Viruses Non Living

The concept of viruses being living or non-living has been greatly debated throughout the scientific community, essentially because of varying differences in scientist’s definitions of what constitutes life. Furthermore, scientists also disagree on the degree to which viruses fit into the living or non-living category.

There are seven fundamental components which can be used to define life. The first being that living things must maintain homeostasis; the ability for it to control its internal temperature, or its internal contests. Furthermore, living things must be made of cells, of which viruses are not. Viruses are essentially nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) enclosed in a protein coat (capsid). A single one of these is called a virion. They
Viruses do not have their own metabolism so are incapable of doing this. Even during virus replication, the virus uses the host’s organelles energy to synthesis proteins and construct them, also supporting that they are not living.

Living things respond to stimuli. All living organisms give some sort of immediate response to a change in their environment. While viruses don’t respond to touch or sound or light, there is still not enough definitive evidence to state if they do or do not react to any form of stimuli, so in this case scientists are still unsure if they meet the requirements for life.

Finally living things are able to adapt to their environment. Adaptation and evolution happen through unintentional changes (mutations) that are advantageous to an entire species. Viruses definitely adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes a host does not have enough energy or supplies to support the virus to actively replicate, creating new viruses which operate slightly differently to the virus they received their genetic material from. This is why it is difficult to treat viruses with drugs and vaccines, because there are a variety of different viruses all with different mutations. This adaptation in a sense, helps prolong its existence as there will always be a type of the virus that survives no matter what the conditions, supporting the theory that viruses are
Some scientists have likened them to biological machines rather than living organisms to accommodate this disparity. Perhaps our current definition of what it means to be living needs to be altered to accommodate for viruses, or perhaps introduce a new word to describe the virus’s existence. A machine is not considered to be alive yet it not considered to be dead either. In any case, viruses are still part of our environment and scientists need to decide how to classify it. In my opinion the way life is classified needs be expanded on to incorporate