Library branch
Biology & Medicine
Body and life — the Human Atlas lives here.
15 pieces
- We Have Never Lived Alone Who Lives in a Drop of Water? A glass of water looks clear. Is there really nothing in it? Three hundred years ago a Dutch cloth merchant looked through a glass-bead lens and found it full of swimming things. Until then we did not know we had neighbours. 2 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone What Is Rotting? — Who Makes Kimchi and Makgeolli Milk goes off; kimchi ripens. Both were simply left alone. In fact it is the same thing — microbes eating. When we can still eat the result we call it fermentation; when we cannot, rot. A story of fizzing kimchi jars and overflowing makgeolli. 1 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone Bacteria, Viruses, Moulds — Why Antibiotics Don't Touch a Cold 'Microbe' just means 'small living thing'. Apart from being small they have nothing in common. A bacterium is a one-room house, a mould is a house woven from threads, and a virus is not a house at all but a letter. Once you see the difference, why antibiotics do nothing for a cold becomes obvious. 1 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone Can Washing Your Hands Save a Life? — The Doctor Nobody Believed In a Vienna hospital in the 1840s, mothers knelt and begged to be sent to the midwives' ward, not the doctors'. Under the doctors, two and a half times as many died. One doctor found out why. It was hands. He was laughed at, and proved right twenty years later. 2 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone The Tenants in My Body — No Germ Is Good or Bad by Nature The adverts say: kill the bad germs, fill up on the good ones. So is the E. coli living in your gut good or bad? The answer is 'it depends where'. A story about the tenants who outnumber your own cells, what they do, and who feeds them. 2 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone The Contaminated Dish — Bacteria Learn Faster Than We Do A dish left over a holiday grew a mould, and around the mould the bacteria were gone. That is how our first antibiotic began — and the man who found it warned in his Nobel speech that careless use would teach the bacteria. He was exactly right. 2 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone Can a Small Illness Prevent a Great One? — Rehearsing the Body Country folk said the women who milked cows never caught smallpox. A country doctor believed the story enough to test it. He had no idea why it worked — there was no word for immunity yet. That method went on to erase the only human disease we have ever wiped from the Earth. 2 questions
- We Have Never Lived Alone Who Keeps the Earth Running? — The Air You Are Breathing Was Made by Microbes Take a breath. That oxygen was not here at first. Long ago a bacterium learned to cook with sunlight and threw the oxygen out as waste. Inside our cells the descendants of another bacterium are still living. The last and largest story of this series. 2 questions
- Wrong, and Useful Anyway Galen — The Book That Said Go and Look He opened living animals to tie off nerves, and cut arteries to see what was inside them. He wrote, again and again, that one should not trust books but go and look. For fourteen centuries afterwards people looked at his book instead. This one is not a story about a wrong theory but about a wrong way of reading. 6 questions
- Wrong, and Useful Anyway Lamarck — Wrong for More Complicated Reasons Than You Think The man who said giraffes stretched their necks. School usually stops there and moves on to the ridicule. But his first claim was not that one, and the claim he is blamed for was not his alone. Nor is it true, as is often said now, that epigenetics has vindicated him. This article has to be careful in both directions. 6 questions
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Biologics — If You Cannot Build It, Get Something to Build It The previous article called a medicine a key that fits a lock. But some keys are too large and too intricate to be built by hand. So what then? You get something that already knows how. That is the work of the biotechnology institute in Daejeon. 3 questions
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Forensic Science — Every Touch Leaves Something The culprit believes nothing was left behind. Yet every touch stamps sweat, every brush sheds a fibre, and a drop of saliva is an identity card. In Wonju, the National Forensic Service reads those traces. 2 questions
- In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled The Brain Runs on Twenty Watts — Will Copying It Cut the Power? The human brain runs on twenty watts, the cost of one light bulb. So, people say, copy the brain and AI's electricity drops a hundredfold. The direction is right. But take apart why the brain is so cheap and what needs copying is not the brain but three of its habits — and those habits have a price. The brain cannot multiply. 2 questions
- One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below Whose Breath Did I Just Breathe In? — Trees Are Built from Air Exhaled breath does not fly into space; in a year or two it mixes through the whole planet. Trees breathe in its carbon and build their bodies from it. Dry a tree and most of its weight came from air, not soil. Grass soon gives the carbon back; a tree holds it for centuries. 2 questions
- One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below Is There a Special Atom of Life? — The Blueprint Is an Order of Ordinary Atoms The atoms of life are the same as in rock and air. Yet a blueprint really exists: DNA. Not one special atom but billions of ordinary atoms in order, carried on not because it never disappears but because it keeps being copied. To close the series, the film's lines are sorted one by one into science and imagination. 2 questions