• Question: Why do you want to find ancient viruses, and not modern viruses?

    Asked by chimbo131 to Katy on 20 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by evemackley.
    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I look for ancient viruses because there’s a lot they can tell us about modern viruses. When we find an ancient virus we can see when it was around, what animals it infected and how it spread. This tells us a lot about how modern viruses could behave. Modern viruses are only a tiny subset of all the viruses which have ever existed, so by only studying modern viruses we waste a lot of information which could be useful in the fight against disease.

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