Frank Ryan – Four Way Interview

Frank Ryan is a consultant physician and an innovative evolutionary biologist. He has pioneered the concept of viruses as symbionts. His book on tuberculosis, renamed The Forgotten Plague, was a non-fiction book of the year for the New York Times, while his Darwin’s Blind Spot created interest in academic and lay circles, leading to Frank being elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Frank’s new book for 2011 is Metamorphosis/ The Mystery of Metamorphosis, in the UK and US respectively. Frank’s books have been the subject of many TV and radio documentaries. He is also an occasional reviewer of books for the New York Times.

Why science?

I’m a physician with an interest in evolutionary biology, so science has been my life for forty years. It attracted me in the first place because it tries to answer some of the great mysteries of life and the universe through logic and experiment.

Why this book?

I’ve always been fascinated by the dramatic changes of metamorphosis. One of the most fascinating is the highly topical evolutionary thread that links the tadpole larva of the sea squirt, which probably evolved more than 500 million years ago, to the present-day development of the human forebrain in the foetus. Metamorphosis bridges these extraordinary evolutionary distances. Twelve years ago Lynn Margulis, the famous US scientist, asked me to take an interest in the work of Don Williamson. I see his work as involving the most extreme hybridisation theory, and even more importantly, extreme hybridisation experiments ever in evolutionary biology. In two of his experiments he produced what may be the first ever artificial life form produced in the lab. The experiment is described in more detail on my website.

What’s next?

My personal field is the role of viruses in the origins of life and its subsequent diversity. So this interest, which I term “viral symbiosis” (which was described in my book, Virolution), will continue to preoccupy me.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

The first ever symbiotic role for a HERV-K (human endogenous retrovirus) has just been reported. HERV-Ks are specific to mammals and include the only HERVs exclusive to humans. It appears to be expressing its genes deep within the human placenta – the involvement of HERV-Ks in our human evolution is very exciting.

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

Search This Blog