，口服疫苗假說是錯的。對爭議性假說持開放性的態度，堅持用證據來證實或否定它，是他的首要原則之一。

With SARS-CoV-2, 20 years later, Worobey likewise felt inclined to give the provocative, heterodox hypothesis all due consideration. Concerned by what he saw as premature dismissal of the lab-leak possibility, he signed a public letter in spring 2021, with 17 other scientists, arguing that “greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.” One of the letter’s other co-signers, in fact the first as listed, was Jesse Bloom. Worobey had helped initiate the letter, with emails to Bloom on March 21 of that year, including the suggestion, “I have been thinking about something like a Perspective in Science or an Op-Ed in the NY Times.”

20年後，對於SARS-CoV-2，沃羅貝同樣傾向於對這一具有爭議性的非正統假說給予應有的考慮。他認為排除實驗室洩漏的可能性過早，出於這一擔憂，他於2021年春季與其他17名科學家簽署了一封公開信，認為「進一步澄清這一流行病的起源是必要且可行的。在我們獲得足夠的數據之前，無論是自然溢出假設還是實驗室溢出假設，我們必須都要認真對待」。這封信的其他共同簽署人之一是傑西·布魯姆，實際上他排在名單的第一位。沃羅貝是發起人之一，並於當年3月21日向布魯姆發送了電子郵件，其中包括這樣的建議：「我一直在考慮發在類似《科學》的觀點板塊或《紐約時報》的專欄文章之類的地方。」

The letter was initially drafted by Bloom and two others: Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who was an author of a preprint in 2020 arguing that SARS-CoV-2 was already well adapted to infecting humans at the start, raising questions about its provenance; and David Relman of Stanford, a distinguished microbiologist with a long-term concern about biosecurity issues and some gain-of-function research. Others of the group contributed input, and the letter ran in Science on May 14, 2021, under the imperative title “Investigate the Origins of Covid-19.” But from that point, with passing months and more research, Worobey would diverge from the most vocal of his co-signers regarding what constitutes “sufficient data.”

這封信最初是由布魯姆和另外兩人起草的：分子生物學家艾琳娜·陳（音），她是2020年一篇預印本論文的作者，論文認為SARS-CoV-2從一開始就已經充分具備感染人類的條件，這引發了對其起源的質疑；另一位是傑出的微生物學家、史丹佛大學的戴維·雷爾曼，他長期關注生物安全問題和一些功能獲得性研究。該小組的其他成員也提供了意見，這封信於2021年5月14日發表在《科學》雜誌上，標題為《調查新冠病毒的起源》。但從那時起，幾個月的時間過去了，出現了更多的研究，對於什麼是「充分的數據」，沃羅貝與立場最鮮明的幾位共同簽署人產生了分歧。

Strong tides of opinion were moving by spring 2021. An international team of scientists, recruited by the World Health Organization to its joint W.H.O.-China study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, had returned from a month in Wuhan and issued its Phase 1 report, finding a laboratory leak “extremely unlikely.” That finding took criticism from Worobey, Bloom and their co-authors of the letter to Science, published weeks afterward. Even the director-general of the W.H.O. himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, hoped for further investigation. At a news conference marking the report’s publication, Tedros said, “As far as W.H.O. is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table,” noting the need for continued research. Notwithstanding Tedros’s hopes, and mainly because of Chinese resistance, there has been no official Phase 2 follow-up study per se. Instead, the W.H.O. created a Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a body of disease scientists who will continue to study the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as well as other dangerous new bugs.

2021年春天掀起了強烈的輿論浪潮。世界衛生組織招募了一個國際科學家小組，參加對SARS-CoV-2起源的世衛組織-中國聯合研究，他們在武漢待了一個月後歸來，發布了第一階段報告，稱實驗室洩漏「極不可能」。沃羅貝、布魯姆和其他共同簽署者致信《科學》雜誌並在幾周後發表，在信中批評了該結果。甚至世界衛生組織總幹事譚德塞博士本人也希望進行進一步調查。在發表該報告的新聞發布會上，譚德塞表示：「就世界衛生組織而言，就目前而言，所有假設仍然存在，」並指出需要繼續研究。儘管譚德塞抱有希望，但目前還沒有正式的所謂第二階段後續研究，主要是由於中國的抵制。相反，世界衛生組織創建了「新病原體起源科學諮詢小組」(SAGO)，這是一個由疾病科學家組成的機構，他們將繼續研究SARS-CoV-2以及其他危險的新細菌的起源。

Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead for Covid at the W.H.O., has been vocal about the barriers to progress. “There’s very little information that can be accessed with regard to lab leak, with regard to breach of biosafety or biosecurity, and that’s the problem,” she told me recently, saying that she had discussed the issue directly with Chinese officials. “That’s what’s frustrating,” she added. “With that lack of information, you’re left with these gaping holes.”

世衛組織新冠病毒技術負責人瑪麗亞·范科霍夫毫不掩飾地說出是什麼在阻礙。她最近告訴我：「人們能接觸到的關於實驗室洩漏、違反生物安全或生物安保的信息很少，這就是問題所在。」她說，她已直接與中國官員討論了這個問題。「這就是令人沮喪的地方，」她還說。「由於缺乏信息，你就會留下這些空白。」

Popular articles espousing the lab-leak idea also began to blossom forth around this time, in magazines and newspapers and on web platforms. In January 2021, New York magazine carried a Covid-origin article by Nicholson Baker, who had lately published a book on American bioweapons research in the early 1950s and his frustrations with the Freedom of Information Act. Baker now raised the “What if?” question about coronavirus research. In May 2021, Nicholas Wade (who once worked for The New York Times) published a long article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing the collaborations between Zhengli Shi’s lab and EcoHealth Alliance, for research on bat coronaviruses as potential threats to human health — research that, Wade suggested, could have led to the escape of a virus intentionally made more dangerous to humans. Soon afterward, another science writer with former connections to The Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr., found himself moved by Wade’s article to do further probing and questioning and posted a more judicious essay, concluding, “All we have so far is speculation, and all the explanations are unsatisfactory.” In early June, Vanity Fair followed with a feature by the journalist Katherine Eban, suggesting that research at the W.I.V. — or, alternatively, field collection of bat samples, and the accidental infection of a fieldworker — might have put the virus, engineered or not, into people.

大約在這個時候，支持實驗室洩漏說法的熱門文章也開始在雜誌、報紙和網路平台上湧現。2021年1月，《紐約》雜誌刊登了尼克爾森·貝克撰寫的一篇新冠病毒起源的文章。貝克最近出版了一本關於1950年代初美國生物武器研究以及他對《信息自由法》的不滿的書。現在，貝克針對新冠病毒研究提出一個問題：「萬一呢？」2021年5月，尼古拉斯·韋德（曾供職於《紐約時報》）在《原子科學家公報》上發表了一篇長文，描述了石正麗實驗室與生態健康聯盟之間的合作，研究蝙蝠冠狀病毒對人類健康的潛在威脅——韋德表示，這樣的研究會有意製造對人類更加危險的病毒，有可能會洩漏。不久之後，另一位曾與《紐約時報》有關聯的科學作家小唐納德·G·麥克尼爾受到韋德文章的啟發，進行了進一步的探究和質疑，並發表了一篇更加審慎的文章，總結道：「到目前為止，我們所做的只是猜測，所有的解釋都不能令人滿意。」6月初，《名利場》雜誌隨後發表了記者凱瑟琳·埃班的專題報導，報導指出，無論病毒是否經過改造，武漢病毒研究所的研究——或者說，蝙蝠樣本的野外採集，以及現場工作人員的意外感染——可能已經將病毒傳播到了人類身上。

Then came Jon Stewart. On June 14, 2021, the comedian appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show and announced, with sublime confidence and transcendent shallowness, his grounds for certainty that the virus first detected in Wuhan had come from a Wuhan lab. “If you look at the name!” he shouted. “Look at the name!” Stewart got the name of the institution wrong, in fact — he called W.I.V. the “Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab” — though he got the name of the city right. How much that mattered to Colbert’s millions of viewers is unknown.

接著，喬恩·斯圖爾特出現了。2021年6月14日，這位喜劇演員在斯蒂芬·科爾伯特的節目中以超群的自信和超凡的淺薄宣布，他有理由確信在武漢最早發現的病毒來自武漢的實驗室。「你看名字就知道！」他喊道。「看名字！」事實上，斯圖爾特把這個機構的名字搞錯了——他把武漢病毒研究所稱為「武漢新型呼吸道冠狀病毒實驗室」——城市的名字他倒是沒弄錯。我們不知道科爾伯特那數百萬觀眾在不在乎這些。

Throughout 2020 and 2021, scientists with deep expertise in relevant fields, especially molecular evolutionary virology, veterinary virology and molecular phylogenetics (the drawing of family trees by comparison of genomes), were busy too. Their efforts added data and analyses to the natural-origin side of the balance.

整個2020年和2021年，在相關領域具有深厚專業知識的科學家們也很忙碌，尤其是分子進化病毒學、獸醫病毒學和分子系統發生學（通過比較基因組繪製家譜）領域。他們的努力為天平另一端的自然起源說法添加了數據和分析。

One study, by two Chinese researchers and three Westerners, showed that the wet markets in Wuhan — not just the notorious Huanan but also three others — contained numerous shops selling wild animals for food from May 2017 to November 2019. The offerings included raccoon dogs, masked palm civets and Malayan porcupines. Many of the animals showed what seemed to be wounds from gunshots or traps, suggesting harvest from the wild (as distinct from farm-raised wildlife), but lacked the requisite documentation to make their sale legal under China’s Wildlife Protection Law.

兩名中國研究人員和三名西方研究人員進行的一項研究顯示，2017年5月至2019年11月期間，武漢的生鮮市場——不僅是眾所周知的華南海鮮市場，還有其他三個市場——都有許多檔口出售供食用的野生動物。這其中包括貉、果子狸和馬來豪豬。許多動物身上的傷口似乎是槍或陷阱造成的，這表明它們是從野外捕獲的（與農場飼養的野生動物不同），但缺乏中國《野生動物保護法》所要求的用於合法銷售的文件。

That’s important because it gave local authorities incentive, as the pandemic spread, to close the market (as they did on Jan. 1, 2020) and conceal whatever illegalities had been ignored by enforcement officers there. For all the assumptions made about China’s motivation to cover up a lab leak, it’s worth remembering that they would have had similar motivations — including that $70 billion national industry — to cover up a devastatingly consequential market leak.

這一點很重要，因為隨著疫情的蔓延，地方當局有關閉市場（就像他們在2020年1月1日所做的那樣）並隱瞞當地執法人員忽視的任何違法行為的動機。如果假設中國有掩蓋實驗室洩漏的動機，值得記住的是，他們也會有其他類似的動機——包括那個價值700億美元的全國產業——來掩蓋具有毀滅性後果的市場洩漏。

Another study, published by Science in July 2022, with Michael Worobey as first author, joined by Eddie Holmes and Marion Koopmans and many others, considered the spatial pattern of more than 150 of the earliest Covid-19 cases from December 2019. Worobey and colleagues found that not only were Huanan market customers and workers (and people in contact with those customers or workers) among those cases living close to the market, but so were patients with no known epidemiological link to the market. Therefore, that market was “the early epicenter” of the pandemic, as the paper’s title declared.

2022年7月發表在《科學》上的另一項研究，第一作者是麥可·沃羅貝，合作者包括埃迪·霍姆斯和馬利恩·庫普曼斯等人，論文考慮了2019年12月以來超過150個Covid-19早期病例的空間分布模式。沃羅貝和同事們發現，在市場附近生活的病例中不僅有華南市場的顧客和工人（以及與這些顧客和工人有接觸的人），還有一些與市場不存在流行病學關聯的病人。因此，如論文標題所示，市場是疫情的「早期暴發中心」。

A distinct but related study that appeared around the same time, with Worobey and other co-authors but in this case with Jonathan Pekar as first author, looked at the shape of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree. It was unexpected. As drawn from comparison of genomes sequenced from human samples, taken at the beginning of the pandemic, it consisted of two thick limbs branching from a trunk, then each limb exploding into many tiny stems, without intermediate branches.

The two major limbs were lineages, labeled Lineage A and Lineage B, from which all the virus’s later diversity arose. Lineage B was the more prolific and successful, accounting for most of the world’s Covid-19 cases, including all early cases directly linked to the market. Lineage A had been found in the market, too, by the Chinese team that swabbed after the place was summarily closed. That smudge of A turned up on a pair of discarded gloves. Lineage A was also detected in two Covid patients living near the market. Pekar and his colleagues did a high-tech analysis of the tree pattern — those two big limbs, then that explosion of twiggy stems from each — and concluded that the virus probably entered humans multiple times. The outbreak of human infections, they judged, most likely had (at least) two separate beginnings.

這兩個主要分支是病毒的譜系，分別被稱為譜系A和譜系B，五花八門的病毒都是從它們產生的。B譜系更為高產和成功，是全球大部分Covid-19病例的來源，包括與市場直接相關的所有早期病例。在該市場被立即關閉後，中國小組對其進行了抽樣檢查，在市場中也發現了A系病毒。A系病毒的污染出現在一副被丟棄的手套上。住在市場附近的兩名患者體內也發現了A系病毒。佩卡爾和同事們對病毒的樹型——那兩個大分支，然後每個分支上都長出了小枝——做了高科技分析，並得出結論，病毒可能多次進入人體。他們判斷，人類感染的暴發很可能有（至少）兩個互無關聯的起點。

Why did this finding matter? Two spillovers into people, from a market stall holding infected raccoon dogs, was more parsimonious than two separately infected laboratory workers, carrying their infections independently to the same market. Partly that’s because of geography: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, as Jon Stewart tried to say, is indeed in the city of Wuhan, but it sits on the other side of the Yangtze River, more than seven miles (as the crow flies) from the Huanan market.

為什麼這個發現很重要？與兩名分別受到感染的實驗室工作人員帶著感染各自前往同一個市場相比，一個市場攤位上的受感染貉兩次向人類傳播這一場景的可能性更大。這一定程度上是地理原因：正如喬恩·斯圖爾特試圖指出的那樣，武漢病毒學研究所確實位於武漢市，但它位於長江的另一邊，與華南市場的直線距離超過11公里。

Beginning early this year, the popularity of the lab-accident idea, which grew steadily from 2020 through 2022, received several additional boosts. On Feb. 26, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy, one of the organizations assigned earlier by President Biden to study the origin question, offered a new judgment. Previously undecided, the D.O.E.’s intelligence people now concluded, though with “low confidence,” that the pandemic most likely began from a lab leak. The Journal’s reporters had this from “a classified intelligence report,” unavailable for scrutiny by the public but delivered to the White House and “key members of Congress,” who were unidentified.

從今年年初開始，自2020年到2022年穩步積攢人氣的實驗室事故說又得到了幾次推動。2月26日，《華爾街日報》報導稱，拜登總統早些時候指派研究來源問題的機構之一美國能源部提出了新的判斷。此前並未得出結論的能源部現在認為，雖然屬於「低置信度」，但這次大流行很可能是從實驗室洩漏開始的。《華爾街日報》的記者是從「一份機密情報報告」中得知這一結論，報告本身無法供公眾查閱，但已提交給白宮和「國會關鍵議員」，具體是哪幾位議員尚不得而知。

The next day, CNN’s website posted a follow-up story stating that three sources, also unidentified, had told CNN that the D.O.E. based its shift partly on information about research done at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, another disease-related facility in the city, more than seven miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This caught my attention, because I knew that the Wuhan C.D.C., having recently relocated, was now just a few hundred yards from the Huanan market. It occurred to me, disquietingly, that a virus leak from the center might fit the spatial clustering of early cases around the market, as analyzed by Worobey and his colleagues, in a way that a putative leak from the W.I.V. did not.

But nothing more on that provocative assertion has come from CNN, or from any other news outlet, in the months since. I was reminded that the Wuhan C.D.C. moved to its new location, near the market, only on Dec. 2, 2019; that date, plus the time presumably needed to bring laboratory work back online, might not jibe with a viral outbreak that most likely began in late November. In any case, two different sources with good access to the Chinese research community told me that the Wuhan C.D.C. (as distinct from the national C.D.C. in Beijing) had no coronavirus research program before the pandemic. One of those sources, Jane Qiu, a China-born independent journalist, added that the Wuhan group’s mandate was mainly technical tasks such as disease surveillance, rather than research. (Qiu couldn’t name her own sources due to their potential jeopardy in China.)

但在那之後的幾個月裡，CNN或其他任何新聞媒體都沒有再報導這一引發爭議的觀點。有人提醒我，武漢疾控中心直到2019年12月2日才搬到市場附近的新址；這個日期，再加上實驗室工作恢復工作可能需要的時間，或許同最有可能在11月底開始的病毒暴發無法匹配。無論如何，兩個與中國研究界有良好接觸的不同消息來源告訴我，武漢疾控中心（與北京的國家疾控中心不同）在大流行之前沒有冠狀病毒研究項目。其中一位消息人士、出生在中國的獨立記者簡·邱（音）補充說，武漢疾控中心的任務主要是疾病監測等技術任務，而不是研究。（由於簡·邱的消息來源在中國面臨潛在危險，他不能透露他們的身份。）

Still more recently, in mid-June, came the Substack article I alluded to earlier, claiming that Ben Hu and two others from Zhengli Shi’s lab were “the first people infected by the virus” and therefore the starting point of the pandemic. Posted by Michael Shellenberger and two co-authors, this article cited unidentified sources “within the U.S. government.” Hu was a first author on a 2017 paper describing the Shi group’s discovery of multiple coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, in bats from a cave (not the Mojiang mine) in southern China, and experimental work on three of those viruses that some critics considered risky. Hu and the other two scientists, according to Shellenberger and his co-authors, had contracted “Covid-19-like illnesses” in November 2019, suggesting that they were the conduits of a lab leak. Hu himself promptly denied the allegation in an email to Jon Cohen at Science: “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have Covid-19-like symptoms at that time.” Furthermore, Hu told Cohen, he and both colleagues had tested negative for signs of recent Covid infection (antibodies) in March 2020.

最近，在6月中旬，我之前提到的Substack文章發表了，聲稱胡犇和石正麗實驗室的另外兩個人是「第一批感染病毒的人」，因此是大流行的起點。這篇文章由麥可·謝倫伯格和兩位合著者發表，引用了「美國政府內部」的未具名消息來源。胡犇是2017年一篇論文的第一作者，該論文描述了石正麗團隊在中國南方一個洞穴（不是墨江礦）的蝙蝠中發現了與SARS-CoV-2相關的多種冠狀病毒，並對其中三種病毒進行了實驗研究，一些批評者認為這些研究具有風險性。根據謝倫伯格及合著者的說法，胡犇和另外兩名科學家在2019年11月感染了「類似Covid-19的疾病」，這表明他們是實驗室洩漏的管道。胡犇本人在給《科學》雜誌喬恩·科恩的電子郵件中斷然否認了這一指控：「我在2019年秋天沒有生病，當時也沒有出現類似Covid-19的癥狀。」此外，胡犇告訴科恩，他和兩位同事在2020年3月的檢測中均未發現近期感染新冠的跡象（即未發現抗體）。

The surge of opinion toward the lab-leak idea was interrupted in March, when Florence Débarre, a scientist working for France’s National Center for Scientific Research, discovered another body of interesting evidence, long missing but now found. This was genomic data — from the swab sampling of door surfaces and equipment and other items, including that pair of discarded gloves — gathered at the Huanan market in early 2020 but withheld since that time. The data were released, perhaps by mistake, and Débarre was alert enough to spot them and recognize what they were. A team of researchers, including Worobey, detected a pattern in the data: strong proximity between samples containing raccoon dog DNA and others containing SARS-CoV-2 fragments (and some samples that contained both), from stalls in the southwest corner of the market where wild animals had been sold as food. Malayan porcupine DNA and Amur hedgehog DNA were also found near the virus, but raccoon dogs were of special interest because of their proven susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2.

今年3月，在法國國家科學研究中心工作的科學家弗洛倫斯·達姆巴雷發現了另一組有趣的證據，它失蹤已久，但現在被發現了。這一事件影響了人們對實驗室洩漏說的看法。這組證據就是2020年初在華南市場收集的基因組數據——來自對門的表面、設備和其他物品（包括那雙丟棄的手套）的拭子取樣，但此後一直被封存。這些數據被洩漏了，也許是因為不小心，達姆巴雷足夠警覺地發現了它們，並認出了它們是什麼。包括沃羅貝在內的一組研究人員在數據中發現了一種模式：含有貉DNA的樣本和含有SARS-CoV-2片段的樣本（以及一些同時含有這兩種片段的樣本）非常接近，這些樣本來自市場西南角的攤位，那裡的野生動物被當作食物出售。在病毒附近也發現了馬來亞豪豬和阿穆爾刺蝟的DNA，但由於貉被證明對SARS-CoV-2易感，因此格外受人關注。

These findings didn’t establish that raccoon dogs had carried the virus into the market. But they added plausibility and detail to that scenario.

這些發現並不能證明是貉將病毒帶入了市場。但他們為這一設想增加了合理性和細節。

Notwithstanding the Débarre group’s revelations, the lab-leak idea has remained strongly preferred by public opinion, and not just in the United States. According to one poll, as of April 2023, 62 percent of Italian respondents, 56 percent in France and 50 percent in the United Kingdom found the lab-leak idea most compelling, with sizable segments of undecided (and flummoxed) people, leaving only modest minorities embracing natural spillover. Earlier polling showed lab-related scenarios even more strongly favored in still other countries, ranging from 73 percent in Kenya and 64 percent in Hungary to 58 percent in Brazil.

儘管有來自達姆巴雷小組的披露，實驗室洩漏說仍然得到強烈的民意支持，而且不僅僅是在美國。根據一項民意調查，截至2023年4月，62%的義大利受訪者、56%的法國受訪者和50%的英國受訪者認為實驗室洩漏說最令人信服，還有相當一部分人尚未決定（或感到困惑）的人，只有少數人接受自然溢出。早些時候的民意調查顯示，在其他國家，與實驗室相關的假設甚至更受歡迎，從肯亞的73%、匈牙利的64%到巴西的58%不等。

Various factors may account for this public drift to the lab-leak hypothesis. In my view, a preponderance of empirical evidence is not one of them. I agree it’s important to remain open-minded toward a lab-leak possibility, but most of the arguments made in support of that possibility boil down to conjecture from circumstance and unsupported accusations.

公眾傾向於實驗室外溢假說的原因可能有多種。在我看來，實證證據優勢不是其中之一。我同意對實驗室洩漏的可能性保持開放的態度是很重要的，但支持這種可能性的大多數論據都歸結為對某種情況的猜測和毫無根據的指責。

To speak of a “lab-leak hypothesis” in the singular is, of course, misleading. There are multiple lab-leak hypotheses, just as there are multiple ways a natural spillover could have occurred. A more encompassing and emollient phrase is “research-related incident,” preferred by Jamie Metzl and some other critics. That covers several possibilities, including the chance that misbegotten gain-of-function research, at the W.I.V. or the Wuhan C.D.C. or who knows where, yielded a dangerous new hybrid virus that escaped through a malfunctioning autoclave or an infected technician or grad student. (In support of this scenario, proponents point to a grant proposal known as DEFUSE — made by EcoHealth Alliance to a U.S. defense research agency in 2018, though never funded — for experiments that some critics construe as potentially dangerous gain-of-function research.) Another “research-related” possibility: the nightmare that some Chinese biowarfare program created a murderous virus intentionally but let it escape to the world by some catastrophic goof. Still another: the notion that a scientific fieldworker became infected while taking samples from bats in, say, the Mojiang mine, where Zhengli Shi’s team found RaTG13.

以單數形式描述「實驗室洩漏假說」自然是具有誤導性的。實驗室洩漏假說有許多種，就像自然溢出假設有多種發生方式一樣。傑米·梅茨爾和其他一些批評人士更偏向於「研究相關事件」這一涵蓋範圍更廣且溫和的說法。它涵蓋了幾種可能性，包括可能由拙劣的功能性獲得研究引發，無論是在武漢病毒研究所還是武漢疾控中心，或者某個未知的地方，這樣的研究產生了一種危險的新型混合病毒，從有故障的高壓釜逃逸，或通過感染了技術人員或研究生而溢出。（該假設的支持者以一項名為「DEFUSE」的資助提案為論據，該提案由生態健康聯盟於2018年向美國國防研究機構提出，但從未獲得資助，其意在資助一些在批評者看來具有潛在危險的功能獲得研究試驗。）另一種「研究相關」的可能性是一場噩夢：中國的某種生物戰計劃故意製造了一種致命的病毒，但某種災難性的失誤讓病毒逃逸到世界上。還有一種說法是，一名科學現場工作人員在從墨江礦洞等地的蝙蝠身上採集樣本時被感染，石正麗的團隊就是在那裡發現了RaTG13。

They’re all vivid but not all logical, and it seems to me they don’t reinforce one another. If a wild coronavirus from the Mojiang mine was capable of infecting and transmitting among humans, for instance, then it didn’t need a furin cleavage site to be inserted during reckless or malevolent lab work. And if it infected a scientific fieldworker in 2013, and that fieldworker returned to Wuhan, where did the virus linger for six years before exploding through the city’s population in 2019? And if the virus was engineered in Shi’s lab, using sophisticated gene-editing methods, or was transformed into this dangerous pathogen by passaging a less dangerous virus through cell cultures or living mice (which seems far-fetched), and then subsequently escaped, then the Mojiang mine, with all its sinister narrative appeal, is irrelevant. In other words, the various research-related-incident hypotheses may each be plausible (some more than others), but they compete against one another. You can’t pile them all on the scale and judge the likelihood of an unnatural origin by their combined weight.

它們都很生動，但並不都合乎邏輯，在我看來它們並不能相互佐證。例如，如果來自墨江礦的野生冠狀病毒能在人類之間感染和傳播，那麼在魯莽或惡意的實驗室工作中，它就不需要插入呋喃裂解位點。如果它在2013年感染了一名野外科研工作者，而該工作者回到了武漢，那麼病毒又在哪裡徘徊了六年，然後到2019年才在該市的人群中暴發？如果這種病毒是在石正麗的實驗室裡，使用複雜的基因編輯方法進行改造的，或者是通過細胞培養物或活體小鼠傳遞一種危險性較低的病毒而轉化成這種危險的病原體（這似乎有些牽強），然後逃逸出去，那麼墨江礦及其險惡而又精彩的敘事就瓦解了。換句話說，各種與研究相關的事件假設可能都是合理的（合理的程度不一），但它們互相矛盾。你不能把它們都堆在磅秤上，然後根據它們的總重量來判斷是非自然起源的可能性。

Lab-leak partisans have focused intently on Shi and her lab, but it’s important to bear in mind that Shi has made her career by publishing research and issuing warnings about potentially dangerous coronaviruses found in the wild, not by keeping them secret. If she had such a formidably dangerous virus in her lab in 2018 or 2019 — a virus similar to the original SARS virus but with a receptor-binding domain and a furin cleavage site well shaped for human infection, features that could make it even more dangerous — she presumably would have announced that important discovery from the pages of a leading journal, to her professional gain as well as the benefit of the world. She didn’t.

實驗室洩漏說的擁護者一直專注於石正麗和她的實驗室，但重要的是，要記住，石正麗的職業成就是發表研究成果和發布有關野外發現的潛在危險冠狀病毒的警告，而不是對其進行保密。如果在2018年或2019年，她的實驗室裡有這樣一種極其危險的病毒——類似於最初的SARS病毒，但具有適合人類感染的受體結合域和呋喃裂解位點，這些特徵可能會使它更加危險——她可能會在權威期刊的頁面上宣布這一重要發現，這不僅會給她帶來職業上的益處，也會讓全世界受益。但她沒有這麼做。

And there’s a small body of lost evidence, recently recovered, that seems to support this logic. In 2018, a scientist named Jie Cui led a study of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats. His purpose was to illuminate the evolution of the original SARS virus by placing it on a family tree of its relatives. Cui had been a postdoctoral fellow in Eddie Holmes’s lab, going from there to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a couple of years, then to a position in Shanghai. Cui and a group of colleagues, including both Holmes and Zhengli Shi, analyzed partial genome sequences of 60 coronaviruses detected in bat samples collected from 2011 to 2016. They wrote a paper and submitted it to a leading virology journal. It was rejected. They tried another. Rejected. The journals’ reviewers wanted complete genome sequences, but the team had only partials. So in October 2018, they gave up on that paper. They pulled it from the submission process. They forgot about it. In the meantime, they had submitted their partial but telling genome data to an international database, GenBank, with a routine stipulation that it would be embargoed, in this case for four years. The embargo allowed them to retain exclusive access to the data for that period, in the event they wanted to revive the project.

最近發現的一小部分丟失的證據似乎支持這一邏輯。2018年，一位名叫崔傑的科學家領導了一項關於蝙蝠中SARS相關冠狀病毒的研究。他的目的是通過將最初的SARS病毒置於其近親的家譜中來闡明其進化過程。崔傑曾是埃迪·霍姆斯實驗室的博士後，畢業後到武漢病毒研究所工作了幾年，然後在上海找到職位。崔傑和包括霍姆斯和石正麗在內的同事分析了2011年至2016年收集的蝙蝠樣本中檢測到的60種冠狀病毒的部分基因組序列。他們寫了一篇論文，並將其提交給了一家首屈一指的病毒學雜誌。論文被拒絕了。他們又投了一次。還是遭拒。期刊的審稿人想要完整的基因組序列，但該團隊只有部分。所以在2018年10月，他們放棄了那篇論文，將其從投稿程序中刪除了。他們忘記了這篇文章。與此同時，他們將雖然只有部分、但很有說服力的基因組數據提交給了一個國際數據庫——GenBank，並附帶了一項常規的約束條款，即這些數據將被封存，具體的禁期為四年。該禁令允許他們在這段時間內保留對數據的獨家訪問權，以備重新啟動項目之需。

Four years passed, and then, in October 2022, the embargo expired. The data, mothballed since just before the pandemic and now publicly available, were revealing for what they did not include: a progenitor of the pandemic virus. Here were 60 coronaviruses that Zhengli Shi and others had considered intriguing in 2018. But nothing that matched SARS-CoV-2.

四年過去了，2022年10月，禁令到期。這些在大流行之前被封存、現在已經公開的數據，揭示的不是它包含了什麼，而是不包含什麼：一種大流行病毒的祖病毒。數據中包括石正麗等人在2018年認為值得關注的60種冠狀病毒。但沒有與SARS-CoV-2匹配的病毒。

“Where’s the virus?” said Eddie Holmes, recounting this to me recently. “The virus is absolutely not there.”

Two other arguments on the lab-leak side deserve attention. Each can be phrased as a question. Why did SARS-CoV-2, from the start, seem to be very well adapted to humans? And why, if its natural host was some kind of bat, has that host not yet been found, after three and a half years?

另外兩個關於實驗室洩漏說的論點也值得關注。兩者都可以表述為一個問題。為什麼SARS-CoV-2從一開始就似乎非常適應人類？如果它的自然宿主是某種蝙蝠，為什麼在三年半之後，宿主還沒有被發現？

The first of those questions ignores the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has shown itself, from the beginning, to be quite capable of infecting other mammals (cats and dogs), and eventually a wide range of them (tigers, gorillas, mink, white-tailed deer and others), not just humans. The second question betrays a lack of familiarity with the history of emerging viruses. When a novel virus appears suddenly in humans, causing disease and alarm, the search for its natural host is always an urgent task. But such ecological work is difficult to do amid the public-health emergency of an outbreak, and once the outbreak (or epidemic, or pandemic) is controlled, the sense of urgency and the available research money tend to disappear.

第一個問題忽略了一個事實，即SARS-CoV-2從一開始就顯示出相當有能力感染其他哺乳動物（貓和狗），並最終的確感染了各種哺乳動物（老虎、大猩猩、水貂、白尾鹿等），而不僅僅是人類。第二個問題暴露出提問者對新出現病毒的歷史缺乏了解。當一種新型病毒突然出現在人類身上，引起疾病和恐慌時，尋找其天然宿主向來是當務之急。但是，這種生態學工作很難在疫情暴發的公共衛生緊急情況下進行，而且一旦疫情（或流行病、大流行）得到控制，緊迫感和可用的研究資金往往就會消失。

Finding the host animal is sometimes easy, by luck, and sometimes hard. Identifying horseshoe bats, with high confidence, as the likely hosts of the original SARS virus took 15 years. Tracing the Marburg virus to its reservoir host in Egyptian fruit bats took 41 years (or 42, if you count the time to publication). And the natural host of Ebola virus, despite what you may think you’ve heard, is still unidentified, 47 years after its emergence at a remote mission hospital in what was then Zaire. The suggested linkage between Ebola virus and some form of bat is still suppositional, not settled scientific fact — and we have enough suppositions entangled with this subject already.

找到宿主動物有時很容易，有時很難，都要靠運氣。以極高的置信度確定菊頭蝠可能是最初SARS病毒的宿主花了15年時間。追蹤馬爾堡病毒的宿主埃及果蝠用了41年（算上發表時間則是42年）。伊波拉病毒的自然宿主至今未知，儘管你可能認為你已經聽說過，47年前，它出現在當時扎伊爾的一家偏遠教會醫院。伊波拉病毒與某種蝙蝠之間的聯繫仍然是假設，而不是確定的科學事實——我們已經有了足夠多的假設與這個宿主糾纏在一起。

So, what’s tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal.

那麼，是什麼讓公眾的觀點傾向於實驗室洩漏說呢？這個問題的答案並沒有深藏我在本文提到的晦澀數據中。在我看來，讓天平傾斜的是多疑和敘事誘惑。

I asked about this in conversation with David Relman, the biosecurity expert who was also an author of the “Investigate” letter with Jesse Bloom. To some extent, Relman agreed. “When you sow the seeds of distrust, or suggest that you haven’t been transparent with what you knew,” he told me, “you’re setting yourself up for a persistent, insidious, continuing distrust.” That inclines people to assume that “there was something deliberate, or deliberately concealed.”

在和生物安全專家、與傑西·布魯姆一同起草那封「調查」信的戴維·雷爾曼交談時，我提到了這個問題。他在一定程度上是同意的。「當你播下不信任的種子，或暗示你沒有將你的所知充分透露出來，」他對我說，「你就會面臨一種持續的、潛伏的、難以消除的不信任。」這會讓人們傾向於假設「這裡面存在某種有意的東西，或故意的隱瞞」。

The seeds of distrust have been growing in America’s civic garden, and the world’s, for a long time. More than 60 percent of Americans, according to polling within the past several years, still decline to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy. Is that because people have read the Warren Commission report, found it unpersuasive and minutely scrutinized the “magic bullet” theory? No, it’s because they have learned to be distrustful, and because a conspiracy theory of any big event is more dramatic and satisfying than a small, stupid explanation, like the notion that a feckless loser could kill a president by hitting two out of three shots with a $13 rifle.

不信任的種子很久以前就已經在美國乃至世界的公民花園裡生根發芽。據過去幾年進行的一項民調，超過60%的美國人至今拒絕相信約翰·F·甘迺迪的死是李·哈維·奧斯瓦爾德一人所為。是因為人們看了沃倫委員會的報告，覺得缺乏說服力，並對「神奇子彈」的說法進行了詳盡的研判嗎？不是，是因為他們學會了疑神疑鬼，因為一個重大事件的陰謀論總是比那些不起眼的蠢解釋更有戲劇性，更讓人滿足，一個總統怎麼會被一個無能的廢物用一把13美元的步槍三槍兩中殺死呢？

Most of us don’t reach our opinions by fastidious calibration of empirical evidence. We default to our priors, as Jesse Bloom noted, or we embrace stories that have simple plots, good and bad characters and melodramatic trajectories, and that seem commensurate in scope to the event in question. The process of scientific discovery is a complicated story involving data collection, hypothesis testing, hypothesis falsification, hypothesis revision, further testing and brilliant but fallible humans doing all that work. Scientific malfeasance driven by hubris and leading to runaway trouble, on the other hand, is a much simpler story that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.”

我們的觀點大多不是通過嚴格求證得出的。正如傑西·布魯姆所說，我們會自動選擇先驗，或樂於接受那些情節簡單、善惡分明、跌宕起伏的故事，看上去跟相關的事件可等量齊觀。科學發現的過程是個複雜的故事，包含數據收集、假說檢驗、假說證偽、假說修正和進一步的檢驗，這些工作都是才能卓絕但也會犯錯的人類在做。另一方面，狂人的科學惡行導致失控的大麻煩，就是個簡單的多的故事了，至少可以追溯到瑪麗·謝利的1818年小說《弗蘭肯斯坦》。

Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and an author of commentaries on scientific misinformation. He ponders, among other things, how students of science are taught — or at least should be taught — about not just what science says but what science is. I asked Bergstrom about the human affinity for dark theories of big events.

演化生物學家卡爾·伯格斯特羅姆就科學不實信息寫作了許多文章。他思考的問題包括如何向學生教授科學——至少是應該如何教授——不僅關於科學在講什麼，還要講到什麼是科學。我就人類受大事件的陰暗理論的吸引這一點問了伯格斯特羅姆。

There was something about that in Thomas Hardy, he told me. “It’s in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ where Tess is doomed by hapless chance. It really sucks! To live in a world where we are at the mercy of hapless chance.”

托馬斯·哈代的小說裡提到了這個，他告訴我。「在《德伯家的苔絲》裡，苔絲是註定不幸的。實在太慘了！我們生活在一個受不幸的命運擺布的世界。」

I had never read “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” to my embarrassment, so I stuck with SARS-CoV-2. “This is not a contest now, in the public domain, between bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “This is a contest between stories.”

我沒讀過《德伯家的苔絲》，覺得很丟臉，於是只能繼續說SARS-CoV-2。「在公共領域，現在不是一場證據和證據之間的較量，」我表示。「這是敘事之間的競逐。」

“Yeah!” Bergstrom said. “That’s right.”

「是啊！」伯格斯特羅姆說。「沒錯。」