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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

A couple of days ago I posted a link to the BLASTN sequence alignment between the 2003 SARS virus and the Wuhan virus in a comment on one of the other discussions here.

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. :/

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> 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.

When you know enough about something, there's horrible misinformation on it everywhere, even on HN.

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.

For sure. The best way to get the right answer on [hackernews] isn't to ask a question, it's to give the wrong answer.

Actually, both have worked for me.

But yeah, wrong answers are more informative.

If you’re an expert in this area, it would help everyone else if you compose and put up a top level comment explaining things. It could get upvoted to be among the first few comments, steering the conversation accordingly. Replies to specific comments with limited information won’t help as much since they won’t bubble up.

(They actually bubble up their parent comment thread, if they're upvoted highly enough. I've seen comment threads where the #1 post has negative point values, but is on top because the response is from someone with firsthand knowledge of the issue which gets upvoted to 100s of points.)

> 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. :/

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.

>On the flip side, I've seen lots of "experts" chime in and say things that prove to be wrong.

If you go back and read about any newsworthy event there are experts getting it wrong.

>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. :/

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.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1

https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...

>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.

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?

Doing a bunch of point mutations that "look" like a normal evolutionary process seems awfully expensive just to engineer a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu.

>a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu.

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.

Bet you $500 it won't.

Given that modifying an RNA virus to obtain specific results from an infection is very hard to begin with, also working with the limitation that your changes to the virus have to look "natural" makes it essentially impossible by being impractical.

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.

> The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me

That's because a reality like Michael Crichton's novels is fun to imagine, albeit...fictional.

i looked up the discussion you mentioned, and a comment right next to yours came to an opposite conclusion, also based on some BLAST result (all of them now expired). I am just a confused laymen.

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