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Since the dawn of life on Earth, the world has been gradually
transformed by living things into a comfortable home for plants, animals, and
ourselves. But many harsh and seemingly inhospitable places remain, and it is
the inhabitants of such places, mainly invisible microbes, that reveal the remarkable
potential and resilience of life itself. How do microbes survive, even flourish,
in superheated water or supercooled brine; at enormous pressures; without air;
amid poisons? And what part do, and did, they all play in making the Earth hospitable?
In this fascinating account, for lay readers, John Postgate,
one of Britain's leading microbiologists, tells of the diverse adjustments microbes
have made to apparently impossible habitats. Modern understanding provides new
clues to the origin and evolution of terrestrial life, offers glimpses of how
life might have established itself elsewhere in the universe, and raises profound
questions about death, sensation and individuality -- as well as illustrating
the often muddled pathways of scientific progress. John
Postgate, FRS, is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sussex,
where he was also Director of the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation. He was educated at
Kingsbury County School, among others, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took
a first degree in Chemistry before turning to chemical microbiology. He then spent
fifteen years in government research establishments -- studying mainly the sulphur
bacteria and bacterial death before moving to the Unit at Sussex, where he spent
the next twenty-two years. He has held visiting professorships at the University
of Illinois and Oregon State University and has been President of the Institute
of Biology and of the Society for General Microbiology. He
is the third Professor John Postgate: the first his great-grandfather taught medicine
at Birmingham University, the second his grandfather taught classics at Liverpool
University. His other grandfather was George Lansbury, the Socialist leader, and
his father was Raymond Postgate, the historian and gourmet. Long ago John Postgate
led the Oxford University Dixieland Bandits (on cornet), and he is known as a
jazz writer. He and his wife, who read English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford,
have three grown-up daughters. |
