// the find
geohot/corona
Reverse engineering SARS-CoV-2
A George Hotz project applying reverse-engineering methods (disassembly, static analysis) to the SARS-CoV-2 genome, treating RNA translation like decompiling bytecode. It's for people curious about virology through a hacker's lens, not a working bioinformatics tool.
The biology-to-software analogy table is a genuinely useful mental model for someone with a CS background and no biology training. The core translate() function in lib.py and the annotation logic in corona.py are small and readable, so you can actually follow what it's doing to the genome. Protein folding via OpenMM in fold.py shows real intent to go past static analysis into simulation.
Last pushed March 2024 and reads like an abandoned side project — the README's 'Work to be done' and open questions sections were never closed out. No tests, no packaging, no requirements.txt visible in the tree, so reproducing the environment (OpenMM, Biopython-adjacent deps) is on you. The README is 80% link dump of external papers and half-finished research notes rather than documentation of what the code does, and the disclaimed medical/treatment speculation (hydroxychloroquine, dexamethasone) is scientifically stale and off-topic for what's ostensibly a reverse-engineering repo.