Virus — Season 1, Episode 3: The Stuff of Life
Documentary, Talk • 29 min • 1 season, 8 episodes
Episode synopsis
Dr. C. Arthur Knight, featured on this program, introduces his topic with a brief description of properties which characterize living things, and then explains to what degree viruses do or do not have these properties. What is significant, he points out, is that viruses are like other living things to the extent that they are capable of reproducing themselves. Because viruses have a chemical content, similar to that of chromosomes — the cells which determine heredity — and because they can be more easily isolated and fragmented than chromosomes, they are a source of much information for scientists who study life's creation and formation. In addition to his general points, Dr. Knight shows, through a remarkable series of micro-motion pictures, how mutations within viruses can be formed and identified.
About Virus
From KQED in San Francisco and the Virus Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, comes a distinguished series of eight half-hour programs on the nature of the virus. Prepared using a National Science Foundation grant, the series is designed to explain to the viewer some of the basic facts about viruses, those structures so essential to life and health, facts which for the most part have only been discovered in the past twenty-five years. Drawing on advanced scientific techniques such as microcinematography, electron microscopy and freeze drying, as well as on animation, large-scale models and drawings, the programs combine lectures with demonstrations to give the viewer an extremely vivid picture of this complicated topic. Particularly emphasized are facts about the virus' relation to bacterial disease, to polio, and to cancer, and new information about viruses which may not yet be generally known to students of biology or to the non-scientific public.