Daily Newsletter January 9, 2012
Today's topic is the nature of microbiology as a scientific discipline.
Biology is a natural science, which means that the focus of the study is to gain an understanding of the workings and rules of the natural world. This is opposed to social sciences, which seek to uncover the rules of human interaction. Natural science can be broken down into two main categories: Life Sciences and Physical Sciences. The life sciences study living systems (Biology), while the physical sciences study non-living systems (Physics and Chemistry).
The word biology comes from Greek origins: Bios (βίος), meaning life, and Logia (λόγια), meaning words. The translitterated meaning of biology is "The Study of Life." Now comes the big question: What is Life? One of the central assumptions of any scientific discipline is that the practitioners must come up with a consensus as to what is to be studied, and the nature of life is something that has been debated since Classical times. With the discovery of microorganisms, our definition of life changed to include living organisms that were too small to be seen by the naked eye. Yes, there were many people who denied that these were living organisms at first, but emperical evidence gathered over decades and centuries, have shown that these single celled structures have the charateristics of life.
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Today's Reflection
Take a moment. Where in your life do you come into contact with bacteria? Fungi? Protists? Viruses? Write these down in your journal or notebook. We will come back to these initial impressions in a few weeks. Don't take long on this, just note the things that first come to mind.
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Today's Challange: What is Microbiology?
Above we started with a discussion of Biology and the characteristics associated with life, but what are these characteristics? How do we currently define life? What is microbiology? The root biology says that we are studying life, but what kind of life? Are there general characteristics that groups all microbes together, as we see with animals or plants, or is it a different sort of classification?
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Optional Reading: The reading below at present is optional, but we will be talking about this paper later in the semester.
Woese CR. How We Do, Don’t and Should Look at Bacteria and Bacteriology. In: Dworkin M, Falkow S, Rosenberg E, Schleifer K-H, Stackebrandt E, eds. The Prokaryotes. Springer New York; :3-23. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/l6548121l33k6v21/export-citation/. Accessed January 9, 2012.
The above book can be accessed by GSU students as an electronic resource through the library.
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