I am an unreconstructed fan of biology visualizers, the da Vincis of the twenty-first century. So I was particularly pleased to learn of a gorgeous new video that conveys the squiggly complexity inside a cell. That video–and the aesthetic decisions behind it–are the topic my newest column for The New York Times. Check it out. Continue reading “Your Inner Mosh Pit”
The New York Times, April 10, 2014
If you could shrink down to the size of a molecule and fly into a cell, what would you see?
In 2006, a team of scientists and illustrators offered a gorgeous answer in the form of a three-minute video called “The Inner Life of the Cell.” Nothing quite like it had ever been made before, and it proved to be a huge hit, broadcast by museums, universities and television programs around the world.
The video was a collaboration between BioVisions, a scientific visualization program at Harvard’s department of molecular and cellular biology, and Xvivo, a scientific animation company in Connecticut.
Over the years, as I’ve learned about the microbes that help keep us healthy, some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the microbiome have been with Martin Blaser. He’s a microbiologist at the New York School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues have found tantalizing links between the diversity of microbes in people’s bodies and medical conditions ranging from asthma to obesity. While those results are preliminary, they’ve led Blaser to worry about the long-term consequences of our torrid love affair with antibiotics. As we overdose on antibiotics to kill bad germs, we may be driving some good germs extinct.
In the latest issue of Wired, I interview Blaser about his work. And if you want to find out more, his new book, Missing Microbes, has just been published. It’s an excellent look at one of the most intriguing fields of biology today.
Wired, April 3, 2014
Antibiotics save lives, but they also wipe out a lot of beneficial organisms that our bodies rely on, says Martin Blaser.
We’re in the midst of an extinction crisis, and it doesn’t involve Siberian tigers. Microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine says that many species of germs are disappearing from our bodies—and that’s a problem.
Continue reading “Antibiotics Have Turned Our Bodies From Gardens Into Battlefields”
“In Moby-Dick, the cabin-boy Pip falls out of the ship and sinks deep in the ocean (emphasis mine):
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.