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Expressing Our Individuality, the Way E. Coli Do

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The New York Times, April 22, 2008

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We humans differ from one another in too many ways to count. We are shy and bold, freckled and pale, truckers and hairdressers, Buddhists and Presbyterians. We get cancers in the third grade and live for a century. We have fingerprints.

Scientists have only a rough understanding of how this diversity arises. Some of it stems from the different experiences we have, from our time in the womb on through childhood and into our mature years. These molding influences include things like the books we read and the air we breathe. Our diversity also stems from our genes–the millions of typographical differences between one genome and another.

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The More We Know About Genes, the Less We Understand

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WIRED, April 17, 2008

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In life, one mystery gives way, revealing a new one underneath, waiting to be solved.

An early mystery was genes. Scientists did not know what hidden factor lurked inside living things, giving rise to their traits and traveling from parent to child to recreate those traits anew.

The answer, of course, turned out to be DNA: Segments of the molecule encode the proteins and RNA molecules that carry out the work of life, send signals, capture energy and build biomass.

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Your Brain Is a Mess, but It Knows How to Make Fixes

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WIRED, April 3, 2008

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It’s easy to be over-dazzled by the brain. Who could be unimpressed by the billions of neurons packed into our skulls, linked together by trillions of connections, capable of encoding memories from decades ago, of playing a saxophone, of sending space probes out of our solar system? We naturally want to know how our brain got to be so good. But there’s an even more interesting question worth asking: How do we manage to survive with a brain that’s so bad?

The job of the brain is to make decisions. It takes in information from its senses, which it then processes in a vast network of neuron circuits, finally producing some kind of output.

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Distinguishing Artificial From Natural Is Possible, for Now

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WIRED, March 21, 2008

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We like to tell ourselves that it’s easy to distinguish between the natural and the artificial, but they have a knack for fooling us. When European colonists traveled through the patchwork of forests and meadows of New England, they thought they were exploring primeval nature. In fact, Native Americans had been tending it carefully with fires for centuries. When the Viking probe snapped a fuzzy picture of a mountain on Mars in 1976, some people were sure it showed a giant face carved by Martians. When another probe took a sharper picture in 2001, all trace of the face had vanished.

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Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism

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Slate, March 19, 2008

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An outbreak of E. coli isn’t usually the stuff of feel-good stories. Feel-bad is more like it–or even feel-organ-failure. But recent E. coli outbreaks can offer us a bit of solace. We live in the anxious age of synthetic biology, when scientists can reconstruct entire genomes from raw chemicals, and when we all fret that someone is going to use this new technology to create a monster bug and unleash a man-made plague. According to one government report, “The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.” But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli–and a closer look at the bacteria themselves–may help us to put aside our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it looks.

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