I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Fascinating information, especially within the context of our changing world.

It made me want to learn more about this topic.

This is so interesting and enjoyable! This is required reading for my class and being able to listen to this has made the material exciting!!!

Fascinating! So much is covered in this book. One thing that really stuck with me was that the author does not recommend taking probiotics as they're rather ineffectual, at least for the products that we currently market.

A very interesting book. Definitely has it's slow moments, but overall a wonderfully in depth exploration of our understanding of the microbiome.

Great book full of highly interesting facts in an approachable rhetoric that neither dumbs down the material, nor makes it too dense for the average reader. The prose does tend to fractal off into biology rabbit-holes on certain topics but this is how bioscientists often communicate. Overall great read.

A lively and insightful observation of what comprises our existance.

This book was fantastic. As I biologist I thought I knew the microbes better but so much has changed in our understanding. What an inspirational & insightful work. Thanks!

Full of interesting stories and research that encourage the reader to view the microbial world in a different way. One of the best popular science books in recent years.

Interesting theme. Felt a little drag midway. Content could have been made shorter & more engaging.

A great read that enhances the reader’s view of our biosphere and the role of us humans within it. I only wish I could live long enough to experience the implementation of ideas surveyed in the final chapter.

Great overview of the oft negelected relationship between the macro world we live in and the unseen micro world of bacteria, viruses, and fungi .

We tend to think about microbes and bacteria about the things that make us sick. But really, all of us have symbiotic relationships with bacteria, whether it be on our skin, or in our mouths. And we're not the only ones - all sorts of animals need bacteria to experience life as we know it. Yong dives into the fascinating, cutting-edge (at least, when this book was published in 2016) science of what we know, and are still wondering, about the microscopic world all around, and in, us.

This was a readable, detailed, and fascinating account. I really enjoyed learning about the wide range of things that bacteria do, whether it's helping animals digest food in various ways or training our immune systems to reject other, more harmful bacteria. Yong does a good job of showing symbiosis and the simple truth that bacteria isn't "good" or "bad", it's just surviving and replicating like any other organism. Sometimes that's in ways that is useful for animals, sometimes that's in harmful ways, and sometimes it's something more complicated. And there's a lot we don't know, or are just beginning to find out. I only had two small quibbles. One, he sometimes starts out telling you a fact, and then proceeds to either backtrack or bring up evidence to the contrary, which is fair when you're just at the beginning of testing something and experiments don't agree, but made for a confusing reading experience. Two, there are just so many facts that at the end my head was spinning and I don't think I retained much at all. That aside, I enjoyed the read immensely and appreciated the thorough footnotes.

Enormously fascinating. Dense with so much to learn, but not really a hard read. A glossary might help, but if one reads this as ebook there's instant access to definitions on the web. (Even though I prefer paper, I do wish I'd read this digitally so I could look up so much.)

It is a slightly older book, by the standards of scientific inquiry. But everything is still relevant. And in fact the few speculative bits would be interesting to check up on, to see if things have developed in the past 7 years or so.

It includes color photographic plates, extensive notes and bibliography, and index.

"The latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones."

"The immune system isn't just a means of controlling microbes. It is at least partly controlled by microbes." Its "main function is to maintain our relationships with our resident microbes. It's more about balance and good management than defence and destruction."

"Medical funding agencies saw [the study of milk] as irrelevant; as [Bruce] German puts it, 'it doesn't have anything to do with the diseases of middle-aged white men.'" (Notably, though, it has everything to do with the health of their descendents. Please breast-feed your baby!!)

"Symbiosis... can be a trap, where the partners become increasingly vulnerable in their dependency." Increasingly, because the partners continue to evolve a more complicated & fragile co-dependency together.

The mice given the 'lean' microbes only had success losing weight when they ate a healthy high fiber diet that allowed the microbes to establish themselves. There is no magic pill.

"Herds, flocks, and colonies make it easier for diseases to spread. But they also create opportunities for beneficial symbionts to find new hosts."

"It turns out that a huge variety of animals play host to chemosynthetic bacteria, which use either sulfides or methane to fix carbon." (As opposed to photosynthesis, which uses light or solar energy, these animals use chemical energy.) Even in the sea off Elba, Italy, which is "drenched" in light.

I need to learn more about Leeuwenhoek's microscopes. There's a photo here, with a caption that aptly compares them to "glorified door hinges."

" genes move from bacteria to animals. ... But are they important? The mere presence of a guitar in someone's bedroom doesn't make them Slash."

A microbiome is much like an ecosystem in many ways. Adding 'beneficial' microbes to one's gut may turn out to be like introducing rabbits to Australia. Or even if the treatment turns out to be harmless, the benefit may be short-lived, as the original communities evolve defenses. At the time of this writing, and I'm sure still, medicine is trying to figure this out. Probably the only treatment we've mastered well enough to be worth doing FMT for is C-Diff. Probiotics from yogurt, not so much, mostly not the biota that you need or even can use.

I appreciate the reminder to use The Cochrane Collaboration to get better understandings of the relevance of science as reported by popular media.

I need to look up to see how "Eliminate Dengue" and Scott O'Neill are progressing. The work seems very promising, as of this book's publ.

Molecular phylogenetics is apparently the term for the study of the tree of life from a view that doesn't look at just appearances etc. I've long wondered what upsets cheap DNA sequencing will create in the Linnaean organization; now I know what term to use to look for info. I got that from reading through the notes! Good info. back there!)

So, yes, I do highly recommend this book. And I'd be delighted to read more on the subject, and/or more by Yong on any subject.

Most interesting and overriding point: microbes are not the simple enemy but part of a complex community. 20th century scientific consensus and its popular formulations are far too simplistic. As an audio book a bit overwhelming - all those multitudes; would repay a 2nd go or to read in print.

Yong does the reading world a great service here, explaining clearly and cogently the role of microbes in the ecosystem (writ large). Easy to read and hard to put down.

This is an excellent review of the popular topic, microbial symbiosis. Mr. Yong covers the symbiotic relationships between bacteria and their uni- and multicellular hosts, their microenvironments, and the various functions that the hosts and microbes have evolved to share or trade.

The people who need to read this book most probably won't. Its best feature is that it explains (and explains... and explains some more) the incredible complexity of the microbiome, its inhabitants, its symbionts, its functioning, its dynamics and breathtakingly subtle balancing, rebalancing, and failures. This definitely NOT your "eat yogurt and cure all your ills"! The style is breezy, approachable, only occasionally tipping over into cuteness. Yong presents some fascinating stories; he knows how science works and can explain the exacting, lengthy, and sometimes tedious processes and experiments so you understand not only what they found, but how they figured it out. I was happy for all those scientists who, after the years spent probing the sexual apertures of fruit flies, finally get an affectionate and appreciative shout-out from Yong. There were parts that dragged, some repetition...it did at times read like a padded magazine piece. You need to be pretty interested in the topic to stick with it, but there's a lot of fascinating information, fun Latin terms, and a lovely history of van Leeuwenhoek's amazing microscopy. You will come away with a new appreciation for germs.

Really interesting and engaging.

Wonderful science writing about a fascinating topic! I’m a big Ed Yong fan now, can’t wait for his next book, whatever it is.

I fascinating book all about the microbes all around us and other creatures. I learned a lot in the process of reading this including how much we don't know about our microbiome. For instance, probiotic yoghurts don't work, well they don't repopulate our gut flora anyway, but scientists are successfully eliminating dengue fever by introducing a specific bacteria to the mosquitos.

For a person who knows next to nothing about microbes, this was a really interesting look into their impact in our lives, as well as into their possible future uses. I enjoyed the fact that this was written by a journalist, so the writing flowed easily and wasn't too dense, and even made me chuckle a couple of times.

I wasn't sure what I was going to get when I started this book; obviously microbes, but was it going to be dry and academic, or worse, evangelical 'omg-microbes-are-the-answer-to-everything!'?

Luckily I got neither. Instead Yong's book was, from start to finish, utterly fascinating; never too arcane and never to simplistic, he found the sweet spot of science writing, creating an engaging narrative that never talks down to the reader. Anyone with an average vocabulary and an interest in the symbiotic world can pick up this book without feeling intimidated.

Microbes (bacteria, viruses, etc.) are everywhere. Everywhere. And bad news for the germaphobes: this is a good and necessary thing. Life on Earth simply could not exist without these microscopic machines. Plants and animals depend on bacteria for nutrients they can't get from food on their own, for turning on specific and necessary genes in the DNA, even for protecting them from other bacteria gone rogue.

Yong starts at the beginning of humans' awareness that there is life we cannot see. Typically these beginning chapters are the deadliest for me, as I get bored with the 'background' and impatient to get to the 'good stuff', but Yong made sure even the boring background was the 'good stuff'. I was never bored reading this book.

Left to my own devices, this review would go on forever, because there's just so much worth discussing, so I'm going to short-circuit myself and say this: I Contain Multitudes is a great book for learning how microbes help make all life possible; it's a 50/50 split, more or less, of information on microbe/human and microbes/other flora and fauna symbioses. It's easy to read, it's entertaining, and for at least myself, it was laugh out loud funny in one part. I finished with a much better understanding of the microbial world and my own digestive system (for now, I'm going to resist the temptation of probiotic supplements).

A very worth-while read and one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone with an interest.

You may think that we are just made from muscles, blood cells, bones and a fair bit of DNA, but in between the gaps are microbes. Billions and billions of them. There are the odd rogue ones, but most of them are useful and make up an essential element of our being. Without them we could not live. They help us in countless ways, sculpting our organs, protecting us from disease and feeding and nourishing us; our gut contains a complete ecosystem that ensure that we extract all the energy we need.

Microbes work equal miracles in other animals too, providing the ethereal light that disguises a squid as they hunt, ensuring that koalas are able to digest the unpalatable eucalyptus leaves and the weevil that uses bacteria to make its shell before killing them. The modern worldview of eliminating all microbes is causing as much harm as it is good; people nowdays have a revulsion of all things bacterial, hence the raft of cleaning products that are designed to scour all surfaces and hands clean of these unwanted intruders. However, as Yong successfully argues in this book that not only we might be missing a trick, but our bacterial ecosystem is essential for our survival. A good example of this is in hospitals; the modern view is that all windows have to be locked shut to keep rogue microbes out, but the effect of this is that patients sit in their beds stewing in a lethal mix of micro-organisms. This hazardous situation can be simply solved by opening a window, this allows the dispersal and dilution of the potentially lethal ones. Simple, but very effective.

It is a fascinating account of the unseen creatures that live within and all around us. Yong takes us on this journey through the microscope to discover the most recent research from scientists all round the world and tell us of the secrets that are being discovered about microbes. Some of the treatments being developed have the potential to make people’s so lives much better; one example is RePOOpulate – as unappealing as it sounds! However, this treatment has worked miracles with a 94% success rate and no side effects, a success rate not seen in many other cures. Yong writes with an engaging and eloquent style and makes the science in here really accessible. Well worth reading. 4.5 stars.

It is sometimes difficult to follow along in audio with science book, but generally I was able to do so with this excellent investigation of all the living things that live in us and everything else. The narration was clear enough for me to understand the various scientific names for both the bad and good buggies (don't ask me to spell them, of course), and if I see an ebook of this on sale I may buy it for occasional review.
From the fashionable discussion of our own gut to the hopes to find a natural defense against the fungus killing frogs, this book enlightened me and gives me a little hope that we will find ways to balance our internal and external ecosystems.

Books like these sometimes make me wish I'd understood better what the life of a scientist would be like, so that I might have made a more deliberate choice back when I was young. It would have been fun to work on the puzzles of nature described here

We are a world in ourselves. This is an amazing look at the world of life that keeps our bodies living.

This is a fascinating look at what we currently know about how animals and plants interact with the microbes all around us. This is still a very young field, and there is a lot to learn. Yong writes with clarity and humor, so this is a very enjoyable and enlightening read.

Lots of interesting facts but in such a big pile I stopped absorbing them after a while.

Kind of like a mat of bacteria...

Always interesting and occasionally elegant or laugh-out-loud funny. Highly recommended.

A very readable summary of the most recent studies into the interactions of microbes with the rest of life illustrating their ubiquitous nature, often benefitting, sometimes harming.