If bats and pangolins could review scientific papers, they’d definitely have given the following article an “accept without revisions.”
An international group of researchers has proposed that COVID-19 hitched a ride to this planet from space. Same for the fungal infection Candida auris.
We’ve heard plenty of bizarre theories about the novel coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, from its having been manufactured in a Chinese lab to its links to 5G cell technology. But this one wins the prize for being, as one Twitter user said, “batshit.”
The authors are from several prestigious and less familiar institutions worldwide, including the University of Toronto, the Tianjin Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in China, the University of Melbourne, in Australia, as well as the Institute for the Study of Panspermia and Astroeconomics in Japan and the History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation in London, England.
The corresponding author is Chandra Wickramasinghe, who has form in this area, having claimed two decades ago that flu also came from space — an idea roundly criticized as bunk. He has also claimed that SARS — an earlier coronavirus — had the same origins. Ditto.
The lead author is Edward Steele, of the C.Y. O’Connor ERADE Village Foundation in Perth, Australia. The foundation’s activities include facilitating:
research, education and small start-up businesses. Patent funding supported a range of multidisciplinary projects, including trials of; • practical assays for haplotype assignment in beef cattle, including the discovery of the gene sequence in these animals with healthy, low melting temperature fat …
According to “Origin of new emergent Coronavirus and Candida fungal diseases—Terrestrial or cosmic?,” which appeared in Advances in Genetics, a book published by Elsevier (let that sink in for a second):
The origins and global spread of two recent, yet quite different, pandemic diseases is discussed and reviewed in depth: Candida auris, a eukaryotic fungal disease, and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), a positive strand RNA viral respiratory disease. Both these diseases display highly distinctive patterns of sudden emergence and global spread, which are not easy to understand by conventional epidemiological analysis based on simple infection-driven human- to-human spread of an infectious disease (assumed to jump suddenly and thus genetically, from an animal reservoir). Both these enigmatic diseases make sense however under a Panspermia in-fall model and the evidence consistent with such a model is critically reviewed.
The authors argue that fluctuations in solar activity could foster the colonization of our planet by cosmic pathogens. In particular, they write:
During times of sunspot minima, a general weakening of magnetic field occurs and this would be accompanied by an increase in the flux of galactic cosmic rays (GCR’s) and also of charged interstellar and interplanetary dust particles. Evidence for such periodic increases linked to solar activity is evident in the high frequency of noctilucent clouds (as at present, in 2019–2020) and also in the increase of particulate deposits in polar ice cores. Since the latter could, in our view, include biological entities such as bacteria, viruses and other eukaryotic microorganisms like C. auris, an increase in their incidence on the Earth will therefore be expected at such times.
Charts of sunspot activity ensue.
As for the coronavirus? They claim:
We now analyze all reliable genetic, epidemiological and geophysical and astrophysical data. This leads to the alternate hypothesis that COVID-19 arrived via a meteorite, a presumed relatively fragile and loose carbonaceous meteorite, that struck North East China on October 11, 2019. This is at odds with the main stream expert “Infectious Disease” opinion of traditional person-to-person spread of an infectious endemic disease such as, for example, Cholera (Vibrio cholerae). We then assume the viral debris and particles then made land fall in the Wuhan and related regions about a month to 6 weeks later resulting in first cases of the viral pneumonia caused by COVID-19 emerging in Wuhan regions late November 2019-early December 2019 (Cohen, 2020; Huang et al., 2020).
We emailed the authors and the editor of the publication for comment but have yet to receive a reply.
Update, 1100 UTC, 9/9/20: Dhavendra Kumar, the serial editor for Advances in Genomics, notes that Steele and Wickramsinghe — the first and last co-authors, respectively, of the chapter — are editors of the thematic volume “Cosmic Genetic Evolution.” He goes on:
All articles in this volume are based on meta-analysis of several papers and reviews. Both Editors and contributors are leading experts in the uncommon field of astrobiology. They have worked for almost 40 years on the role of recurrent asteroids/ meteorites bombarding the earth and contributing to species evolution through recurrent mutations. In this context, authors and as well as editors have put forward a scientific hypothesis on the origin of candida and Corona virus. This unique concept is known in astrobiology as Panspermia.
Please note authors’s views are not based on any experimental work or data that needed external peer review or any other form of validation. In this context, I fail to understand how external review by some one else could have altered the decision to share this innovative idea with the genetic/ genomic scientific community. Contents of the article were internally reviewed between all of us including me as the serial editor. We did not find it necessary to seek any other view or opinion. Since the article is now available online, all reviews, comments and reflections would be open to all.
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Have large numbers of academics signed petitions to retract this obvious garbage? No?
A petition or an open letter denunciating something/someone should always be a last resort. There are processes in place for dealing with shoddy work.
1. Contact the author.
2. Contact the journal editor.
3. If both of the above fail in remedying the problem, then start a petition.
You should also consider refuting the work instead of simply demanding a retraction.
There’s no work involved in this drivel, and hence nothing to refute.
Hard evidence tells that this SARS-2 contains man-made factors, mainly, by PRC/WIV.
You could easily publish in Elsevier!
And who are you, an obscure inhabitant of a tiny, insignificant planet in a miniscule galaxy, itself but a dot in this vast, limitless Universe, where countless unknown lifeforms, matters and energies will remain undiscovered long after man has ceased to exist, to call this “garbage” ?
Is Elsevier ever going to be held accountable for publishing this type of garbage?
What we do know is that COVID-19 originated from Wuhan, China.
Serendipity awaits as RadioLab just presented an interesting podcast, The Fungus Amungus which takes on the rise of Candida auris. Several papers suggest that climate change has made us more suitable hosts for a fungus that has been around forever. It is worth the listen.
Maybe the meteorite with COVID landed in the open market of Wuhan, and some poor merchant got a little to curious and threw a bit of it into the evening stew. Not unlike the Andromeda Strain. I think I’m going to publish my hypothesis…in a fictional novel, or an Elsevier journal.
The virus has terrestrial origins. It was the bats and pangolins that came from space.
I repeatedly said cannabis is good if used with parsimony…..
So you acknowledge your personal use of canabis?
Feel free to pile on. The authors have yet to reply.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/596507AF0D77BB95F982C0ECFDC240
This tissue of idiotic ideas was published on April 1st, right?
Someone should send a blast to Elsevier.
If you check where it was published, it turns out the same panspermia proponents were both editors AND authors, which is a blatant COI. Elsevier / Academic Press decided to dedicate a volume of the book Advances in Genetics to “Cosmic Genetic Evolution”, i.e. panspermia: https://www.elsevier.com/books/cosmic-genetic-evolution/steele/978-0-12-821518-0. There was clearly no independent peer review.
If the excerpts given here correctly show the argument, it’s like this:
(1) It’s impossible for SARS-Cov-2 to have hopped species (from bat or pangolin) in Wuhan and then spread worldwide.
(2) Instead, SARS-Cov-2 must have hopped species (from an extraterrestrial species) in Wuhan and then spread worldwide.
That seems like a self-defeating argument. If it is impossible for the virus to jump species and spread worldwide from a single point, then the proposed alternative hypothesis is equally impossible. (Unless you are proposing that there are humans out there, which is a claim that would need truly extraordinary evidence.)
It isn’t clear (from the excerpts given here) that the authors are claiming (2), or even that the SARS-Cov-2 that they hypothesize to have been brought to Wuhan via meteorite was (before reaching Earth) a “virus” in the sense that it had ever, anywhere, at any time, produced any proteins (whether or not within some structure more or less analogous to a “cell” of a terrestrial “organism”). It is conceivable that they are claiming (2′) the (many!) macromolecules of SARS-Cov-2 aboard the meteorite were assembled, somehow, somewhere, at some time, by strictly non-biological processes (which does not, quite, rule out that they “evolved” from some earlier state without the huge thermodynamic benefit of “co-evolving” with some other system), and sheerly by chance this exo-chemical, when it finds its way into suitable cell environments on Terra, coerces them into expressing such-and-such proteins (etc., etc.).
(2′) obviates the need to assume space humans (or space bats, or space pangolins). It’s even madder, and clearly even less likely to be supported by evidence anytime soon; but it saves the argument from being self-defeating (I think).
I think the claim (which I believe is nonsense) is that the disease surfaced at multiple places at the same time which the authors claim could not have occurred except via an extraterrestrial source.
This was a reply to Mary Kuhner
A few links regarding the editors of the book mentioned above, lead us to
Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe https://profchandra.org/
https://profchandra.org/2020/04/2020-2-15-uk-scientist-claims-coronavirus-brought-earth-meteorite/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/02/scientist-claims-coronavirus-was-brought-to-earth-by-a-meteorite/
Edward Steele https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Steele and his support of Neo-Lamarckism
which has an interesting link to the next retraction story about Temperament gene inheritance
This is just more of the same from Wickramasinghe. He has been arguing for a very extreme form of panspermia for decades (you can check his Wikipedia page for details). By now, I (and probably most other astrophysicists) would be more surprised if he thought that some disease didn’t arrive from space.
You’d need to demonstrate a zoonotic source (from from a meteor) for the theory advanced in the Elsevier book chapter,
then show how Koch’s Postulates were satisfied –
(1) isolation of the questioned organism –
(2) passage of the questioned organism from the ET to an experimental animal, then –
(3) passage that organism to humans)
for it not to be utter bunk.
I don’t see such a proof.
This is garbage !!!!!!!! WHo authorize this kind of article !!!!!!!!!!!!!! STOP Fooling the citizens !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Subway sign: “Watch the gap!”
Me thinks you protest too much. Why are you all so threatened by what NASA and ESA seem to agree is the very plausible Panspermia theory? Sir Fred Hoyle was a well regarded genius way ahead of his time and once again fools mock him and his work.
As far as I know, NASA and ESA have not opined on the possibility that COVID-19 arrived from off-planet. Even if Panspermia is plausible as an origin for life on Earth, which seems quite possible, the authors have demonstrated no linkage with the terrestrial spread of COVID-19 in this paper. Gullible is not in the dictionary.
The issue isn’t how feasible Panspermia is in theory, or even whether it occurred to some extent in history/even now; the issue is that the authors seem to almost-deliberately fail to mention several other works which describe a) the origins of several of the diseases mentioned in their work (Coronavirus, SARS, MERS) and b) describing mechanisms of transmission, of which there are many that would fit a ‘normal’ pattern of infection, and which have reasonably explained how these diseases worked. Instead they include only evidence befitting their theory and ignore vast swathes that don’t in their analyses. This is generally accepted to be very poor practise, for obvious reasons.
Viruses are bits of protein-wrapped RNA or DNA that are exquisitely specific to a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of a … of a subset of terrestrial biology. ALL earthly life is based on proteins made up from the same 20 (out of thousands of possible) small amino acids, and on 4 (why 4?)-nucleotide ATGC/AUGC (why these, out of countless possible ones?) DNA/RNA (why nucleic acids at all?).
Our biology appears to have randomly emerged from among a staggering number of plausible biological motifs. Proteins might be inevitable and nucleic acids biologically and energetically favorable in life across the Universe, but our specific motif, out of the millions if not billions if not … of permutations and combinations of just protein-nucleic acid-based life alone, is likely neither. There is no reason to expect it to have been inevitable or indeed to be anything other than unique in the Universe.
Furthermore, the great similarity of SARS-CoV-2 to other Coronaviridae was well known at the time of publication of the Wickramasinghe paper.
In other words, the possibility that such a collection of organic molecules, randomly arrayed in such a manner as to be able to act as a virus to infect a species of terrestrial life, would arise in isolation from terrestrial biology in sufficient proximity to Earth to be able to be randomly conveyed to its surface intact (or that something analogous would occur on any given life-bearing planet in the Universe) within cosmogonic time (~10^10 y) is too remote for such an event to have more than an absurdly small chance ofr occurring on any of the ~10^22 planets in the observable Universe within cosmologic time (~3×10^10 y).
That paper is a profoundly embarrassing example of what can happen when scientists who have fallen in love with their one and only theme stray far out of their lane.
I don’t think Wickramasinghe claims that life forms or biological molecules that happen to based on the same proteins and nucleotides emerged in space independently of their emergence on earth: rather, that they emerged in space first, “seeding” the earth with those biological molecules, from which terrestrial life developed, and that viral agents continue to arrive on earth. That would account for the compatibility of the biological “motif”. I don’t say that’s what happened, or that it’s likely, or popular with modern-day scientists, or supported by evidence; I simply say that that is what he proposes, and it’s not an intrinsically absurd or incoherent hypothesis.
How can any serious person suggest that there could exist life on another planet? Dr James Tour, an outstanding organic chemist has shown the spontaneous generation of the simplest life form is a virtual impossibility given the complexity of even the simplest life form. To accomplish the formation of even the most simple cell requires the availability of the basic building blocks to construct such a cell with the necessary chirality of these building blocks a further complication. These same building blocks would be challenging to make under controlled laboratory conditions under the supervision of human intelligence let alone be available by some yet to be explained random process. Tour makes the point the origin of life “science” has made little or no progress since the Miller-Urey experiments of 1952. Since that time there has been scientific advances in many fields but in the area of “origin of life science” we are still where we were in 1952!
You mentioned that the article is from Tianjin CDC but I can’t find any authors that are linked with Tianjin CDC. Please could you help me to understand where did you see that? Thanks.
They removed an author, Jiangwen Qu:
https://www.scienceopen.com/document?vid=313c9d96-f36a-4d13-86c9-5d0e88e52b4c