In late December 2019, eight pages of genetic code were sent to computers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Unbeknownst to U.S. officials at the time, the genetic map that arrived on their doorstep contained important clues about the virus that would soon cause a pandemic.
The genetic code submitted by Chinese scientists to a huge public repository of sequencing data run by the US government describes the mysterious new virus that infected a 65-year-old man in Wuhan several weeks ago. At the time the code was sent, Chinese authorities had not yet warned of an outbreak of pneumonia cases of unknown origin in central Wuhan.
But the US repository, designed to help scientists share mundane research data, never added the submission it received on December 28, 2019, to its database. Instead, it asked Chinese scientists to resubmit their gene sequences three days later, adding certain technical details. That request went unanswered.
Two separate virologists, one Australian and one Chinese, have teamed up to post the coronavirus’ genetic code online, launching a frenzied global effort to build tests and vaccines and save lives. It took almost a week.
The first attempt by Chinese scientists to release critical codes was first revealed in documents released Wednesday by House Republicans investigating the origins of the coronavirus. The document confirms questions that have been circulating since early 2020 about when China learned about the virus responsible for the unexplained outbreak, and challenges the U.S. system for monitoring dangerous new pathogens. Gap also attracted attention.
The Chinese government said it immediately shared the virus’ genetic code with global health authorities. House Republicans said new documents suggest that’s false. News accounts and Chinese social media posts have long reported that the virus was first sequenced in late December 2019.
But lawmakers and independent scientists say the document reveals intriguing new details about when and how scientists first sought to share those sequences globally. He said the results show how difficult it is for the U.S. to pick out pathogens of concern from among the thousands of common genetic sequences submitted. Update that repository daily.
“There’s no way an ambulance would be stuck in normal traffic at 3 p.m.,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. Referring to the 2019 coronavirus code, he said, “Why would we allow this sequence to be left there under the same process as the sequence we just got from a new species of snail that we found in the valley? Is not it?”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, said in a statement Wednesday that the genetic code was not released because it “could not be verified despite further investigation by the NIH with Chinese scientists.” Ta. Information and correspondence. ”
In an earlier letter to House Republicans, Health Department official Melanie Ann Egolin said that, as is customary, the sequence initially underwent a “technical but not scientific or public health” review. said. The database, known as GenBank, automatically removed the submission from its queue of unpublished sequences on January 16, 2020, after the Chinese scientists did not respond to their requested corrections.
It is not clear why Chinese scientists did not respond. One of the submitters, Lili Ren, who worked at the Institute of Pathogens at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese embassy said China’s response was “based on science, effective and consistent with China’s national reality.”
However, the same sequence that Dr. Ren’s group sent to GenBank was published in another online database known as GISAID on January 12, 2020, shortly after other scientists posted the initial coronavirus code. It was done. Dr. Ren’s group also resubmitted a revised version of the code to GenBank in early February and published a paper describing their results.
The two-week gap between when the code was first submitted to an American database and when China shared its sequence with global health authorities meant that “none of the so-called ‘facts’ and data from the Chinese government or Republican leadership… “It highlights why we can’t trust it,” said a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said the genetic sequence was a sign that anyone looking at it in late December 2019 knew the new coronavirus was linked to a mysterious pneumonia case in Wuhan. He said that it would have strongly suggested that it was causing the Rather, the government did not make the diagnosis until early January, according to China’s official timeline.
“If this sequence had been available, we probably could have started developing a prototype vaccine right away, two weeks earlier,” Dr. Bloom said.
The document, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, provides no insight into the origins of the virus, Dr. Bloom and other scientists said. This is because the sequences contain no special clues about the evolution of the virus and were published later anyway.
But new details have emerged about the pace at which Dr. Ren’s team worked to sequence the virus. The virus-containing swab they analyzed was taken from a 65-year-old patient, a large market vendor where the disease was first detected on December 24, 2019. Scientists GenBanked the virus’ genetic data within four days.
“This is incredibly fast,” said Scripps Research Institute virologist Christian Andersen.
At the time, finding the coronavirus in a patient’s sample would not have proven that it was the pathogen rather than another virus or bacterium that caused his illness, but it was a reasonable hypothesis. Dr. Andersen said it would have been possible.
This consideration appears to have weighed on Chinese scientists studying samples from early patients. One of the researchers at a commercial laboratory in China who collaborated with Dr. Ren said in a blog post in late January 2020 that while they had identified the new virus in hospital samples, that alone did not indicate that the virus was causing the pneumonia cases. He wrote that the government’s research was delayed because it could not be proven. announcement.
In early 2020, the Chinese government also issued directives to curb certain areas of scientific research and restricted the release of data about the virus.
Even if the virus’ genetic code had been sent to a U.S. repository, it would have been difficult to attract attention from U.S. officials who staff research-oriented databases. This repository holds hundreds of millions of gene sequences. Much of the process of screening them is automated.
And at least until the end of December 2019, when Chinese authorities started sounding the alarm, almost no one knew they were looking for the new coronavirus among the piles of documents.
“At the time, no one at NCBI could have realized its importance,” computational biologist Alexander Kritz Kristof said, referring to the NIH center that runs GenBank. Additionally, gene repositories like GenBank need to be careful about publishing sequences, given that researchers often use the same data to write journal articles, he said.
Still, some scientists believe that U.S. and global health officials are slow to update databases like GenBank to capture sequences that could have serious public health implications. ing.
Dr. Kamil said such a database could, for example, automatically scan for new pathogens whose genetic code overlaps with those known to be dangerous. And while health officials wait for missing details and revisions, it could ensure that these sequences are distributed more widely.
“Leave those sequences to the concierge, oh well,” he said. “Why should public health and global health agencies step up and say, ‘This is 2024, we need to be safer so this never happens again.’ Didn’t you tell me?”