Talk:Kristian G. Andersen

covid

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-covid-origins-investigation-hhs-investigation 2600:8804:6600:45:18B8:3B70:FD6B:6A33 (talk) 22:36, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Some Proposed Changes

Introduction

Kristian G. Andersen (born 1978) is a Danish evolutionary biologist and professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. He is also the Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Andersen’s research utilizes next-generation sequencing, field work, experimentation, and computational biology to study the emergence, evolution, and spread of viruses and other human pathogens. He heads the Andersen Lab, which has the stated aim to “transform outbreak response and change the way we develop countermeasures.”

Education

Andersen obtained a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology from Aarhus University in 2004. He then went on to pursue a PhD in immunology from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which he completed in 2009. In 2014, Andersen performed postdoctoral work in computational genomics at Harvard University and the Broad Institute.

Career

Andersen’s multi-disciplinary approach has been applied to studying the evolution and spread of several pathogens including SARS-CoV-2, Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and Lassa virus. He conducts collaborative research through participating in multiple international science coalitions, including the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), the Center for Viral Systems Biology (CViSB), and the West African Research Network for Infectious Diseases (WARN-ID).

As a research scientist at the Broad Institute, Andersen’s work provided insights into the emergence and transmission of Ebola virus during the 2014-2015 epidemic in West Africa. Using genomic surveillance data, Andersen and collaborators in VHFC dated the origin of the outbreak in Sierra Leone and identified transmission patterns of the virus. Wired Magazine listed the findings of this study as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2014.

In 2015, Andersen joined Scripps Research as an Assistant Professor and was the first author on a study describing the origin and spread of Lassa virus across West Africa, which also showed how Lassa virus might be an ancient evolutionary force that has shaped the human genome.

In 2017 and 2018, Andersen and collaborators published several studies illustrating how Zika virus emerged in the Americas and determined that local transmission had started in the United States several months before the initial detection of Zika virus.

In 2018, Andersen was promoted to Associate Professor at Scripps Research and became a Principal Investigator for the Center for Viral Systems Biology. In 2019, he became Vice President of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium. In 2020, Andersen was promoted to Professor and became a Principal Investigator for WARN-ID.

COVID-19

Andersen is a prominent figure among an international team of scientists working to understand the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2020, Andersen became a member of the “Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats,” which was established by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to help inform the federal government of emerging infectious diseases.

He was the first author of a 2020 study on the origin of COVID-19 that Altmetric ranked as one of the most influential scientific papers ever published, specifically as the third most-discussed article out of the nearly 23 million research outputs tracked by the site as of January 2023. The study, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, utilized comparative genomics to analyze the features of SARS-CoV-2, and concluded that the virus was not engineered. Andersen and his colleagues initially suspected that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, however, after additional analyses and an accumulation of scientific evidence, Andersen and his co-authors concluded that the hypothesis was unfounded.

In 2022, Andersen and collaborators published two studies showing that SARS-CoV-2 likely first spread to humans from animals in two separate transmission events at the Huanan market in Wuhan, China based on spatial epidemiological data and environmental analyses, as well as [sequences] of SARS-CoV-2.

Another area of focus by Andersen lab researchers in the study of SARS-CoV-2 is tracking the emergence of viral variants through sampling wastewater. A 2022 study from the group concludes that wastewater sampling can determine the genetic mixture of SARS-CoV-2 variants in the community and detect new variants up to 14 days before they start showing up in clinical sampling.

Software Tools for Investigating Infectious Diseases

Andersen’s lab has developed several highly used open-source software packages for infectious disease analysis, which have been utilized by U.S. government agencies such as the CDC and FDA. These software packages include iVar, which is used to assemble virus genomes, and Freyja, which is used to analyze wastewater data. In addition, together with colleagues at Scripps Research, his lab has also developed the online resource outbreak.info, which tracks SARS-CoV-2 variants using data shared through GISAID, the leading repository of sequencing data.

Awards and Honors

In 2005, Andersen was the recipient of the Carlsberg Foundation scholarship at the University of Cambridge, and he was later awarded with the postdoctoral fellowship from the same foundation in 2009. In 2008, Andersen received the Max Perutz Student prize, which recognizes outstanding work prior to the award of a PhD. Andersen was recognized with a Ray Thomas Edwards Foundation Career Development Award and as a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2016.

Laurenscripps (talk) 18:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

References

Updates to Some Proposed Changes

There is libelous information on this page currently, so my below proposed changes (truncated from above) are in an effort to make this page accurate and remove the defamatory language.

For example, the article only includes certain, pointed information about Andersen's COVID-19 research that is ordered in a particular way as to make a point. It mentions Andersen receiving an $8.9 million grant from the NIAID, subsequently after it mentions Andersen changing his stance on the virus’ origins. That point of view is subject to significant conspiracy theorizing and was recently the subject to a fact check on FactCheck.org. The way the article is written now seems to support that conspiracy.

Also, some of the information is outdated on the papers that have published.

I propose making these changes to the COVID-19 section:

COVID-19

In early 2020, Andersen became a member of the “Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats,” which was established by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to help inform the federal government of emerging infectious diseases. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Andersen and other scientists were consulted by the NIH and NIAID about the possibility of a lab leak. virus' origins. Andersen, in an email to Anthony Fauci in January 2020, told Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.

As part of the investigation, Andersen was the first author of a 2020 study on the origin of COVID-19 called The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, which concluded that the virus was not engineered. While Andersen and his colleagues initially suspected that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, after additional analyses and an accumulation of this scientific evidence, Andersen and his co-authors concluded that the hypothesis was unfounded.

However, some time later, Andersen was the lead author of the scientific paper The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, which concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus". Later that year, Andersen’s lab was awarded an $8.9 million grant by NIAID.

In a 2022 paper, Andersen concluded that animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, were most likely to be the source of the virus. In 2022, Andersen and collaborators published two studies showing that SARS-CoV-2 likely first spread to humans from animals in two separate transmission events at the Huanan market in Wuhan, China based on spatial epidemiological data and environmental analyses, as well as sequences of SARS-CoV-2.

References

Laurenscripps (talk) 20:31, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Resolved

There are a slate of proposals here and it would be difficult to adapt them all to comply with Wikipedia's guidelines, but here is what I did:

1. removed the citation and sentence to the academic paper where subject is an author, because wiki wants third-party sources
2. removed the grant info, because that is primary data and self-published
3. added the sentence sourced to the New York Times article

If you need more then come back. For anyone else here - I talk with people at Scripps sometimes because of Scripps' Wikidata engagement, and someone asked me about this. The changes I did and documented here are my idea for the quickest fix to this request. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:19, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the help here, @Bluerasberry. I had a few more requested changes - the main reasoning being that the current Wikipedia entry focuses solely on Andersen's COVID-19 work, which is only a small portion of what he/his lab focuses on. Would the below sentences suffice to put in it's own section above the COVID-19 one?

Career

Andersen studies the evolution and spread of several pathogens including SARS-CoV-2, Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus and Lassa virus.

As a postdoc at Harvard University, Andersen’s work provided insights into the emergence and transmission of Ebola virus during the 2014-2015 epidemic in West Africa (The Scientist and Wired). Using genomic surveillance data, Andersen and collaborators dated the origin of the Ebola virus outbreak in Sierra Leone and identified transmission patterns of the virus, which Wired Magazine listed as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2014 (Wired).

In 2015, Andersen joined The Scripps Research Institute as an Assistant Professor and was the first author on a study describing the origin and spread of Lassa virus across West Africa, which also showed how Lassa virus might be an ancient evolutionary force that has shaped the human genome (Nature / Note: this Nature article is not his peer-reviewed study, it's a review article written by a different author).

In 2017 and 2018, Andersen and collaborators published several studies illustrating how Zika virus emerged in the Americas and determined that local transmission had started in the United States several months before the initial detection of Zika virus (Science News). Laurenscripps (talk) 19:25, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I added some of this content in special:diff/1175077837/1175237237. The second Wired source does not mention Andersen and the Nature pub only lists his work as a reference. I do think it improves the biography to note that this is a researcher active in responding to both the Western African Ebola virus epidemic and 2015–16 Zika virus epidemic, and who gave comment to the media about these things. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:13, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Newly released emails

These newly released emails and Slack messages from Kristian G. Andersen show that he privately believed a lab leak was "highly likely," even during and after he drafted a paper arguing the opposite. Let's update this article with this information in mind. Source: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-republicans/ 173.88.246.138 (talk) 04:14, 20 July 2023 (UTC)