How Bacteria Face Depression, Recession, and Derepression

HOW BACTERIA FACE DEPRESSION, RECESSION, AND DEREPRESSION* ARTHUR L. KOCm —Eh bien, mon cher Pangloss, lui dit Candide, quand vous avez été pendu, dissequé, roué de coups, &f que vous avez ramé aux galères, avez-vous toujourpensé que tout allait le mieux du monde:—Je suis toujours de mon premier sentiment, répondit Pangloss; car enfinje suis Philosophe, il ne me convientpas de me dédire; Leibnitz ne pouvantpas avoir tort, & l'harmonie préétablie, {étant) d'ailleurs la plus belle chose due monde, aussi bien que le plein £sf la matière subtile. [Voltaire] I'd like today to tell you how some bacteria get along in a world where conditions keep changing. I hope I have something to say to people attending this lecture representing widely differing disciplines. One of the things that Argonne does very well is to bring together a variety of different approaches and make it possible for people of different backgrounds to work together. I will need to bring together a diverse collection of facts and concepts. To start, let's imagine that the subject matter to be discussed is that pile of stuff shown in figure la. I need to introduce the talk in several very different ways. I would like to start over on the right, and run and see if I can get to the top; and then I want to start over again, from the left, and then from the front with another running start. I must do this because the theme brings a variety of threads together. *1975 AUA-Argonne Distinguished Award Lecture, given at Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, May 20, 1975. Supported by the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration. The experimental work to probe this metaphysic was done only in part by myself; much was carried by resourceful students and colleagues working on Clouds Seven and Eight. They provided exacting, competent molecular biology and microbial physiology to serve as a foundation for this speculation. I owe a deep debt to Tom Alton, Jerry Blumberg, Penelope Clark, Bob Coffman, Carol Deppe, Dick Ecker, Ellie Ehrenfeld, Pauline Koyoma, Kamal Nath, Tom Norris, and Elio Schaechter. I wish to thank Marsha Rosenthal for help in purifying the spoken word into the written word, and Sara Bechtold for repeatedly purifying my handwriting and spelling. The experimental work was supported over the years by both the NSF and the NIH, most recently under grants BMS-72-01852 A03 and AI-09337-05, respectively. These agencies, the University of Florida, Indiana University, and Argonne made the opportunities to pursue this problem . tProfessor of microbiology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401. 44 I Arthur L. Koch · How Bacteria Face Depression a Fig. 1—Development of Argument: a, Introduction, b, Initial success, c, Deeper meaning . The first introduction: Biologists have come to believe that they are sisters in science to the chemists and the physicists. We generally think of biology as a science similar to chemistry or physics, but I think that you will agree that with more careful consideration this is completely wrong. Biology is a historical subject, as we have studied only the way life evolved on one particular planet. Biologists are certainly as badly off as the historian; biologists are as badly off as the astrophysicist. None of these academicians is doing science, but all but the historian are pretending to do so. All three may use scientific principles or facts to understand the limits and constraints on the particular examples or process under scrutiny. All are, in fact, working out particular happenstances in a Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1976 | 45 particular single or closely related series of instances. This is not to deny that these subjects are interesting and important and can be useful. Biology is not science for another reason, that is, living organisms are essentially machines. An organism faces all of the problems of any machine built to serve a purpose; it even has the extra complications attendant to multiple-purpose machines. On this basis, students of these machines are not scientists; they are engineers. They are trying to figure out how the cogs and wheels and other parts work as mechanisms in the biological machine. This need...