Is http://www.askabiologist.org.uk unrealiable?

[Tristan L]

Hi everyone,

On the page http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=6389 of the website http://www.askabiologist.org.uk, someone who claims to be Christopher LaRock asserts that the rabies virus be a poxvirus; he writes: "Poxviruses such as the one that causes rabies". Now, Poxviridae are DNA viruses while the rabies virus is an RNA virus, and the two viruses belong to two different realms (Varidnaviria and Riboviria, respectively), so they are about as far apart from each other as viruses can be if I understand it right. Therefore, the assertion of the answerer on http://www.askabiologist.org.uk who claims to be Christopher LaRock is fully false. This suggests to me that http://www.askabiologist.org.uk isn't very reliable. Have I deemed correctly?

The real Christopher N. LaRock is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University, so I would be very suprised if he made such a blatantly false claim as that one of the poxviruses cause rabies. Does http://www.askabiologist.org.uk check that its answerers really are the academics they claim to be?

[exchemist]

12 minutes ago, Tristan L said:

Hi everyone,

On the page http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=6389 of the website http://www.askabiologist.org.uk, someone who claims to be Christopher LaRock asserts that the rabies virus be a poxvirus; he writes: "Poxviruses such as the one that causes rabies". Now, Poxviridae are DNA viruses while the rabies virus is an RNA virus, and the two viruses belong to two different realms (Varidnaviria and Riboviria, respectively), so they are about as far apart from each other as viruses can be if I understand it right. Therefore, the assertion of the answerer on http://www.askabiologist.org.uk who claims to be Christopher LaRock is fully false. This suggests to me that http://www.askabiologist.org.uk isn't very reliable. Have I deemed correctly?

The real Christopher N. LaRock is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University, so I would be very suprised if he made such a blatantly false claim as that one of the poxviruses cause rabies. Does http://www.askabiologist.org.uk check that its answerers really are the academics they claim to be?

There seem to be 2 sites called "askabiologist", one, which is active, being run by Arizona State University, and another, based in the UK which is defunct and was supposedly aimed at schoolchildren.

You are asking about the defunct one. I wouldn't bother. 

[swansont]

It's unreasonable to expect zero mistakes. Also, Dr. LaRock was a postdoc at UCSD, so this likely isn't an issue of impersonation, just a matter of when the material was posted. 

 

(As an aside: putting multiple links to a site is usually a big red flag. Were this a commercial site and you had less of a posting history, you would be a suspected spammer.)

 

[Tristan L]

On 3/11/2022 at 12:56 PM, exchemist said:

You are asking about the defunct one. I wouldn't bother. 

Oh, good to know, thanks! That explains a lot; of course it can be awaited from a defunct site to give blatantly false info: that the rabies virus (an RNA virus) be one of the poxviridae (which are DNA viruses), and that the rabies virus be rather hardy, when in truth it's quite fragile (thankfully 😅).