SARS-CoV-2, of natural origin?

Spaniard Luis Enjuanes is a sir of science. The Valencian has spent practically 40 years manipulating viruses and especially coronaviruses during an arduous career as a member of the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and as director of the coronavirus laboratory at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (National Biotechnology Centre).

On other occasions he has been distinguished with the Medal of the Principality of Asturias and other distinctions awarded by scientific societies; the most recent recognition of his successful career has been granted by the Association of Friends of Tel Aviv University.

I was able to interview him exclusively for my new book I am writing on the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the current pandemic, but I am not limiting myself to current events, but starting from a whole that began on 11 September 2001.

In Enjuanes' opinion, there is very good research in Spain: "We have practically been working only with coronaviruses for 35 years, which gave the laboratory a great advantage, in fact, it was the first in the world to synthesise a coronavirus with genetic engineering techniques and this gave us a very important working tool because we could manipulate the genome of the virus".

This technology, Enjuanes continues in his explanation, was published in 2000 and was a success because there were many countries trying to achieve it.

The technical problem was that genetic engineering is done with DNA, but not with RNA, and so the first step was to make a copy of the RNA genome, which was very important, and when this operation was attempted, there were toxic fragments that ruined the experiments in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and many other countries. In Spain it was possible to achieve this.

I asked this outstanding scientist if SARS-CoV-2 is a mistake, a manipulation that escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, to which he replied that he himself has been implicated in this controversy because in February this year, a total of 24 scientists from around the world published a letter in the journal The Lancet in which they pointed out that they did not have a concrete position on whether the virus was of natural origin or had escaped from a laboratory in the city of Wuhan.

Properly from the Institute of Virology, as former president Trump put it; however, for Enjuanes all the scientific data supported that this virus had been of natural origin, like the other six coronaviruses so far known... SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh.

Enjuanes said that COVID-19 has very particular modifications that give it tremendous pathogenicity and multitropism: the same virus can infect many tissues and all organs from the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, and so on.

"This is unusual, viruses tend to have a specificity of entropism, hepatitis viruses infect the liver, but do not infect other organs and not this one, and this is due to the acquisition of a tiny protein sequence of four amino acids that introduced a cutting site by a protease; the evil of this cutting site is that it is made by a protease that is in all organs," he told me.

The dean explained how COVID-19 moves in the organism: "So if the virus enters and infects you, let's say the brain, when it comes out it is already activated... this activation consists of cutting the protein of the spicules, those projections that come out of the virus and of course it enters you, wherever it enters you, normally it enters you through the respiratory system when it comes out of any lung cell, it is already activated and ready to enter any other place. That's why this virus has more than 50 tropisms, it can infect more than 50 parts of our organism and therefore cause more than 50 pathologies and combinations of them.

Regarding conspiracy theories in this biological war - as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described it - Enjuanes does not favour any hypothesis that speaks of a virus that has escaped from a laboratory, either accidentally or intentionally.

The CSIC researcher is also a close friend of Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who has studied different species of bats and their coronaviruses.

"It is also very interesting because the coronavirus she works with does not have this sequence of four basic amino acids that give it all these dangerous connotations that I have mentioned," says the Spanish researcher.

And if someone were to manipulate it, make the cuts and insert the four amino acids, is there the technology, the knowledge to do so? According to Enjuanes, this technique is within the reach of many laboratories, however, he has been very specific in pointing out that, in genetic engineering, when a genome is manipulated, traces can be left, so certain traces would have to be eliminated to avoid being caught.  I have the impression that we will forever live with doubt and suspicion in our pockets...