Page 165 - The Miracle in the Cell

HARUN YAHYA

he cell's greatest enemy is a microscopic
organism called a virus. The battle
between these two tiny living entities
has great significance for humankind.
Some viruses merely cause annoying
sicknesses like the flu, but others can lead to deadly
diseases such as AIDS and typhoid.
The attack of viruses on cells is typically fatal, but also quite
amazing because of their highly advanced techniques. The basic viral
strategy is to strike at the cell with its own machinery and weapons.
The way a virus makes copies of itself is in a sense, a suicide attack,
because to perpetuate on the next generation of viruses, it sacrifices
both itself and the cell. On previous pages, you saw how cells, in order
to continue their existence, produce proteins according to the infor-
mation contained in their DNA. Viruses sabotage their host cell's pro-
tein production facility and turn it into a factory for replicating new
copies of itself.

Lifeless, yet Clever Enemies
One of the strangest organic structures found in nature, viruses
do not have a living body, but contain only a genetic mechanism. A
virus is nothing more than a genetic code (either RNA or DNA) found
inside a protein envelope (See Figure 9.1). It has no organelle or func-
tions that would indicate life. But when it makes contact with a living
cell, it virtually comes to life, displays features of a living thing, enters
the cell, and in fact becomes an offensive and very clever organism.
A virus uses the cleverest techniques of attack against the human
body (See Figure 9.2). Before it enters a cell, it first determines with its
leglike fibers whether the particular cell is appropriate for it to enter.
If its test comes out positive, it releases its DNA into the cell, which,

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