When did humans discover the virus, and is the virus considered life?

Human beings became acquainted with the virus at the end of the 18th century, but it was in 1939 that scientists observed the tobacco mosaic virus through a microscope.

The appearance of this microorganism is what humans can understand!

After another hundred years of precipitation, human understanding of the virus has gone from being ignorant at the beginning to having a deeper understanding now. To put it simply, viruses are a mass of proteins packed with genetic material that are quite small in size and distributed all over the world.

Although small, the harm is great, and almost everything related to natural death, is related to them. For example, the new crown epidemic that broke out at the end of 2019.

is caused by the new coronavirus.

caused. Going back in time, the bubonic plague in Europe, the century-old smallpox, and the dreaded cholera.

It's all caused by viruses.

But viruses are different from all living things we know, they don't have the organelles that a normal cell should have.

For example, mitochondria.

chloroplasts, etc. A virus with only genetic material and an outer shell does not look like a living organism. (Definition of life:.)

In the process of the development and change of the universe, there is a certain kind of phenomenon that naturally appears in the process of self-growth, reproduction, feeling, consciousness, will, evolution, interaction, and other rich possibilities. ）

Through the definition of life, we can see that viruses do not fully meet the conditions. It only produces a little bit of life in the host, so for thousands of years, people have not been able to answer the question of "whether the virus is alive or not". We can only tentatively set it to:

A virus is a special existence between non-life and life.

Although the virus is in an inactive mode outside the host, it can neither replicate itself, nor grow in sight, or even be conscious. But when it reaches the human body, it undergoes a certain biochemical reaction, using the host cell to replicate itself, and from this point of view, we consider it to be life. Viruses that float outside the host do not belong to the category of life.

Viruses were discovered at the end of the 18th century, and viruses are also alive, can cause serious harm to the body, and can bring great harm.

It was around the end of the 18th century that scientists saw viruses through microscopes. Viruses are single-celled organisms and are also living beings.

Viruses have been with people since the beginning of human society, but different viruses have different effects on the human body. Humans are also becoming more and more resistant to viruses.

I would like to express my opinion based on my own understanding over the years, whether viruses are biological or not, I think they are. Why is it so certain, we must first go back and determine what is a living thing, and what are the necessary conditions for determining a living thing. Perhaps, the definition of biology we learn is outdated, and several of the articles summarized in biology textbooks, such as that organisms have metabolism, that organisms are able to reproduce, that organisms are stressful, and so on, in fact, I found that these things mentioned in the textbooks are probably not the common characteristics of organisms, nor are they necessary conditions.

Have you ever heard of discrete life? This concept will surprise you at how life can be.

In fact, the forms of life do cover a very wide range, much wider than those covered in biology textbooks. My understanding of biology, the first necessary condition for biology is that there must be an interface, which can be understood as a membrane, separating the organism from itself and non-itself, so that it can exist and define the two levels of self and non-self, otherwise it cannot be called a living organism if it is confused. Note that this membrane interface may or may be tangible, but it must be there.

The second necessary condition is that the organism must be alive, that is, it must be alive in order to be called a living thing. What life is, it is the kind of mechanism that can sustain itself, that is, this mechanism allows the substances that make up life to operate and maintain stability under the envelope of the membrane interface. This mechanism of operation may be varied, but there must be, once this operation does not exist, the matter is still there, but the life is gone, the creature is equivalent to not existing, and it will inevitably disintegrate.

The third necessary condition is that the organism must be able to reproduce and produce new life forms, so as to continue this operating mechanism, which is similar to the reproduction in biology textbooks, in a variety of ways, but it must have this function. Therefore, judging from this article, even if the artificial robot is powerful, if it does not have this article, it is not considered a living thing, at most it is a machine with the first and second conditions.

Therefore, I determined that the virus is clearly a living organism, and it has the above three necessary conditions. In addition, I also feel that there may be biological forms in the universe that we cannot imagine in our conventional thinking, and if there are things with such characteristics on the scale of galaxies, isn't it also giant life? There are very small dimensions, and there may be very large dimensions.

If all the viruses are gone, then humanity will be completely wiped out. Viruses are now integrated into the Earth's ecosystems, sustaining life on Earth through high-speed photosynthesis.

Viruses always seem to wreak havoc on society and cause human suffering. If you could make all the viruses go away, most people would probably make this choice. But it would be a fatal mistake, in fact, more lethal than any virus.

The vast majority of viruses are not pathogenic to humans, and many play an integral role in supporting ecosystems. Others maintain the health of individual organisms – everything from fungi and plants to insects and humans.

Without the virus, life and the planet, as we know it, would cease to exist. Even if we wanted to, we might not be able to wipe out every virus on the planet. But by imagining what the world would be like without viruses, we can better understand not only how important they are to our survival, but how much we need to know.

Bacteriophages are the primary regulators of bacterial populations in the oceans and possibly in every other ecosystem on Earth. If the virus disappears suddenly, some bacterial populations may **. Other populations may lose their competitiveness and fail to grow altogether.

These microorganisms produce about half of the oxygen on Earth, a process involving viruses.

Every day, these viruses kill about 20 percent of all marine microbes and about 50 percent of all marine bacteria. By killing microorganisms, viruses ensure that oxygen-producing plankton have enough nutrients to photosynthesize at a high rate, ultimately sustaining most of Earth's life.

Researchers who study pests have also found that viruses are essential for controlling species populations. This process is known as "killing the winner", which is also common in many other species, including ourselves, and has been proven by the pandemic. If the virus disappears suddenly, the first mill competing species may thrive, harming other species.

Some organisms also rely on viruses to survive or give them an edge in a competitive world. Infection with certain benign viruses can even help ward off certain pathogens in humans. It can be seen that although some viruses have caused great harm to human beings, viruses are indeed an indispensable part of the existing earth's ecological system.

In general, some viruses can kill people, and some viruses can also help humans and sustain life. The virus cannot be completely eliminated, and if it is all eliminated, then humanity will die out very quickly.

Viruses do not exist to kill their hosts. So, what is the ultimate purpose of the existence of the virus? Symbiosis with the host?

The following is a simple analysis of the survival and reproduction characteristics of viruses Not only viruses, but the existence of any species has two basic goals: survival + reproduction, which are also the two instincts of life, without which life cannot continue. Viruses are certainly no exception, although viruses are not life in the strict sense of the word.

<> viruses are something between life and non-life. It cannot survive on its own. It must rely on the host, its cells, to reproduce.

What is the ultimate goal of the virus? Kill the host or coexist with it? None of them are in the right environment, where the virus can multiply quickly.

However, for the virus, it is not enough to reproduce quickly, it also needs to have a strong transmissibility, and only by spreading quickly between different hosts will it not be eliminated naturally, and it will be more adaptable to the environment.

There are many reservoirs for viruses, not just humans, but other species as well. Therefore, the virus must constantly transmit the virus gene to different hosts in the process of reproduction, and cannot be eliminated, which also makes the virus evolve a super evolutionary change ability in the process of reproduction, and the evolution of the virus adapts to different hosts through continuous mutation, which is why we often hear about it"So-and-so virus! "Viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently, do not eat, do not excrete, have no metabolism, and must parasitize in the living cells of the host in order to have vitality.

Within the host, they do only one thing, and that is to reproduce. However, once the virus leaves the host cell, it quickly becomes inactive and shows no signs of life. Therefore, there is still controversy about whether the virus is a living organism or not.

It can only be said that viruses are special beings between living and inanimate things. Viruses are the largest species on Earth and can be found everywhere in nature. Viruses can infect any living organism, including humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi.

But viruses can only infect certain organisms or groups of organisms.

The reason why he is called a virus is also because he is harmful to the human body, so he is called a virus by humans, but in fact, it is also a living organism, and his ultimate purpose is not to kill the host. For the earth, human beings can actually be called a virus, because in the process of continuous exploration of the world, human beings have also done certain harmful behaviors to the world, but our purpose is only to coexist with the earth. So the virus is actually just trying to coexist with the host, and if he kills the host, then he himself does not exist.

Some people shy away from viruses when they mention them, but in fact, viruses are also living organisms, and they need to rely on other biological hosts to survive. Viruses can actually lie dormant in the human body for a long time, and they may spend years or even decades living in the host. He is also called a virus because of his potential to kill the host.

But we can think that if he kills the host, he has no way to parasitize on other hosts, then it will also be killed by itself, so we can also know that his purpose is not to kill the host, but to live with the host.

Only by living in symbiosis with the host can he survive forever and be able to constantly find new hosts. The virus will kill the host, in fact, on the one hand, it is also because the host's own immunity is not enough, so it will be killed. The virus is also constantly evolving, trying to find a stronger host, if it kills the host, then it means that the host is not suitable for being parasitized by the virus.

For human beings, we are constantly being tested by viruses, and we are actually sick because we are infected with some viruses, some of which can be cured by drugs, and some viruses, our own immune system cannot fight them, so we die because of this. But if she can find a stronger host, then he will also be able to live in symbiosis with the host, which is why the virus will continue to spread.

A virus is a small, simple non-cellular organism that contains only one nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and must parasitize and replicate in living cells.

Virus is a non-cellular life form, it is composed of a long chain of nucleic acid and protein outer branch wax shell, the virus has no metabolic mechanism of its own, no enzyme system. As a result, when the virus leaves the host cell, it becomes a chemical substance that has no life activity and cannot reproduce on its own.

Once in the host cell, it can use the matter and energy in the cell, as well as the ability to replicate, transcribe, and translate, to produce a new generation of viruses like it based on the genetic information contained in its own nucleic acids.

A virus is a non-cellular life form, it is composed of a long nucleic acid chain and a protein coat, and the virus has no metabolic mechanism of its own, no enzyme system.

Significance of the existence of viruses: Viruses play an important role in the development of the planet and the evolution of humans. Today, the sequencing of the human genome project has been completed, and scientists have discovered that up to 100,000 gene fragments in our human genome actually come from viruses.

These genes make up about 8% of the total human gene fragment, which is a huge number, and viruses have played a very important role in the evolution of humans. On Earth, a large amount of photosynthesis is also related to the involvement of viral genes.

Viruses are living things, the simplest of them. It's alive.

A virus is a special organism that does not have a cellular structure. Their structure is very simple and consists of a protein shell and the genetic material inside. Viruses cannot survive on their own, they must live in the cells of other organisms, and once they leave the living cells, they do not show any signs of life activity.