Experimental Drugs Target Bacteria’s Social Network

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Scientific American, January 31, 2015

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At the University of Zurich, Rolf Kümmerli investigates new drugs to stop deadly infections. He spends his days in a laboratory stocked with petri dishes and flasks of bacteria—exactly the place where you would expect him to do that sort of work. But Kümmerli took an odd path to get to that lab. As a graduate student, he spent years hiking through the Swiss Alps to study the social life of ants. Only after he earned a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology did he turn his attention to microbes.

The path from ants to antibiotics is not as roundabout as it may seem.

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The Tumor Within A Tumor

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DIVIDING LUNG CANCER CELL. PHOTO BY ANNE WESTON, LRI, CRUK, WELLCOME IMAGES

Biologists who study cancer have been borrowing a lot of concepts from evolution in recent years. That’s because the changes that occur inside a tumor bear some striking resemblances to what natural selection does to a population of animals, plants, or bacteria. Evolutionary biologists who study societies–from human tribes to ant colonies–have investigated how cooperation can evolve when cheating can let some individuals get ahead. Now scientists are finding evidence of cooperation and cheating among cancer cells. In my column this week for the New York Timesmy column this week for the New York Times, I look at the social life of cancer–and how we might undermine it to fight the disease.

This video, made by the authors of a new study I write about in the column, presents the gist of this idea–of killing a tumor by creating a new tumor inside of it.

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In the Way Cancer Cells Work Together, a Possible Tool for Their Demise

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The New York Times, January 29, 2015

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A tumor, as strange as it may sound, is a little society. The cancer cells that make it up cooperate with one another, and together they thrive.

Scientists are only starting to decipher the rules of these communities. But if they can understand how these cells work together, then they may be able to stop the tumor. “You can drive it to collapse,” said Marco Archetti, a biologist at the University of East Anglia and at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Cancer starts when healthy cells mutate and lose the safeguards that normally keep their growth in check. The cells start to multiply quickly, and their descendants gain new mutations, some of which make the cells even better at multiplying.

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Shedding Their Secrets

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The New York Times, January 22, 2015

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You wouldn’t think hellbenders would be hard to find: The huge salamanders, the biggest amphibians in North America, can grow up to 30 inches long. Yet hellbenders make themselves scarce, living on the bottoms of mountain streams, lurking under massive rocks.

As a result, locating hellbenders takes a crew of scientists. First, some of them must wedge a long pole under a rock to hoist it up, and then their colleagues must plunge into the chilly water to catch their quarry.

A couple of years ago, Stephen Spear, a conservation scientist at the Orianne Society in Athens, Ga., heard about a possible alternative.

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Frankenstein Can’t Come Out And Play Today

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In the standard Frankenstein story, a scientist creates an unnatural monster that breaks out of the lab and runs amok. But why should unnatural make something unstoppable? The contrary is possible, too. Imagine a different story: Frankenstein’s monster escapes, realizes that it can’t survive in the outside world, and retreats back to the lab. This story line may not make for a satisfying movie, but it might be a good goal for real life.

The fear of the unstoppable unnatural has been with us ever since scientists began moving genes between species in the 1970s. In a 1973 experiment, researchers transferred a gene from a frog into Escherichia coli. The gut microbe used the frog gene to make a frog protein.

It wasn’t long before researchers figured out how to use genetic engineering to turn microbes into factories. When scientists inserted the gene for human insulin into E. coli, the bacteria were able to manufacture a drug that had previously been harvested from cow pancreases. E. coli became the workhorse of biotechnology, spewing out drugs, vitamins, and industrial materials. (For more on E. coli’s strange yet significant history, see my book Microcosm.)

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