why are viruses considered to
be on border line of living on non-living
Answers
Answer:
Viruses are considered at the borderline of living and non-living because they show both the characteristics of a living and a non-living. As they react like non-living in the free atmosphere but when they enter the body of a living organism then they show the features of a living organism and start reproduction.
Answer:
Viruses are technically non-living. Independently, they have no ability to replicate, grow or undertake metabolic activity. They are like innate capsules of code (RNA or DNA) floating around. However, when they come into contact with a living organism like a cell, they are replicated and can injure or/and kill host cells.
Oftentimes they are described as hijacking host machinery, i.e. they use host cell ribosomes to make their own proteins by corrupting the host cell DNA. This implies that it is a virus’ “intention” to damage cells and replicate. However, it is better to think of the host cell as mistakenly creating the wrong proteins from a bad code (provided by the virus).
Imagine a chef who has found a recipe in his kitchen, but if he uses the recipe, he has to write out two new ones. So the chef goes along, and re-writes the recipe, and creates the dish. It just so happens that this dish is deadly to the chef and the chef dies. But he's already written out a two new copies of the recipe, ready to be made by two new chefs who comes along. This is how viruses work (in a roundabout way).
The recipe is not alive, and does not take a hold of the chef, the chef just goes along thinking its a normal recipe until he dies. Just how viruses are not living, but capsules of code which may happen to be harmful.
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