Do viruses die as apart of their life cycle or must they be killed some way?

Question

i am doing a report on viruses being living organisms or not and i giving both sides of the argument. i need to know if viruses die on their own as a part of their life cycle.

Answer 1

Viruses don't really "die." They're not alive. At least in the biological terms they aren't. They follow the natural selection type of rule that "a species must somehow reproduce to live on." When it attaches to a host (a cell) it automatically inserts its DNA or RNA (viruses can have either one of these), like as if it's programmed to do it. Otherwise it's idle; it's just there on the floor unless it finds a specific host to begin the Lysogenic or Lytic cycle on.

You can view them as protein-made sons of you-know-what machines that aren't alive in a biological sense because it does not reproduce by itself; it depends on something else. It doesn't really have those 7 characteristics of life (see http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/in... for the 7 characteristics). All they do is sit there and wait for something to intersting to happen (you know what I mean by "interesting") and then jumps on a gets to work.

There are viruses recovered from egyptian mummies that still functions!

So to answer your question, viruses do "die" as part of their life cycle inside a host (because it gets destroyed after it inserts DNA/RNA, or another way of saying is that it's just a protein capsule left there doing nothing).

Common Cold is caused by viruses, so they can also be "killed" in some way too!

Answer 2

Viruses are infectious particles.  They don't die because they've never been alive.  Viruses are active or dormant.  Viruses are non-cellular and have either RNA  or DNA but not both.

Answer 3

Viruses aren't really alive at all.  There is a big debate over whether or not they are.  They are basically inert, meaning they don't do anything or are inactive.  They only become active and deadly once they enter a cell, typically a human cell, or animal cell and then start the process of making new viruses in that human cell.  They basically take over that cell, draining it of all it's nutrients.  To stop viruses, they get stopped by different types of blood cells

Answer 4

Viruses are not alive, so they cannot die.  They can be rendered non-infectious.  They can only reproduce inside the cells of the host using the cellular machinery of the host.  

Whether they are alive or not is an issue of  language usage, not biology per se.