3 ms·

Because...? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that most of us aren't virologists.

• bayesian_horse 4y ago
  I'm neither. But basically designing a Virus would mean composing a 30k long string of RNA (in this case) which creates the proteins and RNA molecules which do all the things a Virus does. And it does more than you'd think. It makes the cell copy the Virus, make the proteins, often interferes with other processes in the cell. Copying the genome is easy. Making specific modifications isn't even that hard, as long as you don't have the illusion to know the result beforehand. But for the Virus to change its behavior in a meaningful/useful way requires multiple changes. The best someone could do is recombine changed parts from multiple variants. But they don't necessarily fit together. And the recombination also happens in nature, probably a lot more often than in the lab.
  • baja_blast 4y ago
    And yet H5N1 virus has yet to spread between mammals, but an airborne version of H5N1 that can spread between ferrets(and by extension humans) was achieved in a lab: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSe....
    • bayesian_horse 4y ago
      Yes. It has spread. And was very non-virulent. And they got valuable data on what to do when H5N1 does become transmissible in Humans. However, had this Virus escaped, it would have fizzled. Showing airborne transmission does not mean the Virus would spread among ferrets and Humans under normal conditions. Mammalian H5N1 viruses might have already existed but failed to survive subsequent passage and thus did not evolve to become transmissible enough. Such lab experiments only add a minuscule risk to the much bigger risk of such a Virus occurring naturally.