Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 62

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Popular Culture Review

horse-delivered message to telegraph and telephone. The Industrial Revolution
produced new machines and methods for everything from printing newspapers
and canning food to building bridges and mining ore. The first motors, photo
graphs, sewing machines, refrigerators, light bulbs, machine guns, and dirigibles
appeared. By the end of the century, there were rockets and radios. X-rays, auto
mobiles, and motion pictures.
It is difficult, though, even amid all this change, to overestimate the impor
tance of the discovery that microscopic living bodies enter our own and cause
disease in predictable ways. This realization fundamentally altered the way hu
mans perceived their world. A microscopic universe of alien beings, hitherto un
suspected or ignored as irrelevant, now pulsed with threat to human life and health.
Bacteria, which cause disease by multiplying within a host and vying with its
defenses until one or the other is overwhelmed, were strange enough to contem
plate. The discovery of viruses in the 1880s (they could not be seen until the ar
rival of electron microscopes in the 1940s) was even more frightening, for those
tiny, odd creatures straddle the line between the living and non-living. Alone, a
virus is inert as rock, unable to grow, move independently, or even respond to
stimuli. Inside living cells, though, and once past a body’s immune system, viruses
commandeer the host’s genetics and produce more of themselves, so efficiently as
to be responsible for more than half of human infectious disease. Recent research
has also implicated viruses in ailments such as stomach ulcers, diabetes, schizo
phrenia, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and certain forms of cancer (Hooper 41-53).
Nobel laureate Peter Medawar in a wry moment once called the virus “a piece of
nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” (Oldstone 8).
This microscopic drama - entering invisibly, eluding natural defenses, turn
ing elements of the host against itself, reproducing rapidly - is rife with possibility
for metaphorical co-optation. What contagious microbes do is assault our borders
and call them into question. Germ theory thus invites metaphors addressing cam
ouflaged danger in our midst: secret unlawful entry; spying, subversion, conspiracy;
any subtle other-directed change in the essential identity of the body or body poli
tic. The urge toward such language is irresistible. Even a mildly clinical NIH booklet
from 1975 speaks of viruses “carrying the blueprint” and “taking over,” of “agents”
that “initiate ... changes in a cell and then ‘go underground’” (“Viruses,” unpag.).
An earlier virology text, Wendell Stanley’s 1961 Viruses and the Nature o f Life,
similarly spends the bulk of its time on millimicrons and nucleoproteins, but in
every discussion of viral dynamics veers toward the cloak and dagger. A virus is
only identifiable “once the damage is done,” Stanley writes; then it will “lose
completely its own identity,” “tricking the cell” like an “espionage agent ... ex
tracting from the cell information” (10, 28, 35-6).
The Cold War influence here is clear, but such rhetoric is not uncommon in