Slashdot Mirror
Viruses Infected By Viruses
SpaceAdmiral writes "Scientists have discovered a virus that can infect another virus. The fact that viruses can essentially get sick may change the debate over whether they are alive or not. Check out Nature for a slightly more technical article about the 'virophage.'"
We call it 3 stooges syndrome and Mr. Burns has it.
Only a few years ago.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum,
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
- Augustus de Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes
While I haven't heard of a virus hijacking another virus, I have heard of researchers hijacking viruses to do good things.
you must be one of those students who are learning to write viruses...
You should look into what shit is made out of.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For the debate over whether viruses are "alive" to make any sense, there has to be some literally essential difference between things that are alive and things that are not. The past 200 years or so of biology ought to have taught us that, contrary to what seemed evident to the ancients, there isn't any such essential difference. Organic matter is just a form of organization of inorganic manner. From the point of view of what the ancients knew, there was a huge gulf between everyday living beings and inert objects. From the point of view of what we know, there are many intermediate cases.
So, instead of wasting time trying to decide whether viruses are "really" alive or not, you should just accept the fact that our knowledge today is advanced enough to show that the question--which we inherited from people who knew less than we do--is flawed.
Are you adequate?
To me, the issue of how to define "life" is only a small side note to this discovery.
Far more important are the consequences for medicine. Viruses can be attacked by other viruses. This is huge. Compared to bacteria, viruses have been very difficult to beat. Infectious bacteria can be combated by using anti-biotics, bacterio-phages and other means. Whereas viruses are significantly more hardy, and combating them directly is difficult. But this discovery opens the door to engineering virophages to attack viruses in our bodies that make us sick.
Neither can thousands of other parasitic species. All the same no one debates the status of all sorts of fungus and ferns and others who tap directly into the circulatory system and other facilities of their host and cannot survive or replicate without them.
If a true answer or classification as to whether viruses are alive or not comes about, I suspect it will be far more subtle and elegant.
I will accept nothing less than slashdot comments to read with my fine whisky.
makes it fairly easy for humans to "create life" in the form of self-reproducing machines.
What's so easy about that? It's never been done! It would be a stupendous thing if it were.
Does anybody knowledgeable actually consider this "debate" interesting or important? It's a matter of semantics, surely no more interesting than the question of whether Pluto is a planet, which also got way more press attention than it was worth.
Those parasitic species know how to do cellular reproduction. They also know how to metabolize stuff. They interact with their environment, even if that environment is another species. Virus are just reproduction machines. If RNA is the software of biology, the individual living things are the computers, and a virus is just a floppy disk that can't do anything until you stick it into the computer.
Actually, I think the whole issue is kind of meaningless. "Alive" is a concept we invented when it seemed pretty easy to tell living things from not-living things. Like all such concepts, it tends to break down as our knowledge of the world grows, and the old definitions become hard to apply. We just went through a similar issue with the word "planet".
What about computer viruses and worms? Some people argue that those are life, especially worms which are able to reproduce in their environment independently without a host.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Well they probably don't make themselves sick. Is there a neverending chain of viruses making other viruses sick? I suppose a PO box could, in theory, break the chain..
*I* can't self-replicate, and I'm alive.
> No, they are not alive even if they can get sick. Viruses, even infected ones, cannot ...
> self-replicate as they require the use of a host and host machinery.
So cuckoos aren't alive either, since they rely on somebody else's 'machinery'?
This bigger point being - while science may have come a long way, reporting of science in the media has not.
Hell, fire's 'alive' by that definition. As long as it's got fuel, it metabolizes fuel, it physically grows as time goes on, and often, one flame will split into two when the fuel in the middle runs out. Yes, I know there's more to it than that, but I'm just pointing out that we've gotta be careful about how we define life, or else we run into a few problems we aren't anticipating.
All viruses are parasites that depend on a host's replicating machinery by definition, therefore cannot be considered living.
Don't all 'higher' animals begin life essentially as a parasite within the mother? Now granted, its the same species in this scenario, but it's still something to think about.
What about fungi? They are considered organisms and alive, yet they grow as a parasite in or on a living host or other form of organic matter, and cannot grow or reproduce without said host. That's not too far off from how a virus reproduces. True, fungal reproduction does begin within the cells of the fungus itself, but the line really isn't as clear as many would think.
On that note, no life form truly reproduces autonomously; the chemicals that life is formed of are created/encoded from outside materials. Animals take in these outside materials by eating, plants draw them from the ground, fungi from the aforementioned host/organic matter.
That said, It is true that when viruses replicate, the 'parent' virus does not take in material to reproduce (and rather, as mentioned, hijacks the host cells systems to do so). As important as that distinction may sound, I believe that when compared to how 'true' life forms reproduce, it seems mainly a question of semantics. It's a tough call, I guess all that can be said is that viruses certainly define the term 'gray area...'
Any definition of life doesn't make everyone happy because life is subjective. Life exists on a scale where at one end we all agree its not alive, and on the other we all agree it is alive - however just drawing a line somewhere in between and saying from here on in its 'alive' is pointless.
The same issue occurs when trying to define where one species stops and another starts in animals.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
It's the same thing with planets and Pluto; early in school you need simple classifications. Unfortunately, some people will never really outgrow this level and continue to need them throughout their lives.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
GGGP
In other words until their code(DNA) is executed. Same definition applies.
America, Home of the Brave.
Not if they don't believe in evolution.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia