A human being is a union of vertebrate and virus

*Or, as Wm Burroughs might have put it, "language is a virus and so are you."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.200-i-virus-why-youre-only-half-human.html?page=1

The answer to our paradox is now clear: the human genome has evolved as a holobiontic union of vertebrate and virus. It is hardly surprising that researchers who have made these discoveries are now calling for a full-scale project to assess the contribution of viruses to our biology (BMC Genomics, vol 9, p 354).

It is also ...