Zimmer Carl: Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life

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Publikace: Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer. In 1946, a 20 year old medical school student called Joshua Lederberg decided to find out whether microbes make love. Lederbeter was motivated not by a displaced libido, but by scientific ambition. At the age of seven, he had declared that he hoped to become 'like Einstein' and to 'discover a few things in science.' The 'few things' Lederberg discovered would revolutionise modern science and earn him a Nobel Prize. He chose to observe the breeding habits of a certain bacterium called Escherichia coli, better known as E coli. His experiments used defective E coli strains lacking the essential molecules to reproduce by cloning which should, by rights, perish in the petri dish. But slowly, a few colonies of survivors began to spread accross the dishes. The only possible explanation for their survival was that they were a product of sex. Not only had Lederberg proved that bacteria have sex, he had also proved they have genes. Since then, what was once nothing more than a humble resident of the human gut has become our best guide to what it means to be alive. Most of us might only know E coli for its lethal strain that causes food poisoning. Zimmer uses E coli as a prism to understand what life is, what it was, and what it will become. Among other things, Zimmer tells us how E coli microbes talk to each other, how studies of their evolution represent the most powerful evidence in support of natural selection, and how they might just explain life on other planets... Publikace: Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer. A Best Book of the Year"Seed Magazine "- "Granta Magazine "- "The Plain-Dealer"In this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl Zimmer traces "E. coli"'s pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. He reveals the many surprising and alarming parallels between "E. coli"'s life and our own. And he describes how "E. coli "changes in real time, revealing billions of years of history encoded within its genome. "E. coli" is also the most engineered species on Earth, and as scientists retool this microbe to produce life-saving drugs and clean fuel, they are discovering just how far the definition of life can be stretched.