Your viruses are beyond your command: the times they are a changin'
Richard Koenigsberg
(terrific drawings of viruses--and article--are directly below)
Viruses are non-living entities. They only come alive when they enter into an organic being (a cell). (1) They do not care about national boundaries. (2) They do not care who is "leading" a country.
This current virus seems to SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE and will result in tens-of-thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths, creating an important moment for social theory: because all of the imaginary dangers fade into insignicance: the "enemies" that leaders and populations have created to keep their populations energized and excited; keep their nations alive.
Suddenly, Americans are not so terrified of Mexican rapists, illegal immigrants, or Moslems: the FANTASY WORLD THAT WE HAVE BEEN LIVING IN. Suddenly, unexpectedly, no time or energy or psychic space for these imaginary enemies.
Most Americans LIVED WITHIN this fantasy world--calling it, "society." They accepted and embraced this world and called it "real," even as they ARGUED AGAINST those who had created this fantasy world.
EVERYONE LIVED WITHIN THIS FANTASY WORLD. For most, there seemed to be no other choice: so attached is every to "the media;" so desirous of being PLUGGED INTO THE MATRIX.
No concept of SEPARATION or INDEPENDENCE. Where have those terms gone?
Now, a new reality principle based on BIOLOGY or reality. Where is the last time you heard this term BIOLOGY used in the discourse of social theory?
Cultural theory builds on the DENIAL OF BIOLOGY. Lacan: "There is no such thing as a pre-discursive reality." What NONSENSE that everyone has had to endure for so many years.
Viruses have a "mind" of their own. I think of Bobby Dylan's line, "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command."
Richard Koenigsberg
rakoenigsberg1@gmail.com
Why are viruses considered to be non-living?
Viruses are responsible for some of the most dangerous and deadly diseases including influenza, ebola, rabies and smallpox. Despite their potential to kill, these potent pathogens are in fact considered to be non-living, as alive as the screen that you are reading this article on.
How is this possible? How can something as nasty as a virus spread so fast, reproduce and infect other living things but not be considered a living creature? The answer is complex and has been a subject of debate since the moment they were first named in 1898.
The argument hinges on what we mean by ‘alive’.
What do we mean by ‘alive’?
There is no single undisputed definition that offers a hallmark of life. Some of the more common questions to distinguish between living and non-living things are as follows. Does it have its own biological ‘machinery’ to replicate? Does it multiply through cellular division? Does it have a metabolism?
For each of these questions, viruses receive a fail.
Why don’t viruses fit the bill?
In order to replicate, viruses must first hijack the reproductive equipment of a host cell, redirecting it to ‘photocopy’ the genetic code of the virus and seal it inside a newly formed container, known as the capsid. Without a host cell, the virus simply can’t replicate.
Viruses fail the second question for the same reason. Unlike other living organisms that can self-divide, splitting a single cell into two, viruses must ‘assemble’ themselves by taking control of the host cell, which manufactures and assembles the viral components.
Finally, a virus isn’t considered living because it doesn’t need to consume energy to survive, nor is it able to regulate its own temperature. Unlike living organisms that meet their energy needs by metabolic processes that supply energy-rich units of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, viruses can survive on nothing. In theory, a virus can drift around indefinitely until it contacts the right kind of cell for it to bind to and infect, thus creating more copies itself.
That’s three strikes against, but is there anything to suggest that viruses might be alive?
It’s a little more complicated
In short, yes. Or at least there’s plenty to suggest that the line between living and non-living might be a little blurry.
For one thing, some viruses do contain parts of the molecular machinery required to replicate themselves. The gigantic mimivirus – a virus so large that it was initially mistaken for a bacterium, and has a genome larger than that of some bacteria – carries genes that enable the production of amino acids and other proteins that are required for translation, the process that for viruses turns genetic code into new viruses. (Mimivirus still lacks ribosomal DNA, which codes for the assembly of proteins that carries out the translation process.)
Another sign of fuzzy boundaries between living and non-living is that viruses share a lot of their genetics with their host cells. A 2015 study of protein folds, structures that change little during evolution, in thousands of organisms and viruses, found 442 folds shared across all and only 66 that were specific to viruses.
These findings suggest that viruses may have evolved alongside the very first ‘living’ cells. As Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, one of the authors of the protein fold study, explains, “We need to broaden how we define life and its associated activities."