Livre - Virusphere

What Doesn't Kill You, Makes You Sronger In 1993 an ambulance screamed westwards through the dusty roads of New Mexico. A previously healthy young man was drowning in the middle of a desert, in fluids produced by his own lungs. This was the beginning of the terrifying Sin Nombre hantavirus epidemic. It also marked the start of a scientific journey that would change our understanding what it means to be human. After witnessing the outbreak, leading expert Dr Frank Ryan focused his research on viral evolution – what forces drive it and what makes some viral strains benign while others are so incredibly deadly? He was astonished to discover that living with viruses gives us an evolutionary advantage. That viruses and animals can co-evolve together. Virusphere reveals the hidden world of the virus. This extends from the oceans, where viruses are essential to marine ecosystems; to the soil, where they help plants grow; and into our own bodies, where even in health our gut teems with billions of viruses and when infected so does our blood. The domain of the virus, newly termed the ‘virosphere’, is inside us and all around us. Ryan takes readers on a whirlwind tour of known viruses, from AIDS and Ebola to the common cold, then delves into the virosphere and its role within every ecosystem on Earth, including us. His gripping conclusions shed new light on the natural world and the beginnings of life on Earth, proving that what doesn’t kill you really does make you (and your species) stronger. FRANK RYAN is a consultant physician and evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield. He is also the internationally bestselling author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, a New York Times Book of the Year, Darwin’s Blind Spot and Virus X. He pioneered the evolutionary concepts of viral symbiosis and genomic creativity and has contributed to the modern understanding of the evolution of the human genome. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Linnaean Society of London. ‘Extremelywell written… Frank Ryan has the page-turning and spine-chilling ability of a good novelist’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ‘Ryan is very good at making technical matters comprehensible to the lay reader, but more impressive still is the wayhe conveys the intellectual excitement and elation of scientific discovery’ LITERARY REVIEW ‘Dr Ryan writes well in a difficult technical field, weavingthe technicalities of scientific history, medicine, molecular biology and evolution into the human narratives… Very readable and disturbing’ NEW YORK TIMES ‘Ryan takes us through the drama of discovery and challenges the notion that certain questions are too appalling to contemplate’ NEW SCIENTIST