I have now spent much of the last week looking into the work of Bruttel and his colleagues, and I think their analysis doesn’t hold up — meaning the paper doesn’t help resolve the question of how SARS-CoV-2 originated.
But while usually I wouldn’t bother writing about a preprint that doesn’t stand up to in-depth scrutiny and may never be peer reviewed and fully published at all — for one thing, there have been tens of thousands of preprints on Covid alone — in this case I think it’s worth it. That’s because the researchers’ original claim circulated widely and is worth thoughtfully answering, and because the preprint and the response represent both the best and the worst in how our scientific institutions and processes converge on truth…
Viruses recombine with each other constantly, sharing chunks of their genetic code each time. Each of the restriction sites identified in the paper is present in other SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses researchers have identified in the last few years. Critically, the sequences around the restriction site in SARS-CoV-2 also tend to match the surrounding RNA in the other coronaviruses —suggesting that the whole segment was lifted into SARS-CoV-2 all at once….
While some researchers started out intrigued by the paper, others argued it was not just wrong but obviously, blatantly wrong — “poppycock dressed up as science, with a heavy dose of technobabble on the side,” Kristian G. Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, tweeted, adding, “it wouldn’t pass kindergarten molecular biology.” (As the parent of a kindergartener, I think he may be overestimating the rigor of our molecular biology curriculum.)
Source: A preprint paper said Covid was likely lab-made. Not so fast. – Vox
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