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Comment by cratermoon

4 days ago

This almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".

13 comments

cratermoon

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roughly  9 hours ago

It's a shame it became such a weird political football, because the story of the mRNA COVID vaccine is absolutely in the "we are as gods" pantheon - the virus was sequenced, and 3 days later two separate labs had sequences for the vaccine. Phase 1 trials began within 3 months. To go from "weird novel pathogen" to "enough engineered vaccine candidate to start Phase 1 trials" is some legitimate sci-fi shit.

  • Schiendelman  8 hours ago

    Thankfully the political football is simmering down - I think we have mRNA flu vaccines in progress now, and attempts to stop that failed.

    • neonstatic  8 hours ago

      I was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crushing, incurable side effects, not even mentioning the ones who died.

      So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.

      6 replies →

creaktive  14 hours ago

What’s even more shocking to me: one can “3D-print” downloaded genome, too! What a time to be alive.