Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at theWuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located inJiangxia District,Wuhan.[8] On her resume, Shi mentioned receiving grant funding from U.S. government sources totaling more than US$1.2 million, including $665,000 from theNational Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2019, as well as US$559,500 over the same period fromUSAID.[9]
2005
In 2005, Shi Zhengli and colleagues found that bats are the natural reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses.[10][11][12]
2008
In 2008, Shi led a research team which studied binding ofspike proteins of both natural andchimaeric SARS-like coronaviruses toACE2 receptors in human, civet and horseshoe bat cells, to determine the mechanism by which SARS may have spilled over into humans.[13][14]
2014
In 2014, Shi Zhengli collaborated on additional genetic engineering experiments led byRalph S Baric of theUniversity of North Carolina, which showed that two critical mutations that theMERS coronavirus possesses allow it to bind to the human ACE2 receptor,[15] and that SARS had the potential to re-emerge from coronaviruses circulating in bat populations in the wild.[16] Shi and her colleague Cui Jie led a team which sampled thousands ofhorseshoe bats throughout China.
2017
In 2017, they published their findings, indicating that all the genetic components of theSARS coronavirus existed in a bat population inXiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan.[1] While no single bat harbored the exact strain of virus which caused the2002–2004 SARS outbreak, genetic analysis showed that different strains often mix, suggesting that the human version likely emerged from a combination of the strains present in the bat population.[1] Shi's discoveries on the origin of SARS earned her international recognition.[17]
Also in 2017, Shi and colleagues at WIV published a paper — about an experiment in which they created new hybrid bat coronaviruses by recombining the DNA of several existing ones — including at least one that was almost able to jump to humans — to study their transmissibility and virulence in human cells.[18]
2019
In March 2019, Shi published an article titled "Bat Coronaviruses in China" in the journalViruses, in which she and her co-authors warned that it is "highly likely that a future SARS or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China."[19]
2020
During theCOVID-19 pandemic, Shi and other institute scientists formed an expert group to researchSevere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).[20][21] In February 2020, researchers led by Shi Zhengli published an article inNature titled, "A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin", finding that SARS-CoV-2 is in the same family as SARS, and that it has 96.2%genome overlap with the most closely related known coronavirus,RaTG13.[22] In February 2020, her team published a paper inCell Research showing thatremdesivir andchloroquine inhibited the virusin vitro, and applied for a patent for the drug in China on behalf of the WIV.[23][24][25] This caused conflict with an American pharmaceutical firm that had also applied for a patent.[26] Shi co-authored a paper labelling the virus as the firstDisease X.[27]
In February 2020, theSouth China Morning Post reported that Shi's decade-long work to build up one of the world's largest databases of bat-related viruses gave the scientific community a "head start" in understanding the virus.[28] TheSCMP also reported that Shi was the focus of personal attacks in Chinese social media who claimed the WIV was the source of the virus, leading Shi to strongly affirm that the outbreak "has nothing to do with the lab."[28] In a March 2020 interview withScientific American, where she was called China's "Bat Woman",[29] Shi said "Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks", and "We must find them before they find us."[2]
2021
In June 2021 the New York Times noted that her research on coronaviruses at WIV had put her at the center of a heated controversy regarding the pandemic. Shi argued to the Times that her genetic engineering experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make viruses more dangerous, but instead to see if she could modify them to be able to jump host species (such as from bats to humans).[18] On 31 July,Science Magazine published an interview with Shi in which she commented "to date, there is zero infection of all staff and students in our institute."[30] Asked byScience why the WIV conducts coronavirus experiments in stringentBSL-4 labs when most other scientists work with coronaviruses under less stringent BSL-2 or BSL-3 conditions, Shi explained that her group also used BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories for their coronavirus research, but that they had begun to use BSL-4 laboratories per government regulations after the pandemic.[31][32][30]
Shi,Peter Daszak, andLinfa Wang are three scientists featured in a 2025 documentary by Swiss filmmakerChristian Frei calledBlame. The film focuses on how misinformation and conspiracy theories spread about the COVID-19 pandemic.[33][34]
Service and honours
Shi is a member of the Virology Committee of the Chinese Society for Microbiology. She is editor-in-chief ofVirologica Sinica,[35] theChinese Journal of Virology, and theJournal of Fishery Sciences of China.
^石正丽：与病毒相伴的女科学家.sciencenet.cn (in Chinese (China)). 10 March 2009.Archived from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved6 February 2019.1964年5月，石正丽出生于河南省西峡县。
^Lu Wei (鲁伟); Liu Zheng (刘铮) (10 March 2009).石正丽：与病毒相伴的女科学家.sciencenet.cn (in Chinese).Archived from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved26 January 2020.
^Zhang Juan (张隽); Guan Xiyan (关喜艳) (24 January 2020).石正丽等13位专家组队 攻关新型肺炎研究.People's Daily (in Chinese). Retrieved26 January 2020.
^Cohen, Jon (1 February 2020)."Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak's origins".Science.Archived from the original on 3 February 2020. Retrieved4 February 2020.team led by Shi Zheng-Li, a coronavirus specialist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported on 23 January on bioRxiv that 2019-nCoV's sequence was 96.2% similar to a bat virus and had 79.5% similarity to the coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease whose initial outbreak was also in China more than 15 years ago.
^Cohen, Jon (24 July 2020). "'Trump owes us an apology.' Chinese scientist at the center of COVID-19 origin theories speaks out".Science.doi:10.1126/science.abd9835.
