Quotes About Microbes

#1. My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It's far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y'all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip.

A. J. Jacobs

#2. Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

Nathan Wolfe

#3. All it takes," said Crake, "is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.

Margaret Atwood

#4. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

Marcel Proust

#5. Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.

Ed Yong

#6. 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

#7. The immune system's goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

Anthony Fauci

#8. I had a conversation with a biologist in an art gallery, and he persuaded me that it was possible to grow a dress from microbes. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard, but I'm a bit of a science fiction fan and I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.

Suzanne Lee

#9. If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies ...

Louis Pasteur

#10. What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives. We are them; they are us.

Jonathan Eisen

#11. General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,
Captain Fatigue, and at the base of all
pale Corporal Fatigue,
and curious microbes came, came viruses:
and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry
the rare Order of Weak.

John Berryman

#12. There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

Alan Bennett

#13. The molecules that allow microbes to catch their prey and hold on to them are likely candidates for the molecules that form the rivet attachments between cells in our bodies.

Neil Shubin

#14. Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.

Steven Johnson

#15. In addition to single-gene genetic disorders, there are just five causes of all disease: poor diet, chronic stress, microbes, toxins, and allergens, all of which wash over our DNA causing changes in our gene expression, and turning off or on different genes and messages that affect our metabolism.

Mark Hyman

#16. Considering things in the ecumenical measure, we are the microbes of the Universe.

Sahara Sanders

#17. Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

Craig Venter

#18. Scientists have theorized that when Earth comes to its final days, the only life left on the planet would be in the form of microbes.

Brad Steiger

#19. The first telescope opened the heavens; the first microscope opened the world of the microbes; radioisotopic methodology, as examplified by RIA [radioimmunoassay], has shown the potential for opening new vistas in science and medicine

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

#20. The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#21. An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#22. From the moment he is born to the moment he dies, man is subject to the activities of numerous microbes.

Selman Waksman

#23. Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are.

Jessica Green

#24. In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room.

James Lileks

#25. Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.

Chuck Palahniuk

#26. The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don't know it have so far been overlooked.

Paul Davies

#27. If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?

Carl Sagan

#28. Microbes are doing things we didn't even know they could do 10 years ago.

Robert Jackson

#29. A very pleasant surprise was that items I thought were naughty but that I enjoyed immensely, like strong coffee, dark chocolate, nuts, high fat yoghurt, wine and cheese, are actually likely to be healthy for me and my microbes.

Tim Spector

#30. We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells ... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms.

Jonathan Eisen

#31. If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life.
Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes.

Carl Sagan

#32. Just look at what happens to humans after they die-most of that is done by microbes.

William R. Clark

#33. Most life on Earth is microbes. we've only just scratched the surface of the microbial realm. Probably less than .1% of microbes have been classified let alone cultured or had their genes sequenced, so really that microbial realm is a mystery.

Paul Davies

#34. Although there exist in the world today some microbes of the soul, such as discrimination and aggression, science was and still is the core of progress for humanity and the continuity of civilization.

Ahmed Zewail

#35. Microbes are just nature's janitors who work to clean up a poorly kept culturing medium. Trying to keep microbes off of and out of your body is like trying to keep the wind out of the trees.

Robert Morse

#36. Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.

John Muir

#37. I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.

Alan Alda

#38. In gardens it's not just plants and insects and microbes that grow. People grow too, and the best bit is that they don't realise it's happening. It just happens.

Costa Georgiadis

#39. " ... The large majority of those infectious microbes that cause us so much illness and pain are ANAEROBIC ... a big word that means they live and proliferate best in environments where there is LITTLE OR NO OXYGEN."

Ed McCabe

#40. 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

#41. I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play ... but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.

Alexander Fleming

#42. The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.

Freeman Dyson

#43. When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

Jeremy Rifkin

#44. It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.

T.H. White

#45. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself ... For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

Anais Nin

#46. Dead men may envy living mites in cheese,
Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys,
And subdivide, and never come to death.

Wilfred Owen

#47. The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

Maya Angelou

#48. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.

G.K. Chesterton

#49. In a crowd we are "microbes" infecting everyone around us, a "grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will." We are impulsive, irritable, irrational:

Jon Ronson

#50. Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color.

Sam Kean

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

Stewart Brand

#52. Every day we live and every meal we eat we influence the great microbial organ inside us - for better or for worse.

Giulia Enders

#53. If you wish to view this as a cautionary tale, be my guest.

Philip Plait

#54. The bacterium Escherichia coli (E. Coli) takes about twenty minutes to divide. So after one hour, one E. Coli cell has turned into eight. After only six and a half hours, there will be over a million bacteria!

Jennifer Gardy