| One of the enduring questions around the coronavirus pandemic is what triggered it, an issue now mired in geopolitical intrigue and scientific speculation. Finding an answer is critical to helping the world understand what hit us, and making sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, the answers have been hard to come by. The Chinese government has resisted giving outside experts unfettered access to its laboratories and public health information, while others, including U.S. politicians, have leveled undocumented claims that the pathogen may have been maliciously created inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For the first time, a foreign scientist who was working inside the institute's highest level biocontainment lab is sharing her experience on the ground, just as Covid-19 was starting to emerge. Danielle Anderson, now at the University of Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, paints a picture of a highly-regulated and tightly-run facility, with extensive protocols in place to ensure safety.  Danielle Anderson Photographer: James Bugg/Bloomberg More significantly, Anderson says neither she nor anyone she knew was infected in November 2019, or the following month when many of her collaborators attended a scientific gathering in Singapore. Given the way coronavirus spreads, and the pace of the outbreak in Wuhan at the end of the year, the chances are high that it would have proliferated within the facility had anyone there been infected. While Anderson rules out any chance that the pathogen was man-made and released intentionally, she does allow that it's within the realm of possibility that it could have escaped from the lab, as dangerous viruses have made their way out of other labs in the past. The only hope the world has at getting an answer to what caused the worst pandemic in a century is cooperation and transparency from politicians and scientists, in China and around the world. The objective must be the search for answers, not the allocation of blame. Listening with an open mind to experts like Danielle Anderson share their experiences is a good place to start.—Michelle Fay Cortez | 
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