Mus­ings: The Guild

by Elio

The dic­tio­nary de­fines a guild as "an as­so­ci­a­tion of crafts­men in a par­tic­u­lar trade." Let's ex­tend this term a bit and ap­ply it to the com­mu­nity of mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists. I make this point be­cause I am in­tensely aware that I be­long to a group of peo­ple united by their par­tic­u­lar pro­fes­sional in­ter­ests. When­ever I meet an­other mi­crobiologist for the first time, I feel a high de­gree of affin­ity with him or her. We can im­me­di­ately con­verse about com­mon in­terests, and es­pe­cially about peo­ple we both know. There is usu­ally only one "de­gree of sepa­ration," two at most, de­pend­ing in part on gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences. How dif­fer­ent this is from my en­coun­ters with mem­bers of other guilds, e.g., lawyers, car­pen­ters, po­lice­men, en­gineers.

Bor­rowed from guildmc.com

Look­ing into this a bit deeper, I find that this sense of be­long­ing mat­ters a lot to me, and to my men­tal well be­ing, no less. I have de­rived and con­tinue to de­rive emo­tional sup­port from be­ing a mem­ber of a com­mu­nity of peo­ple joined to­gether by com­mon ex­pe­ri­ences and shared con­cerns. You can now see why I con­sider my year as pres­i­dent of the ASM to have been one of the high­lights of my pro­fes­sional life. The mem­ory re­cedes, as the date was 1985, but I still trea­sure the ex­pe­ri­ence.

This feel­ing has been deep­ened by the fact that all branches of our sci­ence have so much in com­mon. Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, as I and oth­ers have stated be­fore (here and here), is a truly in­te­gra­tive sci­ence. The var­i­ous branches con­verge in terms of both ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proaches and con­cep­tual foun­da­tion, which makes for ready affin­ity among its prac­ti­tion­ers. I re­mem­ber, go­ing back per­haps 40 years, when I met a stranger on a train in Eu­rope and learned that he, too, was a micro­biologist. This was tem­pered, how­ever, by his telling me that his field was dairy mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. I found this to be re­mote from my in­ter­ests and, best I re­mem­ber, I soon changed the topic of the con­ver­sa­tion. This would not be the case to­day, as I would de­light in the fact that this (and most other mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal spe­cial­ties) was just one topic in en­vi­ron­men­tal mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, ergo mi­cro­bial ecol­ogy, with a strong ge­nomic com­po­nent. Surely, there would be a lot that we could talk about.

What prompted these mus­ing was the re­cent case of Bruce Ivins, the Fort De­t­rick mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gist who took his life, ap­par­ently in con­nec­tion with the pro­tracted an­thrax in­ves­ti­ga­tion. I didn't know Dr. Ivins and have had no con­nec­tion with peo­ple work­ing at labs such that one. I have no way of know­ing with cer­tainty whether the al­le­ga­tions of his in­volve­ment with bioter­ror­ism are founded or not. But what­ever the case, I am deeply sad­dened by this event. He was a mem­ber of the guild, thus a fallen col­league.