ANDRZEJ KRAUZEThis year, Edge.org’s annual question asked scientists “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Stewart Brand’s wonderfully articulate response begins by recalling Carl Woese’s estimate that bacteria make up 80 percent of Earth’s biomass:
Microbes run our atmosphere. They also run much of our body. The human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors 3,000 kinds of bacteria with 3 million distinct genes. (Our own cells struggle by on only 18,000 genes or so.)…This biotech century will be microbe enhanced and maybe microbe inspired….Confronting a difficult problem we might fruitfully ask, “What would a microbe do?”
No surprise that the originator of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of one of the Internet’s first robust communities, “The WELL” (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), would invoke the emerging field of “sociomicrobiology.” Pioneered by my one of my doctoral advisors at Cornell, E. Peter Greenberg (now at the University of Washington), this discipline uses the term quorum sensing—broadly defined as ...
