Now for the Tangled Tree.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a remarkable technology that makes genetic engineering relatively easy. With it you can edit DNA, and snip out a gene that otherwise would cause a genetic disease. And, if you do it at the right time, you can actually strip the genetic problem out of not just one individual but of all succeeding generations. That’s not all, of course. Designer babies are now possible. But, what I want is a fungus-proof American chestnut.

This remarkable capability was built off a genetic capability evolved by prokaryotes—bacteria and archaea–to ward off the attacks of viruses somewhere between 2 and 3 billion years ago.

So…now that we are speaking of prokaryotes, that’s pretty much what The Tangled Tree is all about. There is a main character in the book, a person who appears (in the midst of all the science) in Chapter 1 all the way through Chapter 84, and who provides the narrative thread. That person is Carl Woese, at the University of Illinois.

He‘s the guy who discovered that there are not just two branches of all life, but three—bacteria, yes; eukaryotes, yes; AND also archaea. Woese was a pioneer in gene sequencing. Anyone even remotely connected with the field is also connected to him and to Champaign/Urbana Illinois.

Here are a few interesting factoids.:

• No animal could live without its microbiome—bacteria in the gut.
• Bacteria rule planet Earth. Every other creature is just an asterisk.
• If you weigh the average human, somewhere between 4 to 6 pounds of that weight is bacteria.
•The mitochondria inside all living cells are actually bacteria who invaded billions of years ago (Endosymbiosis).
• Chloroplasts (the photosynthesizers) in all green plants are also bacterial invaders.
• Evolution is not just linear, descending down form generation to generation. Horizontal gene transfer has played a major role in evolution (and still continues to do so).
• Actually, what matters—what evolution has done—is to create many thousands of genes, each capable of of some amazing accomplishment. Individuals, and even species, are just collections of various genes. You need something…there’s a gene for that.
• Life is amazing.

The book is good too.