Great writing

PHINJ · Dec 1, 2007

Esquire did a great story on a group of scientists who are working to fight TB.

These two paragraphs are the best thing I've read this week:

The bug is a slosh of proteins in a weird waxy shell. If you could stick your nose into a billion of the bugs, you would smell dirty, musty socks. Soil is the womb. For millions of years, the bug fought other bugs in the soil, in the earth itself, and it won and won and won. The weak strains died, the strong survived. Evolution. Then the bug found a host. Us. Humans. And the bug must have liked its new soil, because it stippled our lungs with lesions and filled our throats with blood, persisting inside our bodies, infiltrating and dividing within the very cells that we sent to kill it, sometimes escaping the lungs to infect our livers and melt our joints and eat our bones from the inside. The bug killed a billion of us in the last two centuries alone, until we learned, through a persistence of our own, to kill it and kill it and kill it.

Then we relaxed.
Click to expand...

kbb · Dec 3, 2007

Yes. Good stuff.

Cansportschick · Dec 3, 2007

PHINJ said:

Esquire did a great story on a group of scientists who are working to fight TB.

These two paragraphs are the best thing I've read this week:

The bug is a slosh of proteins in a weird waxy shell. If you could stick your nose into a billion of the bugs, you would smell dirty, musty socks. Soil is the womb. For millions of years, the bug fought other bugs in the soil, in the earth itself, and it won and won and won. The weak strains died, the strong survived. Evolution. Then the bug found a host. Us. Humans. And the bug must have liked its new soil, because it stippled our lungs with lesions and filled our throats with blood, persisting inside our bodies, infiltrating and dividing within the very cells that we sent to kill it, sometimes escaping the lungs to infect our livers and melt our joints and eat our bones from the inside. The bug killed a billion of us in the last two centuries alone, until we learned, through a persistence of our own, to kill it and kill it and kill it.

Then we relaxed.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Wow, what a detailed description of bug. Never thought it was possible to talk about bug like that.
You'd think scientists get off on this stuff by the way this was described. Doesn't take much for them to get aroused I guess...
I wonder how bored the writer from Esquire was when writing about this...unless they are a scientist themselves.

kbb · Dec 5, 2007

I'm thinking that the writer saw it as a challenge to describe something so "boring" in a way that would get readers interested and perhaps teach them something.

Perhaps there's a lesson there for all of us.

BYH · Dec 5, 2007

Cansportschick said:

Wow, what a detailed description of bug. Never thought it was possible to talk about bug like that.
You'd think scientists get off on this stuff by the way this was described. Doesn't take much for them to get aroused I guess...
Click to expand...

Yeah you should stay away from TBscientists.com. What a buncha freaks on that message board.

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Great writing

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Great writing

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