In the Times of Viruses
Timothy Gitzen
What the paper says
In the past few years, scientists have discovered ancient viruses trapped in ice that some fear may cause our next global pandemic. The existence of frozen viruses engenders multiple types of relations to the pastness of the virus, including past lives, ecologies, diseases, and ancestors. However, the current great thaw also renders frozen viruses a concern of the future, whereby viruses create relations to future promises of viral pandemics in addition to potential vaccines. That viruses are frozen in glaciers and permafrost complicates our relationship to viruses and time: the ancientness of frozen viruses compares to the possibility of its return to new ecological conditions. By surveying recent scientific and media accounts of these frozen viruses, I propose that frozen ancient viruses are an allochronic assemblage of potentiality that are both fearful and promising, speaking to growing STS attention to microbes, cryopolitics, and the divisions between living, nonliving, and dead.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.