At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the dual nature of viruses as both harmful and beneficial to innovation.
Carl Zimmer's quote emphasizes the complex nature of viruses, highlighting that while they can be deadly agents of disease, they have also played a significant role in driving scientific progress and innovation. This duality represents a fundamental aspect of many elements in nature, where creation and destruction coexist, leading to new discoveries and advancements. By pointing out this duality, Zimmer invites us to reconsider our understanding of viruses and their impact on life and science.
In practice
In a presentation about the role of viruses in biotechnology, one might use this quote to illustrate their positive contributions.
Researchers keep identifying new species, but they have no idea about the life cycle of a given species or its other hosts. They cut open an animal and find a new species. Where did it come from? What effect does it have on its host? What is its next host? They don't know and they don't have time to find out, because there are too many other species waiting to be discovered and described.
I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons - and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.
Exxon, one of the companies that has spent tens of millions of dollars denying climate change, denying any responsibility to deal with, taking government subsidies on a massive scale, now their ads are all about, 'Oh, we want a clean future. We're looking at clean energy and all that stuff.'
Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.
The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life.
The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.
If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,-then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.
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