A Best Book of the YearSeed Magazine - Granta Magazine - The
Plain-DealerIn this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl
Zimmer traces E. coli's pivotal role in the history of biology, from
the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. He reveals
the many surprising and alarming parallels between E. coli's life and
our own. And he describes how E. coli changes in real time, revealing
billions of years of history encoded within its genome. E. coli is
also the most engineered species on Earth, and as scientists retool this
microbe to produce life-saving drugs and clean fuel, they are
discovering just how far the definition of life can be stretched.