Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Why do I care so much about viruses?
One is, you just have to have an
appreciation
for how many there are. So on this planet at any one time
it is estimated, and these are
just estimations and they're probably conservative there's ten to the thirty-one
virus particles present. So that's ten to the exponent of thirty-one. What does that number mean?
right
unless you're a physicist or
a geologist, you really don't have a clue what that number means. Let me put it into perspective
So viruses are really small. And you can fit thousands
up to billions of viruses inside a single cell
Well, if you took that 10 to the 31 particles
and laid them end to end,
it would take you over two hundred million light years
to go from one end to the other
That's phenomenal. That's going outside the Milky Way and I think about three quarters of the way back in.
So just
in their sheer number
they're totally incredible.
Because of that number,
and because all viruses require a host to replicate in,
it's estimated that there's about 10 to the 24th infections per second
What's that number mean? Well,
how long do you think the Earth has been around?
The Earth has only been around 10 to the 17th seconds
So we are talking about an enormous number of infections per second occurring on this planet.
Well, again, put that into something
maybe that we can understand
So in the oceans, where the microbial population makes up about 90 percent
of the living biomass
It's estimated that about 20 percent of that biomass
--of these cells--is infected
by viruses and killed by viruses every single day.
So that means in five days on average
the vast majority of the life in the oceans
is turned over. It's a whole new ball game
every five days.
Just as a consequence of viral infections
and very few people
appreciate what that really means
and these are actually pretty recent findings, so
it'll spread throughout the scientific and general community, but these are
remarkable numbers.
So, to keep
discussing this,
we and others believe that viruses
are major drivers of evolution
in the past and in today,
so, it's hard to imagine
that any life you could think of, even us
could be what we are without
viruses.
Everyone thinks of viruses as bad.
They cause disease.
But in reality,
viruses are essential
for
us to exist
as humans.
How can I say such things like that?
It really comes from multiple sources.
Probably the most obvious one, is
over the last
ten years we've really
advanced our technology
in how to sequence the genomes of organisms.
So now we have the sequence of the human genome and about 800 other organisms
we know about.
And every single one of those organisms
when you look at them, a significant number of the genes that make us up are
from viruses.
It can be up to 50 percent
of all the genes in an organism
are from viruses.
Some of us
speculate
that everything
was either invented by viruses or at some point had association with viruses.
The estimations now
when we look at
where are all the genes in the biological world
the vast majority of new genes we believe actually are invented
by viruses
and are introduced into
living cells to help them evolve and
are the drivers of evolution.
So they are the creators you might say
of biodiversity on this planet