Page 56 - WTP Vol. X #7

Head of a Pin (continued from preceding page) death is not the only angel.
~
We live on a Planet of Viruses, which is the title of science writer Carl Zimmer’s survey discussing
our evolving knowledge of the virosphere. “It is estimated that there are 1031 virus particles in the oceans,” he writes, "—they vastly outnumber all other organisms on the planet.” A single cubic inch contains billions of viruses.
According to Zimmer, the word virus is Latin for both venom and semen. Of course it is the few deadly viruses that get our attention, but the vast numbers of viruses that we encounter do not affect us, or do
so in ways we’re largely unaware of. But that venom/ semen paradox is not even the most bedeviling one: there is ongoing disagreement about whether viruses are alive at all, whether they are living beings or tiny specks of dead matter.
It’s hard not to feel that we are entering the realm of philosophy or even theology here, having to ask, ultimately, what we mean when we say the words “living” and “dead,” and entertaining the idea that the virosphere may be the true ground of our
being, the eternal potential from which life springs, differentiates, changes. If we were swimming in a water drop, the water would be made of viruses.
The position that viruses cannot be said to be alive rests in part on their absence from taxonomy:
they are not Eukaryota, not Bacteria, not Archaea. If Taxonomy charts were maps, viruses would require a Here Be Dragons inscription. Evolution- ary biologist Luis P. Villareal, writing in Scientific American, complains that “The categorization of viruses as nonliving during much of the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence: it has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution.”
It is likely that life began some 4 billion years ago with these bits of genetic information, instructions for building protein molecules. It is hard to think
of time as time when it is conceived on that scale, and it is hard then not to see viruses as agents of eternity, present everywhere always, coming and going in our very cells, occasionally surfacing in our human reality.
It turns out that there are some viruses that behave so much like our own bodies’ cells that they can also be infected by viruses. These smaller viruses, called virophages or simply ‘phages’ can alter the genome
of the viruses they invade. This discovery has led to a revolution in medical research, and that research has, in large part, led most recently to the discovery of a vaccine for Covid-19.
Viruses, it seems, are so ubiquitous they are a kind of global haze of unused genetic information, a kind of pervasive cloud of genetic particulate like ash or dust. (That taste in my mouth, was it ash- es?) This dead genetic material is operative every- where as legacy, curse, influence. It might be said that viruses are pure potential, an entire universe of possibilities, the eternal from which time flick- ers and flares.
So, are viruses therefore life un-coalesced? Letters in a vast and mostly undiscovered alphabet? Ideas unarticulated? Genetic engineers? Evolutionary biologists have suggested that viruses are the link between current living things, which continue via the replication of their DNA, to a prior realm of creatures based on RNA. What does this mean? About time? About life? The future? Evolution? Our place in the welter of Ovidian metamorphoses? Are viruses our distant ancestors?
Or are they angels? I was seized and taken from my life and shaken.
~
While virology is a science in its infancy, the study of angels has been avidly pursued for millenia. Getting the jump on a metaphor that evolutionary biologists have applied to viruses, Augustine, in the 5th century c.e., asserted that we are in the soil of God’s garden, and the angels are the gardeners that tend us. “It is easier to know what they do than what they are,” he wrote, which might well be the complaint of a con- temporary virologist.
It turns out that what virus do is enter our cells and use their reproductive apparatus to make copies
of themselves, in the process switching on or off certain genes, and otherwise changing our DNA.
So, even leaving God out of the equation (since that three-letter word is too fraught, too compromised, too imprecise and corrupted) they can be said to be gardening us, and over eons modifying our physiol- ogy and changing our destiny, speaking directly to our bodies, caught up in relentless metamorphoses across innumerable generations.
What our senses cannot perceive, we know with our imaginations. We are hybrid creatures. We don’t simply live in the biosphere. Life is biological, living
49