AUTHOR'S BIO
Joshua Lederberg
Nobel laureate in Medicine; Professor, Rockefeller University, New York.
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Microbiology's World Wide Web
Joshua Lederberg Series: Health and Medicine 2000-12-01All the fashionable talk nowadays about computer “viruses” explains what these culprits do by forging an analogy to their biological namesakes. But it is equally enlightening to portray the biosphere of real, living microbes as a world wide web of informational exchange. Indeed, microbes exchange information with each other and their environment, with DNA serving as the packets of data going every which way. Microbes differ from computer viruses because they not only spread but evolve, and do so at a faster pace than their hosts. Microbes are in fact well designed to exploit this difference to their advantage in the war that occasionally erupts between them and other species - a war we see as disease and death. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 11037
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