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Hey Alina, thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider al

Hey Alina, thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer. I have two questions: 1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later portrayed by US authorities as something that commonly happens. As a layperson I'm curious if that's true and it's a regular occurrence that researchers in another country ask for data to be deleted from the archive. That seems odd. 2. In case you read Chinese, do you know about that Wuhan Institute of Virology job ad where they were looking for a researcher to study coronaviruses in bats, which was posted on their website a few weeks before the outbreak became known? I saw this myself in the very early days of the pandemic, possibly before people in the West were even aware that there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan. At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? Not that the job opening itself seemed suspicious and it's well known this sort of research was done there, but I just found it odd they would try to hide it. ¹ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3

temp8888 4y ago
> At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov.cas.cn/105341/201911/t20191118_5438006.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov...
ayjchan 4y ago
Hi, Thank you for the support! :) 1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no... 2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.
- l8rlump 4y ago
  Hi. Re (1), did anything ever come of the story about the scientist who discovered some of the deleted genetic sequences on Google Cloud (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-sequences.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...)?

temp8888 4y ago

> At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov.cas.cn/105341/201911/t20191118_5438006.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov...

ayjchan 4y ago

Hi, Thank you for the support! :) 1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no... 2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.

l8rlump 4y ago
Hi. Re (1), did anything ever come of the story about the scientist who discovered some of the deleted genetic sequences on Google Cloud (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-sequences.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...)?