From Fin to Hand

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1996

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In evolution, fast small changes add up to slow big ones. A mutation happens in a blink of an eye. Then natural selection acts on the mutations in many individuals, and a species gradually adapts to its surroundings over thousands or millions of years. Magnificent transformations then take place, such as that of fish into land vertebrates 360 million years ago. Until recently, no one would have dared dream that we could ever follow a genetic trail such as the one from fin to hand. But an experiment this past year made that dream a reasonable one.

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Life takes backbone

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, December 31, 1995

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Underneath life’s variety, from mites to mastodons, there’s a profound sameness. Every cell of every organism, with the exception of a few viruses, encodes genetic information in DNA; DNA dispatches a single strand of RNA to make proteins; and the proteins do all the cellular grunt work. This system, so universal and uniform, poses a puzzle: where did it all come from? Complex as it is, it is hard to see how it could have sprung full-blown from the primordial soup. Might the first organisms instead have used some kind of “pre-NA”?

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Tooling Through the Trees

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, November 1, 1995

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Carel van Schaik had a dilemma. In August 1993 he was sitting in a crude shelter in the Suaq Balimbing swamp in Sumatra, deciding whether he should make the place his scientific home. Van Schaik, a primatologist at Duke University, studies orangutans. Suaq had a lot of them–as many as 20 individuals per square mile. But Suaq is a godforsaken place. Never mind the prevalence of malaria, dengue fever, and typhoid–simply following the orangutans as they moved high overhead in the trees required wading through thigh-high muck. Every day was an exercise in exhaustion.

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First Cell

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, October 31, 1995

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Part of the definition of life, says David Deamer, is that it is in a place.  Deamer is not uttering a koan in a Zen monastery. He’s sitting next to a microscope in a biology laboratory at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Deamer is a hard-core biophysicist, but still there is a monkish quality to him.  It comes not just from his unnervingly gentle manner of speaking but from his entire approach to science. This is a man who, in contemplating the pattern of nucleotides in DNA–represented by the letters A, C, G, and T–was reminded of musical notation. By allowing the letters to stand for notes instead of nucleotides–and using E as the equivalent of T–he turned human DNA into hypnotic melodies, available now for your meditative pleasure on both tape and CD.

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Hypersea Invasion

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, October 1, 1995

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The more you think about life on land, the less sense it makes. Life started in the ocean about 4 billion years ago, and for 3.5 billion years, it remained there. Evolution created organisms that had to stay wet- -they were essentially fluid-filled bags, and if they dried out, their circulatory systems would collapse, and most of their proteins and DNA would crumple up into uselessness. Without the ocean’s nutrient-filled currents, they would starve, and they and their fragile eggs and larvae would be immobile, unable to reach new or better habitats.

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