Critics have long questioned why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would fund experiments by University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill (UNC) professor Ralph Baric to develop a technique for hiding evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created super viruses.

Aided by some $220.5 million in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funding, Baric developed a so-called "Seamless Ligation" technique, which he boasted could perfectly conceal all evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created viruses. Baric nicknamed his invention the "no-see'm" method.

Now a new study, "Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2," published on the preprint server bioRxiv, shows that — apparently unbeknownst to Baric — the "seamless ligation" concealment gimmick leaves its own minute but legible signature.

Most momentously, these same researchers have discovered that damning signature in the genome of the virus that causes COVID-19.

Baric's technique has long been controversial. "It's the artist that doesn't sign his name to the painting; the virologist that doesn't put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory," said Jeffrey Sachs, chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a task force that investigated the origins of COVID-19.