Coronavirus Origins | In the Pipeline
Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
I’m going to regret writing about this, but it’s not a topic to be ignored. Where did the current coronavirus come from?
If you ask that question, you get all sorts of answers from all sorts of people. Let me downgrade some of those right up front. To start at the far end of the fever scale, I do not think that this virus is some sort of deliberately engineered (and/or deliberately released) bioweapon, and I am simply not going to give that theory more time here today. But that still leaves a lot of possibilities open, and I don’t think we have enough evidence yet to sort those others out.
The other end of the scale is that this is a virus that evolved into its present form in an animal host and then made the jump into infecting humans through sheer coincidence and bad luck. That does happen, and it has happened many times throughout history, so that absolutely cannot be ruled out. But there are a lot of possibilities in between those two. As the world knows, there is a research facility in Wuhan that has been studying viruses (including coronaviruses), so we also cannot rule out the possibility of an accidental escape from such a site. And there’s also the possibility that such a virus might then be different from wild-type, depending on what sorts of work was done on it. Viruses most certainly have escaped from research facilities before, and this is not a crazy idea.
.png)
