Overview
Viruses are the smallest living things known to science, yet they hold the entire planet in their sway. We are most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or the flu, but viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they were trees. Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long, in fact, that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering viruses everywhere they look: in the soil, in the ocean, even in caves miles underground.
This fascinating book explores the hidden world of viruses—a world that we all inhabit. Here Carl Zimmer, popular science writer and author of Discover magazine’s award-winning blog The Loom, presents the latest research on how viruses hold sway over our lives and our biosphere, how viruses helped give rise to the first life-forms, how viruses are producing new diseases, how we can harness viruses for our own ends, and how viruses will continue to control our fate for years to come. In this eye-opening tour of the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life as we know it, we learn that some treatments for the common cold do more harm than good; that the world’s oceans are home to an astonishing number of viruses; and that the evolution of HIV is now in overdrive, spawning more mutated strains than we care to imagine.
The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” A Planet of Viruses is sure to please his many fans and further enhance his reputation as one of America’s most respected and admired science journalists.
Synopsis
Viruses are the smallest living things known to science, yet they hold the entire planet in their sway. We are most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or the flu, but viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they were trees. Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long, in fact, that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering viruses everywhere they look: in the soil, in the ocean, even in caves miles underground.
This fascinating book explores the hidden world of viruses—a world that we all inhabit. Here Carl Zimmer, popular science writer and author of Discover magazine’s award-winning blog The Loom, presents the latest research on how viruses hold sway over our lives and our biosphere, how viruses helped give rise to the first life-forms, how viruses are producing new diseases, how we can harness viruses for our own ends, and how viruses will continue to control our fate for years to come. In this eye-opening tour of the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life as we know it, we learn that some treatments for the common cold do more harm than good; that the world’s oceans are home to an astonishing number of viruses; and that the evolution of HIV is now in overdrive, spawning more mutated strains than we care to imagine.
The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” A Planet of Viruses is sure to please his many fans and further enhance his reputation as one of America’s most respected and admired science journalists.
Editorials
James Norton
…Carl Zimmer accomplishes in a mere 100 pages what other authors struggle to do in 500: He reshapes our understanding of the hidden realities at the core of everyday existence…Zimmer's train of thought is concise and illuminating.—The Washington Post
Lancet Infectious Diseases
“A contagious fear pervades the public perception of viruses, and rightly so, because they cause many serious diseases; but they are not all bad. In A Planet of Viruses Carl Zimmer seeks to convey this message, elegantly communicating the history of viruses, their symbiotic relation with life, and their influence on mankind’s development.”Choice
“Although most everyone is familiar with the word "viruses," few people are aware of the major role they play as powerful agents of change on Earth. Zimmer presents an intriguing journey into the world of viruses, providing a fascinating historical perspective. . . . This is an insightful book that serves as an excellent resource for understanding viruses and their relationship to humans. . . . Highly recommended.”Booklist (starred review)
“Absolutely top-drawer popular science writing.”ScienceNews
"As with any great journey, this virtual tour opens your eyes and expands your horizons. You’ll learn amazing facts. But this is no textbook. Zimmer does not do boring or stuffy; reading his work is like hanging out with the smartest, most interesting guy you have ever met as he regales you with tales of his travels and fascinating finds along the way."—ScienceNewsWashington Post
“In A Planet of Viruses, science writer Carl Zimmer accomplishes in a mere 100 pages what other authors struggle to do in 500: He reshapes our understanding of the hidden realities at the core of everyday existence. . . . Whether he’s exploring how viruses come to America or picking apart the surprisingly complicated common cold, Zimmer’s train of thought is concise and illuminating.”Microbe Magazine
“This book is pure reading pleasure. It is amazing how seamlessly Carl Zimmer tells the stories of viruses in short chapters, describing the history, microbiology, and impacts of viruses in interesting, informative, readable chapters.”Boing Boing
“Carl Zimmer is one of my absolute favorite science writers, and he's about to come out with a new book called A Planet of Viruses. I'm a bit of a virology fangirl, and am, thus, ridiculously excited about this news.”Rebecca Skloot
“Carl Zimmer is one of the best science writers we have today. A Planet of Viruses is an important primer on the viruses living within and around all of us—sometimes funny, other times shocking, and always accessible. Whether discussing the common cold and flu, little-known viruses that attack bacteria or protect oceans, or the world’s viral future as seen through our encounters with HIV or SARS, Zimmer’s writing is lively, knowledgeable, and graced with poetic touches.”Richard Preston
“I’m a serious fan of Carl Zimmer, and A Planet of Viruses provided a new treat. It’s thoughtful, precise, and engrossing, page by page. Zimmer has an uncanny ability to tell cool tales about nature that leave you with new thoughts and understanding, always keeping precisely to the science.”Jonathan Weiner
“This little book will interest anyone on this planet who has ever played host to a virus. It is beautifully clear, eminently sensible, and fascinating from beginning to end—like everything Carl Zimmer writes. I don’t know how Zimmer does it! Neither does anyone else who follows and enjoys his work.”Nathan Wolfe
“An accessible and gripping narrative on a serious topic that manages to explain, in plain English, how viruses are changing the world. Carl Zimmer has found great stories and woven them into an honest, optimistic book. It is a wonderfully vivid and compelling read.”Julia Sweeney
“I hope Carl Zimmer lives a long, long time so we can get more and more books from him. . . . [A Planet of Viruses is] a short read . . . but intense and well explained.”Forbes
"Part of a series sponsored by the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) to help support educational outreach to students, [A Planet of Viruses] packs into 109 pages just about everything you’ve always wanted to know–and a lot you’ll probably wish you didn’t know–about the viruses that have caused humanity so much grief throughout history."—Forbes
Times Higher Education
"For those with long memories, not much seems to have happened in fundamental physics and cosmology since Carl Sagan's Cosmos, 30 years ago. . . . The real action is in biology, where amazing new facts just keep coming. The techniques of genome analysis make it remarkably easy at the moment to make unexpected observations. [A Planet of Viruses] is packed with them, carefully assembled by another talented populariser, the science writer and Yale University lecturer Carl Zimmer."—Times Higher EducationOnion A.V. Club
"Science writer Carl Zimmer has a penchant for writing about things most humans like to avoid; his previous works include Microcosm: E. Coli And The New Science Of Life, and Parasite Rex. Each chapter of his latest work is dedicated to a different type of virus, providing a brief synopsis on what makes a certain species unique, and using the example to launch into fascinating information about what it teaches about the nature of viruses and life in general."Booklist
"Zimmer’s information-packed, superbly readable look at virological knowledge awakens readers to the fact that not only are viruses everywhere but we couldn’t live without them."—BooklistBoing Boing
Carl Zimmer is one of my absolute favorite science writers, and he's about to come out with a new book called A Planet of Viruses. I'm a bit of a virology fangirl, and am, thus, ridiculously excited about this news.”— Maggie Koerth-Baker
The Barnes & Noble Review
If I told you that you have a virus, there's a good chance that you'd go running to your PC to check that your antivirus software is up to date. Perhaps you'd discover that your computer had been infected by a highly contagious bug -- a software microbe that threatened the health of your hard drive.
But a computer virus is just a metaphor for an actual living thing -- the most abundant form of life on earth. In A Planet of Viruses, science journalist Carl Zimmer goes back to the source and surveys the world of real viruses in nature. His absorbing account combines epidemiology, marine biology, genetics, biochemistry, and population history (among other pursuits) as it hops from virus to notable virus -- only polio is oddly missing -- to tell a story that emphasizes both the long history of viruses and their fundamental importance to how humans have evolved and lived.
Take smallpox, for example, the virus that led to the word "vaccine," whose root in the Latin for cow ("vacca") points to Edward Jenner's historic discovery that cowpox immunized people against smallpox. Jenner published a pamphlet in 1798 that announced the results of his experiments, and they eventually made possible the eradication of smallpox, a historic -- and still unique -- human achievement. The last recorded case of smallpox was in 1977.
Smallpox took a huge toll before being brought to heel, and it's no exaggeration to assert that the virus affected the course of human history. The virus killed hundreds of millions of people between 1400 and 1800 alone, a staggering total to contemplate. Even during the twentieth century, while its territory was being steadily reduced, smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people and blinded millions more.
Moreover, as many historians have noted, smallpox was in effect–if not intention -- a biological weapon of New World conquest, as it cut down Native American populations more swiftly than any human warfare could have. The disease also took the four-year-old son of Benjamin Franklin in 1736. Franklin was a proponent of the early and more dangerous form of smallpox immunization, which involved the use of a smallpox scab to cause a limited infection that would then confer protection against the disease. Of his son's encounter with smallpox, he wrote in his Autobiography that "I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation."
Zimmer's most intriguing point in this slender but compelling book centers on identity: viruses participate in our understanding not only of human history but also human definition -- that is, of what "human" means.
Viruses are tiny packets that carry small strings of genes. Unlike cells, they lack the apparatus to reproduce on their own, and thus require host cells to do that for them. They enter those cells and redirect the cells' internal mechanics for their own ends, issuing chemical commands to the cells to replicate the virus. (The relatively unregulated complexity of this procedure is part of what leads to so many viral mutations, which in turn makes antiviral vaccines so hard to devise.)
When viruses don't kill their hosts, they commingle their genes with the host's own and thus leave their traces in the host's DNA. That means humans are, in Zimmer's phrase, "an inextricable blend of mammal and virus," and viruses are "a genetic archive" that we can use to trace the history of life on earth. Using detection techniques that we might dub "paleo-virology," scientists can examine viral traces to reconstruct the path of a virus -- and also its host populations -- through history. For example, by examining the particular strain of HIV carried by Haitians in the early days of the AIDS epidemic (when the entire Haitian population was demonized by frightened Americans as carriers of this dread new scourge), scientists have been able to trace the paths of expatriate Haitians from central Africa after the country then called Zaire gained its independence from Belgium (which called it the Belgian Congo) in the early 1960s. This insight firms up the theory that AIDS first made a species jump from chimpanzees to humans (a fact established through the study of chimpanzee genetics), and then incubated in Africa for generations before increased development (new roads, increased human contact) led to a tipping point that allowed the disease to explode throughout the global population beginning in the 1980s.
The idea of a tipping point invokes another viral metaphor, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, which suggests that ideas behave like viruses. And so they can. "Ideas," writes Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Jacques Monod, "have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve." Social scientists have long sought cultural equivalents for biological forms of transmission, such as the "meme," an idea introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to describe a communicable piece of social information. The underlying structure of a social network like Facebook bears a more than passing resemblance to a nervous system because our understandings of biology and culture continually inform each other. A Planet of Viruses is a fine brief introduction to the biological underpinnings of a set of ideas that have, you might say, gone viral.
--Leonard Cassuto