Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

by Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD

Still another approach, which has never previously been employed successfully, is to use nucleic acids from the virus instead of proteins—that is, to use fragments of DNA or RNA that resemble the genetic information of the virus. In the case of the DNA approach, the idea is to instruct the body to make a viral protein inside its own cells, as if it had been infected by the virus, and this in turn elicits the usual immune response. A variant of this approach is to add DNA that matches genes of a virus to an entirely different species of another, milder virus.68 This altered virus is then injected into the body, once again initiating an immune response. The RNA approach is similar to the foregoing. But it offers some additional benefits, namely, that human bodies could, in the case of coronavirus, come to recognize the RNA itself as alien and possibly learn to attack it directly in ways that are helpful in warding off future infections. Injecting people with DNA or RNA so that it might be taken up by their cells and produce viral proteins may sound scary, but this is actually a less toxic way of doing what the virus does to people anyway. The molecules being injected into our bodies are a far cry from the actual virus itself.