Biography of a Germ [Hardcover]

Arno Karlen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0375401997 | ISBN-13: 978-0375401992 | Publication Date: May 30, 2000 | Edition: 1st

This is high drama played out on a very small stage: a microbe's life seen from its own point of view. The bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb for short) is a tiny, pale spiral, invisible to the naked eye, yet no one could invent a life so ingenious, or one so tied to so many creatures' fates. We know Bb as the germ that causes Lyme disease, but that is just one recent chapter in its age-old struggle to survive. In this brilliant and original book, Arno Karlen takes readers on a fantastic journey through Bb's world--its ancestry and evolution, its day-to-day life, its perilous travels through ticks, mice, and deer, and, finally, its collision with humanity. Its life evokes the vast ecological web in which we and Bb are threads.

Bb is of special interest because it is one of a score of microbes that recently shifted to humans from other species, causing such epidemics as Lyme disease and AIDS. Like its microbial brethren, Bb entered our bodies because we invited it to, by changing our environment and behavior. Its history shows how germs, their hosts, and their shared environment all shape one another.

But Bb is fascinating in its own right, a distinctive member of bacteria's invisible kingdom. And its story is an homage to the researchers who discovered it, mapped its genes, and continue to explore it.

Imaginative, entertaining, and compelling, Biography of a Germ makes science pure pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might say that if a microbe could talk, we couldn't understand it, but psychoanalyst and science writer Arno Karlen has done his best to listen and translate in Biography of a Germ. This lovely, funny, even endearing portrait of Borrelia burgdorferi (or Bb), the screwy bacterium that causes Lyme disease, would charm even a terminal mysophobe like Howard Hughes. Unfortunately, Karlen has to justify his topic at greater length than do most biographers, but his reasoning is nearly lyrical in its enthusiasm for the microscopic. Following the genealogy of the germ back to our common ancestor (gulp) and beyond, the author finds a freshness in what we too often see as dry taxonomy and genetics. From there, he watches Bb as it makes its way through the circulation superhighways of deer, ticks, and hikers, each a stop on its complex life cycle.

We elbowed our way into Bb's story comparatively recently, ironically hurting ourselves as we renewed our appreciation of and commitment to wilderness areas. As we destroyed, then created habitat for deer, we ended up inviting Bb to run amok in our bodies. Karlen captures the beauty and terror of this bizarre chain of events, providing new insights into our relationship with our environment. Much like its cousins that live harmlessly in our bloodstream, eyelashes, and guts, this tickborne germ will eventually evolve a truce with us to protect its reproduction. Unfortunately for current and future sufferers of Lyme disease, we're quite a few generations away from that happy time. While we're waiting, we can read Biography of a Germ to learn more about our new tenants and why we should care about them. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

The germ is Borrelia burgdorferi, Bb for short, and causes Lyme disease in the people it infects: before it hits a human, Bb has to reside in three other animalsAa mouse, a tick and a deer, in that order. This odd property, and the germ's wide distribution, means that Bb has been affected by changes in human land useAfactories, clear-cuts, the growth of the suburbs and the environmental movement all had to happen for Lyme to become something Americans think about. And think about it we do: Bb is now so interesting that in 1997 scientists mapped its genome. All these facets make Bb the ideal candidate for what Karlen (Man and Microbes, etc.) claims is the first history of a pathogen written from that pathogen's perspective. Fascinating in their own right, Bb and its relatives also demonstrate larger patterns and questions in the study and history of microbes and molecular biology, of zoology and ecology, of medicine, public health policy and disease. In 22 brief chapters, Karlen lays out and answers some of those questions. He tells of Bb's sibling spirochetes, which cause syphilis and tropical diseases. He explains how ticks' adaptations let them parasitize "a chipmunk or a human," "a wren or a raccoon," and how Bb's adaptations let it jump between ticks and their hosts. Karlen has created a vigorous, compact account of Bb's life and times. And beyond the zoology and disease control, Karlen even offers a message: "Pathogens... are just trying to survive, and sometimes they must do so at other creatures' expense." The same could be said of humans." (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (May 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401997
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401992
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,634,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Microbiology as literature, December 8, 2000

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Biography of a Germ (Hardcover)

The germ is the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, and it causes among other things Lyme disease. Karlen is a psychoanalyst by trade and a historian of microbiology by inclination. He fell in love with the world of the very small when as a boy he was given a microscope. Karlen is also a fine prose stylist with a sharp sense of the ecological. In fact this book is really a kind of treatise on ecology, with a concentration on the environment of a bacterium. Borrelia burgdorferi is spread by ticks that bite small animals such as mice and squirrels and larger animals such as deer and sometimes humans. What Karlen accomplishes in this modest little book is to make vivid just what a "germ" is for a general readership. If you are in a fog about microbes and would like a painless, lively introduction, then this book may serve you very well.

I always imagined that bacteria split about every twenty minutes. Here I learned that some bacteria do split every twenty minutes or so, but others take hours and some even longer. I was also fuzzy about just how it is that microbes cause disease. Do they "eat" human flesh or destroy our cells with toxins or hog our nutrients for themselves? Turns out that some do one thing and some do another. Karlen emphasizes that sometimes what they do is cause symptoms: fever, muscle aches, fatigue, inflamation, etc., which are actually the result of our immune system's aggressive response to the presence of something foreign. Sometimes this can get so out of hand that our immune system continues to attack our own cells even after the microbe is gone, as is suspected in rheumatoid arthritis and possibly fibromyalgia (p. 160). And sometimes microbes commandeer some part of our system in order to better spread themselves around by making us sneeze or cough (cold viruses) or by giving us diarrhea (cholera).

There is a lot of other information in this little book, including such diverse facts as tumble weeds being native to southern Russia and not the western United States as I had always thought, or that the people of Lyme, Connecticut didn't appreciate having a disease named after their town. It is also interesting to know that microbes can "hide" in our bodies for years and then break out during times of overload or stress.

Karlen digresses nicely in spots, giving his opinion on the Gaia concept (he likes the "original, narrower version" p. 63), and how he feels about the deer population in the U.S. (he thinks there are too many). This last is directly relevant since it is on the deer that the ticks that are the vectors for Lyme disease mate and are able to reproduce. He recalls some history (the cholera epidemics in London in the nineteenth century, Spanish flu in America, etc.) and literature (Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year; the anonymous The Autobiography of a Flea), and in a footnote (p. 29) cites a story by Isaac Babel about syphilis (a bacterium related to Borrelia burgdorferi) entitled "Guy de Maupassant." A story by Isaac Babel about Guy de Maupassant is like a movie by Stephen Spielberg about Stanley Kubrick!

In summation, this is microbiology as literature, ecology as belles lettres seen in part from the perspective of a germ.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a little gem, July 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Biography of a Germ (Hardcover)

This is a slim book, simply written, easily read. But it also packs a lot of information between its pages--all that you need to know about Bb, the germ in question, in fact. It's also full of anecdotes, literary and cultural history, and even personal history. The short chapters make the book a very compelling read. Sure, this book isn't for scholars, but for the common readers who may not know much about the sciences. But I think it's all the better for it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Laughter and learning makes quite the Bbook, December 12, 2001

By 

Alaska Firegirl (Alaska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Biography of a Germ (Paperback)

Okay, so I must admit... I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to understanding the scientific jargon used in most journals discussing epidemiology and other areas of interest. I love to read about the world around me, but sometimes need a translator to comprehend it all! That's the great thing about Arno Karlen's book, "Biography of a Germ"-- you don't have to have your doctorate in microbacteriology to enjoy this book as a great read. On the surface the subject may seem a bit, well, odd... but Karlen's wit makes it easy to find yourself enthralled with the life and loves of Bb, this book's microscopic hero and hellion all rolled into one tiny spirochete. Before you know it, you are actually LEARNING a thing or two... and enjoying every minute of it! Far beyond just a crack at popular science, "Biography of a Germ" just might provide a few answers not only about the world within but the world around.