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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.
Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.
From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, man is subject to the activities of numerous microbes.
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.
Microbes are doing things we didn't even know they could do 10 years ago.
I love weird science. I learned in an article in 'National Geographic' that there are trillions of bacteria in our guts that help us digest food. These are non-human creatures.
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.
Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.
Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.