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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

There could certainly be a logical error in play here, but considering this is mRNA, and not DNA, it seems like it would be fairly amazing for it to spontaneously form into DNA. Similar to a load of parts spontaneously forming into a bicycle.

That's not to say it isn't possible, but many things are possible but sufficiently unlikely that we take those risks. We eat, drink, and breathe many things every day that we don't fully understand the ingredients or impacts of.

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> Similar to a load of parts spontaneously forming into a bicycle.

For the analogy to be more accurate, the parts should explicitly not be bicycle parts.

Retroviruses carry reverse transcriptase which does exactly that: turns RNA into DNA.

Yep. That was her point.

From the responses you’d think I was talking about brain chips injected by Bill Gates, but I suppose this is the result when a layman attempts to explain something unfamiliar to other laymen.

The thing that all biologists fundamentally understand is that none of this stuff has been designed. Every process in the body happens due to chemical reactions that do happen spontaneously. The replies above don't seem to get this and instead consider a human body to be the product of design like a car or something. You can't just throw metal at a car and hope to invent a new type of gearbox. But throwing stuff at living things is exactly how change is driven. If we were immutable we wouldn't be here.

The part about parts spontaneously forming a bicycle is a nice soundbite, but reverse transcriptase (an enzyme) is used by RNA viruses to do just that.

Spontaneously, yes - fairly amazing. But what if the person treated with the mRNA vaccine happens to be infected with another RNA virus that is producing reverse transcriptase enzymes to convert its own RNA into DNA?

To prevent an immune response and degradation, the mRNA vaccine nucleosides are modified from normal human mRNA. It's possible that RNA virus reverse transcriptase may not be able to work on these modified nucleosides.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

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