{
    "byline": "By James Somers and\n        Edwin Morris",
    "charset": "UTF-8",
    "dir": null,
    "excerpt": "I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some\n          sense it\u2019s the prototype of much of the activity of life. The\n          phenomenon is the way in which an individual cell of\n          E. coli forages for nutrients. This process, known as\n          \u201cchemotaxis\u201d\u2014the \u201cchemo-\u201d for chemical and the \u201ctaxis\u201d from the Greek\n          \u03c4\u03ac\u03be\u03b9\u03c2, for tactics\u2014is intelligence in one of\n          its most elemental forms. An individual E. coli has no brain,\n          obviously, and is even many orders of magnitude simpler than a human\n          cell, and yet already it possesses something like a sense of smell,\n          drive, even a memory. Chemotaxis recasts E. coli not as some\n          aimless gut-pest but rather as an exquisitely sophisticated\n          physical computer.",
    "lang": null,
    "length": 48179,
    "publishedTime": null,
    "siteName": null,
    "title": "The Baffling Intelligence of a Single CellThe story of E. coli chemotaxis"
}