Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long, in fact, that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes.
What’s known about other diseases doesn’t offer much support for the idea that COVID-19 will suddenly disappear over the next few weeks.
Some problems can only be solved when public officials have the resources to act. Today’s public health crisis is that kind of problem. The current disaster threatens our health and our economy.
If only there were some way to safely traverse life without fear of walking into one of those hyper-virulent nebulosities ... Oh wait. That’d be a vaccine that’s been shown to be safe and effective by health authorities.
The race is on to find those viruses in our viromes that have already figured out how to protect us from the bad guys, while leaving the good bacteria intact.
Early embryos may have come to depend on the tricks viruses use to manipulate them.
The discovery that viruses move between species unexpectedly often is rewriting ideas about their evolutionary history — and may have troubling implications for the threat from emerging diseases.
Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.
A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells.
Denied access to some of the best antibiotics developed in the West the Soviet Union invested heavily in the use of bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria — to treat infections. Now, faced with the looming spectre of antibiotic resistance, Western researchers and governments are giving phages a serious look. Pharmaceutical companies remain reluctant to get on board because phage therapy, nearly a century old, would be difficult claim intellectual property.
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