'A group of Stanford researchers has hacked Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for the novel coronavirus, Motherboard first reported on Monday, and published its entire genetic sequence on the open-source code repository Github.'
What does "hacked" mean here? The article makes it sound like this wasn't something illegal:
> Fire and Shoura told Motherboard that they had received permission from the FDA to collect scraps of vaccines that wouldn’t have otherwise been used from empty vials and that they’d notified Moderna in advance of their plans to publish the sequence without receiving any objection in turn.
Also:
> The research team told Motherboard that they didn’t “reverse engineer” the vaccine, they simply “posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.”
I'm not familiar enough with how these sequences to work to understand what's being discussed. Is it simply that they took a sample of the vaccine and studied its composition using some standard machine/process?
https://gizmodo.com/stanford-scientists-post-entire-mrna-seq...