It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is (1) extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality though a relatively low number of cases, and yet (2) poorly transmissible...
Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut’s infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early nove...
Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men—Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research—and their interest in general biological problems was very limited. They cared abou...
Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.
Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes b...
RNA viruses because I already had that list in my mind: Hendra and Nipah, Ebola and Marburg, West Nile, Machupo, Junin, the influenzas, the hantas, dengue and yellow fever, rabies and its cousins, chi...
The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants an...
The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of messenger RNA.
The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.
Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.
Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.
Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his Rosetta Stone paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.
When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. Wilson meant wild animals....
A mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce.
Convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
Disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.
Molecular phylogenetics.
Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bow...
Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the mass action principle. It was a...
Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the ide...
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