wouldn’t they be co-opted by BIG VIRUS though?
Wait a minute, wouldn’t you also be co-opted by BIG VIRUS???
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It’s very difficult to get a virus expert to believe something when his scientific funding depends upon his not believing it.
Huge corporations paying scientists hush money to do nothing is secretly my dream job but I haven’t seen evidence of it yet unfortunately
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With my luck they’ll put me on that island from The Prisoner where they gaslight me all day and chase me with opaque 6-foot bubbles all night
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The incident that I remember was in Italy after the initial outbreak.
Yes, there’s reports on the Web about this and was posted in the Covid-19 main thread way back last year.
But seriously, does what Redfield is saying make any sense to you? I’m particularly interested in the bolded:
Still, Redfield’s comments sparked debate. “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped,” Redfield told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta during an interview taped in January, to be aired in full Sunday. “Now, other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in the laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
He added: "I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient
Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC under President Trump, stressed several times that this is just his opinion, not a proven fact. “I’m allowed to have opinions now,” he said. "Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together," he said of his theory.
So the part where he says it’s not unusual for people in respiratory pathogen labs to get infected… I’ll challenge that. I worked in a legionella lab for a year during my master’s and it’s supposed to kill 10% of the people it infects so I think if accidental infection was anything other than extremely unusual it would have been above biosafety level 2 and they wouldn’t have let undergrads volunteer
In the bolded section I feel like he’s misrepresenting virology research to a Hollywood level. The idea isn’t to supercharge pathogens, it’s the opposite, we introduce mutations that limit the virus’ ability to grow/infect outside of highly controlled conditions. Like a really common thing with pathogens is to mutate an gene essential for producing some key protein or enzyme, then grow it on media with that ingredient added. So even if you wiped it in your nose it’ll die in 1 generation.
For sure the reason he repeats that this is his opinion and he’s allowed to have an opinion is because he knows serious scientists will call him out as a quack.
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That’s what they did with the lysine and raptors in Jurassic Park and we all know how that turned out.
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That works with viruses as well as bacteria?
I would 100% want to live on Prisoner Island when I retire.
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I think so but I gotta look it up and I’ll get back to you. But you can definitely do it from bacteria to flies even with mice you can do it. It’s a lot like in deep space 9 when the vorta control that drug the jem’hadar need to survive.
And don’t tell me about the time a small group of rogue jem’hadar try to cold turkey the drug and the one survives longer than thought possible because I’ve already seen it and I feel the science on that episode is sketchy
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Ketracel White is a helluva drug.
I asked if it was possible for viruses because necessarily the growth medium is inside of a host cell. So if you jack up a gene that expresses one of the proteins the virus needs the cell to make, you’d have to, what, make the cell express that same protein on its own? Seems hard. But with actual stuff that’s alive you could maybe just feed them whatever an enzyme is supposed to make.
I just realized that the lysine Jurassic Park thing is fucking dumb, I’m pretty sure that the raptor’s diet gives them plenty of complete protein.
Viruses seldom code for anything metabolic.There might be some, but I’m pretty sure SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have any.
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yeah, i think the type of mutation you’d do for viruses would be way different depending on what you’re studying. like deleting reverse transcriptase would prevent it from multiplying but you could still study attachment and entry
Yeah, sounds like a tough experiment, though. You’d have to edit the host genome in one of a few ways to get it to produce an essential viral protein, and then infect with a virus with a knockout of that protein.
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After four years of the US president villifying the Chinese for everything wrong in the world, and the resulting increase in hate crimes against asians, you really have to ask how that’s not a racist sentiment? Really? Context in the current moment matters. You don’t see anythign wrong with a thread on this board that could literally have been plucked straight from chiefsplanet or 8kun?
Maybe! What’s wrong with it exactly?
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