Mykola Bilokonsky interviewed Carl Zimmer about his new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life.
The first question and answer:
What made you choose E. coli as a topic for your latest book? Obviously the subject affords a great wealth of information to explore, but so do many others - why work with this one?
CZ: My books usually start out with a lot of connected thoughts drifting around in my head. To turn that t
hought-cloud into a manuscript, I first have to narrow it down to something that can fit in a few hundred pages, not a few thousand. This time around, I started thinking a lot about life--what it means to be alive, what rules govern life no matter what form it takes. Biologists know so much more today about life than just a few years ago that they can really start to ask these questions in a meaningful way. But I knew I didn’t want to write about all 10 million species of life on Earth. So it occurred to me, what if I just choose one species? Which one would I choose? The choice was obvious --E. coli. The story of E. coli is really the story of modern biology, from the 1940s, when scientists struggled to discover what genes are, to today, when they are rebuilding life from scratch.
Read
the entire Q & A at Newsvine.
Read
an excerpt from Miocrocosm, and learn more about it and the author's work at
Carl Zimmer's website.
Writers Read: Carl Zimmer.
--Marshal Zeringue
