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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.'"
A lot of times in school, I was told viruses aren't alive because they can't reproduce. I always wondered if this would apply to eunichs or mule
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internet infected by goatse
How long till these things are linked to stuff like cancer?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We call it 3 stooges syndrome and Mr. Burns has it.
Now those fags with AIDS have to worry about their AIDS getting AIDS?
"The fact that viruses can essentially get sick may change the debate over whether they are alive or not."
Ya ... to the debate over whether the viruses that make the viruses sick are alive or not.
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.
Since previous /. story was about the university malware professor, for a second I thought this story was talking about computer viruses infecting computer viruses. Would that be possible too?
Obligatory.
Any chance this new discovery will lead to the engineering of a symbiotic "virus", as in, an organism that lives within us and helps us out? If so our long-standing fight against microorganisms may turn into a friendship afterall. Fighting fire with fire, an anti-HIV would make a lot of people happy.
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...
been written by a student.
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)
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?
So a virus that attacks viruses eh? I wonder if there a virus that attacks the virus that attacks the viruses? And a virus that attacks the virus that attacks the virus that...er...well, you know what I mean. And what if the first virus evolves to attack the last virus....every time you get one of those mysterious unidentified itches it could just be a ring of viruses all chasing each other around in circles!
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
according to the definition of life 'getting infected by a virus' doesn't make you a living organism...
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.
Could this mean that there could some day be the potential for crafting a virus, with the intent of infecting another virus to potentially destroy it? Something like this would probably have the potential to do more harm than good, but maybe this is a new way to look at potential treatments?
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.
Ha-Ha!
Summary is totally misleading. The story isn't about viruses "getting sick" - it's about a certain type of satellite virus (not new) that can only infect a host that is already infected by another virus. Essentially the satellite virus is competing with the original virus for metabolites. The discovery here is that for the first time a satellite virus is competing for these resources to such an extent that it is actually destroying the original virus.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
A lot of people have an innate discomfort with the idea that we are merely more sophisticated versions of something so simple and mechanical. I've always though viruses should be considered life because most of the counter arguments I've read are really weak, but they persist because of that bias.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
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.
For the classical definition of Living Organism, the virus are not alive; but is that definition correct? Virus contains DNA and reproduce by theyself. Although Don't eat, don't grow. But is not just an death element.
Even the prions are "quasi-quasi-living" proteins, no DNA, but make other cell reproduce copies of they.
Well any good definition to Living Organism?.
No recursing!!
Send your spendthrift head of state this
will this help in a fight against aids/hiv? c'mon people.
The interesting thing is whether we can use this in medicine. Can we create `counter viruses' to slow down the spread of, say, AIDS?
http://xkcd.com/244/ :)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I read this as programmer ingenuity...(starts to open big books....)
I hope it wasn't an STD!
OH.. Oh.. ohhh.. ok. I read the headline and I said "Man! Again, another article about Windows Vista!"
Kidding!
Could this have any implications for HIV? Sickening the HIV viruses so they die off in a host's body?
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
I don't think life means what you think it means, but therin lies the rub. We do not even have a clear definition of 'life' that science can agree on. To me, if it's made of genetic material and proteins and has a survival strategy then it is alive.
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.
If they're alive and don't have warp capability, Picard is gonna be all over this one.
It's somewhat interesting to note that as we've moved from scientific paper to phonebook to slashdot, the quality of whiskey required to make the reading interesting has increased from unqualified whiskey, to good whiskey, to fine whiskey. My noticing this and then posting about it is itself proof that I have no whiskey of any quality on hand.
Did anyone else immediately think of software viruses when reading the summary title? (Given the previous article's title)
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Because the statement that A = A is tautological, but the statement that A = B is not. The truth of the former conveys no information, but the truth of the latter does. To put it like Frege puts it, "The morning star is the morning star" is a trivial statement, but "The morning star is an evening star" is an astronomical discovery.
They just called in sick then went down the beach for the day to infect some ice cream.
Task Mangler
It gets stuck.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Those parasite and fungus and whatnot, have their own cellular machinery with its own basal functionality, accepting energy, execrating toxins, dividing etc, so even if they need a SPECIFIC environment to reproduce (the host) the reproduction process/cellular division or cellular life process are still available ad-hoc... Virus OTOH lack everything. They are more or less only proteins encapsulating a RNA chains which really need to hijack a real cell to be able to do even the most basic operation. Virus have no "metabolism".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...welcome our new sub-microscopic overlords.
Viruses being infected by viruses is nothing new. It's been happening with every version of Windows.
This is exactly as the night and day. We seem to be very certain that some things are alive and some aren't, but there are things out there that we just don't know about if they are alive or not. Are real viruses alive? They look more like a very complex molecule...
This is a problem only if you think that night and day actually exist. It's all in your mind folks...
To me, the mama virus infects the amoeba, and then sputnik infects amoeba's that have been compromised by the mama virus. It's more similar to secondary infections when somebody has HIV. There is a difference in that Sputnik infects things created because of the mama virus infection, but these are not the mama virus itself.
Those damn students, can't they do _anything_ right? When learning to write viruses, the first thing they do is infect other viruses. Oh hell...
I guess I'm ready for one. Without even reading the summary, I assumed the topic must be about computer viruses, and immediately thought of "programs hacking programs" from the Matrix 2. God help me.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
So, if they can get sick, would that really be a proof of them being "alive"? What exactly is "alive"? Just fulfilling certain jobs, being able to reproduce? Or rather having a brain and being able of achieving consciousness?
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
You can stick another part in my car and change its behavior. Adding a square wheel will make it bounce up and down, for instance.
That shows my car is alive!
Wow. No wonder it drives all over the road and too fast, makes sudden stops, takes the wrong turns ... oh, wait, no, that's only when something alive is controlling it. That's right. Now I remember.
The more we learn, the more subjective the definition of life is (to me at least). It's like defining what is art, or if a physical activity is a sport or not. There may be some basic guidelines, but it's still a blurry boundary. It's just a label.
While very cool, and I encourage this topic... it isn't exactly groundbreaking. I learned in one of my Master's courses about Hepatitis D. It is a virion (so a virus that attacks viruses) and requires the presence of Heb B in order to propagate.
Once upon a time there was a Big Papa Virus, a Giant Mama Virus and a Wee Little Baby Virus. The Mama Virus did resent being called 'Giant' since she had been dieting for the past year.
Their Little Doggie Virus named Sputnik sat under the breakfast table as the family of viruses began to eat their bowls of amoebae, it was chewing on the bones of a creeping nematode named goldilocks that it caught trying to burglerize the Virus family when they were out walking in the woods waiting for their amoebas to cool. Then the Doggie Virus farted, and the whole Virus family got sick, puking up their breakfast.
...
Just because a virus was infected by another virus doesn't make it living.
That "mamavirus" always had the possibility that it would be infected, it always provided the environment for a smaller virus to leech off it. But by the logic presented, until it is infected by the smaller virus or there is an example of the smaller virus, it is not living. That doesn't make sense for the virus to be defined as not living before, and then living after it is infected. To say that the proof of something being living is that it CAN support a virus would be a valid point, and that point would support the arguement that viruses are living, but the arguement presented is wrong.
Whether or not a virus is living is not for me to know, but this infomation alone, while cool, doesn't make viruses living.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
This is the God is Dead theory as applied to biological taxonomy:
This is but one of the reasons that the neopagan movement keeps gaining adherents among the growing number of post-Christians despite its aversion to evangelism. In a polytheistic framework, it is simply much easier for a nimble mind to sustain the necessary suspension of disbelief that is the core of Faith.
While this is a viable and interesting approach to the great questions of ontology, I don't see how it can be applied to virology. Fungi are generally considered to be living things, even though their spores are inert and can't grow or replicate until they are embedded in the (usually but not always) dead carcass of some other life form. It would be inconsistent to declare flu viruses as not alive while accepting mushrooms as being alive.
Let's just see how many noses we can tweak this morning, eh, Pinky?
This reminds me of corewars. Like a scanner spraying instructions all over the core in the hope that the other warrior will run its instructions. Of course, corewars has antagonistic strategies by design, but one could in theory write redcode that caused an opponent to execute one's code.
aaagh. Stop acting like you're off to play the grand piano and are fluent in latin. There is no such word as "virii".
I'm not a biology wiz by any means of the imagination. However, the first thing that came to mind was designing virophages to wipe out things like aids and other stubborn viruses. Basically, it would be the exact same concept as bacteriophage cocktails that are used a lot in other countries to cure infections. Granted, such things are very specific to a certain strain of a virus and I imagine there are lots of strains of something like AIDS. Still, it seems possible, even if currently out of reach, to engineer one of these guys to mutate and adapt to counter the different strains of a virus it might encounter. Just like these viruses mutate into seperate strains, your bioengineered virophage might do the same thing.
I agree with his point completely (though I don't share his intensity). I used to work for a pharma as a scientist. The stress on "alleviation" over "cure" used to baffle me... and that's just one thing.
So this raises the question: Can a virus be infected with a virus, which itself has been infected with a virus? If so then God where does it all end?
I recently went to a doctor, and talked with her at length about the HPV virus and cervical cancer. The doctor kind of rolled her eyes and was annoyed at the whole thing, since very few cases of HPV lead to cervical cancer, and that it's all a big scare tactic by the drug manufacture to pimp their latest greatest vaccine. In short all the commercials and alarmist media coverage, just feed into their campaign to get girls vaccinated for a very small threat. In fact, it only vaccinates against a few strains and is causing some nasty side effects in some people.
Holmes: I'm reminded of the curious case of the Manchurian Mambo...
Watson: Holmes, could I have a word?
Holmes: Yes, what is it?
Watson: I believe that was the Manchurian Mamba.
Holmes: Mambo, mamba. What's the difference?
Watson: Well, very little, except that one is a deadly, poisonous snake, while the other is a rather festive Caribbean dance.
Holmes: It was a night like any other, when suddenly a knock came at the door. I opened it, and there were these Manchurians, doing a rather festive Caribbean dance...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
On the contrary, biology has served to buttress what was evident to the ancients (as well as to contemporary folk). We moderns have dug down to the tiniest elements of living organisms and yet still fail to identify the material that separates the living from the non-living. The ancients are calling "checkmate."
Organic matter is just a form of organization of inorganic manner.
That was a sneaky sleight of hand. We were talking about living vs. non-living, and your argument shifted to an issue that no one disputes, pertaining to organic vs. inorganic material. Carbon, as we know, can be of a human or a rock. That's irrelevant.
If the difference between living and living were only a matter of "form," pray tell, what is the difference in form or composition of a living animal and a dead animal? The answer is beyond the reach of biological science (materialism). The answer is: One retains the breath/spirit that was divinely given to it; the other doesn't.
A strong (not a-gnostic) denial of this tenet is itself a matter of faith, since scientific investigation so far forces our eyes to the supernatural. We're down to the "bare metal," and the secret isn't visible to us. "200 years of biology," and all we've got is... TONS and TONS of evidence for an Intelligent Designer.
Not to be too hokey or trite, but truly, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, or spirit (Hebrew: ruach; Greek: pneuma; Latin: spiritus), the breath of God (Gen. 2:7).
Getting back on subject... We were asking if these viruses are alive. Are sperm alive?
What organism really is autonomous? The irony is that humans cannot survive without millions of organisms leeching off of us (bacteria). The host sometimes needs the parasites as much as the parasites need the host. And look at the broader ecosystem. Everything is interdependent.
Moreover, is it really necessary that everything be categorized, as in nested folders? The new organizational paradigm is tagging. Science should learn from the Internet. :)
We can kill viruses, is that a definition of them being alive - maybe. Should we stop wasting time discussing whether they are alive, and instead spend time researching how to better use viruses in medical research and curing diseases caused by them - definitely.
Jesus.
Now I am going to go to hell for having a cold.
If we define life by things that can get infected and sick, then Windows XP is most certainly alive.
or else!
Who cares about whether or not it is alive. Can this virus be used to infect other viruses in a controlled manner? Can we program it to kill aids or other viral diseases?
or else!