loom | June 11, 2008The field of biology has been wildly successful by taking what's called a reductionist approach, i.e., you tackle a small problem in isolation in order to gain insight into larger questions. In his new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, Science writer Carl Zimmer took that reductionist approach and applied it to a pretty big issue: life itself. For Zimmer, the system that serves as a model of all life, and of humanity's often uncomfortable relationship to it, is the unprepossessing gut bacteria, Escherischia coli. Covering all of life is a big task, and Zimmer made the…
loom | June 10, 2008In a couple weeks I head to Texas to the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists to talk about parasites in pop culture. The symposium is called, "Parasitology: Public awareness through literature, art, and film." Our panel has lots of creepy movie clips in store, plus other sorts of media including books and this humble blog. But maybe we'll need to tack on "music" to the end of that list in the symposium title. Inspired by a post of mine on the gorey glam of Ampulex compressa , the emerald cockroach wasp, a band called Super Duper has composed a song. The video is below,…
loom | June 9, 2008Thursday I'll be heading up the road to talk about Microcosm at one of my favorite bookstores: RJ Julia in Madison CT. The talk is at 7, and it's free. And for once I don't have to fly to a talk. Here are the details. Hope to see some Connecticut Loom-readers there.
loom | June 9, 2008
Imagine that mad scientists defied nature and violated the barriers between species. They injected human DNA into non-human creatures, altering their genomes into chimeras--unnatural fusions of man and beast. The goal of the scientists was to enslave these creatures, to exploit their cellular machinery for human gain. The creatures began to produce human proteins, so many of them that they become sick, in some cases even dying. The scientists harvest the proteins, and then, breaching the sacred barrier between species yet again, people injected the unnatural molecules into their own bodies…
loom | June 8, 2008
Imagine that mad scientists defied nature and violated the barriers between species. They injected human DNA into non-human creatures, altering their genomes into chimeras--unnatural fusions of man and beast. The goal of the scientists was to enslave these creatures, to exploit their cellular machinery for human gain. The creatures began to produce human proteins, so many of them that they become sick, in some cases even dying. The scientists harvest the proteins, and then, breaching the sacred barrier between species yet again, people injected the unnatural molecules into their own bodies…
loom | June 6, 2008A reader of Microcosm blogs:
I am literally only 12 pages in, yet Zimmer has already managed to make me catch my breath, clutch the book to my chest, and feel my eyes get a little moist from the emotional impact of it all.
I wonder what a couple hundred more pages will do...
loom | June 5, 2008A couple weeks ago I spoke at Downstate Medical Center in New York about some of my articles in the New York Times that revolve around how the mind evolved. We can learn from bacteria, fruit flies, hyenas, and our own kids. You can now see the whole lecture with surprisingly clear slides on blip.tv. Click on the screen below, or go to the page on blip.tv. Warning: the sound drops out briefly around 13:00.
loom | June 5, 2008I spoke Tuesday on Seattle, and there's proof now! Alan Boyle, MSNBC's science guru, wrote a great piece on both the talk and the subject, my book Microcosm. Meanwhile, folks from Real Science were taping, and now you can listen to the talk at their web site. If I had lots of free time, I'd combine the audio with my slides and post them, but I'm swamped for now.
I also completely spaced out last week and forgot to mention that I was interviewed on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. You can listen here.
loom | June 5, 2008Don't forget to check in for the latest posts going up over at the Scienceblog Book Club. My book Microcosm has gotten us into a debate about the nature of life.
loom | June 5, 2008I'm back at last from the west coast leg of the Microcosm tour.
Portland had a cloudy, melancholy charm, and at Powell's I gave a reading in front of a collection of hand-made black velvet paintings from the nearby Velveteria. When the audience's eyes drifted off of me, I couldn't tell if they were lost in thought or distracted by Jimi Hendrix or a smoking clown.
The next day I headed for San Francisco, where I talked to Moira Gunn for her show Tech Nation (link to come). Then I had lunch with Kirsten Sanford, who will be interviewing me on tomorrow's edition of This Week In Science. Then…
loom | June 4, 2008Jessica asked if I think viruses are alive. John has given his opinion. I will waffle, but I hope in an interesting way. The hard thing about answering that question is that we'd have to agree on what it means to be alive.
We all have a sense that we know what's alive and what's not, but I think that sense is really just an intuition. We use different circuits in our brains for recognizing biological motion, for example, as opposed to the motion of rocks or cars or other dead things. But the trouble comes when we try to turn that intuition into definition. We can see that things that look…
loom | June 3, 2008A caterpillar's life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts for their young. These parasitoid wasps are among my favorite creatures (see my post on the emerald cockroach wasp, which attacks cockroaches like a neurosurgeon). So it was with eye-popping delight that I read a new paper in PLOS Biology One about how another species of wasp in Brazil attacks another caterpillar. Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles is more than just…
loom | June 3, 2008Just a technical note--for some reason my site carlzimmer.com has been put on some bad list by Google, so that you are warned that if you go to the site your computer will melt into a pool of liquid germanium. But it's safe.
loom | June 3, 2008The microbial march continues! I'll be in Seattle today, giving two talks on Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. The first is a 1:30 talk at Microsoft Research. Then I'll be giving a public talk at Town Hall at 7:30 as part of their science series.
loom | June 2, 2008One of the most important experiments in evolution is going on right now in a laboratory in Michigan State University. A dozen flasks full of E. coli are sloshing around on a gently rocking table. The bacteria in those flasks has been evolving since 1988--for over 44,000 generations. And because they've been so carefully observed all that time, they've revealed some important lessons about how evolution works.
The experiment was launched by MSU biologist Richard Lenski. I wrote about Lenski's work last year in the New York Times, and in more detail my new book Microcosm. Lenski started off…
loom | June 2, 2008The French biologist Jacques Monod once famously said, "What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant." At the time, he was referring to the universal rules of molecular biology--of DNA and proteins, for example, that are the same from one species to another. As scientists in the mid-1900s figured out the workings of E. coli, they were also figuring out the workings of life in general. In my new book Microcosm, I make the case that Monod's words were more true than even he realized. In the Boston Globe today, I explain how scientists used to think that there was one big difference between…
loom | June 2, 2008The E. coli epidemic spreads today to the Bay Area. Please come out to Kepler's to hear me talk about Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life.
loom | June 1, 2008One of the best things to come out of blogging is the blog book club. (See, for example, the book club at Talking Points Memo.) In the bad old days, the only way writers could respond to books was with a one-shot book review. A blog book club, on the other hand, allows writers to have public conversations about books and the issues they raise. It also makes room for readers to get into the discussion as well.
Unfortunately, until now blog book clubs have mostly been dedicated to politics. Scienceblogs is now rectifying this imbalance with the launch of the Scienceblogs Book Club. And, oh…
loom | June 1, 2008To kick off this book club discussion, I want to explain how I ended up the past couple years obsessing over E. coli. If you don't know much about E. coli, it may sound like a strange thing to do. But the time I spent in this microbe's intellectual company was deeply enlightening.
I came to write Microcosm after having worked on several articles and blog posts that swarmed around the same fundamental question: What does it mean to be alive? This is obviously a very old puzzle, but today scientists are attacking it with a fresh passion.
Astrobiologists hoping to find life on other planets, for…
loom | June 1, 2008I'm heading cross-country to talk about Microcosm. First stop--Powell's bookstore in Portland tonight. Never been there before, so I'm looking forward to a bibliophile's pilgrimage. Hope to see Portlanders there!