Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!iuvax!silver!chiaravi
From: chiaravi@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: The Virus
Summary: By definition, viruses cannot have been the first life
Keywords: obligate parasitism
Message-ID: <2776@silver.bacs.indiana.edu>
Date: 3 Dec 88 20:59:29 GMT
References: <1491@murdu.Oz> <22882@beta.lanl.gov> <22884@beta.lanl.gov>
Reply-To: chiaravi@silver.UUCP (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Organization: Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 22

In article <22884@beta.lanl.gov> dd@beta.lanl.gov (Dan Davison) writes:
|In Article <1491@murdu.Oz>, Sam@murdu.Oz (Sam Ganesan) Writes:
|> 	The Virus Was The First To Live,
|> 	Or Lean In That Direction; Now We Give
|> 		Lend Our Peculiar Tone To Our Death Knells.
|> -Michael Newman
|
|What I forgot to mention is that it is unbelievely unlikely that
|viruses came first; are there any which are not obligate
|parasites?

	By definition, viruses are obligate parasites, so they cannot live
until they have some life form to live on.  The only way to get around this
would be to have someone create the equivalent of a concentrated cell extract
to grow the virus in (aaacckkphhh!) without using cells to create it and
without themselves being alive.

-- 
|  Lucius Chiaraviglio   |  ARPA:  chiaravi@silver.bacs.indiana.edu
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