What is a virus. You may be curious how virus is formed, created, or even existed. What is the origin of a virus and where its existence began? The word virus came from the Latin word vīrus, meaning “poison” or “slimy liquid”.

What is a virus

Interestingly, the origin or the existence of virus is too controversial and perhaps unknown.

Three commonly proposed mechanisms for the origins of viruses are: Viruses descended from primitive precellular life forms; viruses escaped cellular genetic elements; viruses devolved from more complex intracellular parasites. … all viruses did not share a single common ancestor. Instead, distinct lineages of viruses probably evolved by different mechanism. – National Library of Medicine

In other words, or in layman’s terms, viruses’ origin is unclear, and no one has not found any roots.

However, in 1892, Dmitri Ivanovsky used one of these filters to show that sap from a diseased tobacco plant remained infectious to healthy tobacco plants even after filtration. Martinus Beijerinck named the infectious agent “virus,” and this discovery is considered the beginning of virology.

The first human virus discovered was yellow fever virus in 1901 by Walter Reed and his team, who proved it was a filterable agent transmitted by mosquitoes.

Now the controversial point is this, are viruses mad-made or just naturally evolved? This is the question still being investigated as of this writing.