Before Covid-19, and the current effort to figure out its origins, I began work on my story Hot Zone in the Heartland, co-published by The New Yorker and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s about the risks posed by high-containment laboratories — those rated BSL-3 or BSL-4 — where scientists handle the most lethal and contagious diseases.
My story explored why the US government is putting such a lab smack in the middle of Kansas, where a leak could destroy the beef industry, as well as why it is allowing them to be built at an exponential rate despite the risks.
The piece was published a year ago this week, just as the world was locking down to contain a rampant pandemic and spiking death rate. When someone asked me in an interview about the origins of the virus, I said it came from bats. Which it originally did.
What we still don’t know is the trajectory Covid-19 took from bats to humans, and whether the virus happened to pass through, or change within, any high-containment labs. With scientists and policy makers now looking seriously at the virus’s origins, my story about lab-caused risks feels even more relevant than when it first came out.
Early last spring, to even suggest that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a third-rail subject, and health authorities were understandably focused on the immediate emergency of keeping people alive. More recently, though, there has been excellent reporting on the lab-leak hypothesis, notably by Nicholson Baker in New York Magazine, Rowan Jacobsen in Boston Magazine, and many other journalists and scientists. As Baker observed, it “isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory.”
Even now, the imminent release of a World Health Organization report on the virus’s origins is fueling diplomatic tension and debate.
Wherever Covid-19 originated, high-containment labs have a well-documented history of accidents and leaks. Any such lab — in China, Britain, Canada, the United States, or wherever — could accidentally leak pathogens, including the extra virulent products of so-called “gain of function” research.
Now might be a great time to read or re-read my original story, and check out the accompanying timeline of lab accidents. You can do so here.
Elisabeth Eaves
While travel writing was my first literary love, I’m also a journalist, essayist, science writer, editor, and fiction writer. I was born and raised in Vancouver, lived in Cairo, London, and Paris, spent 10 years in New York City, and now reside in Seattle.
Great article!