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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]

#111

Post by Tenoke »

akamaka wrote: post #105
ctoth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are no post downvotes on HN for a reason (or at least normal users dont have them) - flag doesn't and shouldn't mean the same thing as a downvote.

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

#112

Post by yters »

dang wrote: post #49
ceejayoz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detecting intelligent design in things is done all the time. Teacup dachshunds are intelligently designed. So's corn and broccoli. Throwing your hands up and saying "God must've done it!" when you don't have an immediate explanation and can't be bothered to do some research into one is the bad science part.

Please don't feed egregious comments by replying. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . A religious flamewar on top of whatever else we've got here is the last thing this thread needs!

How is this religious?

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

#113

Post by akamaka »

Tenoke wrote: post #111
akamaka wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are no post downvotes on HN for a reason (or at least normal users dont have them) - flag doesn't and shouldn't mean the same thing as a downvote.

I don’t flag things often, as one might downvote a comment they disagree with. The flag mechanism is for off-topic or spam content, and I consider this way off-topic for this site. There have already been hundreds of published articles about this virus, and if I was interested in seeing them, I would use a site like PubMed to see them.

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

#116

Post by TimonKnigge »

zozbot234 wrote: post #108
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?

see https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1223337991168380928

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

#117

Post by Consultant32452 »

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…

I'm making the assumption that there's a MAD situation here with regards to revealing bioweapon programs. I am assuming every major economy has clandestine bioweapon programs and that every major economy has the dirt on everyone else's bioweapons programs, regardless of treaties. So if the US, or someone else, comes out hard against China for an alleged bioweapon program, then China will release information about US programs. That is why, in my opinion, the media headlines and public positions of the major players will be a polite fiction. The truth may wind up buried in some report somewhere, but it won't make the same kinds of headlines that "kooky bat eating" makes.

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

#118

Post by MiroF »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #77
chadmeister wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been pointed out in previous threads, but this Twitter is full of alarmist unscientific BS and it appears to be spammed with some regularity on HN recently.

Alarmist, yes. Unscientific BS, not really. He’s got the background to make comments from a position of legitimacy. If we can’t trust this guy, even with some healthy skepticism, who should we trust? https://scholar.harvard.edu/ericding/home Edit: by trust, I don’t mean blindly believe, but mean one should consider his comments seriously.

From that link, it seems like he is commenting far outside of his expertise in "behavioral interventions" to improve things like "medicare cost."

Don't trust anyone, just weigh their claims and their background. In this case, I have yet to see people with serious credentials in genomics make this claim (outside of the original scientists who published the paper relating it to HIV - IIT is impressive, but I don't really know how to assess their credentials writ large)

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

#119

Post by folli »

Sorry, but it's very easy to verify that these claims are crap by replicating their study, i.e. doing a simple blast search of the insert sequence against the virus database. Here's the result of the first insert: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=398N4CS...

Although, there are some hits against HIV, there are also equally matching hits against bacteriophages; viruses that only target bacterias, they are completely unrelated to any viruses that target humans and animals. Furthermore, the E value is around 170, that means that matches are statistically completely insignificant, meaning they happened by chance only. Such a high E value corresponds to a p-value of very, very close to 1 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/tutorial/Altschul-1.html).

These guys that published such a paper are either completely clueless or nefarious in trying to stir up conspiracy theories.

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

#120

Post by bawolff »

madddiagnosis wrote: post #81
bawolff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is naive, but I would assume if it was a bio-weapon it would be a lot more deadly.

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.

But the point of a bio weapon is not to kill everyone,just your enemy. So i guess you would want it to be very deadly and not spread to far. And i imagine you would want to primarily take out young healthy people (soldiers) not the eldery and sickly. (I assume)
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