Viral Parasites

Its an amazing time to be alive, especially in the field of Biotechnology.   I believe a majority of the scientific advances to be made in the 21st century will come directly from the understanding and manipulation of genetic material.    Today I read two very interesting articles on Wired.com, one that talked about French researchers discovering a small virus (called Sputnik) that actually infected and hijacked another larger virus to force it to reproduce the DNA of the attacking virus.   Can a cold virus catch a cold is the question now it would seem.   But the researchers were still arguing over the fact that a human type virus might be too small for another parasitic virus to come along and infect it.   Here is a photo from the article showing the smaller virus attacking the larger one.