Try​ to imagine what it is like to be a fungus. Not a mushroom, pushing up through damp soil overnight or delicately forcing itself out through the bark of a rotting log: that would be like imagining the grape rather than the vine.

You based the technology on parasitic hookworms. Where did that idea come from? We’ve been trying to deliver drugs through the gastrointestinal tract, and that is a formidable challenge because the gastrointestinal tract has a mucosa – a mucus layer.

When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease.

The gruesome new field of neuro-parasitology could provide insights into the neurological basis for behavior and decision-making — By Conn Hastings Imagine a parasite that makes an animal change its habits, guard the parasite’s offspring or even commit suicide.

The 5th Mercy Podcast for Liverpool Biennial, 2012 is a work written, performed and edited by the wondrous poet Holly Pester and myself (Daniel Rourke)

Featuring Original Work by: George Major : http://www.georgemajor.com Claire Potter : http://clairelouisepotter.blogspot.co.uk

Featuring Audio Samples From: Bo Didley, I’m a Man The Yardbirds, I’m a man Jacques Dutronc, La Fille Du Père Noël Davie Bowie, The Jean Genie The Winstons, Amen, Brother Danger Mouse, Interlude Die Hard Original Soundtrack (inc. Let it Snow, by Dean Martin) Featuring Textual Samples From: Roger Ebert, Die Hard, July 15, 1988 : http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19880715/REVIEWS/807150301/1023 Scientific American, Shakespeare to Blame for Introduction of European Starlings to U.S. : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=call-of-the-reviled Wired Magazine, Cue the Scream : http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/st_scream BBC 1Xtra, The Story of the ‘Amen Break’ with Crissy Criss : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011cjqd New York Times, 1877, American Acclimatization Society : http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50912F73B5B137B93C7A8178AD95F438784F9

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Planet Earth, which is more stars than are in the Universe -- stacked end to end, they would reach out 100 million light years.

Over tens, hundreds and millions years, our ancestors have been picking up retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) that reproduce by taking their genetic material and inserting it into our own chromosomes. There are probably about 100,000 elements in the human genome that you can trace to a virus ancestor. They make up about 8 percent of our genome, and genes that encode proteins only make up 1.2 percent of our genome making us more virus than human.

Occasionally, a retrovirus will end up in a sperm cell or an egg and insert its genes there, which then may give rise to a new organism, a new animal, a new person where every cell in that body has got that virus.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven to climb to a high spot. Just before dying, the infected body—a zombie—grasps a perch as the mature fungal invader erupts from the back of the zombie’s head to rain down spores on unsuspecting victims below, starting the cycle again. This isn’t the latest gross-out moment from a George A. Romero horror film; it is part of a very real evolutionary arms race between a parasitic fungus and its victims, ants.

One zombie by itself is not necessarily very scary, but in B movies from, Night of the Living Dead to Zombieland, Hollywood’s animated corpses have a nasty habit of creating more of the walking dead. Controlled by some inexplicable force, perhaps an intensely virulent pathogen, the main preoccupation of a zombie is making other zombies.

“What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? - a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at all costs expel, excise, reject? Or something like a parasite, with which we must negotiate a contract of symbiosis? I lean toward the second solution, as life itself does. l’m even willing to bet that in the future the best treatment for cancer will switch from eliminating it to a method that will profit from its dynamism.

Why? Because, objectively, we have to continue living with cancers, with germs, with evil and even violence. It’s better to find a symbiotic equilibrium, even fairly primitive, than to reopen a war that is always lost because we and the enemy find renewed force in the relationship. If we were to implacably dean up ail the germs, as Puritanism would have us do, they would soon become resistant to our techniques of elimination and require new armaments. Instead, why not culture them in curdled milk, which sometimes results in delicious cheeses?” - Quote source: Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time Inspiration for posting: Re-engineering human cells to attack cancer

Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a "personal God", so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities. This God, the God worth fighting against, is the God we grew up with as children (and soon grew out of, or stopped believing in): this God created the world, controls our destinies, sits up somewhere in heaven, loves us, sometimes punishes us, and is ready to intervene to perform miracles. 

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution. Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs.

The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. 

According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible dodge to get their genetic payload inside the host cell. In an early, RNA-protein world, there would not be enzymes to degrade DNA, so a virus encoded by DNA would have a big survival advantage. This suggests a scenario in which a clever parasite brings along DNA plus the means of copying DNA-- a different parasite at least for bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes-- and hijacks the cell's existing interpretation equipment. The symbiosis of virus plus RNA/protein cell eventually resulted in the modern arrangement of DNA, RNA and protein.

The video above captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell - the first time the event has been caught in high resolution.

The Plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes, and is thought to kill almost 1 million people worldwide each year.

Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues used transmission electron microscopy, immuno-fluorescence and 3D super-resolution microscopy to record thousands of high-definition images of separate invasion events, a process that takes less than 30 seconds.

To boost their chances of catching Plasmodium parasites in the act of attacking a red blood cell the team controlled the process using two drugs. 

Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an ideal location for spore dispersal from a dead body following host death. Fossil leaves record many aspects of insect behaviour (feeding, galls, leaf mining) but to date there are no known examples of behavioural manipulation. Here, we document, to our knowledge, the first example of the stereotypical death grip from 48 Ma leaves of Messel, Germany, indicating the antiquity of this behaviour. As well as probably being the first example of behavioural manipulation in the fossil record, these data support a biogeographical parallelism between mid Eocene northern Europe and recent southeast Asia.

So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could leave a predator without prey, or a plant without a pollinator. And exploring a world without mosquitoes is more than an exercise in imagination: intense efforts are under way to develop methods that might rid the world of the most pernicious, disease-carrying species (see 'War against the winged').

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her knowledge, sign by sign, word by word, with the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it. This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” The Emancipated Spectator (2008)

What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. But what distinction can we uncover between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, hell, even between the ‘true’ and ‘almost true’? How does one calculate the value of what is effectively a mistake? Error appears to be a crucial component of Rancière’s position. In a sense, Rancière is positing a world that has from first principles always uncovered itself through a kind of decoding. A world in which subjects “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration”. Now forgive me for side-stepping a little here, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like biological development? Here’s a paragraph from Richard Dawkins (worth his salt as long as he is talking about biology): “Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.” Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Hidden amongst Dawkins’ words, I believe, we find an interesting answer to the problem of mis-translation I pose above. A mistake is useless if accuracy is your aim, but what if your aim is merely to learn something? To enrich and expand the connections that exist between your systems of knowledge. As Dawkins alludes to above, it is beneficial for life that errors do exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (what in information theory would be metered by a coded ‘redundancy‘) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur. Simply put, exchange within and between systems is almost valueless unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. At the scale Rancière exposes for us there are two types of value: firstly, the value of repeating the message (the poem) and secondly, the value of making an error and thus producing entirely new knowledge. In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the amount of work saved on the part of the receiver. That is, if the receiver were to attempt to create that exact message, entirely from scratch. In his influential essay, Encoding, Decoding (1980), Stuart Hall maps a four-stage theory of “linked but distinctive moments” in the circuit of communication:

production circulation use (consumption) reproduction

John Corner further elaborates on these definitions:

the moment of encoding: ‘the institutional practices and organizational conditions and practices of production’; the moment of the text: ‘the… symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance… The form and content of what is published or broadcast’; and the moment of decoding: ‘the moment of reception [or] consumption… by… the reader/hearer/viewer’ which is regarded by most theorists as ‘closer to a form of “construction”‘ than to ‘the passivity… suggested by the term “reception”‘

(source) At each ‘moment’ a new set of limits and possibilities arises. This means that the way a message is coded/decoded is not the only controlling factor in its reception. The intended message I produce, for instance, could be circulated against those intentions, or consumed in a way I never imagined it would be. What’s more, at each stage there emerges the possibility for the message to be replicated incorrectly, or, even more profoundly, for a completely different component of the message to be taken as its defining principle. Let’s say I write a letter, intending to send it to my newly literate, ignoramus friend. The letter contains a recipe for a cake I have recently baked. For some reason my letter is intercepted by the CIA,who are convinced that the recipe is a cleverly coded message for building a bomb. At this stage in the communication cycle the possibility for mis-translation to occur is high. Stuart Hall would claim is that this shows how messages are determined by the social and institutional power-relations via which they are encoded and then made to circulate. Any cake recipe can be a bomb recipe if pushed into the ‘correct’ relationships. Every ignoramus, if they have the right teacher, can develop knowledge that effectively lies beyond the teacher’s. What it is crucial to understand is that work is done at each “moment” of the message. As John Corner states, decoding is constructive: the CIA make the message just as readily as I did when I wrote and sent it. These examples are crude, no doubt, but they set up a way to think about exchange (communication and information) through its relationships, rather than through its mediums and methods. The problem here that requires further examination is thus: What is ‘value’ and how does one define it within a relational model of exchange? Like biological evolution, information theory is devoid of intentionality. Life prospers in error, in noise and mistakes. Perhaps, as I am coming to believe, if we want to maximise the potential of art, of writing and other systems of exchange, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. To determine art’s redundancy, and then, like Rancière’s ignoramus, for new knowledge to emerge through mis-translation and mis-relation.

audio essay : On Pharaohs, Cults and Parasitism (The Condition of Division) Originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM as part of Antepress’ Digestives series, Monday 24th May 2010 [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Subscribe: via iTunes

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye orders you to sit at its table, to share in the feast of one's own image. The image stands beside the real, all the while eating at its table, stealing morsels from the feast it enables. The image is not reality, but the image is the only gesture you have in the direction of reality.

From the Greek pará-noos, he who suffers from paranoia has a mind beside itself. He is convinced that his partner conspires against him: a belief in turn organised by a conspiring mentality. I am confident that you are reading my mind: a position founded by my supposed reading of yours. The paranoid stand beside themselves; a part beside itself as part, conspiring against the whole. Paranoia is a kind of paradox, from the Greek pará-doxon, it stands beside the orthodox.

From the Greek pará-sītos, the parasite is a figure who feeds beside, an uninvited guest who eats at the host's table nonetheless. I display my feast openly, in order that my status be established to the community I consider myself a part. The world outside never ceases at its attempt to gain access to my table. Here I consider to offer them a seat, to share my feast. Here I cast a hand skyward, signalling my absolute negation of their status as a guest. The boundary between my feast and theirs is drawn. As the host I set the conditions under which my body stands beside. My body is entire, but it is also part. I stand beside my community, a conglomerate of bodies, each themselves parts of a greater whole.

The parasite inhabits the host, breaching the boundary of the body in order to organise a new ecosystem around their own, distinct, metabolism. The parasite feeds on the body of its host. Some parasites alter their host's body chemistry, perhaps affecting a biological shift from male to female, from alpha to drone, so that the parasite's offspring have a better chance at survival. In order that the parasite enter the next stage in its life-cycle, it is often unimportant that the host survives.

figure iii : his faithful companion is always at his side

From the Greek pará-digme, the paradigm is literally "what shows itself beside". Parasite, paranoid, paradox constitute a class of forms, standing beside one another, each in relation to the whole. They constitute a paradigm that organises the manner of their know-ability. To overturn the paradigm, one must stand beside it, constituting a reordering of knowing from the outside in.

These are the figures set beside each other: the host and the guest; the mind and its image; the belief as its own antithesis. But these are also a series of relations, figured by a paradigm. It may well seem natural to consider the host and the guest, the mind and its image – indeed the words come in pairs, set side by side on the printed page, or expressed as isolated figures of breath by the speaking subject. Once a relation is figured it becomes difficult to consider the isolated, the individual in opposition. After all, biological evolution has shown countless times, again and again, that an uninvited guest can become an accomplice; that a parasitic burden can become a treasured constituent of one's own body. Parasitism is often indistinguishable from symbiosis. Buddhism teaches that the greatest oneness can only come when the division between mind and self-image has been obliterated. To defuse one's paranoia, it is necessary to stand outside oneself, to places one's state of mind beside itself as paradox, to break the condition of division.

Welcoming the parasite to your table requires you to see your body as their body. At the feast we coalesce, my guest and I. Overturning our differences through the manner of their know-ability. True symbiosis stands beside invitation. True symbiosis is a politics aware of its own difference; a paradigm shown beside itself (together again for the first time).

figure iv : some of the things read (side by side)

• What is a Paradigm? (essay) by Giorgio Agamben
• The Parasite (book) by Michel Serres
• Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (chapter) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

A spider that only eats ants is choosy about which body parts of its prey it devours based on their nutritional value.

These new findings are the first to demonstrate that "specialist" predators relying on a single food source might have evolved feeding behaviors to maximize what they get out of meal time, the researchers say.

"We found that these spiders do have to balance their nutrient intake by choosing different body parts of their exclusive ant prey," said Stano Pekár, an assistant professor of ecology and zoology at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and lead author of the research published in the April 15 issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

When chowing down on ants, the spiders consistently began with the protein-packed front parts before getting to the fattier hind segment, called a gaster or abdomen. The picky eating seemed to pay off: Spiders reared on just front-end ant pieces grew faster, bigger and lived longer than those served only gasters or even whole an