13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks

Author:Michael Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2007-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

8: A Giant Virus

It’s a freak that could rewrite the story of life

Pity the poor souls responsible for drawing tourists to Bradford, Yorkshire. First there are the dark, satanic mills of the city’s industrial past. Then there’s the fact that the Yorkshire Ripper, a notorious serial killer of prostitutes, lived here. The Brontë sisters were born and lived part of their lives nearby, but their lives were hardly long or happy. Emily died from tuberculosis at thirty, the year after Wuthering Heights was published. Charlotte, the creator of Jane Eyre, died at thirty-nine in the early stages of pregnancy. Today, in the United Kingdom at least, the city is better known as the site of violent race riots in the summer of 2001.

And then there is what may turn out to be the city’s most important contribution to science. In 1992 Timothy Rowbotham, a microbiologist with the United Kingdom’s Public Health Laboratory Service, was charged with finding the root of a particularly nasty outbreak of pneumonia in Bradford. His detective work led him to sample the water at the base of a hospital cooling tower. When he took his samples back to the lab, he found they contained amoebae. That was unsurprising in itself, but the amoebae seemed to have been infected by something, some microbe, that he couldn’t identify. Rowbotham named it Bradford coccus, perhaps one of the least glamorous epithets ever given. Not that Rowbotham cared. He had other things to do; he put the unidentified microbe in deep freeze and moved on to the next job.

Eleven years later we learned that Rowbotham had found a monster virus. It is by far the biggest virus known to science; it is huge, around thirty times bigger than the rhinovirus that gives you a common cold. And it is staggeringly hard to kill. Most viruses can be destroyed by high temperatures or strong alkalis, or shaken to pieces by sound waves – but not this one. That’s not what has made scientists sit up and take notice, however. This giant virus’s biggest impact won’t be on the health-care systems of the globe. It will be on the history of life on Earth.

♦

We have only known about viruses for around a hundred years. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Dimitri Ivanovski, a Russian biologist, was sent to find out what was blighting the Crimean tobacco crop. Whatever it was, it was getting through the porcelain filters the laboratory technicians were using to sift out bacteria. In 1892 Ivanovski published an article describing the new, minuscule kind of pathogen he had found. Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist, eventually gave the pathogen a suitable name in 1898: virus – a Latin word meaning a slimy liquid or poison.

Though the virus trail was blazed by two Europeans, it was an American who got the most recognition. In 1946 Wendell Meredith Stanley won a Nobel Prize after isolating the tobacco mosaic virus. Interestingly, Stanley’s Nobel was for chemistry. Though they affect living systems, viruses have almost always been seen as merely chemical, not biological.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.