Allies and Enemies Quotes

“commented on the future of antibiotic drugs. Perhaps, Fleming mused, a time would come when anyone with real or perceived illness could get penicillin. “The ignorant man,” he warned, “may underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Pasteur had received an honorary degree from the University of Bonn in 1868, but returned it later during the height of French-German tension. “Today this parchment is hateful to me,” Pasteur wrote to the university dean, “and it offends me to see my name, which you have decorated with the qualification virum clarissimum, placed under the auspices of a name that will henceforth be loathed by my country, that of Guillermus Rex.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“During a rabies scare in 1885, Pasteur concocted a treatment and gave the untested drug to a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a grocer’s dog. Three weeks later, Meister had almost fully recovered. Pasteur’s legend received considerable help by the fact that Meister hailed from Alsace, a region controlled by Germany but claimed by France. The tricolor declared a victory for French science and for Pasteur who had beaten the German, Robert Koch, who had like Pasteur been working on vaccines. As a grown man, Joseph Meister took a job as a guard at the Institut Pasteur after Pasteur’s death. When German troops entered Paris in 1940, they swarmed the institute’s grounds and ordered that Pasteur’s crypt be opened. Meister likely had been one of several men who defended the crypt against the Wehrmacht and prevented its defilement. Shortly after, Meister inexplicably shot himself through the head. Even this act became part of Pasteur’s celebrity.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Pasteur noticed that a drop of liquid from the fermentation flasks gave a curious result in the microscope. When Pasteur put a glass cover slip on top of the drop, some of the microbes avoided the edges of the slip where the liquid was exposed to the air. Pasteur introduced biology to anaerobic bacteria. By”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Skin bacteria in these places degrade the sweat’s sebaceous oils to a mixture of small fatty acids and nitrogen- and sulfur-containing compounds, all of which vaporize into the air to cause body odor. Some”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“The enzyme lysozyme in tears and saliva kills bacteria, and skin oils contain fatty acids that inhibit gram-positive bacteria. If those defenses fail, the immune system sets in motion a hierarchy of defenses meant to find and destroy any foreign matter in the bloodstream. Dental”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“The pH rises in the intestines and bacterial numbers increase a millionfold from about 1,000 cells per gram of stomach contents, which to a microbiologist is a small number. Humans, cows, pigs, termites, cockroaches, and almost every other animal rely on intestinal bacteria to participate in the enzymatic digestion of food. The numbers reach 1012 cells per gram of digested material.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“The skin holds habitats that vary in moisture, oils, salts, and aeration. The scalp, face, chest and back, limbs, underarms, genitals, and feet make up the skin’s main habitats, and each of these contains smaller, distinct living spaces. The entire skin surface has about one million bacteria on each square centimeter”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“around, some microbiologists have suggested that classifying bacteria by species is futile. It seems as if all bacteria belong to one mega-species, and different strains within this species differ by the genes they express and the genes they repress. By classifying bacteria into a single species, all bacteria would obey the definition for a species first proposed by Ernst Mayr in 1942: Members of the same species”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Venter concluded from a two-year study of marine microbes that for every 200 miles of ocean, 85 percent of the species, judged by unique genetic sequences, changed. The ocean appears to contain millions of subenvironments rather than one massive marine environment, and each milliliter holds millions of bacteria. The actual number of bacteria in the oceans alone may exceed any previous estimates for the entire planet.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“No one knows the number of bacterial species. About 5,000 species have been characterized and another 10,000 have been partially identified. Biodiversity authority Edward O. Wilson has estimated that biology has identified no more than 10 percent of all species and possibly as little as 1 percent. Wilson’s reasoning would put the total number of bacterial species at 100,000, probably a tenfold underestimate. Most environmental microbiologists believe that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all bacteria can currently be grown in laboratories so that they can be identified. Microbial geneticist J.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“(Courtesy of BioVir Laboratories, Inc.) Three years after Koch and Hesse switched to agar-based media, another assistant in the laboratory, Richard J. Petri, designed a shallow glass dish to ease the dispensing of the sterilized molten media. The dishes measured a little less than a half-inch deep and 4 inches in diameter. This Petri dish design has never been improved upon and is a staple of every microbiology lab today. The size”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“York from a Dutch neighbor who had immigrated from Java.” People living in the warm East Indian climate noticed that birds gathered a substance from seaweed and used it as a binding material in nests. The material did not melt and did not appear to spoil—bacteria cannot degrade it. Hesse passed on to Koch the idea of replacing gelatin with agar-agar. Koch immediately formulated the agar with nutrients into a medium that melted when heat-sterilized and solidified when cooled”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Koch’s postulates here: The same pathogen must be present in every case of a disease. The pathogen must be isolated from the diseased host and grown in a laboratory to show it is alive. The pathogen should be checked to confirm its purity and then injected into a healthy host (a laboratory animal). The injected pathogen must cause the same disease in the new host. The pathogen must be recovered from the new host and again grown in the laboratory. Some”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“that a given bacterial species caused a specific disease. In 1876, Koch established a set of criteria that a bacterium must meet in test animals to be identified as the cause of disease. The criteria to become known as Koch’s postulates laid the foundation for diagnosis of infectious disease that continues today. Medical historians have debated whether the criteria attributed to Robert”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Communities contain a messaging system in which identical cells or unrelated cells respond to each other and change their behavior. This adaptation is called quorum sensing. Quorum”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“the stars visible from Earth have been estimated at “only” 7 × 1022. The mass of these cells approaches 2 × 1015 pounds, or more than 2,000 times the mass of all 6.5 billion people on Earth. Of these, the overwhelming majority lives in the soil. Bacteria”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria

“Guesswork plays a part in these estimates. Bacteria exist 40 miles above the Earth and 7 miles deep in the ocean, and most of these places have so far been inaccessible. The total numbers of bacteria reach 1030.”
― Anne E. Maczulak, Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria