May 14, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
The New York Sun has a positive review of Microcosm today, and part of me just wants to point you in its direction, let you read about the book's "ecstatically reflective moments," and leave it at that. But there's one puzzling passage that makes me wonder if some printer bent on mischief swapped my page 31 for one that I didn't write. The reviewer observes, correctly, that much of the book is dedicated to drawing parallels between E. coli and us--and all living things as well. While he thinks this works for the most part, he thinks sometimes the comparison is "perhaps too glib."
Mr. Zimmer makes much of the stationary phase E. coli enter during periods when, having surrounded themselves with their own waste, they run out of food. Having befouled their environment and denuded it of its resources, the bacteria quit reproducing, crumple their reproductive apparatus into a compact and rugged crystalline structure, and hibernate -- only to unfold and resume reproducing once lean times pass. At this, Mr. Zimmer remarks ominously, "we humans never get such a second chance." It's a fair shot at anti-greens, except that it's not clear that humans won't be able to persist through similarly difficult conditions, hunkering down while we figure out how to deal with the mess we've made.
I simply can't see how anyone could take that passage as an attack on anti-environmentalists. The "second chance" that we humans don't get is a second chance on life, not a second chance to reduce carbon emissions. And that comparison, the one that is actually on the page, isn't glib at all. (Anyone who has already readthe book can tell me if I'm wrong--just flip to page 31.)
Trust me, I've made my share of slams against ignorant attacks on environmental science. And I have serious doubts that we can just slip off to some bio-dome to figure out how to undo deforestation, overfishing, and the biogeochemical overdrive we've sent the planet into. But I don't like being accused of a silly analogy I never made.
Okay. I'll be quiet now.
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:30 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
May 13, 2008
Category: Science Tattoos
Last fall the Loom was awash in tattoos from scientists. Since then, I've moved them over to my Science Tattoo Emporium. If you haven't checked it out recently, let me invite you over. Incredibly, someone sends me a new science tattoo just about every day. I post them as fast as I can, but I've still got a backlog. And most of them are astonishingly cool--both beautiful and enlightening. I particularly like today's post, today's post, an homage to Darwin's finches. Plenty more where that came from.
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:26 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
May 12, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
I'm heading to Boston on Friday to speak at the Harvard Book Store about Microcosm. It's at 7 pm, and it's free. Information is here. Then it's on to Chicago, where I'll be talking at the Field Museum on Saturday at 2. Here are the details. I hope some Loom readers can make it! (For those who don't live in either fine city, please check my talk page.)
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:07 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
May 10, 2008
Category: General
Following up on the last post, here's George Johnson with Stephen Colbert. Where else on TV could someone recreate one of Faraday's experiments? The new Mr. Wizard?
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:31 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
As long as I can remember, I've been a fan of George Johnson's writing about science. He has always kept focus on the deep mysteries of existence, even while writing in a deliciously clear style. So it was a real pleasure to talk to him on bloggingheads.tv about my own book, Microcosm. Even though we spent lots of time wondering what E. coli tells us about the universal rules of life itself, we still found time to talk about what it's like to have sex in a Waring blender. Check it out. (And to all those insomniacs--don't forget, I'll be on the radio on Coast to Coast AM tonight at 1 am.)
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:55 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
May 9, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
From the new issue: "It is a powerful account of the dynamic, complicated and social world we share with this ordinary yet remarkable bug. Evolution and genetics glitter among the pages, as do the lives and experiments of the scientists who have studied them. Microcosm is exciting, original and wholly persuasive of the beauty and utility of looking at the largest of issues from the smallest perspectives."
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:36 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
I'll be talking on Coast to Coast at a slightly less wee-hours time: 1 am on Sunday.
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Just a quick note to say that, if all goes according to plan, I will be appearing on the Internets on bloggingheads tomorrow, and on the radio show Coast-to-Coast in the wee hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning. In both cases I'll be talking about--you guessed it--Microcosm. I'll be swilling coffee Saturday night because I'll be talking from 2 am to 5 1 to 2 am EST Sunday. If you're not quite such a night owl, I believe they'll archive it on their site.
A couple other Microcosm-related notes: Discover Magazine gives a nod: "With Microcosm, this award-winning science writer has turned out an illuminating biography of one of biology's most influential--and underappreciated--players."
Meanwhile, Larry Moran is going over the book with a fine-tooth comb and catching at least one mistake. Ouch. I knew I should have been more careful about how fast chromosomes replicate. Something to fix in the next printing...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:44 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
At last we come to the fifth winning question about Microcosm, from Ceph. Once again, thanks to the ~240 people who entered the contest. I hope my answers to these five questions give you a sense of what my book's about and why I'm so excited by this little germ. If you want to learn more about it, and about life, pick up a copy.
Ceph asks,
What is your favorite thing that has been done to E. coli (making it glow, smell like bananas, etc)?
My answer below...
Read on »
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Here's the fourth winning question about Microcosm, from Sigmund:
Creationists often point to the bacterial cell and say something to the effect of "the cell is so complicated it is highly improbable that it could have spontaneously formed - therefore God-did-it. Are there any particular features of E.coli that reveal simpler origins?
The answer below the fold...
Read on »
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Now we come to the third winning question about Microcosm. Kenatiod writes,
Long ago, in bacteriology class, the teacher (an ex-nun at an ex-Catholic college) was telling us about the type "F" pili that are used to pass DNA so coli can have sex. One of the students asked "Why do they call them type F?" The teacher started to answer, but stopped, and then she turned bright red. The class start laughing, and then she did as well, and then someone asked, "What other kinds of pili are there?" She pulled herself together, said "Thank you" and class continued.
I would like to know both the answer to the original question, and also when in evolutionary history these tiny beings started having sex.
Read on for the erotic answer...
Read on »
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Here's the second winning question about Microcosm, from Kevin:
E. coli is a bacteria commonly found in the intestines of some animals. What distinguishes the common and harmless strains from those that can cause illness and death?
A lot of people asked this question in the contest. But my sense is that most people think that E. coli is just a nasty germ. When I would tell people I was going to write about E. coli, they thought I was going to pen an expose of the food industry. It came as a surprise to them when I told them that they were carrying billions of E. coli inside them. [More below the fold...]
Read on »
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
If you're just tuning in, on Tuesday I offered five free signed copies of my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life to readers if they sent in a question. I was quite stoked to see the huge reaction. I can tell from the quality of the questions that the sheer volume was not just the result of the lust for a free book. While I can only answer five questions today, I think most people who asked one will find that parts of the book touch on it.
So--without further ado, let's dive in. (This is the first of five posts I'll deliver today.)
1. Frank asks:
Why E. coli? From a historical perspective, why do we study E. coli? There are countless easily culturable microbes out there, so how did the scientific community select this particular species as "the model" for microbiology?
This is one of the strangest parts of the story of E. coli. This microbe isn't just the model for microbiology. It's a model for a lot of the biology common to all living things, from the genetic code to the creation of new copies of DNA to the process by which food is turned into living matter. Scientists have identified the basic functions of most of E. coli's genes, which is a lot more than we can say even for human genes. If you type in "Escherichia coli" into PubMed, the search engine for the National Library of Medicine, you get 253,128 papers. Another favorite species, Drosophila melanogaster, sometimes (wrongly) called the fruit fly, brings up only 29,918.
So you might think there must have been some eminently rational plan to select E. coli to become the creature science knows best. But there wasn't. It was discovered by Theodor Escherich, a pediatrician. In 1885 he delivered a lecture announcing the discovery of a rod-shaped microbe in the diapers of healthy babies. He was struck by how fast it grew on all sorts of food--milk, potatoes, blood. Scientists in the early 1900s used it to study metabolism, but they also used a lot of other bacteria. It was one among many.
A few scientists in the late 1930s and early 1940s changed that. These were scientists who had especially deep questions about how life works. Max Delbruck wanted to know what genes are. George Beadle and Edward Tatum wanted to know how genes produced traits. They wound up with E. coli almost by accident. Tatum wanted to safe, fast-growing microbe that could build a lot of amino acids by itself. He and Beadle planned to blast such a microbe with X-rays to create mutations, and see whether the microbe lost the ability to make one of those amino acids. He chose a strain of E. coli called K-12 that had been isolated from a diptheria patient and had been used in microbiology classes at Stanford ever since.
Max Delbruck, down at Caltech, wanted to find something simpler than flies in which he could study genes. He discovered that another Caltech scientist, Emory Ellis, was infecting E. coli with viruses from sewer water. Ellis was really interested in viruses that might cause cancer in people, but figuring out how viruses infected E. coli seemed like a good place to start. So Delbruck and Ellis began to investigate how viruses could use E. coli to make new copies of themselves.
It certainly didn't hurt that E. coli was safe, grew fast, thrived in oxygen, and otherwise made life easy on scientists who studied it. But its success also came through a peculiar snowball effect. A young graduate student named Joshua Lederberg came to Tatum's lab to study his E. coli mutants, in the hopes of discovering that bacteria have sex. Tatum's bacteria just so happened to swap genes. Now scientists began to use their sex life to study genes, by pulling the microbes apart in the act and seeing which genes had made the jump. Scientists began to map E. coli's genes. They discovered in E. coli the switches that turn genes on and off. In other words, a new science called molecular biology was born. Soon scientists were choosing E. coli to study so they didn't have to reinvent the wheel. It helped that so much of biology is the same from species to species. As the French E. coli biologist Jacques Monod declared, what is true for E. coli is true for the elephant. But in an important sense, E. coli was the accidental victor.
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
May 8, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Thanks to everyone who submitted the 240 or so questions about Microcosm, E. coli, and life in general. I'll pick five of them tonight and answer them tomorrow and start signing copies for the winners. And if you didn't enter, why not considering getting a copy anyway?
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:09 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
From the blog of Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Mind Wide Open
Go Buy Microcosm Right Now
Carl Zimmer may be my favorite science writer around today (others seem to agree), so I'm excited to report that his new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life hit the shelves yesterday. I had the opportunity to read it in manuscript form, and it's really an exceptional book -- what Carl calls an "(un)natural history of E. coli" -- the world's most famous microbe. Having just published a book that partially starred a bacterium myself, I know how hard it is to make a book about microbial life engaging to human readers, but Carl pulls it off brilliantly here -- it's creepy, mind-twisting, and delightful all at the same time. It's the kind of book that literally expands your perspective on the world -- it helps you see how this alternative universe of tiny life forms is bound up crucially in our own day-to-day experience. So go check it out now....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Just a quick reminder--I'll be keeping the contest for a free autographed copy of Microcosm till 5 pm this afternoon. Think of a question about E. coli (and what it can say about life itself), and get in the running for a signed book. I'll post answers to the winning responses tomorrow by noon.
(Thanks to PZ Myers for a link from Pharyngula).
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks• View blog reactions
