How Viruses Are Discovered

Hi, my name is Michael,

and I'm going to describe how viruses are discovered in one minute or less.

Do you know how viruses are discovered?

You might be thinking like I once did.

Find a sick person, take a sample of their mucus,

and separate the virus from their mucus.

If you thought this, just like me, you would be 100 wrong.

Virologists actually find a sick person, take a sample of their mucus,

add that mucus to a cell culture, add toxic chemicals to the cell culture,

and finally reduce the food to the cell culture, starving the cells.

After doing all that, they notice the cells die,

and then claim there must be a virus in there somewhere.

Virologists then take a small sample of the cell culture,

feed that into a machine to get pieces of genetics,

feed those pieces into software, which then tries to fit things together,

creating a new viral genome.

Do you think the virologist's discovery process is valid science?

Are you convinced viruses exist?