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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

That’s just misrepresenting. While there exists pathways for RNA->DNA, they are a niche occurrence happening on evolutionary timescales. It is not at all applicable to the 30 minutes of mRNA half-life of the vaccine.

And even just playing with the idea of our genome having the spike protein’s gene, it would either just sit there doing nothing (remember it is injected into muscle tissue) or get expressed. The former case would cause no problem (no descendant would inherit it as the gonads are not affected), and the latter would be trivial to see with a continuous immune response.

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>the 30 minutes of mRNA half-life of the vaccine.

I think you'll find it's much longer that that for the vaccine. Apparently it hangs around about a week. The mRNA is modified to last longer than natural mRNA.

There is still an awful lot we don't know about cellular biology, so I'm always a bit baffled when people that should know better say that this or that is (virtually) impossible. Fortunately, we're running the largest phase 4 clinical trial in human history, so in 25 years or so we'll have some absolutely great longitudinal data.

mRNA is continuously produced by every living cell in your body. How come then that you don’t get ridiculously many duplicated copies of the created mRNAs, something that only happens at an evolutionary timescale? You have multiple orders of magnitudes more naturally created mRNA, why isn’t there a concern for that?

how do you know what is produced and called "just mRNA" is the exact same kind of thing that is the mRNA in your body? You can test to verify that it has all the characteristics of mRNA. However, you obviously can't 100% confirm that it does not have characteristics that is not in "natural" mRNA, since the list of characteristics mRNA does NOT have is infinite.

What do you mean produced? As in the pharmaceutical factory? You can quite literally have a look at it with an electron microscope, and there are trillion other ways to chemically verify that. Also, we can reprogram bacteria to manufacture any protein for us - molecular biology is very advanced. Why do you feel the need to question very basic “problems” that were more than certainly thought about and solved by the many experts working on it for decades? You can question whether the engineers of a car engine though of heat dissipation but you would find it sort of dumb, wouldn’t you?

> trillion other ways to chemically verify that

Trillion? Did you not read what I said about being able to verify the behaviors you want and not the side effects you don't yet know exist? Are you telling me that electronic microscopes are used in such a way that people actually look into individual massive molecules and... what count the atoms?

This is questioning a new technique that's not tested for more than a year for the purpose of being a vaccine. You can tell me that this is in theory safer than traditional vaccines all you want, but by my dumb logic, theory is just that. Traditional vaccine was tested for multiple generations of humans, this was not. I am not advocating traditional vaccine or anything just maybe, maybe, don't feel so sure about things in a field that has so much we don't know yet. mRNA is code created from convoluted processes not exactly like programming code that human specifically write with limited known behaviors.

So you don’t believe that we can manufacture nucleotide-perfect sequences of RNAs? Than I have to break it for you, we absolutely can, to the point where you can simply order a specific sequence online without much trouble.

I just don’t understand why would you trust a car engine all that much more vs medicine. Do not blindly trust anything, but questioning uncontroversially held beliefs by a whole field is just cocky.

Mechanic is quite simplistic comparing to life science to me. Every single component of the car was built by a spec made by human. We dont borrow components of nature that oporate at a scale we're not fully able to inspect, to produce code we dont fully understand, then claim that the code does exactly what we want and nothing else.

Aside from that, cars were also tested for more than 1 year you know?

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