ground. that leads us to our current problem with contagion, which is where this started. is it a fair criticism to say that you were dismissive of the lab theory early on and that now you are more open to it, and if it is fair, why did you change? >> it's not entirely fair, chris. you know, when this virus first emerged, all of us at nih were deeply engaged in studying its genome, its letters and its sequence, to try to understand what its connection was with previous viruses. we could see it was a bat virus, it looked a lot like one that had been found in a cave in china seven or eight years earlier. but it had a lot of differences. then the theory began to be put forward, maybe it's human engineered, maybe it's an intention bioweapon that has been put together with the intention of killing people. that theory really didn't hold up. you could look at the letters of the rna code and say, no human would have come up with this. that was rather widely spread. the idea that it might have been