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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

My recent absolute favorite is Lupe Fiasco explaining it to Hotep Jesus (some NSFW language):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MA48bfshw#t=2h14m3s

The overall video is a about vaccines in general (Hotep Jesus is rather skeptical of them), but Lupe explaining how mRNA vaccines work starts at this timestamp. There's also a place where the audio cuts out. It's only a minute or so, but they go back and finish where they left off.

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I love how Lupe doesn't simplify it so far to say "it never goes in reverse".

I'm curious what those rare cases are.

Viruses! RNA viruses like SARS-cov-2. They make the cell reverse transcribe their RNA cargo into DNA, and then the cell produces more viruses.

Most RNA viruses are not incorporated into DNA. SARS-CoV-2 is what's called a "positive sense" RNA virus, which means that it is directly translated by cellular machinery to produce more virus copies. It should have no interaction with cellular DNA.

Retroviruses are a subset of RNA viruses that utilize the strategy you're referring to. This requires additional machinery be coded for to allow reverse transcription to DNA and then subsequent integration into host DNA. The vast majority of RNA viruses are not retroviruses.

That usually (right?) doesn't lead to staying in the host's DNA, but I understand that some of our DNA is virus DNA so it DOES happen. Viruses per se aren't exactly rare, so maybe he specifically meant this phenomenon.

But also - that's reverse transcription, not reverse translation. Maybe Lupe made this point a little too late in his description.

EDIT: Sorry, moved around the above after rethinking

retroviruses, mostly. Crispr, obviously.

I get that that's probably Lupe's shtick, but I think half (or more) of the things he's describing to Hotep Jesus are things that your average person doesn't know!

It's such a refreshing contrast to status quo anti-intellectualism the way he hams up the shame of Hotep's not knowing.

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