The question of whether viruses are living or not always provokes lively discussion. On TWiV 59 we decided to take an informal poll of our listeners on this issue. Let’s open up the poll to readers of virology blog.
This survey had been online since November 2009 and had collected several thousand responses. SurveyMonkey decided to delete all of those, so we are starting over as of January 2013, using a different survey site.
As of November 2013, the second survey site decided to charge users and simply deleted our data without asking. I’m leaving this page up until I find another survey site, mainly because there are quite a few comments below that I don’t want to lose.
In January 2014 I added a new poll. Let’s see how this fares.
[yop_poll id=”1″]
true true
i like food
I think whatever has the energy is alive
My two cents:
Viruses are alive, even if they sit in the cheap seats of living organisms.
A more virulent strain of virus can supersede a less virulent strain in infecting a human making it subject to evolution.
Good enough for me. And there are multiple examples of organisms that coexist with other living organisms. One such organism eventually became mitochondria and another chloroplasts.
Of course, I could be wrong.