Search for "moderna" then scroll up a bit.
Search for "moderna" then scroll up a bit.
If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.
I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the math, convinced everybody they were right, and either subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just garbage".
[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Web&PAGE_TYPE=B...
I had another advisor who thought they were good at homology, so they'd take protein matches with an E-value of 10 (almost certainly random chance) and munge the data to make up a story. Most of my work was about using very stringent blast searches to make profiles, but all that work is superseded by HMMER now.
The HIV paper has been withdrawn and was total bunk.
See comments on the paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1?...