Are viruses alive? Short answer? Who cares? They kill alive people. So you have to fight against them. We know how. We should listen to genuine reliable public health experts on what to do.
Long answer: They're a creepy inbetween, according to the New Scientist magazine. And they're definitely parasites.
"Viruses are microscopic parasites responsible for a host of familiar – and often fatal – diseases, including the [eta Covid!] flu, Ebola, measles and HIV. They are made up of DNA or RNA encapsulated in a protein shell and can only survive and replicate inside a living host, which could be any organism on earth. This means no life form is safe from infection by a virus.
So are viruses ‘alive’? The answer is not as straightforward as you may think.
Since viruses were first discovered in 1892 by Dmitri Ivanovsky, our ideas of what they are have shifted from poisons to biological chemicals. Some years after their discovery, scientists first raised the idea that viruses were living – albeit simple – organisms because they caused diseases like bacteria, which we know to be alive.
However, viruses lack the hallmarks of other living things. They don’t carry out metabolic processes, such as making the energy molecule of life, ATP, and they don’t have cells and therefore the cellular machinery needed to make proteins by themselves. The only life process a virus undergoes independently is reproduction to make copies of itself, which can only happen after they have invaded the cells of another organism. Outside of their host some viruses can still survive, depending on environmental conditions, but their life span is considerably shorter. This complete reliability on a host for all their vital processes has led some scientists to deem viruses as non-living.
However there is also a case to be made for viruses being alive.
For example, the discovery of giant viruses possessing hundreds of genes (the Ebola virus only has seven) suggests viruses are more than just simple, inert bundles of genetic material. Some of these giant so-called mimiviruses contain genes involved in metabolism and making proteins, and their genomes are even bigger than those of some bacteria – so does this indicate that viruses are living after all?
A key to determining viruses’ elusive nature lies in how they came to exist. Shedding light on viruses’ history is tricky since they don’t leave behind fossils to study like other organisms. Viruses are also hugely diverse, constantly evolve and probably swap genes with all types of life (they might even be the source of life’s complexity), all of which make it harder to study their genetic basis.
But this has also helped scientists to draw parallels between viruses and other forms of life. One theory on their origin is that viruses evolved from cells then branched out and evolved separately, backing the notion that they are indeed alive. Studying the shapes of their proteins, for example, has shown that viruses share certain protein structures – and therefore properties – with organisms from all branches of the tree of life.
There are variations to this theory, such as the idea that viruses might have come from circular pieces of DNA called plasmids in archaeans, and that giant viruses might be the remnants of extinct domains of life.
Ultimately, science may never agree on whether viruses are alive or not. E. Rybicki described them as being “at the edge of life” – for now, this may be the closest we will get to an answer."
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
"Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
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