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Article Length : 534 Words

One very unusual aspect of living things is that they can reproduce in so many different ways. Animals have sex of course and many animals have legs as well. This is why many humans think they are so much better off than plants. Humans can have sex and then walk somewhere else to have even more sex.

Then it was found that flowering plants are also having sex, sometimes with a hundred other plants at once. And so it was that humans discovered perennials had far better sex lives than people, without doing a whole lot more than swaying in the breeze. Entire rainforests are procreating from the moment the sun comes up until it fades away at dusk.

Bacteria are always made of single cells and they will usually just divide - so that at the micro scales, reproduction begins to look more alien again. Seeing your uncle Ralph suddenly split in half and become two uncle Ralphs would be highly disconcerting. Especially if he’s one of those uncles, you’d prefer to have none of.

The most bizarre method of reproduction ever found is certainly that used by the virus.

A virus cannot reproduce by itself through division. Two viruses cannot reproduce sexually in any way. A million viruses cannot bud somehow into more viruses. There is no bee to carry the DNA of one virus to another to pollinate it. Viruses by themselves cannot make a single other virus. A virus needs an entire host cell to make more viruses. A human specific virus needs YOU.

Disease causing viruses are usually a simple crystalline ‘body’ carrying a payload of RNA. It can float in your bloodstream, go through your whole body, make its way into a cell... and that’s where the virus begins to find a hope of reproducing.

In any normal cell, your DNA is the code which moderates how the cell behaves by describing in code, the building of specific proteins. Your proteins. Outside the nucleus, cells have small bacterial sized bodies inside them, called ribosomes. The DNA and the ribosomes, it was discovered, were very strongly connected.

Copies of small segments of your DNA are made inside the nucleus, copies called mRNA, or messenger RNA. This segmented mRNA leaves the nucleus and wriggles towards the ribosomes. If the DNA is the moderator of the cell, the ribosome is the protein factory which ‘listens to the instructions of the DNA’. They ‘listen to the DNA’ by reading the mRNA and they build molecules (proteins) based on the original code!

So the ribosome will build anything organic, anything made of amino acids. You give it the mRNA and it will build according to the plan. The virus takes unfair advantage of that cellular feature, sending its own RNA into the cell. By doing that it uses your energy to create copies of itself! Your entire cell is suddenly being used against you and for the virus’s purposes.

What we think of as a viral infection is really the reproductive cycle of the virus. It’s a micro-war, and our bodies are an ecosystem and a battlefield all in one. Even inside our arms, legs and bloodstream, Darwinian principles play themselves out.