Word: unicellular
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...vitro industry is that some people's genetic material is worth more than others' and deserves to be reproduced at any expense. Millions of low-income babies die every year from preventable ills like dysentery, while heroic efforts go into maintaining yuppie zygotes in test tubes at the unicellular stage. This is the dread "nightmare" of eugenics in familiar, marketplace form -- which involves breeding the best-paid instead of the best. Cloning technology is an almost inevitable by-product of in vitro fertilization. Once you decide to go to the trouble of in vitro, with its potentially hazardous megadoses...
Quite possibly the earth's most ancient life-forms, bacteria are experts at the game of survival. Throw a bunch of them onto an ice floe or into the steaming heart of Old Faithful, and one or another of the unicellular beasties will probably turn out to possess a critical trait that enables it to live through the ordeal and pass that trait on to trillions of descendants, a rapid example of evolution through natural selection. Just as predation by lions has gradually increased the swiftness of gazelles, the use of antibiotics has spurred the emergence of bacteria that...
...celebrated war between the sexes, in other words, is not a figment of the imagination but derives from the evolutionary history of sex -- from that magic moment long, long ago when our unicellular ancestors entwined in immortal embrace...
...almost certainly originated nearly 3.5 billion years ago as a mechanism for repairing the DNA of bacteria. Because ancient earth was such a violent place, the genes of these unicellular organisms would have been frequently damaged by intense heat and ultraviolet radiation. "Conjugation" -- the intricate process in which one bacterium infuses genetic material into another -- provided an ingenious, if cumbersome, solution to this problem, although bacteria continued to rely on asexual reproduction to increase their numbers...
Primordial dating: Dates between unicellular organisms had to have the perfect chemistry. A macho amoeba would hunker up to a smaller microbacterium, ooze its way around it and ultimately attempt to swallow it whole. This style of dating, known as phagocytosis, made a brief resurgence during the late 1970s...