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Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

biorxiv.org

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Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#101

Post by blackrock »

thu2111 wrote: post #91
madddiagnosis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses which kill too quickly don't spread widely enough to kill a lot of people. Good viruses kill after a few days of showing few (if any) symptoms so that they can maximise their spread. This is the difference between epidemic and pandemic viral contagions.

This virus spreads quickly (check) but has a mortality rate of 2%, mostly the old and already immunocompromised. If that's a bioweapon it's a pretty ineffective one.

It might not be a bioweapon. It might be an economic weapon.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#102

Post by buboard »

The study is probably bunk and sensational. check the comments by this redditor : https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewt9ep/scientifi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewuotw/discussio...

The real question is: how far are we from this becoming real ?

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#103

Post by cs702 »

jszymborski wrote: post #28

I think the important things to know here are: 1. A group of scientist have submitted a manuscript for review with a number of exceptionally (and uncharacteristically) bold claims. 2. A huge amount of scrutiny and additional reproducibility will necessarily need to be conducted before conclusions of this nature can be drawn. 3. This manuscript hasn't even passed the normal muster... a biorxiv post isn't much differen…

As regards #3, I agree: the more eyes who see this unconfirmed claim, the better. That's the main reason I upvoted the OP.

A great outcome would be if reputable scientists see this on HN or Twitter or learn about it through colleagues, and subsequently refute it or dismiss it as bad science.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#104

Post by sterlind »

T-A wrote: post #69
Consultant32452 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will be talked about in that way. Especially if this is a bioweapon created in China which accidentally escaped. No one wants the dirty laundry spilled of all the countries who are doing bioweapon research. China is too powerful economically and surely has too much dirt on everyone else to go down alone. So I believe the official position will be that it's either not engineered at all ("inconclusive"…

China is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention [1]. The US State Department regularly issues a compliance report about it (and other international agreements). Here [2] is how it summarized China's compliance in August 2019: "Information indicates that the People’s Republic of China (China) engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises conce…

One of the issues in treaty monitoring for bioweapons is that so much research is inherently dual-use. The CDC synthesized Spanish flu and infected primates to study why it was so lethal.. they've even tweaked regular strains of flu to make them more lethal, in order to study what genetic factors influence virulence and mortality. There are legitimate, compelling reasons to make even genetically engineered pathogens. Even straight-up engineered bioweapons can be used to study defenses.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#105

Post by akamaka »

ctoth wrote: post #76
akamaka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users can press the “flag” button for content that is off-topic. I flagged this article because it is an unreviewed pre-print paper that has been rushed out by its authors, who clearly have not investigated any of the most obvious follow-up questions, such as “what is the probability of this occurring naturally?”

Okay so we definitely need to flag any machine learning papers from Arxiv because hey preprint. Further, do you assume that other members cannot read the preprint warning and decide for themselves? This strikes me as some sort of bizarre way to patronize the entire community.

I’m not a biologist, so I’m really not interested in this type of paper, and I expressed my opinion through the voting mechanism.

Also, there are thousands of researchers studying this new virus. If this turns out to be an important finding, I can wait until it is validated. At this point, this paper looks poor quality, and it was a waste of time for me to click on it and read it.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#106

Post by himinlomax »

akamaka wrote: post #70
Tenoke wrote: post #61

Why was this submission suddenly so heavily penalized by the mod(s)?

Users can press the “flag” button for content that is off-topic. I flagged this article because it is an unreviewed pre-print paper that has been rushed out by its authors, who clearly have not investigated any of the most obvious follow-up questions, such as “what is the probability of this occurring naturally?”

> it is an unreviewed pre-print

Any relevant work on nCoV will be unreviewed at this point.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#107

Post by bibinou »

Tenoke wrote: post #61

Why was this submission suddenly so heavily penalized by the mod(s)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In Submissions

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

buboard wrote: post #102

The study is probably bunk and sensational. check the comments by this redditor : https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewt9ep/scientifi... https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewuotw/discussio... The real question is: how far are we from this becoming real ?

Interesting, that user claims to be especially familiar with the 'gag' protein where the paper claims to find a match. User explicitly says that the "matching" portions claimed in the paper are so tiny as to be negligible, and not unique to HIV. They claim that this is easily verifiable with a simple 'blast' search. Could someone comment on these claims?

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#109

Post by ajuc »

thu2111 wrote: post #91
madddiagnosis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses which kill too quickly don't spread widely enough to kill a lot of people. Good viruses kill after a few days of showing few (if any) symptoms so that they can maximise their spread. This is the difference between epidemic and pandemic viral contagions.

This virus spreads quickly (check) but has a mortality rate of 2%, mostly the old and already immunocompromised. If that's a bioweapon it's a pretty ineffective one.

If you want to extinct homo sapiens you should probably make a virus that infects everybody and has as little symptoms as possible and then kills them a year later.

We don't know yet if this virus has any long-term consequences. HIV would seem harmless if we estimated its effects after 1 month.

But I don't think bioweapons need to be deadly. If you can make a virus that kills 2% of people but shuts down global trade with your main economic competitor for example - that's quite useful (if you don't care for morality of course).

I'm not persuaded it's human-created, but it's a possibility.

Re: Scientists claim to find HIV virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov [pdf]

#110

Post by Tenoke »

bibinou wrote: post #107
Tenoke wrote: post #61

Why was this submission suddenly so heavily penalized by the mod(s)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Submissions > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

In which case they just change the title normally.. rather than penalizing it heavier than any other penalized post Ive noticed recently.
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