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CELL PARTS LATER CRYSTALLIZED. "Molecular biologists went on to crystallize most of the essential components of cells and are today accustomed to thinking about cellular constituents—for example, ribosomes, mitochondria, membranes, DNA and proteins—as either chemical machinery or the stuff that the machinery uses or produces." https://lnkd.in/e3cWiQ8 View in LinkedIn

THE DEFENSE. "In an effort to prove the veracity of his discovery, Dr. Stanley redissolved and recrystallized his protein 15 times, after which point it still produced tobacco mosaic virus as powerful as the original sample. The chemical weight of the crystal substance — 17 million times greater than that of the heaviest known protein — gave Dr. Stanley the first clue as to the virus's inherent contradiction." 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

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

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

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

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

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

ANCIENT REDUCTIONS. "The most compelling evidence of the dominance of genome reduction and simplification was obtained through the reconstruction of the genomic evolution of archaea that almost exclusively are free-living organisms." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn