New Yorker: Darwin's Surprise

Here’s a mind-expanding article by Michael Specter that appeared in The New Yorker last December, on a discovery about the way viruses infiltrate human cells and affect the coding of human DNA. The Human Genome Project has shown that our DNA contains many traces of extinct retroviruses that copied themselves into the human genetic code, but were then expelled, destroyed, or altered through the process of evolution. And some of these extinct viruses are now being resurrected in the laboratory by evolutionary biologist Thierry Heidmann of the Institut Gustave Roussy: Darwin’s Surprise. Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died... [read full story]