American scientists planned to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engineer novel coronaviruses with the features of SARS-CoV-2 the year before the virus emerged from that city, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.

While rare in nature, these features were central to the esoteric research interests of the scientists working with the Wuhan lab, those documents show.

Scientists divided over the so-called “lab leak” and natural origin hypotheses have for years pored over the arcane language of a U.S.-China research proposal called “DEFUSE” describing coronavirus engineering experiments.

The DEFUSE grant proposal was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.