Sublime

Louis Pasteur’s germ theory: we still want to do our best to avoid the pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and fungi that can cause acute sickness. But we also want to do our best to avoid autoimmune reactions that lead to chronic sickness, which involves protecting our microbiomes when possible, and certainly avoiding needlessly destroying them.

E. coli builds chemical weapons. Known as colicins, these deadly molecules kill in many ways. Some pierce the microbe’s membrane like a spear, forcing its innards to spill out. Others block E. coli from building new proteins. Others destroy DNA.

A single one of these proteins can safely hold 5,000 iron atoms, which it carefully dispenses, one atom at a time, as the microbe needs them.

In the conclusion to her essay, Dr Morden provides a summary of the mistaken ideas about the existence of an ‘infectious disease’ called rabies, “Is rabies then a disease? Have we isolated a virus or germ? Is the Pasteur-treatment specific? Is rabies, in short, fact or fancy? I believe it is fancy, for I have handled so-called rabid animals and

When a fluorescent dye is dropped into a single cell in a cluster of healthy cells, where the healthy cells share a boundary with a cluster of