From pandemic hero to GOP lawmakers' target. Who is UNC scientist Ralph Baric?
In just a few years scientist Ralph Baric went from being heralded as a global leader in public-health focused coronavirus research, to a target of unproven accusations that he helped start a pandemic.
The UNC-Chapel Hill professor spent decades studying emerging coronaviruses, long before the spread of COVID-19 ignited a worldwide health crisis in 2020.
Over the years he warned that 'emerging' coronavirus strains could pose a global health threat due to their potential to jump from animals to people and spread quickly, according to UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health.
He is also among the researchers named in unproven claims that U.S. scientists deliberately misled the public by saying the coronavirus that caused the worldwide pandemic most likely emerged naturally and jumped from an animal host to people.
The News & Observer obtained a letter Thursday from House Speaker Destin Hall directing UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts to deliver many records focused on Baric's laboratory to the House majority staff of the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations. .
A Hall staff member described the request as a fact-finding mission, stating that Hall is curious about what Baric has researched and any relevance to what caused the COVID-19 pandemic, a politically charged issue.
President Donald Trump is among those contending the pandemic coronavirus strain most likely emerged from 'gain-of-function' genetic engineering and reached people due to a 'lab-related incident.' Such research increases the virility of pathogens to better understand their dangers to people at the molecular scale.
'Current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability,' states a White House web page on the 'true origins' of COVID-19, which mentions studies at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Baric had collaborated with Chinese researcher Zhengli Shi, then based at the Wuhan institute, on coronavirus genetic studies years before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2015, they and others published a study concluding that a coronavirus then circulating among Chinese horseshoe bats might pose a risk to people.
Baric's lab combined elements of a surface 'spike' DNA sequence from a coronavirus found in bats, provided by Shi, with a SARS virus that Baric's lab had adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease, according to published research and Baric's testimony in January 2024 testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee.
The chimaera, as scientists call some engineered DNA sequences, infected human airway cells in laboratory tests, evidence that the virus in bats back then could break into human cells, a news article in the journal Nature reported. That boosted suspicions that some bat coronaviruses could infect people directly, the article said.
In his 2024 testimony, Baric stressed then that he had seen no convincing evidence at the DNA level that pandemic-spawning virus SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered. 'It doesn't mean that that kind of data won't emerge in the future. It just means that, at that moment in time, there was no data to support it,' he said.
Evidence is stronger that the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19 emerged naturally and that it's possible that the highly contagious virus was released from the Wuhan lab, he said then.
While Baric has not made himself available recently to answer questions about his research, a 2021 News & Observer Tar Heel of the Year profile detailed much of his personal and scientific background.
Baric grew up in New Jersey and attended N.C. State University on an athletic scholarship as a swimmer. He earned a bachelor's degree in zoology there, followed by a doctorate in microbiology.
He met his wife while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California, where he focused on coronaviruses. They raised four children.
Baric joined the faculty at UNC in 1986, where he built his lab studying coronaviruses. After the pandemic hit in 2020, it was one of the first places in the U.S. to receive a sample of SARS-CoV-2 to begin conducting tests.
Baric and his lab had been testing mRNA-based vaccines against other coronaviruses before the pandemic with promising results. Baric and other scientists used the data to help develop vaccines to fight COVID-19. His lab also produced genetically modified mice for COVID-19 related research.
In 2021, Baric was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and received the UNC System's highest honor for faculty: the O. Max Garner Award.
He was hailed then for 'seminal' coronavirus research that aided the success of the Moderna vaccine and for his research team's studies with the biotech company Gilead Sciences that concluded the drug Remdesivir could be effective against coronaviruses.
The drug reduced deaths among some people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to published research.
But critics amplified by right-wing news organizations began spreading unproven claims that Baric's lab had a hand in creating the virus. That led to death threats against Baric and others working in the lab, a former researcher there told The N&O.
Since then UNC has received numerous requests for public records about Baric's research. Last month, the advocacy group U.S. Right to Know filed an appeal with the state to press for the release of more documents that might provide additional information on his past work with the Wuhan institute.
Baric has long been an advocate for stricter safety rules globally for labs that experiment with harmful viruses and other pathogens, according to scientists he's collaborated with.
James LeDuc is the retired director of the Galveston National Laboratory, one of the largest active biocontainment facilities in the United States. Starting in 2015, he and Baric met with Chinese researchers and officials roughly every other year to help them develop biosafety research protocols, LeDuc said.
'Our goal was to engage with them, share our best practices with them and also talk about the science that's being done in these laboratories,' LeDuc said.
Baric and Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist, in March co-authored a New York Times opinion piece about the risks of performing experiments in labs that do not operate at the highest levels of biosafety and cited work done previously at the Wuhan lab.
The World Health Organization should take the lead in clarifying biosafety standards that all nations should follow, they argued.
'He's a superb scientist,' Lipkin said of Baric, who he described as a close friend during an interview with The N&O this week. 'I trust him implicitly and explicitly.'
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