Free Republic

Antiviral drugs are generally considered to be a 20th century invention. But recent research has uncovered an unexpected facet to your immune system: It can synthesize its own antiviral molecules in response to viral infections. My laboratory studies a protein that makes these natural antiviral molecules. Far from a modern human invention, nature evolved cells to make their own “drugs” as the earliest defense against viruses. How antivirals work Viruses have no independent life cycle – they are completely dependent on the cells they infect to supply all the chemical building blocks needed to replicate themselves. Once inside a cell,...

China’s no-holds-barred experiments, often involving Western scientists, have come under the spotlight as a controversial World Health Organisation (WHO) report into the origins of Covid dismissed the lab leak theory even as WHO chiefs called for a new probe. But it is known the Communist Party-state has been carrying out all kinds of dangerous and ethically controversial research which may not be allowed in Western countries. It is alleged some scientists attempt to dodge regulation or ethical considerations by "outsourcing" controversial experiments to labs in China. Human-monkey hybrids, souped-up viruses, head transplants and gene editing are just some of the...

Soon after SARS-CoV-2 was detected in China, researchers began analysing viral samples and posting the genetic codes online. Mutations — most of them single-letter alterations between viruses from different people — allowed researchers to track the spread by linking closely related viruses, and to estimate when SARS-CoV-2 started infecting humans. Viruses that encode their genome in RNA, such as SARS-CoV-2, HIV and influenza, tend to pick up mutations quickly as they are copied inside their hosts, because enzymes that copy RNA are prone to making errors. After the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus began circulating in humans, for instance,...

Doctors in China have urged male coronavirus patients to test their fertility as soon as they recover because the infection may damage the function of their testicles. No study has proved that the virus will reduce men's fertility or sexual potency. But medics in Wuhan have suggested the likelihood that the disease can affect the production of sperm and the formation of male sex hormones.