Month: September 2022

UNDER ONE PERCENT. There are millions of types of viruses but only about 5,000 have been described in detail. This is less than a small fraction of 1% of the total. We are living in the viral dark ages in terms of our knowledge. https://lnkd.in/eihaD8M View in LinkedIn

MICROBIOME INITIATIVE. View in LinkedIn

VIRUSES HAVE BEEN SMEARED."New technologies have changed our understanding of viruses throughout the last ten years. Viruses are not primarily pathogens, which is a biased view based on the history of medicine. Most viruses do not cause diseases. Viruses cause diseases if a well-established equilibrium, which evolved over billions of years, gets out of balance." https://lnkd.in/eGaw2Kq View in LinkedIn

DECISIVE ROLE. "For far too long, viruses have only been considered as poisonous and highly infectious parasites. The fact that viruses are silent companions of virtually all organisms and that they play a decisive role in the evolution of the host has been largely ignored." https://lnkd.in/e-pJFM6 View in LinkedIn

"VIRUS. A molecular genetic parasite that uses cellular systems for its own replication." https://lnkd.in/eWJm4qh View in LinkedIn

VIRAL PRIMER, or everything that you wanted to know about viruses. https://lnkd.in/ewwHdGy View in LinkedIn

CRYSTALLIZABLE, INFECTIVE, REPRODUCTIVE. Viruses contain DNA and RNA, and can by crystallized. Because of the latter fact, and they they are genetically streamlined and outsource to the machinery of host cells, many consider that they are not living. Like prions, viruses co-opt the cellular machinery to exist. View in LinkedIn

VIRUSES CAN BE CRYSTALLIZED like common table salt and stored for years and reconstituted as active virus. "Wendell Stanley achieved the first crystallization of a virus (1935), the basis for his Nobel Prize of 1946. He later remarked on the unique position of viruses at the junction of life and non-life." https://lnkd.in/egdQpNg View in LinkedIn

BIG SURPRISE. "So small that they cannot be seen even with a microscope, yet powerful enough to wipe out entire species, viruses were the subject of both intense investigation and wild speculation until 1935, when Rockefeller Institute scientist Wendell M. Stanley purified the tobacco mosaic virus and made one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century: that a virus has properties definitive of both living and nonliving matter." https://lnkd.in/eSUZzUv View in LinkedIn

SKEPTICISM. "The scientific community was astonished, and highly skeptical. Viruses, with their ability to reproduce and mutate, had from the first been classified as a life form. The structural properties of living protoplasm — complex, nongeometrical, mutable — contrast sharply with those of nonliving matter like crystals, which are rigid and definable in mathematical terms. Dr. Stanley had cracked the reigning doctrine wide open by ostensibly purifying living matter in a characteristically nonliving form." https://lnkd.in/eSUZzUv View in LinkedIn