Theodor Diener had a problem. It was 1967, and he and a colleague successfully isolate the infectious agent that causes potato shaft tubers, which destroys crops. But he did not admit like anything. Although they called a virus, it does not act like one.
Diener had four years to show that the mysterious organization was something simpler than a virus: it is the only “naked” molecule that can contaminate potatoes. He proposed to call a viroid. It was the most recent agent ever identified. In a stroke, Dienerr spread to understand life in the microscopic world.
You can think that such a dramatic discovery went, viral. However, almost no one was noticed. Not only other pathologists in other planologists, the scientific world has forgotten more than half a century about the Byboats. They were so dark, in 2020, Benjamin Lee Bethesda, in Maryland’s national biotechnology information, recommended to try to seek Viroids, that he never heard.
Since then, Lee and others allow the discovery explosion. Now we know thousands of viroids and viroid entities, exotic names such as obelisks, ribozyviruses and satellites. They seem to be everywhere, in many bouquets of organisms and microorganisms. We don’t know what they do most, acceptable or dangerous. But these possible replicators raise basic questions about what it means to be alive. They may also originate …
