Headline here on HN seems somewhat misleading, and I fear for how this is likely to be spun. In this context "patented" does not mean "engineered" or "artificial". This is the complement to a genuine human sequence we all have. It's 19 nucleotides (28 bits) long, so unlikely (but not impossible in a cryptographic sense) to have arisen randomly. We do know viruses will pick up these sequences from their hosts though, so by itself this doesn't actually say much absent some statistics about how common that is.

Basically: please be careful here, a lot of people are going to want to treat this as a smoking gun, and it's not. It sure is interesting though.