Bonnie Bassler
speaker
763 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Bonnie Bassler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They are, we think, earth's first living organism, right?
And so they are the most ancient living organisms that we know of.
And they are all single-celled, right?
They're microbes.
You must have a microscope to see one, right?
And they only have a few thousand genes, so a few thousand bits of information in their DNA to give them their physical form and their traits.
And scientists have known about bacteria for almost 600 years, right?
when they were first observed by von Leeuwenhoek, who was like a microscope maker.
Yes, animalcules.
Yes, exactly.
And so he was scraping stuff off his teeth and doing stuff like that.
So anyway, so they've been known for almost 600 years.
We've known they caused disease for 150 years.
But they've always, until about 30 or 40 years ago, when this notion of quorum sensing, and we can talk about how that happened, sort of came about, they were always thought to be these asocial recluses, meaning that they were so primitive and so simple that there was no way they could have sex.
what you just said, sophisticated behaviors.
That was the purview of eukaryotes.
Like bacteria gave us the parts list, you know, we got DNA, RNA proteins from bacteria, right?
But the cool stuff, you know, behaviors and development and thought and all those kinds of things, that's all in higher organisms.
And so there was some kind of snobbery, including among us, the bacteriologists, right?
That they just didn't have the wherewithal to communicate or to
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