Liam Shaw is an evolutionary biologist at Bristol. Dangerous Miracle, a history of antibiotics, is out now.
In 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other...
The first vaccines a two-month-old child gets in England offer protection against three species of virus and five bacteria. Since 2015, they have included Neisseria meningitidis group B, the bacterium involved in the recent meningitis outbreak in Kent in which two people have died. The first vaccine against bacteria was created by Louis Pasteur in 1879. It was a live attenuated vaccine for chicken cholera, meaning it involved weakened forms of the bacteria that didn’t cause serious disease. While that approach is still often used for viruses, modern vaccine development for bacteria has largely moved away from live attenuated forms. Ensuring that a bacterium is reliably weakened is a difficult problem because bacteria are complicated: SARS-CoV-2 has only eleven genes; N. meningitidis has about two thousand.
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current Biology reporting that an Austrian cow called Veronika uses a broom to scratch herself. Appealing to tool use as a defining feature of humanity has always been a shaky argument, though a curiously persistent one.
Streptomycetes are soil bacteria that could easily be mistaken for fungi, their cells snaking through the earth in long threads that resemble mycelial networks. To propagate when their survival is threatened, they break through the earth’s surface and then cannibalise themselves, using their last resources to build aerial platforms that release spores into the atmosphere to be carried away on the wind. Streptomycetes also produce a bonanza of antibiotics.
The pain of toothache arrives long after the damage has been done. The process begins when bacteria in the mouth turn sugars from our food into acid, which etches the tooth’s enamel, allowing the bacteria to penetrate further. Only when they hit the nerve bundles at the tooth’s pulpy core does the sufferer become aware – all too painfully aware – of their...
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