“Microbes are fascinating to me. I think they’re the ultimate underdogs.”
Science writer Ed Yong says that for “a long time microbes have been cast as germs, as villains … but now we’re realising they’re the rulers of the planet.”
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Microbes in a slice of a biofilm. Photo: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Photo: Photo supplied
Ed Yong writes for Atlantic magazine, and is the author of ‘I Contain Multitudes - the microbes within us and a grander view of life’, a book about microbes and the microbiome. He writes that each human contains trillions of microbes that run the show in our bodies, digesting our food, protecting our health and tuning our immune systems.
Ed says that the title of the book reflects the fact that we’re all “massive communities of living things.”
Ed says that although there is now a lot of talk about good microbes, some microbiologists say we have gone from ‘germophobia’ to ‘micromania’, and we shouldn’t forget that there are bad microbes as well.
“The microbes inside us are not inherently our friends or our enemies,” says Ed. “They can do important things for us but we need to keep them in line. We are just another ecosystem for them to live in.”
Our Changing World spoke with Ed at the 2017 Queenstown Research Week, where he was one of the keynote speakers. We also spoke with Nobel Prize winner Bruce Beutler, about his research into the human immune system, which exists to protect us from undesirable microbes.
