Lab-made viruses like that have a close to zero chance of being more successful in the wild, even if the researchers had attempted that goal.
Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No, computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't help.
I'm neither. But basically designing a Virus would mean composing a 30k long string of RNA (in this case) which creates the proteins and RNA molecules which do all the things a Virus does. And it does more than you'd think. It makes the cell copy the Virus, make the proteins, often interferes with other processes in the cell.
Copying the genome is easy. Making specific modifications isn't even that hard, as long as you don't have the illusion to know the result beforehand. But for the Virus to change its behavior in a meaningful/useful way requires multiple changes. The best someone could do is recombine changed parts from multiple variants. But they don't necessarily fit together. And the recombination also happens in nature, probably a lot more often than in the lab.
Yes. It has spread. And was very non-virulent. And they got valuable data on what to do when H5N1 does become transmissible in Humans.
However, had this Virus escaped, it would have fizzled. Showing airborne transmission does not mean the Virus would spread among ferrets and Humans under normal conditions. Mammalian H5N1 viruses might have already existed but failed to survive subsequent passage and thus did not evolve to become transmissible enough. Such lab experiments only add a minuscule risk to the much bigger risk of such a Virus occurring naturally.
This isn't a random 'lab made virus' this is a virus made by taking the specifically deadly aspects of one strain and adding the specifically infectious aspects of another. There is a very high likelihood of it being successful, because it already is. What is unlikely are these mutations happening naturally, which is why this should never be researched in sub-BSL-4 environments.
None of the proteins of this Virus had been known before. Even if hypothetically the Virus would have been constructed out of Bat viruses only known to some top-secret Chinese scientists, there is no way they could have known those components to be "deadly" (to Humans).
You underestimate evolution and wildly overestimate the capabilities of genome engineering.
Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No, computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't help.
reply