flickering pictures

From the Telegraph:

Viruses are glorified scraps of genetic code that are exquisitely designed to pirate a host to reproduce: the common cold virus needs cells in the nose and respiratory tract to reproduce, before being spread with a sneeze.

But the discovery of a giant virus that itself falls ill through infection by another virus seems to suggest they too are alive, highlighting how there is no watertight definition of what exactly scientists mean when they refer to something as “living”.

“There’s no doubt, this is a living organism,” the journal Nature is told by Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseilles, part of France’s basic-research agency CNRS. “The fact that it can get sick makes it more alive.”

There’s a lot of debate as to what exactly is alive, and because of the inherent silliness of the question, there probably always will be. The reason it’s a silly question — at least for now — is that we can’t even get our definitions straight.

Being a literal-minded fellow, I looked it up in the dictionary, but Merriam-Webster didn’t offer much help, calling life “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” Worker ants and mules can’t reproduce — though fire does, sort of, when it spreads through a forest. Another attempt says “living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote their own continuation.” One more point for fire. Fire consumes oxygen and emits carbon dioxide like we do, converts matter to energy, reproduces, dies, is born, excretes waste in the form of ash, responds to stimuli, and does just about everything you’d expect a living thing to do.

So is fire more alive than a mule?

Another definition is that living things must contain matter (as opposed to only energy), but ghost-watchers and religious-minded folk would swear on a stack of Bibles that physical manifestation isn’t necessary for life. Yet another says living things include reproducible hereditary information, but you could pay a computer science major $100 to write you a program that does that.

The point is, the debate rages on, but at the end of the day it’s all just so many words, and all that really matters is that you can now draw some measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that the microscopic baddies making your nose run may be just as miserable as you are. You know, if you’re the vindictive sort.

And is anyone else thinking that maybe one day we could fight the viruses that make us sick by infecting them with viruses that make them sick?

Story via Slashdot.
Image via the Telegraph.

• plug this post
  
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati