Can you kill the living dead?

09/02/2007 by peter.

At various times I have heard the media say that you can kill a virus. Now this is an interesting issue considering it is not realy alive. A virus basically consists of one or more protein molecules acting as a little shell and a strand of DNA or RNA inside. The data in the this strand of DNA or RNA codes for the proteins and how to assemble them along with a copy of this data to make a new virus. It is analogous to a factory making manufacturing machinery. In this factory there is a store of stock materials and parts and a shop floor consisting of machines that can request these parts from store and then assemble them based on a set of plans fed into it creating a new machine. Now what happens is some little malicious person inputs some plans for a machine that bumbles around with a copy of the plans to build itself and feeds it into one of these assembly machines. Once the assembly machine is finished its job the new bumbler will go off and find another machine. now if each set of plans says “make 1000 bumblers” then before you know it the factory will be over run with little wheeled things going around getting these big assembly machines to make 1000 copies of each of them. The are apparently reproducing and causing all other production to halt. Finally, if the bumbler tells the assembler to use parts of itself then the assemblers will die out and the bumblers will have nothing to “infect” but the only thing that needs to survive to get to a new factory facility and cause the same damage is the plans for this bumbler. one wouldn’t say the plans are alive but still they reproduce and cause havoc. In viral infections, the virus causes the cell it injects its DNA or RNA strand into to start producing copies of itself until the cell dies, bursts and all the new viruses escape. the argument over whether or not it is alive tends to centre around the reduction of entropy in their location (lots of ordered structure and behaviour happens in an infection) however they are no more alive than thet little machines trying to copy themselves.

Of course where theses plans came from in the first place is a far more interesting question….

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