Raghuveer Parthasarathy
University of Oregon
Associate Editor
The Biophysicist
What have you read lately that you found really interesting or stimulating (a paper, a book, science or not science)?
I often find it reassuring, or at least interesting, to read about the tumultuous events of the past. A few months ago I read The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978) by Ryszard Kapuściński, about Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia for several decades, and the atmosphere of corruption, fear, and capriciousness that he crafted. It’s simultaneously sad, insightful, and hilarious. The book often drips with sarcasm, such as: “[The emperor] summoned the wretched notables from the north who had been accused by the missionaries and nurses of speculation and stealing from the starving, and he conferred high distinctions on them to prove that they were innocent.” It does hit a bit close to home, though. More recently, I finished Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (2011) by Candice Millard, an amazing book about an intelligent, ethical, thoughtful, and modest US president, James A. Garfield, who failed to survive a haphazard assassination attempt. There’s science, too—disputes about germ theory and a biophysical cameo by Alexander Graham Bell, who uses electromagnetic induction to try to find bullets in bodies.
At a cocktail party of non-scientists, how would you explain what you do?
I tell non-scientists, and scientists as well, that I’m a physicist who looks at gut bacteria. This usually leads to curious puzzlement, which lets me explain that gut microbes must navigate a dynamic physical environment full of competing species, obstacles, and vigorous mechanical forces. How do they do it? What structures do they form? How do they move? My research group examines the physical character of the gut microbiome. We use larval zebrafish—small, transparent animals with a lot of similarities to humans and other vertebrates—as a model organism, and we build our own microscopes that are good at fast, three-dimensional imaging spanning the entire gut. We look not just at how the bacteria behave, but at how perturbations like antibiotics affect their behavior. We’ve discovered, for example, that antibiotics that are too weak to kill gut bacteria can nonetheless induce dramatic shape changes, such as spaghetti-like filamentation, that interfere with the microbes’ ability to persist in the intestine. Much of what we see hasn’t been seen before, which is exciting!