Steven D. Allison
Harvard University Press Out 3 November (US) and 27 November (UK)

It’s 2030. Heatwaves are scorching parts of the globe, while elsewhere, hailstorms or tsunamis ravage homes, cities and farmlands. Wildfires rage across continents, Arctic ice sheets dwindle, volcanoes spew left and right, and Earth cracks open along multiple fault lines. Death tolls – human, animal and plant – soar.

Amid this doom and gloom, a superhero arises from scientific labs, ready to fight our – human-made – enemy, climate change. The tiny figure can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere, or bury it underground or at the bottom of the sea, for near-eternity. It can fuel jet engines with clean energy, replace chemical fertilisers, save coral reefs from bleaching and disease, and re-engineer trees, food crops and other plants to survive, even thrive, in droughts.

This scenario is at the heart of Steven Allison’s book, . Allison, professor of ecology at the University of California, Irvine, maintains a balance between realism and optimism as he introduces his as yet unsung hero, the microbe.

These resilient, highly adaptable and primarily single-celled organisms could, he insists, play a far larger role in controlling or maybe even reversing climate change than we imagine. Many of these bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses are currently dismissed as insignificant or even targeted as pathogens to be wiped out. But the microbes he and others envision using against climate change are non-toxic and non-pathogenic.

The tiny superhero can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere or bury it underground for near-eternity

They are also, unlike other proposals – installing solar mirrors in space or sucking carbon dioxide out of the air – cheap, abundant, easy to produce and totally organic. For Allison, they “offer a rare glimmer of hope”.

His book explores how microbes live and interact with each other, and with “newcomers” such as humans. He focuses especially on how scientists are uncovering the mysteries of microbes and glimpsing the extraordinary properties they could offer if we only understood enough to stop fighting them.

Allison is a captivating storyteller, taking us on colourful journeys to different regions and times. Along the way, we meet fascinating characters, like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who ran his own draper’s shop in the Dutch city of Delft during the 17th century, and discovered bacteria by looking at his dental plaque using microscopes and lenses he had custom-built.

Microbes also appear as characters in their own right. We encounter bacteria-eating viruses engaged in an “insidious lifestyle” known as lysogeny inside their hosts, and zooplankton, which, like cattle, graze – and “poop a lot”.

He ensures we stay focused as we navigate complex concepts and vocabulary, like “phycoerythrins”, light-harvesting and naturally fluorescent proteins in certain cyanobacteria. We also get better acquainted with biofilms – layers of slime made of carbohydrates, proteins and other sticky biomolecules. Unlike the ones we know and hate – dental plaque and toilet bowl rings – these biofilms stop important microbes from being swept away in moving water by holding on to water like a sponge. Those microbes are also protected from desiccation, while predators, such as animals or viruses in soil, find it hard to get at prey inside a biofilm. Inside, microbes can gain the carbon and nutrients they need to grow.

In passing, Allison provides us with what can seem like cool facts to use at dinner parties. But they are offered in service of the big picture. Did you know that Sequoia trees can live a thousand years or that their bark is fire-resistant? That the annual per capita energy usage in the US is 76,300 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the energy in 2300 gallons of petrol? Or that there are nearly 3 billion billion billion oxygen-producing Prochlorococcus cyanobacteria floating around the ocean, thousands more than the stars in the known universe?

One way or another, the core message of The Age of Microbes is delivered: we can get microbes right or we can get them wrong. They are incredibly good at taking carbon in – and at letting it out again. The trick is to get them to swallow carbon and harbour it for thousands of years. That is exactly what they already do when their remains are preserved in the ground or at the bottom of the ocean as “microbial mummies”, forming clumps called necromass.

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Enter the other superheroes in Allison’s book: the researchers and bioengineers studying microbes. There is a refreshing amount of overdue credit given to women scientists. What we now call the greenhouse effect was discovered by Eunice Newton Foote, who published a paper on it in 1856. A century or so later, biologist Mary Mandels pioneered cellulosic ethanol using fungal enzymes. If we ever fly on jets powered by carbon-neutral fuel, Allison says, “you’ll have microbes and Mary Mandels to thank”. He also pays due debt to the Earth wisdom of Indigenous peoples, including the Pacific Northwest Karuk, who understand the importance of mushroom networks.

Today’s labs are investigating the genes behind necromass, hoping to selectively breed for them or to produce “designer microbes”. Others study how to help plants resist climate change. Still others are slogging through complex risk-benefit analyses of commercial products touting microbial benefits. And there is key work on improving soil, depleted or destroyed by millennia of agriculture, using microbial “inoculants”.

We also have some “long-shot” solutions for climate adaptation, especially when it comes to protecting coral reefs, Allison tells me later in an email. There are scary forecasts about losing most of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this century, so “probiotic” microbes that boost heat tolerance and reduce bleaching could save reefs that millions depend on.

Overall, The Age of Microbes is a must-read as climate change bites deeper. Let’s hope that microbes do indeed prove to be an excellent addition to our armoury.

Three more great reads about biology’s frontiers

by Rob Dunn

Rob Dunn explores the biology of homes, from moths in cupboards to thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi and plants under our noses. Kill them in the name of “cleanliness” at our peril.

by Michael Grunwald

We might be making things worse by following bad science (and politics) in the fight to feed (maybe) 10 billion people by 2050. Michael Grunwald offers an intriguing narrative.

by Karen G. Lloyd

For more great storytelling, check out microbial biogeochemist Karen Lloyd’s journey to Earth’s deep biosphere. Its “alien” life forms could make us rethink how life is supposed to work.

Christa Lesté-Lasserre is a science journalist specialising in animal health and behaviour

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“You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” So writes Adam Nicolson in , his paean to that indispensable pair of ancient epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s of the latter makes Nicolson’s book essential reading now for anyone interested in the story’s greater significance.

Nicolson’s work follows three trains of thought. In the first, he waxes philosophical about what Homer – always referred to in the singular, but acknowledged to have been multiple people, spanning generations – has to say about the meaning of life and the clash between civilisation and depravity. He delves into the fascination literary giants have had with Homer, including John Keats, whose poem Endymion gives the book its title, and Alexander Pope, whose translations leave much to be desired.

The other two strands are more rooted in the tangible world. Nicolson digs into the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey and parses out variations in the Greek, tracing the language’s structure back to the Linear B of the Mycenaean era and beyond, and uses this linguistic examination to attempt to pin down exactly when the poems were first composed – much earlier than we’d previously thought, he argues. The standardised, written Homer that we know came down from a much older oral tradition, says Nicolson, as far back as even 2000-1800 BC.

Finally, he finds traces of Homer’s writing in archaeological treasures from around the ancient Mediterranean, from a papyrus found at the Hawara site in Egypt to a pottery shard discovered in a tomb on the island of Ischia, one of the oldest surviving examples of written Greek. The papyrus dates to about AD 150; the pottery, to the 8th century BC. Much attention is also paid to the shaft graves of Mycenae, and what they can tell us about the world before the Bronze Age collapse.

Nicolson isn’t interested in the historicity of the poems themselves – they are myths, after all – as much as he is in the world that produced them. He draws a compelling portrait of a complex ancient realm, and of people for whom these stories provided a link to their nomadic, warrior-centred past.

Rereading The Mighty Dead, with its focus on relics and remnants, reminded me of my honeymoon to Crete. My husband and I visited the archaeological museum in Heraklion and saw a boar-tusk helmet on display; in book 10 of the Iliad, you will find Odysseus described wearing one, too. It is a reminder, as Nicolson’s book impressively contends, that the world of Homer is still very much all around us, if we know where to look.

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�ճ����New Scientist Book Club has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins’s , which celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year.

I hadn’t previously read this one – it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did. He had a few issues with the biology and said it “feels its age” – Dawkins himself admits to “sexist pronouns” in a 1989 preface – but Rowan found that “the core message remains relevant not just because genes being selfish is a brilliant meme (a term Dawkins coins at the end of the book), but because it is such a powerful way to understand how evolution operates: the metaphor makes us think as if genes behave selfishly”.

Read an extract from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

It was time to gird my loins and embark on a book I’ve always been a bit embarrassed for omitting. I have to admit to being a little exhausted at first: there was preface after preface in my edition, in which Dawkins was arguing with all sorts of people about how the book had been received. This was somewhat confusing, given I hadn’t – yet –  read it. I should have skipped straight to the first chapter.

Once I got into it, though, I found myself (mostly) carried along swimmingly by Dawkins’s writing. He certainly has a knack for a good metaphor – I particularly liked the idea of our bodies as “survival machines” for genes. Without having studied any biology after the age of 16, I got my head around his central point: that natural selection works because genes, or copies of them (replicators, as he calls them), are out to survive, building the optimal bodies (or survival machines) in order to do so.

I did find his tone a little irascible and hectoring at times. It was like he was having conversations with various colleagues/rivals about his points, rather than the general reader. For example, talking about how “one gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies”, he writes that “it is an argument that some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with, so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!”. We’re also firmly told about the correct pronunciation of “algae” (a hard “g”, people). There’s a lot of that sort of thing, but I finished feeling pleased to have got my head (mostly) around his argument.

Book club members were less impressed – this is, I think, the book that has received the most negative comments of any we’ve read, with a handful of members deciding not to join us in reading it at all, as they disagreed with some of Dawkins’s personal views. (I share the perspective of member pwhipp, who wrote on our channel: “I don’t think we should reject serious scientific writing simply because the author is combative, controversial, or personally irritating. If we did that consistently, the shelves would become very thin indeed.”) Pwhipp, by the way, called The Selfish Gene “an important and very well-written book, whatever one thinks of Dawkins’ public persona or his outspoken atheism”.

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Pwhipp was in the minority, however. Alan P was one re-reader who felt “underwhelmed” by The Selfish Gene. “The text is (as he admits himself but doesn’t change) sexist throughout. It’s not just the assumption of male pronouns for general statements, but there are some comments in the end notes and the text of the book itself that even for the eighties are questionable,” he wrote. “The tone is argumentative – sometimes I’m not clear that it isn’t argument for its own sake – but it’s definitely jarring. The endless footnotes contradicting the text are really difficult to follow. If the science has changed then the text of the book needs to change as well. So it may be that it was a masterly summary of the known science in its day – but now it’s a bad tempered, difficult to follow, mess.”

Alan did enjoy the new chapter “Nice guys finish first”, added to later editions: “I was always of the opinion that genes don’t make ethics so it’s nice to have the idea that even if genetic determinism was a thing, that cooperation is a successful strategy in the wild.”

The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins’s evolution classic still holds up

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age

Dee55, meanwhile, first read The Selfish Gene back in the early 80s and found it “an absolute revelation” at the time. Going back to it was “interesting”, but, as a humanities graduate, Dee55 found “specific challenges in following some of the arguments”. “I enjoyed the Chapter 5 stuff on the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) as a fun ride, but I think I need to reread it before continuing. I am very aware that I am just not in a position to assess RD’s ideas in the context of other evolutionary biology thinking,” Dee55 wrote.

Rowan took a deeper dive into the book in a longer piece for New Scientist, speaking to biologists about its message and what still stands today. Taking into account developments in the field that have happened over the past 50 years, Rowan wrote that “all the evolutionary biologists I spoke to for this piece struggled to find major problems with The Selfish Gene”. There was one exception: the idea of the meme, which, despite its memetic proliferation today, “doesn’t hold up”, he was told.

Overall, then, a thorny choice: this particular piece of popular science was notedly unpopular for the New Scientist Book Club.

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