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Posted on 03/21/2003 7:56:35 PM PST by gore3000
Issue 11.04 - April 2003
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The Bacteria Whisperer
Bonnie Bassler discovered a secret about microbes that the science world has missed for centuries. The bugs are talking to each other. And plotting against us.
By Steve Silberman
Trim and hyperkinetic at 40, Bonnie Bassler is often mistaken for a graduate student at conferences. Five mornings a week at dawn, she walks a mile to the local YMCA to lead a popular aerobics class. When a representative from the MacArthur Foundation phoned last fall, the caller played coy at first, asking Bassler if she knew anyone who might be worthy of one of the foundation's fellowships, popularly known as genius grants. "I'm sorry," Bassler apologized, "I don't hang out with that caliber of people."
The point of the call, of course, was that Bassler - an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton - is now officially a genius herself. More than a decade ago, she began studying a phenomenon that even fellow biologists considered to be of questionable significance: bacterial communication. Now she finds herself at the forefront of a major shift in mainstream science.
The notion that microbes have anything to say to each other is surprisingly new. For more than a century, bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded opportunists, little more than efficient machines for self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue, in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive, but their lives seemed, well, boring. The "sole ambition" of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973, is "to produce two bacteria."
New research suggests, however, that microbial life is much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively track changes in their environment, conspire with their own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria, gain advantages over competitors, and communicate with their hosts - the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria.
Last year, Bassler and her colleagues unlocked the structure of a molecular language shared by many of nature's most fearsome particles of mass destruction, including those responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, septicemia, ulcers, Lyme disease, stomach cancer, and bubonic plague. Now even Big Pharma, faced with a soaring number of microbes resistant to existing drugs, is taking notice of her work.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
I knew it! I KNEW it!
And the French have already surrendered. Yet, Chirac and Blix are reluctant to approve antibiotics, as they don't see an eminent threat.
So now PETA will defend these guys?
All in all, these guys are nasty. Living 100,000 plus years on the planet teaches you something. Survival.
Look on the bright side. 70,000 years from now, the Rats will understand it too.
Really? Who first came across it at the microbe level?
I just read Prey and to be honest, it is one the scariest books I've read in a while. Still the concepts in it are wonderfully intriguing. I wonder if we are closer to the possiblities Crichtdon wrote about than we thought.
Regards,
Boiler Plate
The bugs are having trouble reproducing which will mean death for the bacteria so they come to the surface and do terrorism until Bradford Dillman can get them to breed with some other roach, then, their survival ensured, they go back under the earth and I think they take Bradford Dillman with them.
The novel was way better then the movie but the film was alright in a mid-seventies, nostolgic kind of way. If the novel had a fault it would be the title, who can remember it, let alone pronounce it? That's probably why they simplified it to Bug! for the major motion picture release. People can remember and pronounce Bug!
Which just goes to show you that, if art isn't dead, it probably should be.
Bacteria per se are perhaps 2 1/4 to 3 billion years old. Or 7000, depending on your philosophy ;-)
Sounds like another quasi-Nobel prize for a deserving minority article.
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