Word: nucleic
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...leave the virus diseases supreme, and virologists are multiplying with a speed reminiscent of the particles they study. Having only in the last dozen years dug out the mechanics of viral cell invasion, researchers now know of fascinating variations in the process. Occasionally and inexplicably; they have learned, viral nucleic-acid particles enter cells and "go underground," lying there dormant or masked for years. Or the nascent "pro-virus" molecules of new nucleic acid may play possum in this way. Virologists are having to coin words such as virion, capsid and capsomere to describe viral particles and their parts...
...tulip-streak virus and you happen to be a tulip, you're sick.'' This lack of evident purpose in viruses leaves teleological philosophers at a loss. Yet viruses must have influenced evolution through natural selection. In deed, the close resemblance between the virus' core of nucleic acid and the gene, or "unit of heredity;" suggests that virus particles are lost genes in search of evolution...
Influenza viruses were found to have horns or spikes. On some of these is an enzyme that can dissolve part of a cell's outer coating. Presumably, this is what the flu virus uses to open a hole in the cell-factory wall for its nucleic-acid core to slip through. A virus known as T2 bacteriophage (it attacks bacteria) was found to have a tadpole shape; the "tail" is like a coiled spring around a tiny hypodermic needle that stabs the cell wall, and through this the nucleic-acid core is injected. Micrographs show whether viruses are basically...
...Vaccination Mechanism. The most practical results so far of virological research are vaccines, and vaccines depend on the basic concept of viral structure as a nucleic-acid core with a protein overcoat. The coat is a foreign substance to the body it invades, and in the higher animals, including man, the system fights back by making antibodies that gang up on a virus particle, surround it and neutralize it. Unhappily, it takes days or weeks for the body to mobilize its antibody police, so the first viral invasion is likely to succeed and make the invaded victim sick...
...belatedly cause cancer. The hows and whys of this latent period are unknown. One partial explanation may lie in the ability of new "provirus" particles to remain undetected in cells, doing no evident damage until they are stimulated by chemicals or X rays. The important thing is that these nucleic-acid molecules can be infective by themselves, with no assist from the protein that normally accompanies them in the whole virus. Dr. Frank L. Horsfall, director of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, the world's biggest private cancer research organization, sums it up: "We can now speak...