Okay, this is another case of a "dropped" book. Doron commented to me, "I'm reading this book now," to which I responded, "Oh, you are? Let me check it out from the library and read it, too," and here we are.

Except I read it faster than he did, finishing when he was a couple chapters in, and, well, okay, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this, but it was an exciting read.

So, there's this guy, Pablo Escobar. You might have heard of him. I, for my part, was incredibly oblivious to much of the world around the time of Escobar's rise, domination, and fall, so while I was vaguely aware of his existence, I wasn't aware of his story.

Well, now I am.

This is the story of Pablo Escobar, as told by his older brother, Roberto. It is a fascinating story somewhat tarnished by Roberto's bit of whining "we didn't do anything illegal!" in various parts of the book. Okay, sure, doing the accounting for a cocaine cartel wasn't illegal, the whole operation wasn't exactly moral or legal. Neither was cooking the books to make the drug money appear to be real estate deals. So, while the history is fascinating, the near pleading "I didn't do anything wrong" was difficult to read non-judgmentally.

If you like non-fiction, and want an interesting recent-history read, this book is a good choice. If you're a fan of this genre, this is also a good choice. If you're more like me, and read it because you wanted to talk with a friend about the book he was reading, this is also a good book to read. I would not have chosen this book for myself, but still enjoyed the reading of it.

The point he emphasized so many times was that the growing legend of Pablo Escobar was used by other groups to service their own needs, from the traffickers of Cali who were ignored while the focus remained on Pablo Escobar, to the various factions within the government who used the shadows that covered the search for him to settle old feuds and destroy growing opposition, and even by those men who once had worked for him and after being arrested provided information that would reduce their own sentences. It was easy for everyone to blame all the violence, all the killings, on Pablo Escobar.
Location 85

Our country has always been ruled by a class of wealthy families that did very little to help the poor. There were very few social programs that assisted people in making their lives better. We have a system of laws in Colombia, but we lived by a different set of rules. From the time we were growing up the government was run by corrupt people who made themselves richer while claiming they were starting programs to help the less fortunate live a better life.
Location 334

Legends are built in many ways, but part of such legends consists of accusations made by enemies, and often for their own benefit.
Location 372

The business of contraband means simply bringing goods into the country without paying the required government fees, the duties and taxes, which allows you to sell the goods to people for much less money than they would have to pay in the stores. It’s very profitable. While contraband certainly is illegal, because it benefits people and hurts only the government, it has long been an accepted part of the Colombian economy.
Location 376

Once cocaine had been widely and freely used in America. A small amount was part of the original Coca-Cola and some cigarettes; it could be bought in drugstores. The first laws were passed against it in America in 1914, when people were told it made black people in the South crazy and caused them to attack white women.
Location 477

Almost from the very first day Pablo knew he had to pay big bribes, just like in the contraband business. Pablo was generous with these payments, he wanted to make it so rewarding for people that they would never betray him.
Location 733

We also knew that the kidnappers were calling our mother’s home from public phones. So Pablo gave out hundreds of radio transmitters to our friends and workers and instructed them to listen to a well-known radio station. Every time the kidnappers called my mother’s home the announcer on the station said, “This song is dedicated to Luz Marina [a code name that was used]; it’s called ‘Sonaron Cuatro Balazos’ and is sung by Antonio Aguilar,” those people were to check nearby pay phones to see if they were being used.
Location 866

When the rivers rose during the winter there were many floods and Pablo and Jaime would go around our country replacing everything washed away by the waters, bringing mattresses, cooking utensils, furniture, and the things people needed for living. And then they would bring engineers to find ways to prevent more flooding. Pablo would supply the materials to the villagers so they could help reconstruct the affected areas.
Location 1270

Under the law of my country, our president must give several cabinet posts to members of the opposition parties.
Location 1543

I find this idea appealing.

There was a new method of assassination that was becoming common in Colombia. It was to become known as parrillero: A man with a machine gun riding on the back of a motorcycle sprayed his victim—usually in a cart—with bullets. The safety helmets gave the assassins a good disguise and the bike provided the best way of escape after the shooting. Eventually this method became so common in Colombia that the government passed a law against people on motorcycles wearing helmets, so they could be identified.
Location 1636

It was one of these colonels who informed Pablo that Noriega had said that he was going to speak with the North American government, especially to the DEA.
Location 1745

To watch your family suffering and not be able to stop that is the most terrible feeling. And I was a fugitive without committing any crimes: I was pursued by Belisario Betancur’s government just for being Pablo’s brother.
Location 1757

An example of an "ehhhhhhhh, I don't quite believe you there" moment.

The secret police death squads would go in black cars into the poor neighborhoods, the barrios, at night. Most regular people would stay off the streets after work, so the police decided anyone on the corner was a bad guy, and that they worked for Pablo. Their secret squads with machine guns would drive around shooting young people for just standing on the corner, or they would take them away and later people would find their bodies. This was every night.
Location 2037

The impossible thing to know about the police was whether they were working honestly or in the kidnap business. Or worse, if they were people just pretending to be police. There was no way of knowing.
Location 2491

I don't know how the people of the U.S. would react to something like this.

I suspect some people in the U.S. already experience this.

In your mind part of you is always the person you used to be. For me, that was the bicycle champion. If I had paused to think about the journey I’d taken it would have been impossible; from representing the country I loved in the sport I loved to running through the jungle as police helicopters fired tracer bullets down on me. So I didn’t think about it. I know that it seems difficult to understand, but it is true. Maybe that was my means of dealing with my reality.
Location 2623

"I saw this person who had been so powerful, so rich, who had always been surrounded by people, so all alone. I had tears.”
Location 3844

I'm a big Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka fan. I found the books on the recommendation of Jim Butcher on some tweet years and years ago, and have been enjoying the Verus series, reading each one pretty much as soon as it is published. I appreciate that Jacka delivers his books very regularly, which means I'm not waiting for a series to continue as the world is with Harry Dresden and the Song of Ice and Fire and the Kingkiller Chronicle (which I am now convinced Rothfuss doesn't know HOW to finish, so he won't) and whatever else books have the author off on a different tangent because that's what interests them at this time and oh, wow, do I appreciate Jacka.

Anyway.

I enjoyed this book. I have enjoyed this series. Two chapters into this book and I realized that reading it felt like coming home in a way, the comfort level of the world that has been developed, my connection with said world and the characters in the world, and the writing style of the author. The Dresden Files does this, too. As did Connolly's Twenty Palaces series.

And I just realized I seem to have a thing for white male author, urban fantasy fiction.

Sigh.

Good thing I'm on a non-fiction kick this year. Go me.

The book was a fun read. If you haven't started on the Verus, start with book one, which is Fated (the naming of which reminds me to add it to my "I have read, but I don't recall when or any of the plot, but I know I've read it" list). Once you're done with those, head over to the Dresden series. And keep reading.

There’s a rhythm to battle, a cadence, almost like a dance. Every move has its counter, every strike its timing. Once you understand it, it doesn’t feel as though you’re attacking at all: you just do what’s natural.
Page 8

Some of the younger men in his profession, the ones who have something to prove, will ignore warnings like that. The ones who survive to Little’s age don’t.
Page 10

“However, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done."
Page 27

“None of the tests were able to find anything,” I said. “But not finding anything doesn’t mean there’s nothing there."
Page 43

"It’s a matter of personality, not what you feel you need, and you simply don’t have enough of a desire to dominate and control.”
Page 48

Yeah. I understand this.

“Everyone has aggressive impulses,” Dr. Shirland said. “They’re a fundamental part of the human condition. If you meet someone who seems not to have any, they’re channelling them somewhere else or keeping them suppressed. Usually, in the latter case, it ends up turning inward and manifesting as depression."
Page 55

"She’s been a little too isolated lately and I don’t think leaving her alone with the contents of her own head for company is a good thing.”
Page 56

I know a few people that this could be applied to, too.

I’ve never lived a safe life and I’ve always accepted that, but it’s one thing to know that there’s a good chance you’re going to die a violent death, and it’s something else to know that it might be someone else doing the dying in your place.
Page 59

"Sure, they’ll offer you protection — as long as you do as you’re told. But as soon as you stop, they’ll make a point of targeting you, just to send the message of what happens to other people who don’t get in line. It’s not getting into those sort of groups that’s the problem, it’s getting out.”
Page 64

You build an army because you’re planning to fight someone.
Page 66

... and the less we knew and trusted each other, the more “harder” shaded into “impossible.”
Page 69

... one of the more useful concepts I’d picked up was the Eisenhower Matrix, a method of ordering tasks by importance and urgency. The idea is that you file every task into one of four quadrants: important and urgent; not important but urgent; important but not urgent; and neither important nor urgent. Depending on which of those four a task is in, you do it, delegate it, schedule it, or ignore it.
Page 74

Rulers don’t like turning on their own if they can avoid it. It gives the common folk ideas.
Page 82

"... If there’s one thing the Council can agree on, it’s that their power and privileges shouldn’t go to anyone else.”
Page 92

“Resentment is an unproductive emotion,” Morden said.
Page 97

I judged him to have potential. Unfortunately power can be a discouragement to growth, and he’s had difficulty adapting.
Page 97

There was another pause. There’s a lot of waiting in battles: when one wrong move can get you maimed or killed, people are understandably reluctant to make hasty decisions.
Page 110

It hadn’t been my fight... but then, that’s how people like Pyre always keep getting away with it, isn’t it? The ones who can stop them won’t, and the ones who want to stop them can’t.
Page 117

“He’s a psycho, but he’s a rational psycho,” Kyle said. “If you can give him a good reason not to attack you, he won’t.
Page 120

“The number one rule when you’re dealing with Dark mages is that you have to negotiate from a position of strength,” I said. “The worst thing you can do is make them think you’re weak. If I don’t have the authority to settle terms, then in their eyes, that automatically makes me weak. And by implication, that makes you weak.”
Page 124

“Don’t people always think that every long-lived institution is immortal right up until the point where it falls apart?”
Page 172

Dragons can tell you your future, after a fashion. But I’ve never known whether they tell you what’s going to happen, or whether hearing it from them is what causes it to happen.
Page 177

Vari’s answer was that everyone has a reason. And when I thought about it, he was right. It’s not like anyone just wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘Hey, you know what, I feel like being a bad guy today.’ Everyone’s got some way to justify what they do. They’ll say that the other guy’s an asshole, or they don’t have any choice, or it’s not like it matters, or it’s just the way the world works, whatever. The point is, knowing why someone’s after you doesn’t really help.
Page 252

I couldn’t change what I’d done. But I could learn from my mistakes.
Page 309

I had this book in my hold queue for a long time before I released it and it dropped into my read queue. I'm fairly certain it was on a Book Riot young adult book, but it has zombies in it, so, yeah, I read it.

This was a very fun read. The premise is that a zombie epidemic starts sometime during the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days in our timeline, a different amount in the America of Dread Nation. The Civil War ended as the living now united against the dead. Except the attitudes and idiocy of the times didn't change, the slave owners still believed the slaves weren't people, still believed they were somehow entitled to subjugate another person, still believed in their own collective superiority. In this world, the ex-slaves and Native Americans were forced into combat schools, where they were trained to kill the dead.

Of course. Because once you have entitlement, you can't not have that entitlement until said entitle-ees are dead (typically of old age, tbh).

ANYWAY.

This was a fun read. Ireland portrays the prejudices well, gives us a heroine we can root for (root for, verb, informal, support or hope for the success of (a person or group entering a contest or undertaking a challenge): the whole of this club is rooting for him), and creates action and mystery at the same time. The letters to and from the heroine and her mother are heartbreaking in a way, but further the plot in a good way.

If you're into zombie fiction, this is a good book to pick up. If you're not into zombie fiction, you might still enjoy the heroine's sass, the book is worth reading.

“What happened then?” I asked, because there’s nothing better than the memories of others when you’re little and have no stories of your own.
Location 75

I’ve heard enough political speeches to know that letting rich white city folk think that we’ve made even a small part of America safe again is a better stump speech than telling them that we’re still in trouble five years after the Army stopped fighting the dead.
Location 182

Momma used to tell me, “Deny it until they’ve got you dead to rights, sugar. If they can’t prove it, it never happened.” It’s good advice, and it’s served me well.
Location 240

But that’s the way life goes most of the time: the thing you least count on comes along and ruins everything else you got planned.
Location 341

The boy had always been a bully, and the thing about bullies is they never learn how to run like the rest of us do.
Location 492

In my head the ideas are so clear and make perfect sense, but when the words come out they’re a mess.
Location 534

I shrug. “Sometimes you have to live down to people’s expectations, Kate. If you can do that, you’ll get much further in life.
Location 679

That last bit is a lie, but the easiest lie to tell is the one people want to believe.
Location 879

But when you think of shamblers as things, as mindless creatures who have to be put down so that we might live, ending them gets to be a lot easier. The farmer doesn’t cry over slaughtering a hog.
Location 891

“Jane, your point is well taken, but heroism means little when it rests on lawlessness."
Location 982

Yeah, what? No.

Miss Preston was convinced that the best way to correct minor misconduct was a little drudgery, and housework was the pinnacle of drudge.
Location 997

This amused me.

Still, the thought of them together is enough to make me more than a little stabby. Jealousy is a terrible thing, and I swallow the emotion down hard as I can.
Location 1083

That’s the way it is when you fancy someone. Your heart starts doing the thinking, and your brain? Well, it gets left out of the equation until too late.
nnnnnLocation 1086

There was a big scary world beyond the boundaries of Rose Hill. I was bold, but not so foolhardy as to think there was something worthwhile on the other side of the barrier fence that kept the dead out.
Location 1106

And if folks could overlook the rumors of a white woman birthing a Negro, well, they could forgive just about anything, couldn’t they?
Location 1468

In Rachel’s mind, every ill that befell her was the work of someone else.
Location 1473

One of the other aunties, Auntie Eliza, once told me it was because Rachel was the major’s favorite before he went to war, and she liked the easy life he gave her. Rachel had adjusted to being owned, to being property, and she didn’t like the new situation, where she wasn’t nothing but a house servant with wages, a servant that had to work just as hard as everyone else.
Location 1480

“Surviving can make people right mean,” Auntie Aggie told me.
Location 1491

It’s a question I’ve refused to ask myself. I don’t want to think about what it would do to my world if Momma is dead.
Location 1685

I get an uncomfortable feeling like I’m sliding backward down a slope into a deep hole that I dug my own self.
Location 1739

"... That’s how men like the mayor maintained control. You believe strongly enough in an idea, nothing else much matters.”
Location 2005

I reckon we all have our childhood scars, whether we wear them on the outside or not.
Location 2172

“Look at you, with those pretty manners. Wherever did they find you?”

“At the junction of hard luck and bad times,” I answer. It’s something that my momma says.
Location 2438

But that means backing down from Cora, and I’ve seen her kind. She’ll do everything the people in charge tell her to, even if that means she ends up broken and bloody. She’s one of those people that never learned to breathe, never understood the true meaning of freedom. She’s a dog, happy even with a cruel master. She eats her three squares and takes her bit of pocket change and happily wears the collar around her throat, because that’s enough for her. But it ain’t for me.
Location 2931

"... I ain’t never going down there again if I can help it. But if you want answers, that’s where they are.”
Location 3154

A bark of laughter escapes from her. “Here you are flayed within an inch of your life and you’re asking after me.”

I sigh. “Sometimes it’s easier to think about other folks’ small hurts than your big ones.”
Location 3396

“You shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people, Mr. Gideon. I contain multitudes.”
Location 3455

I laughed at this one, well, because.

But I can’t change the past; I can only push headlong into an uncertain future. “Kate,”
Location 3909

Momma used to say there were lots of ways to survive. Don’t be afraid to pretend to be something you aren’t, Jane. Sometimes a little subterfuge and chicanery is in order and the quickest way to achieve one’s goal. It ain’t hard to imagine Ida pretending to be just another dumb colored girl in order to make it out here. Survival by any means necessary.
Location 3976

I’ve learned a lot in the past few years. Including that a group of panicked people ain’t that different from a herd of sheep. Nip at their heels a little and they’ll go wherever you tell them to.
Location 4060

Here’s a thing about me: I regret most of my actions five minutes after the fact. I’m rash in my decisions and I spend half my time trying to extricate myself from situations of my own making.
Location 4183

Alan’s jaw tightens and he looks straight ahead. “It was mostly the colored folks that fought the shamblers. No surprise there. Government pays to send them to those fancy schools while real men like me are left to fend for ourselves.”
Location 4333

So, in this story, Alan is a white guy. He believe that forced slavery of black people into killing zombies, which included forcing them into a re-education system which enabled them to be effective at killing zombies, was "fancy schools."

The unfortunate thing about this particular quote and thinking is that it is just_so_true. It's like Louis complaining he has to pay taxes, but he drives on the roads those taxes paid for. His kids go to the schools those taxes paid for. His devices use the GPS information that those taxes paid for. But, no, he complains and complains and complains and says everyone else has it better.

“It matters not, my dear. It is God’s wrath for our sins.” The sheriff lights his cigarette and looks out at the horizon. “The dead never walked until brother fought brother. Until we penitent folk betrayed one another.”
Location 4375

I wouldn't be surprised if this happened, too, in a zombie outbreak. It's about power and control in a fear-laden world.

I didn’t like the big girl, I ain’t never been a fan of snitches, but turning shambler is not a fate I’d wish on anyone, not even the girl who got me whipped.
Location 4394

Well, except for the guy she was planning on killing. Not the point.

“See, the problem in this world ain’t sinners, or even the dead. It is men who will step on anyone who stands in the way of their pursuit of power."
Location 4586

This is the next book in the Caltech book club. I, admittedly, skipped over the biological sciences when I was at Caltech, and that skipping is one of my regrets about my time at Caltech: I came in with these just plain wrong notions about science. Those ideas adversely affected my education, but, fortunately, not my love for science in all its (correctly science) forms.

Anyway.

I read this book, finishing before the first week's discussion, mostly because I keep checking these books out from the library, with due dates much sooner than the slower 1-2 chapters a week pace the book club has. Which is fine, I read the book club books quickly. That I subsequently don't participate in the book club discussions is less fine, I guess.

This book was a meandering survey of various studies, current research, and microbe history. I say meandering because the book lacked a compelling narrative arc. I was expecting maybe a history arc, or a current research arc, or even the author's journey arc. Instead, the end of each chapter lead into the beginning of the next chapter, with each chapter a swirl of interesting information and sometimes a self-contained narrative. Mostly though, each chapter was a fascinating, meandering discussion of a new topic about microbes.

And by fascinating, I mean fascinating. My incoming supposition was, given how much influence chemicals have over our mental state and body composition, the idea that microbes could and do produce chemicals to induce a state in their host doesn't seem so farfetched. After reading the book, learning about how much we know about microbes, and seeing how much we don't know about microbes, my supposition is more like a fixed assumption in my world. One of those "but, of course" obvious things only after the fact.

I enjoyed reading the book. This book is very much worth reading.

Now we’ve seen that they can sway the brain too – the organ that, more than any other, makes us who we are. It is a disquieting thought. We put such a premium on our free will that the prospect of losing independence to unseen forces informs many of our deepest societal fears.
Page 71

Wolbachia can only pass to the next generation of hosts in eggs; sperm are too small to contain it. Females are its ticket to the future; males are an evolutionary dead end. So it has evolved many ways of screwing over male hosts to expand its pool of female ones. It kills them, as in Hurst’s butterflies. It feminises them, as in Rigaud’s woodlice. It eliminates the need for them entirely by allowing females to reproduce asexually, as in Stouthamer’s wasps. None of these manipulations is unique to Wolbachia, but it is the only bacterium to use them all.
Page 78

Huh. So, gay woodlice.

Here is a strange but critical sentiment to introduce in a book about the benefits of living with microbes: there is no such thing as a “good microbe” or a “bad microbe”. These terms belong in children’s stories. They are ill- suited for describing the messy, fractious, contextual relationships of the natural world.
Page 80

A cut or a bruise can split some of your cells apart and spill fragments of mitochondria into your blood – fragments that still keep some of their ancient bacterial character. When your immune system spots them, it mistakenly assumes that an infection is under way and mounts a strong defence. If the injury is severe, and enough mitochondria are released, the resulting body-wide inflammation can build into a lethal condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). SIRS can be worse than the original injury.
Page 81

Some of these molecules get saddled with negative names, like “virulence factors”, because they were first discovered in the context of disease, but they are inherently neutral. They are just tools, like computers, pens, and knives: they can be used to do wonderful things and terrible things.
Page 82

Couples might work well together, but if one partner can get the same benefits without spending as much energy or effort, it will do so unless punished or policed.
Page 83

Well, this one hit home pretty hard.

These principles are easy to forget. We like our black-and-white narratives, with clear heroes and villains.
Page 84

We do. Some of us more than others.

A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. “Both partners may benefit but there’s this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict – conflict that can never be totally resolved.”
Page 85

To allow our first microbes to colonise our newborn bodies, a special class of immune cells suppresses the rest of the body’s defensive ensemble, which is why babies are vulnerable to infections for their first six months of life. It’s not because their immune system is immature, as is commonly believed: it’s because it is deliberately stifled to give microbes a free-for-all window during which they can establish themselves. But without the immune system’s full selective powers, how can a mammalian baby ensure that it gets the right communities?
Page 92

I find this fascinating.

As humans make our presence felt, we disturb the ancient relationships between corals and their microbes, converting the vivid splendour of fish-filled reefs into bleak algal barrens submerged in a pathogenic soup.
Page 109

And I find this depressing.

... a Grand Unified Theory of Coral Death. It shows how the largest sharks are connected to the smallest viruses.
Page 110

The most obvious difference lay in the ratio of the two major groups of gut bacteria: obese people had more Firmicutes and fewer Bacteroidetes than their leaner counterparts.
Page 114

An important lesson emerged: microbes matter but so do we, their hosts. Our guts, like all ecosystems, aren’t defined just by the species within them but also by the nutrients that flow through them.
Page 116

Herbert “Skip” Virgin published a case study that beautifully supports this idea. He worked with mice that had a genetic mutation common in people with Crohn’s disease. Those rodents developed inflamed guts, but only if they were infected by a virus that knocked out part of their immune system, and were exposed to an inflammatory toxin, and had a normal set of gut bacteria. If any of these triggers was missing, the mice stayed healthy.
Page 120

Dogs carry microbes from the outdoors to the indoors, offering us a bigger library of species with which to populate our developing microbiomes. When Lynch fed these dog-associated dust microbes to mice, she found that the rodents became less sensitive to various allergens.
Page 122

Nonetheless, Burkitt was on the right track. “America is a constipated nation,” he said, indelicately. “If you pass small stools, you have big hospitals.”
Page 124

Scientists will talk about Occam’s razor – the principle that favours simple, elegant explanations over convoluted ones. I think the truth is that scientists, like everyone else, find simple explanations psychologically soothing.
Page 134

Still, they provide more questions than answers. Did the microbes set symptoms in motion or just make a bad situation worse? Was one species responsible, or a group of them? Is it the presence of certain microbes that matters, or the absence of others, or both?
Page 135

But if you looked at these communities in isolation you might conclude that their owners were on the verge of chronic disease, when they were merely on the verge of motherhood.
Page 136

Ecosystems are complex, varied, ever-changing and context-dependent – qualities that are the enemies of easy categorisation.
Page 136

Hello, systems thinking!

So, mammalian success was founded on vegetarianism, and that vegetarianism was founded on microbes. Time and again, different groups of mammals swallowed plant-breaking microbes from their environments, and used their enzymes to mount assaults on leaves, shoots, stems, and twigs.
Page 177

The macrotermites there build enormous mounds. Some can tower for up to 9 metres, scraping the skies with Gothic ensembles of spires and buttresses. The oldest one on record – now abandoned – is 2,200 years old.
Page 180

I want to see one of these mounds now.

Bacteria offer an alternative. They are masters of biochemistry, and can degrade everything from heavy metals to crude oil.
Page 183

Beetle outbreaks come and go but the current one, fuelled by a warming climate, is ten times bigger than any other. Since 1999, the beetles and their attendant fungi have killed more than half the mature pines in British Columbia and affect 3.8 million acres in the United States. They have even hopped over the cold Canadian Rockies, which long fenced them into the west coast, and are now spreading east. A continuous belt of lush vulnerable forests lies in front of them.
Page 187

You can see this on any drive in any West Coast state.

Hornets, hawks, and humans might gradually accumulate beneficial mutations, but that individual hornet, or this specific hawk, or those particular humans can’t pick up beneficial genes for themselves. Except sometimes, they can. They could swap their symbionts, instantly acquiring a new package of microbial genes. They can bring new bacteria into contact with those in their bodies, so that foreign genes migrate into their microbiome, imbuing their native microbes with new abilities.
Page 193

The genes they left behind, these ghosts of symbionts past, aren’t sitting idly among the mealybug’s DNA. Some make amino acids.
Page 202

Whatever the case, it is clear that an insect, a bacterium, and a virus have formed an evolutionary alliance against a parasitic wasp that threatens them all.
Page 205

Which is really, really cool.

This point is worth repeating: taking any fast or instant evolutionary shifts as a refutation of the slow, gradual changes we associate with Darwin’s vision is a fatal mistake because these quick shifts are still powered by gradualism.
Page 207

That is the power of symbiosis: it allows gradual mutations in microbes to produce instant mutations in hosts. We can let bacteria do the slow work for us, and then quickly change ourselves by associating with them. And if these alliances are beneficial enough, they can spread with blinding speed.
Page 208

When the parasite arrived, it spread like wildfire, riding through the forests in the bodies of its sterilised hosts. The flies needed a countermeasure and Spiroplasma rose to the occasion. It restored its hosts’ ability to reproduce, and allowed them to outcompete their sterile peers. Since the flies could pass these little saviours to their offspring, the proportion of infected insects grew with each generation. And Jaenike had caught this spread at exactly the right moment. “It made me doubt my sanity,” he says. “What are the chances?”
Page 209

Say goodbye to dated and dangerous war metaphors, in which we are soldiers hell-bent on eradicating germs at whatever cost. Say hello to a gentler and more nuanced gardening metaphor. Yes, we still have to pull out the weeds, but we also seed and feed the species that bind the soil, freshen the air, and please the eye. This concept can be hard to grasp, and not just because the idea of beneficial microbes is new to many.
Page 215

To control a microbiome is to sculpt an entire world – which is as hard as it sounds. Remember that communities have a natural resilience: if you hit them, they bounce back. They are also unpredictable; if you tweak them, the consequences ripple outwards in capricious ways. Add a supposedly beneficial microbe, and it might displace competitors that we also rely on. Lose a supposedly harmful microbe, and an even worse opportunist might rise to take its place.
Page 216

These emerging infectious diseases of wildlife are emerging ever more quickly, and humans are at least partly to blame. On planes, boats, and boots, we carry pathogens around the world with unprecedented speed, overwhelming new hosts before they can acclimatise and adapt.
Page 217

Yet despite the excessive hype, the concept behind probiotics is still sound. Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones. They make up just a tiny fraction of the microbes that live with us, and their abilities represent a thin slice of what the microbiome is fully capable of. We met more suitable microbes in earlier chapters. There’s the mucus-loving bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, whose presence correlates with a lower risk of obesity and malnutrition. There’s Bacteroides fragilis, which stokes the anti-inflammatory side of the immune system. There’s Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, another anti-inflammatory bug, which is conspicuously rare in the guts of people with IBD, and whose arrival can reverse the symptoms of that disease in mice.
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We have already seen that what we eat can substantially change the microbes in our gut, and prebiotics like inulin are in plentiful supply in onions, garlic, artichokes, chicory, bananas and other foods.
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Jim Collins is more circumspect. Given how much we still don’t understand about the microbiome, he is unsettled by the prospect of engineering microbes that can permanently establish themselves in our bodies. That’s why he is also focusing on building kill-switches that will force the microbes to self-destruct if something goes wrong, or if they leave their hosts.
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Or that so many scientists would study it that they would organise a bi-annual, Wolbachia-devoted conference to share their results?
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Of course they would! Humans love their communities, we are social creatures.

I contain multitudes, yes, but only some of them; the rest, I extend into the world like a living aura.
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We all have our cloud of microbes! I love this!

Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.

We also change the microbes of our housemates. Gilbert’s team found that room-mates share more microbes than people who live apart, and couples are even more microbially similar.
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In both settings, sterility is a curse not a goal, and a diverse ecosystem is better than an impoverished one.
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In the developing world, around 5 to 10 per cent of people who check into hospitals and other healthcare institutions pick up some kind of infection during their stay, falling ill in the very places that are meant to make them healthier. In the United States alone, this means around 1.7 million infections and 90,000 deaths a year.
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By removing harmless bacteria that would otherwise impede the growth of pathogens, perhaps we have inadvertently constructed a more dangerous ecosystem.
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Gibbons showed this by studying public toilets. He found that thoroughly scrubbed toilets are first colonised by faecal microbes, which are launched into the air by roiling, flushed water. Those species are eventually outcompeted by a diverse range of skin microbes, but once the toilet gets scrubbed again, the communities go back to square one. So, here’s the irony: toilets that are cleaned too often are more likely to be covered in faecal bacteria.

Jessica Green, an Oregon-based engineer-turned-ecologist, found a similar pattern among the microbes that float inside air-conditioned hospital rooms.7 “I assumed that the microbial community of the indoor air would be a subset of that of outdoor air,” she says. “It really surprised me that we saw little to no overlap between the two.” Outdoors, the air was full of harmless microbes from plants and soils. Indoors, it contained a disproportionate number of potential pathogens, which are normally rare or absent in the outside world, but had been launched from the mouths and skins of hospital residents. The patients were effectively stewing in their own microbial juices. And the best way of fixing that was remarkably simple: open a window.
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And I see, in the driver’s seat, a guy who notices those rivers of microscopic life and is enthralled rather than repelled by them. He knows that microbes are mostly not to be feared or destroyed, but to be cherished, admired, and studied.
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We see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are. We see how they sculpt our organs, protect us from poisons and disease, break down our food, uphold our health, calibrate our immune system, guide our behaviour, and bombard our genomes with their genes.
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A bacterium in your gut might be able to transfer its genes into one of your intestinal cells, but once that cell dies, the bacterial DNA goes with it. The gene might become part of a human genome, but never the human genome.

In 2013, Dunning-Hotopp showed that these short-lived unions are surprisingly common (Riley et al., 2013). She analysed hundreds of human genomes that had been sequenced from body cells – the ones from kidneys or skin or livers, none of which get passed on to offspring. She found traces of bacterial DNA in around a third of them. They were especially common in cancer cells; an intriguing result with unclear implications. It might be that tumours are especially prone to genetic intrusions, or that bacterial genes help to transform healthy cells into cancerous ones.
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