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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> It's certainly possible it came from a lab.

Quite a few significant geneticists consider it extremely unlikely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

Sure, it’s possible, but that probability appears to be extremely small.

Edit: I just realized you might have meant “natural origins but escaped from the lab rather than being introduced directly from wild animals”. If that’s what you meant apologies that my reply is irrelevant. If you meant “deliberately engineered in a lab” then my reply stands. I don’t see science as a “left/right” issue.

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I did mean escaped. There’s plenty of labs that were studying SARS, so it’s not impossible. I agree that we should look at only the facts, but political groups on all sides are twisting them for own convenience, so you have to be skeptical of motivations right now.

What is the argument in that paper?

Perhaps this bit:

While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.

But again, the poster clarified this only addresses the engineering of the virus, not the the other theories that center around lax precautions at the lab.

So, these threads do devolve into a predictable pattern, but I’m compelled to bring up instances where viruses escaped from Chinese labs before:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

I believe there were a few more instances too (not mentioned in the article).

Humans have engaged in genetic manipulation through application of selective pressures since the dawn of time. In its positive form is called 'domestication', and 99% of the food of your table, vegetable or animal, is the byproduct of such genetic manipulation.

Nothing in the article you cite addresses whether SARS-CoV-2 is a result of applying selective pressures or not. And the grant in question is funding exactly that: scientists looking to enhance the ability of coronavirus to infect various species, including humans. Not hard to presume they used the tried and true method of applying selective pressures, at least as a baseline.

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...

The leading theory is that it’s the result of a serial passage experiment.

The genetic “architecture” doesn’t look human-made. Here’s a popular science summary for people who don’t have the training to read the paper (which is most people, for any science paper as they are written for domain experts and nobody is a domain expert in every field):

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...

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