Can you post this as a new submission? I want to read knowledgeable peoples' responses to it! :)
Viruses are incredible. This video does a great job of illustrating how HIV in particular seems to hijack so many essential systems. I now feel like I have a deeper appreciation for why "cures" for viruses are like a holy grail technology – how could you even prevent something like this without collateral damage to some perfectly healthy + necessary process? They're so tangential to how our cells need to work that they're almost parallel.
The level of detail in the knowledge of the process is astounding. Having never studied anything like this, at every stage I kept thinking: how do we know all of this?
For me the most incredible part of the video is the transcription process. Looks like the head of a Turing machine going through the "tape". Really amazing that something like this occurs in the body at a nanometric scale.
If it helps, consider that "your body" is the-same-or-more dangerously impressive, with layers of hideously effective defenses to displace or starve or murder anything that gets close, a swarming hive of unfathomable nanotechnology winnowed over millions of years of adversity between the many inheritors of an ancient grey-goo apocalypse.
I'm not afraid of the viruses per se, I trust in my immune system. It's more the extreme intricacy of the whole damn meatbag. Kinda like looking up at the stars in an ultra-dark environment and seeing more stars than you've ever seen before. I get a little dizzy. Don't get me started on math.
If math can make you feel awe, you've got to watch the Numberphile series on very big numbers. They're constants used in proofs that are specific, well-defined integers known to be finite, but so huge that the physical universe does not have enough particles (or even Plank-scale microstates) in it to represent the number of digits these numbers have! Absolutely mind-bending stuff.
Damn... And proteins are not living organisms, but the video makes them look like autonomous agents and even states thing like "the virus recruits new proteins". Is this mostly an anthropomorphization of the events, or did I miss the relevant episode of biology?
> Is this mostly an anthropomorphization of the events
Yes.
Basically everything is bumping around until the desired reaction or configuration is obtained. The irrelevant proteins are generally not shown.
The length scales involved are extremely short so the chaotic soup works itself into configuration shockingly quickly.
There are also membranes, vesicles, and organelles (e.g. Golgi) that partition, package, and redistribute proteins so that they tend to be more concentrated where required.
"Employing an bio-mimic evolutionary compilation algorithm" does sound better than "changing things semi-randomly until it compiles and passes the tests".
It makes a lot more sense when described from this perspective:
>You may wonder how things get around inside cells if they are so crowded. It turns out that molecules move unimaginably quickly due to thermal motion. A small molecule such as glucose is cruising around a cell at about 250 miles per hour, while a large protein molecule is moving at 20 miles per hour. Note that these are actual speeds inside the cell, not scaled-up speeds. I'm not talking about driving through a crowded Times Square at 20 miles per hour; to scale this would be more like driving through Times Square at 20 million miles per hour!
>Because cells are so crowded, molecules can't get very far without colliding with something. In fact, a molecule will collide with something billions of times a second and bounce off in a different direction. Because of this, molecules are doing a random walk through the cell and diffusing all around. A small molecule can get from one side of a cell to the other in 1/5 of a second.
>As a result of all this random motion, a typical enzyme can collide with something to react with 500,000 times every second. Watching the video, you might wonder how the different pieces just happen to move to the right place. In reality, they are covering so much ground in the cell so fast that they will be in the "right place" very frequently just by chance.
It's wild to think what goes into making a life happen. It's so alien, and so complex that it's hard to even realize where "the person" starts compared to the rest of the world. That video is just mind bending.
I've heard about membrane protein enables interaction with outside molecules that are random walking near the cell membrane, but seeing it as an animation really hit me that that's how things work.
https://vimeo.com/260291607