Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation
The following quotations are currently featured as the Selected quotation at the Viruses Portal. To suggest a quotation for inclusion, use the suggestions page
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/1
| “ | ...getting rid of the last 1 percent has been like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death. As the vaccination fist closes in one country, the virus bursts out in another... | ” |
—Donald McNeil on the campaign to eradicate polio
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/2
| “ | A virus is a piece of bad news wrapped in protein. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/3
| “ | An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/4
| “ | ...in a flash I had understood: what caused my clear spots was, in fact, an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. | ” |
—Félix d'Herelle on the discovery of bacteriophages
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/5
| “ | ...the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/6
| “ | 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. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/7
| “ | Viruses are living chemicals... | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/8
| “ | There are more viruses on Earth than stars in the universe. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/9
| “ | We are part virus. This bizarre yet inescapable fact has been revealed over the past 30 years, as scientists have spelunked their way through the human genome and encountered stretches of DNA with the telltale chemical signatures of viruses. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/10
| “ | What is needed ... is a new inquiry at international level ... to investigate a reconciliation between the right to health and the right of authors to proper protection for their inventions. At the moment, all the eggs are in the basket of the authors, and it’s not really a proportionate balance. | ” |
—Michael Kirby on the cost of antiviral drugs
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/11
| “ | A virus is not an individual organism in the ordinary sense of the term, but something which could almost be called a stream of biological patterns. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/12
| “ | Some scientists visualize the virus as an ill-defined shape emerging bashfully out of a dense and golden cloud. This is a beautiful and romantic vision. Virology should, however, not be too Turnerian. Nor should it be an abstract art. The portrait of a virus should not produce an aesthetic emotion by means of an organic disturbance. | ” |
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/13
| “ | The unusual features of the giant Mimivirus revived the popular, yet unresolved question: "Are viruses alive?" The discovery that some of them can get sick adds a new twist to this old debate. | ” |
—Hiroyuki Ogata & Jean-Michel Claverie on the relationship between Sputnik virophage and mimivirus
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/14
| “ | ...classical approaches to classification are not suitable for viruses, as rigid hierarchies cannot be imposed on organisms that appear – evolutionarily speaking – to have been rather promiscuous in sharing their characteristics around. | ” |
—Ed Rybicki
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/15
| “ | There is no question that virology has long outgrown the confines of "Microbiology": it is an important discipline in its own right, a fact that is attested by the numerous high quality journals that are exclusively devoted to it. Further, it is primarily virology that has made possible the rapid rise of molecular cell biology. | ” |
—Bill Joklik on founding a society for virology
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/16
| “ | To help conceptualize the sheer number of viruses in existence, their current biomass has been estimated to equal that of 75 million blue whales (approximately 200 million tonnes) and, if placed end to end, the collective length of their virions would span 65 galaxies. | ” |
—Peter Simmonds
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/17
Portal:Viruses/Selected quotation/17