China’s ‘bat woman’ Shi Zhengli nominated to join elite science academy
- Virologist who works on coronavirus in bats was at the centre of the Wuhan lab leak controversy
- She is one of 583 candidates in the running for membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Virologist Shi Zhengli – dubbed China’s “bat woman” for her research on coronavirus in the mammals – has been nominated to join the country’s top scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The 58-year-old director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases was on a list of 583 candidates announced by the academy on Thursday.
Seventy-nine will be elected by CAS members later this year.
Shi – who became a member of the American Society for Microbiology in 2019 – made a key contribution to finding the source of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, outbreak in 2002-03.
She was also at the centre of controversy in the search for the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that caused the global Covid-19 pandemic.
At the early stage of the pandemic in 2020, Shi published research describing the similarity of the Covid-19 pathogen to coronaviruses carried by certain bats and suggested possible evolution paths.
But some US officials, including then-president Donald Trump, suggested that the Covid-19 pathogen had been leaked from Shi’s laboratory in Wuhan, where samples of deadly coronaviruses were stored.