Microbial Quotes

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.

Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19

Every day we live and every meal we eat we influence the great microbial organ inside us - for better or for worse.

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.

The “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control,’ ” observed an elder statesman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness. It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence. It is in part this disconcerting feeling that makes the advances in the microbial sciences so exciting.

More specifically, he found that the consumption of thirty different plants in a given week was the greatest predictor of gut microbial diversity.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science.

Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.

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.

Okay, but what about microbial disease? “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we’re killing are our protectors.” In fact, the twentieth-century war on bacteria—with its profligate use of antibiotics, and routine sterilization of food—has undermined our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. “For the first time in human history, it has become important to consciously replenish our microflora.” Hence the urgency of cultural revival. And

Well, since alcohol is anti-microbial, that is to say, deadly to germs, humans who drank that instead of water would die at a much lower rate from waterborne pathogens – which, prior to industrial water treatment and purification, were ubiquitous. And so the booze hounds would proliferate, out-surviving and out-reproducing the water-drinkers. Alcoholism may actually be an adaptation. Yes, that would mean the bugs on this planet have bred an entire race of booze hounds. Ain’t evolution a bitch?

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

There are more microbial cells in and on each of us than human cells. While

The enemy was the microbial world, and over the centuries, it has killed more people than all of man's wars combined.

Sodium bicarbonate acts as a natural and safe antifungal agent, which when combined with iodine, covers the entire spectrum of microbial organisms.

One begins to see bacteria, not as individual species, but as a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world.

A long time ago, on a world as close as shadow : a very different version of north america cradled a huge land-locked saline sea. This sea teemed with microbial life. All this served a single tremendous organism. And on this world, under a cloudy sky, the entirety of the turbid sea cackled with a single thought. I.... This thought was followed by another To what purpose?

The fact is that hundreds of trillions of microbial “invaders,” mostly in our gut, are absolutely necessary for our survival, and there are ten times more of them than cells in the human body. Because the body cannot survive without its microbes (collectively called the “microbiome”), they are the functional equivalent of any of our other vital organ systems. In (belated) recognition of the importance of the microbiome, humans and most other organisms are now properly defined as superorganisms (complex organisms composed of many smaller organisms). (Saey

So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone." "Right, but I wasn't worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange." "Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange." I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I'd taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn't brought it to Davis's house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now. Our friend Agnolo the Fat wrote: “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.” The essence of that account is of an epidemic destroying the very bonds of human society. When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell? And if parents abandoning children wasn’t destabilizing enough, other support elements in society were shattered by the justifiable fear of the pestilence. The natural human inclination to seek companionship and support from one’s neighbors was short-circuited. No one wanted to catch whatever was killing everybody. In an era when people congregating together was so much more important than it is in our modern, so-called connected world, people kept their distance from one another, creating one of the silent tragedies of this plague: that they had to suffer virtually alone.

They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.

we already know enough scientifically about our microbes and our bodies to enable us to alter our lifestyles, eating patterns and diets to suit our individual needs and improve our health. It is useful to think of your microbial community as your own garden that you are responsible for. We need to make sure the soil (your intestines) that the plants (your microbes) grow in is healthy, containing plenty of nutrients; and to stop weeds or poisonous plants (toxic or disease microbes) taking over we need to cultivate the widest variety of different plants and seeds possible. I will give you a clue how we do this. Diversity is the key.

An arcane microbial defense, devised by microbes, discovered by yogurt engineers, and reprogrammed by RNA biologists, has created a trapdoor to the transformative technology that geneticists had sought so longingly for decades: a method to achieve directed, efficient, and sequence-specific modification of the human genome.

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease.

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

Plants themselves deliver glyphosate to their microbial helpers, as was found in soybeans that exuded the herbicide from their roots for several weeks after being sprayed. Delivering a broad-spectrum antibiotic to the rhizosphere—the home for microbial communities that provide nutrients to plants and keep pathogens at bay—is not exactly a recipe for improving soil health, crop health, or the nutrient density of food.

Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.

Tu pierzi inca vremea cu lucrurile astea, Lenu? Noi zburam peste o minge de foc. Partea care s-a racit pluteste pe lava. Pe aceasta parte construim blocurile, podurile si strazile. Din cand in cand, lava iese din Vezuviu sau provoaca un cutremur care distruge totul. Exista microbi peste tot care te fac sa te imbolnavesti si sa mori. Exista razboaiele. In jurul nostru e o saracie care ne face pe toti rai. In fiecare secunda se poate intampla ceva care sa te faca sa suferi in asa fel incat nu-ti ajung niciodata lacrimile.

I am listening, I thought, to the cacophony of my digestive tract. 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 about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on Earth. And if often seems like I can feel them, living and breeding and dying in and on me.

The earliest modern attempt to test prayer’s efficacy was Sir Francis Galton’s innovative but flawed survey in 1872.16 The field languished until the 1960s, when several researchers began clinical and laboratory studies designed to answer two fundamental questions: (1) Do the prayerful, compassionate, healing intentions of humans affect biological functions in remote individuals who may be unaware of these efforts? (2) Can these effects be demonstrated in nonhuman processes, such as microbial growth, specific biochemical reactions, or the function of inanimate objects? The answer to both questions appears to be yes.

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.

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous. Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)... Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells. According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed.

[[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness – all extant bio-systems being equally evolved – so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment. Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence. All political institutions are cyberian military targets. Take universities, for instance. Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. To be continued.

PLOŞNIŢE: Dintre toate formele de sexualitate animală, cea a ploşniţelor de pat (Cimex lectularius) este cea mai stupefiantă. Nici o închipuire omenească nu poate egala o asemenea perversiune. Prima particularitate: priapismul. Ploşniţa de pat nu se opreşte niciodată din copulaţie. Unii indivizi au peste două sute de raporturi sexuale pe zi. A doua particularitate: homosexualitatea şi bestialitatea. Ploşniţele de pat întâmpină dificultăţi în deosebirea semenilor şi, dintre aceşti semeni, le este şi mai greu să recunoască femelele. 50% din raporturile lor sunt homosexuale, 20% se produc cu alte specii, iar 30% se efectuează cu femele. A treia particularitate: penisul perforant. Ploşniţele de pat sunt echipate cu un sex lung dotat cu un vârf ascuţit. Prin intermediul acestui instrument asemănător cu o seringă, masculii străpung carapacea şi îşi injectează sămânţa oriunde, la întâmplare ― în cap, în abdomen, în labe, în spinare, ba chiar şi în inima doamnei lor! Operaţia nu afectează cu nimic sănătatea femelei, dar cum ar mai putea ele să rămână însărcinate în asemenea condiţii? De unde şi... ... A patra particularitate: virgina însărcinată. Din exterior, vaginul ei pare intact şi, totuşi, ea a primit o lovitură de penis în spinare. Cum pot supravieţui spermatozoizii în sânge? De fapt, majoritatea vor fi distruşi de sistemul imunitar, ca nişte vulgari microbi străini. Pentru a multiplica şansele ca vreo sută dintre aceşti gameţi masculi să ajungă la destinaţie, cantitatea de spermă eliberată e fenomenală. Cu titlu de comparaţie, dacă masculii ploşniţe ar avea dimensiunile unei fiinţe omeneşti, ei ar elibera treizeci de litri de spermă la fiecare ejaculare. Din această mulţime de spermatozoizi va supravieţui un număr extrem de mic. Ascunşi în ungherele arterelor, pitiţi prin vene, ei îşi vor aştepta sorocul. Femela îşi petrece iarna găzduindu-i pe aceşti locatari clandestini. Primăvara, conduşi de instinct, toţi spermatozoizii din cap, labe şi abdomen se strâng în jurul ovarelor, le străpung şi pătrund în interiorul lor. Fazele următoare ale ciclului se vor desfăşura fără nici o problemă. A cincea particularitate: femela cu sexe multiple. Fiind tot timpul perforate pretutindeni de sexele masculilor, femelele ploşniţe ajung la un moment dat să fie acoperite de cicatrice care conturează fante maronii înconjurate de o zonă deschisă la culoare. Asemenea unor ţinte! În felul acesta se poate şti câte acuplări a avut femela. Natura a încurajat aceste nelegiuiri dând naştere unor adaptări ciudate. Generaţie după generaţie, anumite mutaţii au ajuns să creeze incredibilul însuşi. Ploşniţele de sex feminin au ajuns să se nască având pe spate pete maronii, aureolate de o culoare deschisă. Fiecărei pete îi corespunde un receptacul care este un "sex sucursală" legat direct de sexul principal. Particularitatea aceasta există actualmente în toate fazele dezvoltării sale: lipsa cicatricelor, câteva cicatrice receptacule la naştere, veritabile vagine secundare pe spinare. A şasea particularitate: autoîncornorarea. Ce se întâmplă atunci când un mascul este perforat de un alt mascul? Sperma supravieţuieşte şi înaintează ca de obicei spre regiunea ovarelor. Negăsindu-le, se îndreaptă spre canalele deferente ale gazdei şi se amestecă cu spermatozoizii autohtoni. Rezultatul: când masculul pasiv va perfora, la rândul sau, o femelă, el îi va injecta propriii spermatozoizi, dar şi pe cei ai masculului cu care a întreţinut raporturi sexuale. A şaptea particularitate: hermafroditismul. Natura nu conteneşte să facă experienţe ciudate pe cobaiul său sexual favorit şi masculii ploşniţe au suferit, la rândul lor, mutaţii: în Africa trăieşte ploşniţa Afrocimex constrictus, ai cărei masculi se nasc cu nişte mici vagine secundare pe spinare. Aceştia nu sunt, totuşi, fecunzi. Se pare că aceste vagine au un rol pur decorativ sau de încurajare a raporturilor homosexuale.

Broadacre farming, which removes existing ground cover so that crops are sown on cleared fields, damages soil structure, interrupts fungal and microbial associations, and releases stored carbon. Pasture cropping, by contrast, leaves soil dynamics intact. It also supports a variety of plants, in particular many deep-rooted grasses engaged in carbon–mineral–water exchanges underground.

microbial diversity

Routine assessments of agricultural soils rarely extend beyond the top 10 to 15 centimeters and are generally limited to determining the status of a small number of elements, notably phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N). Overemphasis on these nutrients has masked the myriad of microbial interactions that would normally take place in soil; interactions that are necessary for carbon sequestration, precursor to the formation of fertile topsoil.

findings suggest that the use of glyphosate—currently applied to hundreds of millions of acres of the world’s crop-growing land—has multiple harmful effects related to plant nutrient uptake and soil microbial life.

This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26

Bare ground sets in motion a different set of circumstances: moisture loss, less food for microbes, and therefore less microbial activity, which results in fewer nutrients for crops, leading to less-than-vigorous leaves, less photosynthetic activity, and less carbon flowing through the roots and being cached in the soil.

Bare ground devoid of plant cover retains heat and has little moisture to spare. Radiation from the sun, then, just sits there and the soil proceeds to dry out, oxidize, compact, and lose the capacity to absorb water and sustain microbial life, all of which makes it more likely to remain plantless.

Steven Apfelbaum, a restoration ecologist in Wisconsin, says that every 1 percent increase in soil carbon holds an additional sixty thousand gallons of water per acre. Not only does this limit damage from erosion, but it also keeps water on the land. This feeds plants, builds aquifers, and maintains the moisture that promotes microbial life.

promoting ways to: build carbon stores in the soil; keep water on the land; stop and reverse desertification; focus on ecological systems rather than individual species; reduce chemical inputs; and maintain diversity in crops, native plants, and microbial life. And—we can’t forget our cows—bring herbivores back onto the landscape.

life on Earth is basically a giant microbial vat and eukaryotic organisms are merely the bubbles on its surface? Are we – the froth – deluded in valuing ourselves so highly?

She had heard the panspermia theory before but didn’t know its name. “The theory that a meteorite splashed into the primordial soup, bringing the first seeds of microbial life to earth.

fully 99 percent of the genetic material in your body is not your own. It belongs to your microbial comrades. These microbes not only influence the expression of our DNA, but research reveals that throughout our evolution microbial DNA has become part of our own DNA. In other words, genes from microbes have inserted themselves into our genetic code (mitochondrial DNA being the prime example) to help us evolve and flourish.

But surely the most important of all the relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when all goes well, delight. Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy. One

Although microbial testing kits are starting to emerge on the market,

The idea behind the Hormone Reset is simple: in three-day bursts, you’ll focus on making specific dietary changes, starting with eliminating meat and alcohol, which resets your estrogen, liver, and gut microbiome—the genetic material of the trillions of microbial critters that live in your body. Every three days you’ll eliminate specific metabolism-wrecking foods and trade up for better foods, which will reset your misfiring hormones, building on the collaboration and regulatory synergy between them so you can feel like yourself again, in body harmony.

Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever.

microbial resistance to antibiotics…

willingness of the scientists to abandon the traditional rules of evidence known as Koch’s postulates. Instead, AIDS researchers, including the ones at the amfAR forum, were willing to “revise Koch’s in a more permissive direction: it would no longer be necessary to find the microbe in all cases of the disease. Mere correlations between microbial antibodies and the progression of the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved ‘epidemiologically’ to be the cause of AIDS.” (PBP p.145)

Even the human body contains many more microbial cells than it does human cells; bacteria swarm all over our skin and in our gut (and in many cases are necessary for good health).

The goal, in other words, is not to reach specialists in the relevant fields, but rather to encourage discussion among general readers and students with an interest in the history of epidemic diseases and a concern about our preparedness as a society to meet new microbial challenges.

Such an inhumane policy also reflected the fact that most planters were absentee owners. They preferred the amenities of Paris to a tropical climate and the risk of contracting yellow fever, the most lethal of West Indian microbial threats.

Those who asserted the doctrine of the conquest of infection viewed the microbial world as largely static or only slowly evolving. For that reason there was little concern that the victory over existing infections would be challenged by the appearance of new diseases for which humanity was unprepared and immunologically naive.

The notion of “microbial fixity”—that the diseases we have are the ones that we will face—even underpinned the International Health Regulations adopted worldwide in 1969, which specified that the three great epidemic killers of the nineteenth century—plague, yellow fever, and cholera—were the only diseases requiring “notification.

let your kids experience as much microbial diversity as you can find. Get them outside, let them interact with animals, allow them to play in the dirt, rivers, streams, ocean. Don’t sterilize everything they are going to touch or put into their mouth. A great example of this is the pacifier that falls on the ground. Parents who sterilize the binky run the risk of increasing the likelihood that their child will develop food sensitivities later in life.

The Haney Soil Test measures seven parameters related to soil biology: Water-extractable organic carbon (WEOC) Water-extractable organic nitrogen (WEON) Percent microbially active carbon (MAC) Inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus levels Organic nitrogen and phosphorus levels Organic C:N ratio One-day CO2 respiration All seven parameters are used to arrive at a final soil-health score.

It’s the start of a new era, when people are finally ready to embrace the microbial world. When I walked through San Diego Zoo with Rob Knight at the start of this book, I was struck by how different everything seemed with microbes in mind. Every visitor, keeper, and animal looked like a world on legs – a mobile ecosystem that interacted with others, largely oblivious to their inner multitudes. When I drive through Chicago with Jack Gilbert, I experience the same dizzying shift in perspective. I see the city’s microbial underbelly – the rich seam of life that coats it, and moves through it on gusts of wind and currents of water and mobile bags of flesh. I see friends shaking hands, saying’ “how do you do”, and exchanging living organisms. I see people walking down the street, ejecting clouds of themselves in their wake. I see the decisions through which we have inadvertently shaped the microbial world around us: the choice to build with concrete versus brick, the opening of a window, and the daily schedule to which a janitor now mops the floor. And I see, in the driver’s seat, a guy who notices those rivers of microscopic life and is enthralled rather than repelled by them. He knows that microbes are mostly not to be feared or destroyed, but to be cherished, admired, and studied.

Bernard’s theory of a new medical epistemology made him a crucial transitional figure. He looked beyond the hospital ward, which had applied the idea of specificity to disease, to the laboratory, which alone would permit the exploration of the microbial world and its relationship to etiology, or disease causation.

The “Columbian exchange” is the term used to describe the process by which the European encounter with the Americas brought about the large-scale transfer of flora, fauna, culture, and people from each side of the Atlantic to the other. That movement involved plants such as the potato, maize, and the tree bark from which quinine is made moving from the Americas to Europe, but microbes also moved in the reverse direction. Europeans, in other words, introduced smallpox and measles to the Americas. The momentous impact of the Columbian exchange in microbial guise is well illustrated by the experience of Hispaniola, where it first occurred.

If I could do it all over again, and relieve my vision in the twenty-first century, I would become a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held in between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end. For one more turn around I would keep alive the little boy of Paradise Beach who found wonder in a scyphozoan jellyfish and a barely glimpsed monster of the deep.

A variety of circumstances prevailing during the trek into Russia created perfect conditions for microbial diseases to flourish—especially dysentery, which was a much feared affliction of nineteenth-century armies. Also known as Shigellosis, dysentery is a bacterial disease caused by four species of the Shigella genus. Like typhoid and cholera, dysentery is transmitted by the oral-fecal route through the ingestion of food and water contaminated by excrement.

nine of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99 percent of the DNA we’re carrying around belongs to those microbes. Some scientists, trained in evolutionary biology, began looking at the human individual in a humbling new light: as a kind of superorganism, a community of several hundred coevolved and interdependent species.

Cresting the peaks, the transpod descended on the other side — down, down until they ghosted over the corpse of the heartlands, which lacked even the fetid microbial life to animate the cadaver. Absent rot, the land lay lifeless, like some mummified king fallen from grace, hollowed and shrouded in a mantle of radioactive dust.

No one knows the number of bacterial species. About 5,000 species have been characterized and another 10,000 have been partially identified. Biodiversity authority Edward O. Wilson has estimated that biology has identified no more than 10 percent of all species and possibly as little as 1 percent. Wilson’s reasoning would put the total number of bacterial species at 100,000, probably a tenfold underestimate. Most environmental microbiologists believe that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all bacteria can currently be grown in laboratories so that they can be identified. Microbial geneticist J.

All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.

Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.

The world around us is a gigantic reservoir of potential microbial partners. Every mouthful could bring in new microbes that digest a previously unbreakable part of our meals, or that detoxify the poisons in a previously inedible food, or that kill a parasite that previously suppressed our numbers. Each new partner might help its host to eat a little more, travel a little further, survive a little longer.

We have already seen how pliable the microbiome can be. It can change with a touch, with a meal, with a parasitic incursion or a dose of medicine, or simply with the passage of time. It is a dynamic entity that waxes and wanes, forms and re-forms. This flexibility underlies many of the interactions between microbes and their hosts. It means that symbioses can change in positive ways, as new microbial partners offer fresh genes, abilities, and evolutionary opportunities to their hosts. It means that partnerships can change in negative ways, as dysbiotic communities or missing microbes lead to disease. And it means that partnerships can change in deliberate ways-ways that we choose. Theodor Rosebury recognised this back in 1962. Our indigenous microbes are "no less subject than the rest of our environment to manipulation for human benefit", he wrote. We should accept them as a natural part of our lives but acceptance "need not be passive or resigned".

Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutchman, was amongst the first to demonstrate their planetary importance. Reclusive, brusque, and unpopular, he had no love for people, except for a few close colleagues, nor any love for medical microbiology. Disease didn't interest him. He wanted to study microbes in their natural habitats: soil, water, plant roots. In 1888, he found bacteria that pulled nitrogen out of the air and turned it into ammonia for plants to use; later, he isolated species that contributed to the movements of sulphur through the soil and atmosphere. This work stimulated a rebirth of microbiology in Beijerinck's city of Delft-where Leeuwenhoek had first laid eyes on bacteria two centuries earlier. The members of this new found Delft school, along with intellectual soulmates like the Russian Sergei Winogradsky, called themselves microbial ecologists. They revealed that microbes were not just threats to humanity but critical components of the world.

Seven hundred new antibacterial products were launched in the United States between 1992 and 1998. One of them was the “oral-care strip,” pieces of anti-microbial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue.

The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, first voiced by Strachan, is that our immune system needs a certain amount of bacteria on which to flex its muscles. Deprived of it, the white cells that are designed to fight bacteria, called Th1 lymphocytes, fail to develop, and the other white cells, Th2 lymphocytes—those designed to make antibodies to defend the body against microbial dangers as well as to produce allergic reaction—will take over.

At the same time, Europe’s long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion’s death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.

And, most extraordinarily, could conditions that were apparently far removed from microbial epicentres, such as allergies, autoimmune diseases and even mental health conditions, be brought on by a damaged microbiota?

Strive for excellence, follow your conscience and heart, and welcome feedback with open arms. Relentlessly pursue your craft.

In this sense, in precisely the same way as Canetti conceives vengeance, evil too is automatic. You cannot will it. That is an illusion and a misconception. The evil you can will, the evil you can do and which, most of the time, merges with violence, suffering and death, has nothing to do with this reversible form of evil. We might even say that those who deliberately practise evil certainly have no insight into it, since their act supposes the intentionality of a subject, whereas this reversibility of evil is the reversibility of a form. And it is, at bottom, the form itself that is intelligent, insightful: with evil it is not a question of an object to be understood; we are dealing with a form that understands us. In the 'intelligence of evil' we have to understand that it is evil that is intelligent, that it is it which thinks us - in the sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our acts. For it is not possible for any act whatever or any kind of talk not to have two sides to it; not to have a reverse side, and hence a dual existence. And this contrary to any finality or objective determination. This dual form is irreducible, indissociable from all existence. It is therefore pointless to wish to localize it and even more so to wish to denounce it. The denunciation of evil is still of the order of morality, of a moral evaluation. Now, evil is immoral, not in the way a crime is immoral, but in the way a form is. And the intelligence of evil itself is immoral - it does not aspire to any value judgement, it does not do evil, it speaks it. The idea of evil as a malign force, a maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a deep-rooted superstition. It is echoed at the world level in the phantasmic projection of the Axis of Evil, and in the Manichaean struggle against that power. This is all part of the same imaginary. Hence the principle of the prevention, the forestalling, the prophylaxis, of evil; rather than morality or metaphysics, what we have today is an infection, a microbial epidemic, the corruption of a world whose predestined end is presumed to lie in good.

There are some 8 million microbial genes in the gut—400 times more than in the human genome. Even more astonishing, we humans differ very little from each other genetically, sharing more than 90 percent of our genes, but the assortment of microbial genes in our guts differs dramatically, and only 5 percent of them are shared between any two individuals. The gut microbiome adds a whole new dimension of complexity and possibilities to our brain-gut emotion-generating machinery.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

See, In India I am going to say as I am Indian citizen, yes there is environmental concerns everywhere in India but they seem to be tiny and can be tackled within 20 years. So either it is exaggerated problem or the real pollution data is not open source i .e - Government is indirectly supporting and/ or hiding monopolies. Because governments focus is only on farming practices where land lords are having too much lands and using mixed system of farming because of unpredictable weather and indeed it does pollute the soil but applying biological remediation will obviously help treat and cleanse them. Why biological remediation is not at all considered? Animal genomics is under ethics, ok understood but microbial genomics, plant genomics? See there is certainly environmental problems from industries that affect farming, But i visualize that it is to eliminate land lords to make complete manu smiriti India. And who polluted farming system, obviously fertilizers and who allowed it? Indian government! before 200 years was there fertilizers in India? Why did they allow it, is it because they wanted pollute it for the money they get from foreign giants! or is it because they wanted to pollute the environment deliberately and then they want to cleanse it so that they get good names and meanwhile while cleansing strategies applied, as a partnership they enter into the system and then they eliminate land holders and make them sudras again manusmiriti concept! Isn't it? Do you know something this manu smiriti concept never much happened in South India, yeah it happened only upto certain level not completely like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. You people have polluted the environment now just pretending to be gods of saving nature and after inturns slowly making manusmiriti India. Yes south has pollution, and we know how to tackle it, we have scientists, we have context specific reasons, we have languages and cultures to protect. Indian law says, every cultures have their own rights to preserve their culture. Yes world is one, I agree, Context specificity always remains same. We have problems yes agreed we resolve it, Indian government as a sovereign country, it your duty to support our work and question only when it is against law, humanism and immorality.

On a cell-for-cell basis, we are 90 percent microbial. We don’t just live on the earth—the earth lives in us.

An emerging field of study has begun to evaluate the extent to which this gut flora impacts food choice, establishing a fascinating link between microorganisms and the foods we pine for. In other words, there’s evidence to support a microbial basis for craving. To illustrate, a team of Swiss researchers determined that people who crave chocolate actually harbor different types of microbial colonies in their gut than those who are indifferent to chocolate. And there’s evidence to suggest that this may indeed be the case for many other types of food as well.*6 But what does this mean? Certain microbiologists, including my friend Compton Rom, submit that there is in fact a very direct and causal connection between our intestinal microbial ecology and the way we think. That, in fact, these microbes message our brains, effectively telling us what to eat. Turns out, it’s our microbes that hold sway over our cravings.

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome—many of our symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our “own” DNA, and at points in our evolutionary history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: Our mitochondria have their own genome as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least eight percent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into “chimeras,” formed when mothers and fetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero). Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing “self” from “nonself.” Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers and appear to have evolved to enable colonization by microbes rather than prevent it. Where does this leave you? Or perhaps y’all?

Fundamental mysteries remained, of course. How this system achieved the acrobatic balancing act between generating a forceful immune response against pathogens, while ensuring that same response did not turn on our own bodies—how the Kampf against microbial invaders did not degenerate into the civil war of horror autotoxicus—was still somewhat of a profound riddle (in Sam P.’s case, we could never control the autoimmune hepatitis induced by the cancer-rejecting immunotherapy).

One manufacturer producing reduced salt bacon has already used this technique; when the salt content of bacon was reduced from 3.5 percent to 2.3 percent, the shelf-life was reduced from 56 days to 28 days.”145 Lowering the salt content of packaged foods may also require higher use of suspect preservatives, such as phosphates, nitrates, and nitrites, in order to maintain microbial stability, which are likely more detrimental to our health compared to salt.146

Modern lifestyle habits have therefore primed your body for unhealthy microbial expansion. If there is no benefit to curtailing your carbon footprint or erecting levees against the equivalent to rising oceans in your body, what can you do to turn the tide against microbial expansion and invasion? Thankfully, you can do plenty.

Babies delivered by C-section into the sterile hands of a surgeon have fewer encounters with their mothers’ microbiomes in the critical early period when gut populations are being established. And newborns fed formula miss out on hundreds of microbial strains in their mothers’ breast milk.

What we do know is that the basic structure of the tree of life has helped us understand that all extant life on Earth is derived from a single, extinct microbial organism.

Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19 The variations that exist between body parts dwarf those that exist between people.

We have become tinkerers of microbial evolution—and we don’t understand what we are doing.

the emergence of some very large organisms has done nothing to diminish the ubiquity and importance of microbes: the biosphere is a highly symbiotic system based on the abundance and variety of microbial biomass, and it could not operate and endure without its foundation of microorganisms.

The smallpox viruses, Variola major and minor, are thought to have caused more deaths than any other disease in human history, wiping out as many as 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. (The disease was eradicated in 1979.) Tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, AIDS—all are products of microbial agents of mass destruction that are natural in origin.

Also, as oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out, the ocean “provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, and maybe in the universe.” That life, most of it microbial, determines most of the Gaian balance of gases in the atmosphere.

Indeed, microbes make up 80 percent of Earth’s total biomass, says famed microbial taxonomist Carl Woese.

What is the actual wet weight of microbes we carry around with us? Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells—like a honeybee versus a cat, as they say. The textbook Microbial Inhabitants of Humans (2004) estimates the total at nearly three pounds, about the weight of our brain.

Findings have become common on brain-like processes outside of the skull. The conductive structure inside the heart, like pacemaker cells, which organizes the heartbeat, can be known as the brain of the heart, just as the intestine's brain is the ganglion cells in the gut. Conduction system independence is shown when a transplanted heart continues to beat even though the nerves that connected it to the central and peripheral nervous systems of the donor have been severed. The interaction between the independent processing of the heart and that of the brain is complex and not fully understood. The trillions of bacteria that outnumber the cells of the body by ten to one are even more enigmatic, residing mostly within the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as pests, but these micro-organisms were simply introduced in vast stretches along the double helix of human DNA over eons. The consequences are immense and essentially uncharted for what we call "being alive" The bacterial part of the body, taken as a whole, is called the microbiome. It is not sitting on the skin or in the gut passively, nor is it invading the body. Actually, the microbiota is the barrier between "in here" and "out there," containing DNA, antibodies, and chemical signaling that allows the brain to do the same stuff. There is no clear role of the microbial DNA that is incorporated into our genomes, but at least this is ancestral material that we have assimilated as our own. More suggestively, this once-foreign DNA in all higher life-forms may be the swapping mechanism for genes. These discoveries demonstrate that our intelligence extends to the whole of ecology. Everywhere mentality has a physical basis. Any attempt at isolating it in the skull comes up against serious objections. Instead of treating cynicism with unbounded consciousness, we need to see that every perception is unbounded. By going beyond the illusory boundaries of the disconnected body, you cannot see, hear or touch anything in the universe. Watching a sunset is like watching yourself, actually.