 I've got a, so this is a tweet from Richard E. Bright, who was one of the biologists who was kind of, I mean, one of the earliest people I remember raising this possibility of it being a lab leak. And he calls this invoice for this particular enzyme that Alex mentions in his study. This is an order form for it. And he calls it the equivalent of a smoking gun. On the other hand, Alina Chan, who is another, someone who's been very sort of putting out the idea of this could have been allowed leak for a long time. We've had her on the show before she co-authored a whole book about the origins of COVID with Matt Ridley called Viral. And she's not convinced yet. She says there isn't enough yet to say a lab accident happened beyond a reasonable doubt. Mostly because the emails and documents we're talking about are from early 2018. So therefore it's unsurprising. There's not any direct evidence of a line from this order to the creation of SARS-CoV-2. I guess an open question that I have for both of you is how should we evaluate evidence? And like when is the appropriate time to say, case closed, this is the smoking gun. We can pretty much say at this point, we're never gonna get 100% certainty, but beyond a reasonable doubt, looks like something happened here, something was constructed. I'm happy to jump in here. I think what I was doing before COVID was specifically forecasting which species are quasi-species that are jump capable. What's the likelihood of that emerging? Where is it likely to emerge? And what does that look like? And we all have actually seen a recent example of a natural spillover with the avian influenza outbreaks that happened last year. Many people got infected and you see these stuttering chains of transmission because exactly as Emily said, the virus was not very transmissible when it first jumped into the human population. And so for me, what jumped out is like, we'll put the line way over here for case closed. And then there's a line way over here for open the books. And I think we cross the open the books line immediately when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, it had a receptor binding domain that was better at binding humans than bats. That's a really unusual feature for a bat coronavirus. Viruses specialize on their hosts. They get these very specific moldings of their spike genes, the receptors of their hosts, the receptors of bats are different from humans. So this should be molded to a bat, but instead it looked more molded to a human than a bat. So that was immediately a very strange occurrence that it didn't have this multiple spillover events across a wide geographic range consistent with the animal trade outbreak of SARS-1. There were not infections concentrated in animal handlers, like we saw on civet handlers in SARS-1 or in poultry farmers for avian influenza. Instead it was this singular outbreak that just exploded immediately out of Wuhan with a SARS coronavirus receptor binding domain was better fit for humans than bats that had a fear and cleavage site that as someone again in this wildlife virology community, I knew that many virologists were fixated on fear and cleavage sites. This was something that virologists thought a lot about, but when you look at the data in nature, nature did not stumble upon it that often. Instead it wouldn't happen, we made a big deal out of it, wrote big papers about it and everyone was aware of it, but nature was not. And so for me, we crossed the line to open the books almost immediately at the start of the pandemic. But that's never seemed to have been the attitude. Opening the books, what would follow from that is open scientific, this is an empirical question. So that requires open scientific inquiry. But I think to kind of capture the tone of that, we can just look at these tweets from Christian Anderson who was one of the authors on the famous Proximal Origins paper that proposed that this jump from pangolins to humans, that pangolins were the intermediate host and then it was revealed through documents that he had this back channel with Anthony Fauci who was sort of guiding that project the entire time. But his reaction to your preprint, Alex, was that it is so deeply flawed that it wouldn't pass kindergarten molecular biology. It's more of the same poppycock dressed up as science with a heavy dose of techno babble on the side. And you don't have to reply to that kind of name calling though you can if you want. What I'd like to know is what are the challenges for dissenting scientists at this point in examining this question? Obviously there's been challenges along the way, but like at this point, do you feel that your paper could even get a fair, peer review or is the process itself kind of compromised? Well, a couple of points here. One, yeah, the feedback from Christian Anderson was not the most constructive feedback we received. Another little aside, my mom was a molecular biologist who in kindergarten, I was doing some listening about DNA at the table, but not that much admittedly. And then finally, a lab origin involves a lab and the lab involves researchers and researchers are in this network of colleagues and funders. And so when we pass this open to books phase very early on in the pandemic, we would have liked to hear about, for example, the diffuse proposal, but did we hear about the diffuse proposal? No, we didn't. Did we hear that NIAID had actually funded the unique collaboration of the diffuse PIs in 2019? No, we didn't. Instead, Anthony Fauci helped prompt that proximal origin paper, Peter Daszak, the PI of diffuse, wrote a paper to the Lancet calling lab origin theories conspiracy theories without acknowledging the conflict of interest that he was working with the lab in question, that he wrote the diffuse proposal containing a highly specific proposal to make something not found in nature, something so unnatural that you could have patented it in 2018 and SARS-CoV-2 would be an infringement of their patent. That's a very important conflict of interest that we should have disclosed when we were at the open to books phase in January of 2020, and he didn't. Just to follow up on a couple of the things that Alex was mentioning, I think in addition to the scientific evidence that we dug up and that he dug up, I think it's also important to look at the behavioral clues here and the odd actions of people central to the coronavirus research going on in Wuhan after SARS-CoV-2 emerged from that city, including the fact that Derek was working on this model that was meant to predict whether a coronavirus could cause disease in humanized mice using the receptor binding domains ability to bind to humanase two and fear and cleavage sites. And then when SARS-CoV-2 with these unique features showed up, did not raise his hand to say, I actually have a model. I've been studying this for years. It's an odd silence for sure. Absolutely, yes. And why did DASIC continue to insist for years that this work would go on at the University of North Carolina under a BSL-3 when clearly he knew, he wrote this comment saying that in fact, this work would be outsourced to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and would be conducted under BSL-2. Yeah, let me pull that up. This is from those documents. Yeah, you got the annotated comments on their proposal. And so here you've got Peter Dasek saying that, if we win the contract, I am not proposing that all the work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph Barrick in North Carolina, but he wants to stress the US side of the proposal to DARPA so that they're comfortable. In other words, he wants to play down the fact that as he says, a lot of this work can be done in Wuhan. And then further down, you've got Ralph Barrick talking about their proposal to in China do this in a biosecurity level-2 rather than the higher biosecurity level-3 that would be expected the US. And he says that if they're growing those in under BSL-2 in China, US researchers will likely freak out. And so yeah, it's very revealing of the mindset and the culture of like, I mean, these are people who have a really serious responsibility of handling a virus that can kill lots of people and just societal destruction. And they're kind of like, what can we slip past DARPA? And again, luckily DARPA did not approve this particular grant, but it does say a lot about kind of the atmosphere, what was the cavalier attitude of the scientists that are working with these really deadly, dangerous viruses. But Emily, continue with your explanation of the psychology and then if you could also talk a little bit about the media coverage of the lab leak at present. Yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on there. I mean, Barak said that US researchers would freak out about this work being outsourced to BSL-2 in China before virus started circulating the globe out of Wuhan. So of course he knew people would freak out about this. And instead of doing what I think would be the moral patriotic thing and being transparent and coming forward, they attempted to save their own reputations. And clearly Dazek made a bet that these documents would never come out. And so he kept lying to his sources in media and lying to other scientists that this work was to be done in more rigorous biosafety standards of the US. And he knew that to be a lie. He also said that they didn't sample in Laos and that was also a lie. Some of SARS-CoV-2's closest relatives circulate in Southeast China. So that's highly relevant information to the origins of COVID. And people looked in GenBank and said, it says that this was sampled in Laos. What's going on? And our documents also confirmed their intention to sample there. So the behavior is very strange. The Lancet letter organizing that and telling Ralph Barak to leave his name off. I think that speaks volumes as well. And then also I did wanna answer your original question about what would constitute kind of final firm evidence. I think the research described in the documents that we in drastic obtained probably describe how SARS-CoV-2 became SARS-CoV-2, but we don't know what viruses they were starting with. We don't know at the time they were exchanging these notes and having these conversations if they had sampled SARS-CoV-2 like viruses at that point. We know they have identified RITG-13, one of SARS-CoV-2's closest relatives. But I think we need to know more information about that. But if we were to confirm that they were doing, using some of the techniques described in these documents with SARS-CoV-2 like viruses, I think that would be, I mean, as close to like a final smoking gun as you could get. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.