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Asked by ethanm on 14 Jan 2022.
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Prabs Dehal answered on 14 Jan 2022:
🤣
Great question (which made me snort my coffee out of my nose)!
It’s called a retro virus because its code is RNA not DNA, and this RNA is rewritten as DNA once the virus is in a cell. Scientists usually consider decoding DNA->RNA->protein as the “forwards” steps. So RNA->DNA is considered a back step, hence the “retro”.
Retro viruses have been around a long time. Almost half a billion years, so they are sort of retro in time too.
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Samuel Ellis answered on 14 Jan 2022:
I love this question, and I really wish it was true! In fact retroviruses are a type of virus which has its genome in RNA form. When it gets into a host cell it uses an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to turn that RNA into DNA, tricking the cell into using that DNA template to make lots of virus proteins to replicate more of the virus.
I believe the name is because usually DNA is used to make RNA, so the virus is doing the reverse direction which is why it is referred to as retro- (from the latin for backwards).
While some retroviruses like HIV are big health risks, retroviruses can actually be useful tools in research as they can be designed as a way of delivering genes into cells
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Amy Mason answered on 14 Jan 2022:
This is an amazing question.
I really like how you have connected the linguistic meaning of the words and the history you know to make a sensible guess as to why that name might be used.
Unfortunately, not a correct guess this time (see other replies) but this breakdown of word meanings can often be a clue to the origin of the term. For example, there is a maths term “isomorphic” which is used to describe functions. If you know that “iso” means same and “morph” means shape, you can work out that isomorphic functions are ones that don’t change the shape of the space they are acting on.
In science, a good pair of these is telescope and microscope – if you knew that scope mean “to look at”, you might guess from “tele” (far) and “micro” (small) what these instruments do. -
Pam Vallely answered on 17 Jan 2022:
I agree with the previous answers, very funny question! Others have answered why it is called a retrovirus, so I will just add that HIV was actually around a long time before the early 1980’s when it came to everyone’s attention. We now now that it probably emerged as a “zoonosis” that means it crossed from animals into humans some time in the 1800’s and was known in Africa as “slim” disease because it caused people to lose a lot of their body weight in the final stages.
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