38 ms·

The furin cleavage site looks suspiciously like a hallmark cut-and-paste operation that is exactly what I would do as a genetic engineer.

hcknwscommenter 5y ago
Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?
- dnautics 5y ago
  The beta coronavirus class has a paucity of naturally occurring furin cleavage sites relative to the other coronavirus clades. I'm just saying that copying sequence from genomes a few species over is very common strategy for engineering projects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/ Irony is that this paper is highly doctored to make it look (from the figures) like the opposite point, without outright lying, like they loaded the dendrogram of beta coronaviruses with a ton of sequences that are distinct but "basically from the same collection", to make the pie slice of betas with furin cleavage sites look much much bigger than it should be. Also, the betas are excerpted from the dendrogram of all coronaviruses... Do you believe the DRASTIC leaked document? https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-doc... It's pretty complete, and exactly like what I would expect a DARPA/NIH grant to look like, having helped prepare one in my career (and one DOE grant). I can't imagine a group of nonexperts drafting this document - correctly - just to make up a conspiracy theory - I'm not a virologist but I am a molecular biologist and biochemist and skimming the leaked document all of the technobabble looks correct to my understanding of science.
  - hcknwscommenter 5y ago
    umm. a paucity. So like, you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites? I have no opinion on DRASTIC.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      > you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites? Never claimed otherwise. They are rare. The DRASTIC leak talks specifically about engineering cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. (P. 11)
alevskaya 5y ago
The trouble with the synthetic furin hypothesis and all this DRASTIC stuff on that grant, etc. is that all of this work would certainly be done in known viral vectors... you would never go messing around testing spike proteins in some totally random virus backbone whose in-vitro behavior hadn't been worked out before in your assay cell lines. So, maybe I missed something, but none of the experimental designs I've seen in those grants would ever plausibly lead to the SARS-COV-2 sequence. Again, pre-pandemic there was no reason to be sneaky about this stuff if it were actually being done... I don't know why anyone would waste their time on some uncharacterized, completely markerless viral vector for these RBD and proteolysis tests. Sigh... maybe if we -had- been doing those experiments earlier we would have discovered this new clade and been more ready for it. That grant looks spooky to some people precisely because it was so prophetic.
- dnautics 5y ago
  I don't think those grants would have led to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence either, because the base strain is different. BUT let's be real here. You don't ask for money and do the experiment. You do the experiment and then ask for continuation money. So it is a "generally accepted grantsmanship strategy" that WIV would have been working on viruses adjacent to that in the grant with the same techniques, and adjacent techniques that would lead to the natural next step. If that natural next step infected a postdoc that was careless that one time when he/she was pulling a 9-9-6 workweek... It's all so terrifyingly plausible to anyone who has been there on the front lines doing lab work.
  - alevskaya 5y ago
    You're really into stacking these hypotheticals. Why would anyone bother developing a pile of fiddly new vectors? cui bono? Vector development sucks, I've done it in simpler virus families. And why do it completely markerless? Remember that the other odd thing about this grant was that a lot of the genetic work was supposed to be done in the US. If it were already being done we'd probably have had those sequences in -our- databases!
    - 5y ago

hcknwscommenter 5y ago

Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?

dnautics 5y ago
The beta coronavirus class has a paucity of naturally occurring furin cleavage sites relative to the other coronavirus clades. I'm just saying that copying sequence from genomes a few species over is very common strategy for engineering projects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/ Irony is that this paper is highly doctored to make it look (from the figures) like the opposite point, without outright lying, like they loaded the dendrogram of beta coronaviruses with a ton of sequences that are distinct but "basically from the same collection", to make the pie slice of betas with furin cleavage sites look much much bigger than it should be. Also, the betas are excerpted from the dendrogram of all coronaviruses... Do you believe the DRASTIC leaked document? https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-doc... It's pretty complete, and exactly like what I would expect a DARPA/NIH grant to look like, having helped prepare one in my career (and one DOE grant). I can't imagine a group of nonexperts drafting this document - correctly - just to make up a conspiracy theory - I'm not a virologist but I am a molecular biologist and biochemist and skimming the leaked document all of the technobabble looks correct to my understanding of science.
- hcknwscommenter 5y ago
  umm. a paucity. So like, you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites? I have no opinion on DRASTIC.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites? Never claimed otherwise. They are rare. The DRASTIC leak talks specifically about engineering cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. (P. 11)

alevskaya 5y ago

The trouble with the synthetic furin hypothesis and all this DRASTIC stuff on that grant, etc. is that all of this work would certainly be done in known viral vectors... you would never go messing around testing spike proteins in some totally random virus backbone whose in-vitro behavior hadn't been worked out before in your assay cell lines. So, maybe I missed something, but none of the experimental designs I've seen in those grants would ever plausibly lead to the SARS-COV-2 sequence. Again, pre-pandemic there was no reason to be sneaky about this stuff if it were actually being done... I don't know why anyone would waste their time on some uncharacterized, completely markerless viral vector for these RBD and proteolysis tests. Sigh... maybe if we -had- been doing those experiments earlier we would have discovered this new clade and been more ready for it. That grant looks spooky to some people precisely because it was so prophetic.

dnautics 5y ago
I don't think those grants would have led to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence either, because the base strain is different. BUT let's be real here. You don't ask for money and do the experiment. You do the experiment and then ask for continuation money. So it is a "generally accepted grantsmanship strategy" that WIV would have been working on viruses adjacent to that in the grant with the same techniques, and adjacent techniques that would lead to the natural next step. If that natural next step infected a postdoc that was careless that one time when he/she was pulling a 9-9-6 workweek... It's all so terrifyingly plausible to anyone who has been there on the front lines doing lab work.
- alevskaya 5y ago
  You're really into stacking these hypotheticals. Why would anyone bother developing a pile of fiddly new vectors? cui bono? Vector development sucks, I've done it in simpler virus families. And why do it completely markerless? Remember that the other odd thing about this grant was that a lot of the genetic work was supposed to be done in the US. If it were already being done we'd probably have had those sequences in -our- databases!
  - 5y ago