Marlene Zuk Mentioned in Today's NYT Natalie Angier Column

From The New York Times, June 26, 2007

In Parasite Survival, Ploys to Get Help From a Host
By NATALIE ANGIER

Not long ago, my daughter proposed a way she could earn some extra cash beyond her weekly allowance. Would I give her a quarter, she wanted to know, every time she cleaned the cat box?

Twenty-five cents to clean the cat box? I squealed with unconcealed joy. Truly we’d hit commensal pay dirt here. She had fiscal motivation, and I could use the olfactory vacation.

But then I read a few items about Toxoplasma gondii, the parasitic protozoa that can be lurking in cat scat, and I changed my mind. I told my daughter that she should skip the litter patrol and try cleaning the refrigerator instead.

I’m not normally a fluttering, overprotective mother, and I know that the risk of contracting the toxoplasma pathogen or any serious infectious illness from the cat box is tiny. Still, we’re talking parasites here, and parasitism is an evolutionary force to be reckoned with, a source of nearly bottomless cunning and breathtaking bio-inventiveness.

Predators want to kill you and eat you right there on the veldt. Parasites, by contrast, want to keep you alive, the better to serve as a parasite paradise, a cozy haven where they can grow at their own pace, suckle on your moist, nourishing tissues, multiply their numbers and finally, one way or another, pass those numbers along. Toxoplasma, it seems, is a member of a particularly insidious genus of parasite, which seek perpetuity by controlling their hapless hosts’ minds. So maybe I’m hyperventilating here, but if any mind in my house is to be monkeyed with, I would really prefer it be mine.

Driving toxoplasma’s specific virulence is its two-stage life cycle and its shifting definition of a suitable host. The amoebalike protozoa begins its days as an asexual opportunist, its eggs able to hatch and grow in the body of any warm-blooded host — cat, rat, bat, buffalo, crow, human: practically any homeotherm unfortunate enough to harbor or have incidentally ingested the little eggs will do.

Come the parasite’s second, sexual stage, though, and it gets fussy. To mingle with others of its kind and produce the next generation of eggs, toxoplasma must find its way to the gastrointestinal tract of a cat. Wild or domestic, tabby or puma, no matter — just as long as it is feline. And this demand for a particular end-stage host, this stipulation that the protozoa migrate to the perfect sexual staging ground no matter what its natal home may have been, serves as the sort of evolutionary pressure known to give rise to chilling parasite ploys.

Consider the case of the thorny-headed worm, which Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, describes in her fascinating new book, “Riddled With Life.” The parasitic worm spends its childhood growing in the belly of a pill bug, a small terrestrial crustacean that feeds on detritus and dry leaves and, occasionally, worm eggs scattered therein. But on reaching parasitic puberty, the worm requires a very different environment: an avian digestive tract. The worm wants the pill bug to be eaten by a bird. Fine: many birds will eat pill bugs if given the chance. But the worm has a tight schedule to keep, and it can’t afford to wait around and hope some industrious starling discovers its tasty crustacean housing. After all, a pill bug normally spends the sunlit hours when diurnal birds are about coiled away like a petite armadillo, often beneath some unpeckable tree stump or stone.

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Michael Kodas in Today's New York Times

From The New York Times, June 26, 2007

The Height of Avarice
by Michael Kodas

WHEN China announced its plans to pave a highway to the Mount Everest base camp in Tibet as part of its 2008 Olympic preparations, adventurers around the world winced at the latest encroachment into the Himalayan wilderness. Mountaineers who have already been to Everest, however, were more likely to greet the announcement of the “blacktop highway fenced with undulating guardrails” with little more than a shrug.

Despite an elevation of more than 17,000 feet, it’s been a long time since the Chinese base camp has resembled a wilderness.

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Marlene Zuk Interview in New Scientist

New Scientist, June 20, 2007

The Joy of Parasites
by Peter Aldhous

While grim tales of coming plagues engage the popular imagination, biologist Marlene Zuk is focusing on the bright side of disease. Pathogens aren’t always our enemies, she says; in fact, they have helped shape our evolutionary history. As Zuk tells Peter Aldhous we ought to respect our complex – and sometimes comical – relationship with pathogens and parasites.

"You call for greater appreciation of pathogens. What is there to appreciate?
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. We need to appreciate them not in the sense of praising, but in the sense of understanding the impact of parasites – and I include viruses, bacteria and fungi. When you take an art appreciation course, no one expects that you’re going to love all the paintings, but you’re going to see how art has affected life. Similarly, if you’re going to appreciate disease, you need to understand how it has affected life. It doesn’t mean you’re going to love diseases, or that you’re going to think it’s great to be sick.

Why have parasites and pathogens been such a powerful force in our evolution?
Because of the potential for co-evolution. When selection acts to produce an animal that is able to resist a drought, it leaves more offspring, and so you end up with a population that has, say, skin that is less likely to desiccate. But that doesn’t provoke the environment into becoming even drier. On the other hand, if defence against a disease evolves, there is selection pressure on the disease organism to evolve back. The tuberculosis bacterium might become better at penetrating your lungs, if your lungs have evolved a mechanism for resisting their entry.

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JoeAnn Hart's Addled on YouTube

Check out author JoeAnn Hart's Addled, on YouTube.

Heads Up: Lou Ureneck's Backcast

Look for a feature on Lou Ureneck and Backcast in the September issue of Men's Journal.

Also, look for an article by Lou in the Travel section of the New York Times, date TBA.

Warren Goldstein on Barry Bonds

Full story can be found in the Chronicle, Newsday, The Courant and the Star Tribue.

San Francisco outfielder Barry Bonds, one of the most talented hitters to play Major League Baseball, as well as the single most disliked player in the game, is about to break one of the most hallowed records in all sports: Henry Aaron's lifetime home run record of 755, which Aaron took away from the game's greatest player, the legendary and beloved George Herman "Babe" Ruth.

Bonds' run-up to this extraordinary record is complicated by many factors, including the likelihood that he used steroids for several years, probably lied about it to a grand jury and could be indicted for perjury sometime this year. He also appears to be a genuinely unpleasant human being.

Nevertheless, his family pedigree reaches deep into baseball's history of segregation and reintegration. Beyond his father, Bobby, a 14-year major leaguer, there's his godfather, Hall of Fame slugging outfielder Willie Mays, who began with the Birmingham Black Barons and then integrated the New York Giants in 1951, and whose 660 home runs now ranks fourth in baseball history.