This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Uncontrolled Substances: How The Chemical Underground is Going Mainstream. By Mike Power.
Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz
November 13, 2013
Did viruses help make us human? As weird as it sounds, the question is actually a reasonable one to ask. And now scientists have offered some evidence that the answer may be yes.
The New York Times, November 7, 2013
In 1799 the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and his companions set out from Caracas, Venezuela, to climb the Andes. They struggled up a mountainside enveloped in mist so thick they had to clamber over rocks by hand. When the fog cleared, von Humboldt was left astonished by the view. Vast grasslands stretched all around him, home to an astonishing number of different trees, shrubs and flowers.
“Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together, in so small a space, productions so beautiful and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants,” he later wrote.
On Wednesday I was in New York to participate in the Wired Health Conference. I interviewed Martin Blaser of NYU on the microbiome and what it means for the future of medicine. We managed to cover a lot of ground, which you can watch in the video, which I’ve embedded below.
Continue reading “The Microbiome and the Future of Medicine”
It’s not exactly true to say that each of us has our own genome. We have genomes. Some of us, known as chimeras, have genomes from more than one person. The cells of children linger behind in their mothers; in the womb, cells from twins can intermingle. The rest of us non-chimeras can trace our genomes to one origin–the fertilized egg from which we developed. But as the cells in our bodies divided, they sometimes mutated, creating a panoply of genetic variation known as mosaicism.