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| In the early days of the pandemic, scientists reported a reassuring trait in the new coronavirus: It appeared to be very stable. The virus was not mutating very rapidly, making it an easier target for treatments and vaccines. |
| 大流行初期，科学家表示这种新型冠状病毒有一个让人松了一口气的特点：它似乎非常稳定。该病毒的变异速度并不快，这使得它更容易治疗并研发相关疫苗。 |
| At the time, the slow mutation rate struck one young scientist as odd. “That really made my ears perk up,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chan wondered whether the new virus was somehow “pre-adapted” to thrive in humans, before the outbreak even started. |
| 当时，这种缓慢的突变率让一位年轻的科学家感到奇怪。“真的让我一下子警惕起来，”在马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的布罗德研究所(Broad Institute)做博士后研究员艾琳娜·陈(Alina Chan)说。她想知道，在疫情暴发之前，这种新病毒是否以某种方式做了“预适应”，以便在人类之中得以繁衍。 |
| “By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans,” Chan said. “It was already good to go.” |
| “到2019年底在武汉检测到SARS-CoV-2病毒时，它似乎已经完成了它所需要的突变，能够在人类之中很好地传播，”艾琳娜·陈说。“它已经准备好了。” |
| The hypothesis, widely disputed by other scientists, was the foundation for an explosive paper posted online in May 2020, in which Chan and her colleagues questioned the prevailing consensus that the lethal virus had naturally spilled over to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal. |
| 这一假说遭到其他科学家的广泛质疑，但却为2020年5月网上发表的一篇爆炸性论文奠定了基础。在该论文中，艾琳娜·陈和同事们质疑了致命病毒通过中间宿主动物从蝙蝠自然传播给人类这一普遍共识。 |
| The question she helped put on the table has not gone away. In late May, President Joe Biden, dissatisfied by an equivocal report he had received on the subject, asked U.S. intelligence services to dig deeper into the origins question. The new report is due any day now. |
| 她参与提出的问题并没有消失。5月下旬，美国总统乔·拜登(Joe Biden)对他收到的有关该问题的一份模棱两可的报告感到不满，要求美国情报机构深入挖掘起源问题。新报告计划在近几天完成。 |
| In last year’s paper, Chan and her colleagues speculated that perhaps the virus had crossed over into humans and been circulating undetected for months while accumulating mutations. |
| 在去年的论文中，艾琳娜·陈和同事推测，在未被发现的情况下，病毒可能已经传给了人类并传播了数月，同时积累突变。 |
| Perhaps, they said, the virus was already well adapted to humans while in bats or some other animal. Or maybe it adapted to humans while being studied in a lab, and had accidentally leaked out. |
| 他们说，也许这种病毒在蝙蝠或其他动物体内时已经很好地适应了人类。或者是它在实验室里被研究时适应了人类，然后意外泄漏了出去。 |
| Chan soon found herself in the middle of a maelstrom. An article in The Mail On Sunday, a British tabloid, ran with the headline: “Coronavirus did NOT come from animals in the Wuhan market.” |
| 艾琳娜·陈很快发现自己陷入了一场大漩涡。英国小报《星期日邮报》(The Mail On Sunday)一篇文章的标题是《冠状病毒并非来自武汉市场的动物》。 |
| Many senior virus experts criticized her work and dismissed it out of hand, saying she did not have the expertise to speak on the subject, that she was maligning their specialty and that her statements would alienate China, hampering any future investigations. |
| 许多资深病毒专家对她的工作提出了批评，并立即予以驳斥，称她不具备就这个问题发表看法的专业知识，她在诋毁他们的专业，她的言论会疏远中国，阻碍未来的任何调查。 |
| Some called her a conspiracy theorist. Others dismissed her ideas because she is a postdoctoral fellow, a junior scientist. One virus expert, Benjamin Neuman, called her hypothesis “goofy.” |
| 有人称她为阴谋论者。还有人否定她的想法，因为她只是博士后研究员，是初级科学家。病毒专家本杰明·纽曼(Benjamin Neuman)称她的假设是“愚蠢的”。 |
| A Chinese news outlet accused her of “filthy behavior and a lack of basic academic ethics,” and readers piled on that she was a “race-traitor,” because of her Chinese ancestry. |
| 一家中国新闻机构指责她“行为肮脏，缺乏基本的学术道德”，读者们纷纷指责她是“种族叛徒”，因为她有中国血统。 |
| “There were days and weeks when I was extremely afraid, and many days I didn’t sleep,” Chan, 32, said recently at an outdoor cafe, not far from the Broad Institute. |
| “有些时候我非常害怕，很多天我都睡不着，”32岁的艾琳娜·陈说近日在布罗德研究所附近的一家户外咖啡馆里说。 |
| Chan’s story is a reflection of how deeply polarizing questions about the origins of the virus have become. The vast majority of scientists think it originated in bats, and was transmitted to humans through an intermediate host animal, though none has been identified. |
| 艾琳娜·陈的故事反映出病毒起源问题已经变得多么两极化。绝大多数科学家认为它起源于蝙蝠，并通过一种中间宿主动物传播给人类，尽管目前还没有确定。 |
| Some of them believe that a lab accident, specifically at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, cannot be discounted and has not been adequately investigated. And a few think that the institute’s research, which involved harvesting bats and bat coronaviruses from the wild, may have played a role. |
| 他们中的一些人认为，实验室事故（特别是在中国武汉病毒研究所发生的事故）不能被忽视，也没有得到充分的调查。一些人认为，该研究所的研究涉及从野外收集蝙蝠和蝙蝠冠状病毒，这可能起到了作用。 |
| It is an acrid debate. In May, 18 scientists, including Chan, published a letter calling for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. In July, a group of 21 virus experts — including one who had signed the May letter — posted a paper compiling the evidence for an animal source, saying there was “no evidence” of a laboratory origin. |
| 这是一场尖锐的辩论。今年5月，包括艾琳娜·陈在内的18名科学家发布了一封信，呼吁对新冠病毒的起源进行调查。今年7月，一个由21名病毒专家组成的小组——包括一位签署了5月那封信的专家——发表了一篇论文，汇编了动物来源的证据，称“没有证据”表明病毒来自实验室。 |
| Scientists on all sides say they have been threatened with violence and have faced name-calling for their positions. The attacks were so fierce that Chan worried for her personal safety and started taking new precautions, wondering if she was being followed and varying her daily routines. |
| 各方科学家都表示受到暴力威胁，并因其立场而遭到谩骂。这些攻击非常猛烈，以至于艾琳娜·陈担心自己的人身安全，开始采取新的预防措施，怀疑自己是否被跟踪，并改变自己的日常生活习惯。 |
| The backlash made her fear that she had put her professional future in jeopardy, and she wrote a letter to her boss, in which she apologized and offered her resignation. |
| 这种反应让她担心自己的职业前途会受到威胁，于是她给老板写了一封信，表示歉意并提出辞职。 |
| “I thought I had committed career suicide, not just for me but for the whole group that wrote the paper,” Chan said. “I thought I had done a huge disservice to everybody, getting us mired in this controversy.” |
| “我认为我已经在事业上自杀了，不仅是对我自己，也是对写这篇论文的整个团队，”艾琳娜·陈说。“我认为我对所有人都造成了巨大的伤害，让我们陷入了这场争论。” |
| But Chan’s boss, Benjamin E. Deverman, who was a co-author on the paper, refused to accept her resignation, saying only that they had been naive not to anticipate the heated reaction. |
| 但艾琳娜·陈的老板、论文合著者本杰明·E·德弗曼(Benjamin E. Deverman)拒绝接受她的辞呈，他只说他们太天真了，没有预料到人们的激烈反应。 |
| Chan’s role has been so contentious that many scientists declined to discuss her at all. One of the few virus experts who was willing to comment flatly dismissed the possibility of a lab leak. |
| 艾琳娜·陈的角色一直备受争议，许多科学家都拒绝讨论她。少数愿意发表评论的病毒专家之一断然否认了实验室泄漏的可能性。 |
| “I believe there is no way the virus was genetically modified or person-made,” said Susan Weiss, co-director of the Penn Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens at University of Pennsylvania, who also dismissed the possibility that the virus may have accidentally escaped the lab. “It is clearly zoonotic, from bats.” |
| “我认为病毒不可能经过基因修改，也不可能是人造的，”宾夕法尼亚大学(University of Pennsylvania)冠状病毒和其他新兴病原体研究中心(Penn Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens)联席主任苏珊·韦斯(Susan Weiss)说。她还排除了病毒意外逃出实验室的可能性。“这显然是由蝙蝠引起的人畜共患疾病。” |
| Others said Chan was brave to put alternative hypotheses on the table. |
| 另一些人说，艾琳娜·陈能提出不同的假设是很有勇气的。 |
| “Alina Chan deserves the credit for challenging the conventional narrative and asking this question,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “It is not easy for a junior scientist to openly challenge an established narrative.” |
| “艾琳娜·陈挑战了传统叙事，提出了这个问题，这一点值得称赞，”耶鲁大学免疫学家岩崎明子(Akiko Iwasaki)说，“一个初级科学家公开挑战一个既定的说法并不容易。” |
| As she sipped unsweetened ice tea and chatted about her ideas recently, Chan seemed an unlikely provocateur. She insisted that she was still on the fence about the virus’s origins, torn “50-50” between the natural route and lab accident hypotheses. |
| 前不久，喝着不加糖的冰茶谈论自己的想法时，艾琳娜·陈看起来不像是一个挑衅者。她坚持说，她仍然对病毒的起源持观望态度，认为自然传播途径和实验室事故假设是“五五开”的关系。 |
| No scientific journal ever published her paper. Determined to draw the attention to what she considered a critical question that had to be answered in order to prevent a future pandemic, Chan took to Twitter, mastering the art of tutorial threads and gathering followers. |
| 没有任何一家科学期刊发表过她的论文。艾琳娜·陈认为，为了防止未来的大流行，必须对这个关键问题做出回答，因此决心引起人们对这个问题的关注，她选择了推特，并熟练掌握了发表介绍性推串和吸引关注者的艺术。 |
| She is now in “worse shape” than before, Chan said: “Now I’m getting attacked from both sides. The scientists are still attacking me, and the lab leak proponents are attacking me, too, because I won’t go all the way and say it’s from a lab. I keep telling them I can’t, because there is no evidence.” |
| 她说，她现在的状况比以前“更糟”：“现在我受到来自双方的攻击。科学家们仍然在攻击我，实验室泄漏说的支持者也在攻击我，因为我不会一直说病毒是实验室泄漏的。我一直告诉他们我不能这么说，因为没有证据。” |
| Critics say Chan bears some responsibility for the backlash. |
| 批评人士说，这样的局面一定程度上是她自己造成的。 |
| Early last year on Twitter, she appeared to accuse scientists and editors “who are directly or indirectly covering up severe research integrity issues surrounding the key SARS-2-like viruses to stop and think,” adding, “If your actions obscure SARS2 origins, you’re playing a hand in the death of millions of people.” (She subsequently deleted the tweet.) |
| 去年早些时候，她在推特上指责科学家和期刊编辑“直接或间接地掩盖了围绕关键的SARS-2型病毒的严重研究诚信问题，请他们停下来思考，”她还说，“如果你们的行为掩盖了SARS2的起源，你们就和数百万人的死亡有关。”（她随后删除了这条推文。） |
| Lab-leak proponents — who have called her “an apologist” for virus experts — have also been irked by the fact that Chan received so much credit for putting the question on the public agenda. |
| 令实验室泄漏说的支持者——他们称她在为病毒专家“辩护”——一直不满的是，将该问题推入公众议题的功劳相当一部分算在了她的头上。 |
| Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said in early 2020 that they had found a virus in their database whose genome sequence was 96.2% similar to that of SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus. |
| 武汉病毒所的科学家在2020年初曾说，他们在自己的数据库中发现了一种病毒，其基因序列与新病毒SARS-CoV-2存在96.2%的相似。 |
| But it was internet sleuths and scientists who discovered that the virus matched one harvested in a cave linked to a pneumonia outbreak in 2012 that killed three miners — and that the Wuhan lab’s genomic database of bat coronaviruses was taken offline in late 2019. |
| 但是，网上的调查者和科学家们发现，该病毒与一种在洞穴里找到的病毒匹配，后者与2012年导致三名矿工死亡的一场肺炎疫情有关——而武汉实验室的蝙蝠冠状病毒基因数据库于2019年底从线上被移除了。 |
| Chan also landed a deal with Harper Collins, for an undisclosed amount, to co-author a book with Matt Ridley, a bestselling but controversial science writer who has been criticized for downplaying the seriousness of climate change. |
| 陈还拿到了哈珀科林斯(Harper Collins)的出版合同，具体金额不明，她将与有争议的科普畅销书作家迈特·里德利(Matt Ridley)合作写书，里德利由于淡化气候变化的严重性而受到了指责。 |
| She denies accusations that she is writing the book for financial gain, saying she simply wants a complete record of the facts that will last longer than a Twitter feed. She plans to donate the proceeds to a COVID-related charity. |
| 她否认写书是为了赚钱，说她只是希望对事实进行一个完整的记录，以一种比推文更持久的方式保存下来。她打算将出书所得捐给一个新冠相关的慈善机构。 |
| “I don’t need money and frills,” she said. |
| “我不需要金钱和虚名，”她说。 |
| Chan was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but her parents returned to their native Singapore when she was an infant. She was a teen when the SARS epidemic hit there. |
| 陈出生于不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华，父母在她幼年时回到了祖国新加坡。当SARS疫情在那里暴发时，她才十来岁。 |
| “People were dying of SARS, and it was nonstop on TV,” she recalled. “I was 15, and it really stuck with me. There were pictures of body bags in hospital hallways.” |
| “得了SARS的人纷纷死去，电视上不停地在播放，”她回忆道。“我当时15岁，这给我留下了很深的印象。那些放在医院走廊里尸袋的照片。” |
| “When COVID started, many people in Boston thought it was no big deal, that flu is worse,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is serious business.’ ” |
| “新冠疫情开始的时候，波士顿不少人认为没什么大不了，还是流感更可怕，”她说。“我记得当时在想，‘这可不是闹着玩的。’” |
| She returned to Canada after high school, studying biochemistry and molecular biology at University of British Columbia, and completing a Ph.D. in medical genetics. By age 25, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and then she took a position working for Deverman, who is the director of the vector engineering research group at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. |
| 她在高中毕业后回到加拿大，在不列颠哥伦比亚大学(University of British Columbia)读生物化学和分子生物学专业，拿到了一个医学基因学博士学位。到了25岁时，她已经是一名哈佛大学博士后，而后开始为德弗曼工作，当时德弗曼是麻省理工和哈佛布罗德研究所斯坦利精神病学研究中心(Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard)矢量工程研究组负责人。 |
| Chan is “insightful, incredibly determined and apparently fearless,” Deverman said, and she has an uncanny ability “to synthesize large amounts of complex information, distill all of the details down to the most critical points and then communicate them in easy to understand language.” |
| 艾琳娜·陈这个人“见解深刻，极为坚韧，无所畏惧”，德弗曼说，她在“合成大量复杂信息，在诸多细节中提炼出最关键的点，然后用易懂的语言与人沟通”方面有着不可思议的能力。 |
| She remains equivocal about the origins of the virus. “I’m leaning toward the lab leak theory now, but there are also days when I seriously consider that it could be from nature,” she said. |
| 她在病毒溯源问题上始终没有明确的立场。“我现在倾向于病毒泄漏，但有时候我也会认真思考它是不是从大自然来的，”她说。 |
| “On those days, I feel mostly really, really sorry for the scientists who are implicated as possible sources for the virus,” she said. |
| “在那样想的时候，我对那些被指为病毒可能来源的科学家感到非常、非常遗憾，”她说。 |
| Referring to Shi Zhengli, the top Chinese virus expert who leads the research on emerging infectious diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chan said, “I feel really sad for her situation. The stakes could not be higher.” |
| 说到石正丽，也就是在武汉病毒所主持新兴传染病研究的那位中国顶尖病毒专家，陈说，“我对她的处境深感遗憾。这件事的利害关系太重大了。” |
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