For years, we've known that not all bacteria are enemies — some are actually good for us, and belong inside us. That understanding sparked a boom in probiotics science and a multibillion dollar probiotics industry. But viruses? They still get a bad rap, despite quietly occupying our insides —and sometimes even helping us.
Not that scientists even agree on whether viruses are alive or not. There's so much we don't know, including just what they are doing in our bodies. What we do know, though, is that viruses are not, in fact, all out to get us. Not only are they not uniformly bad news for our health, but many viruses actually live with us in a symbiotic and evolutionary relationship. Viruses exist in healthy people, and some are even actively beneficial for human health. Not to mention that about 8% of our very own genome consists of ancient viral genes. So basically, viruses are in us, and are us. Although we have known a lot about a small number of heavily-studied "bad" viruses for decades, the vast diversity of these weird little guys that co-exist in humans is mostly unmapped, just waiting to be discovered and understood.
