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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> It’s changes your DNA, mRNA changes your DNA when if you have your DNA tested now, and you eat a bunch of this, lettuce take a bunch of these MRNA vaccines, and you go back and get your DNA tested again, it’s gonna be a little different. It’s not going to be the same as it was that you were born with that you got from your parents.

Sigh.

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What happened to the good ol' days when they limited themselves to legislating the value of mathematical constants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

I am curious; if I was infected with a retrovirus and took an mRNA vaccine, could the reverse transcriptase of the retrovirus pick up mRNA from the vaccine and reverse-transcribe it into a cell's genome?

I suppose the lineage of that cell would already be doomed from the viral infection...

There are two reasons I can think of why that wouldn't happen: first, there's no primer to even initiate the reverse transcription. Maybe you might get unlucky and there's something close enough floating around. But integration machinery usually requires some specific sequence to identify the ends of the viral genome. Maybe that exists, it's not my field, but I've never heard of one.

Also, even if it did integrate, there would be no promoter, so the vaccine gene wouldn't get expressed. So the only danger I see would be if it integrated into something functional, but the virus was going to do that anyway. But this is so improbable to begin with I wouldn't worry about it.

I believe there is some Crisper work going on to remove retroviruses from DNA. I think there was a promising trial recently with trying to strip HIV from someone's immune cells?

AFAIK it's not mRNA-related technology.

Would be a good one for April fools.

This guy has a BachSci in “soil sciences” from University of Tennessee.

I think soil scientists know more about soil than plants.

Anecdotally we have at least one soil scientist who knows less about DNA than plants.

Does Tennessee not require a Biology 1 class?

The legislator in question was born before the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Believing he is ignorant, rather than being purposefully wrong, is no longer reasonable. They lost the benefit of the doubt a long time ago.

I thought this little gem was going to be in the comments section of the article. Surely not in the article itself. Nope.

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