The Viral Storm Read Online Free Page A
Author: Nathan Wolfe
long to find them.
Microbes, Above: In detail; Below: To scale. ( Dusty Deyo )
Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck’s discovery. Our very first glimpses of bacteria came a little under four hundred years ago when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek adapted the looking glasses of textile merchants to create the first microscope. With it, he saw bacteria for the first time. This finding represented such an incredible paradigm shift that it took the British Royal Society another four years before it would accept that the unseen life forms were not merely artifacts of his unique apparatus.
Our scientific understanding of unseen life has proceeded pitifully slowly. Compared to some of the other major scientific breakthroughs over the last few thousand years, our understanding of the dominance of unseen life occurred only recently. By the time of Jesus, for example, we already understood critical elements of how the Earth rotated, its rough size, and its approximate distance to the sun and moon—all fairly advanced elements in understanding our place in the universe. By 1610 Galileo had already made his first observations using a telescope. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope came fifty years after that.
L: Replica of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, 17th century; R: van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope in use. ( L: Dave King / Getty Images; R: Yale Joel / Getty Images )
It is hard to overstate the paradigm shift that van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery represents. For thousands of years humans had recognized the existence of planets and stars. Yet our understanding of unseen life and its ubiquity began only a few hundred years ago with the invention of the microscope. The discovery of novel life forms continues to this day. The most recent novel life form to be uncovered is the unusual prion, whose discovery was acknowledged with a Nobel Prize in 1997. Prions are an odd microscopic breed that lack not only cells but also DNA or RNA, the genetic material that all other known forms of life on Earth use as their blueprint. Yet prions persist and can be spread, causing, among other things, mad cow disease. We would be arrogant to assume that there are no other life forms remaining to be discovered here on Earth, and they are most likely to be members of the unseen world. 3
* * *
We can roughly divide known life on Earth into two groups: noncellular life and cellular life. The major known players in the noncellular game are viruses. The dominant cellular life forms on Earth are the prokaryotes, which include bacteria and their cousins, the archaea. These life forms have lived for at least 3.5 billion years. They have striking diversity and together make up a much larger percentage of the planet’s biomass than the other more recognizable cellular forms of life, the eukaryotes, which include the familiar fungi, plants, and animals.
Another way of categorizing life is this: seen and unseen. Because our senses detect only the relatively large things on Earth, we are parochial in the way that we think about the richness of life. In fact, unseen life—which combines the worlds of bacteria, archaea, and viruses as well as a number of microscopic eukaryotes—is the truly dominant life on our planet. If some highly advanced extraterrestrial species were to land on Earth and put together an encyclopedia of life based on which things made up most of Earth’s diversity and biomass, the majority of it would be devoted to the unseen world. Only a few slender volumes would be dedicated to the things we normally equate with life: fungi, plants, and animals. For better or worse, humans would make up no more than a footnote in the animal volume—an interesting footnote but a footnote at best.
Global exploration to chart the diversity of microbes on the planet remains in its infancy. Considering viruses alone gives some sense of the scale of what’s unknown.
Microbes, Above: In detail; Below: To scale. ( Dusty Deyo )
Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck’s discovery. Our very first glimpses of bacteria came a little under four hundred years ago when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek adapted the looking glasses of textile merchants to create the first microscope. With it, he saw bacteria for the first time. This finding represented such an incredible paradigm shift that it took the British Royal Society another four years before it would accept that the unseen life forms were not merely artifacts of his unique apparatus.
Our scientific understanding of unseen life has proceeded pitifully slowly. Compared to some of the other major scientific breakthroughs over the last few thousand years, our understanding of the dominance of unseen life occurred only recently. By the time of Jesus, for example, we already understood critical elements of how the Earth rotated, its rough size, and its approximate distance to the sun and moon—all fairly advanced elements in understanding our place in the universe. By 1610 Galileo had already made his first observations using a telescope. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope came fifty years after that.
L: Replica of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, 17th century; R: van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope in use. ( L: Dave King / Getty Images; R: Yale Joel / Getty Images )
It is hard to overstate the paradigm shift that van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery represents. For thousands of years humans had recognized the existence of planets and stars. Yet our understanding of unseen life and its ubiquity began only a few hundred years ago with the invention of the microscope. The discovery of novel life forms continues to this day. The most recent novel life form to be uncovered is the unusual prion, whose discovery was acknowledged with a Nobel Prize in 1997. Prions are an odd microscopic breed that lack not only cells but also DNA or RNA, the genetic material that all other known forms of life on Earth use as their blueprint. Yet prions persist and can be spread, causing, among other things, mad cow disease. We would be arrogant to assume that there are no other life forms remaining to be discovered here on Earth, and they are most likely to be members of the unseen world. 3
* * *
We can roughly divide known life on Earth into two groups: noncellular life and cellular life. The major known players in the noncellular game are viruses. The dominant cellular life forms on Earth are the prokaryotes, which include bacteria and their cousins, the archaea. These life forms have lived for at least 3.5 billion years. They have striking diversity and together make up a much larger percentage of the planet’s biomass than the other more recognizable cellular forms of life, the eukaryotes, which include the familiar fungi, plants, and animals.
Another way of categorizing life is this: seen and unseen. Because our senses detect only the relatively large things on Earth, we are parochial in the way that we think about the richness of life. In fact, unseen life—which combines the worlds of bacteria, archaea, and viruses as well as a number of microscopic eukaryotes—is the truly dominant life on our planet. If some highly advanced extraterrestrial species were to land on Earth and put together an encyclopedia of life based on which things made up most of Earth’s diversity and biomass, the majority of it would be devoted to the unseen world. Only a few slender volumes would be dedicated to the things we normally equate with life: fungi, plants, and animals. For better or worse, humans would make up no more than a footnote in the animal volume—an interesting footnote but a footnote at best.
Global exploration to chart the diversity of microbes on the planet remains in its infancy. Considering viruses alone gives some sense of the scale of what’s unknown.
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