day, which is adaptation and gain of function.
Jefferey Smith (32:04)
Well, I won't spend the time now laying out the arguments in terms of the structure of the ACE receptor and the Furin part of the strain and the evolutionary time it would take for a natural thing to mutate into this. But, from a theoretical standpoint, if we're talking about the pig stool factory, it's moving variations within certain natural systems--treated in an unnatural way, but natural systems. If you genetically engineer you might go completely outside anything that might be created through natural systems. It's like you can think of all of the ways that you could raise and change mice. You can genetically engineer with different cells an ear, a human ear, to grow on the back of that mouse, and that's not something that is within the realm of natural variation. It is imposed.
Jefferey Smith (33:08)
Here we come back to the question: If a virus is genetically engineered and released, it may be that our mechanism for using the patch to upgrade our software, to benefit from it going forward, may be disrupted because we may reach to handshake it in one way and it doesn't have the proper handshake the other way. So that's where I'm trying to see if throwing this wrench into your system, if it falls apart--if we're genetically engineering in ways that wouldn't occur in nature and might actually stop the appropriate assimilation or evaluation of the physiological level.
Dr. Zach Bush (33:55)
It's certainly possible. But I would offer you this perspective, which is how little RNA is in that coronavirus. You're talking about 6 genes at the most, right? Five of those have been in every other coronavirus ever studied, including the common cold. You have one new RNA strand at best (and there's still debate as to whether it's really new or not, or just a variant of a previously seen one), but at best we have one new RNA strand here, which may or may not even be a gene. We don't know if that RNA goes on to make a protein yet. It could easily just be a micro RNA segment that gets cleaved up and can change genetic signaling and other things, but isn't actually a gene itself. We have a lot of work to do to prove that this thing actually has a new gene.
Dr. Zach Bush (34:44)
If it does have a new gene, I would challenge anybody to find one gene that can disrupt physiology in a very small number of cells. Because remember, the number of cells that will take up that gene once infected through the lung is a tiny, tiny proportion of human cells. It's not like the entire human genome gets updated with that RNA strand throughout the whole body. No, it's just the lung epithelium, maybe some vast [?] epithelium, and that's it. You're going to have very few cells that ever get exposed to that one new gene. I think it's extremely unlikely that all of the checks and balances, all of the extraordinary control mechanisms that we have to make sure that we can be resilient and repair every day, could be subverted by a single gene and just a few cells.