Borna Virus

Zimmer, Carl. "Hunting Fossil Viruses in Human DNA". The New York Times January 11 2010.

In this article, Carl Zimmer talks about a disease called the Borna Virus, which scientists are trying to discover what genes belonging "to a kind of virus that has never been found in the human genome before," that causes it to show up in most animal species such as horses and humans. Zimmer describes the Borna Virus as "obscure and grotesque," and can "alter human behavior, playing a role in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder."
He argues, "The virus infected our monkey-like ancestors 40 million years ago, and its genes have been passed down ever since," and scientists are studying fossils to see if there are traces of the virus in the bones of our ancestors. I wouldn't guess that the virus would live on, thinking it would die once the fossil reached the air. I didn't factor in the DNA residue. Scientists in this study, first study human genome and moved on to other fossils to study the mammal genome to see how big the virus has spread, which makes sense because we would want to figure out what species it originated in. He also tells us, "Scientists have found about 100,000 elements of human DNA that probably came from viruses."
Zimmer talks about how retroviruses pass and "mutate" through our DNA, which we learned about in class. I thought it was interesting that he talks about H.I.V. being passed down from Chimpanzees to humans. He says, "H.I.V. evolved about a century ago from a chimpanzee virus known as simian immunodeficiency virus, or S.I.V." I've never heard of S.I.V., but it doesn't surprise me that Chimpanzees would have a similar disease, since we are so close to them with our DNA.