My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such “unnatural” bacteria and “natural” ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.
Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I’ve searched far and wide. I’ve looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference–to viruses:
A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever.
Continue reading “A Request For The Hive Mind: Did Darwin Write About Microbes?”
Jen writes: “Out of my interest for Chemistry and my heritage I chose to get his tattoo done almost a year ago. It is on the back of my upper right shoulder and it is a reminder of my philosophy for life “question all objectively.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published March 20, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
WIRED, March 21, 2008
We like to tell ourselves that it’s easy to distinguish between the natural and the artificial, but they have a knack for fooling us. When European colonists traveled through the patchwork of forests and meadows of New England, they thought they were exploring primeval nature. In fact, Native Americans had been tending it carefully with fires for centuries. When the Viking probe snapped a fuzzy picture of a mountain on Mars in 1976, some people were sure it showed a giant face carved by Martians. When another probe took a sharper picture in 2001, all trace of the face had vanished.
Continue reading “Distinguishing Artificial From Natural Is Possible, for Now”
Slate, March 19, 2008
An outbreak of E. coli isn’t usually the stuff of feel-good stories. Feel-bad is more like it–or even feel-organ-failure. But recent E. coli outbreaks can offer us a bit of solace. We live in the anxious age of synthetic biology, when scientists can reconstruct entire genomes from raw chemicals, and when we all fret that someone is going to use this new technology to create a monster bug and unleash a man-made plague. According to one government report, “The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.” But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli–and a closer look at the bacteria themselves–may help us to put aside our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it looks.
Continue reading “Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism”