Microcosm: The Book
loom | March 20, 2007Next week I'll be heading to Utah. Southern Utah University asked me to be their Visiting Eccles Scholar, which means that I'll be spending a couple days talking with students and faculty. I'll also be giving two talks that are open to the public. The first, Wednesday evening, will be on global warming and extinctions, about which I wrote an article for the New York Times a couple months back. The next evening I'll be talking about E. coli and the meaning of life. It's the first time I'll be speaking about my book in public, so I'm looking forward to sharing some of the stuff I learned while…
loom | March 19, 2007Science moves forward by flow. One experiment leads to another. Observations accrue. What seem like side trips or even dead ends may bring a fuzzy picture further into focus. Yet science often seems as if it moves forward one bombshell at a time, marked by scientific papers and press conferences. I can't think of a bigger contrast between the bombshell illusion and the flowing reality of science than the day in 2000 when President Clinton announced the completion of the first draft of the human genome on the White House lawn. He declared it "an epoch-making triumph of science and reason." And…
loom | January 9, 2007On the last day of December, I turned in the final draft of my book about E. coli and the meaning of life. This is the sixth time around for me, and I'm getting familiar now with the havoc the experience wreaks on my nerves. In the final few weeks, the book becomes a monster that follows me around to every room of the house, out on the walks I take with my family. It crouches in the movie theaters and restaurants where I go with my wife to take a break. It just sits there, rumbling and wheezing, making me aware that it is still with me. I work late into the night, trying to get it out of the…
loom | December 18, 2006The manuscript clock is still ticking, and so, in lieu of true blogging, let me direct your attention to another article of mine. This time it's the cover story in the December issue of Discover. Discover chose Jay Keasling as their scientist of the year and asked me to interview him. Keasling, who directs the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology, is trying to get either E. coli or yeast to crank out a powerful malaria drug normally only made by the sweet wormwood plant. I had already been getting familiar with Keasling's work, since it is a great example of the sort of work that's being…
loom | September 18, 2006Over the weekend I wrote about the natural history of the Escherichia coli strain that has contaminated spinach. According to reports today, 109 people have been identified as sickened with Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one has died. In the comment thread of my post, the subject of antibiotics came up. It turns out that antibiotics are the last thing you want to take if you get sick with Escherichia coli O157:H7. It may turn a nasty--but temporary--case of bloody diarrhea into fatal organ failure.
More below the fold...
Like other microbes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 carries a number genes…
loom | September 15, 2006Don't eat your spinach.
That's the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there's been a report of one death in Wisconsin.
There's a fascinating--albeit gruesome--backstory to this outbreak, which I've been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli.…
loom | May 23, 2006
Over the past few months I've been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I've been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade.
In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect…