>Don’t people have different immune systems, thus even if you gave them exactly the same ‘bits’ that wouldn’t result in differing outcomes?
Essentially, there is a region of DNA called the Major histocompatibility complex that is, er, the Genetic equivilent of a computer’s PRNG, except it actually does shuffle DNA around (twins aren’t even identical), so it’s true RNG, but static after conception. This random DNA is used by the immune system to make basically every kind of antigen-receptor possible (the thing that does the sensing/binding for a white blood cell). During development, there is a mechanism by which if antigens match, it’s assumed to be matching to “self” and it gets whitelisted and not made again. Eventually you are left with a library of antigen-receptors that don’t bind to anything inside you—the correct state for a mature white blood cell. Then you are born, and the immune system kicks in and starts recognising all new antigens of these antigen-receptors as foriegn, and long story short when that happens the white blood cell will both divide and suicidally attack anything it’s receptors bind too.
So all of the antigen-receptor based part of the immune system is different between people, giving us group diversity, even in a small isolated family of individuals. However. The miRNA suppression complex and other DNA/RNA based facets of your immune system—some of which i probably don’t even know about, but I know of at least 2 - do not work in this way. They work at the DNA/RNA sequence level, in a non-analog way. A digital way. They are triggered by the detection of a forigen sequences, and stop infection before any viral protein is produced. By comparison, these digital parts of our immune system counteract the bulk of our protection to viruses. While the analog antigen-receptor method will work for poisons, viruses, moulds, worms, cancer, etc, the digital immune system is much faster and much more energy efficient, and essentially once your cells are updated (which we assume they each do individually but maybe there is co-ordination) they simply can not be hijacked by that kind of virus. No amount of viral load will overcome the cellular innate immune system, that is constantly having to supress retrovirals, let alone exogenus fractions of a fraction. It’s the information in a virus that is the problem.
>If DIY is viable then it would be trivial to forge ID and/or make something communicable that screws up the ID. You can presumably write and over write fragments as easily as the initial write.
I hadn’t considered that. Actually a lot of the older genetic tools in the toolkit only let you “insert”, and even then only in a pre-determined place. CRISPR allows in-place editing, but even then it’s not so easy/pragmatic as one would hope. More importantly, if I wanted to barcode you I would use technology out of your reach to do it, or to load it up, or whatever. You see this a lot with DRM. The point being, if they have a cool trick to hide DNA/RNA from sequencing machines—and to be honest that is as trivial as using synthetic bases and/or paying off the sequencing monopoly that is Illumina—then it’s possible we won’t be able to find the barcode for a while, and when we do we might not have the technology to get our new stuff to where it got it’s stuff back when you were vaccinated. I’d imagine they write to your white bloodcell’s genome in a sort of hap-hazard way, which is probably what is suppressing the immune system of some older people, as some of those cells might die if the barcode is inserted into the wrong region. But if the white bloodcells survive then they will eventually have daughter cells that will carry the insertion onwards, and it will remain in your blood and sweat. If that’s the case, it’s all doable with modern technology developed in the last 5 years, but targeted removal of the sequence will be out of reach for at least 50 years.
>What you want is a unique identifier that never changes. You can hang everything else off that one variable.
Yeah, actually, that sounds far more likely. And also totally doable with synthetically made DNA/RNA, it’s done all the time to basically barcode individual cells in a suspension of cells before sequencing them all at once, and there is literally billions of cells. You assumed it would be expensive, and I don’t blame you, but it’s actually really cheap and has been par for the course for about 4 years now. It’s as easy as having the synthesis reaction simply extend the DNA with a random base in solution, so it basically doesn’t cost anything extra to write random junk than it costs to write a specific base. What costs extra is very long sequences, over 100 letters long. But with just 20 letters i can usually target a specific portion of a 3-billion-base human genome. So a per-citizen tag per-vaccine is no problem at all. All automatable. Actually the automatable was only invented in the past 3 years hahah. My poor arms.
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>Don’t people have different immune systems, thus even if you gave them exactly the same ‘bits’ that wouldn’t result in differing outcomes?
Essentially, there is a region of DNA called the Major histocompatibility complex that is, er, the Genetic equivilent of a computer’s PRNG, except it actually does shuffle DNA around (twins aren’t even identical), so it’s true RNG, but static after conception. This random DNA is used by the immune system to make basically every kind of antigen-receptor possible (the thing that does the sensing/binding for a white blood cell). During development, there is a mechanism by which if antigens match, it’s assumed to be matching to “self” and it gets whitelisted and not made again. Eventually you are left with a library of antigen-receptors that don’t bind to anything inside you—the correct state for a mature white blood cell. Then you are born, and the immune system kicks in and starts recognising all new antigens of these antigen-receptors as foriegn, and long story short when that happens the white blood cell will both divide and suicidally attack anything it’s receptors bind too.
So all of the antigen-receptor based part of the immune system is different between people, giving us group diversity, even in a small isolated family of individuals. However. The miRNA suppression complex and other DNA/RNA based facets of your immune system—some of which i probably don’t even know about, but I know of at least 2 - do not work in this way. They work at the DNA/RNA sequence level, in a non-analog way. A digital way. They are triggered by the detection of a forigen sequences, and stop infection before any viral protein is produced. By comparison, these digital parts of our immune system counteract the bulk of our protection to viruses. While the analog antigen-receptor method will work for poisons, viruses, moulds, worms, cancer, etc, the digital immune system is much faster and much more energy efficient, and essentially once your cells are updated (which we assume they each do individually but maybe there is co-ordination) they simply can not be hijacked by that kind of virus. No amount of viral load will overcome the cellular innate immune system, that is constantly having to supress retrovirals, let alone exogenus fractions of a fraction. It’s the information in a virus that is the problem.
>If DIY is viable then it would be trivial to forge ID and/or make something communicable that screws up the ID. You can presumably write and over write fragments as easily as the initial write.
I hadn’t considered that. Actually a lot of the older genetic tools in the toolkit only let you “insert”, and even then only in a pre-determined place. CRISPR allows in-place editing, but even then it’s not so easy/pragmatic as one would hope. More importantly, if I wanted to barcode you I would use technology out of your reach to do it, or to load it up, or whatever. You see this a lot with DRM. The point being, if they have a cool trick to hide DNA/RNA from sequencing machines—and to be honest that is as trivial as using synthetic bases and/or paying off the sequencing monopoly that is Illumina—then it’s possible we won’t be able to find the barcode for a while, and when we do we might not have the technology to get our new stuff to where it got it’s stuff back when you were vaccinated. I’d imagine they write to your white bloodcell’s genome in a sort of hap-hazard way, which is probably what is suppressing the immune system of some older people, as some of those cells might die if the barcode is inserted into the wrong region. But if the white bloodcells survive then they will eventually have daughter cells that will carry the insertion onwards, and it will remain in your blood and sweat. If that’s the case, it’s all doable with modern technology developed in the last 5 years, but targeted removal of the sequence will be out of reach for at least 50 years.
>What you want is a unique identifier that never changes. You can hang everything else off that one variable.
Yeah, actually, that sounds far more likely. And also totally doable with synthetically made DNA/RNA, it’s done all the time to basically barcode individual cells in a suspension of cells before sequencing them all at once, and there is literally billions of cells. You assumed it would be expensive, and I don’t blame you, but it’s actually really cheap and has been par for the course for about 4 years now. It’s as easy as having the synthesis reaction simply extend the DNA with a random base in solution, so it basically doesn’t cost anything extra to write random junk than it costs to write a specific base. What costs extra is very long sequences, over 100 letters long. But with just 20 letters i can usually target a specific portion of a 3-billion-base human genome. So a per-citizen tag per-vaccine is no problem at all. All automatable. Actually the automatable was only invented in the past 3 years hahah. My poor arms.