the most people it may seem mystifying that the "wonder drug" have had so much success against the disease. Since viruses, after all, can cause only if they reproduce themselves, why should it not be possible to jam the virus's machinery just as we jam the bacterium's machinery? the answer is quite simple, and indeed obvious, once you realize how a virus reproduces itself. As a complete parasite, incapable of multiplying anywhere expect inside a living cells, the virus has very little, if any, metabolic machinery of its own. To make copies of itself, it depends entirely on materials supplied by the cell it invades. This, however, it can do wiith great efficiency. one virus within a cell can become 200 in twenty-five minutes. And it is therefore difficult to deprive it of those materials or jam the machinery without destroying the cell itself.
biologist discovered the viruses only recently, after a serious of encounters with increasingly simple form of life.