Virus

Boy, am I ever sick. You can interpret that however you wish, but the sickness I'm talking about at the moment is of a medical nature. Yes, I have a cold, and I sit here and pout over my list of unpleasant but thankfully short-term woes, I am once again transfixed by the idea that all of this - the sluggish fluids in my chest, the endless honking of my schnozz, the dull ache in my sinuses - is caused by something too small to see and isn't even alive in the first place.

Most colds are caused by a loose, ever-shifting confederation of viruses known collectively as rhinoviruses, the name coming from the fact that they grow best in the nose and don't do so well in other parts of the body. They are of the Picornaviridae family and are non-enveloped with a single positive strand of RNA. They are pretty small, about one-fortieth the size of a common bacterium.

The part that gets me is that they aren't alive in the sense that I understand life. They can't move on their own. They don't process energy. They don't eat. They don't excrete. They can't even reproduce on their own. By any standard, they are just large, complex, and quite inert molecules. Until they come into contact (quite by chance) with my own cells, and then they do the only thing they can do - they take over my cells to make more copies of themselves.

All this gunk in my body, all this coughing and wheezing, all this feverish whining, is caused by a bunch of tiny non-living replicators who have taken over a bunch of cells in my upper respiratory tract.

I find this utterly fascinating. I'd find it even more fascinating if I didn't feel like such crap at the moment.