To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.
It's worth rebutting. The nonsense is a little out of control.
Anyways, i just searched for russian bio lab accident and this came up first: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/decades-after-deadly...
I'm sure there is more to find about that, but for the purpose of rebutting your nonsense i deem it sufficient.
What do i mean by that? The theories aren't unfounded when looking back, because they happened! It doesn't really matter where, when, by whom, and what exactly. Just that it did happen multiple times.
Cheers.
edit: Well, it even has a wikipedia article if you prefer that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
It's not out of the realm of possibility and shouldn't be disregarded out of hand like it has been. Could be from there or maybe not. We really need more information from China to settle some of these discussions.
So the same guy that claimed ISIS have biological weapon? Other than public information, so what does he know that others don’t? this guy has no credibility to begin with.
There is going to be an (X) in Wuhan for any value of (X) anyone cares to name. The fog of uncertainty is still thick; nobody has much of an idea what is going on. Anyone claiming that they have a theory on where the virus came from is fantasising. The knee-jerk people probably don't want them drowning out a weak signal with useless noise.
It is possible; but a lot of things are possible. It is a mighty leap from a starting point of basically no primary evidence and all the people who have on-the-ground access to evidence are very busy managing a rapidly growing crisis.
It is important to remember that there is zero evidence of this theory, and yet despite that it is spreading through the Internet populace faster than the virus itself.
I mean by this measure any time someone crashes a car it could be an assassination attempt. It's happened before.
What rubs me the wrong way are the people instantly dismissing something like this as unlikely, or even impossible ignoring history.
The amount of novel virus to have emerged from labs so far is probably very close to, if not zero.
https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-e...
For the article and the pushback, see this link and its comments:
It’s being closely tracked and any claims should not be made without genome.
You can see they are closely related, at about 88% sequence identity. There are point mutations spread more or less evenly over the entire genome. This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources.
Source: Go over to NCBI and do the alignment yourself, also am PhD biologist.
PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
I believe this is generally the case with most topics outside the standard focus of this site (which I would posit is computers generally). There tends to be a mixture of intelligent, accurate commentary, and intelligent but misled commentary (and my observers bias would further distort the separation between those two categories). It tends to get better as discussion continues, but not always.
That said, this topic is more likely to be sensationalized than most.
But one of my favourite things about HN is the rebuttals, deep-dives, and 'well, actually's of informed commenters discussing niches I know little about.
But yeah, wrong answers are more informative.
> PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
On the flip side, I've seen lots of "experts" chime in and say things that prove to be wrong. For example, during the early stages of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, I recall reading comments by lots of "experts" explaining how there's little to worry about and they referred to things like core catchers and all the other mechanisms that are supposed to protect a (modern) nuclear power plant in emergency. As is evident, much of their expertise did not apply and things that weren't supposed to go wrong went wrong.
I don't remember specific cases but I'm pretty sure I've witnessed a similar pattern over and over again here, and just seeing news of coronavirus outbreak immediately brought back memory of -- and prediction of -- experts chiming in telling people why it's nothing to be concerned about and why all the pop news scare is overblown. I'm getting kind of a dejavu feeling here.
If you go back and read about any newsworthy event there are experts getting it wrong.
That's because a reality like Michael Crichton's novels is fun to imagine, albeit...fictional.
Honest question: if this is common knowledge of people in the field, why wouldn't people genetically engineering a virus (and trying to hide it) do so in a fashion to make it look more like evolution in the genomes? Is that not possible to do?
How can you say this as fact when we don't even know the morbidity rate of the coronavirus? The story isn't over yet, but it looks like it could be twice as deadly as influenza.
On top of that, there's no reason to do it for a military weapon. For military use you don't infect a few people and hope it spreads, you infect a whole bunch and hope the whole thing spreads quickly enough that the virus can't be stopped, and it overwhelms an entire population by incapacitating or killing them.
Dispersing virus over a significant fraction of a population isn't easy or quiet, so whether it's a natural disease or GMO doesn't matter, because they'll know who did it.
The only scenario in which it makes sense to evolve a genetically engineered weapon in a way that hides its origins is for bioterrorism... and bioterrorism is very rare because it's a lot harder technically than terrorism that consists of shooting up a military base or running an exploding motorboat into a ship.
HN is good when it comes to technology, and that's what I browse it for. When it comes to genetics or biology...not so much. Engineer's disease runs definitely stronger than coronaviruses here.
True, it's no single expert. It's experts. The HIV-1 insertions, made at functional points, are reasonably suspicious and worthy of further analysis.
This is no longer true. See:
'Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag'
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
These are findings from IIT researchers who have found "uncanny" similarities between nCov and HIV which could increase virality.
See these threads:
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1223337991168380928
https://twitter.com/bblarsen1/status/1223343688400527360
Seems the entire publish and peer-review cycle occurs on the scale of hours or days now, lol.
"Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871. The copyright holder for this short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous."
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/122330594672370...