evidence: In January 2020, when I stumbled upon research carried out in the lab of Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—known as China’s ‘bat woman’ because her work in the past 18 years has focused on bat-borne coronaviruses—I didn’t realize I was stepping into a scientific minefield that would become a fierce battleground for numerous hot-button issues, ranging from biosafety concerns of virus research, transparency and accountability of international science, to geopolitical wrangling between China and the United States. [...] Wuhan Institute of Virology main entrance | Ureem2805 The article, for instance, included a sensational quote from David Baltimore—an expert on viruses that can cause cancer for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975—saying that a seemingly peculiar genetic feature of SARS-CoV-2, known as the furin cleavage site, was "the smoking gun" that makes "a powerful challenge" to the natural-origins theory. This, as Wade insinuated, is evidence that the virus was engineered in the Wuhan lab. Baltimore, however, was wrong. Many contagious pathogens—including some coronaviruses and influenza viruses—have naturally evolved this type of genetic feature because it gives them an evolutionary advantage by making them more infectious. The episode offers a good example of how journalism can go wrong—when journalists do not critically evaluate what’s said but pay more attention to who said it.