These Are the Times

by Roberto

At an ever-in­creas­ing pace and across the globe, mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists con­tinue to ad­vance the fron­tiers of knowl­edge. Wher­ever they look, they un­cover as­tound­ing new fea­tures of the mi­cro­bial world. It is hard not to get ex­cited by these new in­sights; my self-im­posed task here at STC of shar­ing my "ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the width and depth of the mi­cro­bial ac­tiv­i­ties on this planet,"  is ever eas­ier as I con­tin­u­ally be­come aware of amaz­ing find­ings. Yet I would be naive to claim that every­thing is look­ing rosy. 

We are liv­ing through quite a con­tra­dic­tion. At a time when sci­ence is pro­ceed­ing at an un­prece­dented pace there are grow­ing anti-sci­ence sen­ti­ments ris­ing around the world. Wit­ness the ex­am­ple of the re­mark­able gains in vac­cine de­vel­op­ment cou­pled to strong anti-vac­ci­na­tion cam­paigns. Nu­mer­ous gov­ern­ments around the world are cut­ting back their sup­port for sci­ence and trim­ming on pub­lic health poli­cies. But do not de­spair, this is not hap­pen­ing every­where! These para­dox­i­cal times prompt me to para­phrase Dick­ens' fa­mous open­ing lines from A Tale of Two Cities: These are the best of times, these are the worst of times, this is the age of wis­dom, this is the age of fool­ish­ness...

What can we at STC do dur­ing these times? To me the an­swer is sim­ple: con­tinue the mis­sion that Elio started back in 2006, to ex­plore and chron­i­cle un­usual and un­ex­pected fea­tures of mi­cro­bial ac­tiv­i­ties. In what seems to be a life un­der a new world or­der, we might some­times suc­cumb to de­spon­dency. My hope is that the writ­ings in STC pro­vide some so­lace, a ray of hope, a touch of op­ti­mism, when it comes to think­ing about the sci­en­tific pur­suit.

Things are look­ing up for these trum­pet lichens. Photo Credit: Roberto Kolter

Be­cause, deep down, I strongly be­lieve that there is rea­son for op­ti­mism. Last year, in a six-part se­ries, I at­tempted to ex­plain, through the lens of my Weltan­schau­ung, what I see as the ma­jor causes un­der­ly­ing today's po­lar­ized at­ti­tudes and why I re­main op­ti­mistic. In brief, the un­sus­tain­able ex­po­nen­tial growth that has char­ac­ter­ized hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties on this planet for the last few hun­dred years is be­gin­ning to show signs of slow­ing down. There will be in­evitable "slow­ing down pains" and knowl­edge of our world will be needed to face these chal­lenges. Ger­mane to our field, in­creased knowl­edge of mi­cro­bial ac­tiv­i­ties will be key to ad­dress­ing some of the large tasks the lie ahead, like adapt­ing to cli­mate change, restor­ing soil fer­til­ity, and pro­vid­ing health­care to a pop­u­la­tion that is both de­creas­ing and ag­ing. If you feel dri­ven to bet­ter un­der­stand the world around you, I im­plore you to search for new op­por­tu­ni­ties aris­ing dur­ing these chal­leng­ing times. By way of ex­am­ple, my cur­rent "mi­cro­bial in­ter­ests" are fo­cused on re­gen­er­a­tive agri­cul­tural prac­tices. Your in­ter­ests will surely dif­fer. But, who knows, maybe you'll find un­ex­pected stim­uli in read­ing some of our fu­ture posts.

The "sil­ver lin­ing" of the ex­is­ten­tial cri­sis we had to over­come last Sep­tem­ber – when the out­fit that hosted STC since 2006 sud­denly went dark – is that our new host has an ex­cel­lent search func­tion. And, most im­por­tantly, while the rest of us were on a month-long va­ca­tion, Christoph la­bo­ri­ously re­stored and pol­ished the more than 2000 STC posts, go­ing back to No­vem­ber 2006. Ku­dos to Christoph! My hope is that STC con­tin­ues to be a use­ful re­source on all mat­ters mi­cro­bial for decades to come. While the gar­gan­tuan task of re­con­struct­ing STC is now nearly fin­ished, there may be some prob­lems that re­main. Please do let us know if you en­counter any. 

What times are these, re­ally? Let me put them in per­spec­tive by go­ing to back to Dick­ens' words, now quot­ing the en­tire first sentence/paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness, it was the epoch of be­lief, it was the epoch of in­credulity, it was the sea­son of Light, it was the sea­son of Dark­ness, it was the spring of hope, it was the win­ter of de­spair, we had every­thing be­fore us, we had noth­ing be­fore us, we were all go­ing di­rect to Heaven, we were all go­ing di­rect the other way—in short, the pe­riod was so far like the present pe­riod, that some of its nois­i­est au­thor­i­ties in­sisted on its be­ing re­ceived, for good or for evil, in the su­perla­tive de­gree of com­par­i­son only.

Look­ing back at the his­tor­i­cal events of the late 1700s, Dick­ens saw the con­trasts within and be­tween a Paris that was headed to­wards the French Rev­o­lu­tion and the Reign of Ter­ror and a Lon­don amidst the rea­son­able sta­bil­ity af­forded by the progress of the In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, yet still suf­fer­ing from its dis­rup­tive con­se­quences. Strik­ingly, he sees par­al­lels to his present and al­ludes to "nois­i­est au­thor­i­ties" gen­er­at­ing ex­tremely po­lar­ized sen­ti­ments in both times. Just when was this "present pe­riod" of his? Dick­ens pub­lished A Tale of Two Cities in 1859; that year bi­ol­ogy would take a gi­ant leap with Darwin's pub­li­ca­tion of On the Ori­gin of Species. In our dis­ci­pline, it was the time when Pas­teur would rec­og­nize that fer­men­ta­tion was the prod­uct of mi­cro­bial ac­tiv­ity. It was the best of times... Yet, at the very same time, the United States was inch­ing ever closer to the chaos and de­struc­tion of the Civil War. ...it was the worst of times... If you hear echoes of such con­trasts to­day, it's be­cause there are par­al­lels. I urge you to look at cur­rent events from this his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. Amidst the win­ter of de­spair lies the spring of hope. Rather than sur­ren­der­ing to de­spon­dency, take ad­van­tage and act on new op­por­tu­ni­ties.

And re­mem­ber, this too shall pass...