Planet of Microbes: The Perils and Potential of Earth's Essential Life Forms
288
Planet of Microbes: The Perils and Potential of Earth's Essential Life Forms
288Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226353944 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2017 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lightning in the Lab
The University of Chicago campus was freezing in December 1952 when Stanley Miller, a thin twenty-two-year-old California graduate student, walked into the basement lab. He found his unwieldy three-foot-high twin glass globe contraption still sputtering electricity from its Tesla coil. The water was simmering, and he turned down the flame to look.
The water was cloudy, and the collection globe was covered with brown gunk. Miller's heart raced as he pulled open the hatch to sample the tarry residue.
Miller was a Jewish younger brother from Oakland, California, an Eagle Scout who loved the outdoors and chemistry and had little patience for small problems. Known as a chemistry prodigy in his undergraduate days at University of California, Berkeley, he was anxiously following the war news from Eastern Europe — World War II had separated his grandparents in his native Latvia. His father, a lawyer, was appointed by family friend and future Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren to be Oakland's assistant district attorney. Then his father died suddenly in 1946, threatening Miller's dream of pursuing a doctoral program. He needed money to follow his older brother into graduate school.
Miller had applied to the country's top biochemistry programs and waited, unable to sleep, hoping. Only one school, the University of Chicago, offered him financial support. He would have to teach.
These were the earliest days of molecular biology and the origin-of-life search. On the one hand came important papers, like those of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger's lectures collected in the book What Is Life?, which inspired Francis Crick and James Watson. Schrödinger explored the fact that life is the only entity that seemed to defy the law of entropy and prophetically pushed researchers to unravel the molecular basis of heredity.
On the other hand, compelling fantasy fiction, like that of H. G. Wells, promoted the conviction that life must exist elsewhere and may well be smarter or better than we were. But few really imagined that serious work into the topic could be pursued, though a Soviet naturalist, Aleksandr Oparin, and an English biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, had each independently written about the chemicals that would be needed for the creation of life from chaos. Sputnik would soon pour the finances of the U.S. government into pure science. At the dawn of big science, sketchy but exciting speculations received full U.S. and Soviet government support.
Miller arrived at the imposing southside Chicago campus in September 1951, a smallish, brilliant, brash, and insecure graduate student loudly eschewing the slow work of experiment as "time-consuming, messy and not as important ... as theoretical work," he later wrote. Instead he tried theoretical physics with the controversial Edward Teller, who was studying the early universe, but it was difficult research that did not involve his favorite topic, chemistry. Miller floundered. After a year the government called Teller to work on the hydrogen bomb in California, and Miller had a lucrative offer to go with him.
It was cold in Chicago, and Miller longed for his native state, where he could help make weapons for the U.S. Army at high pay with benefits. One day he attended a campus lecture by the professor and pastor's son Harold Urey. The monthly lectures were high-pressure affairs that encouraged and tore down some of the best minds in the lecture hall surrounded by such Nobel Prize–winners as Enrico Fermi. Urey was a quiet, self-deprecating westerner with his own Nobel. "It is possible to create an experiment," he said at the end of his talk, "to recreate the conditions of early Earth and see what lightning, in the form of electrical discharges, might produce." Miller sat upright in his chair.
Miller was galvanized but uncertain, and it took him months to approach Urey. Miller said would try the origin-of-life experiment. Urey turned him down. Miller pressed him. He really thought the experiment might work.
Finally, reluctantly, Harold Urey permitted the Californian to try an origin-of-life experiment. He gave him one year.
A beautiful world
In the 1920s Oparin and Haldane had suggested that the chemicals of the early Earth might, if zapped with an energy source, create dynamic disequilibria, which would be a precursor to life. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger explored in his lectures the many ways in which life defied entropy, the tendency of systems to wear down over time. In this universe, nothing gained energy. Except life.
The 1950s marked a paranoid time of Communist witch hunts, atomic obsession, and the Korean War. Exceptions to the gloom were the nascent fields of space science, science fiction, and molecular biology, where all nations could meet in a dream of human betterment. In Cambridge, England, Rosalind Franklin was X-raying DNA and James Watson and Frances Crick were deciphering its structure. Japanese movies portrayed a world united against mutant monsters. Science-fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov kindled dreams of strange life in the universe. As a child in the 1960s and '70s I spent nights devouring their novels.
In Chicago, Harold Urey was a fifty-nine-year-old Indiana minister's son who grew up in Montana, who first saw an automobile at the age of seventeen, and who taught science in a mining camp in Paradise Valley, memorialized in the Jimmy Buffett song "Cheeseburger in Paradise." Urey's discovery of the element deuterium, also called heavy hydrogen, had swept him into the new physics world of radioactivity. Isotopes got him to Europe in the 1920s to meet Heisenberg and Einstein and to New York in the 1930s to study radioactive dating at Columbia. His discovery of deuterium, a key element of the atomic bomb, swept him into the secret government war effort, a high-stakes, complicated, and top-secret effort that wore out the pacifist Nazi-opponent, who told President Truman not to use the bomb.
Once the war was over and he moved to the University of Chicago, Urey analyzed planet climates and defended the Rosenbergs before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He studied ancient atmospheres by the relative differences in oxygen, trying to understand the early days of the solar system. Deuterium had given humankind one gift: a reliable way to date the rocks of the distant past. That was when he mentioned his idea for an origin-of-life experiment in a lecture.
"I already have a Nobel"
In the basement of the university building, Urey's graduate student Miller created three glass contraptions, mimicking the long-necked glass tubules employed by Louis Pasteur, to electrify the gases he thought existed on early Earth. He fashioned three types of the same experiment: the volcanic version, the lightning version, and a straight version. "Water is boiled in the flask," he wrote, "mixes with the gasses, circulates past the electrodes, condenses and empties back into the flask."
It was a struggle, but Miller's mentor, Urey, understood what it was to struggle. When Urey's first dissertation topic fell through at the University of California, he went to work with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen on the spectroscopic study of molecules. But the secret, high-stress atomic bomb effort of the 1930s and '40s had worn Urey out, and his proposal for the bomb's triggering device was turned down. Urey almost skipped his own Nobel Prize ceremony to be at the birth of his daughter.
In 1952, at the University of Chicago, Miller had the experimental tools made and walked in to see his experiment. Within two days the liquid turned a pale yellow, and in a week it was marred by "cloudiness and turbidity." The cloudiness came from organic material mixing with the silica from the glass. In a laborious process that would identify its composition, Miller dipped a paper in the tarry residue and dipped it first in alcohol, then in phenol, and finally in another chemical. The spot turned purple, which meant glycine, an amino acid, was present. It was a small amount but still, a building block of life he had made in two days of an experiment they both thought would never work. Miller raced to call his older brother Donald.
Glycine is a building block of proteins and of pharmaceuticals. What Miller did not know at first was that as his dipped mixture turned pink, the mixture was building a small portion, some 2 percent, of amino acids, the building blocks of living cells, as well as other biomolecules such as the hydrocarbon bitumen. He had glimpsed a potential vision of the origin of life.
Miller repeated the experiment while Urey was out of town on a lecture tour, this time sparking the mixture for a week. The inside of the flask became coated with an oily scum, and the water turned brownish. Now the glycine spot was far brighter, and other amino acids showed up as well.
Once Urey returned, the result became clear to them, and it was explosive: amino acids appeared in conditions that resembled those of early Earth. When Miller repeated the experiment a generation later, he created thirty-three amino acids, including half of the twenty found in proteins. The acids appeared in surprisingly consistent doses, and some were keys to life. Having learned the power of publicity from his work on the atomic bomb, Urey pushed his graduate student to write it up fast. Miller produced a draft was surprised to get it back from his professor, with a long list of comments, in only a week. By February 1953 it was done. Urey removed his name and sent it in himself to Science. "I already have a Nobel," he said to Miller.
Weeks passed. Urey wrote the editors to question the delay. Another month passed. Urey sent a telegram to the Science editor he knew; Science did not appreciate it. In a panic, Miller tried another journal, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which accepted it at once. Then Science came back on March 25. A reviewer apologized to Urey for the delay.
The article appeared two months later, a few weeks after the announcement of the double helix for DNA. Amino acids appeared in conditions Miller and Urey thought resembled those of early Earth. The two appeared in the New York Times and became famous overnight when the tabloids erroneously reported that they had invented life. The British journal Nature had published the double helix structure of DNA, and this was the American Science's answer. Radio and newspaper reports telephoned the men for quotes. But the hardest part for Miller was his assignment to deliver the monthly lecture to a skeptical group of famous University of Chicago faculty that he had heard Urey give. Now he was the main actor. Enrico Fermi stood and fired back that he thought it all seemed very unlikely. Urey backed his student. "If God did not do it this way," he said, turning to Fermi, "then He missed a good bet."
Miller need not have feared the school faculty. Soon he would make the cover of Time and hear his name mentioned as a prospect for a Nobel Prize. With his simple experiment a new field was born: astrobiology. But on the other side of the world a strange thinker was coming at life from the opposite direction, wandering the foothills near his beloved Russian lakes. His work had everything to do with microbes.
Foothills of lichen
When the scientist awoke he walked down the rotting wood blocks to the lake. He would toss his shirt onto the broken lawn chair on the dock and sink into the water. The fish would scatter, his toes would grasp onto a rock here or there and push off, and he would swim. Konstantin Merezhkovsky would surface to the lonely calls of loons.
At the turn of the century, microbes were still the enemies of humankind. Microbe hunters such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had defeated cholera, tuberculosis, and anthrax, all while racing one another, drumming up funds from national governments and wealthy patrons, and laying the foundation of modern medicine, often at risk to their health and reputations. By the 1940s it seemed like an end to disease was in sight.
There was only one problem. In so doing we were disturbing ancient relationships that had protected us for hundreds of thousands of years. Only a handful of the microbes in our bodies are killers. Many are not only beneficial but in fact critical to us and to the biosphere. Without them, we would not be here.
Few researchers were interested in the beneficial microbes save for a group of idealistic Russian thinkers studying some of the benefits tiny living beings — from algae to parasites, intestinal bugs to those on our skin — provide for us and other animals. The naturalists studying them called themselves the Russian School. Of them, one obscure, troubled individual wandered the lakes, foothills, and steppes of Kazan province, studying the hard-shelled creatures called diatoms that made pond scum and fouled well water. Shaped like elongated diamonds, diatoms often lived in symbiosis with fish and other marine creatures. They floated in such huge packs in the sea that their skeletons formed the White Cliffs of Dover. Konstantin Merezhkovsky studied their role in the biosphere while penning children's fantasy books geared toward his favorite audience, young girls.
Gradually Merezhkovsky shifted his attention from diatoms to the strange combination of microbe and fungus that made up common forest mosses and lichen. These commensal organisms seemed to suggest a big idea: symbiosis, or living together in biochemical cooperation, made for a major factor of life in Russian forests. The union of independent organisms is a life strategy that drove evolutionary advancement. Cooperation, not competition, was the model for complex plant and animal survival.
Merezhkovsky understood that lichen, or moss, was not the plant it seemed, but rather a cooperative community of algae and fungi. You could see them in a microscope. He collected hundreds of lichen species from all over Russia and Austria, and around the Mediterranean, studying them their medicinal uses as best he could. In his spare time he wrote fantasy stories of ritual initiation and secret societies. He published his scientific papers on symbiosis in journals and then in a book. Multicellular life grew out of the ancient unions of bacteria that performed essential roles to aid each other.
In his own country Merezhkovsky was criticized, while few abroad noticed. Yet there was nothing new about the idea of symbiosis. Darwin anticipated it in 1868 when he wrote: "Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms." All around us is evidence of symbiosis. Ancient cyanobacteria that the made the pungent blue-green algae of swamps and ponds, Merezhkovsky proposed, were the basis for chloroplasts, the photosynthesizing engines of plant cells that cleaned our air, created our oxygen, and helped to generate our soil and forests and prairies.
Without pond scum, in other words, life and the environment as we know them would not exist. Merezhkovsky suggested yet a bigger, more audacious idea: the nucleus of plant and animal cells, the control center whose rules all complex cells followed, was itself an independent bacterium incorporated in an ancient union of microbes. So were other vital plant and animal cell organelles. Indeed, the modern cell was, as Darwin intuited, a microcosm of diverse, formerly independent, intricately cooperating parts.
To most people, bacteria — some round, some rod-shaped, some skinny, some fat — caused disease, spoiled food, and signaled decay. Fungi were synonymous with foot and body secretions we hated to consider. Found in rocks and crevices around the world, they went unnoticed because of their mysterious lifestyles in soil and dead things, and as symbionts on animals, plants, bacteria, or other fungi.
Yes, some microorganisms were hugely beneficial. Yeast was a common one-celled fungus that made bread rise and beers, wines, and liquors ferment. Bacteria performed essential roles in recycling organic matter and cycling nutrients that allowed plants to thrive. Still, the dominant model of life's development was of the majestic tree of visible life sketched by Darwin and filled out further by others. There was little room on it for secret sharers.
The strange Merezhkovsky gathered the ideas of the Russian School together in a series of closely argued papers and then quietly left Russia. He moved around the world under a pseudonym, the author of racist and anti-Semitic tracts. Someone was following him. Convicted of raping several girls in Russia, the married aristocrat escaped to the United States, where he worked for two years at Stanford under the name William Adler and tried to seduce a farmer's daughter. He fled to Austria, then to Germany, then back to Russia until finally, penniless, he committed ritual suicide by imbibing poison, as in a scene from his children's novel.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Planet of Microbes"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Ted Anton.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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