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Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

sciencemag.org

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Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#81

Post by marton78 »

dang wrote: post #30
Tenoke wrote: post #25

I hate to ask again, but why is this submission also getting heavily penalized? It seems like maybe all 2019-nCoV posts are getting penalized by mod(s) silently? Because this one and the last one an hour ago are. [0] I am not making any statements about whether that is sensible or not - but why not comment on why, like you've so often done in other cases? 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205338

Major ongoing stories, especially sensational ones like a new epidemic, lead to tons of copycat and follow-up posts. In order for the front page not to fill up with coronavirus stories, or some other sensation du jour, we try to downweight follow-up posts unless there is significant new information. Otherwise the threads fill up with repetition of what's already been said, wild speculation, or both. We hit on the "si…

Excellent reasoning. Thank you very much for your work of keeping this place sane!

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#82

Post by RivieraKid »

yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

The lab theory seems unlikely but out of curiosity, how would a lab approach creating a dangerous virus? Presumably they would iteratively try modifying an existing RNA, synthesize it, then breed the virus and test it on mice?

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#83

Post by dekhn »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #79
dylz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't appear to even be matching entire sequences. An analogy might be "these two web pages both contain * ! oh no!" while completely disregarding everything in the middle.

If it's as bad as it sounds, would this be a neophyte mistake or deliberate conspiracy mongering?

Based on my read, it's inexperienced bioinformaticists.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#84

Post by svara »

mc32 wrote: post #62
yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

Modified, not synthetic.

A couple of days ago I posted a link to the BLASTN sequence alignment between the 2003 SARS virus and the Wuhan virus in a comment on one of the other discussions here.

You can see they are closely related, at about 88% sequence identity. There are point mutations spread more or less evenly over the entire genome. This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources.

Source: Go over to NCBI and do the alignment yourself, also am PhD biologist.

PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#85

Post by dylz »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #79
dylz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't appear to even be matching entire sequences. An analogy might be "these two web pages both contain * ! oh no!" while completely disregarding everything in the middle.

If it's as bad as it sounds, would this be a neophyte mistake or deliberate conspiracy mongering?

I don't know, nor am I in a position to really have an opinion on this, but it might even be as small of a reason as "hey I want to get published"

The PDF itself is MS Word, has numerous typos/little care (words like 'alingment'), random font changes back and forth between Times New Roman and the default MS Word font (Calibri?))

For HIV related fearmongering about "well, why would they know to treat it with HIV meds??", people are looking at this already because previous SARS-CoV has previous investigation with HIV medication, it is not unique to nCOV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14985565, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15144898, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14519691 - these are from 2003-2006.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#87

Post by NicoJuicy »

mustachionut wrote: post #67
allovernow wrote: post #2

There is a recently opened P4 biolab in Wuhan within miles of the seafood market in question, with researchers who have recently been working with and publishing on the topic of Corona viruses, including research on human transmission. Not to be sensationalist, and personally I think the title is alarmist, but are a number of suspicious elements to this story that are worth examining: https://medium.com/@siradrianbon…

The allegation that the virus originated in a lab is appealing but unfounded. Everybody would rather believe that our problems come from circumstances humans understand and control rather than the cold randomness of the universe. Though the virus and death it has caused is terrible, at least the fight against it unites humanity in a limited way. The groundless assertion that it originated in a lab recasts coronavirus…

From a fake account? There is no reason for that. Is there?

Although your content seems very fatalistic ( = we can't understand nature). It seems weird and suspicious

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#88

Post by ashildr »

salemh wrote: post #66
mc32 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modified, not synthetic.

Any source you have found credible? Their is a lot of information going around in both directions.

You have a very lax definition of “Information”. There is absolutely nothing suggesting that Wuhan is man made. I expected a little more scientific perspective from this forum.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#89

Post by aaron695 »

News at 7:00 the first African AIDS carrier may have not had sex with a monkey.

We really need to upvote this old racist meme?

It's from poor people. Poor people who live amongst wild animals. Aka farmers. It came from a rural location. Ie from a bat shitting on their rice while it dries.

Does noone get what the meme about lightning deaths reducing each year means? It's about with wealth, nature has less of a catastrophic effect on our lives in part because people move to cities.

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