With the onset of spring in East Texas comes both beauty and misery. Like so much of life, along with the beautiful comes some ugly. Roses have thorns, plants have allergy-producing pollen, and with the warmer weather we have mosquitoes. And far beyond just being a general nuisance, they can carry deadly diseases. We are taught in the Bible that death, disease, and suffering are a result of sin and our separation from God. I guess that means there were no mosquitoes in Eden!

In any event, I was noticing one of these little pesky flying insects this week and realized that I had seen its likeness in virology. The T4 Bacteriophage (killer virus) looks creepy in the same way. This virus infects bacteria by injecting its own DNA into the bacteria and hijacking the cell to become a virus-producing factory. Shown above, you can see one of these sinister-looking cells injecting its DNA into a cell, about to become a clone-producing factory until its resources are spent and it lyses permanently. Virus comes from the Latin word meaning “poison,” and no wonder!

While the virus and the mosquito are not remotely related, they have more than their sinister looks in common. Both are parasites. They can’t live on their own, so they feed off the life of their unwilling hosts. How incredible is it then that they share so much in common? Who made the parasites? Are these God’s creation as much as the butterfly and the flower? The answer is not so simple. While we know that God created everything, the parasites by definition came later on, because they could not flourish without the life of others to sustain them. And simply because I don’t care for them so much doesn’t negate their purpose. The inescapable fact is that they share an astonishing resemblance and a common Creator.