Understanding Viruses - Appreciation Session

GenWise Appreciation Session: 1 Session Only

Ages 13-18

Isn't it fascinating that a microscopic being has been able to press the pause button on human society? Let's use this opportunity that COVID-19 has given us to explore some questions: what are viruses? How do they exist? Are they living or non-living? How does modern medicine counteract the effect of viruses?

Fun Contemporary Fact: Extracted from The Hindu, Oct 7, 2020

At a time when the world is faced with multiple assaults from a frighteningly obscure virus, it cannot be mere coincidence that the Nobel Committee decided to anoint three scientists who peeled the layers off another virus that confounded generations of physicians — the Hepatitis C virus (HCV). The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice, is a stout endorsement of years of work that went towards identifying one of the world’s greatest scourges. 

But to see it shorn of the context it is couched in would be to miss the larger point or purpose it could serve. Choosing researchers who went after a pathogen, and succeeded in unwrapping the whole puzzle at a time when others are fighting fatigue in a daily battle against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is also a hat tip to the virologists and geneticists burning the midnight oil, for over nine months now.