In a few years, this strange creature has turned into a scientific star. At the origin of this success, the biologist Audrey Dussutour returns to this adventure.
by Nathaniel Herzberg
The book. Let’s be honest: who among us knew the blob only six years ago? Not the American horror film of 1958 with Steve McQueen, but the giant unicellular organism which moves like an animal, produces pigments like a plant, reproduces like a fungus without being none of that? About a nobody in France, with the exception of the laboratory neighbors of Audrey Dussutour, research director at CNRS and antics of ants.
At her spare time, the Toulouse researcher studied these funny creatures with the appearance of omelettes, devoid of neurons but capable of learning, insensitive to cutting, fire or submersion.
The idea takes him to make a book. She tells her discoveries there, but also her daily work, with a style as light as precise. And it’s the accident! When most popular scientific works caps up to a few hundred copies, everything you have always wanted to know about the blob without daring to ask (ed. Equators, 2017) will exceed the 30,000 mark, pocket format included .
But the adventure did not stop there. Over the years, Physarum Polyceptam (its scientific name) has become a real phenomenon. More than one hundred conferences across France, articles, TV reports, radio programs or web formats to no longer know how to do and even a documentary feature: the researcher and her giant unit have conquered the country. Invented by Audrey Dussutour, the name Blob even pushed the doors of Larousse and Robert dictionaries. It is the chronicle of this success that the scientist gives us, this time, embellished with comics and drawings of the illustrator Simon Bailly.
six months aboard the ISS
Success obliges, the Blob has established itself as a narrator. It is therefore he who tells his journey, of the appearance of his distant cousins, the first myxomycetes, 750 million years ago, to the apotheosis, his invitation in the luggage of the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet for a six-month stay in the international space station, from August 2021 to January 2022. Meanwhile, unicellular with 720 sexual types (for the record, we have two …) and thousands of nuclei has been adopted by some 5,000 French classes.
No wonder that, in truth. Because, with the blob, science becomes child’s play, literally and figuratively. You cut it in half, you have two blobs, you bring them closer, they merge. You can put him to sleep, wake him up, let him age or give him back his lost youth. Wonderful creature.
You have 18.93% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.