“This Paper Should Not Have Been Published”

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Slate, December 7, 2010

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On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.” Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand.

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Of Arsenic and Aliens

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Rumors have been swirling this week about a press conference NASA is starting right now. Some people have speculated that they’re going to announce evidence for life on another planet.

Well, not quite. Scientists have found a form of life that they claim bends the rules for life as we know it. But they didn’t need to go to another planet to find it. They just had to go to California.

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The empire of viruses: my story in tomorrow’s New York Times

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Recently I paid a visit to a place where the world’s most mysterious viruses go to find a name. The result was my profile of Ian Lipkin of Columbia University for tomorrow’s New York Times. I first started thinking about this story when I heard Lipkin give a lecture about his work identifying unknown viruses this spring. And when I read this review of Lipkin’s, entitled simply, “Microbe Hunting,” I knew it was time to get cracking.

One thing I didn’t have room for is the fact that Lipkin has gone all Hollywood. By which I mean that he’s helping Steven Soderbergh on a new movie on a virus outbreak called Contagion, starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, and other big stars. Lipkin seems pretty stoked about the movie, which is slated for 2011, so I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it.

Originally published November 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

A Man From Whom Viruses Can’t Hide

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The New York Times, November 22, 2010

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Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

Gustavo Palacios was sequencing the genes from a new strain of Ebola virus found in a bat in Spain–a worrisome development, since the fatal virus has almost never been found outside Africa.

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