From the article, > You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. From The Hardware Hacker (2017)

From the article, > You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang: > So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000. > [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes. > ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation. > [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem. > ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic. > If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild... Fortunately for swine flu at least, > ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A. Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katalin-kariko-developed-mrna-technology-inside-covid-vaccines/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katal...