Not well schooled *enough*, it seems. See below.
In my layman's opinion, you appear to operate like a defense attorney who knows his client is guilty, but they have to make the best case they can.
You noticed that too, eh?
You've made a case that ERVs are not completely random (implying 1/3 odds) that counters Ichneumon's evidence that the highest probability of insertion in his study was 280x random.
Oops, you fell for his mistake/propaganda.
He falsely tries to imply that if 3 subjects out of 9 in a gene-therapy study had retroviruses integrate at the same locus, that this means that 3-out-of-9 retroviral integrations somehow "homed in" on the same location.
WRONG!
Hint: How *MANY* retroviruses (and thus retroviral integrations) are induced in *each* patient in a gene-therapy treatment?
This wasn't "3 out of 9", it was "3 out of a mind-bogglingly large number". Those critical three only got noticed because they caused the individual cells which had the "fatal" location disrupted triggered leukemia in their unfortunate recipients, but there were *VAST* numbers of *other* random integration events in *each* patient which caused no problems at all.
Hey, tallhappy, do your own homework for a change, and tell us how many unique integration events there are, in total, in 9 patients in a gene-therapy study?
So what are the *actual* odds of overlapping events, out of *all* integration events, in a study like that, eh?
Oh, yeah. You're right it would work like that. Dummy me, I fell for tallhappy's deception. If the glove don't fit, you must aquit (another spin, another place).
In other words, of all the zillions of cells infected, only three patients got the bad locus, and even then it was likely to have happened in one solitary cell.
I see it.
<sound of crickets chirping>