A Quote by Richard Dawkins
I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus... Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does its job magnificently well. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out.
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It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus?
It's true that my research expertise is in biology: for example, the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and monkey pox, and not bacteriology as in the case of the anthrax organism. It's also true that I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life. It's a separate field from the research I was performing at Fort Detrick.
I'm tired of being behind this virus. We've been behind this virus from day one. We underestimated this virus. It's more powerful, it's more dangerous than we expected.
Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94)
A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.
Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?
This year, 1996, has been designated the 'Year of the Vaccine,' commemorating the 200th anniversary of Edward Jenner's vaccination of James Phipps with cowpox virus and subsequent challenge with smallpox virus. Insight into the nature of viruses, and how viruses interact with mammalian cells, has evolved since the turn of the century.
Just as the chicken pox virus continues to live quietly in the body after the disease is gone, the god virus may live quietly in the host until something evokes it.
But what has been pretty good about the coronaviruses in general is they keep their structural pieces very similar. What do I mean by that? There's certain - the outer coat, the envelope, and the inside part of the virus has stayed very constant.
An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.
We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that
for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true. And I asked why this was so, and the answer that was given was in a sense, 'Because.'
There was no satisfactory answer.
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.
A virus has three purposes: to duplicate, to infiltrate and to spread from one host to the next. Ultimately, even a single virus can shut down an entire system.
It used to be thought that only a certain kind of virus could get into our genome and it's called a retrovirus and that's a virus that might be HIV for example.
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