Re:Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
by moralestapia on Thursday June 10, 2021 @07:40PM
(#27467500)
>In all of your comments here you're being pretty ridiculous [...]
Well, that says more about you than me, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
>I was a genetic engineer for 20 years and engineered plenty of viruses for therapeutics, including plenty of retroviruses.
Your website and LinkedIn say otherwise ... unless you were doing it as a hobby? Sure, then.
Given all your (presumed) experience, what's your opinion on this: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118
The paper you link to is overexpressing LINE1 on plasmid in HEK293 cells and coinfecting w. sars-cov-2 - not exactly a natural setup! They see some nucleocapsid fragment integration and limited expression, but it's a pretty forced experiment, honestly. Also the whole virus is very different from the mRNA payload of the vaccines. Having a random chunk snagged by an overexpressed retrotransposon is a far cry from a meaningful integration event. Though LINE/Alu transposon integrations are an interesting driver of evolution on million-year timescales.
(and: not a hobby. I was at UCSF, Stanford, and helped start several biotechs. You would have more traction here if you acted a little more thoughtful with those trying to talk to you.)
The existence of reverse transcriptases in nature does not imply that there's a plausible path to an mRNA vaccine reverse transcription event, even the presence of a known reverse transcriptase in say, an HIV infected cell - they'll have radically different priming systems, etc.
We have plenty enough evidence for core molecular cell biology processes to call out some ideas as radically improbable.