An Ode to Evolution and Microbiology

I feel bad. I feel terrible to be honest. This poor blog has been gravely neglected. And there is no one to blame but myself.

Ive been over-worked and low on energy...and no energy creates bad writing. So to spare the few souls of you who might be reading what I write from time to time, Ive stayed away.

But today I had to write something.

I recently visited my old laboratory at the university. The building in which I used to do all my nerdy microbiology-stuff, is now an abandoned building. If you dont know me, you are probably wondering "how damn old is this person?" I can ease your mind by telling you that the building was abondoned already towards the end of my studies due to the rise of a new and better (read: modern) building.

Anyway... We, my significant other and myself, still have a keycard to enter the building, and used it to to leave our bikes there (dry and safe). Now, ofcourse we had to take a little look around the building. There is something very sexy about an abandoned, large, dark building... And to my big surprise I found one of my favorite poems still hanging where I last saw it. All alone... totally abandoned. (I am so sorry to those of you who now expected this post to be of the naughty, sexy kind...I am a nerd. Get over it.) And I took it with me (yes I stole it) and would like to share it with you. So to the biologists out there (and those of you who find science interesting) this is for you:

To the photosynthetical prokaryotes

In the beginning the earth was all wet-
We hadn't got life - or ecology yet.
There were lava and rocks - quite a lot of them both -
And oceans and nutrient Oparin broth.
But then there arose, at the edge of the sea,
Where sugars and organic acids were free,
A sort of a blob in a kind of a coat -
The earliest protero-prokaryote.
It grew and divided: it flourished and fed;
From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread.
Until it depleted the oceans's store.
And nary an acid was found any more.

Now, if one considered that terrible trend,
One might have predicted that that was the end -
But no! In some sunny wee lochean or slought
appared a new creature - we cannot say how:
By some strange transition that nobody knows,
a photosynthetical alga arose.
It grew and it flourished where nothing had been
Till much of the land was a blue shade of green.
And bubbles of oxygen started to rise
Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies;
While, off in the antediluvian mists,
Arose a few species with heterocyst
Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell,
Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell.

As the gases turned on and the gases turned off,
There emerged a respiring young heterothroph.
It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throved,
Creating fine structure, genetics and love,
And, using its enzymes and oxygen-2,
Produced such fine creatures as coli and you.

This, then, is the story of life's evolution
From Oparin broth to the final solution.
So, prokaryologist, dinna forget:
We've come a long way since the world was all wet.

We owe a great deal - you can see from your notes -
To photosynthetical prokaryotes...

Ralph A. Lewin

Happy summer!