“Lets hope this technology is used for good, if not, it could produce endless variations of more lethal viruses.” Admin
If SARS-CoV-2 has frazzled your nerves, I have bad news for you. Scientists are already cooking up more virulent and lethal versions.
In a January 22, 2021, Twitter post, biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin highlighted a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv at the end of December 2020, saying:1
“Ok, the prize for the craziest and most dangerous gain-of-function research goes out to Italian virologists who took SARS[-CoV-]2 and passaged it in vitro in the presence of neutralizing antibodies.2 It quickly obliged and mutated to escape them. Yay for a novel, more dangerous SARS3!”
“Passaging” refers to a genetic engineering technique where a virus is grown in a series of different animal tissue cultures. With each “pass,” the virus will mutate slightly, gaining different functions.
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