After all, there’s a reason he is has been given an Academy Award in Literature and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Alright, maybe he isn’t a diviner maybe he merely pays attention to the scientists around him. He appears to have predicted the 2014 Ebola outbreak and ability to country jump years before it happened. I do think SARS was scary as a healthcare provider because it seemed to circumvent standard isolation and had a high fatality rate.ĭavid Quammen is prescient. I thought the topic might give me heebie-jeebies, but it mostly didn't, except when it comes to traveling to China, Bangladesh or West Africa. And check out the comments below from 2016. Don't say David Quammen didn't tell you so. “ The Tangled Tree is a source of wonder….Quammen has written a deep and daring intellectual adventure” ( The Boston Globe).Įbola and the New Isolationism, Time Inc.2020 Update: Well, here we go, 2020 Covid pandemic. Thanks to new technologies, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition-through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. In The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life-including where we humans fit upon it.

“David Quammen proves to be an immensely well-informed guide to a complex story” ( The Wall Street Journal). We learn about the major players, such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about “mosaic” creatures proved to be true and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health. In The Tangled Tree, “the grandest tale in biology….David Quammen presents the science-and the scientists involved-with patience, candor, and flair” ( Nature). It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived sideways by viral infection-a type of HGT. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field-the study of life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level-is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” ( The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life’s history.

Spillover animal infections