microbial community Quotes

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.

You think of yourselves as human beings, but I think of you as 99 percent bacterial.

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.

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.

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.

Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.

[Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that ... allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference.

There are hundreds of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them. There may be a million microbes of misery floating about us. Never mind! They dare not approach us, they have no power to get a hold on us, until the mind is weakened. This is the great fact: strength is life. Weakness is death. Strength is felicity, life eternal, immortal. Weakness is constant strain and misery: weakness is death

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

There are hundreds of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them.