Hacker News Reader

Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

This specific study sounds relatively benign, but generative models for DNA sequences sounds like an incredibly dangerous technology to develop. If someone were to reproduce their study while including animal viruses in the training data, what would it be capable of? And what about after a few years of progress?

Their phages have only 5400 base pairs, but the hepatitis virus has around 3000, and ebola only had ~19,000. That doesn't mean making a novel lethal virus is easy, but if anyone pulls it off, it would make Covid look like a picnic.

View on HN

Don't worry, if it escapes from the lab we can just blame it on the bats again

Edit: I take back my snark.

I never understood the "it's really important for us to blame the lab leak" angle. I certainly want to know what actually happened, but some people really, really want it to be a lab leak. Perhaps you can explain?

If it is a lab leak people can blame other people for the disease. If it is naturally occuring there is nobody to blame and people have to face the idea that nature can still kill them at anytime and justifies lock downs and restrictions when dangerous diseases arise.

But don't lab leaks that result in pandemics still require lockdowns and restrictions when dangerous diseases are leaked?

It should, but some people don't care as long as they can put the blame of any consequences on somebody else. It lets them push the responcibilty of their own actions onto others.

I don't want it to be a lab leak but all the evidence points towards it being a lab leak

We have 5 known antibiotics. There are "MRSA" bacteria (which is a property of bacterial species, not a name for a particular species (anymore)) which don't care or react to about 4 of them and the 5th one is showing slightly reduced effectiveness already.

Why? Presumably because, of course, the new government rules imposed on doctors for antibiotics are about saving money and NOT about fighting resistance. The 5th antibiotic is ... not expensive in an absolute sense, but compared to the other 4 it's pretty expensive. The guideline from scientists is that if you decide to use it you need to nearly overdose the patient on it, despite that that is not necessary to cure them. Doing that is much more expensive (not that much more expensive really, it just looks impressive in % and presumably in excel sheets), but fights resistance. We're not doing that, and so we have ... probably not even a decade ... and then we have no treatment anymore against bacterial infection.

And in a decade, we will still be surrounded by lethal bacteria. Look at your hand. It's overwhelmingly likely you can't see them but you're looking at lethal pneumococci, several species. This is a clean hand we're taking about. Even a freshly scrubbed hand of a surgeon will still have quite a few bacteria. Grab a handful of soil. You know, the kind plants grow in. Your hand now has botulinum-producing bacteria, as well as many other toxins, tuberculosis (definitely if you're anywhere near a farm), tetanus, and the list goes on and on), some of which we have no vaccine against at all, and many we don't vaccinate for because it's not practical.

So the choice is between developing DNA sequences for viruses, or having a pandemic 100x worse than COVID every 30 years or so.

There is no choice here.

Jesus, how are the other living things existing at all?

You should hear about the war that occurs in the ocean non stop. Quadrillions of bacteria, bacteriaphages, and viruses are in a constant battle and evolving to one up each other.

Really I don't get how multicellular life survived it.

Why go to the ocean, because that happens everywhere, non-stop. If your immune system stops working, then you are a dead man.

Googling the 5 known antibiotics comes back

>There are actually dozens of individual medicines and more than ten major classes of antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections—not just five

I went to chatGPT to get what the fuck you mean (just in case saving money meant the government isn't giving me or my colleagues access at all to some antibiotics). But sadly it's not that. It's a correct answer, just totally disregarding resistance. In order to arrive at 10 classes, ChatGPT is naming classes that are defeated, like Penicillin. I didn't consider or count antibiotics that became completely useless before 1980 or so (because other than historical and research interest, what's the point? Nobody's going to make penicillin effective again) and then 5 is very much the correct count.

So yes, counting useless antibiotics (useless in curing humans, not necessarily useless in research or other procedures like making custom antibodies), there are 10 classes (although if you're going there, why not go further than 10? But whatever)

So let's classify ChatGPT's suggestions:

1) Fully defeated by Bacteria: penicillins, macrolides, fluoroquinolones (yes, very occasionally there will be something these do still work against, however no sane physician will "trust" these, and nobody outside of research bothers testing anything against them)

2) Mostly defeated: carbapenems, cephalosporins, and vancomycin. If you know what you're dealing with these can be used, but if even slightly in doubt what bacterium it is, we do not go here. Without a lab test confirming that what's ailing the patient responds to these (positive confirmation needed), do not use. This also means they're not useful in emergencies.

3) Useful ... except: tetracyclines, aminoglycosides, "combinations", Daptomycin (and lipopeptides in general), oxazolidinones. These can be used "by default". These are "the 5" that we're talking about.

And yes, I got updated, until 2024 there was no known resistance to Daptomycin (which is an "updated" version of Vancomycin in some ways). There now are known resistant strains against all of them, which means we've actually climbed one more rung on the ladder.

Current state: for every antibiotic we know there is a disease that just totally ignores that antibiotic. However we are not yet in the state that one disease is immune against everything (although there are MRSA strains that are highly resistant to 4 out of 5, in India, and frankly, probably in China, except they're lying about it. These strains are also active in Pakistan and probably Afghanistan and Iran except nobody really knows for sure)

What you say would make sense if phages designed from scratch with generative AI were the only solution to antibiotic resistance. That's obviously not the case.

> The guideline from scientists is that if you decide to use it you need to nearly overdose the patient on it, despite that that is not necessary to cure them. Doing that is much more expensive (not that much more expensive really, it just looks impressive in % and presumably in excel sheets), but fights resistance.

I'm skeptical of this often cited claim. The more you use it the greater the evolutionary pressure you place and the more you force evolved resistance. If you overuse an antibiotic, you kill off all of the bacteria that could compete with the resistant strains, thus strongly promoting resistance.

I posit that like with all other evolutionary pressures, reducing the pressure is the right approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com