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Microbiome Quotes

Browse 8 quotes about Microbiome.

Microbiome Quotes

“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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“A biologist with a history of tooth decay invents a symbiotic microbe which lives in the human mouth and feeds by cleaning our teeth. It secreted calcium, which is poisonous to it, controlling its growth and preventing it from eating the teeth themselves. So this guy, he wants to spread the thing to the world, but it'd never fly, FDA and human squeamishness and all, so he becomes a party animal. He throws wild partys at the lab, kisses female grad students, where's, babies. He backwashes in sodas left on tables. He bums drags of cigarettes. He grants humanity eternally clean and healthy teeth but dies of a terrible cocktail of STDs.”

WeirdDentistry2004MicrobiomeAgent 506
Book:Join My Cult!
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