Virologist who was first to share Covid genome sleeps on street after lab shuts

> “He drove that collaboration but there is nothing to collaborate on now; he hasn’t been able to get any data,” says Holmes.

> Holmes believes the lab closure is part of an effort to sideline Zhang for unauthorized sharing of data. “It is heartbreaking to watch,” he says. “It is unfathomable to me to have a scientist of that calibre sleeping outside his lab.”

> But Yanzhong Huang, a specialist in Chinese health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, says the true nature of the dispute and protest are “shrouded in mystery”.

I guess we're supposed to infer that he got in trouble from the University and/or the CCP for sharing data in a way they deemed unacceptable, so they punished him by making it hard for him to get access to data. And that this lab closure is part of that larger punishment, if it's not just a coincidence caused by incompetence (which does exist at both the University and Party level, to be sure).

Sleeping outside the lab is almost certainly a form of protest. He won a $1MM prize a couple years ago, and is a respected researcher anyway. He must have either money, friends, or grad students who would let him sleep on the couch.

Important detail: He is on the street not because he is destitute, but because the government entity that owns his lab (SPHCC) forced him to temporarily relocate for renovations without providing a suitable replacement lab. There's probably a lot more drama beneath the surface of this story.

I find that to be a clickbaity headline, something I was not expecting from Nature.

When I read it, I figured his life was destroyed, he had no money, he lost his home and was begging and living on the street.

Whereas the article seems to indicate that he was doing it as a protest, and as the article progresses it appears that his protest has yielded positive results.

Anybody deeply involved in the vaccine research should get, like, a “do whatever you want” pass from society for the rest of their lives. IMO, retire and open a cafe by the beach, but if he wants to keep running a lab give him tenure and free grants forever.

Reading between the lines (the institute gave the research team two days to leave..., their students’ incomplete experiments were now “impossible to save"...), it sounds like this was not a planned move or reno. One possibility could be that they had a leak and everyone had to be evacuated, but perhaps the more concerning one would be that they were working on H5N1 (release the genome on one of the human-transmitted strains?), and were stopped

*in Shanghai

Just a quick clarification in case anyone breezes past the article.