• Es­ther Leder­berg, Pi­o­neer of Bac­te­r­ial Ge­net­ics

    by Mercè Pi­queras — "She did pi­o­neer­ing work in ge­net­ics, but it was her hus­band who won a No­bel price." So said an obit­u­ary in the British news­pa­per 'The Guardian' re­gard­ing Es­ther Leder­berg, a North Amer­i­can mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gist mar­ried to Joshua Leder­berg from 1946 to 1966. Be­ing mar­ried to and work­ing along such a phe­nom­e­nal…

  • A Short­ened Tail

    Pic­tures Con­sid­ered #8 by Elio — Elec­tron mi­croscopy of phages came into promi­nence in the 1950's and re­vealed many of their phys­i­cal at­trib­utes such as their par­tic­u­late na­ture, mor­pho­log­i­cal com­plex­ity, "tail first" at­tach­ment to host cells, etc. Among these dis­cov­er­ies was that T‑even col­iphages con­tract their tail upon ab­sorp­tion to their E. coli hosts. A 1967 pa­per…

  • Time's Up

    by Merry Youle — Holins are the small­est known bi­o­log­i­cal timers. Timers, not clocks. Timers tick along, then go off af­ter the spec­i­fied in­ter­val. These small, phage-en­coded pro­teins time the length of lytic in­fec­tions of some phages. When they go off, the game is over and...