As the U.S. Congress continues its investigation into the Covid-19 pandemic, with Dr. Anthony Fauci expected to testify on Monday, a Canadian molecular biologist has taken to the New York Times to outline her contention that the virus probably escaped from a laboratory.

Alina Chan is a molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a post-doctoral fellow. She’s also co-author with science writer Matt Ridley of the 2021 book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

Her guest essay in Sunday’s Times, titled “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points,” takes readers through the so-called lab leak hypothesis. It has been a minority view among scientists, many of whom long believed that Covid spread into the human population from infected animals, much like the SARS outbreak of 2003 or the MERS coronavirus of 2012.