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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2906 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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This took me a second to think about, but I guess that is a distinct possibility. I was considering the "might have been version 0.0.1" case, where Covid-19 was an intermediate for a future coronavirus bioweapon, but it's not completely out of the question that someone could e.g. work on a single protein in one virus strain and splice it into a very different base virus.

Indeed, that's a large chunk of the way gain-of-function research tends to work in the context of bioweapon development. Make multiple different things, combine them together, and see what sticks.

See e.g. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1229455

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