A journalist at Nature called me in 2017 with the news that China was opening a new Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Wuhan, one designed to handle the most dangerous pathogens. He asked if I thought China should be allowed to have such a lab and whether it could operate it safely. I replied that China had a right to conduct advanced research, but I worried that operating it safely would require a high-reliability culture—one in which anyone could raise questions about the safety of proposed work and methods. Such transparency, and the ability of junior employees to challenge superiors, runs against the grain of both communism and China’s hierarchical traditional culture.
My skepticism looked prescient when news of Covid broke in 2020, setting off speculation about a leak from the Wuhan lab. Some were surprised that my initial response was that the virus probably didn’t come from the lab. Many prominent scientists and public-health officials said the same.
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