Zimmer Talks about Viruses

Carl Zimmer write articles and books on biological topics. His latest book is titled A Planet of Viruses. Here is a recent talk he gave on that subject and is available as a video from FORA.tv:



Elsewhere Zimmer points out that we are more bacteria than human, i.e. we carry ten times the number of baterial cells in and on our bodies than we carry human cells. In this talk he astounds me with a new fact. We have roughly tens times as much endogenous retroviruses embedded in our genome than we have human genes in our genome! (This article by Zimmer gives examples of embedded viruses.)

To call yourself "human" is to be charitable. We are more bacteria than human and more virus than human. Who would have thought!