"Not only do bacteria outnumber humans but they outweigh us, too, by a factor of a hundred million."

"Civilization is only a tweak to their landscape. 'If Homo sapiens disappears, cities will be gone and fields will become rain forest again, but life as such will not change,' [Slava] Epstein told me. 'If microbes disappear, then everything is gone—no New York, no rain forest.'"

From a great New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian called "THE UNSEEN/Millions of microbes are yet to be discovered. Will one hold the ultimate cure?"

I was listening to the audio version as I was walking today, and I gasped aloud when I heard "a factor of a hundred million." And I cried over Epstein's struggle to become a microbiologist in the Soviet Union....

Through a friend, Epstein found a job... in Kamchatka, where he manned a lone microbial-research station on the Bering Sea. He hiked. He avoided bears. And, dreaming of exile, he memorized seven thousand English words from an old dictionary, with no sense of how they fit together.

... and then, relocated to America...

... with his limited English, reëntering academia was impossible at first, and he half-considered becoming a contractor. While fixing driveways, he listened to NPR, the language flowing by in an undifferentiated stream. Over time, the words revealed themselves, until one day he realized that he was listening to the news.

And then there's the prediction of a “post-antibiotic world”...

[I]f trends continue, annual fatalities from drug-resistant microbes could exceed ten million by 2050, eclipsing those from cancer. Many key advancements in modern medicine could be reversed. As one researcher noted recently, “A lot of major surgery would be seriously threatened. I used to show students pictures of people being treated for tuberculosis in London. It was just a row of beds outside a hospital—you lived or you died.”