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Just to clear one thing: Vaccines actually do edit the genetic code, but only of some select B-cells. And so does any other antigen that your body develops ant

Just to clear one thing: Vaccines actually do edit the genetic code, but only of some select B-cells. And so does any other antigen that your body develops antibodies for. The process is very complicated and beautiful, and is pretty much exactly the same as in plenty of other multicellular life forms. If you've ever wondered what's the "storage format" for all the recipes for all the different antibodies that your body produces, that is how does your body even remember infections from years ago - it's DNA, and the recipes are generated via a massively sped up internal evolution, mediated by T cells. The process of maturing B-cells is kind of similar to machine learning. The matured B-cells are then safely stashed away in the bone marrow. Really remarkable stuff. (I understand that Linus meant that the vaccine mRNA is not reverse transcribed into the host DNA, and that is of course the case. Also, a side note: the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad, we're still too dumb to answer such questions)

Rochus 5y ago
> The process is very complicated and beautiful And all the molecular machinery in our body is much more complex than any software system.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  It had a bit more time to develop :) But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely at the terabytes of code range if you look at the internet as a whole. You can also add the deep ML models, they're easily in the gigabyte ranges. Of course the complexity in the protein-based lifeform comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution (every single cell and every single ribosome!) and the massive amount of noise that the environment constantly throws at the lifeforms. Compare with the nearly pristine conditions that the sets of customized silicone crystals that we call computers operate in. Give me volatility and time, and you'll be stunned, eventually. Let's see what's next in this book :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rochus 5y ago
    > It had a bit more time to develop And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine. > the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte Indeed apples and oranges [*]. As long as we don't know all functions of this molecular machinery (and there is a very good chance we will never know all those functions) all comparisons with programming languages are pure speculations. Some "subsystems" seem to be representable by "programming languages" (as long as one ignores many unknowns and special cases). But the complexity not only happens on molecular level. > comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution A very daring comparison. [*] EDIT: mind that the genetic material e.g. assumes all the laws of physics and chemistry (also those we do not yet know) which are not explicitly encoded.
    - pell 5y ago
      >And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine. Explains all those bugs and bad design choices, doesn't it.
      - Rochus 5y ago
        > Explains all those bugs and bad design choices If there is any choice at all in natural selection, it is only in the choice of the reproductive partner. Apparently, the result of the selection process is not so bad, otherwise we would not have survived. Of course, we still have the chance to go extinct.
dan-robertson 5y ago
That feels like a stretch to me. Your statement is a bit like saying a big bag of labelled images edits the ‘code’ of a [neural network] computer program to make it recognise images. But everyday speech means something different by ‘editing code’. The genetic material of the B-cells, used to generate antibodies, does not come from the vaccine which contains genetic material used to generate antigens.
galgalesh 5y ago
Is it fair to say vaccines rewrite it, though? It's more like your immune system rewriting it in response to the vaccine. It's like saying a virus rewrites antivirus programs. Yes, the databases get updated for every new virus, but it's not the virus doing that directly.
- fastaguy88 5y ago
  No, vaccines do not rewrite the genome, even in immune cells. The immune cells are constantly rewriting their own genetic code, with or without antigens (vaccines). The vaccines simply cause the cells with an appropriately rewritten code to be selected for, and increase in number.
_ph_ 5y ago
I think this is not a good way of representing things. When you say "vaccines edit the genetic code", most listeners would understand it that the vaccines actively and directly change your genes. This is of course what is not happenig. And as many people claim that mRNA vaccines perform genetic manipulation, I would even claim it is dangerous to say. I think, the correct way to phrase it is: an immune reaction, be it against a vaccine or an infection is expressed in genetic changes of some cells. But this is how the immune system works, nothing specific to vaccines. Vaccines are just a safe and efficient way to trigger the immune response.
avz 5y ago
> the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad In some cases, we know too, e.g. synctin-1 [1] is a viral protein coded by a gene integrated into the primate germ line some 25 million years ago and repurposed by our bodies to facilitate cell fusion in the development of the placenta. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytin-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytin-1

Rochus 5y ago

> The process is very complicated and beautiful And all the molecular machinery in our body is much more complex than any software system.

H8crilA 5y ago
It had a bit more time to develop :) But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely at the terabytes of code range if you look at the internet as a whole. You can also add the deep ML models, they're easily in the gigabyte ranges. Of course the complexity in the protein-based lifeform comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution (every single cell and every single ribosome!) and the massive amount of noise that the environment constantly throws at the lifeforms. Compare with the nearly pristine conditions that the sets of customized silicone crystals that we call computers operate in. Give me volatility and time, and you'll be stunned, eventually. Let's see what's next in this book :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Rochus 5y ago
  > It had a bit more time to develop And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine. > the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte Indeed apples and oranges [*]. As long as we don't know all functions of this molecular machinery (and there is a very good chance we will never know all those functions) all comparisons with programming languages are pure speculations. Some "subsystems" seem to be representable by "programming languages" (as long as one ignores many unknowns and special cases). But the complexity not only happens on molecular level. > comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution A very daring comparison. [*] EDIT: mind that the genetic material e.g. assumes all the laws of physics and chemistry (also those we do not yet know) which are not explicitly encoded.
  - pell 5y ago
    >And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine. Explains all those bugs and bad design choices, doesn't it.
    - Rochus 5y ago
      > Explains all those bugs and bad design choices If there is any choice at all in natural selection, it is only in the choice of the reproductive partner. Apparently, the result of the selection process is not so bad, otherwise we would not have survived. Of course, we still have the chance to go extinct.

dan-robertson 5y ago

That feels like a stretch to me. Your statement is a bit like saying a big bag of labelled images edits the ‘code’ of a [neural network] computer program to make it recognise images. But everyday speech means something different by ‘editing code’. The genetic material of the B-cells, used to generate antibodies, does not come from the vaccine which contains genetic material used to generate antigens.

galgalesh 5y ago

Is it fair to say vaccines rewrite it, though? It's more like your immune system rewriting it in response to the vaccine. It's like saying a virus rewrites antivirus programs. Yes, the databases get updated for every new virus, but it's not the virus doing that directly.

fastaguy88 5y ago
No, vaccines do not rewrite the genome, even in immune cells. The immune cells are constantly rewriting their own genetic code, with or without antigens (vaccines). The vaccines simply cause the cells with an appropriately rewritten code to be selected for, and increase in number.

_ph_ 5y ago

I think this is not a good way of representing things. When you say "vaccines edit the genetic code", most listeners would understand it that the vaccines actively and directly change your genes. This is of course what is not happenig. And as many people claim that mRNA vaccines perform genetic manipulation, I would even claim it is dangerous to say. I think, the correct way to phrase it is: an immune reaction, be it against a vaccine or an infection is expressed in genetic changes of some cells. But this is how the immune system works, nothing specific to vaccines. Vaccines are just a safe and efficient way to trigger the immune response.

avz 5y ago

> the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad In some cases, we know too, e.g. synctin-1 [1] is a viral protein coded by a gene integrated into the primate germ line some 25 million years ago and repurposed by our bodies to facilitate cell fusion in the development of the placenta. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytin-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytin-1