#viruses

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material. ↗

— Francis Crick

#although #any #carried #certain #dna

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human. ↗

— Michael Specter

#fungi #microbes #microbiome #microorganisms #viruses

It's in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge. ↗

— Barack Obama

#dreams

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#exceed #exceeds #genes #life #likely

With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important. ↗

— Kristi Yamaguchi

#certainly #deaths #flu #higher #important

I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses. ↗

— Kevin Mitnick

#adventure #causing #challenge #computer #curiosity

The risk from viruses is an unanswered question - and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years. ↗

— Ian Smith

#had #humans #into #many #organs

Images contaminate us like viruses. ↗

— Paul Virilio

#images #like #us #viruses

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#along #around #back #bees #dancing

In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room. ↗

— James Lileks

#viruses #design