Twenty years before, no one thought there were viruses in the oceans, but researchers had since shown that a single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them. Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia, collected seawater from oceans all over the world and found that 90 percent of the viruses he examined were totally unknown to man. Yet every virus carried the genetic codes for proteins—meaning that each one had a mission. What that mission was remained a mystery.
