Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History Hardcover – December 15, 2007
Author: Visit Amazon's Dorothy H. Crawford Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0192807196 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History – December 15, 2007
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Dorothy Crawford is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also Assistant Principal for the Public Understanding of Medicine. She was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to medicine and higher education.
Books by the same author:
The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses
Books with free ebook downloads available Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History – December 15, 2007
Free download Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History Hardcover – December 15, 2007 from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Review
Lucid and authoritative... crisply written narrative. Wendy Moore, Sunday Telegraph Fascinating... Deadly Companions is authoritative, detailed and - despite its gruesome subject - never sensational. PD Smith, The Guardian
About the Author
Dorothy Crawford is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also Assistant Principal for the Public Understanding of Medicine. She was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to medicine and higher education.
Books by the same author:
The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses
Books with free ebook downloads available Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History – December 15, 2007
- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (December 15, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0192807196
- ISBN-13: 978-0192807199
- Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.8 x 8.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,488,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Bacteria have a bad reputation. We think of them as causing illness, and that's correct, of course, but overwhelmingly they do not cause us harm. Without them, indeed, we could not digest our food, and elements could not be recycled into the environment. They have been performing this sort of vital service for around 600 million years. There are a million or so microbes we know about, and of them, only 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans, with the rest steadily chugging away to keep the world in balance. Those pathogenic ones are the main subject in _Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History_ (Oxford University Press) by Dorothy H. Crawford. A microbiologist, Crawford has written plenty of scientific papers, but here (as in a previous book about viruses) she writes for a popular audience to show how microbes, especially the ones that bother and kill us, have affected the humans that are interlopers in their world. We must never forget that most microbes are our companions and are not deadly, and that we live in a mutually beneficial partnership with millions of them. But it is their world: "We relative newcomers to the planet," ominously writes Crawford, "emerge from the safe environment of our mother's womb pristine, untouched by the infectious microbes, but within hours our bodies are colonised by swarms of them, all intent on living off this new food source."
Microbes don't mean to hurt us, of course, and despite the upsurge of religious feeling that accompanies any plague, there is no reason to think that they are doing anything but their natural cycles without any supernatural tinkering to deliver lessons to afflicted humans. The great problem with infective microbes is that they can change faster than we can.
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