I loved, for example, the story of the way that bacteria actually re-engineer the physical structure of a glow-in-the-dark squid. However, whenever the reader is beginning to feel that they are losing interest, up comes a really interesting part. And Yong gives us a dramatic tour of the sheer variety of microbes and the environments in which different bacterial life can thrive, whether we talking black smokers or dolphin armpits.Įvery now and then, we get some excellent storytelling, but the use of example after example does give the impression to the non-biologist of the kind of approach that led Rutherford to comment that all science is either physics or stamp collecting - there is a fair amount of stamp collecting here.

When we go mad with our antibacterial cleansers, we are more like to wipe out good bacteria, leaving space for colonisation by nasties, than we are to simply kill off a threat. What certainly comes across is that our knee-jerk reaction of 'germs are bad' leads to an overemphasis on removing them, where actually they are often doing a useful job. However, Yong quickly takes us beyond that to explore the nuances of a very intricate relationship between bacteria and more complex life that could be summarised as 'Can't live with them, can't live without them.' Even many of our most hated bacterial foes can have positive roles at the right place and the right time.

It's hardly news that we have many, many bacterial cells in us (though it does biologists no scientific favours when we discover the much used 'ten times as many as human cells' figure was just picked out of the air and has no scientific basis).

Ed yong i contain multitudes review