Name: Are Viruses Necessary?
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T04:50:24.000Z
Duration: 3 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I have a cold, and it's super unpleasant.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, having a cold was like a slightly annoying background hum, and now it's a borderline catastrophe.

All of which led me to wonder whether viruses are strictly speaking necessary.

So there are a lot of viruses in the world, like in a healthy river there, often over 400 million viruses in a single teaspoon of water.

If you get the flu, you might have over 100 trillion flu viruses inside of your body.

There are more viruses on earth than there are grains of sand.

I don't know which particular virus is causing my cold, because over 200 viral strains can cause colds.

But whatever it is, there are more of them inside of my body right now than there are stars in the Milky Way.

That's a fun thing to think about when you're a germophobe, but it gets worse, or possibly better, depending on your perspective, because, like all mammals, I don't just contain viruses.

I am part virus, a bunch of human DNA, something like 5 to 8% of our total genome comes from viruses, which bears a bit of deeper explanation, so viruses cannot replicate on their own, which is one of the reasons they're often seen as not being alive.

Instead, viruses rely upon the cells they infect to make copies of themselves.

Viruses insert their genome into the host cell's DNA, and then the host cells start making the proteins that the virus needs to make more of itself.

A virus is using a bunch of my host cells to make more of itself, and there's a battle going on, and eventually I will win that battle hopefully.

But sometimes the virus will infect a reproductive cell, a sperm or an egg.

And if that sperm er egg goes on to, you know, help create an organism, the viral change DNA will be in all of that organism cells and the viral proteins that are now being regularly produced by this new organism will sometimes be used by that organism for new tasks because from an evolutionary perspective, it's a lot easier to use proteins that your DNA is already making than it is to like invent entire new ones.

This process was, for instance, critical to the development of placentas.

Like over 100 million years ago, there was this small, shrew like creature that developed a placenta using proteins from a virus.

Without that virus, placentas would not have evolved as they did.

Humans would not exist as they do, and I would not be able to be miserably sick on account of how I would not exist.

I cannot unambiguously hate viruses because I am partly a product of them.

Hank, you've helped me get my head around the extraordinary diversity and ubiquity of life on Earth with your new show Journey to the Micro Cosmos, which is maybe my favorite YouTube channel of all time.

Like not since I watched Carl Sagan host Cosmos as a kid, have I felt such awe toward the strange universe around us.

Zoom way out and we're just one solar system among billions of solar systems in a galaxy that is among billions of Galaxies.

But zoom way in and looking, for instance, how microscopic organisms eat and hunt, and a teaspoon of water becomes a universe of its own and whether it comes to defining life or fathoming our place in the world.

Looking at the micro cosmos can be especially interesting because, as you said in a recent video, when you look very, very close, every sharp line turns out to be blurry.

Now there aren't viruses in journey to the micro cosmos, because even by microscopic standards, viruses are very small.

Also, based on the photographs I've seen, a virus is I'm not sure I need to see video of thumb.

But, Hank, your show has helped me to see the microscopic world as something more than a mere threat.

All right, go watch journey to the Microcosmos.

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Are Viruses Necessary?

perspective

vulnerable

weird

entire