“It was identical.” It was the final nail, Kamil says: “I was duped.” Five days later, at a restaurant named R+D Kitchen, Kamil says he noticed Bogner had the same voice-with a hint of a German accent-as Meyers. On 24 December 2022, when Kamil was again in Los Angeles, Meyers wrote that he would be “lucky this time around”: Kamil would have a chance to meet Bogner, along with GISAID in-house lawyer Ben Branda, in Santa Monica. But when Kamil confronted Meyers, he denied that was the case. But Meyers never seemed keen.Įventually, Kamil reached a bizarre conclusion: Meyers didn’t really exist, and it was Bogner he had been communicating with. Kamil offered to come to Santa Monica to meet Meyers on one of his trips to see his parents in Los Angeles, where they lived. “I did ask though, first □.” Sometimes Bogner emailed Kamil about a topic he was discussing with Meyers at that very moment. “I used Peter’s account as writing on my little gadget was too treacherous,” was the explanation Meyers gave in one case. Emails he sent to Meyers were sometimes answered from Bogner’s email account. Over time, things got a little weird, Kamil says. Meyers was born in Germany and living in Santa Monica, California, just like Bogner, whom he would call “our big boss” and “the Big Cheese.” Meyers said he had previously worked at Time Warner and had changed jobs after his boss at that company, Peter Bogner, launched GISAID in 2008. The two often exchanged emails and talked on the phone, sometimes for hours, about the pandemic and data sharing-but also about music, beer, and Saturday Night Live. Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says he quickly struck up a friendly relationship with a Steven Meyers, who used a email address. When Jeremy Kamil started to sequence samples of the rapidly spreading pandemic coronavirus in the spring of 2020, it was clear where he should deposit the genetic data: in GISAID, a long-running database for influenza genomes that had established itself as the go-to repository for SARS-CoV-2 as well. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 380, Issue 6643.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |