Plant Viruses Quotes

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When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat,’” in the words of William Ralph Inge.
Lierre Keith
We remain part of the earth's ecosystem, and participate in the food chain whereby we kill and eat various plants and animals, while our bodies provide a fair field full of food for a great variety of parasites.
William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples)
In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
I also become the local computer nerd. The administration brings me in to fix all the computers, I create viruses to invade at a specific day and time. They call me in, and I eradicate my own virus, only to plant another one to go into effect a couple months later. They ask me why I can't just fix the computers once and for all. I tell them to quit going to porn sites and it will stay fixed. That shuts them up every time.
Darynda Jones (Brighter Than the Sun (Charley Davidson, #8.5))
The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
Whitney plants viruses in us to force us to return home. [...] I knew sooner or later I wouldn't return, and I'd die from whatever they put in me.
Christine Feehan (Toxic Game (GhostWalkers #15))
Not all diseases come from bacteria and viruses, Professor. The worst often come from things you cannot see under a microscope. This plant is infested with an aggressive strain of such invisible germs.
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko (The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption)
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
To drop seeds into my belly. To spit a virus in my throat that grew into a giant “you” plant. The branches crawling up the walls of my insides and begging to claw my mouth open and make me say things I don’t mean. The dying leaves flaking off and swaying to the pit of my stomach in an imaginary breeze landing with a deafening thump. Echoes that bounce up between my teeth. And remind my tongue there is no more watermelon. Just empty space.
Halsey (I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry)
Difficult To Believe Impossible To Deny The world today is witnessing the emergence of an extraordinary phenomenon that offers a radical way to transform life on this planet for the benefit of all. This phenomenon brought to the world by Mahendra Trivedi is known as The Trivedi Effect®. The Trivedi Effect® is a natural phenomenon that transforms living organisms and non-living materials through the Energy Transmissions of Mahendra Trivedi and The Trivedi Masters™. This Intelligent energy has the ability to transform all living organisms such as plants, trees, seeds, bacteria, viruses, fungi, animals, cancer cells, human cells…everything. In the addition to that, this energy has the ability to transform nonliving materials, such as metals, ceramics, polymers, and chemicals by changing the structure of the atom permanently.
Trivedi Master
So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth, like Mount Elgon. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere.
Richard Preston (The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus)
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.
Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
As I write, we now consider nature to have given rise to three or four foundational types of living things, or domains of life. I’m going with four. We have Bacteria, Archaea (microbes that are fundamentally different from bacteria), Eukarya (that’s us, animals and plants together), and Vira. You could also call that last one Viruses.
Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
the following supplements are recommended specifically for MS. They’ll help reduce pain and protect your myelin sheath as you heal from EBV: EPA & DHA (eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid): omega-3 fats to help protect and fortify the myelin nerve sheath. Be sure to buy a plant-based (not fish-based) version. L-glutamine: amino acid that removes toxins such as MSG from the brain and protects neurons. Lion’s mane: medicinal mushroom that helps protect the myelin sheath and support neuron function. ALA (alpha lipoic acid): helps repair damaged neurons and neurotransmitters. Also helps mend the myelin nerve sheath. Monolaurin: fatty acid that kills virus cells, bacteria cells, and other bad microbes (e.g., mold) in the brain. Curcumin: component of turmeric that reduces inflammation of the central nervous system and relieves pain. Barley grass juice extract powder: contains micronutrients that feed the central nervous system. Also helps feed brain tissue, neurons, and the myelin nerve sheath.
Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
Researchers studying emerging viruses have noticed an interesting phenomenon. As more human beings are born, there is a consistent spread of human habitation into once undeveloped ecoranges. The previously existing environment is removed, houses are built, people move in. The former populations of plants and animals are displaced. However, one of the major things that has been overlooked is that viruses have also lived in those regions for a very long time—in a healthy symbiotic balance with their hosts, both plant and animal. It is possible to think of them as an invisible herd or pack species, spread with the same kind of density throughout those ecoranges just as deer or birds are.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.21 One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first. It’s kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the beings on this earth at any time, and then add in the ones that are getting born every second and the ones that have already died—and not just human beings, either, but all the animals and other life-forms like amoebas and viruses and maybe even plants that have ever lived or ever will live, as well as all the extinct species—well, you can see that enlightenment will take a very long time. And what if the elevator gets full and the doors slam shut and you’re still standing outside? When I asked Granny about this, she rubbed her shiny bald head and said, “Soo desu ne. It is a very big elevator . . .” “But Granny, it’s going to take forever!” “Well, we must try even harder, then.
Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being)
What all this means is that the ecosystems of cities around the world are growing more and more alike; their communities of plants and animals, fungi, single-celled organisms, and viruses are slowly inching toward a single globalized, multi-purpose urban biodiversity. And even if the exact species across cities may not be identical, you will find similar species playing similar roles.
Menno Schilthuizen (Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution)
physician and viral researcher Frank Ryan comments . . . Viruses have a kind of sensation that could be classed as intermediate between a rudimentary smell or touch . . . they have a way of detecting the chemical composition of cell surfaces. . . . This gives a virus the most exquisite ability to sense the right cell surfaces. It recognizes them through a perception in three-dimensional surface chemistry.1
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Retroviruses are simply viruses that can insert DNA into a host’s genome, changing the host at a genetic level. They’re a sort of “computer software update.” When a person contracts a retrovirus, they are essentially receiving a DNA injection that changes the genome in some of their cells. Depending on the nature of the DNA inserted, getting a virus could be good, bad, or benign, and since every person’s genome is different, the result is almost always uncertain. Retroviruses exist for one purpose: to produce more of their own DNA. And they are good at it. In fact, viruses make up the majority of all the genetic material on the planet. If one added together all the DNA from humans, all other animals, and every single plant—every non-viral life form on the planet—that sum total of DNA would still be less than all the viral DNA on Earth.
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
Life has come to a silent pause, The fear of Virus, the slowdown, Disconnecting me from moments, Heart has taken over the mind, Light now shines upon my eyes, Dreams blocked, the roads traversed, The break has broken the barrier, Me pondering, was I living my life? The days are same and so is night, The Sun, the Moon, and the stars, still rise in the east and set in the west, Trees, plants, flowers there as before, The sky, clouds rivers and oceans, Earth's precious treasures, no different, Change is in my perspective n priorities, Is it that I am learning to live my life. Monotonous tedium chores, Unpleasant hunger for wealth, Most of us are living dead, Body just awaits the soul to leave, To be buried or cremated, Waste of life and for what price, All material things cherished, Useless in our last flight. Time to fall in love with my life, Stop living for others, their expectations, I am again the owner of my choices, Not bothered to please others, Nor what they think about me, My dreams are alive and back, My treasurers are now my deeds, I have finally learnt to live!!!
Mukesh Kwatra
With a combination of proper lighting and climate control he managed to achieve a different ecological niche in each gallery. In the African section, where the imbrications of Augustine, Mafouz and Okri lay decomposing, he grew sorghum and Dioscorea yams. In the Chinese gallery where the Tao Te Ching and countless Confucian annotations moldered, he grew rice, crab apples and barley. Over the poems of Neruda and Borges himself, he grew potatoes. Each plant in this new Eden he lovingly tainted with the virus of civilization - from the short story "Resurrection
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Philippine Speculative Fiction VI)
He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?” He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.” Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too. Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW? Tom began to laugh. “She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.” That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved. He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games. “My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe. Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk. He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory: NAME: Giuseppe Nichols RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division ORIGIN: New York, NY ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8 SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4 Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.” Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.” Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.
S.J. Kincaid
Viruses, for instance, perform a really irritating function of intermingling the DNA from every species on Earth with every other. As Richard Lewontin puts it . . . It used to be thought that new functions had to arise by mutations of the genes already possessed by a species and that the only way such mutations could spread was by the normal processes of reproduction. It is now clear that genetic material has moved during evolution from species to species by means of retroviruses and other transposable particles. . . . What is so extraordinary in its implications for evolution is that transposition can occur between forms of life that are quite different, between distantly related vertebrates, for example, or even between plants and bacteria. . . . Thus, the assumption that species are on independent evolutionary pathways, once they have diverged from each other and can no longer interbreed, is incorrect. All life-forms are in potential genetic contact and genetic exchanges between them are going on. . . . The evolutionary “tree of life” seems the wrong metaphor. Perhaps we should think of it as an elaborate bit of macramé.16
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoake’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court of nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoake, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse. His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence. (p13.)
Yukio Mishima (Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility, #1))
You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right? “But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now. “Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left. “Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’ “You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One)
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I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration. You might miss the signal because you’re watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes, or just generally really busy. The idea will try to wave you
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Stuxnet spurred the Iranians to create their own cyber war unit, which took off at still greater levels of funding a year and a half later, in the spring of 2012, when, in a follow-up attack, the NSA’s Flame virus—the massive, multipurpose malware from which Olympic Games had derived—wiped out nearly every hard drive at Iran’s oil ministry and at the Iranian National Oil Company. Four months after that, Iran fired back with its own Shamoon virus, wiping out 30,000 hard drives (basically, every hard drive in every workstation) at Saudi Aramco, the joint U.S.-Saudi Arabian oil company, and planting, on every one of its computer monitors, the image of a burning American flag. Keith
Fred Kaplan (Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War)
Stuxnet, the virus believed to have taken down Iranian nuclear processing plants in 2010, had used about ten zero-days to get inside the systems it attacked. It was one of the first of a new breed of sophisticated cyberweapons. They cost a lot of time and money to build, so someone wouldn’t be unleashing these ones without some purpose in mind. “What
Matthew Mather (CyberStorm (Cyberstorm, #1))
Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :
CK-12 Foundation (CK-12 Life Science for Middle School)
WILD GREENS—BOTH FOOD AND MEDICINE The wild greens that hunter-gatherers consumed were so rich in phytonutrients that they used them as medicine as well as food. The leaves of wild lamb’s-quarters (Chenopodium album), also known as goosefoot and fat hen, were consumed by hunter-gatherers from North America to Africa. The greens were eaten raw, fried in fat, dried, added to soups, or mixed with meat. The Pomo people, who lived in northern California, steamed the leaves and used them to treat stomachaches. The Potawatomi of the upper Mississippi region used lamb’s-quarters to cure a condition that we now know to be scurvy, a nutritional deficiency caused by a lack of vitamin C. The Iroquois made a paste of the fresh greens and applied it to burns to relieve pain and speed healing. Many tribes consumed the seeds of the plant as well as the leaves, even though the seeds were very small and tedious to gather. Americans are now eating the seeds of domesticated varieties of lamb’s-quarters, which are unusually high in protein. They go by the name quinoa. Lamb’s-quarters may prove to be a potent healer in twenty-first-century medicine as well. Recent studies show that the greens are rich in phytonutrients, fight viruses and bacteria, and block the growth of human breast cancer cells. More investigations are under way. Dandelions, the plague of urban
Jo Robinson (Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health)
There are five types of microorganisms residing within you. They include bacteria, yeasts, parasites, viruses, and archaea.
Will Bulsiewicz (Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome)
published by Márquez et al. (2007) in Science in 2007 described “a virus in a fungus in a plant.” The plant—a tropical grass—grows naturally in high soil temperatures. But without a fungal associate that grows in its leaves, the grass can’t survive at high temperatures. When grown alone, without the plant, the fungus fares little better and is unable to survive. However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures. The microbiome of the fungus, in other words, determines the role that the fungus plays in the microbiome of the plant. The outcome is clear: life or death. One of the most dramatic examples of microbes that live within microbes comes from the notorious rice blast fungus: Rhizopus microsporus. The key toxins used by Rhizopus are actually produced by a bacterium living within its hyphae. In a dramatic indication of how entwined the fates of fungi and their bacterial associates can be, Rhizopus requires the bacteria not only to cause the disease but also to reproduce. Experimentally “curing” Rhizopus of its bacterial residents impedes the fungus’s ability to produce spores. The bacterium is responsible for the most important features of Rhizopus’s lifestyle, from its diet to its sexual habits. See Araldi-Brondolo et al. (2017), Mondo et al. (2017), and Deveau
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration. You might miss the signal because you’re watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes, or just generally really busy. The idea will try to wave you down (perhaps for a few moments; perhaps for a few months; perhaps even for a few years), but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else. But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?” At this point, you have two options for how to respond. What
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Climate change is what we phase, It is the precarious life phase. It will make us vanish soon, Which will not be a boon. We should fathom why we should not destroy our nature, as it will take a retribution in future. Making up a magnificent nature takes time but it will surely make earthlings life shine. Humans are mad in their way, as they make stylish houses and waste paper to show their idiotic fame. Listen your own plight or else the earth will fight. Everyday many people drive, to contribute to pollution rise. The diurnal cycle of nature is disturbed, because many plants, birds, animals and water bodies are hurt. These are screaming at its heights, and soon we will be lashed out from the sight. Life is impossible without all of them, as we need around us their phenomenal hem. Nature cannot make us happy, Till the time we are greedy and shabby.
Mehak Vijay
We took the right to decide about life&death matters of our animal companions into our own hands, why viruses, bacteria, gems and other animals can't do the same with us? Be a Hero, Be Veg, Eat cruelty-free, plant-based meat.
Ema Dan (Hearty Land: A tale about a journey into a land of abundance)
I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
The word “virus” has a much longer history than the study of what we now call by that name. It comes directly from the Latin virus, a term meaning “poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid.” You can even find the Latin word rendered as “poisonous slime.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
This is not to say that there is a clear line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. For the ancients, mould and mildew were not clearly differentiated from rust; from our perspective, prions and viruses are also indeterminate. They can reproduce their kind and they employ resources from their hosts to do so, but they do not have life cycles as plants and animals do.
Catherine Wilson (Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction)
Reintroducing history into evolutionary thinking has already begun at other biological scales. The cell, once an emblem of replicable units, turns out to be the historical product of symbiosis among free- living bacteria. Even DNA turns out to have more history in its amino- acid sequences than once thought. Human DNA is part virus; viral encoun- ters mark historical moments in making us human. Genome research has taken up the challenge of identifying encounter in the making of DNA. Population science cannot avoid history for much longer. Fungi are ideal guides. Fungi have always been recalcitrant to the iron cage of self- replication. Like bacteria, some are given to exchanging genes in nonreproductive encounters (“horizontal gene transfer”); many also seem averse to keeping their genetic material sorted out as “individ- uals” and “species,” not to speak of “populations.” When researchers studied the fruiting bodies of what they thought of as a species, the ex- pensive Tibetan “caterpillar fungus,” they found many species entan- gled together. When they looked into the filaments of Armillaria root rot, they found genetic mosaics that confused the identification of an individual. Meanwhile, fungi are famous for their symbiotic attach- ments. Lichen are fungi living together with algae and cyanobacteria. I have been discussing fungal collaborations with plants, but fungi live with animals as well. For example, Macrotermes termites digest their food only through the help of fungi. The termites chew up wood, but they cannot digest it. Instead, they build “fungus gardens” in which the chewed- up wood is digested by Termitomyces fungi, producing edible nutrients. Researcher Scott Turner points out that, while you might say that the termites farm the fungus, you could equally say that the fungus farms the termites. Termitomyces uses the environment of the termite mound to outcompete other fungi; meanwhile, the fungus regulates the mound, keeping it open, by throwing up mushrooms annually, cre- ating a colony- saving disturbance in termite mound- building.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Earlier work had shown that this disease was infectious—it could be transferred experimentally from one plant to another by applying sap drawn from infected leaves. Ivanofsky repeated the transmission experiment, with one added step. He put the juice through a Chamberland filter, a device made from unglazed porcelain, with tiny pores, for purifying water by screening out bacteria. Ivanofsky’s report, that “the sap of leaves infected with tobacco mosaic disease retains its infectious properties even after filtration,” constituted the first operational definition of viruses: infectious but “filterable,” meaning so small they would pass through where bacteria wouldn’t.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
You can buy plants and seeds that have some level of resistance to common diseases affecting those types of plants. Look for these types of abbreviations on plant tags, labels, and catalog descriptions: BCMW: Resistance to bean curly mosaic virus CMW: Resistance to cucumber mosaic virus Foc, Foc 1: Resistance to fusarium yellows PM: Resistance to powdery mildew PVY: Resistance to potato virus Y TMV: Resistance to tobacco mosaic virus ToMV: Resistance to tomato mosaic virus TSWV: Resistance to tomato spotted wilt virus V: Resistance to verticillium wilt Those are some of the most common abbreviations for the most common diseases, but it’s not an exhaustive list.
Katie Elzer-Peters (Carolinas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening: How to Plant, Grow, and Harvest the Best Edibles)
Don’t you see? They don’t need a reason! But they’ll find one. People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread. People
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
Humans had once used all manner of technologies to modify plants and animals, back before they understood the risks. A wheat crop that was immune to pesticides and only digestible to ninety percent of people was still likely to poison a vast swath of humanity. Ten percent of a trillion humans was a big number. And using viruses to inject new genes into things might have been brilliant technical engineering, but no squid ever bred with a cow. And the chances of the outcomes being entirely beneficial were low. Thus, the University of Uelkal was an agronomy institute.
Blaze Ward (The Bryce Connection (The Science Officer, #9))
People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
They don’t need a reason! But they’ll find one. People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread. People here in Paris—people we know—will be infected. And when the fever spreads, they’ll point the finger at anyone they think might save them. Please, I beg you, go to Lilou.
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
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.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
In South Africa, successive presidents—Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1999, and Jacob Zuma, who took over from Mbeki ten years later—publicly denied the nature of the threat posed by the virus, the latter boasting that a postcoital shower offered protection enough. Matters were made worse by a Soviet disinformation campaign, which planted in a KGB-controlled Indian newspaper the story that AIDS had been deliberately engineered by the United States, and then amplified the lie with bogus research by a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, which was widely cited in newspapers around the world, including the Sunday Express.117
Niall Ferguson (Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe)
One of the reasons why a lot of the statistical claims about COVID-19 are controversial is that endogeneity problems abound. Early on in the pandemic, it was worryingly common, for example, to hear people take the numbers of deaths within some age brackets from COVID-19, divide that by the total population of the group, and then use the low number to conclude that people in that group are less likely to die from COVID-19 than from being struck by lightning, being a victim of a shark attack, or something else that seems a relatively tiny risk. The implicit mental model here is that becoming infected with COVID-19 is a matter of random chance and therefore the death rates observed so far represent an accurate representation of the risk of getting and dying from the disease. But this is obviously not true. Your chance of getting infected and dying of COVID-19 is influenced by both your behavior and policy. That there have been relatively higher infections and deaths in prisons or meatpacking plants does not necessarily tell us that prisoners or meatpacking workers have personal characteristics that make them more susceptible to the worst outcomes from the disease. It might simply be that they spend much time in a place that puts them more at risk of infection.
Ryan A. Bourne (Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19)
What reason could they have to come for me, Maman?” Her eyes glitter, fever mixed with fear. “Don’t you see? They don’t need a reason! But they’ll find one. People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.
Barbara Davis (The Keeper of Happy Endings)
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?
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
Instead of recognizing patterns of imbalance and harmony, the currently accepted western system of medicine, also known as allopathic medicine, looks for agents of disease—viruses, bacteria, and other microbes—and eradicates them without considering the deeper constitutional factors that lead to states of illness. Folk medicine traditions, on the other hand, view the human body in a holistic way and seek to support the body’s innate ability to heal itself. A cure is achieved not by “fixing” one part, but by returning harmony and balance to the whole system.
Scott Kloos (Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants: Identify, Harvest, and Use 120 Wild Herbs for Health and Wellness)
Every time we practice mindful living, we plant healthy seeds and strengthen the healthy seeds already in us. Healthy seeds function similarly to antibodies. When a virus enters our bloodstream, our body reacts and antibodies come and surround it, take care of it, and transform it. This is true with our psychological seeds as well. If we plant wholesome, healing, refreshing seeds, they will take care of the negative seeds, even without our asking them. To succeed, we need to cultivate a good reserve of refreshing seeds.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life)
And such challenges just don’t stop; our boundaries are extremely porous. Viruses, for instance, perform a really irritating function of intermingling the DNA from every species on Earth with every other. As Richard Lewontin
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
If a large percentage of the population dies from the virus, then there isn't going to be anyone left to work the power plants or manage the electrical grid.
Ryan Westfield (Escape the Virus (Last Pandemic #1))
In November, after the harvest, Borlaug would take his four surviving varieties to Sonora, where he would breed them with each other and many other cultivars in an effort to produce new cultivars that both resisted stem rust (as the four survivors did) and produced a lot of grain (as the other strains would if they didn’t succumb to rust). In April he would harvest the seed from the best plants and take it to the Bajío, where he would perform a second round of crossbreeding. Because summer in the Bajío was wet, the area was like an incubator for plant diseases. Borlaug could use the second generation as a screen to check susceptibility to diseases other than P. graminis: viruses, bacteria, different types of fungi.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
viruses present in poultry and poultry products may then be transmitted to those in the general population who handle or eat inadequately cooked chicken.47 These results were replicated recently in the largest such investigation to date, studying more than twenty thousand workers in poultry slaughtering and processing plants. They confirmed the findings of three other studies to date: Workers in these facilities do have increased risk of dying from certain cancers, including cancers of the blood.48 Researchers are
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. The viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes. Evolution is still an infinitely long and tedious biologic game, with only the winners staying at the table, but the rules are beginning to look more flexible. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. They may be a mechanism for keeping new, mutant kinds of DNA in the widest circulation among us.
Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher)
Ocean viruses are stunning not just for their sheer numbers but also for their genetic diversity. The genes in a human and the genes in a shark are quite similar — so similar that scientists can find a related counterpart in the shark genome to most genes in the human genome. The genetic makeup of marine viruses, on the other hand, matches almost nothing. In a survey of viruses in the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda, and the northern Pacific, scientists identified 1.8 million viral genes. Only 10 percent of them showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant, or other organism — even from any other known virus. The other 90 percent were entirely new to science. In 200 liters of seawater, scientists typically find 5,000 genetically distinct kinds of viruses. In a kilogram of marine sediment, there may be a million kinds.
Carl Zimmer (A Planet of Viruses)
The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
While the mechanistic understanding of the cancer cell remained suspended in limbo between viruses and chromosomes, a revolution in the understanding of normal cells was sweeping through biology in the early twentieth century. The seeds of this revolution were planted by a retiring, nearsighted monk in an isolated abbey in Brno, Austria, who bred pea plants as a hobby. In the early 1860s, working alone, Gregor Mendel had identified a few characteristics in his purebred plants that were inherited from one generation to the next—the color of the pea flower, the texture of the pea seed, the height of the pea plant.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
Lectins also facilitate the attachment and binding of viruses and bacteria to their intending 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.
Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
As I write, we now consider nature to have given rise to three or four foundational types of living things, or domains of life. I’m going with four. We have Bacteria, Archaea (microbes that are fundamentally different from bacteria), Eukarya (that’s us, animals and plants together), and Vira. You could also call that last one Viruses. (I took some Latin in school, and I prefer this style of pluralization for this particular second declension noun, describing this particular domain of living or nearly living things.)
Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
Zoopharmacognosy is the long-winded scientific label for studying animal self-medication. You may have seen your pet cat or dog chewing on grass when it's unwell. Chemicals in animal-chosen medicinal plants have been shown to have antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and antihelminthic (antiparasitic worm) properties. Wild chimps eat Vernonia amygdalina to rid themselves of intestinal parasites and aspilla leaves for rheumatism, viruses, and fungal infections. Other animals chew on charcoal and clay to neutralize food toxins and rub themselves wtih citrus, clematis, and piper for skin ailments. Pregnant elephants have been seen to walk miles to find a certain tree of the Boraginaceae family that brings on labor. There are undoubtedly many more remarkable opportunities to be understood and adapted.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
Beginning in 1996, bacteria, virus and other genes have been artificially inserted to the DNA of soy, corn, cottonseed and canola plants. These unlabeled genetically modified (GM) foods carry a risk of triggering life-threatening allergic
Amy Adams (The K.I.S.S. Method to Allergy & Asthma Relief - Based on the books and lectures of Dr. Joel D. Wallach, the Dead Doctors Don't Lie Guy (The K.I.S.S. Method to Optimal Health Book 3))
Symptons of tulip virus: Patterns of yellow discoloration (mosaics, ringspots, mottles) are common. Cause: Sub-microscopic virus particles in the sap of infected plants may be transmitted to healthy tissues by sap-feeding pests such as aphids, by nematodes or other soil-borne pests
Royal Horticultural Society
But your genes can also be different from those of your parents just through random mutation, which is the imperfect copying from one strand of DNA to another. It can literally be a cosmic ray from outer space that knocks into one of your genes and changes it. Genes sometimes jump from one place on the DNA molecule to another. These are called transposon genes. It could be that your parent’s eggs or sperm (or a plant’s ova and pollen) got messed with a little by some chemical. It could be radiation from some radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that caused a mutation. Sometimes viruses get into the reproductive cells of an organism and modify its genes. Virus manipulation can also be exploited deliberately—to adjust the genes of corn plants so they are tolerant of aggressive weed killer, for example.
Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
From all the things he has bothered to find out about the way the Ghoshes ran their business - planting lumpens within unions to spark off violence so that all the union workers could be sacked; an old story of buying off a business from a friend's widow, who did not know any better, for a fraction of its real value; using the Hindu-Muslim riots the year before Independence, the year he was born, to shut down mills, regardless of how many workers were deprived of their livelihoods, and buying up factories in areas emptied by the migration - all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. The anecdotes need not be first-hand; in fact, better if they are not, better if they are repeated across several degrees of separation, because that proves how potent and pervasive they are, bringing everyone together in one huge, collusive matrix. A legendary lecture given by so-and-so in Presidency College in 1926, its iconic status relayed by a nineteen-year-old in 1965 with the words "You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps". The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self-mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past.
Neel Mukherjee (The Lives of Others)
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, 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. We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, without which we could not grow and behave as we do. The forty-odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease. They guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behaviour. If not kept in check, they can cause illnesses and even kill us. We are not a special case. Even bacteria have viruses within them. Even viruses can contain smaller viruses. Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds)
The truth is that inside your digestive system lives a galaxy made up of trillions of bacteria belonging to at least ten thousand different species, plus an as-yet-undetermined number of viruses, fungi, and other microbes. This is your gut biome. You also have an oral biome with seven hundred species of bacteria and a skin biome with a thousand different species.
Steven R. Gundry (Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health (The Plant Paradox Book 7))