纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英在向世界警告新冠大流行前中国已掌握病毒关键基因图谱

In late December 2019, eight pages of genetic code were sent to computers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

2019年12月下旬，八页遗传密码被发送到了位于马里兰州贝塞斯达的国家卫生研究院的计算机上。

Unbeknown to American officials at the time, the genetic map that had landed on their doorstep contained critical clues about the virus that would soon touch off a pandemic.

当时的美国官员并不知道，那张送上门的基因图谱包含了一种病毒的关键线索，而这种病毒很快就会引发一场大流行。

The genetic code, submitted by Chinese scientists to a vast public repository of sequencing data run by the U.S. government, described a mysterious new virus that had infected a 65-year-old man weeks earlier in Wuhan. At the time the code was sent, Chinese officials had not yet warned of the unexplained pneumonia sickening patients in the central city of Wuhan.

这些基因密码由中国科学家向美国政府管理的一个庞大的公共测序数据库提交，描述了一种神秘的新病毒，这种病毒数周前在武汉感染了一名65岁的男子。遗传密码发出时，中国官员尚未对中部城市武汉出现不明原因的肺炎一事发出警告。

But the U.S. repository, which was designed to help scientists share run-of-the-mill research data, never added the submission it received on Dec. 28, 2019, to its database. Instead, it asked the Chinese scientists three days later to resubmit the genetic sequence with certain additional technical details. That request went unanswered.

但是，这个旨在帮助科学家共享普通研究数据的美国知识库从未将它于2019年12月28日收到的材料添加到数据库中。相反，它要求中国科学家在三天后重新提交基因序列，并补充某些技术细节。这一要求没有得到回应。

It took almost another two weeks for a separate pair of virologists, one Australian and the other Chinese, to work together to post the genetic code of the new coronavirus online, setting off a frantic global effort to save lives by building tests and vaccines.

另外两名病毒学家——一位是澳大利亚人，一位是中国人——又花了将近两周的时间，才在网上发布了这种新型冠状病毒的遗传密码，引发全球通过检测和疫苗拯救生命的疯狂努力。

The initial attempt by Chinese scientists to publicize the crucial code was revealed for the first time in documents released on Wednesday by House Republicans investigating Covid’s origins. The documents reinforced questions circulating since early 2020 about when China learned of the virus that was causing its unexplained outbreak — and also drew attention to gaps in the American system of monitoring for dangerous new pathogens.

在调查新冠病毒起源的众议院共和党人周三公布的文件中，中国科学家最初试图公布关键遗传密码的情况得以首次披露。这些文件强化了自2020年初以来一直流传的问题，即中国究竟是在什么时候得知一种导致疫情因不明原因暴发的病毒；同时文件也引起了人们对美国监测危险新病原体系统存在漏洞的关注。

The Chinese government has said it promptly shared the virus’s genetic code with global health officials. House Republicans said the new documents suggested that was untrue. News accounts and Chinese social media posts have long reported that the virus was first sequenced in late December 2019.

中国政府一直称，它迅速与全球卫生官员分享了该病毒的遗传密码。众议院共和党人表示，新文件表明这是不真实的。长期以来，新闻报道和中国社交媒体帖子一直称，该病毒是在2019年12月底首次完成测序。

But lawmakers and independent scientists said that the documents did offer tantalizing new details about when and how scientists first tried to share those sequences globally, illustrating the difficulty the United States has with picking worrisome pathogens out of the thousands of humdrum genetic sequences that are submitted to its repository every day.

但议员和独立科学家表示，这些文件确实提供了一些吸引人的新细节，让人一窥科学家首次尝试在全球范围内分享这些序列的时间和方式，同时它们也说明，要从每天提交给其存储库的数以千计单调的基因序列中挑选出令人担忧的病原体，美国在这方面遇到了困难。

“You’d never have an ambulance sitting in normal 3 p.m. traffic,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport. Referring to the coronavirus code from 2019, he said, “Why would you allow this sequence to sit there under the same process as a sequence I just got from a new snail species I found in a ravine?”

“在下午3点交通正常的情况下，你绝对不会看到一辆救护车一动不动。”路易斯安那州立大学健康科学中心（什里夫波特）的病毒学家杰里米·卡米尔说。在提到2019年的冠状病毒代码时，他说：“为什么这个序列会与我刚从峡谷中发现的一种新蜗牛物种身上获得的序列放在相同的流程里？”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the N.I.H., said in a statement on Wednesday that the genetic code was not published because it “was unable to be verified, despite follow-ups by N.I.H. to the Chinese scientist for more information and a response.”

国家卫生研究院隶属于美国卫生与公众服务部，后者的发言人周三在声明中表示，当时没有公布基因密码，是因为“尽管国家卫生研究院向中国科学家进行后续调查，要求提供更多信息和一个回应，但仍无法核实”。

In an earlier letter to House Republicans, Melanie Anne Egorin, a senior Health Department official, said that the sequence had initially been subjected to a “technical, but not scientific or public health,” review, as was customary. After not hearing back from the Chinese scientists about its requested corrections, the database, known as GenBank, automatically deleted the submission from its queue of unpublished sequences on Jan. 16, 2020.

在早些时候给众议院共和党人的一封信中，卫生部高级官员梅兰妮·安妮·叶戈林表示，按照惯例，该序列最初接受的是“技术审查，而不是科学或公共卫生审查”。 2020年1月16日，在发出补正要求后未收到中国科学家回复的情况下，这个名为GenBank的数据库自动从未公开序列队列中删除了该提交。

It is not clear why the Chinese scientists did not respond. One of the submitters, Lili Ren, who worked at a pathogen institute within the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, did not respond to a request for comment. The Chinese embassy said China’s response was “science-based, effective and consistent with China’s national realities.”

目前尚不清楚中国科学家为什么没有回应。其中一位提交者任丽丽在中国医学科学院病原生物学研究所工作，她没有回应置评请求。中国大使馆表示，中国的反应“科学、有效、符合中国国情”。

But the same sequence that Dr. Ren’s group sent to GenBank was made public on a different online database, known as GISAID, on Jan. 12, 2020, shortly after other scientists had posted the first coronavirus code. Dr. Ren’s group also resubmitted a corrected version of the code to GenBank in early February and published a paper describing its work.

但是，就在其他科学家发布首个冠状病毒遗传密码后不久，任丽丽的团队发送给基因库的相同序列于2020年1月12日在另一个名为GISAID的在线数据库上公开。任丽丽的团队还在2月初向GenBank重新提交了一份修改后的密码，并发表了一篇介绍其工作的论文。

The two-week gap between the code first being sent to the American database and China sharing the sequence with global health officials “underscores why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data” from the Chinese government, the Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said.

众议院能源和商务委员会的共和党领导人表示，从代码首次发送到美国数据库，到中国与全球卫生官员分享序列，中间相隔两周时间，“这凸显了为什么我们不能相信中国政府的任何所谓‘事实’或数据”。

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said that the genetic sequence would have strongly suggested to anyone reviewing it in late December 2019 that a new coronavirus was causing the mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan. Instead, official Chinese timelines indicate the government did not make that diagnosis until early January.

西雅图弗雷德·哈钦森癌症研究中心的病毒学家杰西·布鲁姆表示，在2019年12月底，对于任何查看该基因序列的人来说，这都有力表明一种新的冠状病毒导致了武汉神秘的肺炎病例。然而，中国官方时间表显示，政府直到1月初才做出这一诊断。

“If this sequence had been made available, probably the prototype vaccines could’ve been started right away, and that was two weeks earlier than they were started,” Dr. Bloom said.

“如果能够获得这个序列，或许就能立即着手原型疫苗的工作，比当初的开始时间早两周，”布鲁姆说。

The documents, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, do not provide insight into the origins of the virus, Dr. Bloom and other scientists said, given that the sequence did not contain special clues about the virus’s evolution and was later made public anyway.

布鲁姆和其他科学家表示，由于该序列并不包含病毒进化的特殊线索，而且后来还是公之于世，所以它们并没有揭露有关病毒起源的新看法。《华尔街日报》率先报道了这批文件。

But they do offer new details about the pace at which Dr. Ren’s team worked to sequence the virus. The swab containing the virus they analyzed was taken from the 65-year-old patient, a vendor at the large market where the illness was first seen spreading, on Dec. 24, 2019. Within four days, scientists sent that virus’s genetic data to GenBank.

但它们的确提供了关于任丽丽团队病毒测序速度的新细节。他们分析的病毒拭子来自一名65岁患者，他是一处大型市场的摊贩，那是2019年12月24日首次发现该疾病传播的地点。四天之内，科学家就将病毒基因数据发送到了GenBank。

“That’s incredibly fast,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute.

“这速度太快了，”斯克里普斯研究所的病毒学家克里斯蒂安·安德森说。

At the time, finding a new coronavirus in the patient’s sample would not have proven that it was that pathogen, and not a different virus or bacteria, causing his illness, Dr. Andersen said, though it would have been a reasonable hypothesis.

安德森表示，虽然这个假设可能合理，但在患者样本中发现一种新型冠状病毒并不能证明其就是病原体，导致他生病的或许是另一种病毒或细菌。

That consideration appeared to weigh on the Chinese scientists studying samples from early patients. One researcher at a Chinese commercial laboratory that worked with Dr. Ren wrote on a blog in late January 2020 that while she had identified a new virus in hospital samples, that alone did not demonstrate that the virus was causing pneumonia cases, slowing down an official announcement.

研究早期患者样本的中国科学家似乎也考虑到了这一点。与任丽丽合作的一家中国商业实验室的一名研究员在2020年1月下旬的一篇博客中写道，虽然她在医院样本中发现了一种新病毒，但检测到病毒不等于肺炎由该病毒引起，因此延缓了官宣的速度。

In early 2020, the Chinese government also issued directives discouraging certain lines of scientific research and restricted the release of data about the virus.

2020年初，中国政府还发出指示阻止特定类别的科学研究，并对该病毒的数据发布进行了限制。

Even once the virus’s genetic code was sent to the U.S. repository, it would have been difficult for American officials staffing the research-oriented database to take notice. The repository holds hundreds of millions of genetic sequences. Much of the process for screening them is automated.

就算病毒基因密码被发到美国的存储库，管理该研究型数据库的美国官员也很难注意到。该数据库里保存着数以亿计的基因序列。大部分筛选工作都是自动完成的。

And at least until Chinese officials started sounding an alarm at the very end of December 2019, almost no one would have known to look for a new coronavirus within the heaps of submissions.

至少在2019年12月底中国官员开始发出警报之前，几乎没人意识到应该在海量的提交资料中寻找一种新型冠状病毒。

“At the time, there was no way that anyone at N.C.B.I. would realize the importance of that,” said Alexander Crits-Christoph, a computational biologist, referring to the N.I.H. center that runs GenBank. Beyond that, he said, genetic repositories like GenBank have to be mindful about publicly blasting out sequences, given that researchers are often using the same data to prepare journal articles.

“那时候，国家生物技术信息中心的任何人都不可能意识到那到底有多么重要，”计算生物学家亚历山大·克里茨-克里斯托夫在谈到由国家卫生研究院负责的GenBank时表示。他说，除此之外，考虑到研究人员经常使用相同的数据来准备期刊文章，像GenBank这样的基因数据库必须对公开基因组序列慎之又慎。

Still, some scientists believe that American and global health officials have been slow to retrofit databases like GenBank to allow them to seize on sequences that could have critical public health implications.

尽管如此，一些科学家认为，美国和全球卫生官员在改进GenBank这类数据库方面的工作十分迟缓，因而难以发现可能对公共卫生产生重大影响的基因序列。

Such a database could, for example, automatically scan for new pathogens whose genetic codes overlap with those known to be dangerous, Dr. Kamil said. And it could ensure that those sequences are circulated more widely, even as health officials wait for missing details or revisions.

卡米尔举例称，这类数据库本可以自动搜寻出基因密码与已知危险病原体重叠的新型病原体，也能确保这些序列得到更广泛的传播，哪怕卫生官员还在等待缺失的细节或订正。

“Give those sequences concierge care, my gosh,” he said. “Why haven’t the agencies in charge of public health or global health stepped up their game and said, ‘This is the year 2024, we need to be safer so stuff like this doesn’t happen again?’”

“拜托把这些序列重视起来吧，”他说。“为什么负责公共卫生或全球卫生的机构不能做得更好，不能认识到‘这都2024年了，我们必须提升安全性，以防类似情况再次上演’？”