Virus Podcast Reflection
The thing that surprised me the most about this podcast came at the beginning. I knew that discoveries of bacteria and viruses were fairly recent, with viruses being even more recent because normally they are only a fraction of the size. I didn’t realize that up until 2003, viruses were just lumped into this random category that no one really took the time to sort out and try and make any discoveries in. I think that it makes sense though because researchers want to be on the cutting edge but I really thought that these things would have been discovered at least by the 1970’s. Then there is the issue of technology too. The technology that I grew up with was much different than anything that was around in the 1970’s …show more content…
I think that this is reasonable hypothesis because everywhere that scientist looked from the whales and the ocean environment, water towers, and humans. I think that if these were in an animal it could have been a situation in which there were enough for survival that the cells just slowly starts to get rid of some of its traits, like membrane bound organelles, to essentially become a parasite. This would beneficial for the newly created parasite because it would no longer need to compete for resources. The regular cells would be able to live off of the other cells and if it was depleting the resources to much for one cell it could just go to the next cell. The virus would slowly lose more and more of its DNA as it was becoming unused too to create a smaller …show more content…
It essentially from what I got goes through this scanner like x-ray thing so that it is able to copy the virus. Then all of the new pieces are “spit out” and there are enzymes or something there to put the new virus together and the other whole virus just comes out in whole again. Then the men started talking about the fact that there can then be new smaller viruses that come along and affect the way that this virus performs. What I am curious about though is shutting down the virus if some of these super viruses were connected to a specific sickness. I wonder if medication wise there could be an antiviral that could be prescribed that would inhibit that production. Then if that were a possibility would you run into the issues that we are running into with antibiotics? I do not see how that could be an issue though because technically a virus isn’t living, so I do not know of a way a virus could pass on the code for fighting against this inhibition. Mainly because viruses aren’t like bacteria and do not have the ability to pass on plasmids. Also, if the mechanism for creating new virus molecules if that would shut off the ability to make more of that virus, or if there is a way that these large viruses could uses the animal or plant cells that they spawned from to create new viruses. The only reason I propose that idea is the fact that they would be very genetically
The thing that surprised me the most about this podcast came at the beginning. I knew that discoveries of bacteria and viruses were fairly recent, with viruses being even more recent because normally they are only a fraction of the size. I didn’t realize that up until 2003, viruses were just lumped into this random category that no one really took the time to sort out and try and make any discoveries in. I think that it makes sense though because researchers want to be on the cutting edge but I really thought that these things would have been discovered at least by the 1970’s. Then there is the issue of technology too. The technology that I grew up with was much different than anything that was around in the 1970’s …show more content…
I think that this is reasonable hypothesis because everywhere that scientist looked from the whales and the ocean environment, water towers, and humans. I think that if these were in an animal it could have been a situation in which there were enough for survival that the cells just slowly starts to get rid of some of its traits, like membrane bound organelles, to essentially become a parasite. This would beneficial for the newly created parasite because it would no longer need to compete for resources. The regular cells would be able to live off of the other cells and if it was depleting the resources to much for one cell it could just go to the next cell. The virus would slowly lose more and more of its DNA as it was becoming unused too to create a smaller …show more content…
It essentially from what I got goes through this scanner like x-ray thing so that it is able to copy the virus. Then all of the new pieces are “spit out” and there are enzymes or something there to put the new virus together and the other whole virus just comes out in whole again. Then the men started talking about the fact that there can then be new smaller viruses that come along and affect the way that this virus performs. What I am curious about though is shutting down the virus if some of these super viruses were connected to a specific sickness. I wonder if medication wise there could be an antiviral that could be prescribed that would inhibit that production. Then if that were a possibility would you run into the issues that we are running into with antibiotics? I do not see how that could be an issue though because technically a virus isn’t living, so I do not know of a way a virus could pass on the code for fighting against this inhibition. Mainly because viruses aren’t like bacteria and do not have the ability to pass on plasmids. Also, if the mechanism for creating new virus molecules if that would shut off the ability to make more of that virus, or if there is a way that these large viruses could uses the animal or plant cells that they spawned from to create new viruses. The only reason I propose that idea is the fact that they would be very genetically