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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ed Yong
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December 3 - December 19, 2020
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, they were also taking giant steps for microbe-kind.
Most microbes are not pathogens. They do not make us sick. There are fewer than 100 species of bacteria that cause infectious diseases in humans;8 by contrast, the thousands of species in our guts are mostly harmless.
Symbiosis hints at the threads that connect all life on Earth. Why can organisms as disparate as humans and bacteria live together and cooperate? Because we share a common ancestor. We store information in DNA using the same coding scheme.
The immune system isn’t just a means of controlling microbes. It is at least partly controlled by microbes.
A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. “Both partners may benefit but there’s this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict – conflict that can never be totally resolved.”
The immune system’s main function is to manage our relationships with our resident microbes. It’s more about balance and good management than defence and destruction.
In this counter-intuitive reality, viruses can be allies, immune systems can support microbes, and a breastfeeding mother isn’t just feeding a baby but also setting up an entire world.
Take a globe and spin it until the side that faces you is largely blue. You are now staring into the Pacific Ocean, in all its daunting immensity. Now stab your finger into its heart. Down a bit. Right a bit. You are now prodding the Line Islands, a linear constellation of eleven tiny land masses, slashing their way through the middle of nowhere.
An important lesson emerged: microbes matter but so do we, their hosts. Our guts, like all ecosystems, aren’t defined just by the species within them but also by the nutrients that flow through them.
Scientists will talk about Occam’s razor – the principle that favours simple, elegant explanations over convoluted ones. I think the truth is that scientists, like everyone else, find simple explanations psychologically soothing. They reassure us that our messy, confusing world can be understood, and perhaps even manipulated. They
It would be easier if there was a single “healthy” microbiome that we could aim for, or if there were clear ways of classifying particular communities as healthy or unhealthy. But there aren’t. Ecosystems are complex, varied, ever-changing and context-dependent – qualities that are the enemies of easy categorisation.
I’m standing in a room the size of a small garden shed. There’s enough room to swing a cat, just, but you’d get claw-marks on the walls.
By jumping into an ancient coffee borer, the gene allowed this unassuming beetle to spread across coffee-growing regions around the world, and become a royal pain in the espresso.
Even paracetamol (acetaminophen), one of the most familiar drugs in the world, is more effective in some people than others because of the microbes they carry.
The legendary life-saver Florence Nightingale advocated as much some 150 years earlier. She had no explicit knowledge of the microbiome but, during the Crimean War, she noticed that patients would recover from infections more readily if she opened a window.
David Quammen was the first person I told about the idea for this book and he has been an astoundingly gracious supporter from the start. His masterwork, Song of the Dodo, helped to erode an early writing block, as at various points did Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen and Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong. Their works sat on my shelf as reminders of the quality I aspired to reach.
