Archaea

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny bacteria-sized organisms he was studying were not actually bacteria but from an entirely different branch of the tree of life. It became clear that archaea, as he named them, share aspects of the cells in all plants and animals even if they often live in places where other life struggles including salty lakes, acidic pools, under the sea bed and in the gut. While aspects of what followed from Woese are still under debate, further discoveries suggest that life on Earth has been on a journey of separation and reunion: that the first cells developed into bacteria and archaea billions of years ago and that some of those later combined to form the complex cells from which we are made.

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Guests

• Professor Christa Schleper No other episodes
  Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Vienna
• Professor Thorsten Allers No other episodes
  Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of Nottingham
• Buzz Baum No other episodes
  Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge

Reading list

• One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the evolution of complex life
  John Archibald (Oxford University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• 'I': A Biography of the Biological Self
  Buzz Baum (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2027)
• In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks
  Franklin M. Harold (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
  Nick Lane (Oxford University Press, 2005) Google Books →
• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
  David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018) Google Books →
• Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis
  Jan Sapp (Oxford University Press, 1994) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002sg10

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002sg10

Auto-category: 579.3 (Archaea)