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Very silly beginner question: Arent viruses non-alive? Arent virsus just DNA strands that if they fall into the right place in a cell mechanism, the cell mechan

Very silly beginner question: Arent viruses non-alive? Arent virsus just DNA strands that if they fall into the right place in a cell mechanism, the cell mechanism will replicate them by mistake.

weatherlight 4y ago
There's an ongoing debate, that when the cell is taken over by the virus, at that point the virus is kind of alive. the infected cell is the viruses' living form. 1) The infected cell, is no longer the same as the organism's other cells. If it's a single celled organism, the infected cell no longer the original organism. 2) Once the "infected cell" starts shedding the virus, that's when the virus is alive so to speak. the actual virus microbe thats shedded can be thought as a sex cell of sorts. (Like pollen or mammalian sperm or eggs, etc.) Disclaimer. I'm not a virologist and as far as I know, *most* virologist conclude (last time i checked) that viruses are non-living microbes
bayesian_horse 4y ago
They are sometimes DNA and sometimes RNA. They also usually have proteins and lipids surrounding the genetic material, providing some protection and also the means of entering a cell. When replicating, both the genetic material and those proteins have to be replicated.
twic 4y ago
It depends how you define "alive". Which is not really an interesting scientific question; biologists understand (roughly!) what viruses are and how they work, and defining them as alive or not doesn't contribute anything to that understanding, it just puts a label on it.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  A virus is basically not a full cell. It doesn't do much until it enters a cell where it essentially feeds information to make the cell start doing things. Like creating more of the virus. It can't do that by itself. It relies on the host cell to do all the processing. If you think of the cell as a computer and the virus of some kind of information carrier (tape, cdrom, etc.), you can answer the question by asking yourself whether a cd-rom is capable of doing computation. Which would be a good analogy for being alive. To which of course the answer is no. So, by that analogy, viruses are not alive. They don't act by themselves. In the same way DNA is not alive. It's just a passive protein.
  - fillskills 4y ago
    So is it fair to say that the bug is in the cell replicator system that doesn’t recognize the difference between a virus and a regular useful protein?

Very silly beginner question: Arent viruses non-alive? Arent virsus just DNA strands that if they fall into the right place in a cell mechanism, the cell mechanism will replicate them by mistake.

weatherlight 4y ago

There's an ongoing debate, that when the cell is taken over by the virus, at that point the virus is kind of alive. the infected cell is the viruses' living form. 1) The infected cell, is no longer the same as the organism's other cells. If it's a single celled organism, the infected cell no longer the original organism. 2) Once the "infected cell" starts shedding the virus, that's when the virus is alive so to speak. the actual virus microbe thats shedded can be thought as a sex cell of sorts. (Like pollen or mammalian sperm or eggs, etc.) Disclaimer. I'm not a virologist and as far as I know, *most* virologist conclude (last time i checked) that viruses are non-living microbes

bayesian_horse 4y ago

They are sometimes DNA and sometimes RNA. They also usually have proteins and lipids surrounding the genetic material, providing some protection and also the means of entering a cell. When replicating, both the genetic material and those proteins have to be replicated.

twic 4y ago

It depends how you define "alive". Which is not really an interesting scientific question; biologists understand (roughly!) what viruses are and how they work, and defining them as alive or not doesn't contribute anything to that understanding, it just puts a label on it.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
A virus is basically not a full cell. It doesn't do much until it enters a cell where it essentially feeds information to make the cell start doing things. Like creating more of the virus. It can't do that by itself. It relies on the host cell to do all the processing. If you think of the cell as a computer and the virus of some kind of information carrier (tape, cdrom, etc.), you can answer the question by asking yourself whether a cd-rom is capable of doing computation. Which would be a good analogy for being alive. To which of course the answer is no. So, by that analogy, viruses are not alive. They don't act by themselves. In the same way DNA is not alive. It's just a passive protein.
- fillskills 4y ago
  So is it fair to say that the bug is in the cell replicator system that doesn’t recognize the difference between a virus and a regular useful protein?