Virus- alive or not

Is this alive or not?

Coronavirus

News out this week that Australia has “grown” the nCoV virus in a lab and is now “observing the ‘live’ virus in the laboratory to see how it ‘behaves”.

The biocontainment  security facility at CSIRO in Geelong is set to offer valuable information on the Coronavirus.

I thought I’d touch on a bit of misinformation on the internet about this and other viruses.

Point - Viruses are not alive.

The term live virus is a figure of speech that indicates the virus is able to be active or functional.

It is not a living thing,nor is it dead.   It’s undead.   It is a particle of proteins (amino acids) and sugars.

Think of an egg, or a piece of chocolate; it’s not alive or dead, it just ... is.

Now stay with me,

Take a glass.   The type of glass you drink from.  Not alive or dead (because is was never first living), yet that same glass can hold water.

It functions as a tool to hold liquid.  If you think of a glass as a virus, it isn’t living, so you can’t kill it.

In biology something that is living is called ‘biotic’.   A biotic, possesses the ability to reproduce through cell division (mitosis and meiosis).  Viruses are not cells, they can’t reproduce and therefore, are not biotic (alive).   This is the fundamental reason that antibiotics have no effect on viruses.  They’d have to be biotic, for an anti-biotic to have any effect.

So how do we stop viruses?

Well, come back to the analogy of the glass.    The glass functions to hold a drink; and it does this with no need to be living; but it does need to be intact.

If we broke a glass (say, by dropping it), the glass wasn’t killed, but it broke to pieces, so it ceases to function.   Now the same principle is applied to medications that we can use for viruses.   Antivirals break the protein shell that encapsulates a virus’s genetic information.  Alternatively, some antiviral agents break the genes inside a virus.

Currently we don’t have a magic drug available to destroy (break) the novel CoV virus.  The first step in knowing how to break this virus, is to understand the mechanism this virus uses to infect, and the behaviour of these proteins that it is composed from.

Interesting times ahead.   But for now you’d be more correct to think of a virus as active or inactive, rather than live or dead.