delanceyplace.com 7/30/10 - bacteria
In today's excerpt - bacteria:
"It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumaby did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.
"In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains - about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.
"And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to you hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. 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.
"Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them. ... And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. 'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division."
Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publisher: Broadway
Date: Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 302-304
"It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumaby did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.
"In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains - about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.
"And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to you hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. 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.
"Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them. ... And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. 'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division."
Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publisher: Broadway
Date: Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 302-304
posted by delanceyplace at 3:35 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home