Best 4 quotes of Ed Yong on MyQuotes

Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, the loss of wild spaces, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. Whether on coral reefs or in human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years.

The brutal contract of natural selection ensures that if one partner is unnecessary, it gets dumped.

There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.

When Orson Welles said "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone", he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis - a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right - a colony enclosed within a single body. A mutli-species collective. An entire world.