A Planet of Viruses Quotes

“The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Based on the number of viruses she found in her samples, Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“The Europeans unwittingly brought a biological weapon with them that gave the invaders a brutal advantage over their opponents. With no immunity whatsoever to smallpox, Native Americans died in droves when they were exposed to the virus. In Central America, over 90 percent of the native population is believed to have died of smallpox in the decades following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“We’d be better prepared for these emergencies if they didn’t always come as such surprises. The next plague may start when yet another virus in some wild animal jumps into our species—a virus we might not yet even know about. To reduce that ignorance, scientists are surveying animals, searching for bits of genetic material from viruses. But because we live on a planet of viruses, that task is enormous.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Human rhinoviruses may help train our immune systems not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of colds as ancient enemies but as wise old tutors.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“It may be hard to imagine a world before antibiotics, but now we must imagine a world where antibiotics are not the only weapon we use against bacteria. And now, ninety years after Herelle first encountered bacteriophages, these viruses may finally be ready to become a part of modern medicine.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Ocean viruses are stunning not just for their sheer numbers but also for their genetic diversity. The genes in a human and the genes in a shark are quite similar — so similar that scientists can find a related counterpart in the shark genome to most genes in the human genome. The genetic makeup of marine viruses, on the other hand, matches almost nothing. In a survey of viruses in the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda, and the northern Pacific, scientists identified 1.8 million viral genes. Only 10 percent of them showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant, or other organism — even from any other known virus. The other 90 percent were entirely new to science. In 200 liters of seawater, scientists typically find 5,000 genetically distinct kinds of viruses. In a kilogram of marine sediment, there may be a million kinds.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“It was the first time anyone had found a virus of a virus. It was yet another thing that ought not to exist.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Forced to carry tiny genomes, viruses could not make room for genes that did anything beyond make new viruses and help those viruses escape destruction. They could carry genes to let them eat, for example. They could not turn raw ingredients into new genes and proteins on their own. They could not grow. They could not expel waste. They could not defend against hot and cold. They could not reproduce by splitting in two. All those nots added up to one great, devastating Not. Viruses were not alive.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“That’s not because HPV was rare—far from it: a 2014 study on 103 healthy people detected the viruses in 71 of them—about 69 percent.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Like cold-causing rhinoviruses, influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“In the 1990s, Soviet defectors revealed that their government had set up labs to produce a weaponized form of smallpox, one that could be loaded in missiles and launched at enemy targets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, those biological warfare labs were abandoned. No one knows what ultimately happened to the smallpox viruses used for that research. We are left with the terrifying possibility that ex-Soviet virologists sold smallpox stocks to other governments or even terrorist organizations.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Cows can get infected with cowpox, a close relative of smallpox, and so Jenner wondered if it provided some protection. He took pus from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated it into the arm of a boy. The boy developed a few small pustules, but otherwise he suffered no symptoms. Six weeks later, Jenner variolated the boy—in other words, he exposed the boy to smallpox, rather than cowpox. The boy developed no pustules at all. Jenner introduced the world to this new, safer way to prevent smallpox in a pamphlet he published in 1798. He dubbed it “vaccination,” after the Latin name of cowpox, Variolae vaccinae.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens. In another study in Bangladesh, they examined a bat called the Indian flying fox and tried to identify every single virus that calls it home. They identified 55 species, 50 of which are new to science.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“The future looks rosy for West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne viruses that follow it to the New World. That’s because the future is going to be warm and wet. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are raising the average temperature in the United States.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Terrorists might even try to use it as a biological weapon. Making matters worse, people were no longer getting smallpox vaccines, and so what immunity the public had to the virus was waning.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“When the World Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, those laboratory stocks remained. All it would take to reverse that eradication was for someone to accidentally set the virus loose.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Between 1400 and 1800, smallpox killed an estimated five hundred million people every century in Europe alone.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Over the past three thousand years, smallpox may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“HIV infections, for example, have declined in the United States, but fifty thousand Americans still acquire the virus every year.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“What we’re not so good at is getting rid of viruses. Despite all the vaccines, antiviral drugs, and public health strategies at our disposal, viruses still manage to escape annihilation.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“In a study of fifty patients with SARS, they discovered a virus growing in two of them. The virus belonged to a group called coronaviruses, which includes species that can cause colds and the stomach flu. Peiris and his colleagues sequenced the genetic material in the new virus and then searched for matching genes in the other patients. They found a match in forty-five of them.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Those immune cells then make us feel awful. They create inflammation that triggers a scratchy feeling in the throat and leads to the production of a lot of mucus around the site of the infection. In order to recover from a cold, we have to wait not only for the immune system to wipe out the virus but also to calm itself down.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“And they certainly would not have guessed that the human genome is partly composed from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors, or that life as we know it may have gotten its start four billion years ago from viruses.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“As I write in 2015, scientists are looking at the next potential pandemics. It may take only a few mutations for a strain of bird flu to evolve into a new strain of human influenza virus. Reassortment could accelerate the change. No one can say when, or if, any particular strain will make the jump. But we are not helpless as we wait to see what evolution has in store for us. We can do things to slow the spread of the flu, such as washing our hands. And scientists are learning how to make more effective vaccines by tracking the evolution of the flu virus so they can do a better job of predicting which strains will be most dangerous in flu seasons to come.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses