Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.

George M. Church

I don't get sick much because in the U.S. I always eat with my fingers, you know, to get used to the bacteria.

Abbey Lee Kershaw

I used ribosomes from very, very robust bacteria under very, very active conditions and found a way - I actually took advantage of research done before me at the Weizmann, the same institute I am now - how to preserve their activity and their integrity while they crystallized.

Ada Yonath

Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

Alan Huffman

Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.

Alan Huffman

The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones.

Alex Shoumatoff

I was 19 years old, and I felt like I had the flu one day. Within 24 hours, I was in the hospital on life support, and I was given less than a 2 percent chance of living. It took five days for the doctors to find out that I had contracted bacterial meningitis.

Amy Purdy

That's the problem with bacterial meningitis: it progresses really fast. You think you have the flu, and they say within 15 hours it's severely deadly - for sure within the first 24 hours - but even the first 15 hours.

Amy Purdy

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Andrew H. Knoll

Veggies and fruit are known to harbor bacteria, and so your body naturally wants to avoid them. I used to beat myself up about trying to get enough fresh food and protein like I did before getting pregnant. But then I resigned myself to the fact that my body is going to crave what it needs.

Anna Kaiser

Pneumococcal disease is a real threat. Pneumococcal disease is a bacterial infection that causes anything from middle ear infection to pneumonia to meningitis. Children are particularly vulnerable to it, but adults can get pneumococcal disease themselves.

Anthony Fauci

I actually believe that you should not wash your jeans, ever. In Japan, they actually put them in the freezer. That kills the bacteria and makes them not smell anymore.

Benny Blanco

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.

Bonnie Bassler

By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by numbers, it's not even close.

Bonnie Bassler

If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact.

Bonnie Bassler

It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.

Bonnie Bassler

You live in intimate association with bacteria, and you couldn't survive without them.

Bonnie Bassler

I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it's important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.

Bonnie Bassler

Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.

Bonnie Bassler

Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.

Bonnie Bassler

In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.

Bonnie Bassler