Viruses exist in a murky area between the living and the not living. Unlike megafauna, they often slip the surly yoke of humanity and inflict damage on a global level.
The human population and our global economy was recently rattled by a tiny and strange object that almost nobody understands.
A coronavirus, like other virus, exist in a shadowy realm between the living and the non-living. They are neither mineral, nor animal. They are inbetweeners.
A virus relies on a genetic code to construct itself and to create progeny through the inheritance of this code. However, a virus does not use the cell as a framework for its existence. The virus travels light with just a few structural proteins interlaced in a shell to serve as housing for its genetic code.
To be organized like a cell is a defining criteria for our definition of alive.
A virus has no need for cells or cellular machinery. They infect our cells and hijack the whole operation. By co-opting our cellular machinery, a virus can carry out its business of replicating, thriving and evolving. Viruses readily propagate their genetic code into the future, and in doing so….they are impeded in no manner by the absence of a cellular membrane, a mitochondria, a nucleus or a ribosome.
This non-living entity is free to have its filthy way with us.
Man may have dominion over ‘the Fish in the Sea and the Wild animals of the earth’, but we certainly don’t enjoy dominion over ‘every creeping things that creeps upon the earth’. Our recent pandemic stood as a stark announcement of human’s inability to contain the creepers.
I bring this all up because the biotech industry has finally learned how to utilize the power of the virus in order to carry genetic medicine into human cells. We are now growing large quantities of virus in bioreactors, for the sake of delivering curative therapies to diseased human populations. Humankind and the virus continue to make for strange bedfellows. We seem to be stuck with each other in perpetuity … no matter how poorly we make think of each other.
In upcoming newsletters, I’ll draw out our recent advances with viral vectors and human disease… and I’ll continue to do so in these broad and philosophical strokes.
Kevin Curran PhD
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