For her, that meant working on Ebola in a high-containment laboratory.Īnderson’s career has taken her all over the world.
Her favorite movie is “Outbreak,” the 1995 film in which disease experts respond to a dangerous new virus - a job Anderson said she wanted to do. Her research - which focuses on why lethal viruses like Ebola and Nipah cause no disease in the bats in which they perpetually circulate - complemented studies underway at the Chinese institute, which offered funding to encourage international collaboration.Ī rising star in the virology community, Anderson, 42, says her work on Ebola in Wuhan was the realization of a life-long career goal. Now at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Anderson began collaborating with Wuhan researchers in 2016, when she was scientific director of the biosafety lab at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School.
“What people are saying is just not how it is.” “It’s not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab,” Anderson said. Half-truths and distorted information have obscured an accurate accounting of the lab’s functions and activities, which were more routine than how they’ve been portrayed in the media, she said. It’s a stark contrast to the place Anderson described in an interview, the first in which she’s shared details about working at the lab. has questioned the lab’s safety and alleged its scientists were engaged in contentious gain of function research that manipulated viruses in a manner that could have made them more dangerous. The work of the lab and the director of its emerging infectious diseases section - Shi Zhengli, a long-time colleague of Anderson’s dubbed “Batwoman” for her work hunting viruses in caves - is now shrouded in controversy. That’s turned the quest to uncover the origins of the virus, critical for preventing future pandemics, into a geopolitical minefield. China’s lack of transparency since the earliest days of the outbreak fueled those suspicions, which have been seized on by the U.S. The emergence of the coronavirus in the same city where institute scientists, clad head-to-toe in protective gear, study that exact family of viruses has stoked speculation that it might have leaked from the lab, possibly via an infected staffer or a contaminated object.