Visible World And The Book example essay topic

A bug's life Biography of a Germ Arno Karlen (Phoenix) Various scientific disciplines have proved rather more popular with us now we are grown up than they were with us at school. Now it's a biologist's turn. (Actually, Karlen isn't really a biologist. He's a psychoanalyst, which you may find a little disappointing, but he has written on the history of medicine and biology before; so he makes it easy for us to pretend he's a biologist.) Borrelia burgdorferi, or Bb, is the bug, to use the non-technical term, that causes Lyme's disease. It is named after Willy Burgdorferi (a rather resistible honour, I would have thought: "Guess what, kids! Your dad's had an unpleasant, disease-causing microbe named after him!' ), who isolated it after medical science had been baffled by the symptoms afflicting residents of the town of Lyme, Connecticut.

You get the impression from the book that it is easy to baffle medical science. Sometimes a sniffle is all you need. Here the symptoms are rather more debilitating. Sore joints, meningitis, heart arrhythmia, rashes, fever, you name it – and the condition can last for years.

You may suffer the indignity of scoring a false positive for syphilis if tested. Karlen is united with the people in expressing scepticism at the blatant quackery of the medical profession, against whom we must always be on our guard (the repeated misdiagnoses of doctors in Lyme make salutary reading: attributing the symptoms to Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis was a favourite stand-by, even if they were also suffered by the elderly, or dogs). One must not be too harsh on doctors, though. The array of ailments is perplexing enough, and half the people who have been infected with it remain asymptomatic, but that is little help to everyone else. And it's all down to microbes about 20 to 30 microns (millionths of metres) long, curled up inside a deer tick and biding their time. These bastards can even cross the placental barrier, and are so individually and collectively vile that one looks at the razing of the forests of north-east America with a more benign eye.

Doing so severely curtailed the deers', and so their ticks', habitat. When the forests were allowed to grow back, so did the ticks. And ticks being visible, unlike Bb, we like them even less than Bb. Karlen is sympathetic to this. "Aristotle called them disgusting, and much modern opinion is no higher; if you sing the praises of ticks' ingenuity, people may stick their fingers in their ears.

' This short book, while not exactly living up to its title – that would give us rather more on protein coating than we would wish – makes very good work of the peripheral matter. Karlen salutes the passion and persistence of Leeuwenhoek and Hooke, who first used microscopes to open up the sub-visible world; and the book contains a particularly stirring salute to Linnaeus, whose system of taxonomy has proved astonishingly robust over the centuries. It put an end to nonsense about beavers being declared fish (or, as the French Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix imagined he had settled the matter, "in the same class with the mackerel'). The best lesson we learn is about connectivity, the intricacy of the ecosystem: spray DDT to kill mosquitoes, and it ends up concentrated in the bodies of the lizards that eat them, which ends up killing the cats that eat the lizards, which also, until they die, eat the mice whose infected urine spreads Machu po virus, another bug you don't want to get. It's a book that reminds us that life is more complicated than we thought: but it does so in a droll and fascinating manner.