José Antonio López Guerrero joins the RAED as a Numerary Member

The Honorable Dr. José Antonio López Guerrero, PhD in Biological Sciences (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), joins the RAED as a Full Member, with the speech “Los virus como motor de vida y evolución” (Viruses as a Driver of Life and Evolution).

Reply: Dr. M. Àngels Calvo Torras, PhD in Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy

Headquarters of the Royal National Academy of Medicine (RANM). Arieta Street, 12, Madrid, 28013

Thursday, 02 October 2025

18:30 h

Format: Face-to-face and telematic in live streaming

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Viruses as the driving force of life and evolution

According to Peter Medawar, biologist, immunologist, essayist, literary critic, and science communicator, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine and Physiology in 1960, “viruses are a set of ‘bad news wrapped in proteins.'” It is clear that this definition, lacking scientific rigor—there are infectious agents without proteins and others that are only made of them—presents a purely social intention, renewed in force after the recent global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, statistically and evolutionarily speaking, it could not be more wrong. I cannot accept it as valid. Within the virosphere as a whole, the universe of these nanoorganisms—with an average size of less than 100 nanometers—only a percentage well below one percent of viral species have harmful clinical, veterinary, or environmental connotations.

I was always a very restless child. Hungry for new knowledge and, something that has never left me, for… Communicate it to others. I remember using a stick to write formulas I’d just learned at San Fermín School, with Don Enrique Jr. With him, I learned the formula for water and how those atoms arranged themselves according to the structure of ice, liquid, or gas, that of butane, or any combination of halogens and metals to form salts, or so they explained to me.

My first experiment consisted of infecting several established cell lines—transformed, tumor-like, immortal cell lines used in research in any laboratory around the world—immunocompetent lines derived from cells that, before becoming malignant, played a role in the immune response. I had to infect seven cell lines with different viruses available in the laboratory: poliovirus, herpesvirus, Semliki Forest virus, and vaccinia (the vaccine virus), among others. The results were featured on the cover of an international scientific journal.

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