By Steve Rhodes
A (somewhat irregular) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Cell Mates
What follows might sound like science, but bear with me. As one subject says in the New Yorker story “Darwin’s Surprise,” if you think about this for five minutes, it’s wild stuff.
“Viruses produce rapidly and often with violent results, yet they are so rudimentary that many scientists don’t even consider them to be alive. A virus is nothing more than a few strands of genetic material wrapped in a package of protein – a parasite, unable to function on its own.
“In order to survive, it must find a cell to infect. Only then can any virus make use of its single talent, which is to take control of a host’s cellular machinery and use it to churn out thousands of copies of itself.
“These viruses then move from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billions.”
Okay, so big deal. Nice biology lesson.
Well, the thing is this: Scientists are piecing together extinct viruses and bringing them back to life. By doing so, they can figure out how they work and, in the case of HIV, for example, find a way to stop them. But that’s not really the point of the article.
Posted on November 29, 2007