[News] Stanford scientists cracked the mRNA code for Moderna's coronavirus vaccine and posted it on the Internet

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Scientists discovered the code from vaccine container drops destined for trash, and posted the code on the Github platform.

Two Stanford scientists extracted the entire mRNA sequence from Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine and posted the code on Github, a website po[CENSORED]r with software developers looking to host and share source code.

An mRNA sequence is a set of instructions that tells your body what to do. In the case of mRNA vaccines such as Moderna's, the US CDC indicates that these "teach our cells to produce a protein, or even a portion of a protein, that triggers an immune response within our body." In essence, it is the code that executes the vaccine.

Digital media Vice notes that the entire repository on the site is only four pages long. The first half of the post is just a summary by the scientists of what they did, that is, the last two pages of the post on Github are the ones that contain the full mRNA sequence.

The scientists, Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, explained part of the process in an email to Vice. For example, they technically did not reverse engineer the vaccine to obtain the mRNA sequence.

"We published the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become prevalent enough in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021," they said.

Fire and Shoura also say they were able to get their work done without taking a single vaccine out of distribution. All the two scientists needed was a small amount of leftovers in vials that are usually thrown away after a person is vaccinated. They even asked the FDA for permission to keep the used vials.

The scientists say they contacted Moderna before publishing the mRNA sequence, but received no response. However, according to Fire and Shoura, the FDA granted them approval to "share the sequence with the community."

It should be noted that while providing public access to this information may be beneficial for educational and research purposes, it will not provide any home version of the COVID-19 vaccine. Various resources needed to make vaccines are inaccessible to the public.

As Vice mentions, COVID-19 vaccines have been subjected to this type of analysis to find out what they contain. In late 2020, the founder of PowerDNS, an open source software provider, was able to discover the mRNA sequence of the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine using only the information that was available online.