At Oscillations, Suzan Mazur interviews a virologist, Luis Villarreal, Luis Villarreal is founding director of University of California, Irvine’s Center for Virus Research and UCI Professor Emeritus, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, who offers in an interview a fascinating neither/nor approach to that question:
It is true that it does have protein surrounding the nucleic acid and a lipid around it, like pretty much all RNA viruses. And it’s true that once it is in its transmission extracellular form, it is just a biological entity with none of the characteristics of life. However, it’s also true and equally true that once joined with the cell, the virus starts to program that cell to do what the virus wants or needs and is part of the living system of the host itself. So it’s both dead and alive depending on the circumstance. That the virus is not alive is a conservative, old view and not based on our current understanding of an enormous influence in all living entities due to virus activity and virus colonization.
Suzan Mazur, “Virologist Luis Villarreal: “Leery” of Covid-19 Models—Vaccine Possible Year’s End” at Oscillations
Villarreal and Mazur introduce a term that will be new to many— and relevant to viruses like COVID-19: quasispecies
Suzan Mazur is a science journalist who has chronicled the rise of the Third Way of evolution, biologists who are dissatisfied with doctrinaire Darwinism but not persuaded by anything like intelligent design, researching a number of leads. Her most recent book is Darwin Overthrown: Hello, Mechanobiology