Life's Engines Quotes

“Approximately 80% of all the antibiotics consumed in the United States are used for animal production, not human health.”
― Paul G Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“we are all macroscopic bodies, and our existence is made possible only by the evolution of microscopic nanomachines that evolved a long, long time ago, in microbes.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“The microbes are the stewards of this planet, and we barely understand how they evolved a system of moving electrons and elements across its surface.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“We have become tinkerers of microbial evolution—and we don’t understand what we are doing.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“significant fraction of the horizontal gene transfers is carried out to manipulate a specific reaction in nature that we wish to change; for example, making a new photosynthetic organism from scratch.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“chemically terminating the sequence randomly, at any of the four nucleotides along the chain. They then had to find the molecular mass of what was left from the chemical reaction. The molecular masses of the products were determined by separating each according to its size on a large gel. By applying an electrical field across through the gel, the chopped up bits of DNA could be forced to move through the gel. The smaller bits moved faster, and hence further than the larger bits and by measuring how far each bit moved, one could calculate which nucleotide came first, second, third, and so on.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“Very quickly, we acquire microbes from the environment. We get microbes from touching and sucking on our mothers after we are born; we eat raw food; we eat some dirt; we may even scoop some poop. In fact, one of the first microbes to colonize our guts is E. coli, which, one hopes, is a benign strain.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“A classic example is that of food poisoning caused by the common bacterium, Escherichia coli, which is found in every gut of every single one of us.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“In the upper ocean there are several hundred million viruses in every milliliter of seawater; that is more than ten times all of the bacteria and other microbes together.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“All animals, including us, are completely dependent on Rubisco for our very existence.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“Sets of three deoxyribonucleic acids in a specific order encode a specific amino acid, and the proteins are manufactured on those very old nanomachines, the ribosomes. The proteins are themselves used to make the nanomachines that allow the organism to generate energy and reproduce. The reproduction of cells is dependent on replication of the genes, and the replication of genes is dependent on the ability of the organism to generate energy, survive, and grow.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“In prokaryotes, such as bacteria, several million deoxyribonucleic acids are strung together to form a large circular molecule that contains the instructions for making several thousand proteins. The proteins are, in turn, composed of twenty individual amino acids strung together in a specific order. The twenty amino acids to make proteins are found in every living organism on Earth.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

“What we do know is that the basic structure of the tree of life has helped us understand that all extant life on Earth is derived from a single, extinct microbial organism.”
― Paul G. Falkowski, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable