Theodor Diener had a problem. It was in 1967, and he and his colleagues successfully isolated an infectious agent that caused spindle tuber disease in potatoes that destroy crops. But it wasn’t like what they realised. They called it a virus, but it didn’t act like one thing.
It took Diener four years to demonstrate that mystical beings are even simpler than viruses. It is a single “naked” molecule that can infect potato cells and thus reproduce. He suggested calling it a wild. It was the smallest replicating agent ever identified. With a stroke, dinner expanded my understanding of living in the microscope world.
You might think that such a dramatic discovery would, uh, go viral. Almost no one noticed it yet. Apart from several other plant pathologists, the world of science has forgotten much about wilds for half a century. They had never even heard of him in 2020 when Benjamin Lee of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, was encouraged to look into Wild.
Since then, there has been an explosion of discovery thanks to Lee and others. Now we know thousands of wilds and violids-like entities, with exotic names such as obelisks, ribojunctions, satellites and more. They appear to be found everywhere in a vast range of organisms and microorganisms. I don’t know what most of them are doing, whether most of them are benign or dangerous. However, these simplest replicators raise basic questions about the meaning of being alive. They can even go back to the origins of…
Source: www.newscientist.com
