Re: <nettime> No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. (The Communist Manifesto 2015, written in RNA)

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I wouldn't take a three year old Italian TV segment as a particularly
authoritative source. Rather more substantial studies acknowledge
that while it is possible to that a Virus escapes a lab, the genetic
make-up of this particular virus makes it very unlikely to be
fabricated in a lab.

OK, this is science, so they speak of "unlikely" rather then
"impossible" but latching on to this difference in terminological
conventions is the cheapest trick in the book. Felix


-------------------------


No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows
it’s from nature

Scientists took conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2’s origins
seriously, and debunked them

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-not-human-made-lab-genetic-analysis-nature

By Tina Hesman Saey

MARCH 26, 2020 AT 6:00 AM

The coronavirus pandemic circling the globe is caused by a natural
virus, not one made in a lab, a new study says.

The virus’s genetic makeup reveals that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a
mishmash of known viruses, as might be expected if it were human-made.
And it has unusual features that have only recently been identified in
scaly anteaters called pangolins, evidence that the virus came from
nature, Kristian Andersen and his colleagues report March 17 in Nature
Medicine.

When Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at the Scripps
Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., first heard about the
coronavirus causing an outbreak in China, he wondered where the virus
came from. Initially, researchers thought the virus was being spread
by repeated infections jumping from animals in a seafood market in
Wuhan, China, into humans and then being passed person to person.
Analysis from other researchers has since suggested that the virus
probably jumped only once from an animal into a person and has been
spread human to human since about mid-November (SN: 3/4/20).

But shortly after the virus’s genetic makeup was revealed in early
January, rumors began bubbling up that maybe the virus was engineered
in a lab and either intentionally or accidentally released.

An unfortunate coincidence fueled conspiracy theorists, says Robert
Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Wuhan
Institute of Virology is “in very close proximity to” the
seafood market, and has conducted research on viruses, including
coronaviruses, found in bats that have potential to cause disease in
people. “That led people to think that, oh, it escaped and went down
the sewers, or somebody walked out of their lab and went over to the
market or something,” Garry says.

Accidental releases of viruses, including SARS, have happened from
other labs in the past. So “this is not something you can just
dismiss out of hand,” Andersen says. “That would be foolish.”


__Looking for clues

Andersen assembled a team of evolutionary biologists and virologists,
including Garry, from several countries to analyze the virus for clues
that it could have been human-made, or grown in and accidentally
released from a lab.

“We said, ‘Let’s take this theory — of which there are
multiple different versions — that the virus has a non-natural
origin … as a serious potential hypothesis,’ ” Andersen says.

Meeting via Slack and other virtual portals, the researchers analyzed
the virus’s genetic makeup, or RNA sequence, for clues about its
origin.

It was clear “almost overnight” that the virus wasn’t
human-made, Andersen says. Anyone hoping to create a virus would need
to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired
properties.

But the SARS-CoV-2 virus has components that differ from those of
previously known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or
viruses in nature. “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is
not derived from any previously used virus backbone,” Andersen and
colleagues write in the study.

“This is not a virus somebody would have conceived of and cobbled
together. It has too many distinct features, some of which are
counterintuitive,” Garry says. “You wouldn’t do this if you were
trying to make a more deadly virus.”

See all our coverage of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak Other
scientists agree. “We see absolutely no evidence that the virus
has been engineered or purposely released,” says Emma Hodcroft, a
molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
She was not part of Andersen’s group, but is a member of a team of
scientists with Nextstrain.org that is tracking small genetic changes
in the coronavirus to learn more about how it is spreading around the
world.

That finding debunks a widely disputed analysis, posted at bioRxiv.org
before peer review, that claimed to find bits of HIV in the
coronavirus, Hodcroft says. Other scientists quickly pointed out flaws
in the study and the authors retracted the report, but not before it
fueled the notion that the virus was engineered.

Some stretches of the virus’s genetic material are similar to HIV,
but that’s something that stems from those viruses sharing a common
ancestor during evolution, Hodcroft says. “Essentially their claim
was the same as me taking a copy of the Odyssey and saying, ‘Oh,
this has the word the in it,’ and then opening another book, seeing
the word the in it and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s the same word,
there must be parts of the Odyssey in this other book,” she says.
“It was a really misleading claim and really bad science.”

__Finding peculiar features

Andersen’s group next set out to determine whether the virus
could have been accidentally released from a lab. That’s a real
possibility because researchers in many places are working with
coronaviruses that have potential to infect humans, he says. “Stuff
comes out of the lab sometimes, almost always accidentally,” he
says.

A couple of unexpected features of the virus caught the researchers’
eyes, Andersen says. In particular, the gene encoding the
coronavirus’s spike protein has 12 extra RNA building blocks, or
nucleotides, stuck in it.

This spike protein protrudes from the virus’ surface and allows
the virus to latch onto and enter human cells. That insertion of
RNA building blocks adds four amino acids to the spike protein, and
creates a site in the protein for an enzyme called furin to cut. Furin
is made in human cells, and cleaves proteins only at spots where a
particular combination of amino acids is found, like the one created
by the insertion. SARS and other SARS-like viruses don’t have those
cutting sites.




On 27.03.20 19:50, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> This was hard to believe, but I checked with Italians, this video was
> actually aired in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80q6754o19U
> 
> In short, the Chinese designed this thing, it escaped (or was
> released), and is in the process of destroying the neoliberal
> capitalism around the world.
> 
> Was it intentional (Chinese handled it the way neoliberal societies
> can't) or accidental, it really doesn't matter. It works.
> 
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:



-- 

| |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |





#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: