This was an age far more gung-ho than our own about taking artefacts, creatures and even living human beings from their contexts, and putting them on display for the entertainment and edification of the masses. Prince Albert’s 1851 Great Exhibition had displayed technological innovations alongside consumer goods and looted colonial treasures, setting off a trend for World Fairs that served both in person and via print media as a kind of populist catalogue of all there is to know about the world. Museums of all kinds flourished over the same era as standard-bearers for culture across Europe and the New World.

But is it intrinsically wrong to display things — or people — in this way? Even in 1906, caging a living human in a monkey enclosure prompted outrage. Since then, though, our discomfort with the objectification this implies has grown much more intense. “What’s the point of museums?” asked the Wellcome Collection recently on Twitter. This was a preamble to announcing the closure of the Wellcome Trust’s Medicine Man exhibition, a large collection of medical artefacts from around the world that had been amassed by the American pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The announcement prompted a furious response, denouncing the move as “infantile and anti-intellectual” and modern museums as “vandalising themselves”. And it’s true that the economic and political power that allowed museum collections to be amassed has come under revisionist scrutiny more recently — as has the worldview that gave rise to museums as a cultural form. The turning-point was the First World War, the conflagration that destroyed high imperial Europe, and set in motion the disintegration of its empires in favour of the Pax Americana we’ve all inhabited since.

More than a century after that hinge moment, today the worldview and geopolitical order that amassed most of our museum collections are denounced as “problematic” — and increasingly subject to “dismantling”. But rather than merely complain, yet again, about “woke” culture war being waged in museums, we should see that the assault this implies on an entire worldview — Enlightenment objectivity — is not without justification. Nor is the “dismantling” of this worldview something that can be halted. But the ongoing assault on what’s left of our 19th-century cultural heritage is less a reflection of moral progress in any absolute sense, than of shifts in the underlying power relations that gave rise to museums in the first place.

In their classical 19th-century form, museums and exhibitions are the quintessential “pop” expression of the Enlightenment worldview. To present something as an exhibit in a museum makes a statement about that thing, and what we can know about it.

It says: I, the curator, am in command of what’s knowable about this thing, which you observe from a distance while absorbing facts about it. A museum’s traditional spatial arrangements underline the core empiricist relation between observer and observed. You aren’t free to touch or use or otherwise form a tactile relationship with the artefacts on display. Instead, visitors are invited to observe exhibits from a distance, while absorbing curated facts about them. By extension, the museum implies, this is how civilised people relate to the world in general.

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And to make sense in this context, the exhibit must be removed from the network of social relationships that produced it, and rendered as a thing: a discrete object. So what, you might say. What’s wrong with looking at things, in order to learn about the world? But the revulsion occasioned by Ota Benga’s appearance in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 suggests that it isn’t just “woke” modern-day curators who sense that something violent, or violating, happens when an “exhibit” is removed from its social context and placed on display: a literal objectification, made only starker when it happens to a living person.

This perspective argues further that it’s not just the act of turning artefacts into exhibits that both enacts, and conceals, violence. And this core of the woke critique of this social form is the same as its critique of rationalism more generally: that it obscures its own power relations.

For even when they’re presented as high-minded repositories of knowledge, under the bonnet museums hold the residue of much else besides. Museums encode a hierarchical power relation between observer and exhibit, and another secondly between curator and visitor.  In their 19th-century form, museums also collated the edited highlights of the entire civilisational order of high colonial Europe, while downplaying the real-world power, money and sometimes bloody violence that went into creating that order. In his 2020 polemic The Brutish Museums, Pitt-Rivers curator Dan Hicks argues that far from being a benign side-effect of imperialism, museums are in fact inextricable from that violence — and that for as long as museums exist, they’re still perpetuating it.

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Hicks cites as a central example the Benin bronzes, which were looted from a destroyed city in what is now Nigeria, following the Punitive Expedition in 1897, during which Benin was destroyed and its inhabitants massacred. Though today negotiations are ongoing about returning them to Nigeria, some 900 of the bronzes remain in the British Museum, where they were displayed for many years with little commentary on their provenance.

The British Museum is also under ongoing pressure to return the Greek sculptures taken from the Parthenon between 1801 and 1812 by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin. Their removal was controversial even at the time, and Elgin eventually backed out of the controversy by selling the sculptures to the British government. Like the Benin bronzes, they now reside in the British Museum, where they have become a bone of diplomatic contention between Britain and Greece.

So museums serve as powerful sociocultural force-fields. They collate objects taken sometimes forcibly, while entrenching some ideas as “facts” and normalising the invisibility of other, equally salient ideas, along lines that align with the dominant political order. But the woke critique tends to stop here, rather than noticing that this cuts both ways. Wherever we find museums — or their exhibits — obviously under attack in the modern world, this tends to correspond to wider shifts in power relations; for example modern Greece has been complaining about removal of the Elgin Marbles since the state was founded in the 19th century. But Greek diplomats didn’t start seriously campaigning for their return until some time after the collapse of Britain as a global geopolitical hegemon.

Meanwhile, Dan Hicks has provided a furious text to accompany the Wellcome Collection’s exhibit of Jeremy Bentham’s skin, in which Hicks denounces the way museums “recentred the white cis-male body” and demands that curators “Dismantle Wellcome’s enduring colonialism, its white infrastructure”. But what this perhaps ignores is that we could dispose of Wellcome’s entire collection of artefacts, and doing so wouldn’t make the smallest dent in the Wellcome Trust’s contribution to the objectifying worldview at the heart of woke critiques of museums as such.

Henry Wellcome made his money in pharmaceutical innovation, a success founded in the scientific paradigm: a worldview even more quintessentially objectifying and rationalist than the architecture of a traditional museum. Museums extend this worldview beyond the sciences, implying that this is what “learning” is: a detached, observing consciousness standing at a little distance from an object whose meaning is contained on a little sign. And if you were taking serious aim at the “violence” encoded in that rationalism, you would have to be willing to sacrifice all of the natural sciences too.

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But the Wellcome Trust isn’t doing that. The rationalism encoded in scientific research is still generously funded by Wellcome Trust grants, even as the same worldview is loudly “contextualised” in the same foundation’s museum exhibits. So regardless of how loudly the surface colouring is denounced by Dan Hicks, the institution’s plumbing and associated worldview have been left more or less intact, with little more than a change of surface colouring.

Objectors might point out that the war on science is indeed happening in some contexts, for example where Scientific American and Nature publish pieces arguing that “sex is a spectrum” (it really isn’t a spectrum). But it’s also true that scientists remember there are two sexes again the moment there’s money to be made from the fertility industry.

And this, ultimately, is why woke museum revisionism excites anger: the sense that power relations are less being “dismantled” than redecorated, in the name of a new and just-as-mystified set of power relations. And we can infer from this that calling progressives “anti-culture” is to underestimate this worldview.

Some of those challenging the objectification baked into the museum format are no doubt genuine in their wish to give voice to marginalised perspectives. But no matter how you rail against the past, how many angry footnotes you add to an exhibit, or even if you abolish museums altogether, you can’t really undo historic power relations. Nor does rescuing “objectified” artefacts even necessarily reinstate them in the context from which they were taken. Ota Benga ended up being “rescued” by Black Baptists, who took him to Virginia and gave him a room and board. But he was never happy living in a house, and would often sleep in the woods. Homesick for the Congo, eventually he built a bonfire, burned the European clothes in which he’d been dressed, and shot himself.

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By the same token, while the artefacts in the Wellcome Collection aren’t sentient human beings, it’s not as though being “contextualised” afresh in light of the new morality will make any substantive difference to their previous history, or result in their restitution wherever they came from. Nor would it make any difference to the wider paradigm of scientific rationalism whose advance continues to be funded by the legacy of Henry Wellcome. All that would change would be the aesthetics that decorate that advance.

Those who set the limits on what can or can’t be “problematised” know this. They will merrily smash every legacy of high European imperialism, in the name of ending oppression — except where that legacy is still useful. And this is not any kind of “dismantling’”; it’s simply new owners redecorating an economic and political engine, which will go on operating largely untouched. In other words: it’s not moral progress, it’s just a change of management.

The board members included Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, alongside George F Gao, director-general of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser. This was not surprising: Farrar is an expert in tropical diseases as well as head of Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body and a sure-footed political operator in the world of public health. His £29bn foundation also helped cover costs for the board.

They were, of course, proved right almost instantly. Sadly, their report came too late to achieve its valiant aim of stepping up preparation for a pandemic given the speed of Covid-19’s spread from Wuhan last year. Yet their words were astonishingly prescient. And among the risks highlighted by these experts were the technological advances that “allow for disease-creating micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”, warning how their accidental release might be more devastating than a natural epidemic: “Accidental or deliberate events caused by high-impact respiratory pathogens pose global catastrophic biological risks.”

History shows that labs can leak. So it is strange that Farrar, like his two expert friends, has played such a pivotal role in stifling suggestions that this new virus might have come from a laboratory rather than emerged through natural zoonotic transmission from animals. Spike: The Virus v The People — his book co-authored with Anjana Ahuja from the Financial Times — is a rather self-promotional work, lambasting the politicians he has been advising as a member of Sage for their failures in handling the disease, although his defence of publication seems valid. “Everyone needs to learn the lessons, scientists included,” he writes. “We only honour the dead by pledging to learn from the mistakes that cost them their lives. Protecting lives, and our way of life, is infinitely more important than protecting reputations.”

Such was his fury with government actions last summer that Farrar sent a memo to colleagues about the need to “be honest and transparent”. So why does he decline to answer questions about his own actions in early days of this pandemic that led to the crushing of discussion over possibility that it might be the result of some kind of incident involving one of Wuhan’s laboratories? These include Wuhan Institute of Virology, the biggest bat coronavirus research unit in Asia that was carrying out risky experiments and had known safety concerns. 

“It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab” writes Farrar — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. Many others had similar suspicions — and in recent weeks, such concerns have started being taken more seriously. 

Yet Farrar was a central figure behind two landmark documents published by influential science journals that played a key role in shutting down discussion of the lab leak hypothesis by branding it conspiracy theory. These statements, signed and promoted by leading figures in the scientific establishment, pushed an idea that the pandemic was a natural occurrence by arguing against the plausibility of “any type of laboratory-based scenario”. Critics say this “false narrative” set back understanding of the disease for more than a year.

Although Farrar criticises some aspects of China’s cover-up in his book — including confirming my report last June that scientists there had sequenced the Sars-CoV-2 genome in December 2019 before the world even knew about the disease — he went out of his way to praise Beijing in the early weeks of the pandemic. “China deserves great credit”, he gushed on Twitter in mid-January. Two weeks later he claimed it was “setting a new standard for outbreak response and deserves all our thanks”. Yet the reality was a Communist dictatorship that silenced doctors trying to warn citizens, covered up human transmission and allowed Chinese New Year festivities to carry on despite this entailing the largest annual migration of people on the planet. 

As the Wellcome boss says, “speed matters perhaps more than anything else in disease outbreaks”. Certainly things moved fast the day after that tweet when Fauci was sent an article in Science magazine examining how researchers were trying to unravel the virus origins. It detailed work by British scientist Peter Daszak and his friend Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in sampling thousands of bats and finding 500 new coronaviruses. The article discussed controversies over risky “gain of function” experiments, including mention of a 2015 paper by Shi and a US expert on modification of a Sars-like bat virus to boost infectivity to humans.

Emails released through freedom of information requests show Fauci instantly circulated the article to US officials and contacted Farrar saying it was “of interest to the current discussion”. The Wellcome boss then set up a conference call for the pair of them with 11 other experts from around the world, warning their discussions were “in total confidence” and information “not to be shared” without prior agreement. Farrar also sent Fauci a link to an article on ZeroHedge, a financial blog, that tied a Wuhan researcher to the virus outbreak. The site was banned the next day from Twitter — a move the social media firm later admitted was “an error”.

We do not know full details of what was discussed on the 1 February call since many of the emails were redacted and Farrar refused to tell me when I asked his office. We do know there were discussions that day over contacting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, with fears he might “prevaricate” — and that two days later the Ethiopian doctor made a call to “combat the spread of rumours and misinformation” and for countries “to work together in a spirit of solidarity”. 

We also know that five days after the conference call, Daszak began circulating the draft of a statement published later that month in The Lancet. This letter, signed by 27 global experts including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues, condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. Later it emerged that Daszak had organised this missive, telling signatories they must ensure it was not “identifiable” as coming from one person or organisation so it was seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. 

This Lancet statement played a key role in stifling discussion of a possible lab leak. Such was its influence that Facebook reportedly used it to block discussion of the idea — leading to one of my articles being labelled a conspiracy theory. Yet four signatories have since said the hypothesis merits investigation — with one now convinced Sars-CoV-2 arose from a “sloppy” researcher. Strangely, Farrar does not mention the Lancet letter in his book. And there is only brief mention of Daszak, saying he should not have joined the WHO study team in Wuhan after dismissing the lab origin — including in a Guardian article attacking “conspiracy theories”, an article that Farrar promoted on social media. “Always worth reading @PeterDaszak” the Wellcome chief tweeted.

Among the participants in Farrar’s call were four of the five eminent experts who published a commentary six weeks later in Nature Medicine entitled “The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2”. This quintet — with lead author Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research institute in California — stated firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This statement in a world-renowned journal, which has been accessed 5.5 million times, further depressed debate of alternative theories on the origins, despite being challenged by a few brave voices in the scientific community.

Yet the release of thousands of Fauci emails last month revealed that Andersen, when sent the Science article at the end of January, admitted a close look at the genetic sequences of Sars-CoV-2 showed that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered” and that other experts agreed the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. Andersen later explained this showed “clear example of the scientific process” — then deleted his combative account on Twitter. 

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Now things become even more perplexing with the release of Farrar’s book. He admits he was terrified by the “huge coincidence” of a coronavirus cropping up in “a city with a superlab” and the geo-political implications of a leak at a time of US-Sino tensions. “This was a brand-new virus that seemingly sprang from nowhere,” he says. “Except that this pathogen had surfaced in Wuhan, a city with a BSL-4 virology lab which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses.”

The new coronavirus “might not even be that novel at all”, he thought. “It might have been engineered years ago, put in a freezer, and then taken out more recently by someone who decided to work on it again. And then, maybe, there was … an accident?” He was so concerned that he confided in Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the Wellcome Trust chair and a former head of the MI5 intelligence service, who told him to start taking precautions such as avoiding putting things in emails and using a burner phone for key conversations.

So what changed his mind so firmly he started signing letters and tweeting about alleged conspiracy theories? When I asked Farrar to share the evidence that set his mind at rest, he pointed to the Nature Medicine article. Yet his office told me later he helped “convene” these five authors. They also insist that “the weight of available data and scientific evidence continues to point towards zoonotic origins”. But scientists have found no hard evidence on the pandemic origins, despite testing 80,000 samples on animals to find a natural link, while China has made increasingly ludicrous claims over the origins as well as covering up the outbreak, lying over the date of first cases and taking offline Wuhan’s key database of samples and viral sequences.

Now Farrar writes that at the end of January Andersen “confessed” that three things alarmed him about the new virus: its receptor binding domain, which attaches to infect a host cell and “looked too good to be true — like a perfect key for entering human cells”; the furin cleavage site, not found on similar categories of bat coronaviruses and something expected “if someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific suit of genetic material from elsewhere and inserting it”; and a scientific paper using this technique to modify the original Sars virus behind the 2003 outbreak that “looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory”.

Before the call on 1 February, Farrar says Andersen was “60 to 70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, while Australian virologist Eddie Holmes was “80% sure this thing had come out of a lab”. Patrick Vallance, Britain’s chief scientific officer who joined the call, tipped off intelligence agencies about their concerns. But others on the hour-long call argued the new virus “was more convincingly explained, scientifically, as a natural spillover than a laboratory event”. Afterwards, the participants swapped notes but Farrar remained torn on the origins. “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release I am honestly at 50,” he emailed Fauci. “My guess is this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab — and I suspect that is unlikely.”

Anderson told him that he suddenly realised he might be the person who proved the new virus came from a lab. “I didn’t necessarily want to be that person,” he said. “When you make big claims like that you had better be sure that you can conclude something is based on evidence and not on speculation.” So according to Farrar, then five experts wrestled with the evidence and, the following month, they declared in Nature Medicine that Sars-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. 

They accepted the virus had strange properties that made it so virulent. But Farrar says their conclusion was based on the fact that it attaches to human cells so differently from the first Sars while also unlike “any of the known viruses used in gain of function research”. This was said to make “deliberate manipulation an implausible scenario” on grounds that “the most methodical way of conjuring up a nightmare virus would be to take a virus that is already a known quantity and crank up its infectivity”. They offered the circumstantial evidence that RaTG13, the closest known coronavirus to Sars-CoV-2, had different binding mechanisms — yet similar ones were found on pangolins, so “the ingredients…were out in the wild. They did not need to have escaped, or been unleashed, from a containment lab.”

This is a reasonable argument — but it is not firm evidence. Nor is it any more convincing than the idea of a leak. Not least since Shi has admitted to collecting eight more Sars-like viruses alongside RaTG13 in southern China that have not been shared, along with all those samples on the Wuhan Institute of Virology database that was mysteriously taken offline in September 2019. Shi was also forced to clarify the Nature paper she wrote on RaTG13 since she did not disclose its name had been changed from another virus identified in a previous paper. This masked a link to three miners who died from a strange respiratory disease caught while clearing out bat droppings in a cave hundreds of miles from Wuhan that was used by Shi and her colleagues to collect samples from bats.

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There is another weird twist to Farrar’s story. He writes how the quintet published their findings in Nature Medicine “after the addition of new information, endless analyses, intense discussions and many sleepless nights” and agonising over the information. But two months ago Robert Garry, one of the authors, was interviewed about their efforts. “We looked at the possibility of lab creation,” he said. “We gave it every unbiased look. Our conclusion was it was very unlikely that it was a constructed virus cobbled together somehow in the lab.” Fair enough. Yet he added that “the first draft was complete on 1 February” — which was, of course, the same day as that conference call led by Farrar.

The Fauci emails also show that three days later, Farrar sent over “a very rough first draft from Eddie and the team”, urging his American friend to keep it confidential. The email trail includes a note from Holmes — who was an adviser to Beijing’s CDC — saying he was sending a summary that would be further edited. “It’s fundamental science and completely neutral as written. Did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.” When I queried this with Holmes, he responded: “It was a restriction enzyme site followed by some sequence conservation. We soon realised this was nothing untoward.” 

On the same day, however, Andersen told another group of experts that “the data conclusively show that neither (engineering for basic research or nefarious reasons) was done”. So far from having “many sleepless nights”, these scientists seem to have changed their minds amazingly fast and reached fresh conclusions.

The following day Farrar sent another note to Fauci saying the WHO had “listened and acted” and was asking for names for a group probing “the origins and evolution” of the virus. This was, presumably, the study group that — incredibly — included Daszak, despite possible conflicts of interest and one year later delivered a report downplaying a lab leak as “extremely unlikely”, which sparked furious condemnation across the West. And, yes, which Farrar said should not have included Daszak since “it would have been better for him to have recused himself and for the WHO to have appointed someone who would have been perceived as more impartial”.

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The more we learn, the stranger these events seem to become. The one point of agreement in this fierce debate on the origins is that it is vital to find the truth so the world can be better prepared for pandemics — as those 15 experts warned us weeks before the pandemic erupted. More and more scientists, along with politicians and journalists, have come to accept the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory and merits serious investigation until the facts prove otherwise — especially after Donald Trump’s accusations were echoed by his Democrat successor Joe Biden.

Despite Farrar’s initial concern, and his involvement in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, he sees things rather differently. He insists “the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event”, although adding that we must ensure labs are safe. “The tragedy is that this entire controversy over the origins of the pandemic coronavirus turned out to be a distraction,” he concludes defiantly. “The conspiracist blame game was a fig leaf to disguise the failure of American governance.”

Yet for all his certainty, there are valid fears that we may really have been given an unwelcome glimpse of the failures of China’s governance — and the curious role of a Western scientific establishment in suppressing a crucial debate.