On 2017 Dec 18, Stuart RAY commented:

Replacing "to" with "toward" might have been clearer.

On 2017 Dec 17, Stuart RAY commented:

This is an interesting report, but the wording of claims in the title and abstract seems sensational and likely to mislead some readers; in particular, saying that they observed "evolution of SIVcpz to pandemic HIV-1" might lead some to believe that the result was a strain much more similar to HIV-1. In fact, as the authors note in Fig 1D, SIVcpz strain MB897 has less than 70% sequence similarity with the most similar HIV-1M strain compared, thus there are more than 3000 (30% of 10kb) genomic differences and it remains unclear what further changes would be needed to make the mutated SIVcpz capable of spreading among humans. Even when there is no intent to mislead, words must be carefully chosen to avoid confusion.

On 2017 Dec 17, Stuart RAY commented:

This is an interesting report, but the wording of claims in the title and abstract seems sensational and likely to mislead some readers; in particular, saying that they observed "evolution of SIVcpz to pandemic HIV-1" might lead some to believe that the result was a strain much more similar to HIV-1. In fact, as the authors note in Fig 1D, SIVcpz strain MB897 has less than 70% sequence similarity with the most similar HIV-1M strain compared, thus there are more than 3000 (30% of 10kb) genomic differences and it remains unclear what further changes would be needed to make the mutated SIVcpz capable of spreading among humans. Even when there is no intent to mislead, words must be carefully chosen to avoid confusion.