Sweet review of Microcosm in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine:
All in all, Microcosm is a phantasmagoric read that explains how our understanding of the nature of E. coli has helped to unravel the mysteries of our own nature and evolution. The book is impressive for the information it imparts and even more impressive for the ideas it provokes.
So there you go.
Originally published October 30, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
We humans spend a lot of time building tools out of pieces of the natural world. We started with sticks and stones, began to mine iron and other metals, and, just recently, learned how to manipulate the genes of living things. To make insulin, for example, biologists in the 1970s inserted human insulin genes into E. coli and turned the bacteria into living chemical factories. These days, scientists are trying to retool bacteria much more dramatically, treating them more like programmable computers than factories. It sounds simple enough, but it most definitely isn’t. All material pose challenges to tool-makers. Wood can rot, metal can buckle. And living things are maddeningly sloppy.
I’ve been quietly watching scientists flip out about Sarah Palin’s recent scoff about the US funding research on fruit flies in Paris–even Christopher Hitchens is now championing those fine insects today in Slate. But, thanks to a little grant-digging by PZ Myers, I discover that, in fact, all this brouhaha comes down to those dear friends of this blog, parasites. Frankly, if you wait long enough, everything comes down to parasites.
A lot of people thought at first that Palin was dismissing basic research on Drosophila melanogaster, which has yielded lots of profound insights about human biology. Palin herself hasn’t cleared up the issue, but on further reflection, the consensus is that she was complaining about research on the olive fruit fly.
Originally published October 26, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Angela write: “As an Archaeologist, I wanted my first tattoo to be something related to culture. The Ouroborus is an ancient symbol of a serpent biting its tail and has been a part of a number of cultures and beliefs including (but not limited to!) Egyptian, Greek (who “borrowed” it from the Phoenicians and gave it the name “ouroborus” meaning “tail-eater”), Norse, Chinese, Aztec, Hindu, and various Native American Indian mythologies. The snake in my tattoo is a custom piece by my tattooist, but the writing is straight from the earliest-known drawing of the Ouroborus in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra drawn around 1600BC.