Biography of a Germ

by Karlen, Arno

• ISBN13: 9780375401992
• ISBN10: 0375401997
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

This is high drama played out on a very small stage: a microbe's life seen from its own point of view. The bacteriumBorrelia burgdorferi(Bb for short) is a tiny, pale spiral, invisible to the naked eye, yet no one could invent a life so ingenious, or one so tied to so many creatures' fates. We know Bb as the germ that causes Lyme disease, but that is just one recent chapter in its age-old struggle to survive. In this brilliant and original book, Arno Karlen takes readers on a fantastic journey through Bb's world--its ancestry and evolution, its day-to-day life, its perilous travels through ticks, mice, and deer, and, finally, its collision with humanity. Its life evokes the vast ecological web in which we and Bb are threads. Bb is of special interest because it is one of a score of microbes that recently shifted to humans from other species, causing such epidemics as Lyme disease and AIDS. Like its microbial brethren, Bb entered our bodies because we invited it to, by changing our environment and behavior. Its history shows how germs, their hosts, and their shared environment all shape one another. But Bb is fascinating in its own right, a distinctive member of bacteria's invisible kingdom. And its story is an homage to the researchers who discovered it, mapped its genes, and continue to explore it. Imaginative, entertaining, and compelling,Biography of a Germmakes science pure pleasure.

Author Biography

Arno Karlen, Ph.D., a pschoanalyst, has written widely on history and biomedical science. He is the author of <b>Napoleon's Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory</b> and <b>Man and Microbes: Diseases and Plauges in History and Modern Times</b>. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

A Very Small Life	3	(2)
A Subject Not Picked at Random	5	(7)
A Brief Aside Touching the Erotic Flea	12	(4)
Why Bb in Particular	16	(5)
Apologia Pro Vita Sua: In Defense of Germs	21	(13)
In Some Warm Little Pond	34	(10)
Linnaeus's Tree	44	(8)
And Bb's Twig	52	(8)
Gaia, or Nearly Everyone's Cousin	60	(4)
Very Small Indeed	64	(9)
Not Just a Corkscrew	73	(3)
A Possibly Poignant Anatomy	76	(7)
Instead of Sex	83	(4)
A Fantastic Voyage	87	(10)
Equally Fantastic	97	(8)
Is the Tick Sick?	105	(6)
Rash Discoveries	111	(6)
The Magic of Names	117	(4)
The Annals of Myopia	121	(5)
From Bitterroot to Lyme	126	(7)
Far from Primeval	133	(12)
Machupo and Other Disturbances	145	(8)
With Apologies of Sorts	153	(10)
Like Darwin's Finches?	163	(8)
A More Hopeful Future	171

Excerpts

Chapter One: A Very Small Life

To the naked eye, it is invisible, a nothing. Under the microscope, it seems a silvery corkscrew undulating on a dark field. The form has simple elegance, like the whorl of a nautilus shell or the sweep of a dragonfly wing. But that simplicity is an illusion. Through the more powerful electron microscope you see not a featureless wiggle but a shape-shifter -- now a spiral, now a thread, now a rod or a sphere -- with two walls, a dozen whiplike appendages and internal structures. And beyond any microscope's view, revealed only indirectly, by laboratory tests, lies a marvel of complexities. The surface bristles with molecules that sense and respond to the environment, and the interior churns like a chemical factory. Inside, more than a thousand genes flicker on and off in changing sequences, to allow survival in places as different as a tick's gut, a dog's knee and a human brain.

It is the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, by human standards a very small, brief flicker of life. Yet the boldest writer of science fiction could not invent a creature so ingenious, whose existence is entwined with that of so many other species. Although this microbe inhabits much of the earth and myriad hosts, it was not discovered until 1982, and then only because it had ignited a new epidemic, Lyme disease. That illness, so troubling to humans, is just a short, recent chapter in the germ's long history, and from its own perspective not the most important one. Borrelia burgdorferi has an ancient lineage, far older than ours, and despite all the vaccines and antibiotics we devise, it has a more promising future. It preceded people on earth and will doubtless survive us. For that reason alone it deserves respectful biographers.

Clearly there is much drama in this little theater. But that should be no surprise, for just as every person's life, seen close up, is compelling, so is every other creature's. Borrelia burgdorferi is proof that if you want to see life afresh and be struck with awe, you need only take a germ's-eye view of the world.

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Excerpted from Biography of a Germ by Arno Karlen
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