Gain Of Function

2008 CoVid / HIV Chimera Gain of Function Study To Increase Transmissibility To Humans In February 2008, a group of scientists including Wuhan Institute of Virology’s 'Bat Lady' Shi Zhengli published a study in Journal of Virology titled 'Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and…

Can we use viruses to protect us from viruses? — Let’s face it: We are not very good at researching in advance The Covid pandemic made it evident that we had important holes in the scientific knowledge needed to fight SARS-Cov2. Despite the last two potential pandemics (SARS and MERS) being coronaviruses, which indicated a reasonable risk for these types of viruses, we never invested in studying in detail the coronaviruses endemic…

In a preprint earlier this year, several colleagues and I were able to identify complete genomes for two novel Betacoronaviruses from contaminating reads in agricultural plant sequencing datasets. We identified a novel HKU4-related Merbecovirus in a rice dataset sequenced by the Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan in early 2020.

Evolution and Public Health What does it take for a virus to create new variants and to evolve into a more deadly foe? If we were to model the probability of a virus gaining a function — e.g., escaping a vaccine, increasing its virulence, or being more harmful to children…

Since the beginning of the pandemic, questions have been persistent as to the real origins of COVID-19, but concrete answers have been virtually nonexistent. Skepticism of natural origins has been doused with fierce resistance before it ever reaches the tarmac for liftoff. The official stance — that COVID-19 originated in…

USDA Organic does not require food to be grown in soil anymore, and organic cheaters are keeping animals in factory farms. Meanwhile, it is illegal to sell some of the healthiest regenerative organic foods, like raw milk, and new synthetic genetically engineered foods that are not safety-tested or labeled, like…