Quotes About Microbes

Bacteria dominated our planet for another 2,500 million years before the first truly complex organisms appeared in the fossil record.

Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

Everyone, he knew for a fact, was populated by billions of microbes, and not simply the flora in their digestive tracts. People played host to mites and viruses that all wanted to reproduce and continue life elsewhere. They jumped ship with every handshake. It was folly to imagine we were anything more than vessels, carting around our bossy passengers. We were nothing.

HUMANKIND HAS CHANGED THE CLIMATE. THE PERMAFROST IS MELTING. GROUND THAT HAS BEEN FROZEN FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS CONTAINS MICROBES THAT HAVE NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE THE LAST ICE AGE. THE SOIL THAWS. ANIMALS MOVE THROUGH THAT SOIL. BROWN BEARS, FOR INSTANCE, BECOME CARRIERS FOR SUCH MICROBES AND ARE FORCED FARTHER SOUTH DUE TO THAT MELTING PERMAFROST, AND AS A RESULT END UP SEEKING NEW HIBERNACULA: THEY MOVE TO CAVES THAT ARE ALSO HOME TO OTHER ANIMALS. ANIMALS SUCH AS THE NORTHERN MYOTIS BAT.

In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

Great plagues from little microbes start.

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.

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.

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

80th verse: Imagine a world where weapons are vestiges of the past, displayed in museums to illustrate and warn the populace about an absurdly violent history. You'd see the conflicts on this planet exhibited from the perspective of human being as tiny microbes living on the same body, equally dependent on it and on one another for survival, yet killing each other and destroying their host anyway.

In the nineteenth century men lost their fear of God and acquired a fear of microbes.

Humanity's ancient enemies are, after all, microbes. They didn't go away just because science invented drugs, antibiotics, and vaccines (with the notable exception of smallpox). They didn't disappear from the

Coming into repeated contact with the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes.

There is a fossil in this meteorite! Not just a speck of bacteria or microbes, but an advanced life-form! Proof of life elsewhere in the universe!

Science encourages us to reflect upon the size of our lives in relation to the vastness of the universe or the bewildering multitudes of microbes that exist inside our bodies. And it reveals to us a planet that is beautifully and insistently not human.

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans' conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors' morale.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds.

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.

The grimmest examples of germs' role in history come from the European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus's voyage of 1492. Numerous as were the Native American victims of the murderous Spanish conquistadores, they were far outnumbered by the victims of murderous Spanish microbes.

Los principales elementos mortíferos para la humanidad en nuestra historia reciente -la viruela, la gripe, la tuberculosis, la malaria, la peste, el sarampión y el cólera- son enfermedades contagiosas que evolucionaron a partir de enfermedades de los animales, aún cuando la mayoría de los microbios responsables de nuestras enfermedades epidémicas estén ahora, paradójicamente, casi limitados a los seres humanos.

truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.