selfishness

March of 2020 will be remembered as the month that the world changed because of the combination of the invisibly small Coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, and the pervasive global communication that allowed both insight and fear to escalate at rates unimaginable by prior generations. Things changed within just a few days.

I’ve been reflecting on viruses. As a molecular biologist, I have found viruses to be fascinating for many reasons, but three of them have been on my mind lately. 

Viruses are the ultimate selfish idea. All viruses share in common their parasitic character and their very simple demand of their host:  “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” That is the sole purpose of the virus. They are unashamed examples of the ultimate reality of evolution – the imperative that is actually the driver for all living things – we are selected for the ability to leave more copies of ourselves than our competitors. For those of us who see God’s creative hand at work in this brutality called “survival of the fittest,” the virus is an unavoidable and natural side-effect of this principle – anything capable of being copied can thrive in this game, even if it has degenerated to the point where it literally has no other purpose except just being copied. What distinguishes viruses is that they don’t even pretend to have a higher purpose. They are open about their pure selfishness. “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” That's it. And viruses are even more audacious – they don’t even have the machinery to execute this selfish task on other own – they cleverly demand that the process be done by their hosts, and they fool their hosts, at least for awhile, into doing their bidding. On reflection we realize that viruses aren’t really foreign at all. They are made by their hosts and they are made of their hosts. They are really just ideas, genetic ideas, wrapped in little surprise packages, capable of harassing a host cell for a little while. Their message to the host? “MAKE COPIES OF ME!”  Pretty simple. Though it can be tragically deadly, I find this pure selfishness to be kind of enchanting because of its lack of pretense. God has used this same principle to bring about all the creation of all the mysterious and stunning species on our planet, including countless species that have come and gone before humans ever took their turn making so many copies of ourselves that we are threatening the survival of our own host. In fact, I sometimes wonder if humans are just a little too much like viruses, fooling the earth with our own selfish message “MAKE COPIES OF ME!”

Viruses are simple, small, and clever. Some viruses, like this latest Coronavirus, are especially successful at jumping from one host to another. They are immediately selfish and immediately demanding, and the strategy works for awhile before their version of the “MAKE COPIES OF ME” idea goes extinct. But I think one of the most intriguing things about some viruses that are smarter than this Coronavirus is their guile. These other clever viruses can choose between two lifestyles – they can be immediately selfish and demand to be copied NOW, or they can resort to deferred selfishness and take the form of an apparently benign and passive passenger, a silent unheard message, waiting patiently to make its demands later. These smarter viruses are exemplified by a virus (bacteriophage) named lambda, that infects E. coli bacteria. This virus is a little package containing 50,000 letters of DNA. What was discovered by University of Wisconsin – Madison molecular biologist Esther Lederberg in the 1950s was that this virus is stealthy. It is able to be patient. When its host is healthy and happy, the phage lambda virus can look benign and friendly and gentle. It silently slips a single copy of its selfish message into the genetic instructions of the host, but it stays silent and…waits. Every time the host makes a copy of itself, which, for E. coli bacteria, can be a LOT of times, the selfish message of the virus just gets copied too... passively. The selfish virus rides along as a silent idea being copied with zero effort. But unlike the current Coronavirus, this smart and selfish lambda machine has the ability to choose, to switch, depending on which choice will leave more copies of itself. In this brutally simple calculus, evolution has rewarded phage lambda for being able to switch from a benign lifestyle to a brutal takeover resulting in a rapid revelation of the “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” demand. Pathetically, the cue for this switch is evidence that the host bacterium is in danger or in trouble, risking the passive viral lifestyle. When the switch is thrown, the virus turns on, activates the full force of the “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” demand, and, in so doing, enslaves the dying host to fabricate from its own guts dozens of copies of the virus. Lambda leaves the dying carcass of the bacterial host in a sturdy armor carrier shaped like a syringe…looking for an unsuspecting host to be injected with the same selfish message – a message built from the juices and machinery of the previous unsuspecting host. Amazingly, a similar lifestyle with clever switching capability occurs in a famous virus that infects people. It is called HIV, and it hides quietly in the cellular police of the human immune system, finally demanding “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” when the police are activated, sadly disabling the body’s enforcement functions just when they are needed most. That’s why the “I” of HIV stands for immunodeficiency.


Viruses are vulnerable to rapid extinction. This fact applies to the present Coronavirus and it is relevant to pandemics like that currently affecting our planet, and threatening lethal consequences for a few percent of those infected. The reality is that viruses can go extinct quickly. The present Coronavirus pandemic likely started when a single Coronavirus with a random spelling error in its genetic message found itself able to sneak from a wild animal to a human, perhaps in a street market in Wuhan, China. This Coronavirus pandemic is ominous, but the reality is that the world pandemic could be ended in 14 days with this Coronavirus being driven to extinction in that time. Think of the lives saved and the money saved and the stock market investments saved, and the panic saved, and the toilet paper liberated. Coronavirus extinction in 14 days?  How? It is simple. Assuming that rare human-adapted Coronaviruses do not enter the human population from animals very often, the current Coronaviruses demanding “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” are actually surprisingly vulnerable. Their only fleeting existence comes between the time when they sneak themselves into a new uninfected person to demand that the copying begins, and the few days later when the human host’s powerful immune system recognizes the ploy and shuts down every single virus. And that is exactly what human immune systems do in almost every case. They extinguish the virus. Our amazing immune systems also remember the selfish Coronavirus and prevent it from even thinking about infecting us again. Tragically, a few percent of infected individuals will die from respiratory complications of the virus before they can mount an immune response. However, even in these tragic cases, the virus dies with the victim. Coronaviruses are doomed by both of those scenarios. For all the fear they inspire, Coronaviruses are weak and poorly adapted to life outside their human hosts. Within a few hours, or at most a few days, Coronavirus particles die on surfaces. They are easy to kill with soap and disinfectants. The selfish viral message really only lives on in the act of infecting an uninfected person. If a virus of this kind is kept from jumping to a new host for 14 days it will either die harmlessly on a surface, die harmlessly by the work of the immune system, or, sadly, die harmfully while taking the life of the rare immunocompromised host. All three fates have the same outcome – the virus dies. This Coronavirus lives out its selfishness only in the act of transmission. Fourteen days without viral transmission between humans anywhere on earth and this Coronavirus goes extinct. Unlike the lambda virus or HIV, this Coronavirus doesn’t seem to know how to disguise its selfishness.

14 days without jumping to a new host anywhere on the planet and the “MAKE COPIES OF ME!” demand of this Coronavirus – just the latest in a long line of selfish viral messages – will go unheard…forever.