I am not a biologist so hardly an expert. I don’t really understand how pcr tests work.
I should say I don’t believe germ theory is bunk. I believe this is an illness caused by virus and not stress or whatever. She doesn’t like Pasteur — I dont know what her gripe is with him but the fact that the test comes from an institute named for him does not really make his reputation as a scientist relevant to the issue at hand. I find that sort of rhetorical tactic to be suspect and I dont care for the dismissive attitude of “If you dont agree with me and accept what I say you’re a moron, go take the vaccine” — that is just a shitty attitude, but I digress.
As I understand it the test causes many complimentary strands of DNA to be transcribed from the original viral RNA sample (there is no “T” in RNA, the RNA counterpart is a “U”, so anything with a T in it is the DNA they have derived from the corresponding RNA segment) Then various tests will look for various segments of DNA that would correspond to segments of the viral RNA. Different tests would look for different segments and there are something like 30000 “letters” you could look at, no test looks at all of them.
It is interesting that the segment she points out matches a segment on chromosome 8. But not significant that I can see.
The segment is 18 nucleotides long. There are 4 possible values at every place so there are 4^18 or about 70 billion possible values for the 18 base segment.
There are 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Most of those base pairs could be the start of 2 separate 18 nucleotide long sequences except the ones near the end of the chromosome. So the odds of running into the same 18 character sequence in the human genome would be on the order of one in ten? (6 billion / 70 billion)
Maybe my reasoning is flawed. But it doesnt seem like a totally improbable scenario.
I didnt watch the whole video, just like 5 minutes.
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MarauderShields ago
@helena73 do you have a take on this? I'll defer to your better judgement.
Helena73 ago
I am not a biologist so hardly an expert. I don’t really understand how pcr tests work.
I should say I don’t believe germ theory is bunk. I believe this is an illness caused by virus and not stress or whatever. She doesn’t like Pasteur — I dont know what her gripe is with him but the fact that the test comes from an institute named for him does not really make his reputation as a scientist relevant to the issue at hand. I find that sort of rhetorical tactic to be suspect and I dont care for the dismissive attitude of “If you dont agree with me and accept what I say you’re a moron, go take the vaccine” — that is just a shitty attitude, but I digress.
As I understand it the test causes many complimentary strands of DNA to be transcribed from the original viral RNA sample (there is no “T” in RNA, the RNA counterpart is a “U”, so anything with a T in it is the DNA they have derived from the corresponding RNA segment) Then various tests will look for various segments of DNA that would correspond to segments of the viral RNA. Different tests would look for different segments and there are something like 30000 “letters” you could look at, no test looks at all of them.
It is interesting that the segment she points out matches a segment on chromosome 8. But not significant that I can see.
The segment is 18 nucleotides long. There are 4 possible values at every place so there are 4^18 or about 70 billion possible values for the 18 base segment.
There are 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Most of those base pairs could be the start of 2 separate 18 nucleotide long sequences except the ones near the end of the chromosome. So the odds of running into the same 18 character sequence in the human genome would be on the order of one in ten? (6 billion / 70 billion)
Maybe my reasoning is flawed. But it doesnt seem like a totally improbable scenario.
I didnt watch the whole video, just like 5 minutes.