E. A. Blair: November 2007 Archives

In the newest issue of the New Yorker, Michael Specter leads us on a fascinating journey through the world of evolutionary biology, more specifically how retroviruses, viruses that alter our genetic structure, have played an extremely important role in making us who we are. You can easily get lost among his seemingly sci-fi tales of virus resurrection, traveling genetic instructions, and virus–host relationships.

What I found to be most interesting though, as someone who isn't an evolutionary biologist, was the very simple and clear summary that he provided at the beginning of this report as to what exactly a virus is.

Viruses reproduce rapidly and often with violent results… 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.