Quotes About Viruses

Like cold-causing rhinoviruses, influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

What we're not so good at is getting rid of viruses. Despite all the vaccines, antiviral drugs, and public health strategies at our disposal, viruses still manage to escape annihilation.

The future looks rosy for West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne viruses that follow it to the New World. That's because the future is going to be warm and wet. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are raising the average temperature in the United States.

That's not because HPV was rare—far from it: a 2014 study on 103 healthy people detected the viruses in 71 of them—about 69 percent.

And they certainly would not have guessed that the human genome is partly composed from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors, or that life as we know it may have gotten its start four billion years ago from viruses.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

Although more than 12 million viruses and other malicious files are captured each year, only about a dozen or so zero-days are found among them.

Based on the number of viruses she found in her samples, Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses.

We'd be better prepared for these emergencies if they didn't always come as such surprises. The next plague may start when yet another virus in some wild animal jumps into our species—a virus we might not yet even know about. To reduce that ignorance, scientists are surveying animals, searching for bits of genetic material from viruses. But because we live on a planet of viruses, that task is enormous.

Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.

Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it—the more viruses you get exposed to—the better your immune system becomes.

Almost all of the big epidemics that we've seen in the last decade-plus have come from fruit bats that normally pollinate the rain forest. And as the rain forest is under stress and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock, and eventually to us.

air cannot flow out of the room, only in. There they are bathed in blue ultraviolet light, which kills viruses. After that, they tug on

Everyone, he knew for a fact, was populated by billions of microbes, and not simply the flora in their digestive tracts. People played host to mites and viruses that all wanted to reproduce and continue life elsewhere. They jumped ship with every handshake. It was folly to imagine we were anything more than vessels, carting around our bossy passengers. We were nothing.

In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room.

If we are lucky, they were never retarded enough to create computer viruses and will have no such things as firewalls and security like we have. If they have never experienced a full blown computer failure we'll introduce them to the concept

Armageddon reigns, and survival on this planet gets down to brass tacks, the last three left standing will be cockroaches, viruses and probate attorneys. Fade to black, check please.

It was a bad day for viruses," Moderna's chair Afeyan says about the Sunday in November 2020 when he got the first word of the clinical trial results. "There was a sudden shift in the evolutionary balance between what human technology can do and what viruses can do. We may never have a pandemic again.

Indeed, phage viruses are by far the most plentiful biological entity on earth. There are 1031 of them—a trillion phages for every grain of sand, and more than all organisms (including bacteria) combined. In one milliliter (0.03 ounces) of seawater there can be as many as 900 million of these viruses.7

The easiest of these viruses to study are the ones that attack bacteria, and they were dubbed (remember the term, for it will reappear when we discuss the discovery of CRISPR) "phages," which was short for "bacteriophages," meaning bacteria-eaters.

Most of us someday will have detection devices in our home that will allow us to check for viruses and many other conditions.

Nature isn't benign," Lederberg said at the meeting's opening. "The bottom lines: the units of natural selection—DNA, sometimes RNA elements—are by no means neatly packaged in discrete organisms. They all share the entire biosphere. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program. Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn new tricks, not necessarily confined to what happens routinely, or even frequently.

What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are "highly intelligent" — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social. Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be