A Per­sonal Note: The En­cy­clo­pe­dia and I

by Elio

For the last cou­ple of years, dur­ing hours not spent blog­ging, I served as the ed­i­tor-in-chief of the third edi­tion of the En­cy­clo­pe­dia of Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. If this sounds like a large un­der­tak­ing, it is. The work con­sists of nearly 300 en­tries com­piled into six vol­umes that weigh in toto close to 50 lbs! For­tu­nately for those with weak backs, this edi­tion will also be avail­able elec­tron­i­cally. My con­tri­bu­tion to this project was re­duced to hu­man di­men­sions be­cause prac­ti­cally all the work was done by an ed­i­to­r­ial board con­sist­ing of some ter­rific mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists. They chose the au­thors and edited the man­u­scripts. To see for your­self how dis­tin­guished these peo­ple are, click here. Did I crit­i­cally read each en­try from start to fin­ish? Not on your life! (How­ever, my cu­rios­ity was suf­fi­ciently piqued that I scanned – or more – each en­try). Most of what I did was to cheer ed­i­tors and au­thors along. I wasn't al­ways good at this, but fi­nally this Gar­gan­tuan crea­ture emerged from its womb, hale and well.

At the out­set, my job was not made any eas­ier by the fact that I took it over from Joshua Leder­berg. Enough said. On the other hand, he thought that an en­cy­clo­pe­dia of mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy was worth putting out. This an­swered that ques­tion. Who am I to ar­gue? Still, let's bring it up one more time: Why amass a moun­tain of mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal knowl­edge in this for­mat? With Wikipedia and other In­ternet ma­te­r­ial, man­u­als and text­books, re­view ar­ti­cles and re­search re­ports, is there not enough to sat­isfy every man­ner of thirst for knowl­edge? I agree, up to a point. There is still some­thing unique to our ef­fort: the depth of cov­er­age is rea­son­ably con­sis­tent, it's all to­gether be­tween co­vers – real or vir­tual, and, above all, the con­tent en­dured se­ri­ous qual­ity con­trol. To quote from Lederberg's pref­ace to a pre­vi­ous edi­tion:

The reader wants ac­cess but not to be flooded with in­for­ma­tion and, of course, it's hard not to be in­un­dated with ma­te­r­ial, even just that which is es­sen­tial and im­por­tant to one's sci­en­tific ex­is­tence, not to men­tion every­thing else that comes to one's at­ten­tion. We want qual­ity as­sur­ance so we look for as­sis­tance, we look for fil­ters, we look for peer re­view as a method of as­sist­ing us in nav­i­gat­ing through the bliz­zard of avail­able in­for­ma­tion that will only worsen.

I am happy with the out­come. The en­tries were writ­ten by au­thor­i­ties in each field who did not stint in their ef­forts. Most of them are as good as I've seen. I am not ad­vo­cat­ing that you go out and pur­chase it. It's quite a lot of money and can only be af­forded by those with un­usu­ally deep pock­ets. It's meant to be ob­tained by li­braries, with a site li­cense for the elec­tronic ver­sion. I wouldn't mind if you ask your in­sti­tu­tional li­brar­ian to get it (al­though it won't line my own pock­ets, as I have al­ready been paid in a lump sum, rather than in roy­al­ties). An easy way to con­tact your li­brar­ian is via this link. Also, my col­lab­o­ra­tors and I would be very happy if you were to pro­vide us with some feed­back. A re­view for this blog, maybe?

Do I have sto­ries to tell about this ex­er­cise? Not many, which at­tests to how smoothly it went. A few au­thors came up with in­ge­nious ex­cuses for tar­di­ness, the equiv­a­lent of "the dog ate my home­work." But that was to be ex­pected from busy peo­ple. And it all worked out in the end; the oc­ca­sional set­backs turned out to mat­ter lit­tle. One thing I had to keep in mind was that this was not a text­book. Thus, one of my mi­nor but un­fore­seen tasks was to ex­punge words such as Mi­crobial and Bac­te­r­ial from the be­gin­ning of ti­tles – an en­cy­clo­pe­dia is or­ga­nized al­pha­bet­i­cally.

Here's a chal­lenge to those au­da­cious (or zeal­ous) enough to read it from be­gin­ning to end: I will re­ward the ef­fort with a bot­tle of good wine for the first cred­i­ble claim. I'll set one aside now. (By the time any­one claims it, it will be well aged.)

The French en­cy­clo­pe­dists of the 18th cen­tury "Age of En­light­en­ment" sought to cat­a­log all hu­man knowl­edge. Did we suc­ceed in cat­a­loging all mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal knowl­edge? Hardly. But we may have made a dent and, we hope, may have cap­tured some of the ex­cite­ment in the field to­day.