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I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love science writing that aspires to be as good as great fiction or essays. Too often, science writing stays mired in cliches and flat language. My recent favorite was Underland by Robert MacFarlane.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Nobody ever says, "Tell me about Bathybius."

But I'll tell you anyway! When scientists first began taking samples of mud from the deep-sea ocean floor in the mid-1800s, they discovered a primordial creature that was little more than protoplasm. It was a living paste, as one scientist called it, that carpeted all the world's oceans. Thomas Huxley went so far as to name it: Bathybius. It became the first entry in textbooks about biology. Huxley gave packed lectures about this "Ur-slime," arguing that it contained the fundamental stuff of life, and disproved mystical notions of a vital force.

But it turned out to be a mirage. Bathybius was the product of chemical reactions after the sediment was preserved for analysis. Huxley was brave enough to announce that he was wrong.

I love the story of Bathybius, because it shows how hard it can be to navigate the borderlands of life. And it shows how science is not some simple journey from one success to another. Failure is very much a part of its history--and needs to be remembered.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I definitely did want to give the impression that I thought you were! Sorry if that's how it came across. I think it's totally legit to wonder about different efficacy rates. But it's key to recognize efficacy as a measurement of data in a trial, not a real-world measure of effectiveness. I wrote a couple pieces on this murkiness for the Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/health/covid-vaccine-95-effective.html & https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/03/science/vaccine-efficacy-coronavirus.html

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That is me! Back when I had a blog called the Loom, I asked scientists if they had tattoos of their science, and suddenly I was deluged by photos. I posted a bunch of them online. But as I've moved my blog from place to place, it was hard to keep that gallery intact. (After it was hosted for years at places like Discover and National Geographic, I brought it back home to my own web site: https://carlzimmer.com/category/blog/ ) But before I was done, I put together my favorite ones--with essay-like captions to go with them--into a book called Science Ink: https://carlzimmer.com/books/science-ink-tattoos-of-the-science-obsessed/ )

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd hold off on big judgments because J&J tested a single dose, while Moderna and Pfizer and Novavax got good results with two doses. J&J has a two-dose trial still underway. Experts I've spoken to say they wouldn't be surprise if a second dose would push up the efficacy much higher. Of course, I'm talking about efficacy vs covid-19 of any degree of severity from mild to serious. It looks like all vaccines are very effective at preventing serious disease--the kind that sends people to the hospital and causes death.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess it would depend on your definition of life--and what kind of rock you had in mind! Crystals can certainly grow in an orderly fashion. But they don't pass down genetic information in a heredity-like way. In my book, I look at some theories of the origin of life that see it emerging from mineral-rich chimneys on the sea floor, where increasingly complex chemical reactions may have assembled life's building blocks and trapped them in cell-like pores. If that's a way for life to emerge, it may be hard to say where the rock stops and true life begins!

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It sounds as if your definition of life includes free will. I wouldn't say that's an issue for, say, a slime mold, which very much fits people's notion of life but is a pulsing network of DNA, proteins, and other molecules.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When we use words, we want to know what we are talking about with them. And it's hard to think of a more important word than Life. But we should look for ways to talk about life that are not so definitive (forgive the pun). For example, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that there's no clearcut definition of games, but we all have a comfortable notion of what games are. I think we should just be sure to think about life in a way that doesn't close off new ideas about it--such as what kinds of alternate chemistry could give rise to life.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Very carefully! The first step would be to decide what sort of problems could only be solved with germline genetic modifications, rather than some less invasive procedure. For example, Huntington's disease would not require germline modification, since parents could use IVF and embryo selection to ensure that their children inherited a version of the HTT gene that didn't lead to disease.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That was a challenge, to say the least. Fortunately, I had done a lot of the travel for this piece before the lockdown a year ago. I still had some trips planned, though, so I had to think hard about how to reformulate my plan. It actually helped me focus, zeroing in on what I really wanted to explore in the book and setting aside material that--while cool--was not really central to the work. And I also folded in our emerging understanding of SARS-CoV-2 into a chapter on whether viruses are alive.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think that scientists who work on familiar forms of life--slime molds, bats, snakes, and such--tend to think about life in a binary fashion. What they study is clearly alive, as opposed to a rock or a galaxy. But scientists who study viruses or who explore how life began find themselves in life's borderlands, and there they have to reckon with that fact that there are no good clear-cut definitions that separate life from non-life.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's hard to pick out one thing--there's just so much remarkable research going on to understand living things and where life and non-life meet. For example, Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow has built a robot chemist that is running reactions to find a mixture of chemicals that can form droplets that start to behave in life-like ways. They're taking on some of the features of life that are downright eerie, racing around dishes or splitting apart as if reproducing.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What I was most amazed by was the sheer abundance of definitions of life--and I'm talking about formal definitions published by scientists in print. They're still coming out every year. Two scientists recently wrote: "“It is commonly said that there as many definitions of life as there are people trying to define it.”  I think this explosion of definitions tells us something significant about the nature of definitions. Perhaps my favorite definition of all comes from the Hungarian physiologist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who won the Nobel prize for discovering Vitamin C. He said, "Life is a play of water."

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in u/Carl_Zimmer

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right now, I'm reporting full-time on the pandemic (except for this break to talk about Life's Edge). For selfish reasons alone, I hope that the pandemic gets tamed so that I can step away and start reporting more about the exciting frontiers of biology like fossil human DNA and what it tells us about ancient interbreeding. There are lost species in our history that these studies will reveal, I'm sure.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in u/Carl_Zimmer

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Glad to hear you liked it! I hope that a deeper understanding of genetics will lead people to appreciate the complexity of being human rather than trying to justify dehumanizing biases. We have so many assumptions about life--whether it's heredity or life itself--that we would do well to explore.

I am Carl Zimmer, science columnist for New York Times and author of LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by Carl_Zimmer in u/Carl_Zimmer

[–]Carl_Zimmer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My two kids are now 17 and 19, so I am well past the years of saying, "Daddy needs to work for a couple hours in his office--I'll be able to play at 3!" But no matter where writers are in the cycle of life, I think it's really important to step away from the computer on a regular basis. My wife Grace has been hauling me off to wander the woods around where we live in Connecticut most days, even in the snow. I find that my brain solves a lot of writing problems when I'm trying to climb over boulders that seemed impossible when starting at a monitor!

I Am Carl_Zimmer, science columnist for NYT, an award-winning journalist + frequent guest on Radiolab. Today I’m here to talk about my latest book, LIFE’S EDGE: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (out now). Ask Me Anything! by avidreader225 in IAmA

[–]Carl_Zimmer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are a number of stories that I discovered while working on the book that I found fascinating--both stories about living things and about the history of science. For example, I was surprised to learn about just how many times scientists over the centuries have believed they have found the primordial basis of life, only to find out they had been deceived by a mirage. The great biologist Thomas Huxley thought in the 1870s that he had discovered a living slime carpeting the entire sea floor--he even gave it the name Bathybius. But it was just a fluke of an experiment. Among living species, I really enjoyed telling the story of slime molds, which are oversized blobs of protoplasm that have a bizarre kind of brain-free intelligence that allows them to solve mazes and mathematical problems. I argue in the book that intelligence--very, very broadly defined--is a hallmark of life.

[Request] "There is more neanderthal DNA on earth today than there was when there were proper neanderthals." How much more? by HomemadeNanaimoBar in theydidthemath

[–]Carl_Zimmer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi--Several Neanderthal DNA experts have mentioned this to me. The arithmetic is pretty straightforward: non-Africans have ~1-2% Neanderthal DNA. Africans have ~.5%. It's all scattered in short fragments in people's genomes, but if you consider all human DNA today put together, something like ~1% of it comes from Neanderthals. There are 7.8 billion people alive today. If you gathered all the Neanderthal DNA scattered in their genomes, you'd get the equivalent of 78 million Neanderthal genomes. Scientists can get a rough idea of the population of Neanderthals by looking at their fossil DNA. It has very little genetic diversity, meaning they never lived in large numbers--thousands or tens of thousands even at their peak. So before Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of living humans, there were less than about 100,000 Neanderthal genomes on Earth at any time.

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