Un planeta de virus

Scientific popularizer Carl Zimmer tells in this volume the story of how the smallest living things known to science are capable of stopping all of humanity, and what we can learn from how we have defeated them in the past. We are more familiar with viruses that give us colds or flu, but viruses also cause a wide range of diseases, including a disorder that causes wart formations that resemble the bark of a tree to sprout from the human body. But viruses have been in our lives for so long that we are actually partly viruses: the human genome contains a large amount of virus DNA. Meanwhile, scientists continue to discover new viruses everywhere: in the ground, in the ocean, or in caves miles deep. A planet of viruses presents the latest research on how viruses dominate our lives and our biosphere, how they contributed to giving rise to the first forms of life, how they produce new diseases every day and how we can take advantage of them to our advantage. A fascinating study that covers threats such as Ebola and MERS, and explains, among many other questions, how climate change can cause even more deadly outbreaks in the future.