Tag Archives: books

Your Inner Fish

photo of Neil Shubin

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. A great piece from the University of Chicago, Fish out of Water, provides a good preview to the book:

What are the leading causes of death in humans? Four of the top ten causes—heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and stroke – have some sort of genetic basis and, likely, a historical one. Much of the difficulty is almost certainly due to our having a body built for an active animal but the lifestyle of a spud.
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The problem is that the brain stem originally controlled breathing in fish; it has been jerry-rigged to work in mammals… This works well in fish, but it is a lousy arrangement for mammals.
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The example from microbes is not unique. Judging by the Nobel Prizes awarded in medicine and physiology in the past 13 years, I should have called this book Your Inner Fly, Your Inner Worm, or Your Inner Yeast. Pioneering research on flies won the 1995 Nobel Prize in medicine for uncovering a set of genes that builds bodies in humans and other animals. Nobels in medicine in 2002 and 2006 went to people who made significant advances in human genetics and health by studying an insignificant-looking little worm (C. elegans). Similarly, in 2001, elegant analyses of yeast (including baker’s yeast) and sea urchins won the Nobel in medicine for increasing our understanding of some of the basic biology of all cells. These are not esoteric discoveries made on obscure and unimportant creatures. These discoveries on yeast, flies, worms, and, yes, fish tell us about how our own bodies work, the causes of many of the diseases we suffer, and ways we can develop tools to make our lives longer and healthier.

Two of my more controversial posts have been: Evolution is Fundamental to Science and Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country. Evolution is not controversial scientifically. Just as gravity is not. Obviously this understanding is far from universal however.

But it is just a matter of time: similar to Galileo Galilei and heliocentric cosmology. See: Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens – Copernican System – Galileo). We now sit maybe 100 years after Galileo’s death (based on the evidence available in support of each scientific theory). At some point the evidence is accepted and life continues. Though I must admit it, I find it a bit disappointing how long it is taking for some people to accept the evidence of evolution. But I probably need to learn to be more patient – I have been told that more than once. All I can do is try to help present some small amount of the great work so many scientists have done to advance our knowledge. And here I am talking about evolution – for the 28% of those in the USA that couldn’t provide the answer that earth revolves around the sun, in 1998, well, they need much more help than I can provide.

One Reason Bacteria Gain Tolerance So Quickly

I recently read Good Gems, Bad Germs as part of my effort to learn more about bacteria, viruses, how are bodies work, cells, microbiology etc.. It is a great book, I highly recommend it. Page 111:

In 1951 the husband-wife team of Joshua and Esther Lederberg, microbiologists at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated that their elegantly simple proof that preexisting mutations, not gradual tolerance, accounted for the many instances of new drug resistance… This meant that every new antibiotic became a powerful new force for bacterial evolution, winnowing away every bacterium but the otherwise unremarkable one that could survive its effects. With its competition gone, that lucky mutant could populate, giving rise to a newly resistant colony overnight.

Since bacteria can grow remarkably quickly, eliminating all but a small number just means that the new population boom will come from those few, resistant, ancestors. But that is not the only reason bacteria are so challenging to fight. They have been around billions or years and have survived because they can adapt well. Bacteria, in fact, can get their genes from distantly related bacteria. So if one bacteria gains immunity another bacteria can get that immunity by getting genes from that other bacteria (seems like science fiction but it is actually science fact).

Parasite Rex

Parasite Rex is a great book by Carl Zimmer (one of the bloggers listed in the Curious Cat directory of science blogs). This is the first book read as part of my specific plan to read more about bacteria, cells, virus, genes and the like.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this blog is that I have focused much more on cool things I read. And over time the amazing things I posted about related to these topics made me realize I should put some focused effort to reading more on these topics. Some of the posts that sparked that idea: Tracking the Ecosystem Within Us – Inner Life of a Cell: Full Version – Where Bacteria Get Their Genes, People Have More Bacterial Cells than Human Cells, Biological Molecular Motors – Energy Efficiency of Digestion – Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA – Midichloria mitochondrii – Microbes – Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells – How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life – New Understanding of Human DNA – Soil Could Shed Light on Antibiotic Resistance – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria

Parasite Rex was a great place to start. Carl Zimmer is a great writer, and the details on how many parasites there are and how interconnected those parasites are to living systems and how that has affected, and is affecting, us is amazing. And the next book I am reading is also fantastic: Good Germs, Bad Germs. Here is one small example from Parasite Rex, page 196-7:

A person who dies of sickle cell anemia is less likely to pass on the defective gene, and that means the disease should be exceedingly rare. But it’s not – one in four hundred American blacks has sickle sell anemia, and one in ten carries a single copy of the defective gene. The only reason the gene stays in such high circulation is that is also happens to be a defense against malaria.

Malaria is a parasite. One of the amazing things with repeated examples in the book were parasites that seemed to have extremely complicated life cycles (that don’t seem like a great strategy to prosper but obviously work). Where they grow in one life form (an insect or mammal or whatever) but must leave that life form for some other specific life form for the next stage in life (they cannot have descendants without doing so…). Seems like a crazy way to evolve but it happens over and over again.
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The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett. Review by, Andrea Barrett:

Andrea Barrett is a lyrical novelist of the American past, giving life to pioneers in science with such resonance that even readers who wrestled mightily with chemistry come away entranced by her evocative accounts of discovery.

The winner of a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award (for the 1996 short-story collection Ship Fever) and a Pulitzer finalist (for the 2003 Servants of the Map), Barrett is taken with an earlier time, when the country was much smaller and exploration – pushing boundaries in science, geography and knowledge – mattered far more than it does today. Science moved the country forward and outward, and into the greater world.
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In this age, and in Barrett’s writings, scientists are holding the lamp to lead Americans out of the darkness, and patients away from death. (Curiously, this is the second novel in a year to refer to the diminutive electrical pioneer Charles Steinmetz, a major figure in Starling Lawrence’s The Lightning Keeper, an equally romantic, though less taut and accomplished, novel.)

Interview of Steve Wozniak

Excellent interview of Steve Wozniak from Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston, to be published in a few months.

I said, “No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there.

Sounds like Google today, see: How Google Works focused on engineering and Enginners at Google Make Decisions.
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Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci drawings including a larger version of the image above.

Math and the Mona Lisa : The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci is an excellent book exploring the visionary science of Leonardo da Vinci. More excellent science books that we recommend.

An excellent site for learning more about Leonardo – Museum of Science Leonardo web site (includes classroom activities):

Leonardo da Vinci may seem an unusual topic to study in science. But the more you learn about this remarkable Renaissance man, the more you will realize that he was a terrific role model for applying the scientific method creatively in every aspect of life including art and music. Although he is best known for his dramatic and expressive artwork, Leonardo also conducted dozens of carefully thought out experiments and created futuristic inventions in a time before modern science and invention had really begun.

Leonardo: Master Draftsman exhibit at the Met