About Bacteria
About Bacteria
From "Short History of Nearly Everything"
By Bill Bryson
I am now two third into that delightful book, covering centuries of scientific knowledge, listening to it during the past few months while jogging, so going through these nearly 18 hours wonderfully narrated by Richard Matthews at a steady pace. I know I shall be looking forward to repeat that experience with the written version.
It has been a fascinating journey so far and I have specially enjoyed how Bill Bryson is introducing the realm of bacteria, I listened to it twice, which is why I wanted to share that particular passage with you.
Highly recommended reading, of course!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_bryson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything
http://amzn.com/076790818X
Image source: http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/22/bacterial-arms-race/-
CHAPTER 20: SMALL WORLD
It’s probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumably did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.
In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you body odors.
And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to your hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.
Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn’t survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make them usable again; without their diligent munching nothing would rot. They purify our water and keep our soils productive. Bacteria synthesize vitamins in our gut, convert the things we eat into useful sugars and polysaccharides, and go to war on alien microbes that slip down our gullet.
We depend totally on bacteria to pluck nitrogen from the air and convert it into useful nucleotides and amino acids for us. It is a prodigious and gratifying feat. As Margulis and Sagan note, to do the same thing industrially (as when making fertilizers) manufacturers must heat the source materials to 500 degrees centigrade and squeeze them to three hundred times normal pressures. Bacteria do it all the time without fuss, and thank goodness, for no larger organism could survive without the nitrogen they pass on.
Above all, microbes continue to provide us with the air we breathe and to keep the atmosphere stable. Microbes, including the modern versions of cyanobacteria, supply the greater part of the planet’s breathable oxygen. Algae and other tiny organisms bubbling away in the sea blow out about 150 billion kilos of the stuff every year.
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12 comments:
Thinking about Louis, you tent to find that people who work with microbes carry them on their skin no matter how clean they are. First hand experience.
Barry Smith I read elsewhere that each of us is growing what becomes an unique blend of microbe species and, together, we are forming a highly integrated ecosystem. Health problems arise when there are too many of them for too long, when a new species is introduced and creates an unbalance or when the population of an existing species explodes.
Better have friendly microbes on our hands than none because if our skin is too well cleaned then too many "foreign" microbe species will try it out with possibly unpleasant consequences. A sort of paradox :-)
that was eye-opening.
Very true. But it's the darn fungus that's the problem.
and if we acidify the sea, do we lose out on oxygen to breathe? Another reason to tread gently on this earth.
Barry Smith Fungi are an equally fascinating realm of life, worth a separate Bryson extract :-)
Diana Studer At least, after decades of studies, we are beginning to understand how our ecosystems work. One can still be amazed today that we managed to ban ozone-depleting substances from being used in the industry, we did that!
Zaid El-Hoiydi - If you ever stayed a reasonable amount in the American Midwest, and read Mr. Bryson's The Lost Continent, you'd find yourself snugly at home with his description of small-town and rural America. I spent four years in Iowa City, a stone's throw from his birthplace in Des Moines, and I can tell you, when I read his book eons ago, there was much to be appreciated for his Midwestern (with a tinge of British) humor... details that ordinary folks just gloss over, but he can spend half a treatise on 'em.
Javier Seen I was ready for an avalanche of facts from such a book but the critiques were right, it is written in a very entertaining way and has never been boring so far. I am thus ready to believe that his other books are equally worth reading. Thanks for the hint. I expected that a few of you might have already heard of or read Bill Bryson.
Thanks for the post! Bacteria are definitely important! Of course, we'd be dead without them (the helpful ones, anyway). But I also wonder how much we'd weigh without them. How much do only the human cells in our body weigh?
Odracirys Mediys I just finished to do some jogging (about 2 PM here) and this wonderful book at the same occasion. I remember some comparative figures with regard to our body but I'd need to look that up. I intent to share some more extracts as they still resonate in my mind.
Cool! Looking forward to them.
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