A bat virus specialist known as China’s “batwoman” and her lab in Wuhan have become the centre of a conspiracy theory related to the origin of the coronavirus. The U.S. President Donald Trump insists he has seen evidence coronavirus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the city where the outbreak began in January.
Meet Dr Shi Zhengli, a virologist who is often called China's "bat woman" by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust Shi Zhengli into a fierce spotlight. Shi heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in the Chinese city where the pandemic began. Many have speculated that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, accidentally escaped from her lab. Some have even suggested it could have been engineered there. China has forcefully rejected such claims, but Shi herself has said very little publicly—until now. In this interview, Shi emailed answers to a series of questions about the virus' origin and her research. In them, Shi hit back at speculation that the virus leaked from WIV. Shi and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, Shi says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. "Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence," Shi wrote.
Shi Zhengli, the 55-year-old scientist had been looking to make a mark on bat-linked virology, an area to which she has dedicated her life. For years, Ms Shi has collected strains of coronaviruses from bats. In 2004, she identified a reservoir for such diseases in bat caves in Yunnan province in southern China and she has been at the forefront of research on how viruses such as Sars may have jumped to humans.
Wuhan Institute of Virology was set up in 1956 as a microbiology lab, one of the first of its kind in the country following the communist takeover of China seven years earlier. As a level-4 biosafety facility, the highest level of security in China, it is allowed to handle the world’s deadliest viruses. Scientists at the facility are known to have created hybrid versions of a bat coronavirus that could infect human cells. , th scientific journal, published an article in 2015 that raised questions about the level of risk associated with such research. This has contributed to theories that the virus could have originated as a leak from the lab. However, the journal added a note to the report in March this
