WHAT PHYSICAL ‘LIFE FORCE' TURNS BIOLOGY'S WHEELS?

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

This article tells the story of how scientists figured out how the flagellar motor worked. The flagellar motor was discovered by Howard Berg, who set out in the early 1970s to apply his training in physics to understand how bacteria move. Bacteria move quickly, so Berg had to invent and build an automatic tracking microscope to keep them in view. He hypothesized how the mechanism worked 50 years before scientists discovered how the motor works.