We asked The Telegraph’s experts to name their 2023 ‘one to watch’. Here’s who, and what, we’ll be talking about in the year ahead. Scroll down to browse the whole series.
If you haven’t heard of the whistleblowing scientist Dr Alina Chan, then you almost certainly will in 2023.
The gene therapy and cell engineering specialist at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was one of the first experts to question whether Covid leaked from a lab in Wuhan, and has doggedly pursued an investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
In the coming year, it is possible that evidence will finally emerge proving that experiments to soup-up coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) led to the accidental release of Covid. ‘Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward,’ she told MPs at a session of the Science and Technology Select Committee in 2021. ‘But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.’
Dr Chan was born in Canada but grew up in Singapore, returning to Canada to attend the University of British Columbia for both her undergraduate degree and her doctorate.
She first suspected a leak in March 2020 after realising nobody had found any infected animals at the Wuhan market where China claims the pandemic began. At that time it was impossible to get most scientists to even consider a non-natural origin, with many suggesting that it was racist to even ask the question....
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