“Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or...” — Bonnie Bassler Quote

“Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.”

“We mostly don't get sick. Most often, bacteria are keeping us well.”

“What's great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they're so fast, they grow overnight.”

“A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.”

“Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.”

“I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.”