Virologist who was first to share COVID genome is shut out of lab in China

The first person to publicly release the genome sequence of the virus that causes COVID-19 — virologist Zhang Yongzhen — appears to have resolved a public dispute with the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (SPHCC), Fudan University, that erupted last week.

Zhang had been photographed camping outside his laboratory since Sunday, after the SPHCC closed the lab.

The SPHCC did not respond to Nature’s request to comment but has released public statements saying the laboratory was one of several that needed renovations — and that it provided Zhang’s team with an alternative space.

According to social media posts on Zhang’s personal Weibo account, the institute gave the research team two days to leave but the SPHCC did not initially specify where they should relocate. Later, Zhang said officials told his team to move to a lab that did not have the necessary biosafety conditions to store their samples, which contain unknown pathogens. Zhang’s lab is a biosafety level 3 laboratory.

Zhang said he had been sleeping outside his laboratory since Sunday night, even in the rain. The social media posts include photos of him lying under blankets.

Zhang told Nature on Monday that his situation was “terrible”.

“You don’t know what I have experienced,” he said, but declined to comment further.

According to the social media account of Chen Yanmei, a virologist at the SPHCC, and a member of Zhang’s team, their students’ incomplete experiments were now “impossible to save”. Chen said she was also camping out, inside the lab. Chen also declined to be interviewed by Nature.

But by late Tuesday night, Zhang said in a post that a tentative agreement had been reached with the SPHCC to resume normal research activity in the laboratory. The post states that Zhang will work with the centre to relocate the laboratory and restart research.

Virus sequence

In 2020, Zhang was the first scientist — together with Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia — to share the genome of SARS-CoV-2 with the world on the website virological.org. That act is widely credited as a key factor enabling the swift development of vaccines against COVID-19.

Since 2020, Zhang has received international acclaim. That year, Zhang featured in Nature’s 10 — an annual list of people behind key developments in science, and in 2022 he was awarded the Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Award, which carries a US$1 million bursary.

Nature’s 10: ten people who helped shape science in 2020

But Holmes, a long-time collaborator of Zhang’s, says that since 2020, Zhang’s research output has dwindled. Before 2020, Zhang had an extensive research network and would collect samples of animals and people to study viral evolution, says Holmes. But since 2020, Zhang’s work has largely involved analysing previously collected samples and Holmes’s own collaboration with Zhang is less prolific. “He drove that collaboration but there is nothing to collaborate on now; he hasn’t been able to get any data,” says Holmes. “All I can do is offer support from afar.”

According to the Dimensions database, Zhang co-authored 5 research articles in 2018, 9 in 2019 and 18 in 2020. But that growing publication rate dropped to 3 in 2021 and 4 in 2022. Zhang co-authored 6 articles in 2023, none of which contained original data.

Holmes believes the lab closure is part of an effort to sideline Zhang for unauthorized sharing of data. “It is heartbreaking to watch,” he says. “It is unfathomable to me to have a scientist of that calibre sleeping outside his lab.”

International star

But Yanzhong Huang, a specialist in Chinese health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, says the true nature of the dispute and protest are “shrouded in mystery”.

Fan Xiaohong, a physician who heads the SPHCC told reporters for Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly that Zhang’s contract had expired, but he had refused to leave. A post on Zhang’s social media said that although his own contract with SPHCC had formally ended in 2023, members of his team had renewed their contracts with the hospital, and the laboratory is still owed funding.

Even without clarity on the details of the dispute, Dali Yang, a researcher who studies politics in China at the University of Chicago, says it’s concerning that Zhang is sleeping outside his lab. “Many people who know about him are aghast because he is truly an international star,” says Yang.