March 11, 2020
1 min read
Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAmWhat Is a Virus? Experts Struggle to Say
Originally published in February 1957
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“When a new phenomenon like virus multiplication comes to be studied, almost all the knowledge of cellular chemistry and function gained from other types of study turns out to be irrelevant. A virus is not an individual organism in the ordinary sense of the term but something which could almost be called a stream of biological pattern. The pattern is carried from cell to cell by the relatively inert virus particles, but it takes on a new borrowed life from its host at each infection.—Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet” [Burnet went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960.]
—Scientific American, February 1957
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