

KMO
&
Jean-Marie Volland
015 Bacterial Magnificence with Jean-Marie Volland
01 Sep 2022
• 47 min
• EN
Description
Dr Jean-Marie Volland is a scientist at the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems and an affiliate scientist at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. He is also the lead author on a recent research paper that announced the discovery of something that most people, including biologists, had scarcely thought possible: a gigantic bacterium which is thousands of times larger than its fellow microbes – so large, in fact, that it can be seen with the naked eye.
In this conversation, KMO and Jean-Marie discuss:
- 01:50 – Thiomargarita Magnifica and its discovery
- 05:05 – Geography refresher
- 06:25 – JM's stumbling into biology
- 10:20 – Etymological remarks
- 10:55 – Sulfur-eating lifeforms and KMO's mammalian privilege
- 13:15 – Bug size competition
- 13:55 – The three-domain classification (Eukarya, Archaea, Bacteria)
- 16:45 – Taxonomy of the living forms
- 18:38 – Reproduction and evolution
- 22:13 – T. magnifica's unusual structure (with a brief mention of Anton Petrov's YouTube videos)
- 26:20 – Evolutionary advantages of being large
- 30:00 – Cooperation and competition in the natural world and beyond (way beyond, including the economy); ramifications of this dichotomy; symbiosis, parasitism, and commensalism; why is symbiosis so abiding when its game-theoretical disadvantages are also evident?
- 44:40 – JM's two closing take-home messages
Host and Guests:
- KMO: @Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo
- Jean-Marie Volland (LRC Systems)
Links and Resources:
- Thiomargarita magnifica (Wikipedia)
From "The Padverb podcast with KMO"