Who Knew?

According to Natalie Angier in her recent book, right now I’ve got six hundred different species of bacteria in my mouth. “I’m not talking about six hundred individual bacteria. I’m talking about six hundred different species—or strains, as some microbiologists call them--- each of them as genetically different from each other...‘as Martians might be from humans’.” (Angier is quoting Princeton molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler.)

What’s my point? I’ll get to that shortly, but first: “Something like ninety-nine out of a hundred cells in our small intestine are bacterial cells, which flourish in the warmth and plenty of our plumbing and in return synthesize vitamins for us and help extract from our food essential nutriments that otherwise would pass through unclaimed.”

Now all that makes me feel a bit queasy, or maybe just defensive. After all, it’s my mouth and gut, and we’re not talking about minerals or chemicals, they’re separate little beings as alive as I am. Actually it makes me feel co-dependent, or something like that. Makes me feel compromised. True, they’re smaller than MY cells---you could put about three million E. coli bacteria on a pinhead---but still. It’s not that I mind sharing (although I do like my privacy) but even the ones that are really trying to help, like in fact most are, they’re still aliens---one might say illegal aliens, for they are clearly are not ME. They have their own evolution, their own traditions, their own dna (though they don’t have a nucleus to contain it, as do all the cells of MY body). No telling where else they might be squatting. Sure, they do the dirty work at the tips of roots to fix and harvest nitrogen in soil, and actually I think that’s fine. I just get a little uncertain when there are implications that might have to do with ME.

I mean really. If you listen to Bonnie Bassler on NOVA, you’ll hear her say that there are ten times more bacteria in you or on you than you have human cells. In you or on you.......YOU!