Sublime

The lineage that led to E. coli gained new circuits to sense and feed on new sugars, for example.

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

the virus also makes a second protein that protects the microbe from the restriction enzymes. Known as a modification enzyme,

Splicing—

only took a small double-stranded RNA, the length of about 21 base pairs, to shut down gene expression.

RNA indeed had information and function in the same molecule!

Max Delbrück was a Nobel laureate who studied physics and biology. He obviously believed that scientists should be careful and rigorous in their work. But he thought that a bit of looseness was helpful too, as it allowed room for the unexpected and accidental. He called this the Principle of Limited Sloppiness.

Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized—or even an entirely limitable or controllable—effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had “one great subject,” Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be resp