Paul G. Falkowski - Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

I had been thinking about this book for some time and wrote it in fits and starts over a period of almost two years. The core ideas were developed as an outgrowth of a course I teach every year at Rutgers, History of the Earth Systems, but I didnt want to write another textbook. I wanted to reach a wider readership and to help elucidate what we know, and perhaps more important, what we dont know, about the role of microbes in making Earth a habitable planet. The lions share of the work was done while I was on sabbatical at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. I am extremely grateful to my hosts at the institute and my fellow Fellows for reading and commenting on the first few chapters. I especially thank Ray Jayawardhana (Ray Jay), Tamar Schapiro, Benny Shilo, and Alessandra Buonanno for helping me in the early days. I am indebted to my friend and colleague, Andy Knoll, at Harvard, for encouraging and critiquing my early chapters and for many discussions while I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I thank my late friend, Toshiro Saino, who invited me to give a series of lectures at Nagoya University in 2006. Early on, the lectures in Japan helped me focus on structuring this book. Conversations with many people over the years helped me shape my ideas about the role of microbes in the origins of life on this planet. I thank Tom Fenchel and Ed Delong for collaborating with me on a paper describing the role of microbes in maintaining biogeochemical cycles; the basis of that paper was critical in helping me develop several chapters in this book. The late Lynn Margulis was extremely supportive, and we had many discussions over dinner about symbioses. Joe Kirschvink and Minik Rosing helped me understand what tales very old rocks can tell. Many people were extremely helpful in reading chapters and giving constructive comments; I am especially grateful to Sam Elworthy while he was at Princeton University Press for soliciting the book and to my editor, Alison Kalett, for her patience and insights that helped to improve it. I especially thank my wife, Sari Ruskin, for her very constructive comments and her loving encouragement. My longtime friend Bob Kross gave me many thoughtful suggestions. I thank Ford Doolittle, Dave Johnston, Don Canfield, Paul Hoffman, and Doug Erwin for pointing out key errors that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Nick Lane was extremely charming in his praise of the few chapters I asked him to comment on, and I delighted in talking with him about the basic concept of the book. Many of my students, postdocs, and collaborators down the years have helped shape my thoughts about the role of microbes in the evolution of life. I am grateful for the support of my research from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Agouron Institute, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. I thank and apologize to Sari and our two daughters, Sasha and Mirit, for their understanding and patience and the time stolen from them while I was writing. I thank my colleagues at Rutgers University, where I have worked since 1998. I never would have guessed that as a biophysicist and oceanographer I would one day wind up teaching History of the Earth Systems in a geology department. But, most of all, I thank my parents, neither of whom was a scientist, for encouraging me as a child to follow my dreams in life and for providing me with the intellectual opportunities and emotional support that have served me so well throughout my adult life.

L ife is a series of connected historical accidents, contingencies, and opportunities. I grew up in a New York City housing project at the edge of Harlem. When I was about nine years old, my mother befriended a young couple in the building. They were graduate students at Columbia University and lived a few floors below us.

Bill Cohen and his wife, Miriam, were studying biology and kept tanks of tropical fish in their apartment. They seemed like a wonderful young couple, and my mother surely advised them on things they didnt need to know. Regardless, they didnt have children yet, and shortly after my mother introduced me to them, they invited me to visit their apartment and see their aquaria. I was hooked.

A few weeks after our introduction, Bill and Miriam gave me a small aquarium, and I started to grow guppies and a green alga, Nitella, and watched as the gravid females gave birth to new guppies in the algal bed. I began to read everything I could about tropical fish and became increasingly obsessive about them, and fish in general. I was, unwittingly, on my way to becoming a biologistall because of a chance encounter by my nosey, loquacious mother with a couple of graduate students in an elevator.