How are you not attacking gain-of-function with “the real problem vis a vis Covid19 is not the lab leak. The real problem is "gain of function" research, using gene splicing to make more virulent-to-humans pathogens.”?
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but you seem to be saying it’s a problem without any caveats regarding any potential benefits.
Artificial splicing is common, I agree, but we are talking a handful of mutations per paper rather than the billions of natural mutations that occur. I wasn’t arguing for frequency of mutations that follow the exact path of Covid 19 genetics, I would expect those to be very uncommon, but you only need one in a billion or more.
I've read the Yuri Deigin paper now. It touches on convergent evolution as a possible explanation for the existence of similar protein spike morphologies, but dismisses it without argument ("Talk about Intelligent Design!). It also seems to miss the key point of "computational analysis" when deciding exactly which viruses to synthesise.
The problem isn't synthesising a virus given its genome, it's choosing the genome of the virus to synthesise. As Yuri states, it took 30 days for a Swiss team to synthesise the virus given the genome. You just can't iterate this process very many times, and the chance of getting a virus that spreads effectively is not very high with each mutation (or recombination).
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but you seem to be saying it’s a problem without any caveats regarding any potential benefits.
Artificial splicing is common, I agree, but we are talking a handful of mutations per paper rather than the billions of natural mutations that occur. I wasn’t arguing for frequency of mutations that follow the exact path of Covid 19 genetics, I would expect those to be very uncommon, but you only need one in a billion or more.
I've read the Yuri Deigin paper now. It touches on convergent evolution as a possible explanation for the existence of similar protein spike morphologies, but dismisses it without argument ("Talk about Intelligent Design!). It also seems to miss the key point of "computational analysis" when deciding exactly which viruses to synthesise.
The problem isn't synthesising a virus given its genome, it's choosing the genome of the virus to synthesise. As Yuri states, it took 30 days for a Swiss team to synthesise the virus given the genome. You just can't iterate this process very many times, and the chance of getting a virus that spreads effectively is not very high with each mutation (or recombination).