People are thronging stores from tiny corner markets to giant Costcos and snapping up everything in sight, especially—and I can’t for the life of me figure this out—toilet paper. Schools are canceling classes, from college to grade school, with expectations that schools nationwide will all be shut down by next week. Airlines have almost come to a halt, and layoffs are mounting everywhere. Virtually every large gathering has been canceled, as has spring training in baseball, the NBA, and college basketball’s March Madness. Broadway shows are suspended and so is nearly everything else where people normally gather. States and the national government have declared national emergencies. What the hell is happening? One would think that an alien invasion is taking place, or is imminent.
In a way, it has. But the invasion is not comprised of strange little men with one eye in the middle of their bulbous foreheads. The invasion this time is by these miniscule things called viruses. And so, it probably behooves us to know just what these creatures (if that’s the right word) are. To find out, we have to look to science—something that the current administration has contempt for; which is why their response has been so pathetic and dismissive and infuriating and ultimately catastrophic for us all.
Viruses, to begin with, are tiny. As an example, the polio virus, just 30 nanometers across, is approximately 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt! Even bacteria—which are as small as we can possibly imagine—are large comparatively, the common lab bacteria E. Coli being 40 times larger than the hepatitus virus. But size is only the beginning. Viruses seem to occupy a place somewhere between life and non-life. That is, they seem to exist as life forms, having nucleic acids and DNA or RNA. But they can’t use this genetic information to replicate themselves on their own. As Jacqueline Dudley of the University of Texas at Austin puts it, “A minimal virus is a parasite that requires replication (making copies of itself) in a host cell.” That’s because a virus doesn’t have the machinery to perform this trick of self-generation (i.e., is it possessed of life, or not?), and so therefore, must “hijack” a real cell’s machinery to reproduce itself. That is, the little devil is able to use its host’s equally tiny machinery to make RNA from its DNA, and thereby make the proteins it needs to self-generate. And that’s the central formula we use to define life: DNA to RNA to the proteins that are the building blocks of new little organisms.
This, then, is what viruses must do. Their primary role is to deliver their DNA or RNA genome into a host cell so that that viral genome can thereby be expressed (transcribed and translated). It’s really a literary problem for the poor virus. It can’t express itself on its own, it’s a kind of half-live mute, so it must find another cell (usually one in a living plant or animal like us) it can slip into, and get it to afford it expression and, thereby, real life. One almost wants to sympathize with the mute little buggers. One almost wants to open up one’s passages—respiratory passages, or perhaps an open wound—so the hapless little viruses can sneak in and find their voices. Trouble is, as with all hijacking, this is not a nice process. Because once inside the host cell, viruses disrupt the cell’s normal activity, halting the synthesis of any RNA and proteins that the host cell might use for itself, and get it to produce viral proteins, which it can’t use. And, of course, in the process often crippling the larger organism, often mortally so.
One of the things that has occurred to me in the last few days is wondering just how and why these nasty little creatures have been allowed to mess up our lives. Where did they come from in the first place, and what has allowed them to thrive? There are, after all, millions of different kinds of viruses (though scientists have been able to describe only about 5,000 of them), and they are not only found everywhere, but they outnumber by far every other biological entity on our planet. Surely, anything that numerous and ubiqitous must have some use or value, as we assess it—that is, evolutionarily. And indeed, viruses are now said to be an important means of horizontal gene transfer—the process whereby bacteria, say, are able to acquire new properties that allow them to resist our antibiotics without having to go through the normal reproductive process. Viruses help them do this. And this, in turn, increases genetic diversity, always supposed to be a good thing, without the usual method of sexual reproduction. The bacteria just get novel properties by sideways insertion. Just by being in the vicinity of that new virus-carried genetic improvement. So viruses are of some value to bacteria, at least in allowing them to resist our attempts to kill them (hence the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant superbugs).
But what of the why? Are they at all critical to life itself? Apparently so. Viruses may be the first organisms to have mastered the art of self-assembly (though not self-reproduction). The so-called ‘virus-first hypothesis’ proposes that viruses may be the first proto-life form to have evolved from complex molecules of protein and nucleic acid that initially appeared on this earth. At the very least, viruses are now seen as an ancient form that probably appeared before life split into its three main domains: archaea, bacteria, and eukaryota (micro-organisms with a nucleus, like the cells from which we are made.) So they may well be the ancestors of us all.
Still, in the current state of things, they’re mainly nasty little buggers that bring us ills like cancer and polio and now Covid-19, which is driving our human world nuts. And of course what makes this threat so panic-inducing is that we can’t see something that’s 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, and can’t even be called fully alive. Indeed, we can hardly imagine how such a tiny entity could even exist, much less threaten us. But science, through the magic of electron microscopes, tells us that that’s precisely the case. They tell us that these miniscule things, sprayed out into the air by the thousands when someone sneezes, and thence into our own nostrils and via them into our very cells, can then multiply exponentially, and compromise our cells, our lungs, and our very lives. And though most of us feel completely safe within our normal day-to-day lives, and tend to want to scoff at the supposed dangers, also and equally we sense some unseen cloud of terror lurking just beyond our ken, waiting to envelope us like a nasty dark cloud of miasma, or maybe invisible radiation. And the worst part is that most of us will never see it coming. It’s too small. Too well disguised. Too well integrated into what looks normal and harmless.
And that, of course, is the genius of viruses, and in the larger sense, of life. Life is composed of the very tiny that assembles and assembles and grows and grows some more into things that are finally visible and self-organizing enough to keep going on their own. And eventually taking over the earth. Such as humans. Assemblages of the very tiny we are, of bacteria and cells and organs and selves that come to see everything solely from our own point of view, so that anything that interrupts our race to the top of every chain so that we can rule supreme over all the flora and fauna of the planet is a mortal threat. And cause for widespread panic. Threatening our lives, our toilet paper, our vacations and our stock market.
And perhaps, just perhaps, that’s what viruses are for (we won’t ever know for sure, of course, what the virus actually means, or even what we mean in the end). To bring us a tiny inkling of the balance that is at play here, the calling in of the accounts that must eventually invade our fond dreams of domination. And tell us, in no uncertain terms, that we are not really the monarchs of all we survey. That, in fact, we are just one end of a chain that stretches back eons to before self-reproduction to mere self-assembly and perhaps before that too, and that our supposed reign here is very much temporary and conditional and dependent on so many things we can’t see or even imagine that our hubris in this regard is laughable when it isn’t dangerous. For there is some evidence and speculation recently that most of the pandemics that seem to be threatening us in our time are the result of our reckless disregard for balance in our tearing apart of the very ecosystems (to build our roads and farms and dams) that have kept such pandemics in some check for thousands of years. That, in short, we are bringing on these threats to all humanity ourselves, by running roughshod and unthinkingly over all else.
So even though, in the short run, I personally want to stomp out the little buggers that make up the Covid-19 threat, (if only they were big enough to stomp on) and hope desperately for a vaccine that will prevent them from entering my cells, and a medication that will kill them by the zillions, in the longer run I can see that even they, these half-alive miniscule organisms, have their critical role to play in the drama of which I am a part. And, horror of horrors, may be in the end more crucial to that story than I am. I devoutly hope that is not the case. But just the fact that they’re so small and seemingly insignificant seems not to matter anymore. So who really knows?
Lawrence DiStasi
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