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Comment by studiecomput | Hacker News Reader

Another wild thought: Is it possible that the solution for harmful retroviruses, like HIV, are retroviruses itself? If retroviruses can overwrite or fuse with our DNA, can't we overwrite it back by making a retrovirus ourselves?

I'm not familiar with this topic at all, but it's super interesting.

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The problem with pathological viruses is they take over the cells themselves and make them fabricate more viruses until they burst. In these cases there is no living cell left to reprogram.

In the case of HIV it's even worse since it targers certain immune cells. It will eventually kill most of them if it's allowed to replicate unchecked, crippling its host's immune response.

Pathological viral infection feels like an infinite loop. The CPU is a dumb machine doing its job to decode and execute instructions, until it bursts in to flames. The ribosome likewise transforms amino acids in to proteins as directed by RNA until the cell is destroyed.

Yes. Ribosomes are dumb machines. They have no authentication mechanism. The RNA randomly gets near the ribosome, interacts with it and the result is a whole new protein. It doesn't know whether the RNA was translated from cellular or viral DNA. In the case of cellular DNA, the ribosome makes useful proteins that helps the cell perform its function. In the case of viral DNA, the ribosome makes viral proteins which eventually get assembled into a new copy of the virus.

Viruses aren't actual living beings, they're just self-replicating structures. They are capable of injecting genetic material into other cells in order to get them to make more copies of themselves.

> Pathological viral infection feels like an infinite loop.

The same logic could be applied to biochemistry in general. It's not 100% accurate but it is a lot of fun to think about it in those terms. It's also fun to think about programming in biochemical terms! I wrote about this in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21562716

This is an awesome topic. Thank you both for your response! I try to convert everything into programming terms to make it a bit easier to understand, but it's a really complex topic imo.

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