Viruses are not technically alive. But they’re not dead, either. They operate in a pseudo corporeal state, where they hijack our cellular machinery to carry out their cycle of replication and spread.13 In doing this, they engage in most of the activities that give an organism the features of life. But viruses cannot do it alone. They need a host to model the gestures of life. They need a specific species that they can invade, pirating its cells and using them to invade and propagate. Once inside a host, often a virus will have a specific “tissue tropism,” meaning it has a fondness for
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