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I probably visited more headquarters offices of more discounters than anybody else—ever. I would just show up and say, “Hi, I’m Sam Walton from Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve got a few stores out there, and I’d like to visit with Mr. So-and-So”—whoever the head of the company was—“about his business.” And as often as not, they’d let me in, maybe out of curiosity, and I’d ask lots
Sam Walton
Sam Walton and John Huey
“It’s a late birthday present. I had the idea when I was living with Ray, and it was such a good one that I was really annoyed that we weren’t together anymore. Maybe that’s why I came back. Are you pleased?” she says. She’s been out with a couple of people for a drink after work, and she’s a bit squiffy.
including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses, as part of the international effort to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by predicting how it might emerge. The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.” These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan Province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. But what caught the eye of the US officials was this line: “Cell entry studies demonstrated that three newly identified SARSr-CoVs with different S protein sequences are all able to use human ACE2 as the receptor, further exhibiting the close relationship between strains in this cave and [the original 2002–3] SARS-CoV.” The ACE2 receptor is an enzyme attached to the cell membranes in the lungs, heart, arteries, kidneys, and intestines. It was the primary entry point for the original SARS coronavirus when infecting human lungs, because of a rare, simple, and exquisitely effective compatibility between the virus and the human body: the S protein in the virus linked with the ACE2 receptor in the lung cells of the human victims, allowing the virus to inject genetic material into the host cell, where the DNA replicates and then moves on to infect other cells. Now, these Wuhan scientists presented a paper showing they had found three new viruses that could do the same thing. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the US diplomats cared about was that three new viruses had been discovered that had been found to be potentially dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they were largely unfamiliar.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
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