Quick retraction of a faulty coronavirus paper was a good moment for science
As fears of the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV continued to spread last Friday, an inflammatory new paper appeared on bioRxiv, a preprint server, where scientists post work that hasn’t been vetted.
Titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag,” the paper claimed to find similarities between the new coronavirus and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The use of the word “uncanny” in the title, together with “unlikely to be fortuitous” in the abstract, led some to think that the authors were suggesting the virus had somehow been engineered by humans.
