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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
This bigger point being - while science may have come a long way, reporting of science in the media has not.