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Welcome to the Era of Living Cell Programming

I was reading Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines by the United States Centers of Disease Control and Prevention when it stunned me that living cell can be programmed in vivo. mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are produced by Pfizer and Moderna. I already knew what Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is. RNA is almost a half part of DNA the super-intelligent organic codes that manifest us. But I didn't know that they can produce messenger RNA (mRNA) which can instruct cells to do whatever they wanted.

This is my understanding so far. mRNA vaccines instruct our cells to make a protein and then triggers antibodies to kill the protein. In the case of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines it will instruct our cells to make a part of the virus proteins which is harmless to our body but sufficient enough to trigger the antibodies. Later when the real virus enters our body the trained antibodies will kill it.

mRNA is a new kind of medicinal system. An mRNA can be sequenced or programmed to instruct a cell to make all sort of things like producing drug compounds or other organic compounds. A cell is like a computer and an RNA is the software. The mRNA system is better than the so-called nano-computer or nano-robot, or bio-chip because it is non-intrusive and looks just like a part of the living system.

The race is now on to encode mRNA for any purposes. This is the subject of in-silico genetic engineering, computer-aided drug discovery and design (CADD), and computational molecular physics. It involves big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and supercomputers. The entropy has just begun. 

How about the dark side? Can mRNA turns a cell into a bad actor? In real life all viruses have RNA. It is ironic that we now use mRNA to kill viruses. Hopefully, the system will not fall into the hands of naughty scientists who will code the mRNA with more instructions than it is intended to be. A lot of codes can be packed in a single strand of mRNA. 


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