An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it.
This diary is about an essay by Carl Zimmer, the science columnist at The New York Times and the author of “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.” This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.” Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. Many of his columns there are about Covid and should be available to non-subscribers. Zimmer is the author of thirteen books, including “She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.”
Fortunately for those who don’t subscribe to The New York Times and want to take a deep dive into the the science of viruses and find out the answer to question posed above, this essay isn’t behind their paywall because it is part of their free Covid-19 coverage.
This essay is 3700 words long. It begins:
Last spring, coyotes strolled down the streets of San Francisco in broad daylight. Pods of rarely seen pink dolphins cavorted in the waters around Hong Kong. In Tel Aviv, jackals wandered a city park, a herd of mountain goats took over a town in Wales, and porcupines ambled through Rome’s ancient ruins. As the canals in Venice turned strangely clear, cormorants started diving for fish, and Canada geese escorted their goslings down the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, passing empty shops displaying Montblanc pens and Fendi handbags.
Nature was expanding as billions of people were retreating from the Covid-19 pandemic. The change was so swift, so striking that scientists needed a new name for it: the anthropause.
It is too detailed for me to summarize. Here’s one more excerpt:
That frenzy of research has revealed a lot about SARS-CoV-2, but huge questions remain. Looming over them is the biggest question of all: Is the coronavirus alive?
Scientists have been arguing over whether viruses are alive for about a century, ever since the pathogens came to light. Writing last month in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, two microbiologists at University College Cork named Hugh Harris and Colin Hill took stock of the debate. They could see no end to it. “The scientific community will never fully agree on the living nature of viruses,” they declared.
The question is hard to settle, in part because viruses are deeply weird. But it’s also hard because scientists can’t agree on what it means to be alive. Life may seem like one of the most obvious features of the universe, but it turns out to be remarkably hard to draw sharp lines dividing it from the rest of existence. The mystery extends far beyond viruses. By some popular definitions, it’s hard to say that a rabbit is alive. If we look at our own genome, we can find life’s paradox lurking there as well.
I could share the last sentence which answers the question in the title but that would be a spoiler.
I am sharing this essay because I found it fascinating enough to distract me from thoughts of politics. I thought there would be enough Daily Kos readers who are both interested in a deep dive into science and want to be distracted from the tormented coverage of Trump’s CPAC speech.
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Addendum: My own story about the golden Trump idol was lost among all the other stories yesterday. Here’s a plug for it. I wrote it when I was wondering if it was a prank. Obviously I had to update it when I discovered that it wasn’t.