“at the very fringe of scientific respectability . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 78.

“suggested that our noses evolved . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.

“Wherever you go in the world . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 21.

“We can’t be certain that what you are holding . . .” Victoria Bennett interview, Australia National University, Canberra, August 21, 2001.

“full of noxious vapors . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 200.

“the most important single metabolic innovation . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 78.

“Our white cells actually use oxygen . . .” Note provided by Dr. Laurence Smaje.

“But about 3.5 billion years ago . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 186.

“This is truly time traveling . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 66.

“the slowest-evolving organisms on Earth . . .” Schopf, p. 212

“Animals could not summon up the energy to work,” Fortey, Life, p. 89.

“nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 17.

“you could pack a billion . . .” Brown, The Energy of Life, p. 101.

“Such fossils have been found just once . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 10.

“little more than ‘bags of chemicals’. . .” Drury, p. 68.

“to fill eighty books of five hundred pages.” Sagan, p. 227.

CHAPTER 20 SMALL WORLD

“Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist . . .” Biddle, p. 16.

“a herd of about one trillion bacteria . . .” Ashcroft, p. 248; and Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p. 4.

“Your digestive system alone . . .” Biddle, p. 57.

“no detectable function at all.”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 51.

“about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 67.

“We couldn’t survive a day without them.”New York Times, “From Birth, Our Body Houses a Microbe Zoo,” October 15, 1996, p. C3.

“Algae and other tiny organisms . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 11.

“Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism . . .”Outside, July 1999, p. 88.

“a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 75.

“a single bacterial cell can generate . . .” De Duve, A Guided Tour of the Living Cell, vol. 2, p. 320.

“all bacteria swim in a single gene pool.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 16.

“microbes known as Thiobacillus concretivorans . . .” Davies, p. 145.

“Some bacteria break down chemical materials . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“like the scuttling limbs of an undead creature . . .”Economist, “Human Genome Survey,” July 1, 2000, p. 9.

“Perhaps the most extraordinary survival . . .” Davies, p. 146.

“their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust.”New York Times, “Bugs Shape Landscape, Make Gold,” October 15, 1996, p. C1.

“it would cover the planet . . .”Discover, “To Hell and Back,” July 1999, p. 82.

“The liveliest of them may divide . . .”Scientific American, “Microbes Deep Inside the Earth,” October 1996, p. 71.

“The key to long life . . .”Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” December 21, 1996, p. 112.

“Other microorganisms have leapt back to life . . .”Nature, “A Case of Bacterial Immortality?” October 19, 2000, p. 844.

“claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost . . .”Economist, “Earth’s Hidden Life,” December 21, 1996, p. 111.

“But the record claim for durability . . .”New Scientist, “Sleeping Beauty,” October 21, 2000, p. 12.

“The more doubtful scientists suggested . . .” BBC News online, “Row over Ancient Bacteria,” June 7, 2001.

“Bacteria were usually lumped in with plants . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 22.

“In 1969, in an attempt to bring some order . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 23.

“By one calculation it contained . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 24.

“only about 500 species of bacteria were known . . .”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C3.

“Only about 1 percent will grow in culture.”Science, “Microbiologists Explore Life’s Rich, Hidden Kingdoms,” March 21, 1997, p. 1740.

“like learning about animals from visiting zoos.”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C7.

“Woese . . . ‘felt bitterly disappointed.’ ” Ashcroft, pp. 274-75.

“Biology, like physics before it . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Default Taxonomy; Ernst Mayr’s View of the Microbial World,” September 15, 1998.

“Woese was not trained as a biologist . . .”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Two Empires or Three?” August 18, 1998.

“Of the twenty-three main divisions of life . . .” Schopf, p. 106.

“microbes would account for at least 80 percent . . .”New York Times, “Microbial Life’s Steadfast Champion,” October 15, 1996, p. C7.

“the most rampantly infectious organism on Earth . . .”Nature, “Wolbachia: A Tale of Sex and Survival,” May 11, 2001, p. 109.

“only about one microbe in a thousand . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“microbes are still the number three killer . . .”Outside, July 1999, p. 88.

“once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared . . .” Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 208.

“a disease called necrotizing fasciitis . . .” Gawande, Complications, p. 234.

“The time has come to close the book . . .”New Yorker, “No Profit, No Cure,” November 5, 2001, p. 46.

“some 90 percent of those strains . . .”Economist, “Disease Fights Back,” May 20, 1995, p. 15.

“in 1997 a hospital in Tokyo reported the appearance . . .”Boston Globe, “Microbe Is Feared to Be Winning Battle Against Antibiotics,” May 30, 1997, p. A7.

“America’s National Institutes of Health . . .”Economist, “Bugged by Disease,” March 21, 1998, p. 93.

“Hundreds, even thousands of people . . .”Forbes, “Do Germs Cause Cancer?” November 15, 1999, p. 195.

“a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders . . .” Science, “Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?” September 14, 2001, pp. 1974-76.

“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news . . .” Quoted in Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues and History, p. 8.

“About five thousand types of virus are known . . .” Biddle, pp. 153-54.

“Smallpox in the twentieth century alone . . .” Oldstone, p. 1.

“In ten years the disease killed some five million people . . .” Kolata, Flu, p. 292.

“World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years . . .”American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p. 82.

“In an attempt to devise a vaccine . . .”American Heritage, “The Great Swine Flu Epidemic of 1918,” June 1976, p. 82.

“Researchers at the Manchester Royal Infirmary . . .”National Geographic, “The Disease Detectives,” January 1991, p. 132.

“In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab . . .” Oldstone, p. 126.

“In 1990, a Nigerian living in Chicago . . .” Oldstone, p. 128.