Alina Chan
Molecular biologist, postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
On the podcast
Alina Chan has appeared on the show twice.
On the record
In November 2021, when the lab-leak hypothesis was still widely dismissed as fringe, Chan argued on the show that gain-of-function-adjacent research and a 2016-2019 data gap warranted serious investigation — a position that moved from contrarian to mainstream over the following year.
In their own words
“They were consistently publishing in the top journals... but when you look at that literature, you soon realize that all of the viruses they've described to date have been collected before 2016... this black box window of time between 2016 and 2019.”November 2021, on the Vance Crowe Podcast, on the Vance Crowe Podcast
“If the public is shown that repeatedly and consistently scientists were holding back the facts from them... that would completely break the trust between non-scientists and scientists.”November 2021, on the Vance Crowe Podcast, on the Vance Crowe Podcast
“If you wait two years later, there's so little you can investigate at that point that it will be near impossible. And here we are two years later trying to investigate the origin of this pandemic.”March 2022, on the Vance Crowe Podcast, on the Vance Crowe Podcast
Where this conversation traveled
Moments in later episodes where Alina Chan's ideas and work resurfaced, drawn from the show's transcripts.
The show's year-end awards named Chan's lab-leak work "most relevant for current times," noting it had moved from fringe theory to a subject taken seriously by parliaments and the U.S. president.
Listen →2021 Vance Crowe Podcast Awards, December 2021
Chan co-authored "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19" with fellow guest Matt Ridley, who credited her 2020 preprint questioning the virus's apparent adaptation to humans as the starting point for their collaboration.
Listen →Matt Ridley, June 2020
If you valued this conversation
- Matt Ridley — co-author with Chan of "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19"
- Kevin Folta — fellow molecular biologist covering COVID-era science communication and policy
- Zvi Mowshowitz — covered COVID-era institutional trust and scientific decision-making from a different analytical angle
Link to this page
This page is a stable, permanent URL. If you want to reference this appearance from your own site or press page, copy either line below.
https://articulate.ventures/podcast/guest/alina-chan
I spoke with Vance Crowe on the Vance Crowe Podcast. The full conversation and transcript are here: https://articulate.ventures/podcast/guest/alina-chan
This page is maintained by Articulate Ventures as part of the permanent record of the Vance Crowe Podcast. Quotes are drawn from episode transcripts.