Microbial Ecology Quotes

Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

Better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent E. coli 0157:H7 infections are badly needed.

We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms.

What's natural is the microbe. All the rest-heath, integrity, purity (if you like)-is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.

It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.

The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don't know it have so far been overlooked.

Of course there are depressing periods when nothing appears to be happening. But whenever anything was happening, and even when nothing was happening, it was fun just to do phage experiments.

Microbes are just nature's janitors who work to clean up a poorly kept culturing medium. Trying to keep microbes off of and out of your body is like trying to keep the wind out of the trees.

[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

The best engineered organisms can outpace others, even if they start smaller or later.

The discovery of streptomycin as a product of a rather obscure group of microorganisms, the actinomycetes, led to the study of these organisms as potential producers of other chemotherapeutic substances.

The big question that scientists haven't even begun to get an answer for is how many species of microorganisms are there? Now, this is not stamp collecting. What we need is experts totally devoting their research to everything they can find out about every species, in a community of scientists who appreciate that every fact counts...everything new you learn about any species in any group is worth publishing somewhere.

We don't even know what species are out there, for the most part, particularly when you get down to the microbes and very small invertebrates. They make up the mass of the organisms around us, including the soil we depend on, the soil of cornfields as well as hardwood forests. We haven't taken ecology to the point where we can even make a crude prediction of what's going to happen when we've reduced the living world down to a certain level.

Microbes are doing things we didn't even know they could do 10 years ago.

From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, man is subject to the activities of numerous microbes.

With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world

Antibiotic resistance is as old as the dirt that coats our planet.

Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.

We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds - the same as our brain.

We need to know more about how group A strep interact with humans to cause so many different illnesses.

In the development of antibiotics, the soil microbiological population has contributed more than its share. It is to the soil that the microbiologists came in search of new antibacterial agents.

What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives. We are them; they are us.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.