No. I'm so tired of all the HIV scare mongering from people who don't have a clue as to how genetic sequencing is done. Almost none of it has any bases in reality -- they are all computer constructions, built on top of other computer constructions. It's computer constructions all the way down.
The fact that part of an HIV or tuberculosis sequence shows up in a computer generated genetic sequence (and they are ALL computer generated, the papers admit "isolation" was done in silico, meaning in silicon) just means the genetic databases that were mined for matches paired a part of those sequences (also created in silico) with one of the contigs (short segment of amino acids) floating in the patient sample. A sample, mind you, taken from deep inside the nose filled with God knows what, but that presumably contains the virus, which is only a hypothesis. But that's the hypothesis computer algorithms and heuristics attempt to pull out of the sample soup. There is no honest observation here, it is all biased by preconceived solutions: this patient is sick from a virus, which is in his sample, that we somehow know looks like SARS-CoV-1, so computer, I command you to make it so.
For what it's worth I have a fairly recent PhD in computer science, my thesis was on modeling, and I spent a lot of time studying and attending seminars on bioinformatics, which is almost exclusively about genetic sequencing.
No. I'm so tired of all the HIV scare mongering from people who don't have a clue as to how genetic sequencing is done. Almost none of it has any bases in reality -- they are all computer constructions, built on top of other computer constructions. It's computer constructions all the way down.
The fact that part of an HIV or tuberculosis sequence shows up in a computer generated genetic sequence (and they are ALL computer generated, the papers admit "isolation" was done in silico, meaning in silicon) just means the genetic databases that were mined for matches paired a part of those sequences (also created in silico) with one of the contigs (short segment of amino acids) floating in the patient sample. A sample, mind you, taken from deep inside the nose filled with God knows what, but that presumably contains the virus, which is only a hypothesis. But that's the hypothesis computer algorithms and heuristics attempt to pull out of the sample soup. There is no honest observation here, it is all biased by preconceived solutions: this patient is sick from a virus, which is in his sample, that we somehow know looks like SARS-CoV-1, so computer, I command you to make it so.
For what it's worth I have a fairly recent PhD in computer science, my thesis was on modeling, and I spent a lot of time studying and attending seminars on bioinformatics, which is almost exclusively about genetic sequencing.
Thanks for this! Really good info!
Glad if it helps still your mind. As Frank Herbert told us, "Fear is the mind killer."