Fringe S1E11 (2009) Part II - "It's Viral"

Spoiler Level – Low

The Show – An FBI agent teams up with a criminal and a mental patient (the greatest scientific minds in the world) to solve cases from The X-Files. Okay, two weeks of talking about this show's pseudoscience has left me a little bitter, but it's actually really good in other aspects.

The Scene – Let's continue with the episode Bound (S1E11). Last week we discussed why the slug-like creature in show in no way resembles the common cold virus in superficial terms. But it's how a virus behaves that really defines it. The TV slugs begin life as eggs, which look like a yellow powder. When the eggs are ingested and contact stomach acid, they rapidly grow and climb out the victim's mouth, suffocating him in the process. This is somewhat different from the common cold that most of us experience. 

Viruses can kill their hosts in many ways. Choking on the virus itself is not one of them. From Fringe.

The Science – Last week, I commented on how viruses are extremely tiny. Basically, if you were the size of a rhinovirus particle, a grain of salt would look like a mountain. Here's a fun website that help provide a sense of scale. Rhinovirus is small as far as viruses go, but even the largest viruses must be substantially smaller than the cells in your body. This is important for what a virus is an what it does. Let's explore.

A virus is not a cell. Although the scientists of Fringe refer to their virus as a single cell, that label is wrong. While single-celled organisms are relatively simple compared to plants and animals, they are so so much more complex than viruses. Where viruses are just genetic materials in a package, even the simplest of cells are constantly carrying out a huge number of processes related to their growth and reproduction. Viruses need to infect cells because they can’t carry out these processes themselves.

Viruses don’t come from eggs and don’t grow. They have much simpler life cycles. Viruses inject their genetic material into our cells. They hijack the cells to copy their genetic material and create more coat proteins. The components assemble themselves into new virus particles that are fully mature from the start. The new viruses leave the infected cell and find a new one to infect and start the cycle over again. An infected cell cannot carry out its normal function while helping the virus reproduce, and it will eventually die when it's overrun with new viruses. That is how viruses normally cause harm.

This gets to the heart of why viruses are small why scaling them up wouldn't make any sense. A virus must be  significantly smaller than the cell it infects or else it would be impossible to assemble new copies of itself inside that cell. Even if the creature on Fringe looked like a giant virus, it wouldn't reproduce itself or cause a person harm the same way as a virus would. Despite whatever other properties that slug may have, there's no reason for a scientist to conclude it's a virus.

Fixing the Scene – A supersized virus might make a decent soccer ball, but that’s really about it. We’ll have to scrap that idea entirely. A large, multicellular parasite would serve the same purpose as the virus slug, but that’s not very exciting for science fiction. I’d go with a giant amoeba. Amoebae are cellular. They lack distinct shapes like the slugs and are mobile in a way that would look cool on the screen (though more slow and ominous than the slugs). We could even make it slimy. It would still be incredible to see an amoeba that large, so the audience would still understand that the people who engineered it accomplished a major scientific feat. The giant amoeba is probably still an impossible thing, but it’s realistic enough to allow in science fiction. At any rate, it’s certainly better than taking a giant slug and claiming it in any way resembles a cold virus.

Imagine a giant one of these. I'd be freaked out. From Wikimedia Commons.

Next Week – Genetic engineering and determinism in Gattaca (1997).