Transcript segment

Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted), pp.109-110 · baric_ti:utt:00945

Date: 2026-04-10 09:00 (day precision)
Type: transcript segment · interview
recipient: Christina Salazar, Harry Kazenoff, David T. Lambeth III, William Henderson, Clark Ervin, Jake Greenberg
speaker: Ralph S. Baric
Topics: Furin cleavage site and molecular features

I mean, do you have records that I could look at? I'd be glad to look at them. And I'm sorry, but again, I guess the other issues you need to put this in context are, Kristian Andersen, in the Proximity [sic] Origins paper, made a pretty articulate argument why he thought it was not engineered. And it's based on, one, you have to have a molecular clone that would be identical or DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com nearly identical to SARS2, which did not exist. It certainly did not exist in my lab. The second thing you needed to do is to explain its weird insertion into the spike of the S1/S2 boundary. And it's an out-of-frame insertion that puts in four residues, when in reality there's only three residues that need to be introduced into it if you wanted to make a furin cleavage site there. And so why are there four residues there? Why is it out of frame? That doesn't make sense. So why is there a proline residue? Prolines cause kinks in proteins, so that can be very disruptive.

In context

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2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

No.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

So no one from the government either raised this with you?
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

No. Not that I'm aware of.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

Okay. I mean, it is --
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric

I mean, do you have records that I could look at? I'd be glad to look at them. And I'm sorry, but again, I guess the other issues you need to put this in context are, Kristian Andersen, in the Proximity [sic] Origins paper, made a pretty articulate argument why he thought it was not engineered. And it's based on, one, you have to have a molecular clone that would be identical or DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com nearly identical to SARS2, which did not exist. It certainly did not exist in my lab. The second thing you needed to do is to explain its weird insertion into the spike of the S1/S2 boundary. And it's an out-of-frame insertion that puts in four residues, when in reality there's only three residues that need to be introduced into it if you wanted to make a furin cleavage site there. And so why are there four residues there? Why is it out of frame? That doesn't make sense. So why is there a proline residue? Prolines cause kinks in proteins, so that can be very disruptive.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

So you thought that the Proximal Origins argument was well articulated?
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

In terms of the furin cleavage site, yes. And they argued that the most likely event was a recombination event, I think with a virus called HKU9, that had identical region.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

The paper, generally.
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

Oh, the paper, generally, I disagreed with the idea that you could completely rule out the lab leak, and actually wrote a commentator, commentory piece -- what's the word?

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