Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin: How Has Your Theory Evolved?
- What Is Life?
- Human Origins in a Controversial Age
- An Outsider's View of the Genome
- Possessed: The Biology of Parasite Manipulation
- Evolution in the News
Other Areas of Expertise
- Communications/Media
- History
- Science
Endorsements
"Carl Zimmer delivers lucid vignettes on the power of evolutionary thought in explaining organism design and biological history and diversity. During my introduction, I noted that one of the greatest disappointments for readers of Zimmer is coming to the end of one of his essays or books. The same applies to his talks. He presents complex material with clever visuals and thoughtful honest commentary, making the research he popularizes accessible and exciting to a broad audience. One also feels for the researchers Zimmer profiles; he is a master at elucidating the motivations and hardships (and unexpected blessings) in doing science."
- Mark Forbes
- Carleton University, Ottawa
More Information
Carl Zimmer
New York Times Columnist and Science Author
Base: Guilford, CT
Cited "for his diverse and consistently interesting coverage of evolution and unexpected biology," Carl Zimmer is the winner of the 2007 National Academy of Science Communications Award in the newspaper/magazine/internet category. He writes regularly for National Geographic, The New York Times, and other major publications and is also the author of six widely praised books about the science of life. In all of his work, Zimmer explores the latest advances in biology, from newly discovered fossils shedding light on our origins to the latest advances in biotechnology. Hailed for his lyrical engaging prose (and admired by scientists for his accuracy and authority), Zimmer offers his readers startling new insights into our place in the natural world.
Zimmer has earned numerous awards and fellowships for his work, and he is a frequent guest on radio shows such as Fresh Air and This American Life. He has lectured at many of the country's leading universities, medical schools, and museums. He has enthralled audiences with insightful, engrossing talks on topics ranging from the evolution-creation controversy to the history of the scientific revolution and even the wonderful creepiness of parasites.
His books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, called "as fine a book as one will find on the subject" by Scientific American. His 2004 book Soul Made Flesh, a fascinating history of the brain, was named one of the top 100 books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, and dubbed a "tour-de-force" by The Sunday Telegraph. His other books include At the Water's Edge and Parasite Rex, which the Los Angeles Times hailed as "a book capable of changing how we see the world."
His latest book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, is a biography of the best-studied creature on Earth and will be published by Pantheon Books in May 2008. While most people may only know E. coli as a lethal germ, we actually carry hundreds of billions of these bacteria in our bodies for our entire lives. Over the past fifty years, E. coli has been poked, probed, and dissected by thousands of biologists who seek answers to the most fundamental questions of biology, a number of whom have won Nobel Prizes for their work. Zimmer's exploration of this astonishingly complex germ becomes a profound meditation on the nature of life itself.
From 1994 to 1998 Zimmer was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Along with the National Academies of Science prize, he has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His honors include the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Science Journalism Award, the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting, the American Institute Biological Sciences Media Award, and the Everett Clark Award for science writing.
Works by this Speaker
Microcosm
•Within days of being born, we are infected with billions of E. coli. They will inhabit each and every one of us until we die. E. coli is notorious for making people gravely ill, but engineered strains of the bacteria save millions of lives each year.
•Despite its microscopic size, E.coli contains more than four thousand genes that operate a staggeringly sophisticated network of millions of molecules.
•Scientists are rebuilding E. coli from the ground up, redefining our understanding of life on Earth.
In the tradition of classics like Lewis Thomas's Lives of a Cell, Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating and utterly accessible investigation of what it means to be alive. Zimmer traces E. coli's remarkable history, showing how scientists used it to discover how genes work and then to launch the entire biotechnology industry. While some strains of E. coli grab headlines by causing deadly diseases, scientists are retooling the bacteria to produce everything from human insulin to jet fuel.
Microcosm is the story of the one species on Earth that science knows best of all. It's also a story of life itself--of its rules, its mysteries, and its future.
At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs and How Life Came
"It is wicked, I know, but I have the habit of turning over the corners of pages whenever I chance upon something unexpectedly interesting, exciting, or informative. Zimmers At the Waters Edge quickly became the most dog-eared book on my shelves." The Times (London)
How did our fishy ancestors climb out of the water, onto dry land? How did whales dive back in? These twin puzzles, two of the most remarkable transformations in the history of life, are the subject of At the Waters Edge. Until recently, these transitions remained major gaps in the record of evolution. Biologists could only speculate on the intermediate forms that took vertebrates from water onto land and back. But in a remarkable series of discoveries, in places like Greenland, Pakistan, Russia, as well as the United States, paleontologists have found fish with fingers and whales with legs. They been able to document the ecological forces that drove the rise of these new body plans, and geneticists have been able to find the underlying genetic changes that were at work. In solving these twin puzzles of transformation, scientists have found models for understanding how evolution works on its grandest scale, creating new forms of life that can colonize new habitats.
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Natures Most Dangerous Creatures
Imagine a world where parasites control the minds of their hosts, sending them to their destruction.
Imagine a world where parasites are masters of chemical warfare and camouflage, able to cloak themselves with their hosts own molecules. Imagine a world where parasites steer the course of evolution, where the majority of species are parasites.
Welcome to earth.
Parasites are among the worlds most successful and sophisticated organisms. They can transform the insides of other creatures into hospitable homes. They can evade the onslaught of the immune system and even make it serve them. They can even control the minds of their hosts and force them to do their bidding. And thanks to these skills, parasites may make up the majority of all species.
Parasite Rex offers a guided tour to the hidden, fascinating world of parasites, from protozoans that turn rats into suicidal kamikazes to wasps that turn their own DNA into viruses to help them parasitize catepillars. It follows scientists who are beginning to appreciate how parasites can control the fate of entire ecosystems and even steer the course of evolution.
"One of the years most fascinating works of popular science" Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea (Harper Collins 2002)
Darwin wrote The Origins of Species in 1859, long before paleontologists and geologists worked out the chronology of life on Earth, long before biologists uncovered the molecules that underlie heredity and natural selection. The great irony of Darwins work is that not until the twentieth century would scientists be able to recognize its true power. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea takes readers to the cutting edge of evolutionary biologyfrom the origins of life to mass extinctions to the latest theories on diseases, sex, and psychologyand explores the far-reaching implications of Darwins theory on our place in the world. A companion to one of the most important television series in PBS history, Evolution includes over 150 color illustrations.
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and how it Changed the World
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Soul Made Flesh tells the story of a dramatic turning point in historythe discovery of the role and importance of the human brain. The secrets of the brain were uncovered in seventeenth century England, against a deadly backdrop of civil war, regicide, and plague. At the beginning of this turbulent century, no one know how the brain worked; they didnt even know what an intact brain looked like. By the centurys close, the science of the brain had been established, helping to overturn misconceptions about the body and to unseat philosophies about the mind and the universe that had ruled Western thought for centuries. Presiding over the rise of this new science was the founder of modern neurology, Thomas Willis, a fascinating yet forgotten figure who stood at the center of an extraordinary group of natural philosophers known as the Oxford Circle. Soul Made Flesh chronicles their groundbreaking revelations and gory experiments that first enshrined the brain as the chemical engine of reason, emotion, and madnessas the very seat of the human soul.
