I’m a big fan of All in the Mind, a radio program on neuroscience, psychology, and all things brain-ish, produced by Natasha Mitchell for Australia’s ABC Radio National. So it’s a double pleasure to hear her new episode about how parasites alter behavior. Check it out.
Originally published October 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Misha Angrist has written an excellent book that you might just want to buy for its title alone: Here Is A Human Being. In this case, the being is Misha. He was one of the first people to have his genome sequenced, and he’s chronicled the experience in this book.
Here’s the endorsement I sent to Misha’s publisher back in the spring:
Our genomes pose a paradox. They are at once profoundly intimate and remotely abstract. Misha Angrist blasts the paradox apart with Here Is A Human Being. He bravely explores what it really means for him to be able to gaze at his own genome, not by simply considering the nature of his particular gene variants, but also probing the many ways that genomics is going to influence society as a whole. A fascinating, unique book.
The book is coming out at the start of November. To celebrate the occasion, Misha and I will “be in conversation,” as they say, at Labyrinth Books in New Haven on Saturday, November 6, at 6 pm. Come join us!
Originally published October 5, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
I’ve been invited to give a few talks in the wake of my article in the New York Times on the microbiome, and so I’m prowling for beautiful images that drive home the fact that we are microbial rain forests, rather than sterile mammals. Below is my favorite image of the day.
It’s from a survey of microbes across people’s bodies, published last year in Science. The inner circle shows the major lineages of bacteria found in all the subjects in each part of the body, while the ring shows the ones found in some people but not others.
This picture was stuffed away in the supplementary materials for the paper, so I missed it the first time around. I’m glad I found it–it’s a new Vitruvian man for our microbiomic age.
Originally published October 3, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Shi-Hsia Hwa writes,
I’m a virologist in a biotech company in Singapore. Here’s my story: I’ve been interested in infectious diseases since I was a kid, because my father almost died of TB when he was an infant. I must have been the only kid who looked forward to mass vaccination days in school. For a field trip to the Philippines after my bachelor’s and my first job shortly thereafter, I had to be immunized against a lot of other things that the average person doesn’t.
Charles Darwin wondered if animals were aware of themselves. Allowed to visit a rare orangutan in the London Zoo, he brought a mirror and observed the ape apparently make faces at its own reflection. It’s hard to say for sure that the orangutan really was aware that its reflection was its own. Over a century later, a scientist named George Gallup turned Darwin’s idea into a more rigorous test. He would secretly put a mark on an animal’s forehead and see if it noticed the difference the next time it passed a mirror.
Continue reading “Monkeys in the mirror and the nature of science”