You've got such a gift for this stuff. I'm bored of lab leak articles and you still made this very interesting while also conveying how amazing the science is. You should think about writing a book you know.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

That’s very kind of you, thank you. :) And I get a massive assist from the science actually being amazing!

@Alex-fk3ni

2 жыл бұрын

Well, actually he did! He just released his first book!

Just listened to a very similar story on Tim Harford’s More or Less, but you managed to explain it 10x better Andrew, you really are one of the greatest science communicators I’ve ever come across and your work is criminally underrated!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! (And I do love More or Less…that segment was partly the inspiration for this video actually!)

@MedlifeCrisis

2 жыл бұрын

I agree!

@memofromessex

Жыл бұрын

I did enjoy More or Less at to the point he showed his unpragmatic view of economics which revealed himself as a thoughtless utopian market liberal over the gas price hikes. He couldn't understand why anyone would not consider the market first over their own financial well being. Forgetting the price increase was largely exogeneous and nothing to do with the market, therefore someone even slightly more aware and less ideological would think it'd be reasonable to do something about, rather than believe the market knows best. I'm no ways hard-left, but my god the lack of self awareness and that there were no other ways of managing this temporary problem just blew my mind. It was like a student communist talking about communism.

Brilliant video, as always, Dr. Steele. Concise and easy to follow and understand. I really liked the bit about the COVID codes printed on the single sheets of paper... wild! Well done!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! It blew my mind too!

This video aged well.

this is absolutely brilliantly put! . you deserve more views, Andrew!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! :)

Thanks for this outstanding summary! So much more informative and clear than most of the articles I've come across on this topic. Also, I've started your book, Ageless, and it's excellent! Some of the best science writing I've read in a long while.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks very much! And really glad you’re enjoying the book too! :)

Not only a great video, as always, but greatly useful too! And furthermore you answer many of the viewers' questions in the comment section. You are a gift, Andrew.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! Glad to be of service :)

Medlife Crisis sent me here, and you earned my subscription (with bell of course) in the first minute

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

WITH THE BELL :D Thank you!

@vincentguttmann2231

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Of course with the bell. If ever I find someone who is as entertaining AND educating as you, that's nothing I think about twice.

I heard that is possible to do "gain of function" experiment directly on human tissue in order to speed up the process of replication and recombination with other coronavirus, in this case the process is more efficient than using ferrets as a host, and is much more likely to obtain Sars Cov-2, starting from something like RaTG13, but not necessarily that, is it possible?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, you can use human cells, or ‘humanised’ mice which are genetically modified to express the human ACE2 receptor and thus are susceptible to human coronaviruses. In fact, I think you’d be more likely to use these than ferrets for a lot of experiments, that comment was a bit of a joke. :) It’s not obvious to me that it would be massively faster though…coronaviruses just mutate slowly! The analogy that it took millions of human infections to get Alpha and Delta isn’t perfect, but it does provide a ballpark… It would nonetheless be pretty interesting to see what other samples they have in Wuhan, and their lab notes so we can know for sure…

@giulio9476

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele thanks for the quick response. I was surprised to how fast you covered that topic in the video, but I understend that nobody is perfect, in any case great video, congratulations. However the gain of function experiments seem to me to be one of the key elements of this story, from some articles that I read, seems to me that several experts consider it plausible that there was enough time to obtain the sars cov 2 through this type of experiments, starting from other similar coronaviruses, I recommend this article on the topic iv.iiarjournals.org/content/35/3/1313

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@giulio9476 It’s certainly possible and, given that if this work has been done it’s been done in secret, I think it’s hard to know what a plausible mutation rate would be. :) The solution is more transparency from WIV, China, and everyone else involved!

Amazingl video! Thanks

Great video! Thank you!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Great video! Does the speed at which the coronavirus mutates change when it cross between host species?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Kind of! The speed at which it mutates is (more or less) constant because it’s a property of how well its RNA ‘proof-reading’ proteins work-and they don’t make mistakes that often. However, there could be significant ‘evolutionary pressure’ when a coronavirus tries to infect a new species because if it can find the right changes it can become much more infectious in the new host that it’s less well adapted to-so if a random mutation hits on a winner, it will rapidly come to dominate. And thank you! Really glad you enjoyed it. :)

@GervaisRioux

2 жыл бұрын

It's a balance of proof-reading driven by evolutionary pressure that set the mutation speed, uh? Too much proof-reading and the virus hits an evolution dead end, not enough and you got a bunch of viruses that are not viable. Very interesting!

That was quite interesting and very informative, thank you. I'll now have to peruse the rest of your content :)

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you, hope you like it!!

How this brilliant scientific well explained video has so few reviews ? Because we live in an era of alternative facts and conspiracy .

What If "the news" just got someone to do a 3 minute segment explaining this .... Really a great video, it deserves a lot more views that it actually have.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks! And yes, this is so simple you could easily do a three-minute version for the news…it’s just it’s quite complicated to realise how simple it is! More scientists in newsrooms please. :)

@Podcastforthewin

2 жыл бұрын

I think you know why they didn’t.

Due to POPULAR DEMAND you can now download a PDF version of the sequences I used in the video to PRINT YOUR OWN CORONAVIRUS here: andrewsteele.co.uk/blog/2021/07/coronavirus-lab-leak-wuhan-video/ :) Edit, 02/2023: There’s another round of covid lab leak stuff in the news so I ended up rewatching this video. Surprisingly, it stands up quite well! This is because, frustratingly, we don’t have any additional evidence about what was in WIV’s freezers, meaning the analysis remains broadly the same (and, if we do get some new genomes, this is what we’ll need to do with them!). However, the one line I’d change now is right near the end: we have got increasingly convincing (albeit not conclusive) evidence of a natural origin for the pandemic, which was announced in two back-to-back papers in July 2022. I’ve summed up the latest evidence (and why this video remains surprisingly relevant!) in this thread in Twitter: twitter.com/statto/status/1630160616118788096

@mikolasstrajt3874

2 жыл бұрын

I will print out these sequences and when someone starts blaming government / Chinese / NWO / whatever I will point at it and say: "This is what made pandemics, not XY you propose."

@namashaggarwal7430

2 жыл бұрын

Wow, this is great. I have already downloaded it. Now, I will feed this data to my machine learning model and see what insights will I get ❤️

@dongshengdi773

2 жыл бұрын

@@mikolasstrajt3874 The Wuhan virus started to spread rapidly in Wuhan based on the genetic markers. And the CCP allowed it to spread Around the globe causing the pandemic to level the playing field economically. The origin could have been anywhere which is a common occurrence but outbreaks are stopped by Following safety protocols that the Chinese govt clearly violated.

@dongshengdi773

2 жыл бұрын

@@mikolasstrajt3874 Here is a very common occurrence , just to give you Some perspective : NEW RUSSIAN BIRD FLU DISCOVERED: 2-2021 as reported by CNN and BBC News. The outbreak was prevented because Russia Govt followed safety protocols, Reported to the World health Organization early and submitted data and original samples . But Wuhan virus spread throughout the World killing millions because Wuhan China Govt didn't follow safety protocols and kept everything a secret to this day. No raw data available and No Live specimen available.

@psychalogy

Жыл бұрын

If it was coming from an animal reservoir we’d have seen multiple, geographically dispersed outbreaks over the last three years. AFAIK so far all cases eventually track back to Wuhan. This thing escaped from a lab.

Really well done. Keep up the good work.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks!

CRISPR biowar is not an "escape"

I admire your speech technique.

Is it known how many of the RaTG13 polymorphisms or genetic differences contribute to the transmissibility and disease severity of SARS CoV2? Presumably some of the differences have little to no effect. Obviously, you said that it’s not even agreed upon which mutations make the alpha-variant worse, so trying to do the same for RaTG13 would be far more difficult (as there are so many more differences). Essentially, is it known, what percentage of the the functional difference is between RaTG13 and SARS CoV2?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

I don’t think so, for exactly the reason you suggest: we just don’t know enough about how changing the sequence changes the structure of a protein, and then how changing the structure changes its function… So we’re two big steps away from being able to answer it precisely! That said, the 4% different is probably a slight overestimate because some of the differences will be ‘synonymous’-different RNA letters which code for the same amino acid, and therefore don’t change the protein. (These differences can matter too though, albeit indirectly, so it’s very hard!!)

@Wiperrinm1

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed your video, and you deserve far more views. In the meantime, I will be subscribed. This is not related to the video, just my curiosity. I had always thought that synonymous mutations were silent, would you mind elaborating on how these mutations can have effects. There is something in the back of my mind tells me that there are certain cases where a specific codon is important for the regulation of the gene (Perhaps in some bacterial amino acid synthesis, but I'm really not sure).

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@Wiperrinm1 Yes, it’s regulatory…certain codons are more readily translated (which is exactly as you say especially important in bacteria), and I imagine there’s other regulatory epigenetic stuff overlaid in eg humans because biology always uses every conceivable idea at every level! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codon_usage_bias has a bit more info :)

Awesome video. You'll make more than 1 million subscribers and more than 10 million views, If you keep putting such type of brilliant content. ❤️

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

Could you please make a video on how gene therapy actually works, how does it changes the genetic sequence in the living human to cure genetic disorders. Also, I'm extremely interested to know about stem cell therapy and how Induced Pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are produced in labs? Thanks in advance ❤️

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Both really interesting questions! I’ve got a bit of a backlog for video topics (to put it mildly…) but I’ll add them to the list!

@namashaggarwal7430

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele thank you very much ❤️. I'll be waiting for them

Why not just interactively show the very interpretable IGV interface? Printing out raw fasta sequence is why the public still has no idea how geneticists actually work. People are going to think we work with magnifying glasses and then will want to cut off funding.

At 14:28 you have a graph of a family tree for SarsCov, with a cousin of this virus close to it of 96%. A similar tree for SarsCov 2 would have RATG13 in a prominent position. The theory that RATG13 is some kind of backbone or part of some Chimera for Sars2 is very weak, but this Virus is a key component and it being hidden is very troubling. Why did some random Indian guy have to go through Chinese thesis's to find out about this ? It should have been released years before and god knows what other viruses that were caught by the team !

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

The fact it was publicly available, albeit not very prominently, in a thesis, doesn’t smack of a cover-up to me. If you’ve ever worked in a lab, you’ll know that data get lost in the file drawer all the time, perhaps because of the way scientific publications are required to have a ‘story’, rather than just being a genome sequence. This doesn’t exonerate the lab, and we should absolutely demand higher standards-I think we should have internationally enforced requirements for publishing genomes with pandemic relevance like RaTG13-but, given that there aren’t any at the moment, I still think cock-up rather than conspiracy is at least a highly plausible explanation!

@NiceTriGuy

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele You really need to gain a better understanding of how significant a ‘find’ RatG13 and the story behind it would have been to the WIV before you suggest it was likely lost in a drawer for 7 years. Sorry to be one of the few ‘lab’ types in the comments to question some of your conclusions. I think it is great that your style opens this debate up to wider viewership.

@petesandwich3246

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Why are we assuming RaTG13 is actually the closest relative they had at the lab? The WIV took down their viral database in September of 2019 and refuse to allow anyone to access the data, most likely there is a virus much more closely related to SARS-2

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@petesandwich3246 I’m not assuming that! As I said in the video, there might be a closer match in a freezer in Wuhan. I’m just addressing what’s publicly available-and busting the myth which has been put out there that RaTG13 could be SARS-CoV-2’s immediate ancestor.

@johncookson2494

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele and Lindy Swing If you look more deeply into the provenance of RATG13 you will find it was a sample taken from a bat fecal swab in Yunnan Province. It is also known as BtCoV/4991and was partially sequenced in 2016, but its full sequence has never been published. Oddly, although isolated in 2013, the supposedly identical sequence of RaTG13 was not submitted until January 27, 2020 where it appeared as a fully sequenced artifact. China has not been forthcoming on this topic and it is suspected by most that RATG13 is likely a fraudulent creation designed to justify the natural origin arguments.

You deserve a Nobel peace price for preventing the WW3

12:30 It rather points to it being a reverse-genetical construct by Shi Shengli, where SARS-CoV-2 was the progenitor/source and it had been partially reversed to a supposed precursor.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?

@tnaplastic2182

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele The explanation in my initial comment follows exactly that scheme.

@tnaplastic2182

2 жыл бұрын

@@desmondpun1773 What does this have to do with my comment? Oh... Nothing! You just copy and paste the same text under every second comment under every related video on KZread since months!

What do you think now a year on?

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Not that different to be honest! We’ve got more details that make an origin in the market look more likely, so things are leaning slightly more towards natural origin, but still no absolutely conclusive proof. I summed up my thoughts (and surprise that this video is still relevant!) in a recent Twitter thread: twitter.com/statto/status/1630160616118788096 :)

@kenmasters916

Жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Doubling down huh ? Pathetic

@12:28 it's not that random, there are clearly more changes in the spike protein area

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

This is true, but it’s also what you’d expect if it were evolved naturally! The spike is particularly evolutionarily important whether you’re trying to evade immunity in a given species where your relatives have been living for some time, or jump between them. It doesn’t look like a whole new spike has been swapped in-which is the relevant point for that bit of the video, anyway. :)

Oh yeah it’s big brain time. 🧠

We don't have solid evidence for a conspiracy? Have you read Jamie Metzl? Nicholas Wade?

It's interesting when you do the same overlay with omicron the virus gets outright bizarre.

@chesterbless9441

Жыл бұрын

How so?

I dont see why gain of function research has to be basedon RaTG13.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

It doesn’t, as I say in the video-but RaTG13 was proposed by some people claiming that a lab leak was responsible, so I thought it was worth addressing. We should definitely find out what else they have in the freezer in Wuhan though!

See now this is how you explain science, its objective and looks at questions from multiple perspectives. It's easy and very simple for a dummy like me to follow along and understand exactly what you're saying, and how you're coming to conclusions. When I put the TV or Radio on to listen to this topic my head is absolutely spinning, and you can literally feel that you're being lied to. Great video, I'll be here when this channel hits 1M Subs because you're cranking out such needed content! I do have a few questions even though they may be poorly written lol. Do you think SARS-CoV-1.9 could have been hanging out in plain sight? Were people having similar symptoms before all this? Was there enough time for it to mutate? and are the symptoms of RaTG13 sort of similar to Covid19?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! Really glad you enjoyed the video! And good questions… :) I don’t think it’s particularly likely that SARS-CoV-1.9 would have been widespread if only because of the enormous amount of scientific attention SARS-CoV-2 has had. Scientists have been working very hard sequencing millions of samples, and it would be amazing if something with similar symptoms hadn’t been caught by now. And we don’t know what the symptoms of RaTG13 might be-though there was an outbreak of pneumonia in workers in the mine it was discovered in, we don’t know if they were infected with RaTG13, or something else. And obviously it would be a terrible idea to infect anyone with it on purpose to find out!

@RichieAlton

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele You're welcome! Thank you for the response! Yeah I can't say I've been able to find anything discussing similar symptoms or anything even comparable that was affecting people before covid19. It's so unsettling how this came about so quickly and quietly. I'm no genius here, but do you think the ability for this virus to be asymptomatic is acting as the vehicle that alloud this virus to mutate so quickly?

@patriciarobinson5909

2 жыл бұрын

You’re not a dummy!

Thank you, very interesting topic!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

My pleasure!

The problem is China's attitude to further investigation. I wish you had covered the difficulties faced by researchers gaining access to Chinese data on Covid.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

This is certainly a problem and, as I say at the end of the video, we need to demand full transparency. But, in an effort to make it less than feature-length (and because it’s really outside my expertise!), I decided to stick to the genetics… :)

The only true pictures we have for it are CGI, so I say it was created by Nickelodeon.

Of course it did, Elementary my dear Watson!

Is u strong in maths (calculus) How many marks u used to get in ur test in maths

As mentioned by other, this is the greatest explanation in detailed and easy understanding way of current scientific evidence/facts the international community has. If every country, Politician and scientist had agreed on the logics presented here, the tracing of origination would have been quicker and more effective.

Did the coronavirus escape from a lab that did research on coronaviruses located where the coronavirus pandemic originated? That’s just a crazy conspiracy!

I wish i could find the old videos of all the pompous "virologists" mocking comments and chats for bringing up lab leak. They seem to be gone

I don't believe Sars CoV2 came from a lab but but it's not difficult to work out how this could have happened. Newly discovered coronaviruses are routinely tested on human cell culture. After finding one that can effect human cells. Passaging the virus to improve its affinity for infecting human cells is also routine. Nothing remotely difficult to do, so far an undergraduate could do this.. Then tack on a few acessory proteins to speed up multiplication and hide from the immune system (which CoV2 does unusually well and is why it can multiply to high numbers without the infected person feeling sick). It wouldn't even be difficult, it's not state of the art stuff and doesn't require years of experience.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Have you ever worked in a lab? I’m afraid your comment doesn’t make sense, and misrepresents the science, in ways that I explain in the video. Passaging through human cells, even were it as trivial as you imply, wouldn’t evolve the virus rapidly enough to turn it from one strain of coronavirus into another because coronaviruses mutate slowly, as I explained. And ‘tack on a few accessory proteins’?! Apart from us our extreme naïveté about what these might do in terms of virulence, it’s clear from the genome I showed that ‘a few’ proteins haven’t been ‘tacked on’ because, even compared to SARS-1, the changes are spread throughout the genome, roughly randomly.

Hello Andrew I get the impression you work in a sequencing laboratory. Is this the case ? Your comments below the video (which I have only just noticed), seem to indicate otherwise. I have been fascinated by this particular story since the beginning of the Pandemic and have followed the conflicting narratives from all sides. I found your sequencing sheets fascinating. According to Li-Meng Yan (You may be familiar with her name), SARS-CoV-2 may have been created from a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I would be most interested if the sequencing sheets like those you featured in the video might shed any light on the legitimacy or otherwise of such claims. As of yet, I have not seen any information which might debunk this assertion. Best Regards

12:27 "What you can see" is that there are overwhelmingly more changes in the Spike protein than anywhere else in the virus. Also there are several straight continues lines that do not look random since random would imply one change of the nuclide at a time. By your logic the more continuous lines of code the more it implies cut and paste technique has been done Ie.. reverse genetics, Gibsom assembly, noseum tech., and others

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

This isn’t true! Where there are larger changes, they tend to be in blocks of three-which is because the genetic code is written in codons which are three letters long. The large deletion between the RaTG13 spike and the SARS-COV-2 spike is 12 bases, ie 4 codons, in length, for example, similar to the 6- and 3-base deletions in the spike protein of Alpha that I point out. There aren’t any really large sections ‘cut and pasted’… It looks like natural evolution. :)

@johnfarmer3506

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Maybe it is natural evolution but there are way more changes in the Spike protien than anywhere else when compared to RaTG13 or BatCov/4991 which has a 1% difference from RaTg13. Cut and paste of small snips of code followed by serial passage is an evolutionary history that only the CCP can rule out thru open access to their labs.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@johnfarmer3506 Or a perfectly normal consequence of natural evolution! As I explain in answer to another comment, you’d expect more changes in the spike: ‘The spike is particularly evolutionarily important whether you’re trying to evade immunity in a given species where your relatives have been living for some time, or jump between them. It doesn’t look like a whole new spike has been swapped in-which is the relevant point for that bit of the video, anyway. :)’

@NiceTriGuy

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Actually if you study Spike proteins and RBD segments across viruses, it looks exactly like the spike protein was spliced in from another virus. Why would you suggest that alternate spike protein sequences would not share ‘some’ homology across virus types? They typically show degrees of similarity to what you are showing but key sequences determine conformational and species specific variances. In the case of COV2, that Human ACe compatible spike protein is virtually identical to what already exists in other non coronaviruses. Isn’t that what you are looking for to disprove natural evolution? Or are you determined to disprove a Chimera?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@NiceTriGuy Which non-coronaviruses have a protein ‘virtually identical’ to SARS-CoV-2’s spike? I’m not determined to prove or disprove anything, just presenting the evidence and citing my sources-so it would be great if you could do the same.

You seem like a nice guy but your presentation is little light on the facts about a lab theory or a natural zoologic origin. I recommend you read zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YOaYJjPmuUn I think this will strengthen your arguments for zoological origin. It has some compelling facts about poly basic cleavage site. As far as the lab origin the more the CCP tries to hide this info the guiltier they look.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

I reference that preprint in the video description-along with the fact it came out shortly after I filmed this! :)

My co-founder believes this lab stuff, my eyes opened wide over who I chose as a co-founder. It’s one thing to assume, another to be certain. Anyway, thanks for properly articulating the matter, let’s see what he thinks.

This is not fucking Jurassic park escaped it’s American’s British fantasy imagination story like the movie.