A Thousand Microbes in Your Mouth and Other Scenes From the 2010 TEDMED Conference
book with co-author Steve Gullans, that humans are evolving from Homo sapiens to Homo evolutus, a hominid that directly and deliberately controls the evolution of its own and other species. “We’re moving from reading the life code to writing the life code, and that is a very different circumstance,” says Enriquez, who urges the audience to think about what it means to “upgrade our species.”
A Sugar Glider
—-Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, begins his talk by saying, “A chimpanzee virus killed 25 million people. That’s why I’m here.” In fact, Daszak says HIV/AIDS is only one example of a number of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans today. Daszak, a disease ecologist, says approximately 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originated in wild or domestic animals. Bats, for example, carry rabies, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), Ebola, and the coronavirus. The scariest animal on the planet, Daszak says, is not a Bengal tiger, but the “sugar glider,” an adorable, bug-eyed marsupial with a long tail that glides from tree to tree. “I’m most afraid of this particular little animal, because the people are going into the forests of Indonesia to catch them, bring them into captivity, and ship them around the world—straight into our homes, where we hold them, kiss them, and cuddle up to them,” he says. “What easier way could there be for any one of this species’ 100 new viruses to spread to humans?”
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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