Bacterial Quotes

Lunch is served!" I shouted. The brothers wasted no time. Kishan reached for the chicken, and Ren, the cookies. I smacked their hands away and handed each one a bacterial wipe. Kishan grumbled, "Kells, I ate my food raw off the ground for three hundred years. I really don't think a little dirt's going to kill me.

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.

Remember laughing? Laughter enhances the blood flow to the body’s extremities and improves cardiovascular function. Laughter releases endorphins and other natural mood elevating and pain-killing chemicals, improves the transfer of oxygen and nutrients to internal organs. Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!

Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. …

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

Vaginal cleaning will damage the good bacteria and mucus, increasing a woman’s chance of odor, bacterial vaginosis, and sexually transmitted infections.

* Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy.

Fear, by its depressing effect on our mentality, thus causes disharmony in our physical and magnetic bodies and paves the way for [bacterial] invasion. The real cause of disease lies in our own personality. ..

Or perhaps they are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica , some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction.

I had fallen in love with a young man..., and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

Can you conceive of an injustice, criminal in nature, encroaching upon your life’s course? Yes, you; reading this. -- Does your status, as it were, have you so psychologically fractured you honestly believe you’re immune? If thought occupies you for more than a second, you’re entrenched in ignorance you favor. What should be an innate appreciation of society holds little to no relevance today. Your financial footing takes priority over just about any and everything. Being alive, able bodied, and breathing isn’t enough. What happens when that’s all stripped away? The choice to exist in the creation of social media was yours, where a mere accusation, or negative posting could damage what should be held in the highest regard, your reputation. The cyber establishment’s chokehold is fierce, and you feel it, yet you constantly wonder why you can’t breathe, but hey, you’re “woke” right? Your foundation, personal and or financial might be buckling, but you’re clueless, even though it was you who shared every delicate and secular aspect of your life. Our brand has replaced moral fiber, dictating and tampering with the control of humanity. Are we waiting for the catastrophic crash of mankind? It appears so, when you step back from the edge, watch and listen? That’s a predicament that wasn’t even on your radar, but here you are, “woke,” right? A roof over your head, clothes on your back, sustenance, hell, even the air you breathe, all taken for granted. This should be a daunting notion I’m setting before the appetite of your consciousness, but perhaps it remains far-fetched. The question you should be asking yourself is, how woke are you; really? Regardless of gender, a simple compliment, smile, assistance, or jealousy can ignite a desire to stalk or destroy a person. -- The only untainted bubble any of us occupied was in utero, so you are not above reproach of any kind. Whatever self-made bacterial hubris you’ve placed yourself in, outside of that, speaks to the degree of self-importance encasing you, so it’s impossible for you to appreciate what it is to be “woke,” in the real world.

Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.

Sour Milk You can't make it turn sweet again. Once it was an innocent color like the flowers of wild strawberries, and its texture was simple would pass through a clean cheesecloth, its taste was fresh. And now with nothing more guilty that the passage of time to chide it with, the same substance has turned sour and lumpy. The sour milk makes interesting & delicious doughs, can be carried to a further state of bacterial action to create new foods, can in its own right be considered complicated and more interesting in texture to one who studies it closely, like a map of the world. But to most of us: it is spoiled. Sour. We throw it out, down the drain-not in the backyard- careful not to spill any because the smell is strong. A good cook would be shocked with the waste. But we do not live in a world of good cooks. I am the milk. Time passes. You cannot make it turn sweet again. I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelf trembling with hope for a cook who dreams of waffles, biscuits, dumplings and other delicious breads fearing the modern housewife who will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twist of a wrist... you know the rest. You are the milk. When it is your turn remember, there is nothing more than the passage of time we can chide you with.

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

Look at life from our perspective, and you eukaryotes will soon cease giving yourselves such airs. You bipedal apes, you stump-tailed tree-shrews, you desiccated lobe-fins, you vertebrated worms, you Hoxed-up sponges, you newcomers on the block, you eukaryotes, you barely distinguishable congregations of a monotonously narrow parish, you are little more than fancy froth on the surface of bacterial life. Why, the very cells that build you are themselves colonies of bacteria, replaying the same old tricks we bacteria discovered a billion years ago. We were here before you arrived, and we shall be here after you are gone.

Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another... Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.

The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.

According to pioneering microbiologist Lynn Margulis, "fully 10 percent of our own dry body weight consists of bacteria, some of which, although they are not a congenital part of our bodies, we can't live without." In fact, a healthy human body has more bacterial cells than animal cells (bacterial cells are far smaller). Our own bodies are in some ways microcosms of the biosphere as a whole.

Ehrlich hedged. The cancer cell, he explained, was a fundamentally different target from a bacterial cell. Specific affinity relied, paradoxically, not on “affinity,” but on its opposite—on difference. Ehrlich’s chemicals had successfully targeted bacteria because bacterial enzymes were so radically dissimilar to human enzymes. With cancer, it was the similarity of the cancer cell to the normal human cell that made it nearly impossible to target.

Ava, will you watch your fucking mouth?’ he sighs, but there’s relief in his voice. I’m half tempted to tell him to fetch the anti-bacterial solution and spray it in my mouth.

There are webs of complexity that tie everything together, and they are more numerous than the stars in the night sky. At the moment of self-organization of the bacterial membrane, complex feedback loops, both interoceptive and exteroceptive, immediately formed. Information from both locations began traveling in a huge, never-ending river composed of trillions upon trillions of bytes of data to the self-organized, more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts living system that had come into being. The system began, in that instant of self-organization, to modulate both its interior and exterior worlds in order to maintain its state. It began to modulate its environment.

As a simple exercise, the instructor showed us how to splice our own DNA into that of a bacterial cell. As the bacterial colony then divided and grew, our DNA would be copied ad infinitum, a basic form of cloning. Though of course we only used a tiny fragment of DNA and the results were crude, I distinctly remember thinking, “I shouldn’t be able to clone myself in a one-credit class.

Of course I'd long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn't much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that half the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often feels like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and tried to control my breathing. Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn't irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony.

All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano.

Interesting,’ I say. Of course, it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn’t considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we’re alike. He has no idea how hard I’m trying.

Of all the bacterial species in the world, for instance, fewer than fifty regularly cause disease. Just fifty. All the rest of the species are either benign or beneficial to humans, as are nearly all protists and even viruses

That feeling in your stomach when you hear him whispering off-key, down the hall. That way your heart trips and then hammers against your ribs when he sees you and he grins like a little kid at the top of a steep, shiny-hot slide. Call it hormones, an early-stage bacterial zombie infection, or a very pleasant dream I was experiencing; I didn't care. I liked That.

As Lynn Margulis writes: “All the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.

Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals, mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume secondhand antibiotics in their food (including even some foods labeled as organic) without knowing it. Sweden banned the agricultural use of antibiotics in 1986. The European Union followed in 1999. In 1977, the Food and Drug Administration ordered a halt to the use of antibiotics for purposes of fattening farm animals, but backed off when there was an outcry from agricultural interests and the congressional leaders who supported them.

further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.

It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance which affects different bacteria in different degrees. Generally speaking it may be said that the least sensitive bacteria are the Gram-negative bacilli, and the most susceptible are the pyogenic cocci ... In addition to its possible use in the treatment of bacterial infections penicillin is certainly useful... for its power of inhibiting unwanted microbes in bacterial cultures so that penicillin insensitive bacteria can readily be isolated.

jittery, neurotic parents don't need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They're already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks. . . Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release.

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.

Once you go bacterial, you never go back....

procalcitonin test, which indicates whether a cold is caused by a bacterial or viral infection. It

relapses weeks or months later. As usual nothing about the outbreak fit into a logical pattern, and all tests for bacterial or viral agents came back

A glass or two of red wine may be good for your heart but not for your microbiome. Studies show that just one drink per day in women and two in men can induce dysbiosis and bacterial overgrowth. Levels of good bacteria like Lactobacillus fall, while potential pathogens rise, leading to an increase in toxins and other chemicals that can cause inflammation, damage the liver, and increase permeability of the gut. Most of the overgrowth happens in the small intestine and can lead to malnourishment because the excess bacteria consume the nutrients that the small intestine would normally absorb. Some studies report an incidence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) in alcoholics that’s three times that of the general population.

33,3% of the mice used in this experiment were cured by the test drug; 33,3% of the population were unaffected by the drug and remained in a moribund condition; the third mouse got away.

Some of the earliest self-organized systems that formed after bacteria were the bacterial biofilms. essentially small clusters of bacteria who live together These occurred throughout the world, and later, as the colonies grew larger, they merged together to create the biosphere. Biofilms, when closely examined, are, in essence, three-dimensional physical structures—a type of bacterial city. They are created by single or multiple bacterial species, and allow the bacteria to more easily regulate their environment, moving it toward what is optimum for their survival, much the same as our cities do for us.

Of course it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn't considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we're alike. He has no idea how hard I'm trying.

She lowered her chin to look at me over her sunglasses. "If I hadn't covered my face in time, I'd probably have a broken nose right now." "I'd stop the bleeding with the shirt off my back if that happened, Lizzie." "Yeah, and I'd probably get a bacterial infection from your filthy jersey. Why don't you just take your little toy and go?" I really was insane, because I fucking loved going back and forth like this with her.

two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn’t show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

The Gaian ecosystem, the self-organized system that we know as Earth, came into being with the emergence of the global bacterial community. That bacterial community still is the foundation of this world. It is Gaia. It is the interconnected network of millions of bacterial biofilms, individual bacteria, and symbiogenic, bacterially generated, complex life-forms that lies deep within the crust of the Earth (perhaps by as much as 5 kilometers), covers the entire surface of the planet, and extends at least 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old but sometime in its first half to one billion years of existence bacterial life emerged.

Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. The first known one was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 BC. The plague of Athens in 429 BC killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the second century killed ten million, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed fifty million, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe’s population.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability.

It seems to me the simplest explanation,” he told the audience, “is that they are all HeLa cell contaminants.” Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for cells to contaminate one another if they got mixed up in culture. But when it came to HeLa, they had no idea what they were up against. It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were strong: if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space.

Controlling SE is not rocket science; all it requires is immediate refrigeration of newly laid eggs (to stop bacterial growth), sampling eggs and testing them to see if they are carrying SE, and diverting eggs that test positive out of the supply of shell eggs.

The 2003 flu season started early in North America, with the first cases showing up in the fall. By Thanksgiving doctors were seeing the usual flu-related pneumonias. As always, the most severe cases resulted from secondary bacterial infections in flu-congested lungs.

In the short term, adrenaline gives our immune function a boost to help fight bacterial and viral infections. But in the longer term, over-production of adrenaline and abnormal patterns of cortisol are linked with shorter life expectancy (Kumari et al., 2011). When adrenaline is repeatedly propping up our immune system through chronic stress and then we stop and the adrenaline goes down, so does the immune system. This is why you often hear of people who work incredibly hard around the clock for months on end and when they finally stop to take a holiday they almost immediately fall ill.

When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.

For nearly the entire history of life on this planet, 85 percent of that history in fact, life consisted solely of microorganisms. The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) for every life-form on this planet was bacterial. Again: The last universal common ancestor for every life-form on this planet was bacterial.

In addition to these physical problems, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant among the homosexual population. 75% of homosexual men carry one or more sexually transmitted diseases, wholly apart from AIDS. These include all sorts of non-viral infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial infections, and parasites. Also common among homosexuals are viral infections like herpes and hepatitis B (which afflicts 65% of homosexual men), both of which are incurable, as well as hepatitis A and anal warts, which afflict 40% of homosexual men. And I haven’t even included AIDS. Perhaps the most shocking and frightening statistic is that, leaving aside those who die from AIDS, the life expectancy for a homosexual male is about 45 years of age. That compares to a life expectancy of around 70 for men in general. If you include those who die of AIDS, which now infects 30% of homosexual men, the life expectancy drops to 39 years of age. So I think a very good case can be made out on the basis of generally accepted moral principles that homosexual behavior is wrong. It is horribly self-destructive and injurious to another person. Thus, wholly apart from the Bible’s prohibition, there are sound, sensible reasons to regard homosexual activity as wrong.

Lectins also facilitate the attachment and binding of viruses and bacteria to their intended targets. Believe it or not, some people—those who are more sensitive to lectins—are therefore more subject to viruses and bacterial infections than others. Think about that if you seem to get sick more often than your friends do.

Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.

But even if you do not have SIBO or SIFO, it is likely—virtually guaranteed—that you have, at the very least, dysbiosis. Substantial disruptions of the bacterial and perhaps fungal species inhabiting your colon still pose implications for health, whether or not you are regular or require a stack of magazines for bowel habit success.

Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.

Any adaptive change that occurs in one area of the bacterial universe can spread to any other. It’s rather as if a human could go to an insect to get the necessary genetic coding to sprout wings or walk on ceilings. It means that from a genetic point of view bacteria have become a single superorganism—tiny, dispersed, but invincible.

The largest ecosystem known is the bacterial world that exists in the basalt layers two miles deep in the ocean, underneath and inside the basalt layers that exist another 100 to 500 feet beneath the water. This “seam” of bacterial life extends completely around the globe, a single unified ecosystem that is foundational to everything above it.

Life displays mad hospitality. The Korean biologist Kwang Jeon of the University of Tennessee received in the 1970s a batch of amoebas infected with a deadly bacterial strain. Most died. In a set of careful experiments after culturing the survivor amoebas for several generations, he found that the survivors, with fewer bacteria per cell, could no longer live without their infection.

Three postcards await our perusal, yea, three visions of a world. One: I see a theme park where there are lots of rides, but there is nobody who can control them and nobody who knows how the rides end. Grief counseling, however, is included in the price of admission. Two: I see an accident. An explosion of some kind inhabited by happenstantial life forms. A milk spill gone bacterial, only with more flame. It has no meaning or purpose or master. It simply is. Three: I see a stage, a world where every scene is crafted. Where men act out their lives within a tapestry, where meaning and beauty exist, where right and wrong are more than imagined constructs. There is evil. There is darkness. There is the Winter of tragedy, every life ending, churned back into the soil. But the tragedy leads to Spring. The story does not end in frozen death. The fields are sown in grief. The harvest will be reaped in joy. I see a Master's painting. I listen to a Master's prose. When darkness falls on me, when I stand on my corner of the stage and hear my cue, when I know my final scene has come and I must exit, I will go into the ground like corn, waiting for the Son.

Ironically enough, it was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, who first warned of bacterial resistance. He noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered and by 1945 he warned in a New York Times interview that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria.

The two researchers collaborated on a pilot study.32 What they found was that loneliness reprogrammed a person’s genes in the same way that fear of being outed altered the genes of closeted men. Loneliness changes the immune system. Specifically, feeling isolated turns on genes for inflammation—which are the first responders to tissue damage or bacterial threats—and it puts the brakes on genes that stop inflammation

The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycles are incredibly fast: a single bacterium can produce a million offspring in a matter of hours. Each new generation opens up new possibilities for genetic innovation, either by new combinations of existing genes or by random mutations. Human genetic change is several orders of magnitude slower; we have to go through a whole fifteen-year process of maturation before we can even think about passing our genes to a new generation.

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers. Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage. We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.

Doudna deeply enjoyed being a bench scientist, a researcher who gets to the lab early, puts on latex gloves and a white coat, and begins working with pipettes and Petri dishes. For the first few years after setting up her lab at Berkeley, she was able to work at the bench half her time. “I didn’t want to give that up,” she says. “I think I was a pretty good experimenter. That’s how my mind works. I can see experiments in my mind, especially when I am working myself.” But by 2009, after her return from Genentech, Doudna realized that she had to spend more time cultivating her lab rather than her bacterial cultures. This transition from player to coach happens in many fields. Writers become editors, engineers become managers. When bench scientists become lab heads their new managerial duties include hiring the right young researchers, mentoring them, going over their results, suggesting new experiments, and offering up the insights that come from having been there.

Get a microscope and some spit. Put the spit on a glass slide and put it under the microscope lens. Now look through the eyepiece. You’ll notice, if you look closely, that you can’t see anything, because you have no idea how to operate a microscope. But while you’re looking, billions of germs, left on the eyepiece by the previous microscope user, will swarm into your eyeball—which to them is a regular Club Med—and start reproducing like crazy via wild bacterial sex. You’ll probably need surgery.

The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key: toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular parts of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes. If biology was an elaborate mix-and-match game of chemicals, Ehrlich reasoned, what if some chemical could discriminate bacterial cells from animal cells--and kill the former without touching the host?

Enterococcal organisms cause urinary tract infections, bacteremia, bacterial endocarditis, diverticulitis, and meningitis. The primary herbs to treat them are sida, alchornea, cryptolepis, bidens, ginger, echinacea, juniper berry, usnea, Artemisia annua, honey (I know, it’s not exactly an herb), licorice, oregano oil, and Acacia aroma. If you are treating a really tough vancomycin-resistant enterococcal infection, add ginger juice to your formulation; it strongly inhibits resistance mechanisms in these bacteria.

In 1923, d’Herelle helped Soviet scientists set up an institute in Tbilisi, present-day Georgia, dedicated to bacteriophage research; at its peak, the institute had over a thousand employees producing tons of phages a year for clinical use. Phage therapy has continued up to modern times in certain parts of the world—about 20 percent of bacterial infections are treated with phages in Georgia today—but after antibiotics were discovered and developed in the 1930s and 1940s, this treatment quickly lost momentum, especially in the West.

Then we’d head to a bar on Third Avenue. Diaz, in his uniform, with his limp, almost always met a woman. The limp was gold. As the woman watched Diaz hobble back to us with drinks, sloshing gin and tonic on the floor, I’d say, “Fucking Iraq.” She’d seldom ask me to elaborate. If she did, I wouldn’t tell her how, as a squad leader, Diaz contracted a bacterial infection while masturbating in a Port-a-John; how the infection spread up his urethra, into his testicles; how that made him lurch, causing a herniated disk, which resulted in sciatica.

[from an entry by her daughter Camille] On the other hand, if cattle remain on pasture right to the end, that kind of beef is called "grass finished." The difference between this and CAFO beef are not just relevant to how kindly you feel about animals: meat and eggs of pastured animals also have a measurably different nutrient composition. A lot of recent research has been published on this subject, which is slowly reaching the public. USDA studies found much lower levels of saturated fats and higher vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 levels in meat from cattle fattened on pasture grasses (their natural diet), compared with CAFO animals ... Free-range beef also has less danger of bacterial contamination because feeding on grass maintains normal levels of acidity in the animal's stomach. At the risk of making you not want to sit at my table, I should tell you that the high-acid stomachs of grain-fed cattle commonly harbor acid-resistant strains of E. coli that are very dangerous to humans ... Free-range grazing is not just kinder to the animals and the surrounding environment; it produces an entirely different product.

The way to peer into life’s past is to examine fossils and to determine when a branch was first created by assessing the age of rocks when a certain fossil was formed. The oldest known fossils are of bacteria that apparently lived in ponds or a shallow sea located in what is now western Australia. They are fossil mats of bacteria, called stromatolites, whose metabolism led them to excrete calcium carbonate, chalk, the stuff of seashells and limestone. The ancient ponds dried up for some climatological reason, and these bacterial mats turned to stone. They’re 3.5 billion years old. As

And, irritatingly, bacteria are generating resistance to antibiotics we haven’t even thought of yet. For example, after placing a single bacterial species in a nutrient solution containing sublethal doses of a newly developed and rare antibiotic, researchers found that within a short period of time the bacteria developed resistance to that antibiotic and to twelve other antibiotics that they had never before encountered—some of which were structurally dissimilar to the first. Stuart Levy observes that “it’s almost as if bacteria strategically anticipate the confrontation of other drugs when they resist one.

When the drug vancomycin falls completely by the wayside, as it will, we may, just as Stephen predicts here and I have predicted elsewhere, fall back on the bimillennial biblical medicinal herbs such as garlic and onion. These herbs each contain dozens of mild antibiotic compounds (some people object to using the term “antibiotic” to refer to higher plant phytochemicals, but I do not share their disdain for such terminology). It is easy for a rapidly reproducing bug or bacterial species to outwit (out-evolve) a single compound by learning to break it down or even to use it in its own metabolism, but not so easy for it to outwit the complex compounds found in herbs.

Very few people are aware that infections from resistant bacteria, often picked up in hospitals during routine procedures, are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (In 1999 they were fourth.) Very few people know, as well, that the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies have stopped research and development on new antibiotics—there are virtually no new ones in the pipeline. Within the next few decades, we face, as many bacterial researchers have pointed out, the emergence of untreatable epidemic diseases more deadly than any known in history. Or as David Livermore, one of Britain’s primary bacterial resistance researchers, puts it . . . It is naive to think we can win.

Shapiro concludes his twenty-three-page paper with this remarkable statement . . . The take-home lesson of more than half a century of molecular microbiology is to recognize that bacterial information processing is far more powerful than human technology. . . . These small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere’s geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics, and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives.21

The American system of jurisprudence recognizes a wide range of factors, predispositions, prejudices, and experiences that might cloud our judgment, or affect our objectivity—sometimes even without our knowing it. It goes to great, perhaps even extravagant, lengths to safeguard the process of judgment in a criminal trial from the human weaknesses of those who must decide on innocence or guilt. Even then, of course, the process sometimes fails. Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of politics, economics, religion, and ethics? — If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically—not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are. Can we conscientiously and courageously follow planetary motion or bacterial genetics wherever the search may lead, but declare the origin of matter or human behavior off-limits? Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you’re eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world.

In an extremely short period of geologic time the Earth has been saturated with several billion pounds of nonbiodegradable, often biologically unique pharmaceuticals designed to kill bacteria. Many antibiotics (literally meaning “against life”) do not discriminate in their activity, but kill broad groups of diverse bacteria whenever they are used. The worldwide environmental dumping, over the past 65 years, of such huge quantities of synthetic antibiotics has initiated the most pervasive impacts on the Earth’s bacterial underpinnings since oxygen-generating bacteria supplanted methanogens 2.5 billion years ago. As bacterial researcher Stuart Levy comments . . . It has stimulated evolutionary changes that are unparalleled in recorded biologic history.4

Fletcher believed—decided, really—that by chewing each mouthful of food until it liquefies, the eater could absorb more or less double the amount of vitamins and other nutrients. “Half the food commonly consumed is sufficient for man,” he stated in a letter in 1901. Not only was this economical—Fletcher estimated that the United States could save half a million dollars a day by Fletcherizing—it was healthier, or so he maintained. By delivering heaps of poorly chewed food to the intestine, Fletcher wrote, we overtax the gut and pollute the cells with the by-products of “putrid bacterial decomposition.” While other feces-fearers of the day advocated enemas to speed food through the putrefaction zone (and more on this in chapter 14), Fletcher advised delivering less material.

The 'instructions' received by our military and political leaders for contriving atomic, bacterial, and chemical means of total human extermination have the same psychological status as the messages recorded by the Xosa girl: they are self-induced hallucinations that wantonly defy all the historic precepts of human experience. The fact that these dreams have been put forward under the pseudo-rational garb of advanced theoretic science and justified as a measure for national 'survival' does not disguise their bottomless malignity and irrationality, with its complete divorce from even an animal's instinct for self-preservation. But unlike the pitiable mistake of the Xosa, the colossal kind of error, or 'accident,' that the Pentagon and the Kremlin have already neatly set the fuse for, would be beyond redemption.

We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Without these regular residents, our guts are easily taken over by less congenial newcomers looking for low-rent space. What keeps us healthy is an informed coexistence with microbes, rather than the micro-genocide that seems to be the rage lately. Germophobic parents can now buy kids' dinnerware, placemats, even clothing imbedded with antimicrobial chemicals. Anything that will stand still, if we mean to eat it, we shoot full of antibiotics. And yet, more than 5,000 people in the United States die each year from pathogens in our food. Sterility is obviously the wrong goal, especially as a substitute for careful work.

I think we can reasonably conclude that complex life will be rare in the universe – there is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other form of complex life. It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity. I can’t put a statistical probability on that. The existence of Parakaryon myojinensis might be encouraging for some – multiple origins of complexity on earth means that complex life might be more common elsewhere in the universe. Maybe. What I would argue with more certainty is that, for energetic reasons, the evolution of complex life requires an endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes, and that is a rare random event, disturbingly close to a freak accident, made all the more difficult by the ensuing intimate conflict between cells. After that, we are back to standard natural selection.

The milk is long since out of date, the bread all has mold and I think you could start a bacterial plague with what’s in the crisper here…” “Order a pizza,” he suggested. “There’s a place down on the corner that still owes me ten pizzas, paid for in advance.” “You can’t eat pizza for breakfast!” “Why can’t I? I’ve been doing it for a week.” “You can cook,” she said accusingly. “When I’m sober,” he agreed. She glowered at him and went back to her chore. “Well, the eggs are still edible, barely, and there’s an unopened pound of bacon. I’ll make an omelet.” He collapsed into the chair at the kitchen table while she made a fresh pot of coffee and set about breaking eggs. “You look very domesticated like that,” he pointed out with a faint smile. “After we have breakfast, why don’t you come to bed with me?” She gave him a shocked glance. “I’m pregnant,” she reminded him. He nodded and laughed softly. “Yes, I know. It’s an incredible turn-on.” Her hand stopped, poised in midair with a spoon in it. “Wh…What?” “The eggs are burning,” he said pleasantly. She stirred them quickly and turned the bacon, which was frying in another pan. He thought her condition was sexy? She couldn’t believe he was serious. But apparently he was, because he watched her so intently over breakfast that she doubted if he knew what he was eating. “Mr. Hutton told the curator of the museum in Tennessee that I wasn’t coming back, and he paid off the rent on my house there,” she said. “I don’t even have a home to go to…” “Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “I’m your home. I always have been.” She averted her eyes to her plate and hated the quick tears that her condition prompted. Her fists clenched. “And here we are again,” she said huskily. “Where?” he asked. She drew in a harsh breath. “You’re taking responsibility for me, out of duty.” He leaned back in his chair. The robe came away from his broad, bronzed chest as he stared at her. “Not this time,” he replied with a voice so tender that it made ripples right through her heart. “This time, it’s out of love, Cecily.” Cecily doubted her own ears. She couldn’t have heard Tate saying that he wanted to take care of her because he loved her. He wasn’t teasing. His face was almost grim. “I know,” he said. “You don’t believe it. But it’s true, just the same.” He searched her soft, shocked green eyes. “I loved you when you were seventeen, Cecily, but I thought I had nothing to offer you except an affair.” He sighed heavily. “It was never completely for the reasons I told you, that I didn’t want to get married. It was my mother’s marriage. It warped me. It’s taken this whole scandal to make me realize that a good marriage is nothing like the one I grew up watching. I had to see my mother and Matt together before I understood what marriage could be.

What are these evolutionary changes? At the simplest level, the development of exceptionally sophisticated resistance mechanisms in all the bacterial populations of the world. In response to the impact of not me on the bacterial me, bacteria have begun generating tremendously sophisticated behavioral and physical responses. Bacteria have literally begun rearranging their genomes. As those genomes shift, their physical structures alter, sometimes considerably. It has been two and a half billion years since anything approaching this degree of change has occurred in the bacterial populations of Earth. But this kind of response is inevitable in any self-organized system; as Francisco Varela et al. observe, a biological network will reconfigure itself to an unspecified environment in such a way that it both maintains its ongoing dynamics and displays a behaviour that reveals a degree of inductive learning about environmental regularities.5

The bacterial defense system was soon found to involve at least two critical components. The first piece was the "seeker"-an RNA encoded in the bacterial genome that matched and recognized the DNA of the viruses. The principle for the recognition, yet again, was binding: the RNA "seeker" was able to find and recognize the DNA of an invading virus because it was a mirror image of that DNA-the yin to its yang. It was like carrying a permanent image of your enemy in your pocket-or, in the bacteria's case, an inverted photograph, etched indelibly into its genome. The second element of the defense system was the "hitman." Once the viral DNA had been recognized and matched as foreign (by its reverse-image), a bacterial protein named Cas9 was deployed to deliver the lethal gash to the viral gene. The "seeker" and the "hitman" worked in concert: the Cas9 protein delivered its cuts to the genome only after the sequence had been matched by the recognition element. It was a classic combination of collaborators-spotter and executor, drone and rocket, Bonnie and Clyde.

It was the magnesium. The addition of the ion was critical: with the solution supplemented with magnesium, the ribosome remained glued together, and Brenner and Jacob finally purified a miniscule amount of the messenger molecule out of bacterial cells. It was RNA, as expected-but RNA of a special kind. The messenger was generated afreah when a gene was translated. Like DNA, these RNA molecules were built by stringing together four bases-A,G,C, and U (in the RNA copy of a gene, remember, the T found in DNA is substituted for U). Notably, Brenner and Jacob later discovered the messenger RNA was a facsimile of the DNA chain-a copy made from the original. The RNA copy of a gene then moved from the nucleus to the cytosol, where its message was decoded to build a protein. The messenger RNA was neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of hell-but a professional go-between. The generation of an RNA copy of a gene was termed transcription-referring to the rewriting of a word or sentence in a language close to the original. A gene's code (ATGGGCC...) was transcribed into an RNA code (AUGGGCC...).

Second, the production of RNA Messages was coordinately regulated. When the sugar source was switched to lactose, the bacteria turned on an entire module of genes-several lactose-metabolizing genes-to digest lactose. One of the genes in the module specified a "transporter protein" that allowed lactose to enter the bacterial cell. Another gene encoded an enzyme that was needed to break down lactose into parts. Yet another specified an enzyme to break those chemical parts into subparts. Surprisingly, all the genes dedicated to a particular metabolic pathway were physically present next to each other on the bacterial chromosome-like library books stacked by subject-and they were induced simultaneously in cells. The metabolic alteration produced a profound genetic alteration in a cell. It wasn't just a cutlery switch; the whole dinner service was altered in a single swoop. A functional circuit of genes was switched on and off, as if operated by a common spool or a master switch. Monod called one such gene module an operon. The genesis of proteins was thus perfectly synchronized with the requirements of the environment: supply the correct sugar, and a set of sugar-metabolizing genes would be turned on together.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make the distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens, not just archaeological relics, what will they make of fragile, highly strung racehorses and greyhounds, or snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can't be born without Caesarian assistance, of blear-eyed Pekinese baby surrogates, of walking udders such as Friesian cows, walking rashers such as Landrace pigs, or walking woolly jumpers such as Merino sheep? Molecular machines - nanotechnology - crafted for human benefit on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems... Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we, in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artefacts?... [Graham] Cairns-Smith was writing in a different context, but his point works here too. An arch is irreducible in the sense that if you remove part of it, the whole collapses. Yet it is possible to build it gradually by means of scaffolding[, which after] the subsequent removal of the scaffolding... no longer appears in the visible picture...

Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

Summary: Wheat Belly Detox Supplements Look for the supplements we use in the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox in health food stores. Because of regional variation in brands, the reputable brands that are available to you may differ from the ones I list below. Where national brands are widely distributed, I will specify a few quality representative ones. High-potency probiotic supplement: 30 billion to 50 billion CFUs per day for 6 to 8 weeks. My favorite brands include Garden of Life, Renew Life, and VSL#3, all of which contain a long list of preferred bacterial species, as well as high CFU counts. Vitamin D: 4,000 to 8,000 IUs per day to start for adults, as gelcaps or drops; long-term dose adjusted to achieve a 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level of 60 to 70 ng/mL. Excellent vitamin D preparations are widely available in many brands and surprisingly low in cost. Look for oil-based gelcaps (that look like little fish oil capsules) or liquid drops, but not tablets. Even the big-box stores like Costco and Sam’s Club have excellent preparations. Magnesium: Preferably magnesium malate, 1,200 mg two or three times per day, or magnesium glycinate, 400 mg two or three times per day; or magnesium citrate, 400 mg two or three times per day. (If elemental magnesium—i.e., magnesium without the weight of malate, glycinate, or citrate—is specified on your supplement, aim for around 400 mg magnesium per day.) Source Naturals, NOW, and KAL are excellent brands. Fish oil: 3,000 to 3,600 mg per day of EPA and DHA, divided into two doses. Among my preferred brands are Nordic Naturals, Ascenta Nutra-Sea, and Carlson. Iodine: 500 to 1,000 mcg per day as potassium iodide drops or kelp tablets. Like vitamin D, there are many excellent preparations available at low cost. Iron: Look for supplements in the ferrous form and take only if low ferritin levels or iron deficiency anemia is identified; the dose depends on the severity of anemia and the form chosen. Sundown Naturals, Feosol, and Pure Encapsulations are among preferred brands. Zinc: 10 to 15 mg per day of (elemental) zinc as gluconate, sulfate, or acetate. Twinlab, Thorne, and NOW provide great choices.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.