Viruses are not autonomous living beings. Viruses are, so to speak, molecule complexes. Are they alive? Well, outside a host they cannot live autonomously. In other words they need a host, they have to infect a cell and then use metabolism of the cell and so on and the machinery of the cell. So if the virus are outside of the cell you can crystallise them... they are just like inorganic material. But once the virus penetrates a cell it has all properties of a living being, be it already... Name some of these properties, it is able to reproduce itself, it will undergo mutation so it can adapt to a new environment, by having these properties it has the property of selection, Darwinian type of selection. Well, what about metabolism? Well, it utilises metabolism of the cell, it utilises the building blocks of... the cell also has to synthesise nucleic acids and proteins, so it utilises that. And sometimes it so efficiently reprograms the cell that the cell dies and the virus multiplies in large amount.

Now you might ask, where do viruses come from? Isn't it a principle against life which they are based on, if they destroy their host they destroy their basis of life also. That evolutionary adaptation is usually done the other way around, that you provide the basis for your existence and not destroy the basis of your existence. But viruses might not have learnt that and perhaps are able to learn because we have seen already they have a very high mutation rate.  They have the mutation rate which is simply the error rate of the polymerising enzyme which is of the order of one in ten thousand. So they make every... about every ten thousand replications they make one error, and if a virus contains ten thousand building blocks, well they make one per replication step. And that's how they build up a quasispecies of many different mutants.

Now we have studied very precisely the processes connected with it. Christof Biebricher using our [pet], the Q-beta, virus... phage Q-beta, has studied in detail the kinetics of these replication mechanisms and mutation processes and so on, and much of our knowledge is based on this. We also, and you yourself, were involved in this work. We also studied evolution of viruses. Now viruses most certainly are not prebiotic events, they are post-biotic events, because they need a host cell. So they can only come about when there is a cell, perhaps they were a part of the cell which got independent and used evolutionary tricks to become independent.