microbiome

Book review – Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape our Lives and the World around Us

7-minute read
keywords: microbiology, popular science

As the invisible glue that holds the world together, microbes might well be some of the most underappreciated life forms on our planet. While the previous review of The Curious World of Bacteria dealt with “the who” by discussing fifty noteworthy bacteria, Invisible Friends deals with “the what and how” by discussing the many beneficial and vital roles microbes play in our lives. This is an enthusiastic and hopeful romp through microbiology that encourages readers to rethink their relationship with nature and see themselves as embedded in it. Keep your critical thinking caps at hand though, as the book gets starry-eyed in places.

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Book review – The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer

7 -minute read

Fifty years ago, US President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” when he signed the National Cancer Act. Despite fantastic progress on some fronts, overall it is clear that we are not winning this battle. Cancer remains one of the leading causes of human mortality. But what if the tired war-metaphor is getting it all wrong? Brimming with thought-provoking questions, The Cheating Cell looks at cancer through an evolutionary lens and forces the reader to radically reconsider cancer; not as a bug, but as a feature of life.

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Book review – Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

6-minute read

One objection sometimes raised against the search for extraterrestrial life is that our planet is rich with bizarre life forms that we still poorly understand. As a biologist, you are usually so close to the subject that you sometimes forget just how otherwordly our home planet can be. With his beautifully written book Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake shook me out of that daze by offering a truly mind-opening book on fungi. Excitingly, he does so without floating off into speculative or esoteric territory.

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Book review – The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How To Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

If the design of the cover didn’t already give it away, the instruction to NOT PANIC on the dust jacket makes it clear this book is riffing on the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And just as Douglas Adams’s book was intended to be an indispensable guide to navigating the galaxy, so The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe is an indispensable guide to navigating a world gone mad with pseudoscience, alternative medicine, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Don’t let the book’s bulk put you off, this is an incredibly engaging read with a most humble outlook on life.

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Book review – Kin: How We Came to Know Our Microbe Relatives

The problem with many history books is that they are written long after the facts, sometimes when the original protagonists are no longer alive. Historians or journalists often have no choice but to puzzle together the pieces of their story from eyewitness testimony or archival sources. Kin: How We Came to Know Our Microbe Relatives is a welcome exception to this rule. Written by emeritus microbiology professor John L. Ingraham, currently 94 years young, this book gives an intellectual history of the discipline of microbiology based on over seven decades of first-hand involvement and observation.

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Book review – Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present

As one of several intellectuals who wrote about evolution before Darwin, time has not been kind to the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Reviled during his lifetime by the influential Cuvier, after his death he became best remembered, and ultimately ridiculed, for the idea that characters acquired during an organism’s lifetime are passed on to its offspring. With the rise of the modern field of epigenetics, some of his ideas are making a comeback, albeit modified and adapted for the 21st Century. Palaeontologist and astrobiologist Peter Ward would even like to go so far as to restore some honour to his name and consider epigenetics a neo-Lamarckian process.

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Book review – The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

After I recently finished Carl Zimmer’s new book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, I noticed there was one mechanism of heredity he mentioned only ever so briefly: horizontal gene transfer. Since it does not play a large role in humans, it is understandable he left it aside. And doing it justice would have required almost another book. Luckily, science writer David Quammen is here to give us that book.

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Book review – She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

If Charles Darwin were to walk into my office today and ask me: “So, what did I miss?” I think I would sit the good man down with a copy of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, telling him: “Here, this should get you up to speed”. Darwin struggled to explain how traits were being inherited from generation to generation. As New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer shows in this wide-ranging book, the story of heredity has turned out to be both diverse and wonderful, but has also been misappropriated to prop up some horrible ideologies.

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Book review – The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence That Explains the World

I sometimes wonder whether I am a closet Buddhist. Now, I will be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about Buddhism, but what little I have encountered often strikes a chord with me. The Enlightened Gene shows there might be a good reason for this. This book chronicles a most unlikely project: the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. On the invitation of the Dalai Lama no less (!), Emory University has developed a science curriculum to be taught to Tibetan monks and nuns in exile in India. Spearheaded by professor Arri Eisen and in close collaboration with monk Geshe Yungdrung Konchok, the aim is to integrate modern science (focusing on physics and life sciences, especially neuroscience) into their monastic curriculum.

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Book review – Planet of Microbes: The Perils and Potential of Earth’s Essential Life Forms

What unites deep subterranean caves, hydrothermal vents in the deep sea, our guts, cloud formation, geochemical processes, and astrobiology (the search for life beyond our planet) to name but a few things? Microbes. The tiny, single-celled organisms that we cannot see with the naked eye are everywhere. With Planet of Microbes, Ted Anton makes the point that this world is really theirs, and takes the reader on a tour of the rapid increase in our understanding of their importance, focusing on three major subjects.

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