Maelstrom

Acknowledgements

Thanks first for the forebearance: to Mike Brander, one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet, for not sueing me after I inadvertently named a psychopath after him in the last book.

Thanks next for the help: Laurie Cha

I also got diverse technical assistance from other folks with postgraduate degrees like mine, the difference being that theirs were in subjects that actually proved to be good for something. Prof. Denis Ly

Given a world in which Quebec has become the predominant economic power, I figured various Quebecisms would have worked their way into casual N'Am conversation—hence all those italicised expletives that left most of you scratching your heads. For a crash course in how to be foul-mouthed in Canada's Other Official Language, I thank Joel Champetier, Gle

Once again, the music of Ian Anderson and the inestimable Jethro Tull kept me company during the many long nights it took to lay this puppy to rest. As did the music of REM, from whom I stole a couple of chapter titles.

My thanks to all of these for their efforts and/or inspiration, and apologies for all the stuff I probably got wrong anyway.

Notes and References

The following references helped me beat Maelstrom into a shape that's (hopefully) more plausible than if I'd just made everything up myself. This is in addition to the references I cited two years ago in Starfish, which I won't bother repeating here: go buy the damn book if you’re so interested.

When I started writing this book, strange claims had just started surfacing in the scientific literature: a new kind of extremely primitive microbe freshly discovered, something inconceivably small[1]. So small, in fact—less than 100 nanometers in some cases—that many argued they couldn't possibly be alive [2]. Believers dubbed them nanobes. (Formal taxonomy- Nanobacterium sanguineum—has been suggested, but not yet formally adopted [3].)

Now, a couple of years later, nanobes have been found not only in hotsprings and Triassic sandstone, but in the blood of mammals (including humans) [4]. Evidently they find us comfortably reminiscent of the primordial soup in which life originally evolved some 3.5 billion years ago; they feed off the phosphorus and calcium in our blood.

ßehemoth is not N. sanguineum, of course. It's more sophisticated in some ways, more primitive in others. Its genome is encoded in p-RNA, not DNA; it snarfs sulfur, not phosphorus and calcium; it can't survive in cold saline environments (real nanobes probably can't metabolise under such conditions either, but they can withstand them in a dormant state); it has advanced adaptations for cell penetration that are way out of Nanobacterium's league. It's larger, as large as conventional mycoplasmas and marine bacterioplankton. It is also much nastier, and—last but not least— it doesn't actually exist.

I have, however, tried to make this bug reasonably plausible, given the dramatic constraint of a global apocalypse in a crunchy coating. As a result, ßehemoth is like one of those "composite serial killers" you read about in True-Crime books—bits and pieces of various real-world bugs, thrown together with lots of dramatic license. «A-51» really exists, both in deep lake sediments and the human mouth [5]. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is another bacterium that lives quite happily in soil, water, worms, and people [6]; like ßehemoth, it has genes which allow it to speed up and slow down its own rate of mutation so it can quick-adapt to novel environments. (I've called them "Blachford genes" here, in the hopes that one Alistair Blachford will get off his ass and publish his thesis on genetic metavariation as an evolutionary strategy [7].) March and McMahon's 1999 review of receptor-mediated endocytosis [8] told me how ßehemoth would be most likely to get inside a host cell, and Decatur and Portnoy [9] told me how it could avoid getting digested afterward. And once again, a nod to Denis Ly

ßehemoth's genetics are cadged from a variety of sources, many of which I quoted without really understanding. The stuff on mitochondria and pyranosal RNA come from Eschenmoser [10], Gesteland et al. [11], Gray et al. [12], and Orgel [13,14]. ßehemoth's size and genome are consistent with theoretical size-limits for micro-organisms [15], and big enough to sustain a normal microbial metabolic rate. (Real nanobes are too small to contain many enzymes, which means that many of their metabolic pathways crawl along at uncatalyzed speeds. They therefore metabolize about ten thousand times slower than bacteria such as E. coli4, which makes them pretty poor candidates for outcompeting a whole biosphere.) And of course, it's looking more and more likely that life itself began as a sulfur-dependent phenomenon in a hydrothermal rift vent [16]. I cobbled other bits and pieces from Lodesh et al.'s "Molecular Cell Biology" [17].

1 Unwins, P.J.R. et al. 1998. Novel nano-organisms from Australian sandstones. American Minerologist 83: 1541–1550.

2 Broad, W.J. 2000. Scientists find smallest form of life, if it lives. NY Times, Jan. 18.

3 Euzéby, J.P. March 2001. List of bacterial names with standing in nomenclature. http://www.bacterio.cict.fr/index.html

4 Kajander, E.O., et al. 1999. Suggestions from observations on nanobacteria isolated from blood. In Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms: Proceedings of a Workshop. National Academy Press, Washington. 164 pp.

5 Kroes et al. 1999. Bacterial diversity within the human subgingival crevice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 796(25): 14547-14552.

6 Rainy, P.B., and E.R. Moxon. 2000. When being hyper keeps you fit. Science 288: 1186–1188.

7 Blachford, A. 1984. Metavariation and long term evolutionary patterns. M.Sc. thesis, Zoology, University of British Columbia, 140pp.

8 Marsh, M., and H.T. McMahon. 1999. The structural era of endocytosis. Science 285(5425): 215–220.

9 Decatur, A.L., and D.A. Portnoy. 2000. A PEST-like sequence in Listeriolysin O essential for Listeria monocytogenes pathogenicity. Science 290: 992–995.

10 Eschenmoser, A. 1999. Chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure. Science 284: 2118–2123.

11 Gesteland, R.F., et al. 1999. The RNA World. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY. 735pp.

12 Gray, M.W., et al. 1999. Mitochondrial Evolution. Science 283: 1476–1481.

13 Orgel, L. 2000. A simpler nucleic acid. Science 290:1306–1307.

14 Orgel, L. and L. Ost. 1999. Did life originate in an RNA world? In Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms: Proceedings of a Workshop. National Academy Press, Washington. 164 pp.

15 Vogel, G. 1998. Finding life's limits. Science 282: 1399.

16 Rasmussen, B. 2000. Filamentous microfossils in a 3,235-million-year-old volcanogenic massive sulphide deposit. Nature 405: 676–679.

17 Lodish, H., et al. 1995. Molecular Cell Biology, 3rd ed. Scientific American Books, W.H. Freeman & Co., NY. 1344pp.