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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Frank Ryan 2019
Cover photograph © Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/Getty Images
Frank Ryan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008296674
eBook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008296698
Version: 2020-02-28
I would like to thank my editors,
Myles Archibald and Hazel Eriksson,
and my agent, Jonathan Pegg,
for their support of my writing this book
We all play hideous games with each other.
We step inside each other’s chalk circles.
Anthony Hopkins
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. What Are Viruses?
2. Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases
3. A Plague Upon a Plague
4. Every Parent’s Nightmare
5. A Bug Versus a Virus
6. A Coincidental Paralysis
7. Deadly Viruses
8. An All-American Plague
9. Lurker Viruses
10. How Flu Viruses Reinvent Themselves
11. A Lesson from a Machiavellian Virus
12. The Mystery of Ebola
13. The Mercurial Nature of the Zika Virus
14. A Taste for the Liver
15. Warts and All
16. Lilliputian Giants
17. Are Viruses Alive?
18. Inspiring Terror – and Delight
19. The Ecology of the Oceans
20. The Virosphere
21. The Origins of the Placental Mammals
22. Viruses in the Origins of Life
23. The Fourth Domain?
Bibliography and References
Index
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Frank Ryan
About the Publisher
What springs to your mind when you sit back and consider viruses? I am altogether aware that even if you come, as will many of my readers, from a non-scientific background, you will likely be uncertain as to the strange and ill-definable nature of viruses. Even among scientists, viruses are among the most enigmatic of the biological entities that are to be found on our precious blue-girdled planet. Certainly, there is a good deal of misinformation about them. You might, for example, be apt to confuse them with bacteria, a confusion that is not helped by the fact that we doctors caused this confusion in the first case by lumping two radically different entities together as the ‘microbes’ that are the root cause of infectious diseases.
Viruses frighten us. They elicit a primal fear of the unknown. They are capable of crashing through our natural barriers and defences, turning healthy cells into microscopic factories to produce exponential numbers of daughter viruses. These swarm through the bloodstream, drawing the attention of the immune system. This provokes our own white blood cells and other immune defences to become an aggressive reactionary force, fixated on annihilating the invaders, regardless of the devastation in their wake – indeed our very own immune system contributes to many of the familiar symptoms of the resultant illness, from runny noses to violent, bloody haemorrhages. In effect, every infection becomes a pitched battle
