Quotes About Viruses

The hosts—our bodies—and the viruses—any bug that makes us sick—are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defence. Then the virus changes to beat that defence, so the host gets a new defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen Contest. It's from the story, you know, Alice in Wonderland.

The way that worms and viruses spread on the Internet is not that different from the way they spread in the real world, and the way you quarantine them is not that different, either.

Piracy was kind of hard: It took a few minutes to download a song. It was kind of cumbersome. You had to worry about viruses. It's not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience.

The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated.

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as 'bugs' or 'viruses' in, or 'mis-activations' of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.

Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.

Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Garlic: Whole baked garlic cloves not only will help blood pressure and cholesterol but will help detoxify the body from heavy metals, especially mercury and cadmium. Garlic was used during World War II as Russian penicillin, as it also neutralizes dozens of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. It is a perfect nutraceutical.

the computers provided by the department were old and slow and most of them carried more viruses than a Hollywood Boulevard hooker.

Like many detectives he preferred to use his own laptop because the computers provided by the department were old and slow and most of them carried more viruses than a Hollywood Boulevard hooker.

These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

The question is important because if fever is a defense mechanism, then any effort to suppress or eliminate it may be counterproductive. Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.

It's mind-blowing how cheap and effective masks are. This is a little hard to admit, because the power of inventing things is so central to my worldview, but it's true: We may never devise a cheaper, more effective way to block the transmission of certain respiratory viruses than a piece of inexpensive material with a couple of elastic straps sewn onto it.

The oceans are thought to contain of the order of 4×1030 viruses, equivalent in mass to 75 million blue whales.

It has been suggested that she was plodding, that she could not understand her own data or work in teams, accept criticism or use imagination. That none of these alleged inadequacies manifested themselves in Rosalind's work on viruses or coal is ignored by her detractors

And such challenges just don't stop; our boundaries are extremely porous. Viruses, for instance, perform a really irritating function of intermingling the DNA from every species on Earth with every other. As Richard Lewontin

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

I was upset, sad, angry - something! I needed to do something! I needed to feel myself, understand myself and this horrible world we are all trapped in, where bugs and tumors and viruses worm their way into our brains and lay their putrid eggs that hatch and eat us alive from the inside out.

tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

All too often, doctors end up giving antibiotics to their patients with colds. This is a fundamentally pointless treatment, because antibiotics work only on bacteria and are useless against viruses.

influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.