I have been recently pondering some of the “information” that is being espoused on the internet. This “information” — internet, books, and social media, YouTubes — question the existence of viruses.
I believe that we should always question what we believe. However, I would also like to address the idea of lying by omission.
The most important piece of information to realize here is that there are three major cell types. Two of them are ca. bacteria sized, (bacteria, and archaea) and one is eukaryotic (a thousand times more massive then bacteria). Human beings, and all animals that are visible by naked eye are built out of these huge, eukaryotic cells.
All three of these cell types reportedly have “viruses” that prey on them. But I would like to focus here on the _bacterial_ “viruses”.
Bacteria are physically tougher than eukaryotic cells. They are far, far easier to grow, manipulate, and experiment on. There is a product called agar. (please look up any of these terms. That’s why I provide them. But I am not going to waste space detailing information about them because so many of you already know it.) Agar is similar to a thick, firm, Jello and must be heated to boiling to melt but it then does not resolidify until it’s just hot. A hot bath temp that you can barely tolerate but you can tolerate. Once at that “just hot” point it solidifies quickly.
I can take a solution of bacteria approximately 3 * 10e9 (three times 10 to the exponent of 9) or roughly three _billion_ cells and mix that with several volumes of hot – not boiling – agar, mix, and then quickly pour it into a petri plate where it will instantly cool and solidify. The mixture I poured it into the plate is cloudy with bacteria that are still alive. There are billions of them suspended. They form a faint cloud in the agar that forms a firm gel in the bottom of the Petri plate. I can then save that plate and others that I have made in the refrigerator for future work.
Here is where the viruses come in. I have been exposed to thousands of books that show information on the life styles of bacterial viruses, electron micrograph images, DNA sequences, and specific mutants of these viruses. I have studied experiments that allowed us to figure out how certain protein and enzyme systems in these bacterial viruses work, even how different DNA regulation systems work. All this information about bacterial virus systems, has led to some of our beliefs of what might be properties of human viruses.
All of this information about bacterial viruses allows them to be used in some cases as tools to explore other mechanisms. And that is what I wanted to do in my lab work. I wanted to create a tool that would allow me to study how systems interact with our biological membranes. I did not care in the least about studying bacterial viruses😀 I simply wanted to use them as a tool.
I wanted to mutagenize some bacterial virus to create this tool. So I took some “virus” material from a lab stock. A little bit of tea colored liquid. And I wanted to know how many virus particles there were in it. I had been taught that there were probably in the neighborhood of 10 to the 10th (1x10e10) virus particles. But that it might vary. I needed to actually count what was in this particular sample.
I diluted 10 microliters (about 1/5 of a small drop) into one milliliter of liquid (a 1/100 dilution [-2].) I got a clean transfer tip and took 10 microliters of that dilution into another mil [-4], and again [-6]. In theory I am down to 1e4 “virus” particles. I now do a last dilution of only a 1 to 10 instead of 1 to 100. In theory I now have a solution that has about a hundred virus particles in 100 microliters.
Here’s where the plates that I made earlier come in. Supposedly, these virus particles will infect bacterial cells. So I grab one of my bacteria agar plates. And I spread 100 microliters of this last dilution or possibly ca.100 virus particles on the surface of that plate.
In theory the virus particles will bump up against the embedded cells attach and infect. Or, in the worst case scenario vibrate around in the water for a little bit (there are billions of bacterial cells) so it can’t go very far before it bumps into a cell and infects it. Virtually all the virus particles quickly end up bumping in the cells and infecting them.
After I let this “grow” overnight, I get a very cloudy plate because all the uninfected bacteria have continued to grow in their little jello places. Whereas the cells that were infected made lots more virus and popped, releasing virus particles, that infected the cells around them, made more, popped them, and so on, and so on killing all the cells in a little area around the original virus particle. So you get little clearish areas about the diameter of a pinhead scattered around the plate where there was a virus particle originally. These little clearish areas are called plaques. And you can _count them_.
I can count the number of particles I put on the plate. I can calculate the number of particles in that original stock solution. These particles caused little clearish holes in my bacterial lawn. I can think of no possible way that a chemical poison could do this.
I can take a type of lab chemical and show in many ways that it is a mutagen. Literally hundreds of thousands of people currently doing research in the United States can as well. And I can treat a solution of virus particles with this chemical and create virus mutants that instead of clearish plaques create clear, crystal clear, plaques.
I see no possible way that I could mutagenize a _chemical_. The most intelligent, straightforward, and simple explanation to me is that study after study after study are correct and that these are bacterial viruses. And the idea that these bacterial viruses do not exist is like me holding out a ball and dropping it and expecting it to go _up_.
I can write about experimental cases where the ball _does_ go up, and I can enthusiastically try to convince other people that that means that balls always go up and accidentally (or conveniently) leave out the fact that I am aboard the international space station under thrust.
However; that would _not_ be the honest thing for me to do. What we must start doing today is calling out the authors, politicians, and especially pesticide manufacturing PR departments that leave out _the important stuff_; intentionally, or conveniently, and thus lie by omission. But it’s hard to be sure whether it was deliberate or not. Accidents do happen. Sometimes authors don’t do it deliberately, and conveniently, but unfortunately just ignorantly.
Eukaryotic viruses are hundreds or even thousands of times more difficult then bacteria to work with. They cannot be analyzed and made into tools as easily as I just described. And whether we have identified the correct human virus for a particular disease is certainly more questionable than whether eukaryotic viruses exist.
Questioning whether we have the right policy for over population is _not_ the same as questioning whether the Earth is flat, or round, or whether people even exist. Please read carefully and think!
I would encourage all of you to not shoot yourself in the foot by simply believing that all viruses don’t exist.
The absolute best to you all!