Education Matters

It really is remarkable how little we know about life on earth, even with scientific data pouring in constantly. This is particularly true for the smallest forms of life; microbes and organisms that are only a little bigger than microbes. But since we are used to seeing and hearing things, we rarely even think of life that is smaller than say an insect. Yet over 90% of all life is microbial, and we don’t even know how many species of mammals there are on earth, leave alone microbes.

Microbes though couldn’t care less. They have always ruled earth (though we would love to think we rule this planet) and will, in all probability, continue to do so. It is easy to forget that the earliest forms of life were microbial, single-celled organisms capable of only the simplest functions: survival and reproduction. And it is in these two functions that microbes have excelled. In places where you would think life would be impossible, you are more likely than not to find some microbes chugging along. Put it this way, if there was a hell, there probably wouldn’t be any humans there, but there would be plenty of extremophiles having an orgy. It is always fascinating to see what creature can survive where no other can, and every now and then there is a discovery of yet another creature (usually a bacteria or archaea) that defies all probability of life and thrives.

So, let us say there was a world without light, where the temperature was over 60 degrees centigrade (140F), where the pH was over 9 (an extremely alkaline environment), and there was little or no oxygen. Would you think there would be life possible? Apparently, if you literally dig deep enough, the answer to that is yes. So what kind of life is it?

Some researchers collected fracture fluid from a depth of almost 3 kilometers within the earth’s surface, from a South African gold mine. Within it, they surprisingly found a single dominant species of bacteria, which they called Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator. Now, it looked like these bacteria were perfectly happy living all alone in a vent where there was no light, and therefore no photosynthesis, as well as next to no oxygen, and an extremely alkaline and hot environment. Everything about its life seems wrong. Yet it lives, doing all things that living things need to do. It fixes nitrogen and carbon. It divides (albeit all so slowly, taking a few hundred years to divide). All life needs energy to drive it. Yet there is no light here, so this bacterium actually gets energy from the radioactive decay of uranium. This allows the generation of an electrochemical gradient from hydrogen to sulfate. It was thought that for all life you need a diverse ecosystem (which provides nutrients for each other, or helps break down compounds and so on). And here we have this bacteria happily being an ecosystem of one, in true US Army style. Yet, this bacterium is not all that different from other bacteria, or just all other living cells in general, and has all the genes used to make amino acids, or metabolizing carbon and nitrogen, with a few tweaks here and there.

This story is probably best told by one of the people who discovered it and then analyzed its genome, in this absolutely fascinating podcast. If life fascinates you, this podcast will amaze you.

If we do some day travel in space, and explore new worlds, we probably will not see any four eyed green web-fingered aliens. If we do find something, it will probably be closer to this bacterium.

While a bookstore might be a favorite place for me to “hang out”, a constant grouse remains that in many bookstores far too many books are mischaracterized, and live on shelves they have no business being on. And that can make navigation around the bookstore a little inconvenient, to say the least. I’m never sure how books are categorized in different sections, and who does the categorizing, but far too often it just doesn’t make sense.

Science books are often a serious casualty. The science sections in many bookstores are poorly organized, and some books that should actually be there end up in other sections. I remember once looking for The Selfish Gene in a bookstore, and it wasn’t in the popular science section, or the biology section. Now this book is as good a book on genes and natural selection as can ever be found. Puzzled, I asked the person at the counter, and he finally tracked it down…..in the religion section. Dawkins has certainly written other books (like The God delusion) that could, conceivably, end up in the religion section, but The Selfish Gene? On the other hand, some exceptional science books end up in the “gardening” or “fishes and aquariums” section, so go figure.

The casualties very often spill over to some of my favorite authors. It doesn’t help much that many of them are British, and some of them are now dead. In a blink-and-you-are-a-forgotten-author American world, ambiguously delightful, dead British authors are bound to cause confusion. A particular favorite author of mine remains Gerald Durrell. Now, I can understand Durrell being hard to categorize. He wrote hilariously insightful autobiographical books, non-fiction and some fiction, with animals and natural history forming a backdrop. But to classify My family and other animals under “pets” does a grave and severe injustice to the author. In a bookstore we recently visited, his books were scattered across “pets”, “birds”, “animals”, “dogs”, “cats”, “animal psychology” (yes, honestly) and more. This we discovered, but only after a futile search through literature, autobiographies and natural history. It is so much easier to find the far more boring books of his brother, Lawrence, right under literature. But my very first encounter with bookstore cluelessness started with another favorite author of mine, that old master of English prose and humor, P.G. Wodehouse. Now, Wodehouse remains extremely popular in India (through some strange colonial legacy), and you can walk into any bookstore there, go straight to the literature/fiction section, and find a few dozen of his books neatly arranged. Assuming it would be the same here, I walked into a half-price bookstore years ago, strode confidently to literature, made my way down to “Woolfe”, and….no Wodehouse. A little disturbed but still calm, I shimmied like Jeeves would have down to the “fiction” shelves, and it wasn’t there either. Worried, I went up to the counter and asked. A bored clerk told me to go look for Wodehouse in the comics/humor section, and indeed I found a bunch of them there, resting unhappily between Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes collections.
At least another favorite British author of mine is easier to find, though (in my opition) grossly miscategorized. James Herriot wrote some fantastic semi-autobiographical books on his life as a vet. They really can only be classified as literature. But, while most bookstores here don’t do that, at least the books are easy to find if you walk to “veterinary science” and “animal behavior”. Finally, there is yet another fantastic author who is actually impossible to categorize. Terry Pratchett, the author of (in his own words) a series of inexplicably successful books, is usually categorized in different bookstores in these parts under “fantasy” (very reasonable), “fiction” (for want of anything better), “science fiction” (o.k, maybe), “literature” (I’ll go with that) or “comics and humor” (what can I say). While making it hard to search for his books, it at least ensures that I spend an hour in the bookstore, going from aisle to aisle. (And for those of you who don’t know, Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s. Do read what he has to say about it in his own hilariously inimitable way).

But then, the very best authors are indeed hard (if not impossible) to classify. They do not remain within crudely drawn lines, but always flow across boundaries. This is why I miss the little independent but superbly stocked used bookstores that were almost as common as Starbucks coffee shops in Seattle, with Twice Sold Tales a perpetual favorite. Yes, there might be cats around, but you couldn’t ask for more knowledgeable bibliophiles at the counter, who loved the books they had, knew about them, and always ready to chat about books, authors, and how they could (or couldn’t) be categorized.