It Wasn’T Darwin’S Error That He Didn’T Convey Access To Fully Sequenced Genomes

From the Washington Independent Review of Books:

The Tangled Tree: Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Radical New History of Life

The worldwide flu epidemic of 1918-19 was accompanied past times a strain of bacterial pneumonia that killed millions of people. In searching for a treatment, a British researcher named Fred Griffith discovered that approximately forms of the bacterium were relatively mild, exactly others were virulent. He farther discovered that combining the alive mild shape alongside the dead virulent shape created a alive virulent form.
It was the quintessential horror storey of transformation from the mild-mannered into the Beast, played out inward a Petri dish.

Griffith’s study documents the firstly known observation of a phenomenon right away known equally horizontal cistron transfer, or HGT. The unfolding agreement in addition to implications of several related, relatively recent lines of scientific inquiry, including HGT, shape the discipline David Quammen’s latest book.
Quammen is the head of deconstructing complex, obscure scientific concepts in addition to reconstituting them into coherent, understandable, in addition to illuminating narratives. In The Tangled Tree: Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Radical New History of Life, he does this primarily past times focusing on the people behind the scientific discipline who, inward a rattling brusk menses of fourth dimension — whether working alongside or against each other — stimulate got changed much of what nosotros idea nosotros knew virtually evolution, heredity, and, yes, the origin (and definition) of species.

The championship refers to the mutual metaphor of the “tree of life” that has been drawn in addition to redrawn, since earlier Darwin, inward our attempts to demo the hierarchical in addition to evolving relationships of life forms. In the final xl years or in addition to then of scientific endeavor, that tree has instead revealed itself to hold out a web.

Serving equally the cardinal figure inward this narrative is Carl R. Woese, a scientist whose function at the University of Illinois Urbana starting inward the 1960s eventually made him the begetter of a branch of scientific discipline right away known equally molecular phylogenetics. Woese’s involvement was inward discovering the oldest origins of the genetic code in addition to figuring out how it evolved. He was attempting to become all the agency dorsum to the beginning.

In the years earlier consummate genomes of diverse species were mapped, earlier computer-based sequencing was possible, this function involved a mind-numbingly manual in addition to unsafe procedure of RNA sequencing that helped to divulge degrees of ancient relatedness, something never earlier possible.

It was Woese who demonstrated that, beyond prokaryotes in addition to eukaryotes — the 2 scientifically accepted kingdoms of life at the fourth dimension — at that topographic point was a third: the archaea. He called the resulting novel diagram of evolutionary relationships “the Big Tree.”...

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