Unification, part one – discovering the common ground of organic and inorganic existence.

Dubos, White Plague

Tuberculosis was one of the leading causes of death in the United States and Europe in the early twentieth century. I remains a killer today with an estimated nine million cases per year and one third of the earth's people infected with the microbe.

Tuberculosis is an infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which can occur in any organ of the body but is more often found in the lungs. It has been a scourge throughout history and may have killed more people than any other microbial pathogen.

Hippocrates' references to phthisis and Aristotle are usually credited as being the first to recognize symptoms and the contagious character of the disease.



Discovery of the specific infectious agent, the tubercle bacillus (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), did not occur for centuries until it was isolated by Robert Koch in 1882. The discovery established that microbes caused specific maladies, ruling out strictly speaking the environmental milieu, or an inherited predisposition.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis appears to be more genetically diverse than generally assumed. There is mounting evidence that this genetic diversity translates into significant phenotypic differences between isolated clinical strains. M. tuberculosis exhibits a biogeographic population structure and different strain lineages are associated with different geographic regions.

Methodology

Darwin

• errors
• contents
  • key ideas
  • letter to Hooker

Darwin's only illustration in the Origin of Species

Ernst Mayr

• Contents
• Concepts
• Themes
• Summaries

 

Keller

• genes are deceptive because they are contingent arrays of heritable materiality.
• Not the blueprint but the performance, if you will a choreography.

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