Are Viruses Alive? A Rethink
The spell that started in 1962
Taking a keen look at my high school, I doubt we ever focused on viruses.
Bacteria were a given, since we had to learn about the binomial nomenclature system developed by Carl Linnaeus. But viruses were a foreign concept.
The topic was likely forgotten because biology, from its name, should deal with studying living things. Viruses, according to the mainstay argument, are not living organisms.
I learnt about viruses because I went to medical school. I can only imagine what the rest understand about these compounds that bathe our biosphere since they are hardly ever taught at the basic level of education.
Maybe it was done on purpose. Maybe it was innocent.
But there’s a huge interference, they’re saying you shouldn’t hear it
— Eminem.
Regardless of the intention, it interferes with a lot of interpretation that can follow from the basic understanding of their role in our lives and in evolution.
Despite staying outside basic biological books, they have been able to influence thinking and still poke our insoles like the pebble in our shoes that just wouldn’t let us walk with ease.
I guess you could say that viruses are renegades.
And you won’t be lying.
The cellular point of view
The first book I read by Karl Popper was An Open Society and Its Enemies.
In it, he critiques systems that do not allow for open objective criticism. He gives the example of the Pythagorean school which did not allow anyone to ask questions that challenged the neat calculations the school had formulated.
In the same spirit, Plato, who broke away from the school, believed in formalism. Neat geometrical shapes that man could never attain. His philosophy of forms and ideas was supported by similar principles as that of Pythagorus, even though Plato allowed some form of objective criticism.
Thus, the first part of the book is called ‘The Spell of Plato’. The phrase by Alfred North Whitehead ‘all of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato’ starts with this spell.
We can say the same thing about viruses. They are footnotes of the cellular point of view. It’s a spell, one which we need to break ourselves free of.
Cells can be divided into two major categories — those with membrane-bound structures and those without. The former are called eukaryotes, and the latter are prokaryotes.
Bacteria are prokaryotes. They have so much of their innards floating anyhow in the cytoplasm. They constitute their own kingdom.
You and all the other four remaining kingdoms are eukaryotes. Their genetic component, for instance, is kept inside a nucleus.
This division was formulated in 1962. It has stuck. The consequences are subtle though ruinous for research and diverse schools of thought.
This cellular point of view is now used to divide viruses into two. Those that infect bacteria or prokaryotes are bacteriophages. Those that infect the rest are just that, viruses.
This division stands even though there exist viruses that can infect both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The cellular point of view assumes that there is a threshold or boundary on which viruses cannot cross from one kingdom to another.
Nature, however, does not respect our boundaries. It just happens.
What’s more, it has stuck despite the works of Carl Woese, who in 1977 brought the world to the attention of a three-pronged system of viewing cellular organisms. Before, life could either fall under the domain of eukaryotes or bacteria.
Molecular analysis showed that a single component of minimally changing structure, the ribosomal RNA, was different in three domains. Life had three domains — bacteria, eukarya, and archaea.
Microscopically, archaea and bacteria as so alike that for the longest time, they were grouped as one. Since the cellular perspective was 15 years old by then, the idea had already sunk its roots into the minds of scientists who, more often than not, try to pivot on the next big thing without shimmying back to question if the foundations are okay.
That’s what Bandea and Forterre did. They wanted to twist the idea and the perspective is worth considering.
I give you the news with a twist
— Jay-Z
An inverted view
Now that cellular life exists in three domains, we can think of viruses in this way:
- Bacterioviruses
- Archaeoviruses, and
- Eukaryoviruses.
It’s simpler and still tries to stick with the domains of life. But it also has an issue. It still assumes that the ones that infect eukaryotes are distinct and different from the rest. They are not.
The theory that viruses are naked genes that come from cells guides this idea because viruses don’t have a metabolism. They lack a machinery system to replicate by themselves. The only way we can think of these particles being generated is if they are spewed from cells.
Surprisingly, the molecular components of viruses are unique to the three domains of life. It makes you wonder if they are indeed products of cellular matter. One might even think that the only time viruses change their structure is when they are inside a cell, but there is a virus, Acidianus-Tailed Virus (ATV) that changes outside the cell at different temperatures.
So we have to renege. We have to shatter this image. As Eminem says:
To shatter the picture in which of that as they paint me as
Claudiu Bandea introduced a different idea. Rather than think of viruses as the particles produced by the cells, these, he reasoned, would be the products of the virus. The cell, once it has been infected by the particle would then become the virus. The products would be the virion particles.
Arguments in favour of this point of view are evident in bacteria, once infected by virion particles, have a revamp of the machinery for photosynthesis. The cell undergoes servicing or transformation the kind we see when Optimus Prime gets called for a new mission every time the Earth is under attack in the Transformers Series.
If the cell transforms into a virus, a system that produces virions, it would be hardly any different from other kingdoms, such as fungi that produce spores that are resistant to a wide latitude of weather changes. The capsid covers protect the genetic components of the virion until they find a suitable environment where they can come to life.
The virus, now the infected cell, could be seen as one that produces a well-protected package containing the basic components for further persistence — a replicon, comprising the genetic material — and its protection with the capsid cover.
In the absence of these infective products, a cell encodes only protein through ribosomes, the other organelles that help build the cellular products. Forterre has thus divided organisms into two — ribosome-encoding organisms (REO) and capsid-encoding organisms (CEO).
This neat system shatters the debate of whether viruses are alive or not. From this perspective, the answer is inevitably yes. They are.
It also complements the idea I had about evolution, which was any form of merger forms a new organism. The REO after infection becomes a CEO. They are then a pocket that is shielded from nature’s annihilative forces and thus, extend their lives because of the fruitful mergers.
Myxomatous virus was introduced to the rabbits in Australia to control their rapid growth as a biological control measure.
The result was several rabbits developed immunity and started living with the virus. They had formed a new merger, more resilient than the ones that had succumbed. The merger has to be sustainable, where the role of one serves the other and vice versa.
Most of the infections we know of or the ones the media hypes, however, are unstable mergers. COVID-19, for instance, killed millions of people. It was an unstable merger.
The result, often, is the virus (CEO) produces enough virions to await their new host. They find ingenious ways of spreading, like stimulating the cough reflex or causing one to diarrhea severely. Poor sanitation would then enhance their ways of continuously spreading.
Today, several people have COVID-19 but it is not as catastrophic as the original wave. Viruses don’t have to be the dangerous particles we have always known them to be.
In short…
What I’m trying to say is…
Breaking away from the cellular point of view to that of a virus’ view of life changes the game. Again, Eminem reiterates:
See, it’s a matter of taste
It also becomes a matter of taste when the debate still stands as to whether viruses are alive or not.
But if their compounds are unique, it could mean they existed long before our cellular understanding of life.
We can borrow a particle from their extensions and challenge the idea we have always known. Break away from the spell.
And like the virus you still wish to know or that which you have now been introduced to, become a renegade.
Could we consider this perspective, please?
Reference: This work by Forterre inspired this article.
