THE largest virus yet discovered has been found lurking in a water cooling tower at Bradford in the north of England. It infects amoebas, but its discoverers believe it may also be capable of infecting humans.
The mammoth virus is 400 nanometres in diameter. Though that is a thousand times smaller than a pinhead, it is bigger than some bacteria.
At first, Didier Raoult at the Mediterranean University in Marseille and his team assumed that is exactly what it was. The virus’s outer coating even reacts to a chemical stain that is supposed to be bacterium-specific. But the researchers became…
