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Comment by beiller | Hacker News Reader

I have the opposite Occam's razor thoughts. My opinion is we are not capable of developing in a lab a virus that is so transmissible and survivable in human species only. I think the complexity of the virus machinery and its interactions inside of our bodies and immune system is beyond astronomical in complexity. It's laughable to suggest that we are so intelligent as to invent a better version of the machinery that is hypothesized as the very machinery responsible for creation of multi cellular life itself.

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Well, SARS-CoV-2 isn't transmissible in humans only; it survives just fine in many other mammals, including pets.

This is basically the reason we can't get rid of it. Even if we had a perfect human vaccine that blocked transmission, it wouldn't help.

Speaking as an artist, many (most?) of my enduring works were the result of an accident of some kind. I call them "happy accidents" because I recognized that the mistake was better than whatever the vision was that I had at the time.

As a corollary, there are unhappy accidents, and with respect to life forms in a chaotic system, such accidents can perpetuate and endure without human recognition.

The lab in question was doing gain of function research.

The existence of gain of function research shows that you are wrong.

> My opinion is we are not capable of developing in a lab a virus that is so transmissible and survivable in human species only. I think the complexity of the virus machinery and its interactions inside of our bodies and immune system is beyond astronomical in complexity. It's laughable to suggest that we are so intelligent as to invent a better version of the machinery that is hypothesized as the very machinery responsible for creation of multi cellular life itself.

The very first synthetic virus created in 2002 and was modeled after polio, which is fairly transmissible and affects humans. That virus was made 20 years ago; synthetic biology has come a very long way since then.

Does that fact alter your opinion?

There is a huge variety of viruses, just because someone wrote the equivalent of "Hello World" doesn't mean you can write a complicated CMS anytime soon.

Synthetic biology (the actual synthesis of DNA) has come a long way, we don't understand all the components yet though.

Sorry it does not. Was that virus more deadly, effective, or in any other measure better than the original polio? Or was it "polio" with a spike protein glued to it's head?

You can trigger a pandemic by making a virus less deadly too.

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