IMAGE: Not a smallpox virus.
A few days ago, journalist Derek Thompson posted an op-ed article in The Atlantic, with the title ‘The Scourge of All Humankind’.
As one might guess from the title, the story is a bit on the gloomy side. It begins like this:
If you were, for whatever macabre reason, seeking the most catastrophic moment in the history of humankind, you might well settle on this: About 10,000 years ago, as people first began to domesticate animals and farm the land in Mesopotamia, India, and northern Africa, a peculiar virus leaped across the species barrier. Little is known about its early years. But the virus spread and, whether sooner or later, became virulent. It ransacked internal organs before traveling through the blood to the skin, where it erupted in pus-filled lesions. Many of those who survived it were left marked, disfigured, even blind.
As civilizations bloomed across the planet, the virus stalked them like a curse…
Mr. Thompson is writing, of course, about the smallpox virus, which, reportedly, has been almost completely eradicated from the face of the earth, thanks to an aggressive global humanitarian effort, plus a generous helping of plain old ‘luck’.
Good riddance. Smallpox was the kind of virus that gives viruses a bad name, in much the same way that Vladimir Putin gives Russians a bad name.
(We could mention certain American politicians in a similar vein, but Mr. Putin will serve our purposes for the time being.)
The effort to rid the world of smallpox got a huge boost in 1796, when a physician named Edward Jenner became fascinated with a theory that inoculation with ‘cow pox’ — a disease among cows — could provide cross-immunity to smallpox. He tested his theory by inoculating an 8-year-old boy named James with cow pox, and then purposely exposing him to smallpox.
Much to the relief of James’ parents — and James himself, no doubt — the experiment worked. (Things could have gone rather badly otherwise.)
Dr. Jenner had no idea, in 1796, that the agents involved in his daring experiment were ‘viruses’. Viruses weren’t discovered until the late 1800s, and even then, scientists had no idea what they looked like. The little guys were too small to be seen with an optical microscope, so science had to wait around for the invention of the electron microscope, before getting a visual picture.
This particular electron photograph supposedly represents a ‘bacteriophage’. A virus that infects bacteria. It looks, to me, like an alien creature from the Planet Zargoz.
As we all know, or ought to know, bacteria can be friendly, and they can also be deadly. (Like people.)
Turns out, the same is true for viruses. Bacteriophage viruses, in particular, can be our friends, when they infect and kill the nasty bacteria that can cause, for example, cholera, pneumonia, plague, malaria and tetanus. If it weren’t for these weird-looking but friendly viruses, we might all be up to our necks in nasty bacteria.
Then a virus like COVID-19 comes along and soils everyone else’s reputation. It doesn’t seem fair.
Some scientists think bacteriophages are the most common form of life on earth. Which suggests that, in the end, the good guys will win.