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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.'"
So are software viruses alive too? The only difference is that one replicates with code in binary, the other uses code in chain of molecules.
Life is not for the lazy.
That's pretty much why viruses aren't considered alive, as they only propagate by hijacking living organisms' replication machinery. Eunuchs are individuals, that the definition of life applies to species, not individuals. Mules can occasionally reproduce, but is rare and it's due to the unequal distribution of chromosomes in meiosis. This isn't why they would be consider alive, they are the offspring of organisms that are alive. It's just an anomaly of nature. All viruses are parasites that depend on a host's replicating machinery by definition, therefore cannot be considered living.
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. If you can find me a self-templating virus, then we'd have an interesting discussion...
viruses infecting viruses is still cool though.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I don't see why this should have any effect on the living vs. undead debate for virii. Anything complex and successful enough to fool a cell into absorbing and then reproducing it seems like a perfectly reasonable target for other, less host-adapted things to hijack. If something like this hadn't already existed, I'm quite sure it would have come along sooner or later.
What would be really impressive is for someone to figure out how the adaptation occurred, and whether we should be afraid or not.
cogito ergo dubito
There was a very interesting editorial piece in my local newspaper today on pretty much this topic that deserves to be read by anyone working in health / safety / threat / etc. research.
The short point is that when every preliminary study, or even hypothesis, is presented by the news media in the same fashion as something that has stood up to rigourous testing (e.g., smoking causes cancer), people begin to filter out everything.
That being said, my short summary doesn't do the editorial piece justice.
saying something is "alive" or "not alive" holds about as much weight as saying it's a "froodle doo". if the definition is standardized it should be easy to define: if not, what does it matter what we call it as long as we know what it does? attempting to apply terms that apply well to one group, from species to kingdom, to another group almost always ends in failure for this reason.
shame on the virologist for perpetuating this craziness. the real cool part about this finding is its possible medical applications.
that's anthropomorphizing it. Better to say they can have their replication machinery disrupted by another replicator.
Is a mule alive? It can't reproduce. Maybe you object because the mule is *made* of cells, each of which can reproduce, but your body is full of cells that can't reproduce, are they alive? What's reproduction got to do with being alive anyway? If you take a cell that can reproduce and mutate the gene that produces a necessary protein for the reproductive process, is the cell now dead? It can still metabolize, make other proteins and interact with its environment. When it no longer can, that's when we say it is dead. As such "living" already has a good definition, even if it isn't too strict, and that is the opposite of dead or, more precisely, "inert". Viruses are not just a package of DNA, (or RNA), they're also a system of proteins for delivering that package from cell to cell. A virus most definitely isn't "inert" in the same sense that a "dead" thing is. So if something isn't dead, what is it? Undead? We typically reserve that word for horror writers, and just say "alive".
I think the objectionable aspect of calling viruses "alive" comes from people thinking of viruses as "pure information", they're not. They're complex machines that can cause their own replication in their environment. Their environment just happens to be living cells, which are also complex machines that can cause their own replication in their environment.. To accept that a virus isn't alive because it needs its environment means you have to accept that a cell that requires a water environment isn't alive, or all multi-cellular organisms are not alive. Are mitochondria alive? Are the cells that require mitochondria alive? How about yeast? How about that mule?
How we know is more important than what we know.
What about computer viruses and worms?
TaDa! This just in from Science Daily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080806194601.htm
Our definition of 'alive' is flawed. Virii, plasmids, prions, etc. are not alive, but they aren't just arrangements of molecules either. They're in some sort of limbo.
Add to that the fact that this doesn't seem to infect other viruses, just uses a specific MHCI protein as a binding site that happens to be produced by another virus. In which case it's not that interesting.
This is more interesting in and of itself than it is to 'our belief of what life is' or something. We've known that 'life' is a pretty flaky definition for a while now.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
It would seem to me that there is some significant qualitative difference between humans and rocks. Extending that further, it seems there exists differences between bacteria and rocks.
Essentially, the question is what is the largest subset of differences that can be used to distinguish between something that is alive and something that has never been alive.
A question arising from the previous one is, what is it exactly that separates life from death. We can't even detect life - only the by-products of what we define as life. Thus we define death as the absence of those by-products of something that at one point had displayed those by-products.
So I would disagree that the question is flawed. I think it might be oversimplified sometimes, but that at its core, it captures a very fundamental set of questions which essentially, arise from, "What does it mean to be human?" and "What is intelligence?"
Each time you're looking for differences between 2 things, remember to ask yourself if the differences were already there when you found them, or if you actually created them.
Remember that this is more a matter of convention than actual knowledge.
The problem here is due to our flawed previous knowledge. We already "know" that humans are alive and stones are not. We aready "know" that bacteria are alive and stones are not. But there will always be this tiny slice where we cannot say for sure if life is present there.
Is a molecule alive? Probably not. Although if you look at the simplest of cells, like a virus, it will definitely look like the only alive thing in it is the DNA, the rest being just an environment for it to multiply. Just like our house, town, country or planet is to us.
Drawing the boundaries of life in our heads is so easy and will raise more questions than actual answers.
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.
I'm wondering if this, (as well as the question of whether Pluto is a planet), it is more about coming up with an objective and internally consistent definition of what the word means.
So, no, there may not be a great difference between one classification and another, but the argument is more about coming up with a logical way of thinking about the two.
As someone who has a genetic disease, I can't tell you how much I love that a cure for myself and those of my family who didn't win on the genetic dice roll is being held back due to popular opinion. There's really nothing better than spending every damn moment of my life in pain, knowing that if I have children I could be inflicting this on them too, and seeing someone blessed with an easy life giving a thumbs up to our suffering because he saw a scary movie. Here's a shock, the researchers actually do know more about this than either you or Wil Smith. Every time a large medical advance comes to the world it's greeted by the tired refrain of "playing God" by healthy people like yourself. And, oddly, you people also never seem to hesitate to take advantage of them the second you experience even a tiny fraction of the suffering that you'd prefer many of us have inflicted on them every waking moment of our lives.
You probably should have posted that under your username. You may be doomed to languish in obscurity in this thread as well as in the minds of the healthy majority.
There is some merit for caution, certainly, but there are too many barriers in place for people such as (perhaps) yourself who would jump at the chance of receiving treatment, no matter how experimental. As long as the treatment has no chance of mutating and running rampant (a scenario that is much less likely than is generally portrayed), people should have the right to volunteer for experimental treatment. It should go without saying that there would need to be a waiver of liability in case such treatment turned out to be harmful to the individual.
"Playing God" is one of those phrases that is always trotted out for emotional impact yet has no meaning whatsoever, except that whosoever spaketh the phrase should be smited with extreme prejudice.
Your brain is not a computer.
I've thought about this recently, too. It of course depends on how you define life. I think astrobiology is usually a good resource for definitions of this sort. If we found a virus on mars, would we say we discovered life? I think so. I like Carl Sagan's definition: "Living systems might then be defined as localized regions where there is a continuous increase in order." This is important to note, as the universe generally increases in entropy. At the center of all life we know is information. Information that replicates itself in some manner, as books are clearly not alive. So it would seem information (increase in order) and replication in some manner. So could a computer virus fit the definition? Conceivably.