Mark Twain once discovered to his horror that his story “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” had been hideously translated into French. He went so far as to publish the original story, the translation, and his own retranslation of the French back to English to show just how badly it had been abused. “I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life,” he declared.
Author: Lori Jia
Over at Blog around the Clock, Bora has the details on the new science blog anthology book he has put together and which is now for sale. (My posts on eye evolution (1, 2) are included.)
Bora apparently got the idea for his book three weeks ago, and now he’s got an honest-to-goodness tome between covers. I got the idea for my own book in 2005, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be out in a year. Strange business.
Originally published January 16, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Cancer, many biologists argue, is an evolutionary disease. It is a burden of being multicellular, and a threat against which natural selection has only managed mediocre defenses. Making matters worse, cancer cells can borrow highly evolved genes for their own deadly purposes. And even within a single tumor, cancer cells get nastier through natural selection.
I’ve been following the study of evolution and cancer for some time now, and have blogged on the Loom about it here, here, and here. But it was a review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that spurred me to launch a full-blown article. The articles appears in the January issue of Scientific American, and you can read it here.
On 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 house and out of my life.
One reason I love writing about biology is that it has so many levels. Down at the molecular scale, proteins flop and twist. Higher up, cells crawl and feed and divide. They organize into animals and plants and other big organisms, which must obey their own rules in order to survive. For some organisms, a day is a lifetime. Others must weather centuries. When millions of organisms get together, they form ecosystems that wax and wane in ways that could not be predicted from lower levels. And over the course of generations, genes take on a new personality, no longer passive bits of code, but units of selection that can sweep across the planet and leap from species to species.