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Controversial genetic research which is suspected to have created the Covid virus should be banned under the equivalent of nuclear test treaties, a leading Tory MP has demanded.
Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke out amid growing concern in the international scientific community about 'Gain of Function' experiments, which aim to make animal viruses more transmissible, and able to infect humans.
Documents leaked last month confirmed revelations published by The Mail on Sunday over the past 18 months about the secret – and risky – work being carried out by Chinese scientists in Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak first took hold in late 2019.
Details of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency showed that scientists in America and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology requested funding to create entirely new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic code of closely related strains. The Wuhan site was one of just five laboratories in the world carrying out this Gain of Function research.
Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke out amid growing concern in the international scientific community about 'Gain of
