LETTERS TO THE EDITORThank you all for the response to thumbnail photos of folks at the memorial symposium for Lynn Margulis. I think we have positive identification (more than one source ) on each now. We also got greetings from friends of the Margulis Lab and colleagues that we had not heard from in quite some time and that is always encouraging.

Steven Dick sent the photo (left). What a lovely look Lynn is giving him! On Lynn’s left is James Strick whose book, Wilhelm Reich Biologist, is now out in print. I have my copy. The book is

impressively researched and it is a page-turner! The duo of Dick and Strick are the authors of The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, a wonderful history of that field and another great read.

YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO SEE WHAT YOU’RE SURE ISN’T THERELynn Margulis was an extremely generous mentor and made a habit of inviting her students to become authors on papers where they could make a contribution and learn the many skills required for preparing a paper for the primary literature and peer review. This is how I ended up as the coauthor on a number of papers as a graduate student working on my Master’s. Consequently, I now get notices from www.researchgate.net that let me know when one of our papers is cited. In March, I was notified that Destruction of spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi round-body propagules (RBs) by the antibiotic tigecycline had been cited in the paper, Formation and characterization of non-growth states in Clostridium thermocellum: spores and L-forms by Elizabeth B Mearls, Javier Izquierdo and Lee R Lynd. Why do I mention all this? This new paper in BMC Microbiology is about using Clostridium thermocellum, an anaerobic thermophilic bacterium, in the digestion of cellulosic biomass into ethanol. And in the article, the authors have no problem identifying two non growth states, spores and L forms (round bodies) of the bacterium. The authors conclude, “Both spores and L-forms were determined to be viable. Spores exhibited enhanced survival in response to high temperature and prolonged storage compared to L-forms and vegetative cells. However, L-forms exhibited faster recovery compared to both spores and stationary phase cells when cultured in rich media.”

Steven Dick wrote, “You may remember me from the Woods Hole meeting my NASA office sponsored in 2005 [photo above]  I’m the other half of Dick/Strick.   Jane Maienschein (my office mate in grad school) is in the left background.” [JM - I believe Jim Strick is holding a copy of What is Life.]

photo Steven Dick

One Lynnism was that the closer science got to humans the more dubious the science. A few months ago, I was told that that same paper had been cited in A Systematic Review of Borrelia burgdorferi Morphologic Variants Does Not Support a Role in Chronic Lyme Disease by Paul M Lantos, Paul G Auwaerter, Gary P Wormser.  Their conclusion was that "There is no clinical literature to justify specific treatment of B. burgdorferi morphologic variants [round bodies].” This is a paper based on their own specific literature review, so taken literally the conclusion could be true as far as their literature review went, but it certainly is misleading. First one must appreciate that a literature review tends to look back into the past. Given the temper of times past, when the human body was considered sterile by much of Anglophone medicine, it is likely that papers to the contrary did not stand a good chance of passing peer review. Nonetheless, the conclusion that there is “no literature” is the result of a incomplete review of the primary literature because there is published literature showing that the morphologic variants of B. burdorferi are viable, difficult to eradicate with antibiotics and capable of returning to motile forms. I would point the reader to the work of Morten Laane accompanied by his excellent photo microscopy [Note: it is a long download]. While the persistence and viability of these forms may not “justify specific treatment of B. burdorferi morphogenic variants,” it certainly does not justify the end of the investigation into their role in chronic Lyme Disease!

Gerald Domingue spent his career studying the persistence of bacteria in the human body. His work pointed to fundamental problems with the work of pathologists who have for decades misidentified “round forms, variants, L-forms, round bodies” as tissue artifacts. An additional problem is that often pathologists are working at levels of magnification insufficient to visualize spirochetes or their morphologic variants. Now, the molecular tools are at hand to prove that these aberrant tissue forms (often stainable) are bacterial variants observable in tissues. Domingue and his colleagues documented this in a variety of chronic human diseases and it is evident in Lyme’s Disease where the biological cycle of the organism has been well defined and documented.  For those of you who will be interested Domingue’s last paper on bacterial persistence and expression of disease with a relevant bibliography was published in 2010 in the September issue of Discovery Medicine. The paper brings into focus the importance of “dense bodies” components of cell wall-defective bacteria as viable bacterial persisters in humans and their role in chronic inflammatory diseases. Two earlier companion papers on “dense bodies” in Infection and Immunity in 1974 were first

Figure 6. Electron micrograph of mature vesiculated mother L-form with full peripheral vesicle just prior to extrusion. Note the similarity between the dense form within the vesicle and that from outside, with reference to peripheral cytoplasm with expanded nucleoid (arrows). x 13,750. [Reprinted with permission from Green et al., 1974b. inDemystifying Pleomorphic Forms in Persistence and Expression of Disease: Are They Bacteria, and Is Pepti-doglycan the Solution? (2010)]

authored by Domingue’s graduate student, Mary Green (Green, Heidger, Domingue).  These papers put Domingue’s laboratory on the international map of research for the basic biology of L-forms and their possible role in disease.

Gerald Domingue, professor emeritus at Tulane, retired 18 years ago after a 40 year career in research and teaching (30 years at Tulane University), with a main research focus on the etiology of several idiopathic nephro-urological diseases. He moved to Paris in 1997 where he began to paint and write poetry fulltime, relocating five years later to Zurich where he is presently a permanent resident of Switzerland. In addition to his primary affection for the world of science, passions for painting and creative writing have always been an important part of his life since age 9. For those who might be interested in viewing his work, access the following websites: www.galerieneworleans.com or www.dlareg-arts.com

We have now entered the era of the microbiome. Tissues of the animal holobiont are colonized by bacteria--even the placenta. We now recognize that “our” immune system is, in large measure, a function of our persistent microbial symbionts. Despite our well-practiced neurosis of identifying our “self” as an individual, we are communities--more bacterial cells than nucleated animal cells.

Our nucleated cells are composite cells formed by the integration of communities of eubacteria and archaebacteria. Our cells couple to their environment (Maturana and Varela) in metacellular organizations of symbioses, tissues, organs, and organ systems that make us up.

These “communities”--from the bacteria of the extremes of the chemolithoautotrophic microcosm all the way up to the mega flora, fauna and fungi of the solar-powered systems of the Earth’s surface--are structurally coupled to their environments. In extant species, this coupling has persisted since the origin of life. This structural coupling produces systems

Tree of Knowledge-The Biological Roots of Human Understanding

H. Maturana and F. Verela

Cosmic Aliens Visit Mardi Gras by G. Domingue

with cybernetic tendencies, that result in the emergent properties of Gaia (Lovelock, Margulis et al).

Science and medicine must grapple with the ramifications of the fact that ours is a bacterial world. Reductionism must face the reality of systems. “Community” has enormous implications in medicine for health promotion and the treatment of disease that do not match the myths to which many still cling?

NATHAN CURRIER SUGGESTS A COORDINATED EFFORT TO REWRITE SELECTED WIKIPEDIA ENTRIESNathan Currier, composer of classical music and columnist on climate change for the Huffington Post, wrote to me suggesting that certain entries in Wikipedia relevant to Lynn Margulis really need a technically competent rewrite to bring the information presented up-to-date with current science.

Nathan wrote, in part, “It's important how such public information dealing with ‘contro-versial’ topics gets portrayed on Wikipedia. The Gaia hypothesis [theory] entry, for example, was very poor: it did not even mention the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, but had a whole section on ‘recent criticism’.”

Quoting Wiki, "Several recent books have criticized the Gaia hypothesis, withwith comments ranging from ‘... the Gaia hypothesis lacks unambiguous observational support and has significant theoretical difficulties’[52] to ‘Suspended uncomfortably between tainted metaphor, fact, and false science, I prefer to leave Gaia firmly in the background’[53] to ‘The Gaia hypothesis is supported neither by evolutionary theory nor by the empirical evidence of the geological record’.[54] The CLAW hypothesis, previously held up as confirmation of the success of Gaia, has subsequently been discredited.’[55]”

Nathan points out Toby Tyrrell's recent anti-Gaia book, On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth, was presented as something "new" and important in the Wiki Gaia entry, receiving most of a paragraph. Tyrrell’s arguments have serious flaws and are based on the discredited 52. Waltham, David (2014). Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional – and What that Means for Life in

the Universe. Icon Books53. Beerling, David (2007). The Emerald Planet: How plants changed Earth's history. Oxford: Oxford

University Press54. Cockell, Charles; Corfield, Richard; Dise, Nancy; Edwards, Neil; Harris, Nigel (2008).An

Introduction to the Earth-Life System. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press55. Gaia Hypothesis, Conjectures and Refutations. James Kirchner. Climatic Change 58: 21-45,

2003

Nathan Currier

rules and assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. Nathan notes, “From what I read in their “Information for Contributors” section, one of the rules of Wikipedia is that critical or negative material generally should not be removed (as attempts to do this can lead to locking of the entry). So, what I did was to expand the Tyrrell section to show that his critique is just a rehashing of the same old Richard Dawkins critique. No one has made any changes to the Gaia entry since I worked on it, and I think it really reads very differently than it did before. The opening section is entirely reworked. Under surface temperature regulation, I added a good deal about CLAW, since it just said that "CLAW has now been discredited" (based on the Quinn & Bates Review in Nature). So I added material about a paper that Quinn & Bates didn't review, although it was published 18 months before their review and was the first paper using a GCM climate model with coupled aerosol chemistry. The paper I added showed significant CLAW effects. I rewrote the ‘recent criticism’ section completely and even included some material from the McFall-Ngai et al Animals in a bacterial world paper, although I could picture the implications of that material not being understood at Wikipedia and being removed as ‘irrelevant’. With Lynn's own Wikipedia entry or that on ‘Symbiogenesis’, you must be in contact with many experts who could contribute to making them better. The Gaia section in Lynn’s entry is currently awful, and I’d be happy to work on that myself.

The section on ‘Symbiosis as evolutionary force,’ pretty much dismisses it as simply, ‘something of a fringe idea.’ I'd even like to see more on Donald Williamson’s larval transfer hypothesis, which is given a whole paragraph, but seemingly only in order to create a kind of blot on Lynn's reputation. ‘Symbiogenesis’ and the ‘Evolution of Flagella’ [Undulipodia!] seem to me in need of a great deal of work.

For better or worse, Wikipedia is the go-to place for students and public information. Making sure these entries are accurately represented should be a priority for those of us who want to promote the changing paradigms in evolution and biology.”

Next month we will take a look at selected headings of Wikipedia’s entry on Lynn Margulis with an emphasis on “Symbiosis as evolutionary force”.

CONSUME, BE SILENT, DIEOn April 3, 1980, Cronkite tossed to a news piece from CBS veteran Nelson Benton.  For two and half minutes – an eternity even then by TV news standards and a near-impossibility today, a broadcast warned us about the danger of climate change.

EARTH TO BOSTON OLYMPICS: YOU HAVEN’T POLLED MEDouglas Zook’s take on the Boston follies.

“And so it goes.” - Kurt Vonnegut