Microbes Quotes

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products? - Jeremy Rifkin

This process might not work in all petroleum-contaminated aquifers, but we have proved it works where there are sulfate-reducing microbes present in the environment. - Derek Lovley

This dramatic confirmation of standing water in Mars' history builds on a progression of discoveries about that most earthlike of alien planets. This result gives us impetus to expand our ambitious program of exploring Mars to learn whether microbes have ever lived there and, ultimately, whether we can. - Ed Weiler

They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection. - Mark Merchant

They literally throw a bucket overboard and bring it back up and take that water, with probably several thousand species of microbes, and they shotgun-sequence it and reconstruct what all the species were. - Larry Smarr

The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashing and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west. She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn't save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her. - Joy Williams

The microbes are challenging us in ways we wouldn't have imagined 10 years ago and for which we're not prepared. - James Hughes

The deep ocean floor is a new world, and it contains microbes and minerals and plant organisms that are quite extraordinary. Micro-organisms in particular can be used to provide new pharmaceutical treatments for a variety of human ailments. - Ian McLachlan

Soil microbes are actually the ones that break down the petroleum contaminants. But the plants accelerate the microbes' action in the soil. They stimulate microbes to degrade contaminants by getting more oxygen into the soil and by supplying nutrients through their roots. - Paul Schwab

Our ultimate goal is to be able to put as much chemistry as we can into microbes. We can use microbes to do a lot of complicated chemistry, and the way in which this will be done is through the use of enzymes. One can imagine where you could take a series of promiscuous enzymes that would make different parts of a molecular compound, and combine them to obtain a final product that could do whatever you needed it to do. - Jay Keasling