Microcosm: The Book
loom | April 24, 2008I recorded a video for my Facebook page about the Microcosm book tour, which I've cloned below. Still fine-tuning my video interfaces...how does YouTube embed, compared to blip.tv?
loom | April 21, 2008
With two weeks to go till Microcosm's publication date, I'm happy to direct your attention to an adapted excerpt that's running in tomorrow's New York Times. In this passage, I discuss what I like to call E. coli's fingerprints.
We like to think that genes equal identity. If that were true, then a colony of genetically identical E. coli should be nothing but a robot army of clones. But diversity rules E. coli's world, because there's more to life than DNA, even when you're just a microbe. Check it out.
I've also set up some pages over at carlzimmer.com with news, reviews, and other…
loom | April 18, 2008In my new Dissection column over at Wired, I take a look at a remarkable new experiment on E. coli. Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe's activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.
One thing worth adding...in an accompanying commentary, Matthew Bennett and Jeff Hasty at UCSD write,
This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex. For instance, advocates of 'intelligent design' compare the genome to modern…
loom | April 16, 2008Three weeks away from the publication of Microcosm, and another kind review has come out, this time from Library Journal:
To display a broad swath of the people, scientific processes, and discoveries involved in biology, science writer Zimmer (Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How It Changed the World) describes a common, luxuriantly growing, usually benign gut bacterium, Escherichia coli, or E. coli. Easily grown in petri dishes, the species has alter egos that can kill its hosts, making the organism a useful laboratory model to explore the basis of heredity. Zimmer recounts…
loom | March 31, 2008Greg left a comment:
You know, Carl, if you don't have one of these yet, you might consider picking one up to accompany you on your (hoped for) book tour.
Greg, I always try to find a plush toy related to my latest book. I think it's part of the late-stage madness that sets in during the third round of manuscript corrections. And E and me will be making the rounds in May to talk about Microcosm. So far, it looks like we're heading to New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. In the next couple weeks I'll have an official book tour schedule to post.
FYI, E. coli does…
loom | March 24, 2008My recent piece on Slate about E. coli, evolution, and germ warfare is now on their podcast. You can listen to it with this embedded player below, or grab the mp3 file.
It is very weird to hear someone else read my words. I feel like a teacher is using me as an example of how not to do last night's homework. Nevertheless, I plan on recording some of my own previews of Microcosm between now and the publication date. Stay tuned.
loom | March 20, 2008Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I've searched far and wide. I've looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference--to viruses:
A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. It has recently been ascertained that a minute portion of the mucous discharge from an animal affected with rinderpest, if placed in…
loom | March 19, 2008Well, we're down now to seven weeks till Microcosm hits the book stores. Here and elsewhere I'm going to discuss some of the fascinating things I discovered about E. coli--and life in general--while working on the book. For instance, I came to have a grudging respect for the vicious strain of E. coli known as O157:H7, which has caused outbreaks in recent years in contaminated foods. The weaponry it uses to attack and subvert our cells is quite impressive. But my respect went up a notch more when scientists recently reported how E. coli O157:H7 has been continuing to evolve into an even…
loom | March 17, 2008
A few weeks ago I moderated a discussion about synthetic biology down in Washington. Excerpts from the talk (including the one above) are now posted here.
loom | February 15, 2008After a lot of writing and a lot of waiting, the first review of my next book, Microcosm, has just come out. Actually, it's coming out on Monday in Publisher's Weekly, but they apparently couldn't wait, sending out a link to it today in their weekly newsletter:
When most readers hear the words E. coli, they think tainted hamburger or toxic spinach. Noted science writer Zimmer says there are in fact many different strains of E. coli, some coexisting quite happily with us in our digestive tracts. These rod-shaped bacteria were among the first organisms to have their genome mapped, and today…
loom | February 5, 2008Via Tara Smith, I learned of the passing of Joshua Lederberg. I came to appreciate the full scope of Lederberg's work while working on my book Microcosm; by discovering the secret sex life of E. coli, he helped build the science of molecular biology. It's sad to observe the passing of this scientific cohort who together uncovered some of the fundamental secrets of life, including Lederberg's wife Esther, Seymour Benzer, and Francis Crick. Today we live in an age of big biology; Lederberg won his Nobel prize in large part for the work he did in near solitude as a graduate student. We may not…
loom | February 2, 2008University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward and I are talking again on bloggingheads--this time about aliens. Ward explains why science fiction writers hate him, and why we need to breed tiny astronauts if we ever want to get out of our solar system. Check it out.
Poster from Wikimedia Commons, Headline Defiled From Shelley
loom | January 30, 2008Earlier today, I took a walk in the blustery winds of Washington DC with Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist from MIT. We had just been talking with Congressional staffers about the promise and perils of being able to manipulate life. There was too much to fit into the ninety minute session, and so our conversation spilled out on the street. And one of the things we talked about was the question of whether you can put your signature on a living thing.
The question came up thanks to Craig Venter and his team, who announced last week that they had synthesized the entire genome of a microbe. The…
loom | December 17, 2007This is the sort of thing that made me decide to write a whole book about these bugs...
LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.
Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms - washingtonpost.com
loom | December 12, 2007Some of the blogs that I find most interesting are also the most sporadic. Fortunately, RSS feeds mean their occasional utterances don't disappear off my radar. Rob Carlson's blog, synthesis, is an excellent, deeply considered blog on the rise of synthetic biology. (Full disclosure--I interviewed Carlson for a recent article in Discover.) Even though a week or two may pass between posts, they're always interesting. His latest entry, on the hype around Craig Venter's development of artificial chromosomes, is like a very sharp needle poking a very fat balloon:
...the philosophical implications…
loom | October 25, 2007Ugh. Several days, pretty much day and night, going over the copy-edited Microcosm manuscript with a green pencil. I haven't had any time to write any original blog posts--or even reply to most of my email. But I can at least point you to three articles of mine that went online while I was buried deep in dangling participles. Looking at them now, I see a common theme: comparison.
1. The Internet and E. coli. Some of the most intriguing papers I've read about E. coli while researching Microcosm came from an engineer. John Doyle is a control theory expert at CalTech who has spent lots of time…
loom | October 22, 2007
At least for me, getting to see the cover of a new book for the first time is a great morale boost. The designer usually finishes it up right around the time when I'm starting to wonder if the book will ever become real. Recently I got the new cover of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. I wrapped it around another book and stuck it on my mantelpiece, to remind myself that soon (May, actually), the book will be in bookstores. But I can show it to you now, because it's been posted at Amazon and at the Random House web site.
There's still plenty of work for me before it becomes…
loom | June 25, 2007In the past few months, the New York Times science section has been putting together some special packages of articles, and this week's bundle is on the topic of evolution. You can read John Noble Wilford on hominids, Nicholas Wade on recent human evolution, Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the evolution of animal development, and more. No animals for me, thanks--I got the microbes. Which is just fine with me. It's a world of evolution I get all to myself.
In my article, I take a look at experiments in which scientists watch microbes evolve, testing out hypotheses about natural selection and other…
loom | June 22, 2007If you sometimes look around and ask yourself, "So what is life, anyway?"--even if you haven't ingested some illegal substance--you may be interested in a story I've written for Seed magazine. "The Meaning of Life" is the cover story for the August issue, which just turned up at my doorstep. The story isn't online yet, but when it does pop up, I'll make a note of it.
The idea for the story crystallized during the course of my work on my next book. My initial idea for the book was to investigate this very question, "What is life?" There is actually a lot of new research and thinking going into…
loom | June 7, 2007For the past few years, Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer, has been trying to build an organism from scratch. While Venter is no shrinking wallflower (see, for example, a recent interview in Newsweek), he has been keeping his synthetic-life cards pretty close to his vest. I spoke to Venter in 2003, shortly after he announced the project, and he provided some basic details which I wrote up in a news article in the journal Science (I've archived it here). I was startled to find my article being cited in scientific papers about synthetic biology, but one scientist (Eugene Koonin of NIH)…