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We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

Different viral species contain nucleic acids that differ not only in length and nucleotide sequence but in many unexpected ways as well.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Human beings are a wonderful virus in some ways.

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.