Andrew Rambaut: Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Guessing the income from Chinese students there is similar to the above so won't rake over that.

The interesting thing about Rambaut is that he is a staunch advocate of genomic surveillance, which is DNA profiling technology.

Apart from the virus originating at the seafood market through pangolins article, his most recent published paper in Nature Medicine is: Pandemics: spend on surveillance, not prediction. In this paper he praises another Nature article which states:

"Surveillance and discovery efforts are bearing fruit in chronic disorders and in studies of normal physiology... What is anticipated, although not yet achieved, is the development of systems that aggregate data about the use of medical services, data about prescription and over-the-counter drug purchases, and other chatter that could promote situational awareness."

However, other dissenting reports point out, "Across the world, DNA databases that could be used for state-level surveillance are steadily growing. The most striking case is in China. Here police are using a national DNA database along with other kinds of surveillance data, such as from video cameras and facial scanners, to monitor the minority Muslim Uyghur population in the western province of Xinjiang."

Now here's the thing. Guess who the co-authors on Rambaut's genomic surveillance paper are?

None other than Edwards C. Holmes and Kristian G. Andersen (who we'll get to next) - both co-authors of the article endorsing China's version of the conronavirus origin - both big-time recipients of Chinese money.

The three of them frequently collaborate. Their stuff seems to get automatically printed in Nature - the top Science rag in the world. In theory, that makes our guys the world's pre-eminent think-tank on genomic surveillance.