Blogs / The Loom

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.

Here are a fresh batch of reviews for Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life…

Cleveland Plain-Dealer: “For readers who enjoy a seat at the revolution and a chance to ponder the ’supple little bugs’ at the dawn of life, Microcosm’ is a bracing read. This timely book deserves shelf space near Lewis Thomas’ classic, ‘Lives of a Cell.’”

Living the Scientific Life: “Carl Zimmer has done such a remarkable job with this book; transforming an already interesting topic into something that is nearly universal in its relevance. His personable and engaging narrative piques his readers’ curiosity as he carefully builds his story from basic scientific findings. As a result, his readers end up learning about complex science in the same way that scientists do: by building upon the discoveries and innovations of the past.”

Adaptive Complexity: “Microcosm packs a lot of depth into less than 200 pages. If you are looking for a peephole into today’s world of modern biology, how it has developed, what are its triumphs, where are the controversies, there is probably no better place to start than Zimmer’s marvelous examination of the world of E. coli.”

A wonderful review of Microcosm just came out in the Times of London. It’s particularly gratifying to see it written by Oliver Morton, a science writer gifted with grace and style…

[Zimmer] “comes up with turns of phrase and images that are deep delights. The ways in which the structure of the cell depends on the tempo of different molecular processes give it a ‘geography of rhythms’; the building of a flagellum, which takes longer than the bacterium’s replication, is like building a medieval cathedral, in that ‘a new microbe inherits a partially built tail and passes it on, still unfinished, to its descendants”. (Another flagellar delight is the way in which Zimmer shows that, far from being a structure that could not evolve stepwise, as proponents of intelligent design would have you believe, this complex corkscrew actually reveals its evolved status clearly down at the molecular and genetic level.) Perhaps the phrase that will resonate with me longest, though, is the one he uses to frame the discussion of E. coli as a workhorse of biotechnology and a proving ground for the more ambitious redesigns of life - ‘playing nature’ - so much richer in its implications than the tediously Faustian ‘playing God.’ If you want to get a clearer idea of the sort of nature that science can now play with, this is the book for you.”

Full review here. Amazon link here.

A couple weeks ago I spoke to a great crowd as part of the Zocalo lecture series in Los Angeles. The subject was my new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life.  You can listen to the podcast here, [whoops–go to this page and look for my mug.) and the talk will be airing several times starting today on LA City Channel 36. I think that you will also be able to watch it on their web site live. Here is the schedule (all times PST):

7/15/08  Tue             2:00 pm

7/15/08  Tue             9:00 pm

7/16/08  Wed           12:00 pm

7/16/08  Wed           11:00 pm

7/17/08  Thu             9:00 pm

7/20/08  Sun            11:00 am

7/20/08  Sun             7:00 pm

Zocalo will also archive the video on their site; I’ll post a link when I get one.

In case you haven’t seen Wordle, which totals up the words in a piece of text…here’s a picture of my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. A pretty good likeness, I think. I like the way humans are overshadowed by the microbes–as in life. (Hat tip: Oliver Morton.)

That’s what I told Moira Gunn, host of the radio show Tech Nation, in a recent conversation about my book Microcosm.  Listen here. I hope you find it infectious.

If you’re free at 6 pm EST, please tune in to Wisconsin Public Radio. I’ll be talking to Ben Merens about my new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. It’s a call-in show–toll-free 1-800-486-8655 or 227-2050 if you’re in the Milwaukee area.

Allow me to introduce myself by way of a homecoming.

It was at Discover that I started writing about science, a couple years out of college and with no clear idea of what I was going to do. My first two articles came out in the same issue in November 1989. One was illustrated with a picture of E. coli colonies, each glowing its own color of the rainbow. The story described the work of a scientist named Keith Wood, who had isolated the gene fireflies use to glow in 1984, and who went on two isolate genes for other colors from Jamaican beetles. The other story described a hybrid underground of poets and novelists who were just starting to use computers. Some were experimenting with something called hyperfiction, in which pages of a text were linked, so that a reader no longer had to be trapped in a one-dimensional narrative.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but those two pieces pretty much epitomize my life today. During my time at Discover, my passion zeroed in on biology–in particular on the intersection of old-fashioned natural history and cutting-edge technology. I was a senior editor at Discover in the 1990s and then left to write books on things like parasites and walking whales, and most recently I wrote about E. coli–including experiments in which scientists made E. coli glow in different colors to understand how genetically identical clones can behave as unique individuals. Even E. coli has fingerprints.

Along the way, I also became fascinated with new formats for writing about science. I came to the world of publishing just as the computer was taking over. The folks in Discover’s production department had yet to give up slicing articles up with Exacto knives and gluing them to pages. I persuaded my boss to get a modem for the magazine and discovered web pages scientists were setting up. I lobbied for us to get email addresses, and helped set up Discover’s web site. At the time, I did these things mainly because they were fun; their use–their inescapableness–would come much later. Four years ago, I discovered people who were doing for science writing what others had done to stories with hyperfiction. They were blogging. I joined in, and blogging has become a regular part of my writing life–a notebook, a playground, a personal wire service.

Today I’m moving my blog to Discover, where I got my start. I’ll also be writing a monthly column for Discover about the brain, which will provide much fodder for additional blog posts. It’s good to be back.

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