Small Things Considered

Feynman Said "Just Look At The Thing!"

by Jan Spitzer
On October 28, 2010, Elio posted this Talmudic Question: "Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, said: It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! To take him up on it, imagine a microscope that lets you observe single molecules in a… Read more →

Why Medical Microbiology Is Not Like Stamp Collecting

by Elio
I started teaching microbiology to medical students in 1958, at a time when biomedical science was in its full ascendancy. Grant money was there practically for the asking, jobs were plentiful, universities and their medical schools were frenetically building up their science base. Not entirely surprising, the general feeling of young… Read more →

The View From Here – by John Coffin

by John Coffin  
Why is it so hard to make an HIV vaccine? The answer lies in the unusual relationship of this particular virus with its host. By and large, viruses of humans and other animals interact with their hosts in one of two ways. After an initial period of rapid (often symptomatic) infection, some viruses... Read more →

The View From Here – by Richard Losick

by Richard Losick  
My dear friend Linc Sonenshein introduced me to Bacillus subtilis forty years ago when he was a graduate student with Salvador Luria. The remarkable capacity of B. subtilis to transform itself into a spore has been the focus of my research ever since. Before too long, Sonenshein and I focused on 168 and related strains... Read more →

The View From Here – by Julian Davies

by Julian Davies  
This is in response to Mark Martin’s prompt; he is an interesting and eclectic character. Well, I was not inclined to write anything, but since this week has been spent on grant writing (for not very much money, this being the style in Canada) and today, being a sunny day, I decided to cut the grass but... Read more →

The View From Here – by Charles Yanofsky

by C. Yanowsky  
Although the genetic code is well established, a very exciting unsolved problem is discovering how codons were related to amino acids in the evolution of protein synthesis. How did a tRNA and a tRNA synthetase first evolve, and what was their ancestral source? Read more →