October 31, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Fathers of Modern Microbiology
The moment from replicating molecules to cells
with walls was a landmark moment in the history of life on our planet as it
allowed the invisible hand of natural selection to alter the game completely.
This essentially meant that now if any
“lucky” molecule by random process generated an enzyme that had better survival
role then selection pressure would be able to “work” on it.
The person who actually categorized the Archaea
as a whole separate domain and kingdom of life was an American microbiologist
and biophysicist Carl Woese, essentially an east coast guy.
Even before him, the guys who first divided
all cellular organizations into prokaryotes and eukaryotes were Roger Stanier
and C. B. van Niel.
Stanier was Canadian and van Niel as the
name suggests was from Holland, all of them migrating to America, that had
become the power house of pure science after the World War II.
It was in their highly influential 1962
paper that they defined prokaryotes as those organisms that lacked a cell nucleus.
If Stanier and van Niel divided all current
organisms existing into earth into two domains of prokaryotes and eukaryotes,
then it Carl Woese gave origin to the third domain, the Archaea.
The domain was founded essentially on the
basis of genetic phylogeny, more specifically on 16s ribosomal RNA.
The gene for the 16s ribosomal RNA is an
extremely reliable molecular clock as it is a highly conserved gene among
bacteria and Archaea.
So these simplest humble creatures were the
subject of study of an equally humble unknown microbiologist Francisco Mojica
from an equally unknown University of Alicante.
From 1993 onwards, Mojica published several
papers based on his research.
Let me name a few of them for you.
I know many would prefer not to know the
details how science is done, but I think it is important to have an
understanding how scientific research is really done.
It is not glamorous as made out either in
short BBC-type documentaries nor sensational as newspapers and tabloid headings
make it appear to be.
It is slow, tedious yet meticulous, often-boring
repeated work with test tubes, centrifuges, culture plates, incubators,
spectrometers, stirrers, shakers and so on.
Each experiment finally ends with
collection of date that gets fed into a software program for analysis followed
by discussion of the findings and possible conclusion with the mentors.
Following the completion of all the
experiments, the conclusion is written down in the form of scientific paper
that is proof read by all the co-authors and then finally the principal
scientist.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee
or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the International
Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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