Quotes About Bacteria

#1. You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.

Bonnie Bassler

#2. A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

Gunter Blobel

#3. Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.

Richard Dawkins

#4. Science chases money
and money chases its tail
and the best minds of my generation can't make bail.
But the bacteria are coming
that's my prediction.
It's the answer to this culture
of the quick-fix prescription.

Ani DiFranco

#5. The bacteria of resentment bred: distance turned to distrust; distrust turned to bitterness; bitterness to hate, which is, after all, a kind of grievous love

Johnny Rich

#6. New science reveals that exercise positively influences the gut's balance of bacteria to favor colonies that prevent weight gain.

David Perlmutter

#7. [Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that ... allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference.

Bonnie Bassler

#8. We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.

Lewis Thomas

#9. Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning ... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

Lynn Margulis

#10. At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists.

Nick Lane

#11. Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially - with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect - are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.

Steven D. Levitt

#12. Recently a piece of Martian rock has been recovered from Antarctica. NASA has discovered fossils of bacteria-like organisms on this rock, suggesting that life could have come on earth from outer space.

Girish Chandra

#13. Listeria ... secretes two or three proteins that together hijack the host cell's cytoskeleton. As a result, the bacteria motor around the inside of the infected cell, pushed by an actin 'comet tail' that associates and dissociates behind them.

Nick Lane

#14. I actually believe that you should not wash your jeans, ever. In Japan, they actually put them in the freezer. That kills the bacteria and makes them not smell anymore.

Benny Blanco

#15. We've all been sick; we're all afraid of infection. I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it's important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.

Bonnie Bassler

#16. Corporations are like protean bacteria; you hit them with accountability and they mutate and change their names.

Doug Anderson

#17. What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.

Stephen Jay Gould

#18. We mostly don't get sick. Most often, bacteria are keeping us well.

Bonnie Bassler

#19. I'm in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.

Clarice Lispector

#20. It seems now clear that a belief in the functional importance of all enzymes found in bacteria is possible only to those richly endowed with Faith.

Marjory Stephenson

#21. Morning breath is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.

Mary Roach

#22. But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.

Hans Zinsser

#23. Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

Douglas Coupland

#24. If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Andrew H. Knoll

#25. I love weird science. I learned in an article in 'National Geographic' that there are trillions of bacteria in our guts that help us digest food. These are non-human creatures.

Will Hobbs

#26. If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

Stewart Brand

#27. [Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

E. O. Wilson

#28. People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.

Michel Faber

#29. DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

Spencer Wells

#30. Since we're living with antibiotic drugs and chlorinated water and antibacterial soap and all these factors in our contemporary lives that I'd group together as a 'war on bacteria,' if we fail to replenish [good bacteria], we won't effectively get nutrients out of the food we're eating.

Sandor Katz

#31. When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we'd have the resistance problem we face today. We didn't give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.

Bonnie Bassler

#32. I always cook meats on low and things like eggs or cakes on high, because things with eggs in them you want to cook through and through; and you don't want to put food in there that cooks so slowly that bacteria develops.

Michele Scicolone

#33. Biocides, for example, are designed to kill bacteria - it's not a benign material.

William Stringfellow

#34. If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.

Nathan Wolfe

#35. Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

Alan Huffman

#36. Periodontal bacteria can easily slip into the bloodstream and cause infection elsewhere in the body.

Mallory Ortberg

#37. Vaccines are little pieces of bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that you're ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without becoming sick first.

Rene Fester Kratz

#38. One might have complained about the soot and ashes or about the pipes and curtain rods that hung crazily from the ceiling, but patients never lived in a hospital ward so nearly free of bacteria as this one that was sterilized by fire.

Michihiko Hachiya

#39. Fermented foods contain natural probiotics, or healthy bacteria, that can take your health to the next level. Nearly every culture has a version of a fermented food: yogurt, kefir, miso, and fermented vegetables, including sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi.

Sara Gottfried

#40. Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.

Walker Percy

#41. Any bacteria planning to rot my taters will die screaming. In

Andy Weir

#42. They all have in common that they are bacteria caused by bowel and feces.

Kennedy

#43. Every time someone uses a bathroom and they flush, all the bacteria is shot into the air.

Megan Fox

#44. The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

Lewis Thomas

#45. Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

Walter Gilbert

#46. If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.

Sam Kean

#47. There's a respected theory in astronomy called Panspermia," Glinn finally continued. "It holds that life may have spread through the galaxy in bacteria or spores carried on meteorites or in clouds of dust. But

Douglas Preston

#48. In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.

Benjamin Franklin

#49. Almost nothing influences our gut bacteria as much as the food we eat. Preboiotics are the most powerful tool at our disposal if we want to support our good bacteria - that is, those that are already there and are there to stay.

Giulia Enders

#50. Bacteria and parasites cannot cause disease processes unless they find their own peculiar morbid soil in which to grow and multiply.

Henry Lindlahr

#51. Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of

David Quammen

#52. My bacteria glow in the dark - no human being doesn't like that.

Bonnie Bassler

#53. There's very little that shocks me because I consider life a miracle so I guess what shocks me is that life exists. How the hell did we get here? What shocks me is that bacteria alter their genes and resist antibiotics and viruses resist vaccines.

Bernie Siegel

#54. As far as I am concerned, LGBT can only stand for leprosy, gonorrhea, bacteria, and tuberculosis, all of which are detrimental to human existence.

Yahya Jammeh

#55. We are, after all, citizens of the world - a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's?

Anthony Bourdain

#56. When you're in the womb, you're in a sterile environment. When you enter the birth canal and are born, you're no longer in a sterile environment. Very quickly you have bacteria living on your skin, in your nose and throat.

Paul A. Offit

#57. Most bacteria aren't bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you're breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don't get sick.

Bonnie Bassler

#58. People are like germs, only bigger. That bit of wisdom has proven true, for the most part. Humans are little more than highly evolved bacteria, leeches on a rotting ball of clay. It's depressing, I know.

Mike Duran

#59. It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.

Bonnie Bassler

#60. The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#61. Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.

Bonnie Bassler

#62. 'I really don't see what all the fuss is about, Sir Hugh,' said Kate with a polite smile. 'As a man of science you should know that urine is sterile. It's only when it's left to stand that it accumulates bacteria. So, if I were you, Sir Hugh, I'd eat my soup quickly.'

Kenneth Oppel

#63. As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, "Animals might be evolution's icing, but bacteria are really the cake.

Ed Yong

#64. these same chemicals found in the brain are also produced in the gut, and that their availability to the brain is largely governed by the activity of gut bacteria, we are forced to realize that ground zero for all things mood-related is the gut.

David Perlmutter

#65. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

Noam Chomsky

#66. Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Richard Dawkins

#67. Brenda cared for our bacteria with a love and affection that some people don't show their flesh-and-blood children. She would sneak in between classes to coo encouragingly at them, cheering on their growth.

Eileen Cook

#68. For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

Richard Dawkins

#69. The Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 after tests discovered carcinogens, lead and dangerous bacteria flowing from faucets in New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Boston and elsewhere.

Charles Duhigg

#70. I am in favor of deliberately spreading methodically prepared bacteria among people and animals
mildew ... to destroy the harvests, anthrax to destroy horses and livestock, and the plague, in order to kill not only entire armies, but also the inhabitants of large regions.

Winston Churchill

#71. Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant.

Joseph Roth

#72. pharmacology of its class. A good grasp of the use of specific agents to target specific bacteria leads to

Donna Coffman

#73. There was a toilet in the far corner, with nothing in it except basic facilities and about a trillion bacteria. It was like a huge three-dimensional petri dish.

Lee Child

#74. Since then, I've added my own shit to it as well. The worse it smells, the better things are going. That's the bacteria at work!

Andy Weir

#75. Understanding how Cas9 is able to locate specific 20-base-pair target sequences within genomes that are millions to billions of base pairs long may enable improvements to gene targeting and genome editing efforts in bacteria and other types of cells.

Jennifer Doudna

#76. 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

#77. There is no significant difference between human activities and those by amoebas and even bacteria, well, on the GRAND SCALE.

Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#78. Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.

Nancy Gibbs

#79. Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes by which bacteria manufacture new proteins for cell growth and replication.

David Quammen

#80. With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#81. In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn's skin.

Robin Marantz Henig

#82. Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

Tom Wolfe

#83. The biggest food-related risk in pregnancy is listeria. It's a dangerous bacteria, to which pregnant women are especially susceptible, that can lead to miscarriage or stillbirth.

Emily Oster

#84. You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

Vandana Shiva

#85. Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.

Bonnie Bassler

#86. At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.

Harvey V. Fineberg

#87. No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Vaclav Smil

#88. Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

Gore Vidal

#89. If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.

Jerry A. Coyne

#90. When it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, people say 'Yuck! Why would scientists do that?' Because sometimes it is the safest, cheapest and most effective technology to advance sustainable agriculture and enhance food security.

Pamela Ronald

#91. By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by numbers, it's not even close.

Bonnie Bassler

#92. I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.

Bonnie Bassler

#93. This triple-decker reflects our evolutionary development from the earliest model (single-celled bacteria) to the latest (George Clooney). Each

Ruby Wax

#94. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

Bill Bryson

#95. Happiness and bacteria have one thing in common; they multiply by dividing!

Rutvik Oza

#96. On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

James Thurber

#97. To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we're killing are our protectors.

Sandor Katz

#98. I don't get sick much because in the U.S. I always eat with my fingers, you know, to get used to the bacteria.

Abbey Lee Kershaw

#99. Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

Craig Venter

#100. More than 95 percent of the world's bacteria are harmless to humans. Many are extremely beneficial. Disinfectants have no place in a normal household. They are appropriate only if a family member is sick or the dog poops on the carpet.

Giulia Enders