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In the early days of the pandemic, scientists reported a reassuring feature in the novel coronavirus: It seemed very stable. The virus didn’t mutate very quickly, making it an easier target for treatments and vaccines.

At the time, the slow mutation rate seemed odd to a young scientist. “This really ringing in my ears,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. started.

Dr. “When the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans,” Chan said. “It was good to go anyway.”

The hypothesis, which has been widely discussed by other scientists, was published online in May 2020 and by Dr. It was the basis for an explosive paper in which Chan and colleagues questioned the prevailing consensus that the deadly virus naturally transmitted from bats to humans through an intermediate host. animal.

The question he helped put on the table was not lost. at the end of May, Dissatisfied with the vague report he received on the matter, President Biden asked US intelligence services to dig deeper into the origin question. The new report can now come at any time.

In last year’s article, Dr. Chan and his colleagues speculated that perhaps the virus had passed to humans and had been circulating undetected for months as it accumulated mutations.

Perhaps, they said, the virus was already well adapted to humans when it was in bats or another animal. Or maybe it had adapted to humans and accidentally infiltrated it while it was being studied in the lab.

Dr. Chan soon found himself in the middle of a vortex. An article in the British tabloid newspaper The Mail On Sunday was published with the headline “The coronavirus DID NOT COME FROM animals in the Wuhan market”.

Many top virologists criticized and disposed of his work, saying he did not have the expertise to speak on the subject, vilifying their expertise, and that his statements would alienate China and hinder any future investigation.

Some called him a conspiracy theorist. Others rejected his ideas because he is a postdoctoral fellow, a young scientist. One virologist, Benjamin Neuman, called his hypothesis “stupid”.

A Chinese news outlet accused him of “dirty behavior and a lack of basic academic ethics”, and readers claimed he was a “racial traitor” because of his Chinese ancestry.

32-year-old Dr. “There were days and weeks when I was extremely scared and I didn’t sleep many days,” Chan said in a recent interview at an outdoor cafe not far from the Broad Institute.

Dr. Chan’s story is a reflection of how deeply polarizing questions about the origins of the virus have become. The vast majority of scientists think it originated in bats and was transmitted to humans through an intermediate host animal, although none have been identified.

Some believe that a laboratory accident, especially at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, cannot be underestimated and insufficiently researched. And few think the institute’s research, which involves collecting bats and bat coronaviruses from the wild, may have played a role.

Scholars from all sides say they have been threatened with violence and faced name-calling for their positions. The attacks were so severe that Dr. Concerned for his personal safety, Chan began to take new precautions, wondering if he was being followed and changing his daily routines.

The backlash caused him to fear that he was jeopardizing his professional future, and he wrote a letter to his boss in which he apologized and offered his resignation.

Dr. “I thought I was doing career suicide, not just for myself, but for the entire group that wrote the article,” Chan said. “I thought I was doing everyone a disservice by getting us into this discussion.”

However, Dr. Chan’s boss, Benjamin E. Deverman, one of the paper’s co-authors, refused to accept his resignation, saying they were simply naive not to expect a heated response.

Dr. Chan’s role was so controversial that many scholars refused to discuss it with him. One of the few virologists willing to openly comment, dismissed the possibility of a lab leak.

“I believe there is no way the virus is genetically modified or man-made,” said Susan Weiss, co-director of the Penn Research Center for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens at the University of Pennsylvania. He may have accidentally escaped from the lab. “It is clearly zoonotic from bats.”

Others, Dr. He said Chan was brave to put alternative hypotheses on the table.

“Alina Chan deserves credit for challenging the traditional narrative and asking this question,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “It’s not easy for a young scientist to openly challenge an established narrative.”

(Dr. Iwasaki also credited a group of loose internet detectives who used the acronym DRASTIC.)

Dr. “The extent to which the question of origin has become so provocative and polarized is mind-blowing,” Iwasaki said. “The truth is we don’t know exactly where the virus came from, period. It was important to point that out.”

While sipping unsweetened iced tea recently and talking about her ideas, Dr. Chan seemed like an unexpected provocateur. He insisted he was still on the fence about the origins of the virus, which fell between “50-50” between the natural route and laboratory accident hypotheses.

No scientific journal has published his article. Determined to draw attention to a critical question that must be answered to prevent a future pandemic, Dr. Chan took to Twitter, mastering the art of tutorial topics and garnering followers.

Now in worse shape than before, Dr. Chan said: “I am now receiving attacks from both sides. Scientists are still attacking me, and lab leak advocates are attacking me too, because I’m not going to go all the way and say it came from a lab. I keep telling them I can’t because there’s no proof.”

Critics, Dr. He says that Chan bears some responsibility for the backlash.

Earlier last year on Twitter, he appeared to accuse scientists and editors of “stopping and contemplating, directly or indirectly, the serious research integrity issues surrounding SARS-2-like viruses,” adding, “If your actions obscure the origin of SARS2, you are playing a role in the deaths of millions of people. ” (Then he deleted the tweet.)

Proponents of the lab leak, calling him the “apology writer” for virologists, Dr. They were also annoyed by the fact that Chan received so much praise for bringing the question to the public agenda.

Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that in early 2020 they found a virus whose genome sequence was 96.2 percent similar to that of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in their database.

But it was internet detectives and scientists who discovered that the virus matched a virus harvested in a cave linked to a pneumonia outbreak that killed three miners in 2012, and that the Wuhan lab’s genomic database of bat coronaviruses was taken offline in late 2019.

Dr. Chan also struck a deal with Harper Collins for an undisclosed amount to co-write a book with Matt Ridley, a bestselling but controversial science writer criticized for downplaying the seriousness of climate change.

He denies accusations that he wrote the book for financial gain and says he wants a full record of the facts that would take longer than a Twitter feed. He plans to donate the proceeds to a Covid-related charity.

“I don’t need money and no frills,” he said.

Dr. Chan was born in Vancouver, but his family moved back to Singapore when he was a baby. He was young when the SARS epidemic hit there.

“People were dying from SARS, and it was on TV nonstop,” he recalls. “I was 15 and it really stuck with me. There were pictures of body bags in the hospital corridors.”

“When Covid started, a lot of people in Boston thought it didn’t matter, this flu is worse,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is serious business.’

He returned to Canada after high school, studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia and completed his PhD. in medical genetics. By the age of 25 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and then director of the vector engineering research group at the Broad Institute of MIT and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Studies at Harvard. He took a position working for Deverman.

Dr. Chan is “understanding, incredibly determined, and seemingly fearless,” said Dr. “It has an uncanny ability to synthesize large amounts of complex information, distill all the details down to the most critical points, and then communicate them,” Deverman said. It is an easy language to understand.”

Describing himself as a workaholic, Dr. Chan married a scientist friend a few years ago during his hiatus at an academic research conference.

“We took the morning off and went to town hall and came back to the conference and my boss was like, ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. “I was saying, ‘I’m married. I don’t even have a ring. My mother was terrified.”

He remains ambivalent about the origin of the virus. “I’m leaning towards the lab leak theory now, but there are days when I seriously think it might be from nature,” he said.

“In those days, I mostly feel really sorry for the scientists who were cited as possible sources of the virus,” he said.

Citing senior Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, who led research on emerging infectious diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Chan said, “I really feel sorry for his condition. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”