Myrna Watanabe | Sep 5, 1993 | 8 min read
"Word's biggest bacterium found in a fish," declared the front- page headline in a March 1993 edition of USA Today, while the New York Times trumpeted its coverage with: "In the world of bacteria, a behemoth." Even the relatively staid science journals couldn't resist. Science announced the identification of "Monsters from the guts," and Nature's header read "Giant among the prokaryotes." The extraordinary flurry of interest--and imagery--was over an article in Nature (E.R. Angert, et al., 362: