What are behind Ralph Baric's deep ties with Fort Detrick?

People are seen near the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States, on Sept. 6, 2021. The total number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 40 million on Monday, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Ralph Baric, a professor of the U.S. University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, is a longtime coronavirus researcher. For one thing, he has long been well known for his technique of "reverse genetics" in coronavirus; for another, he has conducted many coronavirus-related studies with U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) based in Fort Detrick, Maryland, as well as the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick (IRF-Frederick), as scientific papers have shown. Both have long been engaged in research involving high-risk viruses; and both have spotty laboratory safety records, based on reports from local media Frederick News-Post and New York Times.

In 2006, the paper "Cynomolgus Macaque as an Animal Model for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" published on the PLOS Medicine website showed that Baric's team and the institute had been doing researches on SARS. Besides, more evidences have revealed Baric's connections with Fort Detrik labs.

Ralph Baric masters the special technique of "reverse genetics" in coronavirus, with which Baric can not only cultivate a living virus based on the gene fragments of the coronaviruses, but also modify the genes of the coronaviruses and create new ones to explore the harm of the viruses to humans, according to the MIT Technology Review. The paper titled "Reverse Genetics in full-length infectious cDNA of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus" which expounds the power of this technique, was published in PNAS, with Ralph Baric and the USAMRIID as co-authors. They applied for a patent for this achievement and co-own the patent after the application was approved in 2007.