The first person to publicly release the genome sequence of the virus that causes COVID-19 — virologist Zhang Yongzhen — seems to have resolved a public dispute with the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (SPHCC), Fudan University, China, which erupted last week.
According to social-media posts on Zhang’s personal Weibo account, which have since been removed, the institute gave the research team two days to leave, but the SPHCC did not initially specify to where they should relocate. Later, Zhang said that officials told his team to move to a lab that did not have the necessary biosafety conditions to store its samples, which contain unknown pathogens. Zhang’s lab is a biosafety level-3 laboratory.
Zhang said that he had been sleeping outside his lab, 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 also posted that she was camping, but inside the lab. Chen, too, declined to be interviewed by Nature.
But by very early Wednesday morning, Zhang said in a post that a tentative agreement had been reached with the SPHCC to resume normal research activity in the lab. The post states that Zhang will work with the centre to relocate the laboratory and restart research.
