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New York Times Bestseller
New York Times Notable Book of 2016 * NPR Great Read of 2016 * Named a Best Book of 2016 by The Economist, Smithsonian, NPR's Science Friday, MPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Times (London)
From Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin--a "microbe's-eye view" of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth.
Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light--less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are.
The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people.
Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us--the microbiome--build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British science journalist Yong succeeds in encouraging readers to recognize the critical importance of biological microorganisms. He argues that humans must move past the belief that bacteria are bad and need to be eradicated, and adopt a deeper understanding of the positive role they play in the lives of most organisms. Yong makes a superb case for his position by interviewing numerous scientists and presenting their fascinating work in an accessible and persuasive fashion. Throughout, he takes a holistic ecological perspective, contending that it makes no sense to examine bacteria in isolation. As in all ecological systems, context is everything, and the complex community structure of the microbiome does much to determine the effects of various bacteria. Yong demonstrates that this more inclusive view has led to a reconceptualization of how the immune system might work, how microorganisms can shape the development of organ systems, how bacteria might play a role in autism, and how the microbiome may influence an organism's propensity for obesity. He also shows that scientists have moved beyond the theoretical by successfully performing "ecosystem transplants" of human gut microorganisms, and he envisions a future that includes "artisanal bacteria" designed to perform specific tasks. Yong reveals "how ubiquitous and vital microbes are" on scales large and small. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* You are not alone. Smothered in and transformed by microbes, each one of us is a we not a me, insists science-writer Yong. A dazzling and dynamic, pliable and evolving menagerie of microorganisms known as the microbiome or microbiota exists within every human being. Recent estimates figure around 39 trillion microbes (mostly bacteria but also fungi, viruses, and archaea) and 30 trillion human cells share a symbiotic relationship in the typical person. There is no escaping these miniscule creatures. On average, we swallow about a million microorganisms per gram of food we eat and breathe out approximately 37 million bacteria per hour. Banish the stereotype that microbes are bad guys that beget only disease. In our bodies, they guide the immune system, make vitamins, assist in digesting food, degrade chemical toxins, and, very importantly, squeeze out pathogenic bacteria. Yong delves into research on the microbiome across a spectrum of species humans, mice, Hawaiian squid, citrus mealybugs, Mojave woodrats, coral, and giant tube worms, to list just a few. The title of the book, repurposed from Walt Whitman, is indeed apt. Bottom line: don't hate or fear the microbial world within you. Appreciate its wonders. After all, they are more than half of you.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ONGOINGNESS: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso. (Graywolf, $14.) Out of a desire to record every detail of her life, Manguso, a poet, began keeping a journal over 25 years ago - and was so prolific that her entries reached about 800,000 words. In this slim volume, she reflects on the project and her efforts to guard against forgetting, death and "that great and ongoing blank." THE ARRANGEMENT, by Sarah Dunn. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Owen and Lucy have fled New York City for the Hudson Valley, settling in a 200-year-old house and stocking the coop with chickens. But paradise has its downsides, and the couple rock their upstate idyll by trying out an open marriage. What begins as an affair with a man in the city develops into love, and Lucy confronts an old question: whether passion or stability will win out. RUMI'S SECRET: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, by Brad Gooch. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) Few figures have had the same resonance and enduring popularity as Jalai al-Din Mohammad Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim mystic who has been a muse for everyone from Madonna to budding Pinterest spiritualists. Gooch investigates Rumi's life and theology, with a focus on his life-changing, and creatively rich, relationship with the mystic Shams. SNOWBLIND, by Ragnar Jonasson. Translated by Quentin Bates. (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $9.99.) It's 2008 and Ari Thor Árason, a recent police academy graduate in a remote Icelandic village, is investigating the death of a local author. "This classically crafted whodunit holds up nicely," our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, wrote. "But Jonasson's true gift is for describing the daunting beauty of the fierce setting, lashed by blinding snowstorms that smother the village in 'a thick, white darkness' that is strangely comforting." I CONTAIN MULTITUDES: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Yong, a British science journalist, investigates the vivid, all-encompassing realm of our microbiome - the essential microscopic organisms that help bolster our health and work in concert with our bodies to shape how they work. (By a recent estimate, only half the human body is made up of human cells.) A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR, by David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Vintage, $15.95.) In the basement of an Israeli comedy club, Dovaleh G's routine quickly veers into tales of his tormented childhood. Grossman's novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. Our reviewer, Gary Shteyngart, called it a "magnificently comic and sucker-punchtragic excursion into brilliance."
Choice Review
When the public thinks of microbes, the context is usually that of disease. Yet as Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, indicates, life would not exist without the bacterial domains called Bacteria and Archaea. Emphasis is placed on the microbial biome within humans; the human genome contains some 25,000 unique genes, while human microbial flora, largely in the gut, contain some 500 times more. Several are involved in activities such as vitamin production or suppressing the growth of potential pathogens (which really are a tiny minority of microbes). But Yong does not neglect the importance of analogous interactions in nature as a whole. The book is replete with descriptions of host microbe interactions, and even genetic exchange within the microbe population itself--in humans and throughout nature. For example, in Japanese populations, the bacterium Bacteroides (arguably the most common organism within humans) contains genes obtained from another bacterium, which allows it to digest seaweed. Numerous anecdotes of a similar nature, alongside research studies on a variety of subjects, are found throughout the work. The reader is not only informed, but hopefully left with a fascination for the microscopic. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Richard Adler, University of Michigan, Dearborn
Guardian Review
Each of us contains 40 trillion microbes. Their power is enormous, and we are just beginning to realise it, as this thrilling book details We are not alone. We have never been alone. We are possessed. Our inner demons cannot be cast out, because they did not move in and take possession: they were here before us, and will live on after us. They are invisible, insidious and exist in overwhelming numbers. They manage us in myriad ways: deliver our minerals and vitamins, help digest our lunch, and provide in different ways all our cheese, yoghurt, beer, wine, bread, bacon and beef. Microbes can affect our mood, take charge of our immune system, protect us from disease, make us ill, kill us and then decompose us. As complex, multicellular lifeforms, we are their sock puppets. We spread them, introduce variety into their brief lives and provide them with all they need to replicate and colonise new habitats. We are perambulating tower blocks, each occupied by maybe 40tn tiny tenants. Our skins are smeared with a thin film of microbial life, with ever greater numbers occupying every orifice and employed in colossal numbers in our guts. Yet, until late in human history, we didn't know they were there at all. We still do not know who they all are, or what they do. We discover new things almost every day. In July, German microbiologists announced a new antibiotic that kills the hospital superbug MRSA. It was produced by a seemingly inconsequential microbe fighting for space in the impoverished habitat that is the human nostril. Staphylococcus lugdunensis can produce a toxin that can see off MRSA, even if it is outnumbered 10 to one. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed You won't find this particular microbe in Ed Yong's marvellous, thrilling and richly annotated book, but don't worry. Unless you are a microbiologist, almost all of it will be new to you. I call it marvellous: everything about the microbial world is to be marvelled at. And it is a page-turner in a very old-fashioned sense. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed. Wolbachia is a genus first discovered in 1924, inside a mosquito. Actually, it is in almost everything. Most of the planet's animal species are arthropods -- spiders, flies, scorpions, mites, woodlice and so on -- and Wolbachia infects at least two in every five. It manipulates their sex lives: it kills male wasps, and the females replicate by cloning themselves. It selectively kills the male embryos of blue moon butterflies of Fiji and Samoa, so that females outnumber males by 100 to one. It changes insect sperm so that males can only effectively fertilise eggs that are also infected with the same strain of Wolbachia, and all of this happens because the microbe makes the journey through the generations via the ovaries and in the eggs. It is a feminist force. It has an astonishing arsenal of strategies for survival, and executes them brilliantly. All this helps put the rest of us in our place. These things are tiny. They exist as just one cell, each vastly smaller than almost any single human cell. They have no brain or nervous system, but they exist in monstrous numbers -- every hour you sneeze, cough, splutter or just breathe an estimated 37bn into the air around you -- and untold variety. Collectively they are cleverer than us; they both compete and cooperate. The rest of us spread our variant genes by replicating: change happens with a new generation. Microbes can swap those handy mutations that deliver advantage in stressful circumstances with their neighbours: change happens on the spot, and this egalitarian, cooperative talent, called horizontal gene transfer, swiftly delivers microbial strains that can learn to resist whatever antibiotics we throw at them. Microbes have been around, and have learned a thing or two. Complex life has a 500m-year evolutionary history: microbial life is at least 3.5bn years old. We are their offspring. We share our genes with them, we incorporate their DNA. To a microbiologist, all plants, birds, mammals, insects, molluscs, reptiles, fish and amphibians are just the last few twigs of one tip of the eukaryote branch of the microbial imperium. And although microbial life extends kilometres below the ocean basalt, rides on the dust and water vapour high in the transatlantic clouds, and makes a living in thermal springs, mine dumps, alkaline lakes and even radioactive waste, Yong's book addresses only the microbiome, our name for those microbes that live parasitically on, or in symbiosis with, or just manipulate, animals. Complex life has a 500m-year evolutionary history: microbial life is at least 3.5bn years old. We are their offspring We meet Vibrium fischeri, which occupies the Hawaiian bobtail squid, turning on the luminescence machinery that cancels its shadow and makes it invisible to submarine predators. A bacterium called Tremblaya colonised the citrus mealybug, and then discarded the genetic material it no longer needed as a mealybug freeloader; another bacterium called Moranella colonised Tremblaya. There are now three parties in the symbiosis, between them contributing the nine enzymes necessary to create one amino acid. None of the three could survive without the other two. Gut bacteria in the desert woodrat in the US south-west help the animal eat and dispose of the toxins in the creosote bush that would kill any other mammal. The rat, of course, is rewarding the microbe too: both benefit. The story gets even more subtle when it comes to mother's milk. Human breast milk contains lactose, fat and more than 200 complex sugars called oligosaccharides. Human infants, however, can digest none of these. One single-celled creature called Bifidobacterium longum infantis gobbles up the lot. It is reportedly the dominant microbe in the bowels of breast-fed babies, and as it digests the sugars, it releases short-chain fatty acids, which then feed the infant gut cells. So the nursing mother feeds the microbe which then feeds the baby. No other mammal makes as many oligosaccharides as humans, or in such quantity. It may be that we can thank B. infantis for our large brains, or perhaps the spurt of growth in the first year of human life. If you were looking for an instance of "good bacteria" -- and this tricky conceit is intelligently addressed in this book -- B. infantis sounds like a candidate. Like coprophagy and faecal transplant, also discussed in the book at length and with some glee, the notions of "good" and "bad" are deceptive. Our microbes just are, and do, and somehow we benefit each other, except when we don't. Unlike ruminating cattle or the great grazing herds of the Serengeti, Yong says, humans could just about scrape by without their bacterial companions, but it is clear that our lives would be the shorter without them. We have an inner life, in every sense, and are the richer for it: richer still for this witty and compelling book. - Tim Radford.
Library Journal Review
Most people associate bacteria with the bad germs that cause infection and disease, but symbiotic bacteria are crucial to life as we-and many other species-know it. Yong, a science journalist who writes for the Atlantic, examines the bacteria vital to the digestive, immune, and reproductive health of species as diverse as humans, squid, woodrats, and wasps. Even sap-sucking aphids rely on symbiotic microbes to provide them with the amino acids they can't make on their own. He concludes this fascinating study with a look at the brave new world of synthetic biology, where scientists hope one day to bioengineer "designer" bacteria equipped with the right genes to destroy pathogens, eliminate cancer cells, and alter neurotransmitters. (Originally published in Great Britain, this book retains British spelling, punctuation, and expressions.) Yong's readable and entertaining style is appropriate for the nonspecialist, though occasionally the author gets carried away with the use of metaphor and other figurative language. VERDICT Highly recommended for general science readers interested in the complicated relationships between microbes and their hosts.-Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: A Trip to the Zoo | p. 1 |
| 1 Living Islands | p. 7 |
| 2 The People Who Thought to Look | p. 27 |
| 3 Body Builders | p. 49 |
| 4 Terms and Conditions Apply | p. 77 |
| 5 In Sickness and in Health | p. 103 |
| 6 The Long Waltz | p. 143 |
| 7 Mutually Assured Success | p. 165 |
| 8 Allegro in E Major | p. 191 |
| 9 Microbes à la Carte | p. 211 |
| 10 Tomorrow the World | p. 251 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 265 |
| Notes | p. 269 |
| Bibliography | p. 299 |
| Index | p. 339 |