DRACO rides again?
A decade ago a scientist named Dr. Todd Rider had a clever idea for an anti-viral drug. In normal eukaryotic cells you have DNA that spends most of its time as a double strand except when being copied or transcribed to an RNA message. That RNA message is single stranded as is the rest of the RNA in your cells except for the occasional short length in some cell processes. But generally a big length of double stranded RNA in a cell means that a cell was infected with a virus. Either a virus that naturally transmits itself with double stranded RNA or one engaged in copying itself within a cell. DNA viruses generally don't make this and some RNA viruses such as AIDS use DNA to copy themselves but most viruses we worry about involve double stranded RNA. And DR. Rider's drug uses this as its point of attack. Now, evolution is quite aware that double stranded RNA is bad news and your innate immune system already has weapons against it. We all have barr...