Modified, not synthetic.
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.