Ebola Terrified Us. Now It’s Helping Us Fight Cancer.

Remember how Clarice Starling has to join forces with Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs to catch Buffalo Bill, even though Dr. Lecter is a convicted serial killer and gets off on hearing about Clarice’s childhood trauma?

That pairing seems so unlikely — a rising star FBI agent and the kind of psychopath she is being trained to hunt down herself. And yet, with Lecter’s help, Clarice is able to bring Buffalo Bill to justice.

This “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” concept is nothing new. But it is blossoming somewhere entirely unexpected: under a microscope. And this time, we’re Clarice and the part of Dr. Lecter is played by a deadly virus.

Warfare on a microscopic scale

Entire lives and deaths are constantly being played out at the microscopic scale — cells divide to make more cells, bacteria eat smaller organisms, viruses infect healthy cells and turn them into production factories to make more virus particles.

A quick note on terminology here — cells are the basis of all living things, and they contain various parts that help them operate, called organelles. Humans and other mammals are made up of trillions of cells, smaller animals have fewer cells, all the way down to bacteria — which are single cells. Viruses, on the other hand, are just pieces of genetic material wrapped up in a protein coat — no fancy organelles. Viruses are also called phages, and viruses that target bacteria…