evidence: Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it "unlikely" that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, interprets the proposal as stating that any novel cleavage sites would be inserted into a SARS-CoV-1-like coronavirus. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given that it is not mentioned in the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic. [...] With discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis being how they are, other scientists took a different point of view—one less skeptical of the idea that the experiments could have been carried out in China. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, calls the timeline "plausible … certainly possible." Chan points to other recent reports that the team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been sampling very close relatives to SARS-CoV-2, and that it was testing, in humanized mice, genetically engineered SARS-like coronaviruses that were more infectious than natural strains. "WIV was fully outfitted to run all these experiments themselves," she says.