E. coli: chaos and creation

The University of Alabama in Huntsville, despite being a regional, small school, has -or used to have, I guess it does still- a wonderful general library. I recall it as the place where you could find basically everything, from any kind of rare editions to a rich Spanish and Spanish-American collection; from excellent books in Unit Operations from the 50s to Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres or an appealing, black, hard-covered edition of Johnson's Intellectuals.

There was this yellow book written in a nice typo style, quite attractive. It was one of those which exerts a mysterious sort of undeniable magnetism, a hidden force of unique attraction, from just the way its pages arranged themselves when opened or the beautiful, poetic shape it had when closed. That book _It was a biography on Franz Haber (1868-1934).

For a while I got fascinated with the story of this man. His life, his end; the end of his family or his first wife. Most of all, it enraged me the paradoxical idea of the same mind providing benefits for the whole humankind -fertilizers, Haber-Bosch process to ammonia- and, at the same time, being a notorious catalyst for human annihilation -a notorious head on the Chemical Warfare of the 1st World War and of the Weapon factories in the pre-2nd World War Germany.

Today, I got the the same recurrent reflection.

E. coli now is in fashion because of the cucumbers... . But it is a very old thing. E. coli is indeed a very old acquaintance of the scientific community, as old as the river Thames, so to speak. It caused fatal diseases in children by the end of the 19th century when discovered and, as we see, it still does in the 21st century. Here is my guess (not knowing anything about strains or mutations, nor much about the case): the crisis looks like a matter of poor control and deficient procedures. In FDA terminology, a negligence, a mix-up, a cross-contamination, something like that. That's my guess. Let's wait and see, what do you think?

But my point today is:

I crossed a few words in the hall with a girl in BioChe department who is doing PhD and learned that her research is in biosynthesis of human insulin from E. coli. Literally: the old-friend, Gram-negative bacteria, E. coli, is genetically modified to produce insulin as treatment for diabetes. And even more: just learn now that the technique is not new at all!!

Good and evil, death and life, chaos and creation... Faces of the same coin, isn't it?

(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT)