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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.'"
"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.
The reason your school taught you that is because the definition of living usually taught in schools includes such characteristics as:
just to name a few. Viruses don't possess any metabolic function (they use the host cells hijacked machinery), they don't grow (once created, they are essentially static objects until they bump into a cell), and they have no means of independent reproduction (again, the hijacked cells reproduce the virus).
On the other hand, many people simplify the definition of life to solely the ability to reproduce (independently or not), which makes viruses alive, but also makes prions alive, and makes it fairly easy for humans to "create life" in the form of self-reproducing machines.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Obligatory link to an old paper: Eugene H. Spafford. Computer viruses as artificial life. Artificial Life, 1(3):249-265, 1994.
The short answer is "no," but it makes for an interesting read if you have some whiskey to drink while you're reading it.
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.
The local phone book makes an interesting read if that's the excuse you need to relax with some good whikey
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.
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.
No, no! Human Pamplona virus is the one that makes seemingly healthy, sane people go running with the bulls!
I believe you meant papilloma (a virus that induces warts and similar growths), not Pamplona (a town where you can be an idiot and get yourself gored by a bull).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
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.
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.
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
Yes. Mules cannot reproduce. The distinctions between species are based on the production of offspring which can reproduce to the nth generation.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
This bigger point being - while science may have come a long way, reporting of science in the media has not.