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Asked by anon-240848 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 12 Mar 2020.
Question: can you make a new corona virus in the lab
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Tom Dally answered on 12 Mar 2020: last edited 12 Mar 2020 3:15 pm
It is possible to synthesise viruses in a lab environment as viruses are essentially just packages of DNA inside a shell or envelope. But these synthesised viruses are primarily used medicine and genetics to do things like insert DNA inside cells. Apparently a group of scientists have recently synthesised the SARS-CoV-2 virus (coronavirus) so that they can study it for further research: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.21.959817v1, but this has raised some ethical concerns about the potential future uses for this kind of technology. Also, I am not virologist, I just like insects 🙂
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modclaire commented on :
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