Our Sixth Year Is Start­ing

by Elio

Five years and over 500 posts be­hind us, I would like to share with you a bit of the his­tory of this blog. How did it start? I had re­tired of­fi­cially in 1995 from Tufts Uni­ver­sity in Boston and came to San Diego. I ar­rived with the in­ten­tion of stay­ing in­volved in mat­ters mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal, but how? Ba­si­cally, I think of my­self as a com­men­ta­tor and I knew that there was a lot to com­ment about. Since I like to write, I started look­ing for pub­li­ca­tions. I found very few where I could park my prose. I had heard of a thing called a blog, but as is gen­er­ally true of my age group, I did not take kindly to such a fresh in­ven­tion with an un­fa­mil­iar name. How­ever, I thought I should look into it and I called Chris Con­dayan, man­ager for Pub­lic Out­reach at the ASM for ad­vice. For all I knew, I could have asked it in a for­eign lan­guage,  e.g., Qu'est-ce que c'est, un blog? The time could not have been more pro­pi­tious be­cause Chris told me that ASM had just de­cided that what they wanted was a blog! So, with his help, I tim­o­rously started post­ing a few snip­pets. Sur­pris­ingly, I felt com­fort­able do­ing it, so I kept it up.

Our first post

Soon, I had the en­counter with my part­ner, Merry, a defin­ing event in this en­deavor. Merry ap­proached me early on say­ing that she was in­ter­ested in blog­ging in mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and could she help. We pro­ceeded with some cau­tion, not know­ing each other, but I soon found out that she was not only a re­mark­able ed­i­tor (she knew how to get into my brain and pick out what I wanted to say), but also that she had a lu­mi­nous writ­ing style. She had not spent most of her life in mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, so this was dou­bly im­pres­sive. Merry and I de­cided to share the work, much to my im­mense grat­i­fi­ca­tion. You've got to be lucky some­time!

What I had in mind at the be­gin­ning was to share with read­ers in­ter­est­ing and ex­cit­ing sto­ries, per­haps some that would oth­er­wise es­cape the at­ten­tion of many in mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. I knew fully that as­tound­ing dis­cov­er­ies were be­ing made at the level of ba­sic phe­nom­ena. But be­sides that, the mi­cro­bial world is full of daz­zling phe­nom­ena that pop up from all sides, some of in­ef­fa­ble beauty or mind-bog­gling cun­ning. They kept knock­ing on my door! I have a par­tic­u­lar lik­ing for sym­bio­sis, per­haps in the be­lief that if one genome is ex­cit­ing, two in­ter­act­ing are even more ex­cit­ing. Plus, I love the in­tri­cate chore­og­ra­phy of mi­crobes and their en­vi­ron­ment.

Week af­ter week we have posted a ma­jor piece on Mon­day and a "mi­nor" piece on Thurs­days, which is a pret­ty­de­mand­ing en­deavor. And ex­cept for stated va­ca­tion pe­ri­ods, we have not missed a sin­gle one of these post­ing in all these years. We have come up with a few in­no­va­tions. Chief among them are our Tal­mu­dic Ques­tions, ques­tions with no def­i­nite an­swer but that make for think­ing along un­con­ven­tional tracks. We also have a few other hall­marks, one be­ing our Terms of Bi­ol­ogy, an­other our Fine Read­ing posts where we point to ar­ti­cles that we think are ei­ther par­tic­u­larly well writ­ten or a good re­view of an area.

Most grat­i­fy­ing is that ma­te­r­ial from the blog has been used in teach­ing, from high-school to ad­vanced stud­ies, or so I'm told. The rea­son this mat­ters to me has to do with the pow­ers of less struc­tured­sci­en­tific writ­ing. When writ­ing for our blog, I think in con­ver­sa­tional terms, pic­tur­ing how I would tell a story if I were talk­ing to some­one. That is one way to teach, and not a bad one at that.

From the be­gin­ning, we en­cour­aged oth­ers to con­tribute, and so they did. In time, we agreed that the blog could be an op­por­tu­nity for stu­dents to try their hand at telling sci­en­tific sto­ries. I of­fered this to a num­ber of grad­u­ate stu­dents in a course I teach, and many ac­cepted the in­vi­ta­tion, suc­ceed­ing in fine style in most cases. I like to think that they all ben­e­fited from our ex­act­ing and some­times bru­tal edit­ing. A num­ber of other peo­ple have shown up spon­ta­neously, ex­press­ing an in­ter­est in con­tribut­ing an ar­ti­cle. All of this has been a great plea­sure to us. Three col­leagues, Mar­vin Fried­man, Welkin John­son, and Mark Mar­tin, have be­come part of the fam­ily and so we call them our as­so­ciate blog­gers.

Our in­ten­tion is to con­tinue in this en­deavor. We're told that we're do­ing well. On that as­sump­tion, we'll try to im­prove.