Amateur Amalgam

June 25, 2025

I really liked reading this one. I wouldn’t call it a comprehensive text on viruses, more like an introduction to virology and how this particular subject came to be. Instead of being full of jargon, each section focuses on a single type of virus (broadly) and our journey through it’s discovery.

In each chapter we go through how we first recognized it, how we isolated what it was, how it works, what we’ve been able to do about it, and how that relates to the wider virus world. A very interesting – and accessible – jumping off point for people who want to look more into this topic.

Side note – do we like the stars vertically on the side? My vote is yes

Spoilers Ahead!

Introduction

We start with a basic introduction to virology by starting with a place that people didn’t expect to find anything in – the Cave of Crystals. The original meaning of virus is as both the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Destruction and Creation together. That statement foreshadows the whole vibe of the book.

Viruses were first described as a contagious living fluid in 1898. They were distilled from a sickness that affected tobacco plants. As the years passed and scientists found more viruses in more places – including in people – they were able to eventually see that a virus is 100x smaller than a bacteria and only has a few genes that it uses to spread.

Old Companions

We go back in time to see some of the oldest diseases that have plagued mankind, and find that they are viruses; the most familiar of which are the viruses that make up what we know as the common cold.

In 1914, a microbiologist filtered the mucus of a sick assistant and used the result to get others sick – in the experiment way, not the evil way. At first people used to think that the cold was caused by bacteria, but this filtering and still getting sick indicated it wasn’t – bacteria are too big to go through the mesh filter, but viruses aren’t.

Bacteria can be dealt with using antibiotics, but viruses don’t have the same sort of cure. One of the most famous outbreaks of a virus is the Influenza outbreak of 1918 (also known as the Spanish Flu). It only has 13 genes, but this was enough to allow it to spread and kill somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.

Viruses use the host cell to multiply, and sometimes they mix their code with other viruses – if two infect the same cell – and this creates multiple strains of the same disease. Thats part of what makes it so hard to come up with a cure. What works for one strain might not work for another.

We can also get viruses that jump species, like H1N1, or HPV (which curiously enough, gives rabbits horns – like a jackalope)

Everywhere, In All Things

At first, people thought viruses only attacked animals and plants, then bacteriophages were discovered. Before antibiotics, these phages were used with a decent amount of success at fighting disease that were caused by bacteria. It fell out of practice, but phage therapy is still researched and used sometimes.

Viruses have also been found in the ocean. They actually produce like 10% of the worlds oxygen supply from there too. Because they have so few genes, they can mix with host DNA and spread that around as well. That’s actually how we can track how old a virus is. And not just in bacteria, in people and plants and animals too. In people, they are responsible for creating the protein that allows transfer of nutrients in the placenta – we would literally die without them.

Side note – I’m tempted to make a ‘mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ joke here (cause they started out as bacteria), but I wont.

The Viral Future

Most of the time, this sort of thing is benign, rarely it’s helpful, but sometimes it’s harmful. This mixing of genes allows us to trace that some things have jumped between species and one of the most infamous is HIV. There are a few strains of HIV that each have different levels of intensity and are more common in different groups.

Another disease that jumps species is West Nile, this one coming from birds, and unfortunately its a human dead end – meaning we die and it cant spread from person to person; It’s spread through mosquitoes.

Living in as global a world as we do, COVID-19 should not have been a surprise, and actually I remember it’s predecessors SARS and MERS when I was a kid, and the only reason those weren’t as bad as people thought they would be is cause scientists had prepared extensively. For COVID-19, it was more contagious and also helped by so many more people ignoring the advice and word of their health officials.

The small number of genes means messy reproduction, meaning many strains, meaning difficult to cure. One that has been cured though is smallpox. While it isn’t out and about anymore, it does exist in labs for research and the debate rages on on weather it should be destroyed once and for all or kept and studied. That debate has been made a little more complicated by the fact that recently, scientists have been able to reverse engineer and reconstruct a virus from the traces in the DNA of the things it infects – very Jurassic Park.

Epilogue

In the 90’s giant viruses were discovered in water coolers, attacking the amoeba that lived there. They were the size of bacteria and had 1000+ genes. This discovery once again changed things up in the microbiology world, and has scientists struggling to redefine a virus.

Virology is still a field that’s in it’s infancy so there are definitely more things to come.