It is a cold killer, with a calculated cunning honed over millions of generations. It can interfere with the sophisticated immune surveillance machinery of an organism, melting unobtrusively into the background like a double agent. It can recognise proteins on the cell surface, and lock on to them as if it were an insider, gaining entrance to the inner sanctum. It can home in unerringly on the nucleus, and incorporate itself into a host cell’s DNA. Sometimes it remains there in hiding for years, invisible to all around. On other occasions it takes over without delay, sabotaging the host cell’s
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