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Bacteria Quotes

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Bacteria Quotes

“...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured.”

PainScienceCultureEmotionResearchExperienceTrueBiologyRewardVirusCureBacteriaMicrobesVaccineIncubator
Author:Felix D'Herelle
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“Dr. Richard Selzer is a surgeon and a favorite author of mine. He writes the most beautiful and compassionate descriptions of his patients and the human dramas they confront. In his book Letters to a Young Doctor, he said that most young people seem to be protected for a time by an imaginary membrane that shields them from horror. They walk in it every day but are hardly aware of its presence. As the immune system protects the human body from the unseen threat of harmful bacteria, so this mythical membrane guards them from life-threatening situations. Not every young person has this protection, of course, because children do die of cancer, congenital heart problems, and other disorders. But most of them are shielded—and don’t realize it. Then, as years roll by, one day it happens. Without warning, the membrane tears, and horror seeps into a person’s life or into the life of a loved one. It is at this moment that an unexpected theological crisis presents itself.”

PeopleLifeYearsChildrenBookBodyHappensBeautifulYoungTimeTearsHorrorOne DayHumanCrisisThreatCancerProtectionUnexpectedWarningCompassionateImaginaryProtectedDieUnseenPresencePersonMomentShieldsTheologicalWalkTheNotDoToItImmune SystemBeAndMostOfBacteriaAwareRealizeOtherSituationsEveryDon TThemTheyFromWithoutEvery DayHisHarmfulPatientsByConfrontMythicalIntoDisordersPresentsItselfRollSurgeonGuardsItsDescriptionsSeemLoved OneDramasProtectsHardlyMembraneLife ThreateningCongenital Heart ProblemsDoctor Richard SelzerLetters To A Young DoctorPerson SSeeps
Book:Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
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“He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as disease, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims. The bacteria are results of disease. In the course of time we will be able to show perfectly that the microscopical little fellows are not the disease cause, but that they come after, that they are scavengers accompanying the disease, and that they are perfectly harmless in every respect. They are the outcome of the disease, are present wherever the disease is, and by the microscope it has been discovered that every pathological result has its corresponding bacteria. The Old School consider these the cause, but we will be able to show that disease cause is much more subtle than anything that can be shown by a microscope. We will be able to show you by a process of reasoning, step by step, the folly of hunting for disease cause by the implements of the senses. –The Art and Science of Homeopathic Medicine, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., Page 22, 2002. [Originally published as Lectures on Homœopathic Philosophy in 1900.]”

HealthDiseaseGermsOld SchoolBacteriaHomeopathy
Author:James Tyler Kent, A.M., M.D.
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“I was born in a dumpster, in an alley behind a dive bar. A wee speck of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, baptized by saliva from a hospital orderly, clinging to a wedge of pizza crust. Honestly, I didn’t want to hurt anyone—certainly not the Norwegian rat who gobbled me with his yellowed fangs, feeding me a banquet of liquefied refuse. We’d both gotten a bad rap, MRSA and rats.”

HumorSexScience FictionHorror FictionBacteriaBacterium
Book:Rigor Morbid: Lest Ye Become
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“For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”

Science FictionNatural SelectionBacteriaMartiansAlien Invasion
Book:The War of the Worlds
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“In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now, by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and then shriveled and brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.”

InfectionBacteriaAlien InvasionWeedsAlien Life Forms
Book:The War of the Worlds
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“Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...] Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...] The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...] The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.”

GardeningPlantsBacteriaFungiOrganic FarmingPlant LifeMicrobiologyOrganic GardeningSoil HealthAllotment
Book:Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
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“To make things even more challenging, cells must also be able to make all of their component molecular machines using only the resources that are available in the local environment. Think of the magnitude of this accomplishment. Many bacteria are able to build all of their own molecules from the a few simple raw materials like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ammonia. A single bacterial cell knows how to build several thousand types of proteins, including motors, girders, toxins, catalysts, and construction machinery. This cell also builds hundreds of RNA molecules with different orderings of nucleotides, as well as a diverse collection of lipids, sugar polymers, and a bewildering collection of exotic small molecules. All of these different molecules must be created from scratch, using only the molecules that the cell eats, drinks, and breathes.”

InspirationalHumorScienceCellsComplexityBacteriaResourcefulMolecularBiosynthesis
Book:The Machinery of Life
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“Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.”

CattleBacteriaFactory FarmingFeedlots
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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“The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It's where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It's the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses.”

SpiritualityHealthy LivingNervous SystemImmune SystemBacteriaGutGut Brain
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.”

BacteriaCopperMicrobesFungiAlgaeAntimicrobial
Book:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
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“Everything in all manifested universes is composed of strings. They are created immediately after a Big Bang and they rapidly multiply like viruses or bacteria until they are brought under the control by dark matter and dark energy.”

StringsVirusesBacteriaBig BangDark MatterDark EnergyManifested Universes
Book:How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny
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“We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.”

VirusesBacteriaMicrobesFungiMicroorganismsMicrobiome
Author:Michael Specter
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“There's no such thing as good and bad bacteria or fungi. It's not good and bad. It's just whether there's too much of it or too little of it and things are out of balance, so the 'bad things' have an opportunity to prosper.”

GardeningBacteriaMicrobesMicroorganismsMicrobiologyMicrobiome
Book:The Regenerative Grower's Guide to Garden Amendments: Using Locally Sourced Materials to Make Mineral and Biological Extracts and Ferments
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“Who would you be if you had somehow avoided every tenacious impediment in the invisible bacterial obstacle course of your daily life? Or what if, through some miracle of science...there was a way to cleanse the detritus that has cumulatively contaminated your genes since before you were even born? Who would you be today? Would you be the same person; the same unique individual? Or would you be something more?”

What IfPotentialGenesHuman PotentialBacteriaUniqueness Of IndividualSickness And DiseasesUnique IndividualSicknessesMiracle Of Science
Book:Upgrade Soul
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“The Hospital for Infectious Diseases...The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their only reason for being. Unceasing approbation of life; a rough, rude approbation that did not care at all about appearances. An approbation of life beyond law and beyond morality, dramatized and incessantly demanded by delirium, incontinence, bloody excrement, vomit, diarrhea, and horrible odors. This air which, like a mob of merchants hosting bids at a produce auction, craved in every second the call: "Still alive! Still alive!"...This mass off active bodies, unified by the unique form of existence they bore, namely, contagious disease. Here the value of men's lives and germ's lives frequently came to the same thing; patient and practitioner were metamorphosed into bacteria - into such objectless life. Here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no prettier desire was allowed. Here happiness reigned. In fact, here happiness, that mostly rapidly rotting of all foods, reigned in its most rotten, most inedible form.”

HappinessDiseaseHospitalBacteriaPurpose In LifeInfectedInfected People
Author:Yukio Mishima
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“You are one miniscule piece of a never-ending cycle. In fact, you're not even a piece. You're just a holder for billions and billions of other pieces. Whether that's organic components, living organisms inside your body, bacteria or whatever it is, you're just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what's good about it.”

TryingFactsBodyUniverseEnjoyPiecesYour BodyBillionsCyclesMmaOrganismsSoupComponentsNever EndingBacteriaLiving OrganismsNever Ending Cycle
Author:Joe Rogan
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“What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we've studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it's all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we're looking for, "life 2.0."”

WantDifferentEarthSpaceCommonTreeShareFishesAliensBelongingGenesOaksMushroomsSampleBacteriaTree Of LifeOak TreeAlien Life
Author:Paul Davies
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“Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.”

IfsKnowsMenMayLittlesEyeFormUniverseBrainConsciousnessMillionsExamplePlanetsBuiltGreenEvolveAppropriateLimbsNeuronsBacteriaOrigin Of LifeMartians
Book:Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History
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“When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.”

WritingMeanTreeBearsDiseaseFleshMonstersGoldenParadiseApplesFlashFloodEarthquakesVolcanoesRottingBacteriaCactusQuicksandApple TreesScorpionsRattlesnakesDisease And DeathTarantulasSandstormsFlash Floods
Author:Edward Abbey
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“Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.”

WorldWaySelfSeemsMovingFormChoicesMemoriesSupportStudyCenturyEventsDevelopmentPerceptionPhysicsBehaveBiologyUnpredictableTwentieth CenturyEnergeticElementalsBacteriaAnimism
Book:God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology
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“In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.”

IfsKnowsFirstsLooksImportantHappensEarthFormCoursesShareUniversalDiedOriginalsSpeciesLeavingChainsAssumptionPairsAncestorTraitsOrganismsExtinctionDescendantsBacteriaLineageLiving OrganismsSpecies Extinction
Author:David M. Raup
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“The phrase 'contrary to all expectations' rings through the story of the progress of human knowledge. It was 'contrary to all expectations' that the Earth was found to revolve around the sun, and not the other way round, and that a mould growing in one of Dr. Alexander Fleming's dishes was found to be capable of destroying bacteria. When in 1989 the spacecraft Voyager 2 got close enough to the planet Naptune to take detailed pictures of the surface, they were 'contrary to all expectations'.”

WayHumansEnoughStoriesEarthScienceFoundSunGrowingProgressPlanetsCapableExpectationsRoundsSurfaceContraryRingsPhrasesDestroyingDishesDrsMouldBacteriaHuman KnowledgeSpacecraft
Author:Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart
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“Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.”

WayFallLostAliveGroupsAtheismLuckyCreaturesPercentDiedCompetitionPositive AtheismMatesAncestorBacteriaLucky YouProgenyReproducing
Author:Daniel Dennett
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“Every November, during the certain holiday people love so much, people take a dead turkey, open up the dead turkey’s ass, or carve out a really big hole in their ass, take some stuffing and shove it inside their dead empty ass, and use the little dead ass as an oven to bake some bread. Somebody else’s dead empty bacteria-laden ass to make bread? Ass bread?! And people think vegans are weird? Because we eat tofu? And rice, and beans, and lentils?”

PeopleThinkingLittlesUseBigsCertainEmptyHolesBreadAssHolidayVeganTurkeysRiceBeansNovemberOvensBacteriaTofuLentils
Author:Gary Yourofsky
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