There are fewer than 100 species of bacteria that cause infectious diseases in humans;

Micrographia,

No man is an island? Not so: we’re all islands from a bacterium’s point of view.

“eukaryote” comes from the Greek for “true nut”.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, they were also taking giant steps for microbe-kind.

According to a 1910 textbook, the “bad germs” that everyone focused on were a “small, specialised off-shoot of the realm of bacteria, and, broadly speaking, actually of minor importance”.

In 1909, Kendall described the gut as a “singularly perfect incubator” for bacteria whose activities were “not in active opposition to those of the host”.18 They might opportunistically cause disease when a host’s resistance was lowered, but they were otherwise harmless. Could they possibly be beneficial? Ironically, Pasteur, the man who cocked the

Woese published his results in 1977, in a paper that rebranded the methanogens as the archaebacteria, later renamed simply as archaea.

A detailed history of bacteriology, published in 1938, failed to mention our resident microbes at all.21 The leading textbook in the field gave them a lonely chapter, but mainly talked about how to distinguish them from pathogens. They were notable only because they had to be separated from their more interesting peers.