Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, Gustavo Palacios, and Mady Hornig
A TWiV panel of five considers the finding of Streptococcus pneumoniae in fatal H1N1 cases in Argentina, hysteria in the Ukraine over pandemic influenza, and human vaccinia infection after contact with a raccoon rabies vaccine bait.
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Download TWiV #59 (58 MB .mp3, 80 minutes)
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Links for this episode:
- Argentine flu death mystery
- H1N1 influenza outbreak in Ukraine (article one and two, and WHO statement)
- Human vaccinia infection after contact with rabies vaccine bait
- Agrippal S1 inactivated H1N1 vaccine (pdf – thanks Ariel and Ayelet)
- Nick’s letter on viruses and life
- Take the poll: are viruses alive?
Weekly Science Picks
Rich Longitude by Dava Sobel
Alan Heil Pro Set Media Headset (for a good price, order from a ham radio store)
Vincent MicrobeWorld app for iPhone and iTouch (iTunes or MicrobeWorld)
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I have been listening to your show and enjoy it a great deal.
I have some thoughts regarding the ongoing debate over whether or not viruses are alive.
It's true that viruses need to be inside a living organism to reproduce, but all living things require a specific environment. Seeds require more than water to turn into a plant: they require nutriants, light, and a specific temperature range.
Even more to the point, certain species of wasp must plant their eggs inside spiders. They need living spiders to reproduce, but it's hard to argue they are not alive.
To some extent, the question while interesting is irrelevent. It doesn't really matter if a prion or virus is “alive” — it's a prion, or a virus. It is an entity on a spectrum of increasingly complex chemical reactions which start with hydrogen combining with oxygen on one end, and end with me commenting on a website when I am supposed to be working on the other. Somewhere in that spectrum is “life,” and it's probably impossible to specify exactly where it must be.
Personally, I think of life as a structure which reproduces itself and has no other origin in nature. This excludes fire or crystals, which “reproduce” but will also appear in the right conditions. I'll admit that it appears to exclude the very origin of life, however, and it's not quite perfect.
There is only one field I can think of where splitting “life” from “non-life” is an important problem: exobiology.
I understand that the Viking Mars landers each had three experiments designed to find life, and that on each lander two of these three experiments came up positive. As the protocols required all three experiments to return a positive, the results were declare inconclusive and remain unexplained to this day.
So really, the question might best be phrased this way:
If a virus were found off of the Earth, would you agree that extraterrestrial life had been found?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DkeQ0roAM
A virus walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don't serve viruses
in this bar”. The virus replaces the bartender and says “Now we do”.
A virus walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don't serve viruses
in this bar”. The virus replaces the bartender and says “Now we do”.
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