A mobile gene that creates an enzyme that destroys almost all known antibiotics have been reported in NATURE this week, leading the news around the world.
Bacteria (and microbes generally), kick dust in the face of Charles Darwin and his theories of genetic inheritance.
They can send their 'seed' sideways - not just vertically down to their offspring like humans with PhDs - but also to other species or even towards other forms of life.
It is called HGT ( for Horizontal Gene Transfer) (aka Transformation) and Martin Henry Dawson from Truro,Nova Scotia (the doctor whose biography I am writing) was the first person to try to make HGT a big issue in the science world.
That happened between 1928 to 1943 but unfortunately few scientists back then cared to face his unpleasant message ---- "simple creatures are anything but."
(And its corollary, that scientists are less brillant than they think they are.)
If we start dying en masse from these new superbugs, maybe more of us will start listening to Dawson's still-pertinent message
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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