On the eve of my departure to the US (if I followed Carl's habit of naming posts according to song, the title would have been Amerika ...) I was reminded of a chat I had with the passenger next to me on my way back from Zurich in July. The man was a professor in virology at the University f Harare, and while we talked a lot of politics and the "situation" in Zimbabwe; we also had a chat about other things; including viruses (or is it virii?) and the idea of a good virus.
The word virus has a bad reputation - both in biology and in computer science. Viruses have a reputation of being parasites; bringing harm to their hosts and generally causing a nuisance. But, in my opinion they are under rated - and their basic power of how quickly they can be transmitted from host to host could be exploited for "good" purposes. Consider a potential vaccine for HIV - the easiest way to spread the vaccine would be to use a virus that can easily spread amongst the population - like a cold. Sure, it would not suit the purposed of the big pharmaceutical companies; but it would certainly be the easiest way to cure people. and viruses as cures are used already for flu vaccines etc anyway - shouldn't be too difficult.
The same mechanism could be used to patch security holes in computers - fix a bug with a virus - much more efficient than the current way of doing things. And all will hail the good virus ;)
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