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Quote by Carl Zimmer

“If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.”

Quote by Carl Zimmer

Author

Carl Zimmer is a renowned science writer, born on July 13, 1966. His work spans a wide range of scientific fields, from biology to environmental science, and is known for its clear and engaging writing style. more

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“We really depend on viruses for our complete survival.”

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“One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.”

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“Over millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.”

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“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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“Borna virus is not a retrovirus. It doesn't actually insert its own genes into our cells. What it does is just hangs out near our DNA and uses some of the molecular machinery to copy itself.”

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“We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome.”

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“We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.”

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“The only kinds of ways we have to deal with viruses are old school, so vaccines for example are very effective, but the first vaccines were invented in the 1700's, so we're talking about technology that is over 200 years-old.”

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“The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.”

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“When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.”

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