Last night I scared the bejesus out of myself reading about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1917, hantavirus, and the Ebola virus. Then I started to wonder. We can kill bacteria. If you come down with a nasty case of bubonic plague, it’s at least possible that your doctor could knock it out with an antibiotic. How come we can’t kill viruses once they’ve gotten inside a person? Is anyone working on figuring out how?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You think computer viruses are insidious? They’ve got nothing on the organic kind. Unlike bacteria, viruses aren’t cells. They’re basically just encapsulated DNA or RNA code. They can’t reproduce on their own, so they can’t be grown in the lab (not without special tricks anyway), which makes them hell to detect. The world’s smallest parasites, they do their thing by insinuating themselves into living cells and using the host cell’s amino acids and other chemical building blocks to reproduce. Some viruses insert their DNA into the host’s DNA, so that the viral DNA reproduces whenever the cell does. To destroy the virus you have to destroy the host cells and maybe the host, which sorta defeats the purpose.
In short, virologists have their work cut out for them. Despite decades of research, most viruses have no cure. Antibiotics are useless–prescribing them for a viral infection only helps breed drug-resistant strains of bacteria. The most effective approach is still vaccination, which creates antibodies that intercept the virus before it invades a cell. Antibodies can’t penetrate cell membranes, though, so once a virus gets past that point, too bad for you.
Wrong again. In 1997 a scientist and his wife were walking through an Indonesian fish market when the wife spotted a fishmonger having a special on fresh coelacanth. (Well, one fresh coelacanth.) The couple barely managed to snap a photo before the thing was sold. A year later another specimen was pulled from Indonesian waters. Scientists are now trying to figure out how the coelacanth could have migrated thousands of miles from Madagascar. The rest of us are trying to figure out how scientists could have overlooked a five-foot-long fish. Keep an eye on that tuna melt; the next sighting could be yours. For more, see www.dinofish.com.
