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| As soon as Edward Holmes saw the dark-ringed eyes of the raccoon dogs staring at him through the bars of the iron cage, he knew he had to capture the moment. |
| 一看到铁笼里那些长着黑眼圈的貉子正盯着自己，爱德华·霍尔姆斯就知道，他必须捕捉下这一刻。 |
| It was October 2014. Dr. Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney, had come to China to survey hundreds of species of animals, looking for new types of viruses. |
| 那是在2014年10月，为了寻找新型病毒，悉尼大学生物学家霍尔姆斯来到中国调查了数百种动物。 |
| On a visit to Wuhan, a commercial center of 11 million people, scientists from the city’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention brought him to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. In stall after stall of the poorly ventilated space, he saw live wild animals — snakes, badgers, muskrats, birds — being sold for food. But it was the raccoon dogs that made him pull out his iPhone. |
| 在访问拥有1100万人口的商业中心武汉时，该市疾控中心的科学家将他带到了华南海鲜批发市场。在一个又一个通风不良的摊位里，他看到了蛇、獾、麝鼠和鸟等等活体野生动物被当作食物出售。但让他拿出iPhone拍照的，还是这些貉子。 |
| As one of the world’s experts on virus evolution, Dr. Holmes had an intimate understanding of how viruses can jump from one species to another — sometimes with deadly consequences. The SARS outbreak of 2002 was caused by a bat coronavirus in China that infected some kind of wild mammal before infecting humans. Among the top suspects for that intermediate animal: the fluffy raccoon dog. |
| 作为世界级病毒进化专家之一，霍尔姆斯对病毒如何从一个物种传播到另一个物种有着深入了解，这种传播有时会带来致命后果。2002年暴发的“非典”是由中国的一种蝙蝠冠状病毒引起的，在感染人类之前，它曾感染某种野生哺乳动物。最可能的动物类中间宿主之一，正是毛茸茸的貉子。 |
| “You could not get a better textbook example of disease emergence waiting to happen,” Dr. Holmes, 57, said in an interview. |
| “再也找不出比这更教科书式的潜在疾病暴发案例了，”现年57岁的霍尔姆斯在接受采访时表示。 |
| The tall, bald Englishman did his best not to draw attention to himself as he snapped a picture of the raccoon dogs, which look like long-legged raccoons but are more closely related to foxes. He then took a few more pictures of other animals in cages of their own. As a vendor began clubbing one of the creatures, Dr. Holmes pocketed his phone and slipped away. |
| 这位留着光头、身材高大的英国人在拍摄貉子时努力让自己不引起注意。这种动物看起来像长腿版浣熊，但与狐狸的关系更近。随后他又拍下了被单独关在笼子里的其他动物。当一名摊贩用棍棒敲打其中一只动物的时候，霍尔姆斯将手机放进衣袋，悄悄离开了。 |
| The photos faded from his mind until the last day of 2019. As Dr. Holmes was browsing Twitter from his Sydney home, he learned of an alarming outbreak in Wuhan — a SARS-like pneumonia with early cases linked to the Huanan market. The raccoon dogs, he thought. |
| 在2019年的最后一天以前，这些照片都已被他淡忘。那天霍尔姆斯正在悉尼家中浏览Twitter，才得知武汉暴发了令人担忧的疫情——一种类似非典的肺炎，早期病例与华南海鲜市场相关。一定是因为那些貉子，他想。 |
| “It was a pandemic waiting to happen, and then it bloody well happened,” he said. |
| “这是一场迟早发生的大流行，然后就真的不折不扣地发生了，”他说。 |
| From that day on, Dr. Holmes was swept into a vortex of discoveries and controversies related to the origins of the virus — making him feel like “the Forrest Gump of Covid,” he joked. He and a Chinese colleague were the first to share the genome of the new coronavirus with the world. He then discovered crucial clues about how the pathogen most likely evolved from bat coronaviruses. |
| 从那天开始，霍尔姆斯就被卷入了关于病毒起源的发现与争议的漩涡，他开玩笑说，这让他感觉自己成了“新冠界的阿甘”。他与中国同事率先向世界分享了新冠病毒基因组。后来，他又发现了病原体最有可能从蝙蝠冠状病毒进化而来的关键线索。 |
| And in the contentious geopolitical debate over whether the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, Dr. Holmes has become one of the strongest proponents of an opposing theory: that the virus spilled over from a wild animal. With colleagues in the United States, he recently published tantalizing clues that raccoon dogs kept in the very iron cage he photographed in 2014 could have set off the pandemic. |
| 在关于病毒是否从武汉一处实验室泄漏这个带有地缘政治色彩的争议中，霍尔姆斯是最坚定的反对论者之一，他认为，病毒是由一种野生动物传播的。最近，他与美国的同事一起公布了重大线索，称他在2014年拍摄的那个装有貉子的铁笼可能就是疫情的起点。 |
| Dr. Holmes’s Covid research has won him international acclaim, including Australia’s top science prize. But it has also garnered claims that his research had been overseen by the Chinese military, along with a flood of attacks on social media and even death threats. |
| 霍尔姆斯的新冠研究为他带来了国际声誉，包括澳大利亚的最高科学奖。但这些声誉也引来关于他是在中国军方督导下从事研究的怀疑，以及社交媒体上铺天盖地的攻击，甚至还有死亡威胁。 |
| Through it all, Dr. Holmes has continued to publish a torrent of studies on Covid. Longtime colleagues attribute his steady output through unsteady times to an exceptional knack for building big scientific teams, and a willingness to dive into controversial debates if he thinks they are important. |
| 身处这一切之中，霍尔姆斯继续发表大量关于新冠病毒的研究。长期合作的同事都表示，他在这样的动荡时期还能稳定发布研究成果，要归功于他擅长组建大型科研团队，同时，如果他认为争议性的辩论意义重大，他也愿意投入其中。 |
| “He’s the right kind of person with the right kind of mind-set, because of the fact that he can be open-minded and engaged and thoughtful, and not become defensive,” said Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard who worked with Dr. Holmes on Ebola. |
| “他就是心态正确的合适人选，因为他思想开放，专注投入，思虑周全，而且不会变得充满戒备，”麻省理工学院博德研究所与哈佛大学的遗传学家帕迪斯·萨贝蒂说道，他曾与霍尔姆斯一起研究埃博拉病毒。 |
| Hunting for Viruses |
| 寻找病毒 |
| Growing up in western England, a young Edward Holmes had a biology teacher who put a poster of an orangutan on the wall that read, “I’m not your cousin.” |
| 爱德华·霍尔姆斯在英格兰西部长大，小时候，他的生物老师在墙上贴了一张红毛猩猩的海报，上面写道：“我不是你们的表亲。” |
| The teacher told the class not to read the garbage in their textbook about evolution. That made the 14-year-old eager to dive in. |
| 老师告诉同学们，不要读课本里关于进化论的那些垃圾内容。这激起了14岁的霍尔姆斯深入了解相关知识的渴望。 |
| He went on to study the evolution of apes and humans, and then turned to viruses. Over three decades — working in Edinburgh, Oxford, Pennsylvania and finally Sydney — Dr. Holmes has published more than 600 papers on the evolution of viruses including H.I.V., influenza and Ebola. |
| 后来他研究了猿类与人类的演化，然后转向了病毒研究。三十年来，霍尔姆斯辗转于爱丁堡、牛津、宾夕法尼亚，最后来到悉尼进行研究，发表了600多篇关于病毒进化的论文，内容涵盖了HIV、流感病毒以及埃博拉病毒等。 |
| When he was invited to come to the University of Sydney, in 2012, he seized the chance to move closer to Asia, where he feared that the wildlife trade could set off a new pandemic. |
| 2012年他收到悉尼大学的邀请，于是抓住了这个搬到更靠近亚洲的地方的机会，因为他一直担心野生动物交易可能会在亚洲引发一场新的大流行。 |
| “He goes where the fire is,” said Andrew Read, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University, who worked with Dr. Holmes at the time. |
| “哪里着火他就去哪儿，”当时与霍尔姆斯共事的宾夕法尼亚州立大学进化生物学家安德鲁·里德说。 |
| As he was preparing for the move, Dr. Holmes got an email out of the blue from a Chinese virologist named Yong-Zhen Zhang, asking if he’d like to study viruses with him in China. Their collaboration quickly expanded into a sweeping search for new viruses in hundreds of species of animals. They studied spiders plucked off the walls of huts and fish hauled up from the South China Sea. |
| 就在霍尔姆斯为这次调动做准备之时，他突然收到了中国病毒学家张永振的一封电邮，后者询问他是否愿意来中国一起研究病毒。他们的合作很快发展为在数百种动物中寻找新病毒的大规模研究，从棚屋墙上抓下来的蜘蛛到南海打捞上来的鱼，他们都曾做过调查。 |
| They ultimately found more than 2,000 virus species new to science, with many surprises among them. Scientists used to think that influenza viruses infected primarily birds, for example, which could then pass them along to mammals like ourselves. But Dr. Holmes and Dr. Zhang found that fish and frogs get the flu, too. |
| 他们一共找到了2000多种科学上的新病毒种类，其中有许多意外发现。例如，过去科学家们认为流感病毒主要感染鸟类，再由鸟类再传给人类这样的哺乳动物。但霍尔姆斯和张永振发现，鱼和青蛙也会感染流感。 |
| “That’s been quite eye opening,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the surveys. “The diversity of viruses that are out there is just enormous.” |
| “真的让人大开眼界，”未参与过这些调查的爱丁堡大学进化生物学家安德鲁·兰博特说。“那里的病毒种类极其繁多。” |
| On one of their survey trips in 2014, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Zhang formed a partnership with scientists at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention to survey animals in the surrounding Hubei Province. The C.D.C. scientists brought them to the Huanan market to see a worrying case of wildlife trade. |
| 在2014年的一次调查之旅中，霍尔姆斯和张永振与武汉疾控中心的科学家们联手，对湖北省周边地区的动物进行调查。该疾控中心的科学家们带他们去了华南海鲜市场，了解这个隐患重重的野生动物交易场所。 |
| After the visit, Dr. Holmes hoped he and his colleagues could use the genetic sequencing techniques they had developed for their animal surveys to look for viruses in the animals at the market. But his colleagues were more interested in searching for viruses in sick people. |
| 在那次访问后，霍尔姆斯希望能与同事们利用他们为研究动物开发的基因测序技术，在该市场上的动物中寻找病毒。但他的同事们更感兴趣的是寻找病人身上携带的病毒。 |
| Dr. Zhang and Dr. Holmes began working with doctors at Wuhan Central Hospital, fishing for viral RNA in samples of lung fluid from people with pneumonia. Because of this collaboration, he was named a guest professor with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 2014 to 2020. |
| 张永振和霍尔姆斯开始与武汉市中心医院的医生合作，从肺炎患者的肺液样本中提取病毒RNA。因为这次合作，他在2014年至2020年被中国疾控中心聘为客座教授。 |
| Last month, Dr. Holmes and his colleagues published their first report on the project, based on samples from 408 patients collected in 2016 and 2017. Many were sick with more than one virus, it turned out, and some were also infected with bacteria or fungi. The researchers even saw evidence of a hidden outbreak: Six patients were infected with genetically identical enteroviruses. |
| 上个月，霍尔姆斯与同事发表了关于该项目的第一份报告，该报告基于2016年和2017年收集的408名患者的样本。结果发现，许多人感染了不止一种病毒，有人还出现细菌或真菌感染。研究者们甚至发现了一次隐匿暴发的证据：六名患者感染了基因相同的肠道病毒。 |
| Dr. Holmes and Dr. Zhang also continued surveying the virosphere, examining soil, sediments and animal feces from across China. But in late December 2019, that work ground to a halt. |
| 霍尔姆斯和张永振还在继续调查病毒圈，检查来自中国各地的土壤、沉积物和动物粪便。但在2019年12月下旬，他们的工作陷入停顿。 |
| Covid’s Arrival |
| 新冠到来 |
| When Dr. Zhang got wind of a new pneumonia in Wuhan, he asked colleagues at the Wuhan Central Hospital to ship him lung fluid from a patient. It arrived on Jan. 3, and he used the techniques he and Dr. Holmes had perfected to search for viruses. Two days later, Dr. Zhang’s team had assembled the genome of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. |
| 当张永振得知武汉出现新型肺炎后，他要求武汉市中心医院的同事为他送去一名病人的肺液样本。样本于1月3日抵达，利用他与霍尔姆斯完善的技术，张永振对样本进行了病毒搜索。两天后，张永振的团队合成了新型冠状病毒SARS-CoV-2的基因组。 |
| Other scientific teams in China had also sequenced the virus. But none made it public, because the Chinese government had barred scientists from publishing information about it. |
| 其他中国科研团队也对这种病毒进行了测序。但没有任何一方公布结果，因为中国政府禁止科学家发布相关信息。 |
| Dr. Zhang and Dr. Holmes began writing a paper about the genome, which would later appear in the journal Nature. Dr. Zhang flouted the ban and uploaded the virus genome to a public database hosted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. But the database requires a lengthy review of new genomes, and so days passed without the information going online. |
| 张永振和霍尔姆斯开始着手撰写一篇关于病毒基因组的论文，该论文后来发表在《自然》科学期刊上。张永振无视禁令，将病毒基因组上传到了美国国立卫生研究院的公共数据库中。但该数据库需要对新基因组进行冗长审查，所以一段时间过去后，相关信息仍未被发布到网上。 |
| Dr. Holmes urged his collaborator to find another way to share the genome with the world. “It felt like it had to happen,” Dr. Holmes said. |
| 霍尔姆斯敦促张永振再找别的办法将基因组公诸于世。“感觉这疫情肯定是要发生的，”霍尔姆斯说。 |
| On Jan. 10, they agreed to share it on a forum for virologists, and Dr. Holmes put it online. |
| 1月10日，他们同意在一个病毒学家论坛上分享基因组信息，霍尔姆斯也将其发到网上。 |
| That decision was a turning point, according to Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin who worked on the mRNA technology powering the Moderna vaccine. Only with that genetic sequence could researchers start working on tests, drugs and vaccines. Until then, Dr. McLellan said, scientists like himself were like runners in their starting blocks, waiting for a starter’s pistol. |
| 得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的结构生物学家杰森·麦克莱伦表示，他们的决定是一个转折点。麦克莱伦研究的mRNA技术推动了莫德纳疫苗的问世。只有拿到基因组序列，研究人员才能开始研究测试、药物和疫苗。麦克莱伦说，没有这些信息，他们这些科学家就和起跑线上的运动员一样，只能等待发令枪响起。 |
| “It fired the moment Edward and Yong-Zhen posted the genome sequence,” he said. “Immediately, Twitter was abuzz, emails were being exchanged, and the race was on.” |
| “爱德华和永振公布基因组序列的那一刻，发令枪就响了，”他说。“Twitter马上就热闹起来，到处都是电邮交流，比赛开始了。” |
| After the coronavirus genome was sequenced, Dr. Holmes was puzzled to see some bits of genetic material that looked like they might have been put there through genetic engineering. |
| 在新冠病毒基因组测序之后，霍尔姆斯对他看到的一些遗传物质感到困惑，它们似乎像是通过基因工程植入病毒的。 |
| On a Feb. 1, 2020, telephone conference, Dr. Holmes shared his worries with other virus experts, including Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the N.I.H., and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert. Other scientists explained on the call that those features of the genome could easily have been produced through the natural evolution of viruses. |
| 在2020年2月1日的电话会议上，霍尔姆斯将自己的担忧告知其他病毒专家，包括国立卫生研究院院长弗朗西斯∙柯林斯和美国顶级传染病专家安东尼·S·福奇。其他参与电话会议的科学家解释称，这些基因组特征很容易通过病毒的自然进化产生。 |
| Soon afterward, Dr. Holmes helped researchers at the University of Hong Kong analyze a coronavirus, found in a pangolin, that was closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The virus looked especially similar in its surface protein, called spike, which the virus uses to enter cells. |
| 不久之后，霍尔姆斯帮助香港大学的研究人员分析了一种在穿山甲中发现的冠状病毒，与SARS-CoV-2的相关性很高。这种病毒的表面蛋白（亦称刺突蛋白，病毒利用其入侵细胞）看起来极其相近。 |
| Finding such a distinct biological signature in a virus from a wild animal strengthened Dr. Holmes’s confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of genetic engineering. “Suddenly what looks odd is clearly natural,” Dr. Holmes said. |
| 在来自野生动物的病毒中发现如此独特的生物学特征增强了霍尔姆斯的信心，即SARS-CoV-2不是基因工程的产物。“突然间，看似异常的东西明显来自自然，”霍尔姆斯说。 |
| Dr. Holmes and his colleagues laid out some of these findings in a letter published in March 2020. That same month, he published some of his photos of caged animals at the Huanan market in a commentary he wrote with Dr. Zhang, suggesting that it might have been the site of an animal spillover. |
| 霍尔姆斯和他的同事在2020年3月发表的一封信中列出了其中一些发现。同月，他在与张永振一起撰写的评论文章中发表了他在华南市场的一些笼中动物的照片，暗示那里可能是病毒从动物外溢的场所。 |
| In reports published last month, Dr. Holmes and over 30 collaborators analyzed early Covid cases, finding that they clustered around the market, and examined the mutations in early coronavirus samples. |
| 在上个月发表的报告中，霍尔姆斯和30多名合作者分析了早期的新冠病例，发现这些病例聚集在市场周围，并检查了早期新冠病毒样本中的突变。 |
| Chris Newman, a wildlife biologist at the University of Oxford and a co-author of one of the studies, said that his Chinese colleagues saw a number of wild mammals for sale at the Huanan market in late 2019. Any of them might have been responsible for the pandemic, Dr. Holmes said. |
| 牛津大学野生动物生物学家克里斯·纽曼是其中一项研究的合著者，他说，他的中国同事在2019年底看到了一些在华南市场出售的野生哺乳动物。霍尔姆斯说，其中任何一种都可能造成这场大流行。 |
| “You can’t prove raccoon dogs yet, but they’re certainly a suspect,” he said. |
| “你还不能证明是貉，但它们肯定有嫌疑，”他说。 |
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