The Role of Retroviruses in Human Evolution

mhackarbie writes "The current edition of the New Yorker magazine has up a story about endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of humans and other species. Although researchers have known about such non-functional retroviral 'fossils' in the human genome for some time, the large amount of recent genomic data underscores just how pervasive they are, in a compelling tale that involves humans, their primate cousins, and a variety of viral invaders. Some researchers are even bringing back non-functional viral remnants from the dead by fixing their broken genes."

Comments

Oh no!

[Quasar1999]

Fixing the genes of 'broken' viruses that clearly have the ability to infect us seems pretty damned stupid. Spanish flu, Avian flu, 30,000 BC flu... Here comes the next pandemic. While we're at fixing 'broken' viruses in our DNA, let's fix other viruses while we're at it... Why don't we just fix that part where they're drug resistant? Oh... we can't do that? Then what the hell makes them think we have enough knowledge to 'fix' the ones in our DNA?