Hi Christine,

Nothing better than Sunday morning dabbling in science! OK, I may be a bit biased in that. It used to be Sunday comics, then reading the rest of the paper with a cup of coffee… and now it is sitting in my lab doing experiments and dabbling on the internet as well…

Kary became a crank for sure. You can read his Nobel Prize lecture and postscripts and he admits that he went off and spent most of his time traveling and lecturing, rather than doing research. So he was not at all an expert on HIV (and he was not alive for COVID) - so Kary is not a reliable reference for those disease. Dr. Fauci is.

One specific comment you reference from Kary, if he made it, is actually quite correct factually - but it is easy to see how Kary runs off the rails from there. You said:

“…since findings in a small DNA strand (even if copied a million-fold...) seems to say as much as nothing about the full sequence…”

Which is correct. You only know that the primers bound to DNA on either side of the sequence which was amplified - you do not know the exact sequence of the amplified DNA from the PCR alone.

But- it is quite easy to take the PCR amplified DNA and sequence it and know what each letter of the code is. Kary should have known that - because he was familiar with the technology (dideoxynucleotide Sanger sequencing).

We know exactly what the viral sequence is. It has about 30,000 letters of RNA (instead of DNA), and every letter of the virus’s genome has been sequenced many times. And it looks nothing like the human genome, which we also have sequenced, all 6 billion letters, many times. So we know for sure that there is no way COVID comes from the human body.

I am happy to answer the 4 questions you posed - but I need a little more context or framing of your questions because each is kind of ambiguous and can be answered many ways, most probably not relevant to your real question.

But I am super-psyched that you are interested in the science and technology of biology - it is super-illuminating if you are receptive to the light of data and information.

Best,

SD