Biography of a Germ

We elbowed our way into Bb's story comparatively recently, ironically hurting ourselves as we renewed our appreciation of and commitment to wilderness areas. As we destroyed, then created habitat for deer, we ended up inviting Bb to run amok in our bodies. Karlen captures the beauty and terror of this bizarre chain of events, providing new insights into our relationship with our environment. Much like its cousins that live harmlessly in our bloodstream, eyelashes, and guts, this tickborne germ will eventually evolve a truce with us to protect its reproduction. Unfortunately for current and future sufferers of Lyme disease, we're quite a few generations away from that happy time. While we're waiting, we can read Biography of a Germ to learn more about our new tenants and why we should care about them. --Rob Lightner

Product Description
Arno Karlen, author of Man and Microbes, focuses on a single bacterium in Biography of a Germ, giving us an intimate view of a life that has been shaped by and is in turn transforming our own.

Borrelia burgdorferi is the germ that causes Lyme disease. In existence for some hundred million years, it was discovered only recently. Exploring its evolution, its daily existence, and its journey from ticks to mice to deer to humans, Karlen lucidly examines the life and world of this recently prominent germ. He also describes how it attacks the human body, and how by changing the environment, people are now much more likely to come into contact with it. Charming and thorough and smart, this book is a wonderfully written biography of your not so typical biographical subject.

The reason I only gave three stars to this book is that I felt it is superficial. Arno Karlen does not explain intimate relations between Borrelia and Ioxodes, nor between Ioxodes and deer, he just mentions the relations between them, but do not explain intimacies.


An enjoyable look at a small subject   October 5, 2002
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Sometimes it's the simple books that help cut down the clutter and look at something in a manageable way. So often books about disease or germs become large dense tomes. Karlen has taken the time to look at a single germ, the one responsible for Lyme Disease, and looks at its past, present and potential future. Along the way he teaches you Biology 101 about germs in a simple and enjoyable manner. A simple book with a simple purpose, but one that shows us an aspect of the world around us we may not have thought about.


Laughter and learning makes quite the Bbook   December 12, 2001
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Okay, so I must admit... I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to understanding the scientific jargon used in most journals discussing epidemiology and other areas of interest. I love to read about the world around me, but sometimes need a translator to comprehend it all! That's the great thing about Arno Karlen's book, "Biography of a Germ"-- you don't have to have your doctorate in microbacteriology to enjoy this book as a great read. On the surface the subject may seem a bit, well, odd... but Karlen's wit makes it easy to find yourself enthralled with the life and loves of Bb, this book's microscopic hero and hellion all rolled into one tiny spirochete. Before you know it, you are actually LEARNING a thing or two... and enjoying every minute of it! Far beyond just a crack at popular science, "Biography of a Germ" just might provide a few answers not only about the world within but the world around.


Borrelia Burgdorferi   January 11, 2001
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I have read Mr. Karlens book and have heard him speak. I found the book a refreshing unbiased look at the life of a spirochete, Bb. As one who suffers from the disease it was nice to read about the ecology of the germ without all of the controversy regarding diagnosis and treatment. C. Dickey RN


Microbiology as literature   December 8, 2000
 17 out of 17 found this review helpful

The germ is the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, and it causes among other things Lyme disease. Karlen is a psychoanalyst by trade and a historian of microbiology by inclination. He fell in love with the world of the very small when as a boy he was given a microscope. Karlen is also a fine prose stylist with a sharp sense of the ecological. In fact this book is really a kind of treatise on ecology, with a concentration on the environment of a bacterium. Borrelia burgdorferi is spread by ticks that bite small animals such as mice and squirrels and larger animals such as deer and sometimes humans. What Karlen accomplishes in this modest little book is to make vivid just what a "germ" is for a general readership. If you are in a fog about microbes and would like a painless, lively introduction, then this book may serve you very well.

I always imagined that bacteria split about every twenty minutes. Here I learned that some bacteria do split every twenty minutes or so, but others take hours and some even longer. I was also fuzzy about just how it is that microbes cause disease. Do they "eat" human flesh or destroy our cells with toxins or hog our nutrients for themselves? Turns out that some do one thing and some do another. Karlen emphasizes that sometimes what they do is cause symptoms: fever, muscle aches, fatigue, inflamation, etc., which are actually the result of our immune system's aggressive response to the presence of something foreign. Sometimes this can get so out of hand that our immune system continues to attack our own cells even after the microbe is gone, as is suspected in rheumatoid arthritis and possibly fibromyalgia (p. 160). And sometimes microbes commandeer some part of our system in order to better spread themselves around by making us sneeze or cough (cold viruses) or by giving us diarrhea (cholera).

There is a lot of other information in this little book, including such diverse facts as tumble weeds being native to southern Russia and not the western United States as I had always thought, or that the people of Lyme, Connecticut didn't appreciate having a disease named after their town. It is also interesting to know that microbes can "hide" in our bodies for years and then break out during times of overload or stress.

Karlen digresses nicely in spots, giving his opinion on the Gaia concept (he likes the "original, narrower version" p. 63), and how he feels about the deer population in the U.S. (he thinks there are too many). This last is directly relevant since it is on the deer that the ticks that are the vectors for Lyme disease mate and are able to reproduce. He recalls some history (the cholera epidemics in London in the nineteenth century, Spanish flu in America, etc.) and literature (Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year; the anonymous The Autobiography of a Flea), and in a footnote (p. 29) cites a story by Isaac Babel about syphilis (a bacterium related to Borrelia burgdorferi) entitled "Guy de Maupassant." A story by Isaac Babel about Guy de Maupassant is like a movie by Stephen Spielberg about Stanley Kubrick!

In summation, this is microbiology as literature, ecology as belles lettres seen in part from the perspective of a germ.