"Bruce Sterling - Bitter Resistance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

BRUCE STERLING

BITTER RESISTANCE

Two hundred thousand bacteria could easily lurk under the top half of this
semicolon; but for the sake of focussing on a subject that's too often out of
sight and out of mind, let's pretend otherwise. Let's pretend that a bacterium
is about the size of a railway tank car.

Now that our fellow creature the bacterium is no longer three microns long, but
big enough to crush us, we can get a firmer mental grip on the problem at hand.
The first thing we notice is that the bacterium is wielding long, powerful whips
that are corkscrewing at a blistering 12,000 RPM. When it's got room and a
reason to move, the bacterium can swim ten body-lengths every second. The human
equivalent would be sprinting at forty miles an hour.

The butt-ends of these spinning whips are firmly socketed inside rotating,
proton-powered, motor-hubs. It seems very unnatural for a living creature to use
rotating wheels as organs, but bacteria are serenely untroubled by our parochial
ideas of what is natural.

The bacterium, constantly chugging away with powerful interior metabolic
factories, is surrounded by a cloud of its own greasy spew. The rotating spines,
known as flagella, are firmly embedded in the bacterium's outer hide, a slimy,
lumpy, armored bark. Studying it closely (we evade the whips and the cloud of
mucus), we find the outer cell wall to be a double-sided network of interlocking
polymers, two regular, almost crystalline layers of macromolecular chainmail,
something like a tough plastic wiffleball.

The netted armor, wrinkled into warps and bumps, is studded with hundreds of
busily sucking and spewing orifices. These are the bacterium's "porins," pores
made from wrapped-up protein membrane, something like damp rolled-up newspapers
that protrude through the armor into the world outside.

On our scale of existence, it would be very hard to drink through a waterlogged
rolled-up newspaper, but in the tiny world of a bacterium, osmosis is a powerful
force. The osmotic pressure inside our bacterium can reach 70 pounds per square
inch, five times atmospheric pressure. Under those circumstances, it makes a lot
of sense to be shaped like a tank car.

Our bacterium boasts strong highly sophisticated electrochemical pumps working
through specialized fauceted porins that can slurp up and spew out just the
proper mix of materials. When it's running its osmotic pumps in some nutritious
broth of tasty filth, our tank car can pump enough juice to double in size in a
mere twenty minutes. And there's more: because in that same twenty minutes, our
bacterial tank car can build an entire duplicate tank car from scratch.

Inside the outer wall of protective bark is a greasy space full of chemically