"The dog ate my gene sequence."
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The U.S. National Institutes of Health deleted gene sequences taken from early COVID-19 carriers at the request of Chinese researchers, raising concerns about Beijing’s efforts to conceal information crucial to the virus origin investigation.
A Chinese scientist asked the NIH to eliminate the sequences after submitting them three months prior, the NIH told the Wall Street Journal.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement.
According to the NIH statement, the researcher asked that the sequences be removed from the NIH database because they had been updated and were to be rerouted to another database, the name of which remains unknown. The paper mentions the use of an advanced sequencing technology to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.
The deleted data includes sequences from early virus samples taken from hospitalized patients in Wuhan who were believed to have contracted COVID in January and February of 2020, according to a non-peer reviewed paper authored by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Bloom told the Journal that the deletion of the sequences from the NIH created “a somewhat skewed picture of viruses circulating in Wuhan early on.” He added that “it suggests possibly one reason why we haven’t seen more of these sequences is perhaps there hasn’t been a wholehearted effort to get them out there.”
Bloom said that while the data was deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive, he recovered the deleted files from the Google Cloud, allowing him to conduct research to reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.
While the data likely won’t significantly contribute to the origin investigation, its erasure at the request of Chinese researchers is the latest in a string of developments which suggest that Beijing is working against U.S. and international efforts to discover the pandemic’s origin.
“It makes us wonder if there are other sequences like these that have been purged,” Vaughn S. Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist who did not study or research the topic of the paper, told Journal.
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The U.S. National Institutes of Health deleted gene sequences taken from early COVID-19 carriers at the request of Chinese researchers, raising concerns about Beijing’s efforts to conceal information crucial to the virus origin investigation.
A Chinese scientist asked the NIH to eliminate the sequences after submitting them three months prior, the NIH told the Wall Street Journal.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement.
According to the NIH statement, the researcher asked that the sequences be removed from the NIH database because they had been updated and were to be rerouted to another database, the name of which remains unknown. The paper mentions the use of an advanced sequencing technology to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.
The deleted data includes sequences from early virus samples taken from hospitalized patients in Wuhan who were believed to have contracted COVID in January and February of 2020, according to a non-peer reviewed paper authored by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Bloom told the Journal that the deletion of the sequences from the NIH created “a somewhat skewed picture of viruses circulating in Wuhan early on.” He added that “it suggests possibly one reason why we haven’t seen more of these sequences is perhaps there hasn’t been a wholehearted effort to get them out there.”
Bloom said that while the data was deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive, he recovered the deleted files from the Google Cloud, allowing him to conduct research to reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.
While the data likely won’t significantly contribute to the origin investigation, its erasure at the request of Chinese researchers is the latest in a string of developments which suggest that Beijing is working against U.S. and international efforts to discover the pandemic’s origin.
“It makes us wonder if there are other sequences like these that have been purged,” Vaughn S. Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist who did not study or research the topic of the paper, told Journal.
@george-k said in "The dog ate my gene sequence.":
According to the NIH statement, the researcher asked that the sequences be removed from the NIH database because they had been updated and were to be rerouted to another database, the name of which remains unknown. <
And it didn't occur to anyone to say, 'K, when we get the updated sequences we'll send back the old ones?
