Friday's Elk, February 19, 2021

On a snowy February afternoon almost exactly a year ago, I took my final pre-pandemic road trip. I drove to Albany, where I met a pair of wildlife biologists named Carl Herzog and Katelyn Ritzko. Together we traveled on into the Adirondacks, stopping at the end of a road in the woods. Getting out of the car, we hiked a snow-covered trail until we reached a half-frozen stream. There we stopped to suit up in neoprene chest waders. We put on helmets, switched on headlamps, and stepped into the stream to make our way into a flooded graphite mine. 

“Tripping and falling is the biggest threat,” Herzog said as the darkness closed around us. “You don’t ever want to touch the ceiling.”

I had come to the mine to pay a visit to its inhabitants. Clinging to the walls were bats, looking like furry pears glistening with beads of moisture. They held perfectly still in our headlamps as they hibernated. The temperature of their bodies matched the cool temperature of the mine. They had been hanging on those slick walls for over four months and would still be there weeks after my visit.

Yet the bats were different from the chunks of rocks lying on the floor of the mine, from the timbers still propping up the passageways. Inside their bodies, the molecules making up the bats were balancing each other in a delicate dance of homeostasis. In other words, they were alive.

Fortunately, I got out of the mine and back home safely. There I wrote about the trip--and what it showed me about life--in a chapter of Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means To Be Alive. I’m looking forward to sharing these experiences when the book comes out on March 9. Since my last newsletter, Booklist gave Life’s Edge a starred review, writing, “Zimmer invites us to observe, ponder, and celebrate life’s exquisite diversity, nuances, and ultimate unity.”

Next month I’ll be having a series of live events where I’ll be talking about the book. On March 10 at noon PST / 3 pm ET, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco will host a conversation about Life’s Edge between me and environmental reporter Rachel Becker. You can sign up here. 

There’s still time to enter the Goodreads giveaway. Visit this page by March 1 and click the “Enter Giveaway” button for a chance to win one of fifteen finished hardcover copies of Life’s Edge. (Only U.S. residents are eligible, I’m afraid.) If that kind of uncertainty is just too much to handle, you can pre-order it here.
 

The cover of Life’s Edge features another strange form of life called brain organoids. These pea-sized spheres, made of hundreds of thousands of neurons that develop from a single cell, can produce electrical impulses much like brain waves. 

I first wrote about brain organoids back in 2018, and I explore them further in Life’s Edge. A lot of our notions about human life are wrapped around our brains. Brain death is the legal definition of death, for example. Now brain organoids tangle up those definitions in fascinating ways.

Last week I wrote in the New York Times about a new frontier in brain organoid research: scientists are using them to explore our evolutionary past. Researchers have edited a gene in brain organoids, turning it back into the form it had in our ancestors over half a million years ago. Remarkably, the brain organoids turn out very different from normal ones. That difference may hold clues to how we became uniquely human.

The continued drop in new Covid-19 cases in the United States is heartening. In early January, the country was averaging over 250,000 new cases at the peak. Now the daily average has fallen below 73,000--a seventy percent drop.

But it’s easy to lose sight of just how bad things remain. We’re closing in on half a million deaths from Covid-19. Before this horrific third wave, the previous record for average daily cases had been over the summer. But the summer peak never reached 67,000 cases a day on average--6,000 cases below the rate that seems so encouraging now. This pandemic is still out of control.

There aren’t enough vaccinated people to explain the drop over the past several weeks. It’s likely a post-holiday shift in behavior that deserves the credit. People may be taking masking seriously. They may be cutting down on the visits to restaurants and house parties that were driving super-spreader events in late 2020. We can hope that these efforts continue, and that cases continue to drop. But variants are becoming a looming threat, with the potential to reverse that progress.

B.1.1.7, first discovered in the United States at the end of December, is now exploding just as it did earlier in the United Kingdom where it was first found, as well as Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries. I recently reported on a study that found B.1.1.7 is doubling every ten days in the U.S. Preliminary studies hinted the variant was not just more contagious but more lethal. More research is now supporting that view.

Two other variants, called B.1.351 and P.1, are also worth concern--not just because they seem to be more contagious, but because they can dodge some of the antibodies produced by vaccines. And more variants are gaining new mutations all over the world. I wrote about the discovery of seven variants in the United States alone, all gaining a mutation at the same spot in their genome.

All this evolution is making it more and more challenging to keep track of the variants, so Jonathan Corum and I have created a variant and mutation tracker to help you keep these critters sorted.

Just a couple months ago, coronavirus variants were a theoretical concern. Now they are front and center. Vaccine makers are preparing to test out B.1.351 boosters. Others wonder if maybe vaccines could have a broader impact, so that we don’t have to continually play catch-up with evolution. Indeed, there are other coronaviruses lurking in animals that may spill over in years to come. I wrote about some preliminary research into the possibility of a “pancoronavirus” universal vaccine--one shot to rule them all.

The first step, scientists agree, is to get a better fix on the variants. Until now, the United States has done relatively little genome sequencing necessary to track their origin and spread. The efforts are going on in a patchwork of underfunded labs. My colleague Noah Weiland and I wrote Wednesday about an announcement from the White House of a $200 million “down payment” on variant surveillance. The Covid-19 relief package making its way to a vote in Congress has another $1.75 billion in funding to set up a far more massive program. It’s likely that we’ll need it not just to get through the next few months, but to handle the emergence of new variants for years to come.

 

Last night, the Discovery Channel aired a 90-minute documentary about the scramble for a Covid-19 vaccine. My favorite part was the deep backstory on mRNA vaccines, featuring Katalin Karikó and Drew Weisman, a pair of scientists who toiled in obscurity for years on the concept. Now they might well win a Nobel Prize, plus the satisfaction of watching millions of people get protected thanks to their work. 

I provide some commentary along the way from my backyard. Nobody who’s not in my pod is going to hang out inside my house until we’re all vaccinated--not even a film crew!

The show is streaming now on discovery+.

 

That's all for now. Stay safe!


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Best wishes, Carl