When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.
Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications. There’s a nice word: ramifications. It’s...
To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and cir...
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.
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.
Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.
Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding...
How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressur...
Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of dome...
When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like...
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....
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...
Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.
Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befud...