On Reading The Carbon Age

Posted by jns on 28 October 2008

I recently finished reading The Carbon Age : How Life’s Core Element has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat, by Eric Roston (New York : Walker & Company, 2008. 308 pages). I very much enjoyed the act of reading it, but it was only when I was writing about it that I realized that is really an excellent book on all counts. My book note is here.

In this case I think what I admired the most was the author’s scienticity, which is how we refer to a scientific / rational / analytical / naturalistic perspective combined with the fortitude to integrate science moments into a larger cultural context. Mr. Roston did an excellent job of it, making it entertaining and informative without being the least bit silly or imprecise. As you may recall, I’m easily irritated by authors writing about science who do not take the trouble to be precise and thoughtful in their scientific exposition, but I had no such reaction here. If my memory is correct, I thought there was one explanation, out of the 300 pages, where the concept being explained was slightly befuddled–not a bad record!

But, our purpose here is to provide a place for a few excerpts that just didn’t fit into the book note for some reason or that I marked specially for blogging. (It’s true! Sometimes there are bits of the text that I think are a must-share but they don’t share the tone of a book note, so it’s lucky you!)

In this first excerpt, we’re in the midst of a long discussion about carbon’s place in the origins of life and how its central role may have come about. One of the great steps forward happened very, very early in the process. In a world of one-celled life, one cell managed to trap another cell inside it and the two continue to reproduce together to this day. Eukaryotes are organisms, including humans and most everything we think of as life except bacteria, whose cells are complex systems containing a nucleus and other parts, including mitochondira, which produce the energy the cell runs on by breaking down (“burning”) carbohydrates. I liked this terse, elegant, and altogether sensible paragraph about that moment.

The capture and integration of one cell by another is called endosymbiosis. Nearly all eukaryotes have little organs (“organelles”) called mitochondria. These cellular energy centers descend from purple sulfur bacteria, inhabitants of stomatolites in Shark Bay. This class of bacteria has made its living for as long as 3 billion years by using oxygen to burn carbohydrate fuel. Deep in the evolutionary past, some oxygen-breathing bacteria became engulfed within anaerobic cells, which needed help thriving in an atmosphere of increasing oxygen. These bacteria are the ancestors of our cellular power plants. The evidence is that bacteria and mitochondria share much of the same DNA. [p. 73]

In this next short excerpt, Roston comments on the familial culture of experimental scientists. I’ve known this phenomenon myself. I started out in low-temperature physics, an experimental discipline that appeared early in the 20th century when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, the Dutch physicist, first liquefied helium in 1908. We were a small community and everyone could trace their lineage; there are only a couple of major branches of the family. I don’t think I’ve seen this written about elsewhere and I thought Roston’s observations were very perceptive.

Labs are structured as intellectual family fiefdoms. A professor “raises” his graduate students, who grow up and fan out across the world of research universities and private industry. Virtually everyone’s intellectual ancestors [in chemical synthesis] can be traced back to J.J. Berzelius, the Swedish chemist who first called carbon “C”. Every generation tends the repository of knowledge, weeding out its predecessor’s bad ideas, answering some of their questions, and asking many of their own. [p. 135]