Blogs / The Loom

I just spoke yesterday about Microcosm, and brought a little recorder with me. This afternoon I fooled around with Soundslide and my Powerpoint, and produced this video. This is a format I’d like to experiment with more on this blog, so I’d be grateful if people would take a gander and offer their thoughts. The sound is a little scratchy (and a nearby fire company tested out their siren just as I was starting my talk), but all in all it should be easy listening.

On Thursday evening, I’ll be talking about Microcosm at the Guilford Free Library just down the road here in Guilford, Connecticut. It’s great to be talking in this lovely space on the Guilford Green, reopened at last after a year-long renovation. Here’s a flyer with more information. The event is free, but the library is taking reservations by phone at 203-453-8282.

It’s already end-of-the-year-list time, and I’m delighted to see that Amazon has picked Microcosm for their top ten science books of 2008. I must confess I’ve been slow this year on reading science books. What little free time I’ve got I’ve signed over to trying to finish War and Peace before I die. I’m enjoying it greatly, but at the rate I’m going, it’s a toss-up whether I’ll hit my biological deadline. Of the books on Amazon’s list, I can certainly recommend Your Inner Fish, having reviewed it in Nature. But are there any 2008 science books missing from this list, in your opinion?

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.

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. That’s why it’s so impressive that scientists at the University of California at San Diego have just made the movie I’ve embedded below: glowing bacteria keep time with their blinks. (more…)

Steve Mirsky of Scientific American came to my recent lecture at Stevens Institute of Technology about Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. He was equipped with a digital recorder, and now he’s posted a two-part podcast of my talk, introduced by a short chat we had about the book. Here’s part one, and here’s part two. And…here’s the book. You remember books, right? That information technology that came right after papyrus and right before neurodownloads?

The Alliance for Science is running an essay contest for high school students, on the subject of Darwin. The top four winners will get cash prizes, plus a couple books, including one of mine, Microcosm. Spread the word!

I’m happy to relay some new information about my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life

1. Jersey! I’ll be returning to the Garden State where I spent my formative years, to speak next Wednesday at the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ. For you New Yorkers, that’s a quick PATH ride under the Hudson.

The Center’s director, John Horgan, blogged the other day about the talk, having just read Microcosm. He even admits that the book made him question his long-held belief that science’s best days are over. I’ll be speaking at 4 pm at the Babbio Center. (Here’s a campus map.)

Some of the past CSW talks, from folks like Steven Pinker, Gary Taubes, and Chris Mooney have been posted online, so I’ll let you know if mine ends up there as well.

2. Reviews. A couple more just came out. Nick Anthis, who writes The Scientific Activist, has a positive review that’s particularly interesting given that every day he is up to his elbows in the subject of my book: E. coli.

And the Washington Post has a short but sweet write-up:

Homo sapiens likes to believe it is the most advanced species on the planet, certainly way ahead of anything as primitive as E. coli — the usually harmless, microscopic bacteria that live in our guts.

 

But as Carl Zimmer, a science writer for the New York Times, explains in Microcosm, humans have more in common with the bacteria than they realize. E. coli are social. They have sex. Some are even lactose intolerant.

 

In getting to know E. coli, scientists have come to understand the building blocks and mechanisms that underpin all life. E. coli helped them figure out what genes are made of and how genes are turned on and off, among other watershed findings. Zimmer moves from discovery to discovery, marking each scientist’s contribution to the larger body of knowledge, but he doesn’t dwell too long on individuals. The star of the book is the bacterium.

 

In recent years, biotech engineers have manipulated its genes to create life-sustaining drugs. “Through E. coli we can see the history of life,” Zimmer writes, “and we can see its future as well.”

In today’s Boston Globe, Anthony Doerr praises Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life as “quietly revolutionary.”

As scientists study the genes of more and more strains of E. coli, they’re finding that foreign DNA has been steadily pouring into the genome. Not only is E. coli mutating within itself, it’s also claiming new genes from elsewhere.

A major source of this input is viruses. As Zimmer notes, “Viruses are quickly losing their reputation as insignificant parasites.” Viruses, we now know, pick up genes from one host and plug them like cassette tapes into the genome of a new host. This sort of gene-leapfrogging is called horizontal gene transfer, and it’s not limited to bacteria and viruses. We’ve already identified around 100,000 viruses in the human genome, and the vestiges of 150,000 more.

What findings like this, and writers as capable as Zimmer, force us to ask is: What does it mean to be a human being? Are the barriers between species really as distinct and inviolable as we think they are? If human beings were nothing at all like bacteria, why would pharmaceutical companies be able to successfully plug human genes into microbes like E. coli?

Here’s the whole review. And the Amazon link.

Prospect Magazine picks Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life as a a book to pack for your summer vacation:

Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm: E Coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon Books) delivers what a science book should; it reveals the new and re-enchants the old. By looking at the process common to all life through the prism of an organism with no public persona to distract us—the bacterium Escherichia coli, uncomplaining workhorse of ten thousand laboratories, unobserved and mostly benign passenger in the guts of us all—he is able to draw out all sorts of implications form one of the 20th century’s great discoveries. At the cellular level, a vast amount of what drives and allows life is the same the world over: as the molecular biologist Jacques Monod remarked, “What is true for E coli is true for the elephant.” Yet, at the same time, E coli’s world—in which bodily appendages take longer to make than the bodies they hang from, and where, when pricked, the living do not bleed but explode—is oddly intense in its own particularities.

The Guardian has just reviewed Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life:

“This is a thought-provoking book that wrenches us from our human-centred perspective and gives us a guide to life through the chemical-sensing molecules of a species that was here long before we were, and which will certainly outlive us.”

The full review is here.

The Columbia Journalism Review wants you to read it too…

“It is a story of discovery that illuminates a microscopic and alien world and explains how it has helped guide the course of human history. Anybody that picks up a copy will find that Zimmer has produced a book not just about E. coli, but about microbiology and evolution itself.”

My recent talk in Los Angeles about Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life is now on the web. You can watch it here. The sound is a little buzzy, thanks to my stentorian pipes, but I hope you like it.