Are viruses alive?

I wish to quote Professor Eckard Wimmer;

"When asked whether I believe that viruses are dead or alive, I answer 'Yes'"

Fabulous! I should have included that as a possible answer to the
survey question.

For me virus are living, if at the edge of what is living. But like said in twiv, it all come down to the definition of life you use.

So, here is the one I use:

1. A system that is capable of replication with mutation (capable of evolution).
2. A system that is capable of locally reducing entropy by increasing it elsewhere.

I think this definition is sufficient to have a clean separation living and not.

I have a simple definition of life. I consider things as a life when the are reach certain level of complexity - when they are made of cells.
As anybody know, viruses are just complex chemical that can manipulate the cell, but they are smaller and simpler from a any given cell.

PS that was very pleasant to hear you reading my simple question. Thank you.

..i would be very curious to see another survey on the same topic asking something like : do you think it's important to know if viruses are alive or not ?

Thank you prof. Racaniello for all of the work you are putting in the blog and in twiv !!
ciao !!

are computer viruses living ?

That would depend on your definition of life! According to some,
computer viruses would be included as living. Which means that we have
to be careful about how we define life. In my view neither viruses
with nucleic acids, nor computer viruses, are living.

So my "No" answer was basically correct? Either way, thank you for the education your blog and podcast has given me. I've developed an interest in virology since 2009 H1N1 surfaced, and tremendously appreciate your work.

As far as I'm concerned, viruses are not alive - but many disagree
with me and their arguments are cogent. It's one of those questions
with no single answer and which can be debated forever. That's evident
from the poll results.

I have a philosophy of science background and got tremendously interested in this issue in my high school life in the 80's . The more I studied the more awed I got about the complexity of viri lifecycle and their "intelligence". Wheather viruses are members of our club we call living matter or life is certainly "only" a question of definition and criteria. And essentialist notions like soul and spirit long lost our interest. Could that happen to the notion of life? That we simply regard it as retarded? I don't think so, and I believe it to be useful to retain a pragmatically applied distinction between life-forms and non-life-forms, but their boundaries may well be fluent. My main argument for viri being life-forms or being alive stems from their sheer complexity, and I find systemic/ecologic criteria that the two by Etienne here quite appealing. But remembering the bad history of stiff criteria and definitional boundaries, I opt for a more radical ecological convincing argument coming from A) their being part of an quite tangible and hyperactive membership in the Darwinian club of evolutionary items. And B) the fact that the more people study properties of virus the more will they find intriguing and complex about them. Their ecological qualities and personalities may well be very much different from our type of intelligence. But so are swarm type of intelligence and intra-species communication between bacteria, flies, ants etc.
May be ultimately our choice is to be bio-tolerant (opening up to the simplest and strangest lifeforms) or bio-chauvinist (closing the gates to viri, may be bacteria and certainly negating chimpanzees moral and person-like status).

That Wimmer quote is great!

Back when high school biology was mostly zoology + botany, I was taught that to qualify as living, an object had to possess all of seven properties: feeding, movement, respiration, excretion, growth, sensitivity and reproduction. That pretty much rules out anything non-cellular as living.

I see viruses as complex macromolecular machines. I suppose to some people they appear as complex and "purposeful" as an organism, but so would a ribosome, if you could watch it in action.

I think viruses are alive because they seem to have a fondness for bacteria that exceeds a simple energy, entropy, biomechanical randomness. I think you and your readers would enjoy the essay on the question of whether a jellyfish is an animal or a colony by the highly regarded biologist essayist whose name eludes me now. Was it Steven J. Gould ? thanks for your site and your willingness to respond to blog comments questions.

Virus's have the potential to be alive only when there enviorment provides what is necessary to activate them.

Virus's have the potential to be alive only when there enviorment provides what is necessary to activate them.

Like Lazarus resurrected eh!

Think about that sort of whitewash you are being led to believe because that's all it is, an unproven, unfounded belief. It is certainly not what I understand as being 'scientific' in any way shape or form.

When we are dead I bet you cannot specify the physical environmental conditions necessary to activate us all again, unless of course you have an unconditional belief in the potential of fictitious zombies - the so-called 'living dead'

I like the term obligate intracellular parasite

Cyndi - to be a parasite is to be defined as an organism which in turn is defined as a living system in biology e.g. ticks. fleas tapeworms etc are parasites, but viruses are inert chemicals and are not organisms at all in any meaningful biological sense of the word. If this is true then it follows that they are not and cannot be parasites whether 'obligate', 'intracellular' or otherwise. They are only made to appear that way by the surreptitious use of philosophical arguments that usually pass undetected in microbiological science.

Human pathogenic viruses despite all arguments to the contrary have never been effectively isolated, photographed and biochemically characterized to date.

Where is the conclusive proof that such viruses really exist? I have seen none and can't find any, and NOBODY has come forth with any because there is none. Please prove me WRONG and show me the proof - no indirect methods will do - no secondary references - no textbook references of computer enhanced models - no 'virus-like particles' - only the original primary sources, with the names of the scientists who carried out the work and readable copies concerning the methodology and techniques as to how they did it.

Do you know of any other object that contains DNA or RNA that is not living? The description obligate parasite seems to "fit" simply from the way a virus reproduces its own genetic material(hence "alive") using mechanisms within other cells--(hence "intracellular"). Maybe we don't understand all living things that don't fit into our definitions of "alive."

Cmyers - only objects that have been produced 'synthetically' in the labs, as far as I am aware, and of course dead bodies.

There is no proof that viruses reproduce their own genetic material that would be another miracle for a bunch of dead chemicals - it is only made to APPEAR that way. If that were really possible then they would be capable of ACTING in some way and yes they could 'utilize' mechanisms within other cells.

The way in which viruses are conceived at the moment in microbiology is problematic - they cannot 'utilize' the cellular systems to reproduce despite all arguments to the contrary - that's just a myth. In fact they cannot 'utilize' anything - they are dead in the water so to speak , even if we give them a postulated existence.

You are correct in what you say in your last sentence, but to go down that road would imply that really there is no dead matter whether it is inorganic or organic and that everything is really alive at least to a limited degree and in various forms. Since current microbiology is still bogged down in its quagmire of mechanistic and materialistic way of thinking such a notion would be regarded as heretical.

Best wishes for Christmas & the New Year

An entity is 'living' if it can independantly carry out the energy/matter transformations necessary for maintaining it's structural existence and reproductive processes. This is true for all organisms, including symbiotes and parasites.

Viruses are therefore not living, being unable to do anything without access to their specific host's living cellular machinary, and only becoming active as a component of the host cell.

They should be seen as an evolved 'artifact' of living cells that have, unfortunately, the ability to cause harm.

Andros -- despite the apparent overwhelming watertight 'scientific' evidence that most microbiologists usually uphold as being the gospel truth for the existence of viruses in general and pathogenic viruses in particular its really full of holes.

I really can't believe that rational human beings can be taken in by it. There is no conclusive proof whatsoever that viruses 'pathogenic' or otherwise have ever evolved as 'artifacts' or anything else, or that viruses CAUSE harm or disease in a living host despite what the textbook propaganda says.

Do not forget that viruses are merely assigned certain functions in and by microbiology, it does not follow that they DO actually perform those functions or that they are constrained to perform them in the modalities alleged independently of the particular discourse in which they are specified e.g. in the 'real world' conceived as existing independently of discourse. Hope you understand my the meaning of my argument since it raises ontological and epistemological questions concerning the existence and knowledge of viruses that I can't go into here.

To me viruses are alive, and now I wonder about prions.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/...
Public release date: 31-Dec-2009
Contact: Keith McKeown
Scripps Research Institute
Scripps Florida scientists show 'lifeless' prions capable of evolutionary change and adaptation

Emily - interesting paper on prions. However, prions like viruses may well be alive but I have yet to see a materialistic and mechanistic microbiology come to terms with that proposition. I cannot see orthodox microbiologists accepting anything that cannot be reduced to biochemical and biophysical phenomena. They tend to identify the effects of vital phenomena as causes if you catch my drift.

To date NOBODY has ever provided any concrete scientific evidence that conclusively proves that the alleged human disease causing viruses exist let alone EVOLVE a la Darwinian style. So I would not get too excited about this report on prion research that claims to have a 'scientific' basis.

If you can provide any proof concerning the isolation and existence of human pathogenic viruses Dr Stefan Lanka (virologist and molecular biologist) would be more than pleased to examine it and you can claim his 10,000 euros reward if it conforms to the rigorous scientific criteria for virus isolation etc. Also bear in mind that nobody in the materialistic microbiology fraternity has ever claimed to have observed a live pathogenic virus as far as I am aware . Royal Raymond Rife may well have been the only exception but his work is largely ignored today.

Best wishes

Viruses are both, dead AND alive. Outside a living cell they are nothing but a large complex of organic chemicals. Inside the cell they assume some properties of life. I believe it's impossible to truly create life from inert matter, without using another life form to assist in the process. Or at least we are a very long way from it.

Since it is now fairly easy to create certain viruses from scratch, as done by Eckard Wimmer of Stony Brook University, I think it's not really life that's being created, but rather at best "re-created" from known information. This life can be "molded" within certain parameters to be put to good use, for instance in the making of new vaccines, as the groups around Eckard Wimmer and Steffen Mueller subsequently showed (some explanation found here: http://ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~smueller/index.html )

The closest thing to creating some type of new life form is the group around Craig Venter. They use a completely synthetic bacterial genome, and try to transplant it into an empty bacterium, which had its genome completely taken out. However, as I said this process depends on an empty surrogate bacterium, which contains all the "stuff of life" in form of thousands of different proteins, EXCEPT the information (i.e genome) to replicate itself. So, even if they succeed in doing that, it may new life form, and after "booting" it from the synthetic genome, it will assume the properties encoded by the new genome, but it first needed that "empty" bacterial shell, and THAT perhaps can never be made from scratch, because it is way too complex.

Bob - like the vast majority of microbiologists you are treating the physical existence of viruses as a fait accompli when they have not yet been effectively isolated, photographed and biochemically characterized scientifically, and despite all the usual objections to the contrary. Show me the beef!

Here, I am referring to the alleged human disease causing viruses. To date I have been unable to find any hard scientific evidence that these pathogenic viruses actually exist in isolation in the natural physical material world.

If viruses in general [assuming they do exist] are BOTH dead AND alive which you appaer to be implying then their general form of existence is a CONTRADICTORY one. If that is the case then how are they able to function effectively as viruses at all whether inside or outside a cell??? Do you see the problem here?

Regards, Tony

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying nobody has ever seen a virus? Are you saying there is no evidence they EXIST? You are seriously deluded. This is not what this discussion is about. Of course it is a fact that viruses EXIST! The question is are they ALIVE? The penny in your pocket EXISTS, right? I'm sure you would agree it is not alive. Your dog, if you have one, exists, and you would probably agree it is alive. The problem we're discussing here, is where do viruses fit in on this continuum. Viruses CAN be and HAVE BEEN seen, touched, photographed, isolated, broken up into there constituent, and yes for some of them even put back together from their constituent.

I think they are kind of alive, because they can reproduce, but only when they have a host cell. I mostly think they are not alive, but it depends on how you look at it.