News from DTN Member Jim McAllister:  The news for 2019 is out.  Some would make Lynn Margulis smile. some would have had her asking that the lights be shut off.  The big news comes from the Library of Congress where Bruce Clarke has been busy researching and writing about the Lovelock Margulis collaboration. Phillip Hilts has retired from teaching science writing at MIT to begin a multi-year project, a biography of Lynn Margulis. Michael A. Leto, then the University of Massachusetts Amherst Vice Chancellor for Development & Alumni Relations & Executive Director, UMass Amherst Foundation wrote after Lynn’s death “On behalf of the students, staff and faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as the people of Massachusetts we take great pride that it was our visionary biologist who pointed the way to the New Biology of the 21st century.”
     Lynn would tell me to look at the bigger picture.  Reg Morrison (with my apologies for not getting to this much earlier) has revelatory things to say about two biologists who took special note of a peculiar feature of “plague species”, Australian researcher and author Samuel Barnett, and Hans Selye, a Prague-trained endocrinologist. Selye described the phenomenon in detail, and called it the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).