Coronavirus: bat scientist’s cave exploits offer hope to beat virus ‘sneakier than Sars’
- Shi Zhengli is one of the scores of scientists joining a global effort to hunt down the new coronavirus
- But some people have blamed her for creating it in the first place
Shi Zhengli has spent a lot of time in smelly caves, poking around in bat droppings. The world may well prove thankful she did.
Shi has hiked into deep mountains across 28 of China’s provinces, finding the dark places where bats live. Then it was zipping on layers of protective clothing, head to toe.
Breathing protection was next and then stepping into the caves to search for the creatures and collect their droppings, many different kinds of bat in all kinds of caves.
What she found she brought back to the National Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan, Hubei province, for analysis. After more than a decade of work, she built one of the world’s largest databases of bat-related viruses.
Her team was the first to identify that the coronavirus that was killing people by causing pneumonia was a direct descendant of a wild strain they culled from the droppings of a fruit bat in Yunnan province, sharing 96 per cent of genes.
