A Planet of Viruses

by Carl Zimmer

In 1992, a microbiologist named Timothy Rowbotham scooped up some water from a hospital cooling tower in the English city of Bradford. He put it under a microscope and saw a welter of life. He saw amoebae and other single-celled protozoans, about the size of human cells. He saw bacteria, about a hundred times smaller. Rowbotham was searching for the cause of an outbreak of pneumonia that had been raging through Bradford. In the ranks of the microbes he found in the cooling tower water, he thought he found a promising candidate: a sphere of bacterial size, sitting inside an amoeba. Rowbotham believed he had found a new bacterium, and dubbed it Bradfordcoccus.