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1. A Specious Reality

Plants and animals that receive genes from two parents are classified into “species”,

A bacterium is an asexual clone of a single ancestor,

but it can also exchange genes horizontally with different bacteria “species”,

Can a human become a werewolf?

Not to worry: Horizontal exchange is not known to occur between plant or animal “species”,

although humans many carry genes from other “species”, like viruses and Neanderthals.

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2. Hopeful Beginnings, Sad Endings

The first vaccine? Thank a milk maid’s scabby legs,

The first soapy washed hands? Thank illiterate midwives,

The first antibiotic? Thank a moldy Petri dish mistake,

But Big Pharma no longer invests in new antibiotics: Small profits,

As more and more people reject life-saving vaccines: Pure Ignorance,

Will handwashing die next?

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3. Germaine Germy Germans

Syphilis, aka St. Job’s Disease:

The irreligious German Dr. Koch explained it,

A German Jew named Dr. Erhlich learned to kill it,

A German con artist named Mr. Hitler suffered from it,

Thankfully Drs. Koch and Erhlich died before

the syphilitic con artist could murder them.

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4. What’s in Your Body?

One trillion human cells,

Plus bacteria and viruses too numerous to count,

Antibiotics can decimate good bacteria,

You become sicker because dormant bad bacteria take over,

Fecal transplants have literally brought sick persons

back from the edge of death within a day.

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5. Unhealthy Skepticism

Stress hormones help us fight or flee but they impair immunity,

Patients receiving adrenaline developed strange infections,

A physician proposed the connection at a conference:

Two persons came to his talk: His lab technician stayed to the end of his talk,

The other person walked out before the talk was finished,

Thirty years later a physician’s once-crazy hypothesis is in all textbooks.

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6. Dark Matters

Most of the microbial world is dark to us,

to study a microbe, you have to grow it in a lab,

to grow a microbe in the lab, you have to know what it needs to grow in nature,

to know what it needs in nature, you have to know the microbe exists;

most of the microbial word is as dark to us

as are dark matter and energy.