Synopsis
In 1946, a medical school student called Joshua Lederberg decided to find out whether microbes make love. Lederberg 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. In his experiments on the breeding habits of the bacterium Escherichia coli, Lederberg used defective E. coli strains which, unable to reproduce by cloning, ought to have perished in the petri dish. However, the few colonies of survivors that began to spread across the dishes enabled Lederberg to prove both that bacteria have sex as well as genes. Zimmer uses E. coli, usually known for its lethal strain that causes food poisoning, as a prism to understand what life is, what it was, and what it will become.
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About the Author
Carl Zimmer is the author of 12 books about science, including Microcosm: E-coli and The New Science of Life and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and writes frequently for the New York Times and magazines such as National Geographic and Discover. Since 2003 he has written The Loom, an award-winning blog. He was awarded the 2007 National Academies Communication Award, the highest honour in the US for science writing. He is a lecturer at Yale University.
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