Biology

Tuesday

Sinclair McKay

Seeds of hope in the siege of Leningrad

The idea was revolutionary – yet there was something ancient at its heart. The scientist Nikolai Vavilov, arriving in Petrograd in 1921 to take the helm of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, was on a sacred mission: to make, in his words, ‘a treasury of all known crops and plants’. The world’s first seed bank would shape the future of agriculture – possibly even eliminate failed harvests and hunger. This was gleaming scientific idealism, but there was also an element of the Old Testament Ark about it. Throughout the siege, the botanists had to find the superhuman strength not to eat the seeds themselves The vision would

Wednesday

Simon Ings

What rats can teach us about the dangers of overcrowding

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was the subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags. He studied how rodents adapted to different environments and specifically how the density of a population affects an individual’s behaviour. He collected reams of data but published little, and rarely in the mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw from his studies of rats and mice apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity. Charged with reducing the rat population of Baltimore,

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Harris Tweed, the miracle fabric

To understand the development of technology, you may be better off studying evolutionary biology rather than, say, computer science. A grasp of evolutionary theory, with the facility for reasoning backwards which it brings, is a better model for understanding the haphazard nature of progress than any attempt to explain the world by assuming conscious and deliberate intent. One useful concept from evolutionary thinking is the idea of the ‘adjacent possible’. As the science writer Olivia Judson explains: ‘Evolution by natural selection only works if each mutational step itself is advantageous. There’s no such thing as advantageous in a general sense. It’s advantageous in the circumstances you’re living in.’ In the

Wednesday

Katrina Gulliver

Not everything in the garden is lovely

While I was reading Most Delicious Poison, I visited a herbal garden in Spain which features the plants grown by the Nasrid rulers of Granada hundreds of years ago. They cultivated myrtle for its medicinal uses and jasmine for its fragrance. How did they know of myrtle’s properties? Some ancient ancestor must have figured it out. And that ancestor might be more ancient than we realise. Noah Whiteman explains that DNA from plants found in Neanderthals’ teeth tartar suggests even they were self-medicating with herbs. We have been entangled with the chemicals around us for as long as we have been human. The author of this book, a professor of

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

Laurel Hubbard is the beginning of the end of women’s sports

When women’s professional soccer was deemed good enough for our TV screens a couple of years ago, I was watching with a friend and her four-year-old son. He was enthralled by the game, and asked his mother, ‘Are boys allowed to play football as well as girls, mummy?’ This little boy’s comment clearly highlighted the insidious sexism prevalent in all aspects of competitive sport. When it comes to soccer, rugby, weightlifting, darts, you name it, commentating, sports writing, sports photography and so many other operational aspects of competitive sports are dominated by men. Female sports champions can be such important feminist role models for girls. Look at Martina Navratilova, Jessica

Tuesday

Bissan Al-Lazikani

The solving of a biological mystery

DNA is the blueprint that encodes the instructions to make proteins. Proteins are the building blocks and the machines that power life. And proteins make up the tissue that in turn comprise the organs and muscles that make up us. Considering how crucial proteins are to life itself, there is still so much we do not know about them. But Google’s AI firm Deepmind may just have helped us make a giant leap forward. When a protein is first made inside a living cell, it is merely a chain of connected amino acids — like beads on a string. Yet, it instantaneously folds into unique three-dimensional, beautiful shapes, which enable

Thursday

John Lee

Covid’s metamorphosis: has lockdown made the virus more deadly?

‘Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution,’ the splendidly named biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. It’s a good rule of thumb. Despite near-miraculous advances in medical science we remain biological beings, subject to biological laws. None is more central to our understanding of disease than evolution. Yet this theory remains poorly understood and poorly utilised in medicine. And an evolutionary perspective raises important questions about the drastic action we have been taking to confront Covid-19. Most doctors are too busy dealing with the day-to-day deluge of cases to have much time for what they may consider abstruse academic ideas. I can see why: it’s hard