4-22-20
“Infectious clone technology” stands for creating live synthetic viral clones. Considering the heights of user friendliness and automation that genetic engineering tools have attained, creating a synthetic CoV2 via the above methodology would be in reach of even a grad student….
So the virologists are puzzled. Where did this 12 nucleotide insert (in Sars-Cov-2 genome) come from? Could it be lab-made? Well, virologists have studied furin sites in coronaviruses for decades, and have introduced many artificial ones in a lab. For example, an American team had inserted RRSRR into the spike protein of the first SARS-CoV back in 2006:…And the Japanese have inserted a similar site (RRKR) into the SARS-CoV protein in 2008, though a bit downstream than in CoV2:…In 2009 another American group also worked on “improving” SARS-CoV and, continuing the American tradition of not penny-pinching on arginines, they inserted as many as 4 of them (RRSRR):…
But the most recent work of this kind that I came across was an October 2019 paper from several Beijing labs, where the new furin site RRKR was inserted into not just some pseudovirus, but into an actual live chicken coronavirus, infectious bronchitis virus (IBV):….
What I do hope it highlights is the scale of dangerous gain-of-function research that has been and is going on in virology. The Covid-19 pandemic really exposed its huge risks in the face of few benefits: GOF research hasn’t protected us from this outbreak, hasn’t provided us with any effective treatments or vaccines in time to save hundreds of thousands of lives lost to CoV2, and if there is even a 0.1% chance GOF research caused the whole thing, that chance is too high. https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
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