I remember even has a middle school kid learning about viruses in science class and then the topic “they aren’t alive” would come up. It never would sit right with me. Not alive? How is this the one thing on the planet that seemingly is it’s own organic life form but isn’t “alive”. It seems so unnatural, like it doesn’t belong, I don’t know exactly how to describe how I felt as a kid learning it every year but it felt like learning a pack of lies, like the emperor was naked but no one was willing to look into it, just repeat the lesson and take it as gospel.
It's not "alive" in the sense that viruses are more like pre-programmed self replicating robots. They have all the instructions and main goal to reproduce as much as possible. That's kind of other life forms goals as well, survive and reproduce. Once a virus has infected a cell, it goes to activating it's instructions and just works on replicating as much as possible. There aren't the general metabolisms going on in viruses themselves like a cell would, but the virus does continue to reproduce, and in that process find new hosts to reproduce more. Like I said, viruses are just kind of biologic (so one would think living) self replicating robots that don't use most of the general qualities of a living cell.
I remember even has a middle school kid learning about viruses in science class and then the topic “they aren’t alive” would come up. It never would sit right with me. Not alive? How is this the one thing on the planet that seemingly is it’s own organic life form but isn’t “alive”. It seems so unnatural, like it doesn’t belong, I don’t know exactly how to describe how I felt as a kid learning it every year but it felt like learning a pack of lies, like the emperor was naked but no one was willing to look into it, just repeat the lesson and take it as gospel.
It's not "alive" in the sense that viruses are more like pre-programmed self replicating robots. They have all the instructions and main goal to reproduce as much as possible. That's kind of other life forms goals as well, survive and reproduce. Once a virus has infected a cell, it goes to activating it's instructions and just works on replicating as much as possible. There aren't the general metabolisms going on in viruses themselves like a cell would, but the virus does continue to reproduce, and in that process find new hosts to reproduce more. Like I said, viruses are just kind of biologic (so one would think living) self replicating robots that don't use most of the general qualities of a living cell.