Category: Blog
Matthew writes:
“My tattoo is taken from a 1950’s biology textbook. The reason it means so much to me is because of the relevance of the nitrogen cycle to the cycle of life. The horse dies, which feeds the plant, which feeds the horse. It’s really quite beautiful.”
Carl writes: We are each fleeting intersections of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, the paths of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other elements.
My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such “unnatural” bacteria and “natural” ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.
Having 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.
Continue reading “A Request For The Hive Mind: Did Darwin Write About Microbes?”
Jen writes: “Out of my interest for Chemistry and my heritage I chose to get his tattoo done almost a year ago. It is on the back of my upper right shoulder and it is a reminder of my philosophy for life “question all objectively.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published March 20, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Well, 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 nastier bug. Over at Slate today, I explain why there’s a silver lining in this microbial cloud–it means we should be a bit skeptical that anyone is going to engineer a killer bug from scratch any time soon.
Continue reading “E. coli, Nastier Than Ever, Cause for Comfort?”