Tiny Intruders

An autonomous agent swims through your body, finding its target: one of your cells.

That’s right: this little nano-machine resides inside of your body, doing its work to rearrange your DNA.

Don’t worry, though. This previously programmed entity isn’t exactly like today’s self-driving cars or even early ancient Greek automata. It’s certainly far from passing the Turing test.

This “machine” is ten times smaller than a bacteria cell that lives inside your body, and your cells are ten times bigger than a bacterium.

In spite of being tiny and not particularly intelligent, our little machine has a superpower: there are trillions of identical copies of our little machine inside you, right now.

This isn’t really a machine as such, though. These aren’t really tiny robots that live inside you.

That’s right! I’m talking about a virus.

Is it any wonder, then, that the computer industry long ago made the analogy that a malicious software program is like a human virus? After all, the software virus goes inside the program, wreaking havoc on the cell’s programming—its DNA.

Like a biological virus, a software-based virus can be replicated with the greatest of ease. With software, it’s just CNTRL+V, copying and pasting your way to an identical virus in a matter of seconds (or much, much faster in the case of programs designed to do this).

Unlike a computer virus, with biology, the virus needs a physical substrate. It has to attach itself to a cell membrane. Then, it enters the heart of the cell so it can release the goodies: the genetic material at the center of the cell.

At its core, DNA is information—or programming, if you prefer. Like a computer virus, the biological virus corrupts that information, changing it so that the cell begins to function completely differently. Then, the cell replicates with that new programming.

Is it an ironic twist that we can study something we’ve created in order to understand something that lives inside our bodies? I’m not sure, but we humans have been building models of things to understand them for a long time, like models of the planets or the Big Bang and its subsequent resulting mess.

Of course, the difference here is that we didn’t create computer viruses in order to help us understand biological viruses, but we’ve managed to repurpose something harmful into something useful. That’s always noteworthy.

At their core, all systems—whether forged by billions of years of evolution, or designed by humans—operate on principles of information exchange, replication, and adaptation.

By looking through the lens of our creations, like computer viruses, we can gain insights into the natural phenomena that predate us by billions of years.

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