Carl Zimmer is the Keynote Speaker for the Biological Sciences’ Graduate Student Symposium. He will present “Darwin among the Microbes” at 5:00 pm in Morrill Hall. The Keynote speech is open to the public. "Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, Zimmer's sixth book, will be published by Pantheon in May. It is a biography of the best-studied creature on Earth. While most people may only know E. coli as a lethal germ, we actually carry hundreds of billions of these bacteria in our bodies for our entire lives. Over the past fifty years, E. coli has been poked, probed, and dissected by thousands of biologists who seek answers to the most fundamental questions of biology, a number of whom have won Nobel Prizes for their work. Zimmer's exploration of this astonishingly complex germ is a meditation on the nature of life itself."

Additional Public Info: A book signing will be held in Morrill at 4:15 pm prior to the lecture.