Throughout the life of this blog (it started in December 2018), “extraordinary ordinary things” have been essentially things so integrated into our daily lives that we seldom think about them and their origins, e.g. the balloon, elevator, zipper, pencil, postage stamp, U. S. Constitution, etc. In virtually all cases, these seemingly unremarkable items have a long and well-documented history going back thousands of years . The topic of this essay, the “virus,” also has an extremely long history, dating back millions and millions of years rather than just a few millennia, and a backstory that is largely unknown and certainly not well-documented. Nevertheless, today viruses are at the top of most people’s minds, both in the area of health (COVID) and science (computer virus).
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