All 13 Uses of

virus
in
Oryx and Crake

The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host — organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year.†
p. 22.8

The bad microbes and viruses want to get in through the cell doors and eat up the pigoons from the inside.†
p. 29.5 *

They have a really elegant delivery system — they embed a virus inside a carrier bacterium, E. coli splice, doesn't get digested, bursts in the pylorus, and bingo!†
p. 211.5

Jimmy pondered this; then he asked if anyone else had caught the virus.†
p. 253.4

Documentaries were hastily thrown together, with images of the virus — at least they'd isolated it, it looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines — and commentary on its methods.†
p. 341.3

He might be immune from the virus — unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him — but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.†
p. 345.8

He left it turned on — deliberately, I believe — and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand selected by Crake and subsequently eliminated, and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product.†
p. 346.6

There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves.†
p. 346.7

Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to his assisted suicide death.†
p. 346.9

Definitions:

(1) (virus as in: Covid 19 virus)
a tiny infectious agent that causes disease by invading living cells and using them to make more copies of itself

Although viruses contain genetic material, they can only reproduce by hijacking the reproductive machinery of a cell they invade.
(2) (virus as in: computer virus)
a type of software that spreads without invitation between computers and causes damage to data and software

Computer viruses are so-named because like a biological virus, they contain instructions on how to reproduce, but require the infected computer to actually execute the instructions.
(3) (viral as in: it went viral)
spreading rapidly and widely -- especially through the internet or social media