3 ms·
I would love to see the day when we can calculate the Hamming distance to deadliness for all the common flu strains, so we'll know exactly how alarmed we should
by sketerpot 17y ago
I would love to see the day when we can calculate the Hamming distance to deadliness for all the common flu strains, so we'll know exactly how alarmed we should be each year.
- jcl 17y agoOf course, that means we'd be living in a future where the DNA sequence for the deadliest possible flu strain is computable. We'd have a pretty good reason to be alarmed every single day.
- Semiapies 17y agoWhy? That'd be the first thing we'd vaccinate for, given that capability.
- jcl 17y agoOnce you vaccinate for it, it becomes less deadly. Which means there is a new (computable) "most deadly" flu. And, presumably, there is an upper limit to the number of strains our immune systems can remember and defend against.
- Semiapies 17y agoPerhaps; on the other hand, once we have the capability to do something as hard as compute most-deadly-flu, we'll almost necessarily have the immunological understanding to vaccinate against very broad categories of diseases, not merely individual strains.