Science Questions

Do viruses have a metabolism?

We put this question to Chris Smith

Chris - This is interesting in terms of biomimetics because people are talking about using viruses and their ability to infect cells and inject their DNA and RNA into cells for gene therapy so it’s an important question. And the answer is no. Viruses are not alive they don’t have a metabolism, they’re nothing more than an infectious bag of genes which is able to put those genes into a cell and make the cell produce all the viral products to make more viruses. That’s all they do.

May 2009