I'm sure somebody's working on it

Remember your kingdoms of living things? Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria (and viruses)? Somehow I missed this, but in 1977 that view of more or less equal dominions was destroyed by Carl Woes, U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who used not morphology and eating habits but molecular biology to redraw the tree: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya -- everything with a nucleus. "In terms of gene content, humans and potatoes are more closely related than [these] two bacter are to each other -- one measure of bacterial diversity." ("The Undiscovered Planet" by Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007).

Don't worry, I have a point. But first:

And remember "culturing" bacteria on agar? Well, that's pretty meaningless too. It turns out that only a fraction, an infinitesimal fraction, of bacterial species will create those pretty colonies in that simple way. And get this: scientists knew this (vaguely) -- the "plate count paradox." No one told me about this! And I majored in biology...Anyway, it means that through a microscope one can see thousands of different species from a teaspoon of soil, but only a handful grow in the petri dish.

In 1990, Norman Pace took a gram of sediment from Yellowstone National Park, extracted the DNA, cloned it and inserted it into one type of bacterium he knew how to grow. He "discovered more diversity than we ever knew existed before," says Roberto Kolter, co-director of Harvard's five-year old Microbial Sciences Initiative.

"The world of animals is divided into 13 phyla (vertebrates, insects, etc.). In the microbial world, their equivalents are called, for the time being, 'deep-rooting branches.' In 1987, 13 of these big divisions were known in the bacterial domain...by 1997...36...By 2003, 53, by 2004 80 such divisions from which we couldn't cultivate even a single representative." Each of these deep-branching divisions is thought to represent millions, if not hundreds of millions of species. "That means there are lots of genes out there, and we have no clue what they are doing," Kolter says.

Okay, so what's the connection to fighting global warming? These hundreds of millions if not billions of genes have helped shape our planet's surface and climate. Perhaps we can enlist them to help us control the shaping we're doing. Crazy? Here's a clue that it might not be: renowned climate scientist and proselytizer for seriously practical solutions, Daniel Schrag, is on the steering committee of this new cross-disciplinary Microbial initiative, first of its kind.