Thomas Levenson writes:

Six weeks ago, a reporter, Nicholas Wade, published what seemed to be a blockbuster story, one that, if true, would expose the greatest scandal in recent history. SARS-CoV-2, he wrote, or SARS2 for short, the virus that has driven the global COVID-19 pandemic, had likely been modified in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it then escaped into the wild. “Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out,” Wade wrote. “But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.”

Wade, a former New York Times science reporter, best known for promoting a genetic basis to racial hierarchies, first placed his piece at the self-publishing site Medium on May 2. The story really took wing when it was reposted three days later at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It was an extraordinary assertion, and as the saying goes, such claims need extraordinary proof.

That validation came, it seemed, from one of the most prominent biologists of the last half century, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore, who confirmed one of the key pillars of the argument. Some features in a brief genetic sequence in the virus seemed to suggest that a human, in a lab experiment, had put it there. When he first saw the sequence, Baltimore is quoted as saying, “I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.”

With that a bad “fact” was born: a seemingly simple statement about reality that turns out to be not so simple—and deeply misleading. The Baltimore quote sealed the deal, not just because of what was said, but who was saying it.

It’s standard practice in science journalism to seek confirmation of key facts from experts who are not directly involved in the research that lies at the center of any given story, the reporter’s equivalent of peer review. That’s what Wade needed, a source that could transform his long chain of inference, his series of ifs and assertions about what evolution can and cannot do, into a statement that (to use Isaac Newton’s phrase) “cannot fail but to be true.”

That’s what Baltimore provided. “Smoking gun” is the critical phrase; it leaves no room for doubt. It confirmed, or seemed to, that the 4 million and counting who have died of COVID were victims of human choices and mistakes.

Baltimore’s picture could appear in the dictionary next to “authority.” He won his Nobel Prize for work on the molecular genetics of tumor viruses. He has run a trio of the world’s most important research institutions, as director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, then as president first at Rockefeller University, and then at Caltech. After stepping down, he continued to run an active lab, investigating basic questions about gene regulation and expression. If there were anyone whose word one could accept on a question of who did what to a virus it would seem to be Baltimore.

And yet Baltimore got this one wrong—and has retreated from his earlier emphatic support for Wade’s claims. But like most retractions in media stories, Baltimore’s admission has made little impact, and the originally reported “fact” has continued to feed the ongoing promotion of the lab-escape hypothesis. [Continue reading…]